I turn toward Michael. He is still sitting upright; his eyes remain wide open. I notice, for the first time, that his eyes are as strikingly blue as everyone else’s in the family. It must be the glasses, I decide, that make them appear hazy most of the time.
I’m afraid to suggest that he lie down, because I’m quite sure that whatever he is doing is part of his nighttime routine. I don’t want to touch him, for fear of setting him off, but I feel like I ought to do something. I settle for pressing my palm against his bedspread, far from his body. “Sleep well, Michael,” I say quietly. “I love you.”
He doesn’t move a muscle, or look my way. I turn off the lamp, leaving the room lit only by a nightlight plugged into an outlet near the rocking chair. Going out silently, I shut the door behind me.
I meet Lars in the hallway, coming out of Missy’s room. “Sleeping?” he asks me.
“Close.” Even though neither boy is asleep, I have an instinct that where they are right now is where each of them needs to be to get himself to sleep. I nod toward Missy’s door. “How about her?”
“Fast asleep.” He smiles. “That bike riding takes it out of her.”
“She’s getting good, though. They both are.”
Lars does not respond, and I know what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking the same thing. About how I—mindlessly—used the word both. Because two of them are “getting good.” And one of them might never “get good.”
“Want a drink?” Lars asks, as we make our way down the stairs.
“Now you’re talking.”
He goes to his office to pour, and I wait in the living room, sitting on the sofa. Like so many things in this house, the sofa is sleek and modern, new. Its fabric is a nubby beige tweed with a faint striped pattern. To liven it up, there are throw pillows in solid colors of orange, yellow, and cobalt blue.
Lars returns with two glasses of Scotch on the rocks. Handing one to me, he sits beside me and drapes his arm over my shoulder, massaging it gently. “You look so tired, love,” he says, and the concern in his voice makes me tremble.
I close my eyes. “I’m exhausted,” I admit. “I’m overwhelmed.” It seems ridiculous to say such a thing in a dream, but since it’s true, I may as well say it.
“Well, it’s understandable,” he says. “There’s not much that’s more stressful than this.”
I shake my head. “I guess I don’t know . . . quite what you mean.”
He sips his drink. “I felt the same way, you know,” he says. “When it happened to me.” His voice lowers. “Mine weren’t together, of course, but . . . you know that mine were only days apart.”
I have absolutely no idea what we’re talking about, so I just nod and wait for him to go on.
“He couldn’t live without her,” Lars says, his voice breaking. “He couldn’t go on without her. So he . . .” His lips tighten. “So he . . . didn’t.”
I put my hand on his. “I know.” Of course, I don’t know, but I want him to keep talking. “Does it help . . .” I hesitate. “To talk about it?”
He looks up. “It helps to talk to you about it,” he says. “It always has.” He swirls the ice in his glass. “You were so understanding and so . . . not shocked, when I first told you how . . . how horrendously things had gone for my family. Horrendously. There’s really no other word for it—and because of that, I didn’t share this story with many people in those days. But I knew from the start, when we first met, that I could tell you about it, and it would be okay.” He smiles, but his expression is forlorn. “It made me feel like I could tell you anything.”
“You can,” I say softly.
“She was so sick,” he goes on, entwining his fingers in mine. “Heart palpitations, coughing, chest pains. You know, she was probably the same as me, probably had an irregular heartbeat like I do, but back then, such things were not diagnosed. Still . . . it exhausted her, sucked the life out of her. Every bit of life she’d ever had. And she had had life in her, even though hers wasn’t easy. She worked so hard, they both did, and . . .”
I squeeze his hand.
“I was just glad she didn’t suffer long,” he says. “You know, in those days and in those times especially, and where we were—rural Iowa, of all places, and we hardly knew a soul and could barely speak English—well, she’d been having chest pains and she should have seen a doctor, but it’s not like her treatment options were plentiful.” He finishes his drink and sucks on an ice cube. “At least it was over quickly for her. There was nothing we could do for her.” He shakes his head. “My mother’s life was shorter than it should have been,” he says grimly. “Short and not so sweet.” He stands up. “I’m going for another,” he announces, holding up his glass. “You want one?”
I hold out my glass to him, and he takes it and strides down the hall.
When he returns with fresh drinks, I’m worried that he’ll let the story go and turn to some other subject. But he continues. “She’d only been buried a few days when he decided he couldn’t bear it,” Lars says. “Took a shotgun and went out to the shed. Linnea found him.” He takes a long swallow of Scotch. “Linnea was only sixteen years old, still just a girl. No one, no child, should have to face something like that.”
Oh, no. Linnea had hinted at some of this, but she hadn’t told me any of these grim details.
“What did you do?” I know I shouldn’t ask this question; certainly, I would already know what he did. I am hoping he is so involved in his story that he won’t register my asking.
“I did what any big brother would do,” he says. “I took charge. We buried our father next to our mother. We sold everything we had, which wasn’t much. We got on a train going west, because neither of us ever wanted to see Iowa again.”
“And ended up here.”
“And ended up here. It was early morning when our train arrived at Union Station. We had only bought tickets as far as Denver. We would have had to buy another ticket and change trains if we wanted to go farther west. We didn’t, though. We got off the train and looked around; we saw the mountains in the distance and the sun shining on the buildings of the city just as it was waking up. And we looked at each other and decided that here was as good as anywhere else.”
“You’ve come a long way since then,” I say. “And so has Linnea.”