“Don’t talk. Go,” he said in a harsh voice. “Please. Just go.”
She looked at him, tears in her eyes. She was so beautiful he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to cry, to scream. How would he ever let her go? He had been waiting for this moment, for her, for them, for all the years he could remember, through pain so bad he cried in his sleep, but every day he woke and thought, Her, and he tried again. He’d imagined a million versions of their future, but he’d never imagined this. Her coming back just to say goodbye.
“You have a son, Matthew.”
It happened for him like that sometimes. He heard the wrong words, took in information that wasn’t there. His screwed-up brain. Before he could guard against it, use his learned tools, the pain of those words crashed down on him. He wanted to let her know that he’d misunderstood, but all he could do was howl, a deep, rolling growl of pain. Words abandoned him; all he had left was pure emotion. He lurched out of the chair and stumbled backward, away from her, hitting the kitchen counter hard. It was his damaged brain, telling him what he wanted to hear instead of what was actually said.
Leni moved toward him. He could see how hurt she was, how crazed she thought he was, and shame made him want to turn away. “Go. If you’re leaving. Go.”
“Matthew, please. Stop. I know I’ve hurt you.” She reached out for him. “Matthew, I’m sorry.”
“Go away. Please.”
“You have a son,” she said slowly. “A son. We have a son. Do you understand me?”
He frowned. “A baby?”
“Yes. I brought him to meet you.”
At first he felt pure, exquisite joy; then the truth hit him hard. A son. A child of his, of theirs. It made him want to cry for what he’d lost.
“Look at me,” he said quietly.
“I’m looking.”
“I look like. Someone rebuilt me with. A bad sewing machine. Sometimes it hurts. So much I can’t speak. It took me two years to stop. Grunting and screaming. And say my first. Real word.”
“And?”
He thought of all the things he’d once imagined he would teach a son, and it collapsed around him. He was too broken to hold anyone else together. “I can’t pick him up. Can’t put him. On my shoulders. He won’t want this. For a dad.” He knew Leni heard the longing in his voice at that; the universe in a three-letter word.
She touched his face, let her fingers trace the scars that put him back together, stared up into his green eyes. “You know what I see? A man who should have died but wouldn’t give up. I see a man who fought to talk and walk and think. Every one of your scars breaks my heart and puts it back together. Your fear is every parent’s fear. I see the man I have loved for my whole life. The father of our son.”
“Don’t. Know how.”
“No one knows how. Believe me. Can you hold his hand? Can you teach him to fish? Can you make him a sandwich?”
“I’ll embarrass him,” he said.
“Kids are durable, and so is their love. Trust me, Matthew, you can do this.”
“Not alone.”
“Not alone. It’s you and me, just like it was always supposed to be. We’ll do it together. Okay?”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
She held his face in her hands and rose up onto her toes to kiss him. With that one kiss, so like another kiss from long ago, a lifetime ago, two kids believing in a happy ending, he felt his world come back into alignment. “Come meet him,” she whispered against his lips. “He snores just like you do. And he bumps into every piece of furniture. And he loves Robert Service poems.”
She took his hand. Together they walked out of the cabin, him limping slowly, holding her hand tightly, leaning on her, letting her steady him. Wordlessly, they made their way out of the trees and past the house that was now a world-class fishing lodge, toward the new beach stairs.
As always, the shoreline was full of guests, dressed in their new Alaska rain gear, fishing at the water’s edge, birds cawing in the air, waiting for scraps.
He held on to Leni with one hand and clutched the handrail with his other and made his slow, halting way down the stairs.
On the beach, off to the right, Large Marge was drinking a beer. Alyeska was out in the bay, giving kayak lessons to guests. Dad and Atka were with a child, a blond boy, who was squatted over a big purple starfish.
Matthew came to a stop.
“Mommy!” the boy said at Leni’s appearance. He jumped up, smiling so big it lit his whole face. “Did you know that starfishes have teeth? I seen ’em!”
Leni looked up at Matthew. “Our son,” she said, and let go of Matthew’s hand.
He limped toward the little boy, stopped. Meaning to bend, he crashed down to one knee, grimaced in pain, groaned.
“You sound like a bear. I like bears, so does my new grandpop. Do you?”
“I like bears,” Matthew said, unsure.
He looked into his son’s face and saw his own past. He suddenly remembered things he’d forgotten—the feel of frogs’ eggs in your hand, the way a good laugh sometimes shook your whole body, stories being read by a campfire, playing pirates on the shore, building a fort in the trees. All of that he could teach. Of all the things he’d dreamed of over the years, tried like hell to believe in when his pain was at its worst, this was something he’d never dared to even hope for.
My son. “I’m Matthew.”
“Really? I’m Matthew Junior. But everyone calls me MJ.”
Matthew felt an emotion unlike anything he’d ever felt before. Matthew Junior. My son, he thought again. He found it difficult to smile; realized he was crying. “I’m your dad.”
MJ looked at Leni. “Mommy?”
Leni came up beside them, laid a hand on Matthew’s shoulder, and nodded. “That’s him, MJ. Your dad. He’s waited a long time to meet you.”
MJ grinned, showed off his two missing front teeth. He threw himself at Matthew, hugged him so ferociously they toppled over. When they came back up, MJ was laughing. “You wanna see a starfish?”
“Sure,” Matthew said.
Matthew tried to get up, put his hand on the ground. Bits of shell stuck to his palm as he stumbled, his bad ankle giving way. And then Leni was there, taking his arm, helping him stand up again.
MJ raced down to the water, talking all the way.
Matthew couldn’t make his feet move. All he could do was stand there, breathing shallowly, a little afraid that all of this could break like glass at the merest touch. At a breath. The boy who looked like him stood at the shore, blond hair glinting in the sun, the hem of his jeans wet with saltwater. Laughing. In that one image, Matthew saw the whole of his life; past, present, and future. It was one of those moments—an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world—that changed a man’s life.
“You’d better go, Matthew,” Leni said. “Our son is not very good at waiting for what he wants.”
He looked down at her and thought, God, I love her, but his voice was gone, lost in this new world in which everything had changed. In which he was a father.
They had come so far from their beginnings as two damaged kids, he and Leni. Maybe it had all happened the way it needed to, maybe they’d each crossed their own oceans—hers of damaged love and loss, his of pain—to be here again together, where they belonged. “Good thing I am.”
He saw what those words meant to her.
“I wanted to stand by you. I wanted—”
“You know what I love most about you, Leni Allbright?”
“What?”
“Everything.” He took her in his arms and kissed her with everything that he had and all he hoped to have. When he finally let go, reluctantly, and drew back, they stared at each other, had a whole conversation in breaths taken and expelled. This was a beginning, he thought; a beginning in the middle, something unexpected and beautiful.
“You’d better go,” Leni finally said.
Matthew walked carefully across the pebbled beach toward the boy standing at the waterline.
“Hurry up,” MJ said, waving Matthew over to the big purple starfish. “It’s right here. Look! Look, Daddy.”