“The shock must have been indescribable.”
“David,” he said, spitting the name on the rug. “I knew I couldn’t trust him, I knew he would fuck me over in the end. Son of a bitch only wanted what he couldn’t have and if he couldn’t have it, he’d steal it.”
“You assume he stole her?”
Erik looked at her. “What?”
“You seem convinced he seduced Daisy. Not the other way around.”
He closed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter who seduced whom,” he whispered. “She had my heart. I gave her my soul. I helped her after she was shot. I held her head when she was throwing up. I helped her to the bathroom, in and out of the shower. I was there when she woke up screaming. I gave her every single thing in me and then she fucked David and don’t ask me how it felt, Diane. I know you’re going to. Just don’t.”
Diane was silent.
Erik opened his eyes. “She ruined everything.”
Diane glanced at her watch. “We have to stop now.”
“Yes,” Erik said. “We do.”
*
One night he dreamed of his father, and called him by name.
Byron.
Erik was out in a golden boat on a lake, reeling in fish after golden fish. Calling out Byron with every catch, calling to his father, who stood on the shore, waving. Erik let go his rod and reel, cupped hands and yelled over the water, Who do I look like?
And his father called back, You look like me.
Erik woke up. Calmly came out of sleep. The dream had been gentle. Uncomplicated. He lay in bed, his fingers tracing his collarbone where the chain had once hung. Staring into the dark corner of his little room, his mind was far away, walking the galleries of his life’s museum, where he touched memories long abandoned.
They were there.
They were delicate, light things, like feathers, wafting away if he grabbed too hard at them. But they were there. Sensory and tactile. Blocks of scrap wood to play with. The rhythm and ring of hammers. The smoky whine of the power saw. The smell of sawdust and paint as a forest playground emerged in Erik and Peter’s bedroom.
“He was a set designer,” Daisy had said after Erik described the loft beds, the trees, swing and hammock.
“Maybe it’s why I was drawn to technical theater,” Erik said to Diane at his next session. “The smell and sound of the workshop reminded me of him.”
“Could be,” Diane said. “Or it could just be what you love. Not everything has to be a thing, you know.”
He glanced at her. “You learn that line in school?”
“No, from my mother,” she said, one of her rare, personalized engagements.
More feathers, piling up in his hands, drifting around his ankles. If he sat still, if he put aside the customary armor of anger and pride, they came to him. He made his breath hover above the snowy heaps, leaned into their silence.
“Where are you now,” she said.
“With him,” he whispered. A lap, and a gold necklace to play with. Strong arms lifting him up to sink a basketball. A broad back beneath his stomach, on top of a sled in winter. Gentle hands steadying the seat of his bicycle. Prosit when he sneezed. Sk?l for a toast.
He remembered when they were a family.
And he remembered when they weren’t anymore.
After their father was gone, he and Pete wouldn’t sleep among the trees of their bedroom. They didn’t want the swings and the hammock. They recoiled from the lingering smell of wet paint. Defiantly they dragged sleeping bags to Christine’s bedroom and slept on her floor until she sold their house and they moved away from the past. Tried to start again.
He sat still, the tears making steady tracks down his face. The pain pressed on him from all sides.
“You must have missed him horribly,” Diane said.
What an obvious thing to say.
But what a truthful thing to say.
I had a bad dream.