Patrick looked out into the shady courtyard. Too many trees. It was preventing the residents from getting sun.
“How am I the only one to remember this? I was the baby.” Greg stood behind Patrick and put his hands on his brother’s shoulders. “Your well is in a mountain,” he said.
Patrick broke, his eyes filled with tears. Already Greg understood grief better than he did. This fucking place. What were they teaching? Maybe he should call Clara for real and then check himself in here, too. He ran his fingers through his hair, messing it and smoothing it to one side again. “Dad probably made that up. Like the Siamese twins who were drafted.”
“Only one twin was drafted and that was real.”
“HOW DOES EVERYONE KNOW THIS BUT ME?” Patrick felt his mouth twitch and the corners of his lips spread into the widest smile. It was like his face was putty and someone was pulling his skin out and then up, stretching it against his will until it was so wide it might snap. Greg smiled, too, which set Patrick off further. “Stop.”
“What?” Greg was honestly bewildered.
“Just don’t.” Patrick put both hands to his face and pushed it back into a neutral expression.
“Oh, good lord. Are you worried about the lines on your face? Just smile once in a while and enjoy it. Earthquakes happen, Patrick. It’s not your fault. You should probably bolt your shit to the wall, but it’s not your fault. What’s more, I don’t buy that you think it is. I think this is all because you’re in spitting distance of sending them home. Of my taking them back to Connecticut. And you don’t know what your life is going to look like after they leave.”
Patrick stacked a few magazines before fanning them across the table in a perfect display of healthy living.
“So, come back with them. With us.”
Patrick put his finger over a headline that read “Take Down the Flu, Naturally.” “To Connecticut? Oh, hell no.”
“Why not?”
“It’s cold. You call yourself nutmeggers. You want me to go on?”
“I’m going to need a sober companion.”
“Pass.”
“Don’t you even want to hear what it entails?”
“Does it entail being sober?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Pass.”
Greg turned away. He knew they were joking, but the sting of rejection was real. “Do you think this is fun for me? Locked up here alone with my thoughts? Awake at night because they won’t give me anything to sleep? Do you know how dark it is? I’ve never seen more stars and been so lost. It’s awful. I’m confronted with my every failure. I was taking her pills, Patrick. At the end. Her pills. That’s how bad it was. That’s how small I am.”
Patrick was always surprised how quickly rage traveled through his body. After the accident that took Joe, he was given morphine. He remembered how it flushed cold through his veins, from limbs to fingertips, into each miniscule capillary, not an inch of him left unrewarded. One instant, pain; the next, blessed relief. This was that but in reverse. Molten anger all the way into his toenails. He started to sweat and his hands clenched into fists.
“It wasn’t at her expense, I swear. Refills were easy to come by. There was always more than enough in the house. She never went without.”
Patrick crossed over to the window and leaned on the sill. The mountains rose in the distance. His well was in a mountain. He let himself breathe, but it was the first time their looming presence around the valley’s edge felt invasive, and not like protection. They were encroaching, holding him in, threatening to suffocate him instead of keeping danger out. “Celestial navigation. It’s a sucker’s game,” he said, recalling Greg’s comment about being lost.
So many nights Patrick had looked up at the desert night sky trying to find meaning, trying to locate himself. He would always come back to the same thing: stargazing was time traveling. He’d looked it all up, read every book in the library. We see the sun as it was 8.3 minutes ago. Alpha Centauri—the next closest star—was 4.3 light-years away. When he looked at Alpha Centauri, he saw light that was generated when Joe was still alive. He even remembered the time, 4.3 years and a day after that fateful night, when he looked up at the sky to see the first light generated after Joe had died; he wept like a child. The North Star? Three hundred and twenty light-years. Its light was generated long before either he or Joe existed. It was a sucker’s game, he repeated, this time to himself. How can you tell where you’re going when you’re always looking up at the past?
“Go home, Patrick. Be with the kids. Show them your grief. Talk to them. Show them your grief and help them navigate theirs.”
Patrick had a thousand questions; chiefly, what if he said the wrong thing? “And then what?”
Greg smiled. “I’ll see you in twenty-four days.”
Patrick looked back down at the magazines; there was no headline screaming “10 Former TV Stars That Will Help You Live a Healthier Life.” The very thought of it, ridiculous.
Greg pulled his brother in for a hug. “Maisie wants a husband?”
“That’s what you got from all this?” Patrick rested his chin on Greg’s shoulder.
“I’m just surprised, is all.”
Patrick squeezed. “Don’t you dare hold her to it.”
“All I will ever want is for her to be happy.”
They stood there and held each other. As little kids, they would hug every night before bed. Patrick wondered when that stopped, when intimacy
