“Alan doesn’t like this,” Nick said. “He’d like us to go home.”
“Yeah?” I asked, and I reached out a hand. Not to touch him, just ready to catch him if he lost his balance. “Well, then. Maybe we should pack up. We don’t want your brother to be unhappy, do we?”
Nick helped me pack up, and we drove home through the night. I thought Nick might fall asleep. He gets comfortable in cars and falls asleep easily when we have to run, while Alan always spends those nights awake, pale and strained for days afterward. I would’ve carried him in to bed.
He didn’t sleep. He stared out the window, calculating miles.
“This is a stupid car,” he said at length. “It should go faster.”
“That would be against the law, Nicky.”
I got fixed with a baleful stare. “That’s stupid.”
Alan came running to the window when he saw the car outside. I saw the gleam of a knife in the lamplight, and I had to stop and concentrate on a simple act like turning off the car engine, my heart clenching because my son knows always to grab for a weapon first and look for the threat later.
“What happened?” he asked as he came running outside. “Did something go wrong? Are you all right? Did you not enjoy it? Why are you home?”
“It was stupid,” said Nick. “And you’re stupid too. It was your idea.”
Alan looked at him, shocked and a little hurt. The tension was gone from Nick’s body for the first time in two days. I seldom get to understand Nick better than Alan does, but I’d been the one there to see him trying to use a language that will never be quite familiar to him to tell me about feelings he isn’t even comfortable having. I could look after them both, for a while.
“We brought you a giant bag of marshmallows, Alan,” I said, and hugged him as I went by. “Don’t start complaining, or we won’t share.”
The boys toasted marshmallows over our toaster, which is now irredeemably ruined, and Nick fell asleep on the countertop. I think he had a pretty okay birthday, in the end.
I went up to check on Olivia, who was sleeping, and then I sat down and wrote this. I don’t even know why. I do not know what meaning this diary I started years ago has, or why I keep being drawn back to it.
Maybe just to record the boys, like a photo album, like a memento of a baby’s first step and a pressed curl of their hair. It doesn’t seem right to leave a record of Nick’s first word and Alan’s first gun, but a record has to be true. I don’t know what truth will mean to Alan by the time he reads this, or if Nick will ever be able to read it and understand anything I was trying to say, but I wanted to put real feeling down here. So that they could open this book if they ever wanted to, and know beyond doubt or death what they meant to me.
This is not the story I meant to write, not the apology I wanted to give or an explanation that would make everything worthwhile.
But one thing is very clear to me now. I am writing this for both my sons.
Mae paused. There was no line drawn beneath the words, as there usually was when Daniel finished an entry, but the rest of the pages were blank.
“He never wrote any more,” Nick said, toneless. “He died that winter.”
“He really loved you,” said Mae. “In the end. That’s what he meant. That’s what he wanted you to understand. He really loved you.”
“And then he died.”
Mae bit her lip, not sure if she was feeling frustration or grief for a man she’d never even met, for his stupid, stubborn son who had not known how to say he missed someone then and had never learned.
“He got a lot wrong, didn’t he?”
Nick’s head came up. “What?”
“Half monster and half magician,” Mae said. “What way is that to think about someone you love? You didn’t want to go on that trip. He shouldn’t have taken you. He should have done
“My dad did his best!” Nick snarled. “It wasn’t—the way he—”
He lost control of words and glared hatefully up at her, radiating coldness, the monster child all grown up.
“It was all really complicated,” she said softly. “It’s still really complicated. So if Alan did something to you— something that felt like coming into that room with your cradle in it, holding a knife—you could understand that it doesn’t mean he hates you. He still—”
“What are you talking about?” Nick asked, even colder than before but suddenly in control, wielding his words like a weapon. “What has Alan got to do with this?”
“Nick, I want you to listen to me.”
Nick was on his feet suddenly, uncoiling in a lethally fast movement and coming at her. Mae backed up fast, but she was on a roof with nowhere to go.
“What do you know?” he demanded.
His hair had gone wild around his face, like a writhing crown of shadows. Mae realized that the wind had really picked up an instant before the cold hit her, scything through the thin material of her shirt. She shuddered, feeling the chill run all through her, like an icy knife sliding in and then stripping the flesh from her bones.
“He’s going to betray you.”
“He’s not!”
“Nick,” Mae said. “He is. He told me so.”
