Drake tried to put it all in perspective, but it just wouldn’t go. For the next hour after his father had gone to bed Drake kept rolling around the idea of blinking away the past. Nothing like that had happened to him in those twelve years. All that time now seemed longer than anything. And everything before—when he’d been a boy in Silver Lake, then gone on to college—like water in his hand, bleeding through his fingers and then gone.
“The truth is,” Drake said, “I can’t trust him. I want to but I just can’t.”
“He’s your father. I don’t know what else you want from him. I’m sure he’s sorry about it all.”
“He’s not the same person. He’s not who I remember. Earlier, on our way home, he thought someone was following us.”
“What do you want me to say?” She looked over at him, her eyes begging for understanding. “It’s just nerves. When they told us he was getting out they said it might be difficult.”
“Stop acting like you know him,” Drake said, the words spilling out before he could stop them. “You don’t know him like I do.”
“Did you ever think that maybe you don’t know him?” Sheri said. She’d pushed herself up on the bed now, her thin, fine-boned hands at her sides. The brown hair she usually wore at her shoulders, tied up in a ponytail, a smattering of freckles on her cheeks that would only grow darker as the season warmed. “You went to visit him only once in all his time away. At least I tried to write him and keep him in the loop. Telling him about you and what was going on here in Silver Lake, and he was good about responding, about wanting to hear about you. At dinner tonight you heard him yourself, talking about the land, about the hills and mountains, about how you two used to ride up into the valleys on horseback. It seems like going along with you would be something he’d want.”
Drake shook his head. He knew already there was no point in going into it. He was being the asshole, but he didn’t care, he was angry at his father, he’d been angry for a long time, and his father’s coming home wasn’t going to change that. He got up from the bed and crossed to the dresser, where he took out a pair of thin cotton pants and changed into them. For a little while, when Sheri had become pregnant—when they had stayed up late in bed, the lights off, making plans for the future and whispering to each other in the darkness even though there was no one else to hear—Drake had let himself forget about who he was, about where he’d come from and the reasons his life was the way it was. His father a convicted criminal, and anything Drake had wanted to be in his younger years no longer a reality he could ever hope for. “Don’t you see that my life would be completely different if it wasn’t for him?”
“You would have finished college,” Sheri said.
“Yes.”
“And you would never have come back to Silver Lake.”
“Probably not.”
“And you never would have met me.”
Drake looked over at her; he didn’t know what to say. It was the truth. He never would have met her. He started to tell her it wasn’t true, but then gave up. He was being pigheaded. He loved her. He depended on her, knew she would never lie to him, that she would always give it to him straight. He felt bad for every unnamed thing that had been going through his head from the moment he’d woken up this morning, to this moment, here in their bedroom.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I get it.” Her voice losing some of the sharpness that had been growing in around the edges. “But it’s not like you can invent a time machine and go back. Your life isn’t going to change in that way. Not ever.” The last few words beginning to tighten and catch in her throat as her voice broke.
“Hey,” he said, and then, “Hey, hey, hey.” His voice dropping to a whisper as he stood next to the dresser and looked back at her, knowing what she’d just said wasn’t really about him alone. It was about them. It was about the baby they’d lost and a million other things that had been adding up to this moment alone.
She was crying now, softly, with her body turned away from him on the bed. The sheets pulled tight over her shoulders. He went around the bed and sat next to her. With his hand he tried to rub some warmth onto her back. “Hey,” he said. “We’re okay. We’ll be just fine.” But he didn’t know it and he said it again, repeating it like a mantra.
For a while now he’d thought maybe they were both waiting to see who would leave first, and then when the parole board had called to tell Drake about his father’s release, Drake had thought maybe they would stay together, maybe they would figure it out.
He knew losing the baby had hurt Sheri in a deeper way than he could understand. He hadn’t been there for her. He’d been on the outside, listening through the bathroom door. Stuck between knowing what to do and not knowing. No clue. No training for a thing like this—for life to come at them out of the dark without warning. But hadn’t that been it? Drake thought. One moment you’re joking about calluses and corns and secrets and the next…
Drake sank into the bed and pulled Sheri toward him. Her wet face to his, warm and soft, strands of loose hair come free from her ponytail where they lay against her cheeks. She wasn’t crying anymore and he listened to her snuffling breath. Her nose and mouth close into his shoulder and her hot breath on his skin.
“It’s good,” he said, taking his time, “that you were able to talk about it with my father today. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He felt her give the smallest nod. The crown of her head just below his chin. “We had to start talking about it sometime.”
Everything Drake had thought or done in the last month felt like it was all coming together. His past life asking questions of his present. Still, he’d gone rigid when Patrick had started talking to Sheri about the baby. Drake just standing there holding the spatula, paralyzed. Everything inside telling him he needed to protect Sheri. But at the same time, realizing that he’d been waiting for this, waiting for this time of his life. The past meeting the future, Drake adding a new role, being a father, sweeping all the failures of the past away to make room for this new stage in his life. He’d wanted that baby more than anything he could remember wanting before.
Instead they’d lost it and now their marriage felt like something fragile, like an egg in the palm. Hold too tight and he’d crush the thin shell in his hand, too loose and he’d drop it on the floor.
He kept her close for a long time, feeling her breath whispering on his clavicle. He remembered the days after. Sheri home in bed, not wanting to move, not even bothering to take the medication the doctor in Bellingham had prescribed for her. He thought of this now and about how fragile she’d become in such a short time. So different from the person she’d become to him. The person he thought of as his wife. When she fell asleep he turned and flipped off the bedside light and lay there listening to the air in her lungs, feeling his heart beating in his chest.
He lay there until he was quite cold, feeling the chill on his skin but worried that if he moved to pull the sheets up and cover them both fully, she would wake. Eventually, when the goose bumps had risen and pricked his skin like chicken feathers, he got up from the bed and loosened the sheets from the bottom where Sheri had tucked them that morning. When he climbed back in, Sheri’s breath had changed and he knew she was awake.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel bad about what I said to you. About another life. About things being different.” He moved his fingers down the outside of her arm, feeling the little hairs that grew there, and for a while he wondered if she’d heard him.
“I thought tonight might be different,” she said, eventually. “Meeting your father for the first time. Having him out of prison finally. To anyone else this would be a happy day.”