“You’ll come again, right?”
Yeah.
“My caseworker will wonder if you don’t. I told her you were practically my brother and integral to my recovery process. Pretty good, huh?”
I’m impressed.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t come up with it on my own. Hey, Matt?” She lifted her hips off the chair to reach into her pocket, pulled out a wrinkled square of lined paper. Pressed it into his hand.
“These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace.
In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the
world.”
Matthew hugged her, hard. See you soon.
He gathered his things from the locker and took the cab back to the station. He asked the woman at the ticket window to call Ellie for him, and she clenched her jaw but did it. When the bus pulled into Hollings, Ellie was there, waiting outside with her coat zipped up over her nose. She held his hand, and they walked to her mother’s minivan. As the engine idled, she asked, “Did it go okay?”
He nodded.
“Good. That’s . . . good.” She played with the buttons on the dashboard, turning on the heat, the front and rear defroster as the windows clouded with their breath. She scratched her fingernails over her tights. Striped today. Gray and pink and purple and red. She jiggled her leg. “I’m glad.”
Question?
“Okay.”
Do you know what this means?
He copied the sign she made earlier.
She nodded.
What?
“I love you.”
Do you?
“That was really stupid of me.”
Do you?????
“Yes.”
I do too.
Ellie smiled, ever so slightly. “Do what?”
Clever girl
, he wrote.
“You already knew that, and you’re not getting out of answering.”
Matthew looked at her. “I love you,” he said.
“I guess we’re even now,” she said, and then turned her head away. He saw her reflection in the dark window. She grinned, her hand covering half of her face.
He tapped her knee with his pad.
Both of us, even?
“Matthew Savoie, if you make a math joke right now, I’ll punch you. I mean it.”
I wouldn’t dream of telling you that the derivative of an even function would just make us . . . odd.
She swung at him, and as her momentum carried her forward, he kissed her, only their second kiss—not the quick, puckery kiss she gave him walking home a few weeks ago, but the sweetest, softest kiss he ever dared imagine. Finally, Ellie sat back and said, “I guess there are worse things than being odd.”
Like, without you,
Matthew wrote.
“Yeah. That,” Ellie said, and kissed him again.
Still aglow with Ellie’s declaration the day before, he ran the twenty yards from Pastor Larsen’s house to the church for Sunday service. He sat in the third pew from the front, closest to the wall so he could see Mrs. Healen. Not that she helped much.
He closed his eyes, breathed in the old wood smell, musty and pious, and he thanked God for Ellie once more, as he did almost every time he thought of her. He prayed for Skye, for all his cousins. And for Silvia.
And Abbi and the deputy.
I miss them, Lord. Please, please let them forgive me.
Someone brushed past his knees, stepping on his feet despite his tucking them under the seat. The person settled next to him, close enough he felt the heat radiating off the person’s leg onto his own. The entire pew had been empty when Matthew came in five minutes ago.
Why can’t they move down?
And then the someone squeezed his arm.
His eyes popped open; from the paisley-clad thigh he knew who it was, but he turned his head anyway to see Abbi, and Benjamin beside her. She enclosed him in her arms and, clasping her hands against his shoulder, drew him against her, the top of her head crushing his ear, hurting him.
He didn’t care.
“Okay,” Benjamin said. “Everyone out. You’ll need boots.”
In the back seat of the Volvo, Matthew and Ellie zipped their coats and wiggled on their mittens. He jammed a knit hat over his hair while she untied her ponytail and ran a brush through hers. They laughed as they tumbled from the car and jogged along the guardrail, then over it, tromping through long locks of dead, brown grass and snow on the side of the road.
Benjamin opened the door for Abbi. “It’s freezing,” she said.
“Come on. This is the last one.”
“They better not want to do this on the way back.”
The teenagers had already slid down the embankment and stood together in front of the
Welcome to New York
sign, inside arms around each other, outside arms pointing up at the lettering above their heads. Benjamin snapped a photo. “Wait. One more,” he said.
It felt good to be standing, to be out of the cramped car. Benjamin pushed his chest forward and his shoulders back, waggling his head from side to side until his neck popped. Twenty hours of driving, no matter how it was broken up, did a number on a man’s bones.
“Your turn,” Ellie said, climbing up the small hill. It had been her idea to stop and take a picture at each state line, and she hadn’t had to do much to persuade Matthew—smile and ask. She lost her footing, and Matthew, walking behind her, instinctively flattened his hands against her rear to stop her from slipping.
“Hey now,” Benjamin said. “No getting fresh. I’ve sworn on my life to Ellie’s parents I’d return her exactly the way she was when we took her.”
Matthew buried his hands in his coat, face blazing red, and Abbi gave Benjamin a small punch in the arm. “Oh, stop. Leave the boy alone.”
Benjamin laughed. “He knows I’m joking. Right, Matt?”
The boy shook with an embarrassed shrug and reached for the camera. Benjamin handed it to him and jumped down into the ditch. Abbi followed, and they posed in front of the sign. “Okay, got it,”
Ellie said.
As he walked back to the car, a lump of cold thudded against the back of Benjamin’s head, and then wetness in his collar, trickling down his back. He spun, and another snowball hit him in the side of the face. All three of them—Abbi, Ellie, and Matthew—stood with misshapen hunks of snow in their gloved hands. His hands were bare, and his fingers froze before he could properly pack the snow; his projectiles fell to dust as he flung them toward his attackers.
And then they all dropped their snowballs. “Uh, Ben. Turn around,” Abbi said.
A state police car pulled in behind the Volvo, lights spinning silently. Benjamin took out his badge and approached the trooper, who glanced at it, saying, “Someone’s going to get themselves killed out here, fooling around like that.”
“I’m sorry, Officer. We’re all just a bit rowdy from being cooped up in the car for the last twelve hundred miles.”
“How far you heading?”
“Buffalo.”
“Well, that’s only ’bout an hour and a half drive from here. I think you rowdy folks can handle that.”
The trooper waited until they all strapped back into the car, and Benjamin steered out into the oncoming traffic. After the trooper
car passed them, Matthew passed his notepad up to Benjamin.
I don’t think Ellie’s parents would appreciate her coming home with a police record.
“Ha, ha.” Benjamin tossed the pad over his shoulder.
Ellie caught it and, after skimming the note, giggled.
“I don’t need comments from the peanut gallery back there,” Benjamin said.
After Ellie repeated his comment to Matt, she said, “Matt wants to know if you know where the term
peanut gallery
comes from.”
“Howdy Doody,”
Benjamin said.
“No, before that,” Ellie read from Matthew’s pad.
“Kindly remind our little smarty-pants friend that I made no promises to get him home safely, so if he doesn’t watch it, I’ll accidentally forget him at the next rest stop.”
In the rearview mirror he watched as Ellie repeated his comment to Matthew, who broke out in a wide grin. He wrote something back to her.
“What’d he say?” Benjamin asked.
“That you’d miss him too much to ever do that.”
“He’s right,” Abbi said.
He is right
.
Matthew had been living with them since the week before Thanksgiving, both of them knowing the boy only agreed to it because he still felt guilty about his part in their losing Silvia, and the first couple of weeks had been uncomfortable as all of them tried too hard.
But now, nearly a month and a half later, Benjamin couldn’t imagine their home without him. Any remaining awkward moments were only because he and his wife sometimes forgot they now had a teenager in their house, not an infant. They left little sticky notes on the bathroom and bedroom mirrors reminding each other that clothing was no longer optional. And Matthew made a lot of noise before entering any room. They had worried when it started, him seemingly so klutzy, dropping things or banging against walls. He finally told them he did it on purpose; he’d come into the kitchen one morning when Benjamin and Abbi were kissing, and he wanted to make sure to warn them before he stumbled upon them in a more intimate situation.
They added locking doors to their sticky-note reminders.
The trip to Buffalo had started with a phone call. Abbi somehow convinced Matthew to let her call his father, and Jimmy Savoie wanted to see his son. He hadn’t known Matthew was sick. He didn’t even know the boy wasn’t living with Melissa anymore. Yes, yes, he said, he could have done a bit of digging, found the number and called. But the way he and Matthew’s mother had parted—well, he figured Melissa wouldn’t have let him talk to his son anyway.
“But tell him . . .” Jimmy had said. “Tell him I still have that picture of him, from that day we went to the fair, the day his face turned blue from the snow cone—tell him I have that one on the mantel. Tell him he has brothers.”
Matthew said he didn’t remember the fair, or the blue ice. But when Benjamin told him they’d take him out to New York over Christmas vacation, he’d agreed.
They had left on Sunday, early, suitcases and snacks crammed in the trunk, pillows and blankets mounded between them, and drove twelve hours, spending the night in a cheap motel outside Chicago— he and Matthew in one full-sized bed, Abbi and Ellie in the other. The next morning they logged another six hours, stopping in Cleveland so Matthew could have a dialysis session, staying another night. Then another two hours today.
Abbi turned around. “Anyone want to stop for breakfast?”
Benjamin glanced in the mirror again, saw Ellie look at Matthew. He shook his head. “No, I think we’re good,” Ellie said.
“Well, there’s some granola back there. And fruit in the cooler. I think a couple sandwiches from yesterday.”
His wife was worried about Matthew. So was he. Benjamin hadn’t had a moment to talk—really talk—about how Matthew felt being so close to the end of this leg of the journey.
He loved the boy. He didn’t think, after Silvia, he’d be able to love a child so freely again. And it wasn’t like with the baby, an overwhelming instant of emotion crashing over him. It came on in bits and spurts, surprising him, because who outside of God himself would have known a brilliant, deaf kid, a vegan hippie, and a toeless soldier would find themselves some sort of family?
They didn’t get only Matthew, though. Ellie came over nearly every evening, and more afternoons than not, Benjamin found Sienna and Lacie playing Polly Pockets in the living room, or sitting at the kitchen table, Matthew helping with homework. Even Jaylyn showed up a couple of times a week. And Heather, once. She had been looking for the girls, and Abbi invited her to dinner. She stayed, uncomfortable and self-conscious, but there nonetheless. Slowly, like rock candy crystals, they all piggybacked on one another, growing thicker and stronger and sweeter.
He reached across the armrest and threaded his fingers through Abbi’s, smiled at her and mouthed
I love you.
She covered their hands with her other one, picked at his knuckles. Things were better between them. They tried now, every day, working hard at loving, like the blistering, sweaty task it was, the unnatural discipline of denying oneself. He grilled his own steak when he wanted it; she bought him paper napkins and disposable razors while grocery shopping. They didn’t meet in the middle, but above it, in that place neither could reach alone, but in Christ was possible. Not all the time. Not even most of the time. But when they did, they could rejoice in the magnitude of the tiny victory and think,
Yes, God is growing us.
They drove in silence, no radio, no scribbling in the back seat, and after all the hours and the planning and the wondering, they were in Buffalo. Benjamin pulled in to the first gas station he found, and Abbi asked Ellie to help her get coffee for all of them.
Benjamin checked the directions to the Savoie house. “About fifteen minutes more,” he told Matthew.
Matthew nodded.
“You okay?”
More nodding.
“You’re sure?”
Ben, I’m fine.
“I don’t think you need to be concerned. Abbi said she got the sense he’d be open to a transplant, and—”
Matt stopped him with a shake of his head.
It’s not about that. Not really. Not now. Not anymore.
“I know.”
I never really thanked you. Both of you.
“You don’t owe us anything.”
I didn’t say owe. I said thank.
“You’re welcome, kiddo. And so much more.”
The women returned, and Benjamin navigated through Buffalo. Eventually he turned into the Savoie driveway, a little bungalow with asbestos siding and a basketball hoop cemented into the oil-stained blacktop. They all got out of the car.
“Do you want us to go in with you?” Benjamin asked.
Matthew shook his head.
“You don’t have to do this alone,” Abbi said.
I’m not alone.
“Should we wait, or maybe come back in an hour?” Benjamin asked.