MANDY
I have spent twenty years reading what bodies try not to say. It’s most of the job, honestly — the part the license never mentions — and I knew before Beckett cleared the jet bridge that he had lost more than his wife. He had lost the argument every grieving person runs in the dark: whether they are still allowed to be here, taking up air, wanting things. Nyah had been dead six months. Beckett had been losing that argument all six.
I knew the walk. I had seen it on a hundred patients and exactly zero times on him. That was what got me, sitting in the cell-phone lot with the AC in the 4Runner losing its slow war against a Pensacola afternoon. The boy I built pillow forts with had learned to carry himself like a man braced to be told to set something down and determined not to hear the order.
I sent the text a week ago without letting myself think about it too long, which is how I do most of the brave things in my life. Come down here. Florida. The guest room has the best light in the house. All true. But that’s not why I sent it.
I sent it because Nyah told me to.
Not in those words — Nyah didn’t do those words. Two summers ago, on my back porch with a bottle of wine she was mostly drinking alone because I had an early shift, she listened to me talk Beckett down off some ledge of his own construction over the phone. He said it was a warped fence board. It was not a warped fence board. Whatever it was lived inside a building he has never once been allowed to describe to me, and it was waiting for him there Monday morning, and the board was just the thing in the yard he could put a level on. Put the level down. The board’s fine. Go inside. I hung up and set the phone face down on the rail.
“You’ve been doing that a long time.”
“Since before he could spell lieutenant.”
She looked at me the way she looked at everything, as if she had already found all the exits, and put two fingers on the back of my wrist where it still lay on the phone.
“Good. Don’t retire.”
I didn’t know then that she was handing me something.
People assumed Nyah came to me through Beckett — as if he got her first and I got whatever friendship was left over. It went the other way as often as not. She called me on her own, usually about nothing, which is how you know somebody is really yours. She worried about the blood — Beckett’s ridiculous golden blood, the thing that turns every cut into a planning problem and once made a broken ankle and three pins more complicated than they had any right to be — and she told me so herself one night, afraid in the specific way only very brave people get afraid, of the day the card in her wallet might belong to no one.
I wasn’t at the funeral. I had a patient that week I couldn’t hand to anybody else, which is true, and which I have said often enough since that it has started to sound like a reason. What I did instead was send flowers to a house in Virginia, and a note I rewrote four times, and then nothing, for six months.
I don’t know where her card is now. In a plastic bag with her watch, probably, in a house in Virginia, with a man who can’t hold that number in his head for more than a week. Somebody has to be the person who remembers it, and it was never going to be him.
So I wasn’t driving to the airport to fix him. You cannot fix grief. You can only refuse to leave a person alone inside it. I was keeping a promise I hadn’t technically been asked to make, to a woman who had known exactly what she was doing when she handed it to me.