stubbed his toe.
“Absolutely not,” he said, in his pompous schoolteacher voice. “That’s ridiculous. That achieves nothing. You lost your son.”
“Maybe I need you to be angry with me.”
“You do not,” said Napoleon. “That’s … sick.” He turned away from her. “Stop this.”
“Please.” She got up on her knees on the bed so she could look him in the eyes. “Napoleon?” she said.
She thought about the home she grew up in, where nobody ever yelled or laughed or cried or screamed or expressed a single feeling, except for a mild desire for a cup of tea.
“Please?”
“Stop this nonsense,” he said through clenched teeth. “Stop it.”
“Shout at me.”
“No,” he said. “I will not. What next? Should I hit you too?”
“You’d never hit me in a million years. But I’m your wife, Napoleon, you’re allowed to be angry with me.”
It was like she saw the anger shoot through him, from his feet to the top of his head. It flooded his face. It made his whole body tremble.
“You should have checked on the fucking side effects, Heather! Is that what you want to hear?” His voice rose on an ascending scale until he was shouting as loud as she’d ever heard him shout, louder even than when Zach, at nine years old, old enough to know better, nearly ran in front of a car to chase a ball, a ball he’d been told to leave behind, and Napoleon shouted “STOP!” so loudly that every single person in that car park stopped.
Heather’s heart raced as Napoleon held his hands on either side of her shoulders and shook them violently, as if he were shaking her hard enough to make her teeth rattle, except he didn’t touch her.
“Does that make you happy? Is that what you wanted to hear? Yes, I am angry because when I asked you about side effects for a medication you were giving my child you should have checked!”
“I should have checked,” she said quietly.
He grabbed his phone from the bedside table. “And I shouldn’t have pressed snooze on this fucking piece-of-shit phone!”
He threw it against the wall.
Heather saw tiny shards of glass fly.
For a long beat neither of them said anything. She watched his chest rise and fall. She watched the anger leave him.
He sank onto the bed, facing away from her, put his face into his hands, and spoke in a hoarse, heartbroken voice with only pain and regret left, so softly it was barely above a whisper, “And our daughter should have told us there was something wrong with her brother.”
“She should have told us,” agreed Heather, and she laid her cheek against his back and waited for both their hearts to resume their normal pace.
He said something else but she didn’t catch it. “What?”
He said it again. “And that’s all we’ll ever know.”
“Yes,” said Heather.
“And it will never, ever be enough,” said Napoleon.
“No,” said Heather. “No, it won’t be.”
* * *
That night Heather slept deeply and dreamlessly for seven hours straight, something she hadn’t done since Zach died, and when she woke she found herself moving across the invisible, uncrossable expanse that had separated them for the last three years, as if it had never been there in the first place. She had made some bad decisions in her life, but saying yes to a freakishly tall, nerdy boy’s polite invitation to see a “well-reviewed film called Dances with Wolves” was not one of them.
You’re not meant to think of your children when you make love. Sexuality between married parents is for behind closed doors. And yet, that morning, as Napoleon took her so tenderly into his arms, she thought of her family of four, of both her children, of the baby boy who would never become a man, and the baby girl who was a woman now, and the powerful currents of love that would always run between them: husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, father and daughter, mother and daughter, brother and sister. So much love that came about because she said “yes” to a movie invitation.
And then she thought of nothing at all, because that nerdy boy still had the moves.
One year later
Ben and his mother had imagined it so many times that he thought they would surely be prepared when it finally happened, but they weren’t.
Lucy died of an overdose during one of her good periods, which is often the way, just when everyone thought that maybe this time she was going to make it. Lucy had started an interior