she tidied up from the sandwich-making in chilly silence. From my nest in the chair nearest his, a cotton blanket thrown over my shoulder and the baby nursing beneath it, I watched him steadily. My eyes implored him to look at me, but he only shifted in his seat, flicking the ash from his cigarette without even looking to see if he’d hit the glass ashtray. I missed the sense of connection I’d once had with him—the rolled eyes when Candy misspelled a word on her lesson chalkboard, the shadowy smirks at the corner of his mouth when Dodge said something even more ignorant than usual. But now he seemed to have turned inward, not bothering to send those subtle messages. His mind was as impenetrable to me now as it had been the day I met him. And speaking his mind about Randy made me wonder all the more what was going on in there.
Maybe he’s angry at you, I thought. The idea caused anxiety to well up inside me, but I knew I couldn’t blame him if he was. In the five weeks since the baby’s birth I had paid little attention to him, easy enough to do when he was almost never awake. The more time I spent apart from him, the more unnerving details wormed their way into my memories of the hours before TJ’s birth. I remembered the power I felt in Elias’s arms when he threw my hands off him, and the muted electric thrill it stirred in me. When he hugged me and pressed his face into my hair, I heard him inhale deeply. All along there had been so many solid walls that made our friendship safe: our filial relationship, my growing pregnancy, his heavy and hurting body, the complete lack of privacy. I had meant no harm, but I loved him in a way that wasn’t fair to him. It was so easy for me to share my affection generously, knowing at the close of each day I would lie down with Cade and offer him the best of it. But Elias spent each night alone, and there was no place for him to channel whatever feelings welled inside him. Without ever meaning to, I had been cruel.
Now that TJ was here, I felt chagrined by it all. I needed to learn to live beside Elias in a way that would not hurt, or tempt, either of us. I needed to get over my judgment of Candy and look to her as a model for how to be with Elias. She knew how to care for her brother without adding complications to his already overburdened mind.
On the afternoon after his comment to Dodge, I caught up with him sitting on the back porch, looking out over the backyard from his mother’s white wooden rocking chair. He wasn’t smoking, wasn’t drinking and wasn’t asleep, so it was immediately noteworthy.
“Jill,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to apologize to you.”
I laughed in surprise. “For what?”
“For not doing anything to help when you were bleeding out on the sofa. It just got to me, and I felt frozen by it. I’m sorry for standing there screaming like a little girl.”
“But you did help,” I pointed out. “Cade said I would have been dead by the morning if you hadn’t alerted everyone.”
Elias’s expression changed. He seemed to be considering that. Then he shook his head. “I’m trained in field medicine. There’s a lot I could have done besides watch Cade throw you in the car. If you’d died, it would have been on me. I’m the one in the house who knows how to handle that. But I couldn’t handle it.”
“And I’m not dead. So there’s nothing to worry about.”
He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose in his weary way. “Just accept my apology, all right?”
“No. I don’t accept that you have anything to apologize for in the first place, so I can’t.”
He frowned. “I really wish you would.”
“You were trying to wean yourself off the medicine,” I said. “Nobody would have expected you to do anything differently. I’m sorry I’ve been preoccupied these last few weeks. I’ll get Cade to make you another appointment, okay? And you and I can drive down together, like last time.”
He shook his head. The chair’s wooden rockers creaked in rhythm, and he gazed out over the yard. “I already know what they’ll tell me. They’ll lower my dosage and I’ll just take twice as many. I can