Page 56 of Roadrunner

It wasn’t there.

What was there was more complicated and less flattering. A tightening in the chest that I recognized, after a moment of honest examination, as something close to disappointment.

I sat with that.

I was not a cruel person. I had never wished Joshua dead. Even at his worst.

But I had, in the weeks since his accident, begun to construct a quiet and tentative version of what came next. It had arrived without invitation. Late at night mostly. A future that existed in the conditional tense. If. Maybe. Possibly.

A future that had no shape I was willing to give a name.

I closed my eyes.

I was a terrible person.

I opened them.

I was a human person. That was what Martina had said. The distinction felt important.

I tried, sitting there with the cold coffee, to locate exactly when the conditional future had started. I couldn’t. That was the unsettling part. It hadn’t arrived as a decision, the way I kept wanting to frame it, something I could take responsibility for and therefore forgive myself for. It had arrived the way weather arrives. Gradually, and then all at once, until one day you look up and the whole sky has changed color and you can’t say which cloud did it.

I thought about all the small, private ways I had already begun grieving a man who was still alive. The side of the closet I’d started leaving empty in my mind. The sentence I’d caught myself halfway forming to a divorce attorney I’d never called. The nights I’d lain in bed doing the quiet math of what Arthur and I could build, just the two of us, once the waiting was finally over.

None of it had felt like betrayal while I was doing it. It felt like survival, exactly the word Martina used. It only became betrayal in retrospect, now that the man at the center of all that quiet arithmetic had, against the odds and against my own worst self, started coming back.

Martina appeared in the doorway.

She looked at me. Then at the cold coffee. Then at me again. “What happened?”

“He’s improving,” I said.

She came in and sat down. “That’s good news.”

“Yes,” I said.

She studied me. “Alex.”

“I know,” I said.

“You feel—”

“I know what I feel,” I said. “I’m working through it.”

She was quiet.

“I accepted it,” I said. “His death. I accepted it and started—” I stopped. “I had started to think about what came after.”

“That’s not a sin,” she said.

“It feels like one.”

A month after the wreck the doctor used a different word. Improving. A hand had moved when a light hit it. Not a wave. A twitch.

I looked at her hand over mine.

“God’s will,” I said quietly. “That’s what I told him. I stood in his room and told him I was going to let God decide.”

“And God decided,” Martina said.