Page 37

Jonah

MARCH

It was cold when Jonah stepped outside a little past two in the morning. His thin cotton pants didn’t hold up against the punishing chill, but he welcomed the bite. Tonight, the cold was the whole point.

He had spent hours turning over in bed, long past the time the rest of his family had fallen quiet behind their closed doors. The air inside his old bedroom was too warm. The street outside his window was too quiet. The comforter was too soft, too big, too clean. This endless state of half-awakeness he had been trapped in for weeks was eating him alive. Even true unconsciousness failed him as a means of escape, either evading him entirely or plaguing him with images of half-formed memories that left his skin crawling for days. He didn’t have a preference for either .

It was that gnawing feeling that propelled him out of bed tonight, shucking off the bedspread and clambering to his feet.

He had just stood there for a moment, in the dark, in the middle of his room. His fingers had twisted into the hair on either side of his head—when had it grown?—pulling tight, tight, until the sting of his scalp blurred his vision with tears. He squeezed his eyes shut and wondered, not for the first time, if he was going out of his mind.

Outside, he thought. Just needed some air. Just needed some room to breathe.

He hadn’t even stopped to pull on socks, and now the concrete patio was an icy anchor beneath his feet.

Jonah pulled in a deep lungful of air and held it, praying for the cleansing burn to shake loose his internal claustrophobia. It swirled around him when he let it out. He watched as the last trace dissipated into the darkness before he sank to the ground.

The backyard pool was stretched over with the tarp they used to cover it in the off-season. From this vantage point, it was hard to imagine the days he had spent out here as a child, his skin glowing into a golden tan in the sunlight. He looked down at his arms, turning them over to see the pale reflection of moonlight staring back up at him.

Looking away, he folded his knees into his chest and stared out at the pool, thinking about how shockingly cold the water must be beneath the cover. Maybe there was even an inch of ice on the surface. He remembered one summer, when his dad let him help open it for the season. They had removed the tarp together, freeing the hooks from the anchor points around the edge, and he had let Jonah dip his hand into the murky, green water. He remembered the way the cold shocked him, like ice down his back. Cold enough to hurt.

He wondered if he would feel the same sting now. If that sting would finally be sharp enough to cleanse his insides. Or if it would be lost like all the other sensations to his endless well of numbness, and apathy, and non-existence.

Sometimes he wondered if he really was alive at all.

It would have only taken a few steps, really. In a matter of seconds, he could have cleared the few feet to the pool’s edge, could have freed the cable that held the corner of the tarp taut, just enough to give him room to slip his body over the lip of the pool, to slip beneath the surface and feel the cold shatter him. To break up the numbness, if only for a moment.

To disappear.

Jonah blinked, coming back to his body to find his toes at the edge of the tarp. He flinched, stumbling back.

“Jonah?”

He hadn’t heard the back door open. His mother stared at him from the patio. The first thing he registered wasn’t the deepened crease in her brow or the way she stood with one arm poised away from her body, as if preparing to reach out and yank him back from the edge of the water. It was the oversized shirt, faded from years of wear and hanging loosely on her frame.

His father’s shirt.

His instinctive reaction was quick and fleeting, but he recognized that flare of heat in his chest as anger. Hot enough, if only briefly, to break through the fog and make him feel its burn. Jonah grasped after it like a starving man with a fish.

“Jonah?” she repeated, taking a step forward. Her slippers stopped at the edge of the deadened grass. “What are you...? Baby, it’s freezing out here.”

“Sorry,” he murmured.

He was braced for the usual reassurance, the promise that there was no need to be sorry, Jonah . But she was silent, eyeing him like he was every bit as crazy as he felt. For a long time, the only sound between them was the whistle of wind through the naked tree branches overhead.

“I wish you would talk to me,” she said.

There was something different in those words, all falsehoods and optimism stripped from her voice. For the first time since Jonah had returned to Indiana, he heard the exhaustion that lay behind the facade.

Jonah ducked his head forward, the vague sense of frustration burrowing deeper.

“I don’t know how to help you, Jo. I’m trying my best, but I can’t reach you when you close yourself off like this. ”

Maybe they were both done pretending. Maybe they were both too tired, now, to keep dancing around the elephant in the room.

“What do you want me to talk about?” The calm in his voice was that of a smooth surface over a dangerous rip current.

“Anything,” she said, and wasn’t that a load of bullshit? “What you’re thinking about, what... What happened to you.”

“You don’t want to listen to that,” he snapped.

“If it would help you, of course I—”

“Trust me,” Jonah said. “You don’t want to hear the details, Mom. You can barely look at me as it is.”

She flinched, but Jonah didn’t feel compelled to retract his words. The anger had taken hold, and he wasn’t about to fight it now.

“You know I don’t...” She couldn’t look him in the eye when she lied to him. “I don’t think any differently of you.”

“I am different!” he shouted. “Stop pretending like I’m this person you used to know. You won’t say it out loud, but I can feel it. You’re just waiting around for your son to show up, but he’s not coming. He’s never coming back.”

“You—” She matched him for fierceness now, her slippers stumbling into the grass to meet him. “—are my son. You will always be my son.”

“Where was that conviction when I needed you?”

He might as well have slapped her. She stepped back, shaking her head. Her silence only drove his anger forward .

“You wanted to talk about it,” he threw back at her. “That seems like a good place to start. What did you think would happen to me when you kicked me out? Did you even care?”

Tears tracked down her face, just as they had the night Jonah left. “Of course I care,” she cried. “I always cared. Your father—”

“My father,” Jonah spat, “isn’t here. I’m asking you. You’re my mom . I needed you and you didn’t help me.”

Silence rang out through the darkness around them. The night sky had never felt so dark or so permanent overhead. In that moment, Jonah was sure he would never see the sun again.

“It’s late,” his mom said finally, her voice wavering. “And you’re tired.”

“I hated you,” he whispered. “For months, I couldn’t even think of your face because of how much I resented you for choosing him over me. And then...” He let himself pause, calculating how much exactly he was willing to divulge.

He thought about the time in the run-down clinic on the south side, getting tested for the first time, afraid that whatever diagnosis the doctor had for him would be a death sentence.

He remembered—only in hazy, grayed-out pockets—throwing up in the grass outside the car after a man had forced half a bottle of vodka down his throat, sure that the poison would kill him this time .

He remembered another man who had pulled out a gun inside the hotel room and made Jonah perform the full hour while thinking he wouldn’t see the other side of it.

“I thought I was going to die,” he settled for saying. “And that’s when I realized that I didn’t hate you. I loved you, still. Even after everything, I still loved you. And I didn’t want to die never getting to see you again, because you’re my mom, and you... and I...” He pulled in a deep breath. “I just can’t make it make sense in my head. I can’t understand how I could love you after everything you did, but you couldn’t even love me enough to just accept me for who I am.”

“Please don’t say that,” his mother begged. “Please, Jonah, don’t ever say that I don’t love you.”

“Did you ever try to come after me? Even once?”

She was quiet, her eyes on the grass.

“I did,” she said. “Once. It was a few weeks after you...” She shook her head. “It was a few weeks after. You were eighteen by then. When I talked to the police, tried to file a report, they said they couldn’t open a search on a legal adult who wanted to disappear.”

Jonah was momentarily stricken silent. “I didn’t want to disappear,” he whispered. “I didn’t—” His voice broke off. He pressed a fist to his mouth, but the sobs sputtered out around it anyway. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want this, mom, I didn’t... I didn’t...”

The fear that had turned to rage turned to despair and exhaustion, coming to a head as his knees found the grass. Jonah buried his face in his hands, and he screamed .

His mother’s hands on his back, light and frantic, were peripheral. The consideration of his neighbors hearing him was peripheral. The only thing that existed in the world was concentrated in the fire that tore his throat apart in the backyard of his childhood home.

It was impossible to tell if the screaming continued, or if the sound only reverberated in his head. He was lost, and with every second that passed, he became emptier. Devoid of weight and intention and strength.

When hands pulled him forward, his body obeyed. He collapsed against his mother like a child, weeping into her chest. On some level, it was a parallel to their first reunion in Chicago, but something was distinctly different this time.

There was a desperation in this embrace, a finality, that wasn’t there before.

He recognized, in that moment, that there was no world in which he could heal under that roof, sharing space with the ghosts of his past. Jonah clung to her this time because he knew it was a goodbye.