Work Text:
Imagine your wife dies in the night. And you’re standing out in the yard with your oldest son holding your youngest, smoke still billowing from the house you couldn’t pull her from in time, when the baby starts crying. (He hasn’t stopped crying) but this one is a wail, this one is the piercing siren you remember from your baby’s first cold, when your wife had left you with the oldest while she sped him to the hospital with skin too hot for a thing that small, and you feel your blood run cold. Because what if you lose him? Your wife had left you with the implicit responsibility for the two things she left you, the only parts of her you have left, and your oldest is already starting to seem a lot more like you, this one might be your only chance to see the ghost of her smile again, to raise one better than you were, the way that she was—
But you already know you can’t stay here. You tell your oldest to take his brother to the car and you wait there with the reflection of the fire in your eyes until the firemen come and shove you back to the street (quiet, just like she’d wanted, where there weren’t too many cars for the boys to play ball outside in the summer).
So imagine you leave, first thing that you can. And you have your oldest in the back checking the temperature of the youngest on the back of his hand while you spread out the map in the passenger’s seat, playing navigator the way your wife always teased you about (smiling, “you can’t even trust me with the map?”) while you drive off and away, to somewhere eventually but first you have to put as much distance behind you as you can stomach and you can’t stomach much.
And you already know you aren’t going to call your oldest in to school tomorrow, aren’t going to be there to see the body again because you can’t—you know she deserves a proper funeral to rival the queens of Egypt but you can’t give it to her or you’ll go down in the dirt with her and your boys need you to stay strong. There was something off about the house, something wrong you can’t put words to and you know the nice sheriff had written off as rambling. So you know you can’t take him to the hospital, or there’ll be questions. But the whole time he hasn’t stopped screaming, shrieking like the fire alarm gone off too late, and so you pull into a motel earlier than you’d planned on because you need to get his temperature down and at least the motel will have ice.
Imagine your oldest son is lying awake in the other bed—his back to you but you’re familiar enough with this one to know when he’s playing possum and so you can see from the line of his shoulders that he’s lying stiff as a rod—after sending him back and forth to get ice all day so you could pile it around the baby and try to keep him cool. And you don’t know anything about how to keep him cool but you know if he gets too hot he won’t come back from it and the prospect of losing your son and the last remnant of your (late) wife in one fell swoop makes your gut clench and your teeth ache and your eyes feel like hot coals so you do everything you can and you stay with him, try to feed him and he’s so small but you know he needs more food to fuel him than he can seem to keep down, so you’re sitting up all night on the still-tucked sheets of the bed closest to the bathroom with your head bowed in a prayer you can’t put words to because your mama taught you better than to cuss and threaten God. It’s the worst night of your life and you hate that because your wife died last night but this is the night it’s sinking in and you don’t sleep a wink of it because you’re afraid your youngest is going to follow her.
The fever breaks in the dregs of the next afternoon, and your oldest asks you so many questions afterward but you won’t talk about it again. You convince yourself that he lived and that’s enough and you push the wriggling pit of fear of death deep enough into your stomach to last you the rest of your life. He lived and that’s enough. She didn’t live and that isn’t.
By that evening you’re driving past the state line and your oldest son sleeps like a baby in the back of the car with his head again his younger brother’s car seat.