I go upstairs to find Bailey in the primary bedroom.
The bed is enormous, and Bailey is already lying on a corner of it. Her sweats are on. Her hair is damp from the shower.
And her burner phone, the one I had waiting for her, is in her hands. I don’t have to double-check that she isn’t texting anyone. Not Shep or her friends or her boss. She doesn’t need me to tell her that she can’t do that. She knows what she can and can’t do.
“You okay?” I ask instead.
“Yeah, I think so,” she says. “The shower helped.”
She pulls her legs up so I can scooch onto the base of the bed. I lie down, perpendicular to her, holding her ankle.
“Good,” I say.
“Can we both sleep in here tonight?” she asks.
I offer her a smile, trying not to make a big deal about her asking me to stay close. But it still catches me, fills my chest up. Especially now that we live apart, these moments are fewer and further between—as they’re supposed to be. But I treasure them when they come. I treasure the knowledge that, against the odds, it gets to be me. I get to be the one that makes Bailey feel safe.
“Please!” I say. “I almost got lost on my way up here to find you.”
She gives me a laugh, it’s a small laugh, but her first all day. I feel it move through me. A little found joy.
“How about you?” she asks.
“How about me?”
“You doing all right?”
She is worried. I can hear it. She is worried about me.
“No no no,” I say. “No worrying about me. That’s not allowed, kid.”
She rolls her eyes, and I know she wants to point out that she’s not a kid anymore. But she knows that would be useless. She knows that I’ll push back. I’ll remind her that I was my grandfather’s kid until the day he died. That I will resist all of her instincts to take care of me, just like he resisted all of my instincts to take care of him. It’s the great blessing of my life—that I get to be the one to take care of her.
“I keep looking at my phone, expecting a million texts from my boss,” she says. “She must actually be losing her mind that she can’t reach me.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” she says. “Her not being able to reach me is the only upside of this whole fucking mess…”
I give her a smile.
“But I can’t stop thinking about how I had to work last Sundayuntil almost midnight, and so I missed Grandpa’s weekly call. I missed our last call. That just seems… I don’t know… so fucked-up.”
“Bails, there was no way for you to know.”
“No, I know.” She pauses. “But I’m having trouble figuring out when we last spoke before that. I don’t know for sure. I mean, without my phone, there’s no way to really know. But, whenever it was, he was telling me about this cartoon he saw in theNew Yorker,” she says. “Only Grandpa would actually like… try to explain a cartoon as opposed to texting the photo of it…”
I nod, not saying what I know to be true. That the reason Nicholas didn’t just send a screenshot, but walked Bailey through it, was that he knew that Bailey lovedNew Yorkercartoons. And talking about them was a way to keep Bailey on the phone—it was a way to get to hear her laugh. The way I knew he loved that laugh.
“It was a funny one. It’s the one where the father takes his kid out fishing. Did you see it?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I say.
“Okay, well, the kid catches this tiny fish and the father tells his kid to smear any witnesses that said the fish wasn’t big. I’m not explaining it great, but I’m telling you it was funny.”
“You’re taking on your grandfather’s role.”
“Exactly,” she says. “Anyway, Grandpa was laughing so hard. Which made me laugh so hard. And I don’t know, maybe it was the kid and dad fishing together, like Dad and I used to do, but… I just thought Dad would love that cartoon too. And so I told Grandpa that, you know? I said,Dad would love this. It just came out before I thought about it.”
