LOGAN
Once the last person leaves, the house is quiet in a way that makes it feel almost haunted.
It’s not peaceful. It’s not calm. It’s just…stripped.
Stripped of the laughter. The banter. The sarcasm. Stripped of the man that held his family together like glue. Who raised the most amazing woman and a great-ass man.
As if all of the noise and love that used to be here got scraped off the walls and carried out with the last casserole dish.
I’m standing in the hallway outside the bathroom, staring at the thin sliver of light under the door like it’s a heartbeat I can measure. To make sure she’s still breathing, even if she doesn’t feel like she can.
Water runs, and steam curls around the frame, faint and sweet with her shampoo, but it doesn’t do anything to soften the knot in my chest. If anything, it tightens it, knowing she uses the shower as a space to give herself permission to completely fall apart, just so no one else can see it.
Just a few minutes after the shower had started, the sound of her sobs escaped the safety net she thought she had in place.
I heard her do this many times before, but not to this level.
Hearing her now, I’m not sure how she’s still standing, and maybe she’s not.
I know I wouldn’t be if I were making those sounds. Even through the walls, the raw, agonizing sobs shred right through my heart, knowing I can’t protect her from this pain or magically make it all go away. I can’t say it’s going to be okay, because who knows if or when it might be.
I’ve been through pain. I’ve built a whole personality out of tolerating it. I know what it feels like to have your life ripped out from under you and be expected to keep breathing like it’s just another day.
But hearing someone you love break like that does something different.
It makes you want to kick the door down.
It makes you want to fight the universe with your bare hands.
It makes you want to fix what can’t be fixed.
I don’t move.
Because the thing about being there for someone isn’t always doing the biggest, most heroic thing. Sometimes it’s just staying. Holding the perimeter. Letting them have their grief without an audience.
So I stay.
Outside the door, back against the wall, hands shoved into my pockets like I’m keeping myself from reaching for something I can’t put back together.
Down the hall, Cameron is in the living room, sitting in Pops’s chair like it’s the only place he can exist without coming undone. The TV is off. The lamp is on. He’s staring at the floor like he could drill a hole through it if he concentrates hard enough.
We haven’t said much since everyone left.
We don’t need to.
Grief turns men into statues. It makes you speak in smaller words.
Every now and then the shower sound shifts, and my spine goes rigid. Another choked inhale. Another broken sound. Then silence and water again.
I look up at the ceiling and swallow.
Please.
I don’t even know who I’m praying to.
But I’m praying anyway.
The bathroom door finally unlocks with a soft click.
