Oliver can’t hold his expectant gaze. He puts his glasses back on and looks out the window over the kitchen sink. The sun has set. Lightning flashes across the night, silhouetting the trees. “If there was someone you knew you could never be with, would you still see them?” He’s not sure why he asks. Maybe he wants to hear Theo say what he already knows. That he was selfish to visit Beatrix. That he should never have let it get this far. That he should have been more careful, should have let her go, should have said goodbye in Paris. Or maybe he wants to know if Theo would have made the same mistakes, too.
“The woman you met?” Theo asks.
Oliver nods. He picks at the label on his beer bottle.
Theo treads carefully. “Does she know you’re sick?”
“Dying,” Oliver corrects. “And yeah, she knows.”
“And what does she say?”
Oliver takes a long drink. She says she’ll see him soon in the steadiest voice she can manage. She says she wishes he could stay, while fighting back tears. Says she loves him, without saying it at all. Zoë warned him. “I am going to break her heart either way.”
“Then I think you make as many memories as you can before you run out of time together,” Theo says.
Too late.
“All she has is memories. That’s what she told me once,” Oliver says, glancing over at Theo. “She said she wanted something real. Do you know what I said?”
Theo shakes his head.
“I told her memories are real. That the love that made them was real. You told me that.”
“I remember,” Theo says. It was their first Christmas without their parents, only six months on from the accident. “I was panicking because I didn’t know what the fuck to get you as a gift.”
“Likewise,” Oliver admits. “That’s how you ended up with the world’s ugliest tie.”
“Hey, I liked that tie. I still have it,” Theo says with a smile Oliver hasn’t seen in a long time.
“You do not. It was hideous. It had ducks on it.”
“Penguins,” Theo corrects. “I’ll go get it right now, if you don’t believe me.”
Oliver shakes his head. “You don’t have to prove it. I believe you.” He takes a swig of his beer. So does Theo.
“Christ, what a fucking disaster that was,” his brother says. A smile creeps over his lips at the memory.
A record-breaking blizzard had hit New England three days before Christmas. It took Theo and Oliver a day and a half to dig out the house without getting frostbite. By the time they got to the grocery store—an hour before closing on Christmas Eve—the shelves were bare of the usual festive foods their mother would have made. Theo wanted so badly to re-create their last Christmas together as a family that Oliver thought he was going to have a breakdown. He lied and told Theo he didn’t like ham anyway.
They ended up with a Christmas Eve feast of spaghetti and meatballs, with frozen waffles topped with ice cream for dessert. The next morning, two gifts sat under the tree. Theo’s hideous penguin tie and a photo album for Oliver. It was full of photos of him with his parents, from the day he was born to his last dance recital, just a few weeks before the accident.
Oliver loved and hated the gift: loved having the physical reminder of his parents, but hated that he needed it. For weeks he had been secretly terrified that he was forgetting things about them, the details that made them more than ghosts.
He wept for the first time since the accident, then hated himself for crying in front of his brother, who hadn’t said a word about it. When his tears stopped, he didn’t say thank you. He told Theo, “I wish they were real.” Which wasn’t exactly what Oliver meant, but somehow, Theo had known what he was saying. He told Oliver that their parents’ memory and their love were the same thing, and that was—and always would be—real.
“Hey, Christmas waffles is a great tradition,” Oliver says.
Theo clinks his beer against Oliver’s, and they both drink to it. “How’s the time travel going?”
“I had an appointment at Aevum today,” Oliver says. “They denied my access.”
“What does that mean?” Theo asks.
Oliver sighs. “It means I’m too sick to travel.”
Theo stops with his beer halfway to his lips. “So, that’s it?”
“I hope not.” God, he hopes not. “They’re suspending me for a week, then I have one more chance to try again.”
