Coda Books 06 - Fear, Hope, and Bread Pudding (MM)

asleep. I don’t know where Carol was. And I said to him, ‘If only you had stayed in your bed, your sister would be alive.’” I had to stare down at my lap again. I quit trying to dry my eyes. “I was the one who insisted that Carol keep him in his bed. If I’d only let him sleep with us. If I’d waited until later to call the AC company. If I’d only locked the gate on the pool. But instead, I blamed him.” She waited silently for me to take a tissue from the box on the table and blow my nose. “He wasn’t even two yet, and he was asleep, so he couldn’t have heard me—”
    “Of course not.”
    “But sometimes, I’ve wondered. Especially later, when he was so determined to prove himself—working sixty-hour weeks, killing himself at a job he didn’t even like—I had to wonder if he didn’t hear me, somewhere in his mind. If he didn’t know that for that one day at least, I blamed him.”
    She crossed the room to sit in the kitchen chair next to me. She scooted it closer and reached out to take my hand. “He couldn’t possibly know.”
    “Probably not. But that’s not even the worst thing I did to him. It may be the worst thing I’ve ever done as a father, letting my daughter drown, but for Jon, the worst damage came later, when he told me he was gay.” I shook my head. “I didn’t take it well.”
    “You seem to have accepted it now.”
    “Have you?”
    She blinked at me. “I don’t understand.”
    “Is that why you’ve abandoned Cole? Because he’s gay?”
    She shook her head. “No. I never meant to abandon him at all. It felt more like he was taken from me, and I guess…. I don’t know how to go back. I don’t know how to make it up to him. Not after so many years of failing.”
    “He’s your son. He needs you.”
    “I told you. He’s his father’s son.”
    “Not really. Not in the way you mean. He could care less about the type of society his father lived in.” She sounded skeptical, and I sighed, frustrated that she couldn’t see it. “Think about it, Grace. He could have gone to any school in the world, and yet he went to a state university. In Colorado no less. His best friend in the world teaches high school math. And he married an accountant. He sold his house in Orange County years ago, and he prefers Phoenix to the Hamptons. He’s more yours than you know. You’re worried about impressing him? He doesn’t need to be impressed. He just needs you to be present and accounted for.”
    “He’ll never forgive me. I don’t even blame him for it, to be honest.”
    “He will, if you give him a reason.”
    She took a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t know if I can.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you’re right. I’m afraid of him.”
    “Well, he’s afraid of you, so you should get along just fine.”

    T HE rest of the holiday was pleasant. We used the symphony tickets Cole had given us, although we snuck out during intermission, vowing we’d never tell either of our sons that we found it mind-numbingly boring. We went skiing. Best of all, I found a book of crosswords at a newsstand, and we spent the mornings at the table, working one or two puzzles over coffee. It was my favorite part of the day. We only had sex one other time, but she slept in my bed each night.
    She talked about Cole a lot, especially as she grew more comfortable with me, but I was surprised at her tone. It was as if she really had lost her son. As if she was talking about some other boy, long since vanished, only a memory, now grown hazy with time. As if she didn’t realize the man she’d seen on Christmas was her own flesh and blood. There were times I wanted to shake her. I wanted to yell at her, “Your son’s not dead! Stop talking about him like he is.”
    Yet I never did.
    The truth was, I was happy in a way I hadn’t been for a long time. It wasn’t love. Love felt like a fairy tale I’d long outgrown, but there was something comforting about having a warm body in the bed with me when I fell asleep and hearing her breathing next to me when I woke.
    At the end of the week, she helped me pack all the gifts and ornaments into boxes to ship back to Phoenix. Jon and Cole had gone home in such a hurry, they’d left half of their stuff behind. I found the box of baby items Grace had given them sitting next to the couch.
    “Leave it,” she said. “Maybe the cleaning staff will take it.”
    “Cole will want it,” I assured her. “Eventually.”
    She reached up to touch the