“I just walk,” he said. “Around the block. Sometimes down to the park. I can’t sleep sometimes. Since Dad. My head gets too loud. So I walk until it gets quiet.” He looked at me. “I’m not doing anything bad, Mom. I swear. I just walk.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Same reason.”
“Because I’d cry?”
He nodded.
I was crying.
He sighed and put his arm around my shoulders.
“See?” he said. “This is exactly what I was talking about.”
I laughed. I laughed and cried at the same time, sitting on the back step in my wrinkled scrubs, with my son’s arm around me.
“From now on,” I said, wiping my face, “you tell me. Even if it makes me cry. Especially if it makes me cry. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And if you can’t sleep, you knock on my door. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning.”
“You’re always sleeping after a double.”
“Then wake me up.”
He was quiet.
“Okay,” he said. “I promise.”
And this time, I knew he meant something different by it.
The next morning, I asked for the day off. Denise gave it to me before I finished asking.
I drove Logan and Andrew to St. Agnes. Up to the fourth floor, the cardiac step-down unit. I know every nurse up there. When we walked out of the elevator, three of them came out from behind the desk.
“Is this him?” asked Patrice, who’s worked cardiac for twenty-five years and doesn’t impress easily.
“This is him,” I said.
Patrice looked Logan up and down. Then she shook his hand. Hard.
“Six minutes,” she said. “Solo. You know how many people I’ve worked with who can’t do that?”
Logan turned bright red.
Mr. Henson was sitting up in bed in room 412. He had wires taped to his chest and an IV in his arm and his reading glasses on his nose. He was doing a crossword puzzle in the newspaper.
He looked up when we came in.
He looked at me. Then at Andrew, who was hiding behind my leg. Then at Logan.
He set down the newspaper and took off his glasses.
“Well,” he said. His voice was rough. “There he is.”
Logan stood in the doorway with his hands shoved in his hoodie pocket.
“Hi, Mr. Henson.”
“Come here, son.”
Logan walked over to the bed. Mr. Henson reached up and took his hand in both of his. They were thin hands, old hands, covered in spots. But his grip was strong.
“They tell me you broke two of my ribs,” Mr. Henson said.
Logan’s face fell. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”
“Son.” Mr. Henson squeezed his hand. “That’s the nicest thing anybody’s done for me in fifteen years.”
Logan stared at him.
Then he laughed. A real laugh. Surprised out of him.
They talked for a while. Mr. Henson told him about the porch. How he’d gone out to get the mail and felt the ground tip sideways. How the last thing he remembered was the porch boards under his cheek and thinking, Well, Walter, this is it. This is how you go. Alone, like a fool, on your own front porch.
“And then,” he said, “I heard this voice.”
Logan looked down.
“I don’t remember what you said. I don’t remember any words. Just a voice. Somebody talking to me. Somebody right there.” His eyes filled up. “I wasn’t alone. That’s what I remember. I thought I was going to be alone, and I wasn’t.”
Logan didn’t say anything. He just nodded.
I had to go stand by the window for a minute.
Andrew finally came out from behind my leg. He walked up to the side of the bed and looked at Mr. Henson very seriously.
“Your heart works now?”
“It works now,” Mr. Henson said. “Thanks to your brother.”
Andrew considered that. Then he reached into the pocket of his little jeans and pulled out a butterscotch candy. It was a little smushed. He must have been carrying it around for days.
He held it out.
“For you. For your heart.”
Mr. Henson took the candy. He held it in his palm and looked at it for a long time.
“I usually give these to you,” he said.
“Now it’s my turn,” Andrew said.
On the way home, in the car, Logan was quiet. Andrew had fallen asleep in his car seat with his mouth open.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think Dad would have…” He stopped.
“Would have what, sweetie?”
He looked out the window.
“I don’t know. Been proud. Or whatever.”
I pulled over.
