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His legs felt numb, his bare feet insensate against the cold concrete. If this was a gambit, it was a superb one, playing all the right notes on the bars of his ribs, coaxing an emotional response into resonance.
She laid her hands on his shoulders, feeling his muscles, the mass of him. It was so odd to be touched that way, a sensual experience that wasn’t the least bit sexual. Her face radiated a kind of maternal pride as alien to him as the red dust of Mars.
They drive out of the city, heading north, passing drab concrete overpasses and interstate exits Evan has never seen. His excitement morphs into terror and then back again. The line between opportunity and ruin seems wafer thin.
Evan pictured Mia’s condo, candles and throw blankets, laundry and a stocked fridge, TV blaring cartoons, Peter fussing or cracking up, Mia sipping red wine and listening to Miles Davis. So much warmth. And color. Like looking through the aquarium glass at a wondrous new world.
Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction—it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving.
“Mo-om!” A two-syllable bellow from across the condo. “I’m out of toothpaste!” They drew apart, smiling as if they’d been caught at something. “Hang on, Black Hole of Need!” she shouted.
How much courage it took to care for someone. He thought of Mia figuring it out alone. What had she said? I’ll let you in on a secret. No one’s enough as a parent. And yet she was doing everything for Peter that she could—the way Cammy’s parents likely had for her. Evan’s training had taught him to cover every operational contingency, but the feat of laying bare one’s heart seemed rife with greater dangers yet. There was nothing more wild and unpredictable than a human being.
Evan flashed on Peter sitting on the couch in his dead father’s dress shirt—I don’t have anyone to be proud of me—and the image about wrecked him. How could a kid that fundamentally good ever have to wonder if he was good enough for someone to be proud of? With quiet awe Evan considered the upbringing Mia had given Peter that let him interact with the world so purely, so freely, so unabashedly. That was what kids were supposed to do: say how they felt and have fun and create joy before life wore them down and dulled their clarity.
She reached again for his cheek, and in the soft pressure of her palm and the boundless hazel of her eyes he felt something he never had before. A maternal warmth with a depth and breadth and reach like nothing he’d encountered. It was dizzying, terrifying in its scope, like staring at the night sky pinpricked with countless other worlds.
