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Bone-rattling exhaustion shivers its way through his muscles in waves. It’s almost welcome, almost a distraction from the leaden, heart-sore way his ribs clench whenever he thinks about Jack. His son, his child, lying gaunt and too pale against the white hospital sheets. It’s far, far too easy to imagine his chest still and his skin cold to the touch.
Home feels surreal. In the darkening onset of evening, nothing looks the way it should. It’s like someone has come in and shifted everything just a few inches and walking through the living room feels like swimming in syrup. It’s like his eyes can’t focus on anything for too long and they skitter about looking for something solid to anchor him, to let him know that everything was going to be all right.
Alicia spins a loose orbit around him, ponderous and austerely graceful. Even now, graceful. They move through the house without bothering to turn the lights on, sparing only the briefest of moments to lock the front door and seal their bubble of grief off from the outside world. Already the press is hounding them – calls to agents, reps requesting a statement, even a group standing outside the gates to their estate – and Bob can feel a headache brewing behind his eyes. He just wants everything to stop.
He doesn’t have a real concept of time, which is unsurprising considering his thoughts are just a loop of the last thirty hours or so: a panicked call from Kent, fumbling for his car keys, the interminable drive to the hospital, every stutter and start of his heart as he wondered if the next ring of his cell phone or the next PA announcement in the waiting room of the hospital would change his life forever. Finally, finally seeing his little boy asleep and oblivious to the chaos and anguish around him. Sitting up with him for hours until he finally roused and croaked out an apology (an apology!) and promises it was an accident that Bob desperately wants to believe.
So now he finds himself, an undetermined amount of time later, lifting one knee onto the bed. He stops and his eyes unfocus again, seeing Jack in the hospital bed, too blue around the lips. It’s all an overwhelming whirlwind of colors and difficult emotions and he just wants to close his eyes. His head feels too heavy so he drops his forehead to the sheets and manages to pull himself the rest of the way horizontal. He stays like that for a long time, staring sightlessly out across the expanse of fine cotton sheets that feel too rough to be comfortable. Nothing is comfortable.
Eventually, his staring is broken up by a soft, moving lavender in the background, somewhere between the edge of the bed and the far wall of the bedroom. Licia.
She pauses at the bed but he’s not looking at her face, doesn’t know what she’s thinking or where she’s looking. They haven’t spoken a single word since they both kissed Jack goodbye with promises to return in the morning. He’d only looked over at her once while they were driving, her lips pressed into a thin, grim line, eyes hard as they tracked the houses and cars outside. Her face was double-fired porcelain but he felt like an ice floe, breaking up in frigid waters.
Now he watches her sit on the edge of the bed, the satin of her pajamas catching at her lithe curves. She sits like this, with her back to him, for some amount of time before she too lays down, staring at the ceiling, profile haloed by the gauzy glow of the window beyond. He can only stare at her for so long before he feels like a failure, so he turns over and mimics her position, picks a point on the ceiling to blink at while he wishes for the oblivion of sleep. He leaves his left hand between them even though it doesn’t feel like enough (maybe he had never been enough, to either of them) and he’s too much of a coward to reach out and feel for hers. But a minute, an hour later, he feels her cool, dry hand slip into his and squeeze, and the only thing he can think to do is rub his thumb over her knuckles once, twice, because his throat is still too thick to speak.
She's still wringing his hand, tighter and tighter, but he welcomes the pain of it. Her nails cut little crescents into his palm; it’s like the night Jack was born and he thinks she could break his hand but he doesn’t care. He remembers a dizzying sense of joy that day, and ironically it made the world swim before his eyes much the same way his grief and guilt does now. This lumbering clunking in his chest every time he takes a breath is new, though, and his lungs can barely take it.
Her hand, her forearm, her bicep are trembling with the force of it. A thin, shaking exhalation has the tension seeping out of her and her hand falling open in his. Blood rushes back into his fingers, tingling, but he leaves them cradling hers and pretends the sharp, unpleasant burning could be something like penitence.
They lie like that for a long time, his mind finally tired enough to coast blankly, before he hears a soft, pointed breath like Alicia is about to say something. Another string of unconnected moments.
“We almost lost him, Bobby,” she finally says quietly, plainly. “Our son almost died.”
Her voice cracks on the last, a crack in her veneer. Hearing it feels like drowning and he can only squeeze his eyes shut against the overwhelming urge to cry. She is the strong one. If she falls, that leaves him and his viscera laid open and bare for the carrion.
Apologies and pleas clog his throat, suffocating. Instead he shifts down and over, tucking himself into her side so that his lips press against her shoulder. She feels warm and he feels undeserving. The arm under him shifts to crook around him at the elbow, fingers dangling down to brush his side in mindless, abortive strokes while her head tilts so that her chin rests against his forehead.
For something that’s starting to feel like countable minutes he lets her calming heat seep into him. Jack’s alive and he can feel her pulse. That’s all that matters.