Page 62 of Margins

“I want.”

“And the 9-year-old with me half the time?”

“I’ll take her at 9 and 10 and 11 and—”

Alex damn near giggles. “Okay, okay, I got it.”

But then Elijah changes lanes and slows down just noticeably enough, his attention turned to the signs up ahead, and Alex finally starts to read them too. His heartbeat kicks up again, and he takes his hand back.

“We’re almost there,” Elijah says unnecessarily.

They’re quiet after that, Alex looking anywhere but at Elijah, afraid that he might become more of a distraction than a comfort. There’s nothing particularly interesting around them, just the same array of buildings found in any place like it, and it takes them another ten minutes—stoplights as bad here as anywhere else—before they land in the parking lot of the care facility, and neither of them moves for a minute when Elijah parks.

“You know, when we first started reading their story, I thought I was so much like Peter,” Alex says.

“Why?” Elijah rasps, anything they’re about to do leaving him shakier than he probably wants to be.

“He was scared. Kind of fascinated by what he felt, but he would’ve kept it inside him, tucked into little corners of himself that nobody else could see,” Alex explains. “It was Edgar who first suggested they write in the books, because maybe Peter had already resigned himself to the smallest kind of happiness, just seeing Edgar when the world tilted the right way for him. It was Edgar who pushed for more, who seemed brave and ready and eager to embrace what they were told they couldn’t have. Peter lived passively, not wholly unhappy with his son at home, but not with any genuine passion either.”

Elijah nods, his exhale a shaky one. “And now?”

“Edgar ended up being the one who wasted so much time—then and now—terrified of doing everything wrong and hurting the people he loved, unable to see that his own solution was the biggest problem of them all. And I spent most of the last 20 years hiding in my marriage and he’s spent that same time hiding after Peter died, and it’s just—this is your family’s story, but I feel so much of it inside me, too.”

“That’s because it is,” Elijah says, leaning across the console for a long kiss, one inexplicably intimate in the middle of a parking lot, everything both cold and warm under San Diego’s confused December sun. “Yeah, it’s my family, but the story is mine and yours and ours, and it belongs to millions of people we’ll never meet.”

“Everyone who’s ever hidden from something good?”

Alex doesn’t get an actual answer to that, but he doesn’t need one either, and he shifts easily when Elijah comes back with a question of his own. “Did you know, way back at the very beginning, that marrying Cassidy was a mistake? That you weren’t being honest with yourself about what you really wanted?”

“Mmmm, no, I don’t think I could have, really,” Alex muses. “It would’ve meant pausing long enough to have a much bigger conversation with myself, and whether I wasn’t ready for that, or whether I just thought everything happening was sort of an imperative, I never—I did what I thought was inevitable, I guess.”

Elijah nods slowly and looks toward the sliding glass door waiting to open for them whenever they’re ready. “I’m not sure he stopped to have those conversations either, or he would’ve remembered how hard he fought for love way back when it seemed impossible.”

“So, what now? What happens today or tomorrow or ten years from now?”

“I never, ever want to forget that fight,” Elijah says, his voice low. “But I need to make sure he knows it’s okay that he did.”

Alex watches him sit with that for a minute, Elijah almost visibly affected by his own words, then nods toward the building. “You ready?”

“I don’t know.”

“Careful, you’re starting to sound like me,” Alex warns.

“That’s not the insult you think it is.”

“Okay, come on,” Alex says, twisting to pull the faux Edgar Allan Poe collection from the backseat, everything put carefully back inside where they’d found it, except for the picture of Peter and Elijah that Elijah’s kept for himself. They plan to leave the book with Edgar when they go, knowing they’re likely to get the entire collection back again soon enough when Alex can’t imagine anyone else will lay claim to it once Edgar’s gone. “If we stall much longer, it’s gonna get really hard to go inside at all.”

So, they open the doors of the truck and slam them again and are silent until they get inside, the sliding glass doors sighing their impatience behind them. The man at the reception desk is perfectly pleasant when he checks them in and asks them to take a seat in the waiting area, and they’re not there long before they’re greeted by the nurse who arrives to take them to Edgar’s room but wants to talk to them first.

“You’re Peter’s great grandson,” she says to Elijah, and Alex doesn’t miss that she—Natasha, according to her name tag—isn’t really asking.

“Elijah,” he replies with a nod.

“You look just like Laura and James,” Natasha tells him. “And from what I’ve gathered, they both looked just like Peter.”

“Sounds like you’ve gathered a lot,” Elijah says. “You’ve taken care of Uncle Edgar for a while?”

“Since he moved in, yeah. And Laura told you he doesn’t really talk? I don’t want you guys getting your hopes up too much.”

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