Page 63 of A Love Most Fatal
He leaves the room without saying anything, and I find myself disappointed that he didn’t want to stay. On a normal night, we’d be watching a movie together downstairs or laughing about the things he heard in his interviews that day.
Maybe it’s all too cozy for him, he doesn’t want to be friendly with a monster.
I hear his steps up the stairs with the jingling of Ranger’s collar following behind. The noises of the dog used to grate my nerves, but there’s something familiar about them now. A constant reminder of the heartbeat of the house, so many of us living inside.
I’m about to sink further into bed and try to rest when Nate is back in my doorway, this time holding a tray with two mugs.
“I brought tea,” he says.
He’s never been in my bedroom before today, but he makes himself right at home, moving stuff on my nightstand so that he can set down the tray and waiving his hand so that I scooch over towards the kids making room for him to sit. He pulls the blanket over his legs as he sits beside me with his back against the soft headboard.
His hair is wet, little drops of water on his neck and the collar of his sweatshirt, and I watch the damp skin on his neck as he situates himself.
“Here,” he says. My eyes move first to his face, then down to the mug he’s holding out to me. I take it and decide that the best thing to look at is the steam that floats off the top. I’m not thirsty, but I love the hot cup in my palms.
“Thank you.”
“You know, every day it gets less glamorous to be you than I thought,” Nate says.
“Maybe being an aunt isn’t glamorous,” I say. “But otherwise, being me is pretty deluxe.”
He gives me a wry look like he sees right through that and then burns his tongue on his tea. We both laugh, but quietly, to not wake the little ones.
“They adore you,” Nate says, looking at the drooling kids. They both wear old college shirts of mine, and beneath them, their chests rise and fall as they sleep. Artie makes tiny snoring sounds.
“I was so young when Willa had them, and she was so young, I had no clue what they would be like. But Willa wasn’t afraid. She was so confident, so in love.”
“And you?”
“I was seventeen. I didn’t know anything about babies, and Willa was so sure it would work out. She was going to have the kids and raise them and be the best mom and go to law school, and to her credit, she’s done all those things.”
Angel shifts, and her head burrows against my side, the same way she did when she was a baby. There were two months where she’d only sleep if she was in someone’s arms or pressed right against her brother. I remember being so petrified of breaking them when they were that small.
“Do you want kids?”
“In the abstract, yes,” I say. “This legacy won’t die with me.”
This legacy being the family, the responsibility, the business. If we weren’t in the position we are, none of them would be safe.
Ours isn’t just a life you can get out of, it’s a generational curse, or blessing, I’m not sure, but as my father always used to say,it is what it is.Nothing else to it.
“I’ll have a kid, or more than one, and God willing they’ll like each other and lean on each other, and then one of them will take over when I’m gone.”
“What about one of these two?” Nate asks.
“They’re kids,” I say.
I can’t explain that it makes me ill to imagine either of them where I am, having to do the things I’ve done. The things any of us have done. None of our hands are clean but the children’s.
“They’re just kids.” I say again.
It’s code for I love them too much to think about their hearts, big as the sky, turning cold and hardened.
“And yours won’t be?”
“No, it’s just—Angel and Artie are too good. It’s something within them, Willa and Sean are so loving, so tender with them. If it’s a matter of nature, I can’t imagine my kids will be so. . . sweet.”
Nate is quiet for a long moment, digesting this I think, or maybe agreeing that my children would be callous little devils.