I’d almost go so far as to say that Ma was lucky. While I was gone, she died in her sleep, the same way she’d lived, not making any trouble for anyone. Pa woke up next to her that morning and at first he didn’t realize. He told Cole she looked like a little girl asleep, more calm and peaceful than she’d been in months. The doctor said that her heart had given out, just like that, nothing more to it.
But I don’t think she had a weak heart. I think she was too ashamed at seeing one son leave, then the other, and that she didn’t have any will to go on living. Before you have kids, you think your life is full to bursting, that its little ups and downs are enough to make you happy. And then you get some idea of how empty it’ll be with them gone, when there’s nothing left really worth experiencing, nothing left as wonderful as having seen them grow up, change from tottering kids to teens who’ll whine about every decision you make. For me, becoming a father by accident, I didn’t really think on any of it. I’d never really imagined that someday I’d have a kid, my own kid.
More than any other, little Thomas is a being all on his own, a human who’s nothing like me at all. Not because I’m not his actual father, but because he’s in that space between two worlds. Who is he the son of? A mother who decided to raise him on her own? A man who was such a coward that he ran off just as fast as he fathered him? I’ve never asked anyone those questions.
Not long after Ma died, Pa had a stroke. It happened while he was standing in the middle of the river, fishing for trout. He would have drowned if Cole hadn’t managed to drag him to the bank. In the weeks after, he fed my father, washed him, talked to him every day, and sometimes wiped away his tears. By the time I came back home, Magnus was almost nothing like his old self. I tried to tell him about Thomas and the kid when we were alone. I couldn’t wait to tell him that he had a grandson, that the Alaska Mayers would keep on going with a new generation here, but he barely reacted, with half his face drooping thanks to the stroke, his skin looking like a landslide. I don’t know what I was expecting. He wasn’t going to jump and shout for joy, I’ll say that much. I don’t think the news made it to his brain, and all I felt was ashamed.
I wished I hadn’t kept that happiness secret from him. I could have just called, or sent a letter, so that he could have stopped fretting over his lost son and started dreaming about the baby, Thomas’s son. Ma might have still been alive, at least until I came back without the child and with no explanation of why he was so far away from them, thousands of miles away, in a city that they only knew by name. I didn’t tell Cole about any of that either.
Years later, when I brought the boy to his grandparents’ tomb, he asked me what sort of father Magnus had been. A father who’d never failed, I said, and that only made me feel even more like an orphan.