Minnesota doesn’t make Chamberses. Massachusetts does. It makes no sense that he is here, but here Wesley Chambers is. In Minnesota.
For a brief moment I consider that the stress of quitting my job and getting to my mother and ending my relationship with Wesley has left me delirious, but my arms are too full for this to be a hallucination. It’s the smell that clinches the reality of him, like a warm spot of sunshine through a window, clean laundry, and a hint of cinnamon toothpaste.
I didn’t know they made cinnamon toothpaste until I started kissing Wesley Chambers regularly.
This smell, this weight in my arms, takes me back to the too few memories of waking up next to him, inhaling him like he’s air.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I say into the fabric of his wrinkled gray T-shirt.
Until my mother got sick, I never realized being the “strong older sister” meant when our family matriarch was in the hospital I’d have to be the one to hold the rest of them up. They’re not just heavy physically.
The weight of their grief is crushing me.
Not only have I been supporting them emotionally while they cried beside our unconscious mother’s hospital bed. All I’ve done is cook, clean, and comfort since I got home. But there’s been no one to comfort me.
Family surrounds me but I’ve been so utterly alone.
“You’re here.” The words crumble around my sob. He’s here and I’m not alone anymore. I hate that I’m crying and I hate that I need him. I’m not supposed to need anyone but as I grip his thin canvas jacket in my fist and catch a glimpse of his red-and-orange socks I can’t bring myself to care much. I needed Wesley in this moment and he knew.
“What are you doing to my sister?” Sebastian asks.
I lift my head from the wet spot I’ve created on Wesley’s chest. At some point he’d closed the door, sat at the wooden bench in our small foyer, and pulled me into his lap.
I scramble off him like we’ve been caught doing much worse than holding each other.
“I’m Wes.”
He stands, too, offering his hand to Sebastian. After a moment of suspicious frowning, Sebastian takes it. The couch groans and the hardwood floor creaks as John and James join us from the living room. The television still blares but at least they’re off their designated spots on the couch and Sebastian has risen from the kitchen table, where he’s nursed the same cold cup of coffee all day.
“What’s he doing here?” Sebastian directs his question at me.
“He’s...”
“I’m here to help.” Wesley wraps his hand, warm despite the cold outside, around mine. “Anyway I can. I can cook and clean. Do whatever you need me to so you can focus on getting your mom home.”
I blink down to my feet. If I look at him right now there’d be no hiding the adoration on my face.
“Wes. As in Wesley?” Sebastian asks slowly. “Your intern?”
Wes and I wince at each other.
“That’s some commitment to your job, Wes,” James says.
“I got fired.”
I turn to him. “He fired you?” I’m not sure why I’m disappointed. I knew this was coming. Part of me hoped Wesley might have been able to salvage a little of his dignity in all of this.
He shrugs, rubbing the back of his neck.
“You flew all the way here out of the goodness of your heart?” Sebastian’s voice contains the sharpness that I’m sure will serve him well when he’s cross-examining witnesses. Before we can respond his gaze snags on our hands, the puddle of my tears on Wesley’s shirt.
“Ugh.”
“Seriously, Cor?” James says.
John chuckles. “What?”
Sebastian sighs and shuffles back to the kitchen. James elbows his twin. “Bro, they’re...” He makes a lewd gesture with his fist.
John blinks, shocked. “Corrie, no.”
Honestly. “I don’t need to explain myself to you.” We can’t even make it three days without returning to the roles we’ve worn like old sweaters our whole lives.
“Actually, she dumped me.” Wesley grins like a maniac.
I hold my forehead in my hand. “What is happening,” I mutter.
“Dude.” James winces. “That sucks.”
John shakes his head. “Harsh, Cor.”
But I can tell from the dimple in his cheek that he’s teasing. They shake Wesley’s hand before returning to the couch and leaving us alone again. There’s so much I want to say to him. Mostly why and how and why again. But I can only blink, speechless at the anomaly of him in my childhood home.
“Wesley...”
“Where do you want me to start?” he asks quickly, like he’s trying to hold me off from any line of questioning.
After a moment of hesitation, I point to the kitchen. “Can you help me with the dishes?”
When he smiles, the dark circles under his eyes become more pronounced. He looks like he’s worn his clothes for too many hours. He needs rest. But he says, “I’ll wash. You can put them away.”
Wesley cleans the kitchen so I can take a shower. He starts a load of laundry and goes to the grocery store while I call my father to check in on Mom. I feel like we’re playing house with three grown men, who haven’t showered in a questionable amount of time, as our children.
He makes lunch—tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. There’s no way he could have possibly known that was the meal that our mom used to make us on busy Wednesday nights when I had tutoring and Sebastian had soccer and the twins had hockey.
But Wesley notices how still Sebastian gets when he sets the plate in front of him.
“I should have asked,” he whispers, joining me at the kitchen island. “Does anyone have a food sensitivity?”
I shake my head, blowing on the spoon of steaming soup. “We’re fine.”
John sniffles.
“But—”
“Dad suggested we stop by for a visit in about an hour. He said she seemed to be doing better today.” I check the time on the microwave. “Will you be okay here for a few hours?”
The four of us will go to the hospital together but visit her one at a time so we don’t overwhelm her.
“I’ll find something to keep me busy.”
He starts loading the dishwasher. The idea of him alone in my childhood home is oddly...comforting. If there’s one person I could trust not to snoop, it’s Wesley, but even if he did I can’t think of anything I would want to hide. Even the awkward tween school photos seem safe in his hands.
“Are you sure? We probably won’t be back until dinnertime.”
Wesley stands next to me but he’s careful to leave a safe distance between us. He hasn’t touched me once since he let go of my hand in the front room. It’s the last thing I should be thinking of, the very last thing, but the right side of my body is electric where it reaches for him. He’s here because he knew I needed him, but maybe he might need me, too?
“I could catch a cab back from the hospital after I’ve gone in to see her,” I muse.
“Corrine.” He puts his hand over mine. I go still while my skin sparks for him. “Everything will be okay.”
“Right.” I nod. I sound breathless. “Okay.”
When he holds my hand like this, I can believe it.
As we trample up the porch steps, all the lights in the house blaze. The house looks warm and inviting even if it doesn’t feel that way. We all try to cram into the front door at the same time. Something we’ve done since we were kids, except now that I’m the smallest of the four of us I almost get crushed between a brother and the doorjamb, then trampled by six pairs of boots. When I get into the house, my brothers are already throwing coats onto the bench and I spend an extra two minutes placing them on hangers and hanging them up in the closet.
There are crisp lines on the gray living room carpet from the vacuum. The air smells like lemon-scented cleaner combined with something mildly spicy wafting from the oven. My brothers troop into the kitchen and make exclamations about dinner.
We couldn’t convince Dad to come home with us, even though he looked like he needed a shower, food that wasn’t made in a hospital, and a nap on something other than a chair. But he won’t leave Mom until she wakes up.
When I walk into the kitchen, I have to work very hard to fight the smile that wants to take over my face. The boys hover around Wesley as he bends over the oven, pulling out a casserole dish full of something cheesy. He’s using my mom’s matching oven mitt and apron set. There are frills and multicolored owls all over them.
He smiles at me over Sebastian’s shoulder and now I don’t stop myself. I smile back. It feels so good.
“I only learned how to cook like, five things well when my mom was sick. So I hope you guys like enchiladas.”
He places the casserole dish on a trivet and my brothers surround the food like a pack of wild dogs.
Wesley pulls off the apron and stops in front of me. “Hey.”
“Hi.”
“How is she?”
I watch my brothers over his shoulder and nod toward the French doors leading to the backyard. “Let’s talk outside.”
I pull on a sweater that smells like Mom’s vanilla hand soap and we step into the crisp evening air. I sit on the wooden patio steps and Wesley sits beside me, hunching into himself for warmth. I pull off half of the sweater and he does his best to curl under it.
“She had an allergic reaction to a combination of her medications. She collapsed and they took her to the hospital. She’s been in and out of consciousness since. They think she’ll be okay but because her body was already under a lot of stress from the cancer and the treatment, she went into organ failure. They need to stabilize her kidney function before they’ll say that she’s in the clear but...they’re optimistic.”
Wesley lets out a breath that crystallizes in front of us.
“Okay.” There’s a world of relief in that one word. He turns to me. “Everything is going to be okay, Corrine.”
I nod. But tears still brim in my eyes. “I thought... I prepared myself for the cancer killing her. Like, I prepared myself for what that process would be like. I didn’t prepare myself for her dying from some...” I dash at the wetness on my face. “Stupid allergic reaction. I’m not ready.”
I bury my face in my hands so he doesn’t see me cry. But he lets me nonetheless. He sits here while the tears accumulate and then the sobs come. He puts his arm around me and holds me up while everything inside of me crumbles.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so tactless. Here I am complaining about losing my mother when...when...” Another sob shudders through me. “You’ve already lost yours.”
“You’re not tactless,” he promises, his voice sincere. “You’re in a shitty situation. You’re allowed to be upset about it.”
I wipe at my face with the backs of both hands. “You probably don’t want to talk about this. You’ve lived through it.”
He shrugs, staring off into the dark backyard.
“You just... I look at you and you seem so put together. So okay. I feel like I should be like that.”
He laughs silently on a long exhale. “You don’t. And I’m not.” He stares up at the stars. His ears are pink from the cold and so is the tip of his nose. In this moment, he looks so vulnerable, so lost. Exactly like a man who lost his mother.
He might be a mess and yet he came here to help me. After what I said to him, I’m not sure I deserve it.
“Why are you here, Wesley?” I take his hand in mine.
He looks down at our fingers, twined together, then up to me. “You said you felt like you couldn’t trust me, that I let you down. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t let you go through this alone.”
My chest aches for him, for his selflessness, for the way he’s still such a lost boy, for how not okay he feels. “Will you talk about her? Your mom?”
He shrugs. “What do you want to know?”
I lean into him and squint up at the sky. The fear that has been following me rises up again, like a specter just out of my line of sight that disappears every time I turn to it. “You don’t have to if you don’t want but...will you tell me about...when she died?”
He frowns over at me. “Do you really want to hear about that right now, Corrine?”
“I do. If you want to tell me.”