Work Text:
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
Anne Sexton,
“Small Wire”
Unknown caller
mercredi, 21 décembre 2039
08:28 | Boîte vocale
Voicemail
27 seconds
[Hi Jack, um, this is Emily from the bakery. I had to grab your number from the emergency contacts sheet. Sorry if this is a bad time, I just wanted to let you know that, uh, Eric’s in the hospital? We found him in his car, he never even made it inside, but he had a super high fever and wasn’t really responding so we called 911—]
After almost fifty years, Jack knows how to be famous.
What really helps is thinking of it like a rulebook, or a set of plays. Here’s how to dress and how to shake a hand. Here is the way you walk, talk, and act. Here’s where you stand so the camera gets your good side. Here is how you perfect a signature. Here is the ache in your wrist and your cheeks.
Here’s a good tidbit to pacify the media. Here is your husband on the phone with your lawyer while you tuck the kids into bed. Here's a suit of armor, a high wall, a lifetime achievement award. Here, your father’s voice is coaching you through a panic attack in the holding room. Oh, right, here’s the holding room. Come in through the same back door every time, find the same chairs pushed against the walls. Pick one and wait to be wanted.
The thing they never tell you about being famous is how much time you’ll spend hiding yourself away.
“Mr. Zimmermann?”
Jack doesn’t stand in time, so one of the doctors sits down next to him. She’s older, kind-eyed, with silvery hair pulled back in a knot. The nametag dangling from the front pocket of her scrubs, or at least the part of it he can see over the top of her arm, says Celia. Jack finds himself looking at it for probably longer than is strictly polite.
When he realizes that she seems to be waiting for something, Jack clears his throat, hastily offers a hand. “Hi. That’s me.”
“Nice to meet you,” she says. Her handshake is practiced like his own. “Obviously I’d rather it not be in these circumstances, but—I’m Dr. York. You’re Eric’s husband?”
The joke almost tumbles out before he can stop it. Who the fuck is Eric? He sees it so clearly: the marriage license they'd never expected to be able to sign, Bitty grinning in his arms; Shitty, their witness, making a crack about the pitfalls of government paperwork. It’s been an inside joke for a quarter of a century.
Instead of laughing, Jack nods.
So does Celia—Dr. York—who starts speaking again. Jack lets the words float over him, staring intently at a framed picture of someone’s kid on the desk in front of them. They’d shuffled him out of the waiting room and into someone’s office, which is still kind of clinical under all the personal touches; honey-colored wood and lilac walls and white tile floors. Liminal. A room where things like bacterial pneumonia happen to other people.
The kid in the picture is missing her two front teeth, like Ollie is. She's cute.
“—able to get the fever to come down a little,” Dr. York is saying, “so he should be a bit more comfortable. We don’t have him under or anything, but I’d still expect him to be sleeping a lot.”
“Okay,” Jack says. When he looks down at his lap, it's to find that his clasped hands are blurry. He twists them together, one over the other, trying to feel something other than numb terror.
"Mr. Zimmermann?" The doctor's voice is kind, but very far away. "Are you—?"
"Just Jack is fine," Jack says, too quickly to be polite. "Yes, I'm sorry, it's just—"
Dr. York makes an understanding sound. "No need to apologize, Jack. This can be a lot to take in at once." She angles her knees slightly away from his, like she's trying to give him space. "I can cut right to the chase—I'm just hoping to ask you for a little more information so we have a better idea of how to proceed."
“Euh, sure.” Jack tries to look her in the eyes, but his own keep sliding somewhere up and over her shoulder. All those years of media training, of doing interviews sick and jetlagged and starving and, once, too drunk to remember his name, have long since gone to waste. He blinks, shakes himself. He’s being rude and can't bring himself to care. “Yes.”
“Perfect. I promise we'll make it quick. How old is Eric?”
“Forty-four,” Jack says automatically, before wincing. “Don’t tell him I told you.”
Dr. York smiles. She has a nice smile, the kind that says I'm sorry to be holding your whole heart in my hands. Jack's not sure if he believes it. “Safe with me,” she says, patting the pen-filled pocket over her own heart. “Is he allergic to anything?”
“No, nothing.”
She makes a note. “Great. And he hasn't been hospitalized recently, has he?"
"No," Jack says again. Of the two of them, that score tips heavily in Jack's favor.
"Okay. If he didn't pick it up from a hospital... we can also see pneumonia like this after another illness, has there been any of that going on?”
Two long weeks of insisting he was fine, even as the opposite became true. And then this morning, when Jack had awoken to find his car gone. “Yeah, he—yes.”
“Okay." She doesn't press him. Maybe she can read minds, Jack thinks. "And when did that start?”
“Around our son’s birthday,” Jack says. “December fourth.”
“Did it seem like he was getting better at all?”
Jack has never in his life wanted to be somewhere less than he wants to be in this sterile office right now. He keeps waiting for the tap on the door, someone's assistant with their head and shoulders in the gap. We're ready for you. He thinks about Bitty in this seat, answering these questions. Dozens of times they must have been in the reverse of this situation, after all these years, and Bitty has never mentioned it or complained; just squeezed Jack's hand and let him doze and done the dirty work of coordinating his life. Jack owes him a return on all those favors, at the very least.
“Not really, but he, euh. Said he was?”
Dr. York looks at him briefly before returning her eyes to her clipboard. “What does he do for work?”
“He owns a bakery,” says Jack. “He’s working on his third book, he’s in the middle of recipe testing for that right now, and he’s got this TV show…”
He waits for the moment of recognition, but it never comes. Good. He doesn't think, given everything else, that he'd handle it well at all. He wonders what would happen if he shouted.
“Busy guy,” she says, crossing a t with some force. She looks back up. “So we’re looking at probably four, five days inpatient right now. We’ll want to make sure Eric responds well to the antibiotics, which is part of the reason. The other part is that we’ve got him on some supplementary oxygen to help his lungs out, and my team doesn’t want him to come off that just yet. Could help us avoid the ventilator down the road, just in case.”
“Okay,” Jack hears himself say. He feels very far outside his body, like the walls are closing in. He makes himself continue, “Can I see him?”
Dr. York dusts invisible crumbs off her scrubs. “No problem. Let me go grab you a mask and make sure they’re ready for us, okay?”
Recents
Unknown caller
Maman
Suzanne Bittle
Delta Airlines (2)
Giselle Bittle-Zimmermann (3)
His first thought is that the person in the bed looks very small.
Dr. York puts an unobtrusive hand on his shoulder, lets him know that there’s a nurse outside if he has any questions. Jack can’t even muster so much as a thank you before she steps out and shuts the door.
It’s the middle of the morning, but the room is almost dark, lit only from underneath the cabinets and the gaps around the bathroom door. The air is still the way the lake behind his parents’ house is still before it freezes: glassy, deceptive. Deathly quiet. Jack wonders who had thought to leave the bathroom light on. Bitty couldn’t have—he couldn’t. He tries to imagine it, limp hands and a stretcher and quick, clinical voices. Imprints of people long-gone but left behind.
Their children were born in rooms like these. Jack had moved heaven and earth to meet them, three cold winter nights shuttling between cars and planes. The clocks had ticked over and the time zones blurred; Jack had forgotten, in all of it, to be afraid. How could he have been? Bitty’s hand in his had been real, more important than the chiming of the monitors. Everyone had smiled. They’d both looked up when the nurses asked for Dad.
Bitty had cried the whole time. He had—there are tear stains, on the pillowcase.
Jack swallows. This close, he can kind of pretend it's not real; he could be watching a movie, following the slow pan of the camera. Blanketed knee to hip to hand, with its ring winking gold in the darkness of the room. Collarbone edged in overwashed mint-green cotton. Warm red cheeks, tired sunken eyes.
It’s not as easy as he’d hoped to forget who they belong to.
After the surgery that had reattached his shoulder, he had woken up to his arm strapped to his side and Bitty right next to him in the bed, watching the door, ready to put together something he didn't break. He'd held on the whole time, even when it had all seemed so awful.
There’s no such room for Jack here. He drags one of the faded vinyl chairs to the side of the bed instead, carefully maneuvers one of Bitty’s hands out from under a mess of wires. The monitors are marking a heartbeat that Jack could set his watch to. Touching Bitty’s skin feels like palming an open flame; Jack can’t imagine what they brought him down from.
He braces his forehead on his outstretched arms, listens to Bitty struggle for air, and tries to hold on.
Giselle Bittle-Zimmermann
aujourd’hui 10:52
can you drive your sister home today
Sure?
??? I’m supposed to have rehearsal tho
Everything okay?
dad is in ER
going to be fine but pretty sick
i can't leave
Wtf
???????????????????
Papa wtf
Call me
When Jack was younger, he’d realized that his parents had this weird trick of having most of their conversations without saying a word.
Mostly it was little things—his father’s eyes flicking to his mother’s in the rearview mirror while they drove him to practice, the ways she would touch his arm or fit her hands around his waist as she passed him in the kitchen. A reflection of years spent in each other’s company, of thoughts that had been spoken so often that a single breath could now suffice: I’m here. I heard that. Please move.
He’d called them on it once after rehab. If you guys are going to fucking talk about me, at least do it where I can hear you.
I didn’t realize you’d noticed, his mother had said later, by way of apology. She’d come in and sat on the edge of his bed, undone, bathrobe and sweats and big tired eyes that matched his. They had all looked horrible that winter. Jack had taken them by the hands and dragged them down the hole with him, and they’d spent months and years learning to bend their heads together again, weaving the rope that would pull them out.
Why do you do that when you know I’m standing right there?
Sometimes we can’t help it. She had reached out to run a hand through his hair and he’d let her. Someday, if you find someone you want to spend your life with —Jack had scoffed— you might get to that point. When you spend so much time around someone, you can usually tell what they’re thinking.
Jack had turned that over in his mind all night instead of sleeping. Would he ever meet someone he could read that well, if not even the people who’d made him could seem to understand him?
Thirty-one years later, Jack walks back into a hospital room, finds Bitty looking at him, and thinks, oh.
It's like an entire conversation in the space of two breaths. Jack goes hi and Bitty goes hey and Jack goes why did Emily find you in the car and Bitty goes I don't know, please cut me some slack, I am so far out of my own head it's not funny and Jack goes I guess that makes sense, I just wasn't expecting it from you and somehow, despite the fact that he looks tiny and terrible, Bitty gives him that look that says I am still full of surprises and also so, so sorry. I'm so sorry.
It's not just the look, Jack realizes; he's actually apologizing over and over. His voice is raw and thready, desperate, almost gone.
"It's okay," is the first thing Jack manages to say aloud. He doesn't remember closing the gap from the door to the bed. "I—Bits, shh, shh. Easy."
Bitty's chest heaves. It's like a car crash or a terrible check, the way Jack can't look away. There are tears spilling down his cheeks now, fresh ones, hot under the cannula and Jack's hands on his face. "Honey, I—"
"Easy," Jack says again, low. He wonders what his expression must look like for Bitty's to be crumpling the way it is. Everything feels—wrong, like he's having the worst dream of his life. His feet aren't touching the ground. His chair's still where he left it when he went into the hall to call Suzanne; he sort of falls back into it, feels the way his knees bark at him in anger. "It's okay, bud, it's alright."
It's clearly not, but what else is there to say? Pointing fingers isn't going to fix the situation; anyway, Jack's pretty sure Bitty's not the one to blame. One way or another, Jack let him go on downplaying how bad he actually must have felt, which he was apparently so good at that he got up and left for work this morning and landed himself in the hospital instead, and Jack didn't know. Didn't stop him.
"You're not mad?"
Jack is fucking furious with himself. It's just the flu, they'd decided, and Jack had believed it, believed it, believed it, until forty-five minutes ago Dr. York had said we're lucky this is looking as mild as it is, which he knows from bitter experience is doctor-speak for think about how easily this could have gone worse.
"I'm not mad," he says anyway. It's only half a lie, and Bitty is in no place to know the difference. There’s something in his eyes behind the obvious exhaustion, all the pain he’s been banking for days. Please don’t leave me here. Jack keeps his voice soft in deference to it. “What happened?”
Bitty manages a shallow, shuddering breath. "I scared you," he says, which isn't really an answer. He could be a frog again, the way his eyes have gone huge. He could be one of their kids. He could be Jack, long ago, far away, waking up in a room just like this. Everyone had wanted answers, and he'd had none.
"Yes," Jack agrees gruffly. Hearing it out loud makes it suddenly real. He has to turn and press his mouth, hard, to the inside of his arm; is grateful for the mask so Bitty can't see the way he bites his lip to quell the tears. Beneath the anger is the terror again, the way a panic attack feels: the bottom dropping out of his stomach.
Bitty swallows, looks away. “Wasn't thinking.”
"It's not your fault, bud. You're sick, eh?" Jack reaches up for one of Bitty's hands. "I should have—câlisse de tabarnak. I should have noticed sooner."
"Shouldn't have to be your job to—"
The end of his sentence is swallowed by a cough. It’s the same one he’s been fighting for days, hard and wet and concussive. Maybe because there’s meaning assigned to it now, Jack’s heartbeat ticks up a few notches, just like that.
"It is my job to take care of you," Jack says shortly, in the ringing silence that follows.
He means it as an admonishment to himself, but Bitty takes it wrong; his face twists again, miserably. "I didn't mean to hurt you."
You didn't, Jack wants to say, you didn't, but the words come out all wrong. “Don’t worry about me,” is what he says, in a hearty voice he doesn’t really mean. He stands up slowly. His whole body aches with the effort of holding itself together. “I’ll go home and get some of our stuff, okay? I have to tell the kids what’s going on—”
He could have slapped Bitty and it probably would have hurt him less. “Okay,” he whispers.
Jack throws caution to the wind, tugs the mask down, brushes his lips over Bitty’s forehead. He’s so fucking hot. Outside, it’s starting to snow.
“I’ll be right back,” he says. “Try to get some sleep.”
“I—” As if he suddenly realizes his own exhaustion all over again, Bitty’s body slumps, gives up the fight to stay awake. “Yeah.”
He feels Bitty’s eyes on his back all the way to the hallway, past the nurses’ station, out into the cold. The social team had chirped him his whole career for the way he walks when he’s worried: big strides and a firm scowl. Jack feels the laugh brewing, bitter, at the hinge of his jaw. He wants to yell, to hit something. He took it for granted, all those years of being able to solve his problems with his fists.
He kicks at the base of a concrete pillar in the parking garage. All he gets is a throbbing pain in his foot and his pride injured beyond belief.
Walking into the house feels exactly like he’s walking into a press conference. It doesn’t help that all three kids are at the kitchen table when the wind blows him in from the garage, eyeing him like hungry tigers. It also doesn’t help that all of them start talking at once: Papa, is Daddy—what’s happening—is everything—
Jack holds a hand up for quiet. He can almost see the microphones in his face. “Everybody take a breath, okay? Deep breath.”
He doesn’t care that they exaggerate it. Even angry breaths are better than nothing. He only wishes, as soon as he starts to struggle with the words, that he'd taken his own advice just once.
It's different than telling his mother or Suzanne; he passes on only the vaguest of details. He probably does a terrible job of it, judging by the fact that when he finishes explaining everything he still only half-understands, Ollie just goes, “What?”
“But he was fine yesterday,” Sophie says, bewildered. “Or kind of—”
Their voices start to overlap again immediately: Does this mean we’re not going to—why didn't you call me back—is Dad gonna die?
“Enough,” Jack says. “Guys, enough. Everyone needs a change of clothes and your toothbrush, we’re going to stay with Aunt George—”
“We?” Sophie asks. Her hair is falling out of its braid. “Are you coming too?”
“No, we as in the three of you,” Jack says. “I have to go back to the hospital to stay with Dad.”
“Can we come with you?”
Jack feels it like a gut punch, like his heart's being ripped in half. He already knows that dwelling on this will occupy the long, restless hours of waiting ahead of him. Nothing like empty time to think about all the ways he's managed to fuck things up this week. "No," he says, not meaning to snap but kind of doing it anyway.
Ellie’s eyes are blazing. She’s tall, almost at Jack’s shoulder already; the hurt and the anger make her taller. "But if he's—"
“Guys, Dad is going to be fine, but you need to do what I’m asking you to do.”
It's not pretty, but it gets their feet moving. Ellie’s the last one up the stairs. She turns those big brown eyes on Jack, and she doesn’t say anything, but the hurt is clear.
“Go,” he says to her, final. "Anything you think you'll want with you. Ollie, I'll come help you in a minute."
The drive is the worst kind of silent. He kisses everyone goodbye on the porch and accepts a lingering hug from George, who tells him to call her in the morning. When the door has closed behind them, Jack sits back down in the driver’s seat and puts his head in his hands.
Jack’s grown to like Christmas a lot.
If he’s honest, he still prefers the warmth of his childhood holidays. His father used to stand behind him, his voice adding weight to Jack’s, until he was old enough to say the blessings by himself. He’s taught their children about faith, about miracles, about doing what you can with what you have. They’ve had countless messy afternoons filling sufganiyot and frying latkes, and just as many quiet nights watching the candles burn in the big front window.
But he’s also gotten to watch Bitty teach their family how his own traditions work. There’s something beautiful about the sense of peace that pervades the end of the year, and the wealth of new stories he's learned. The house is full of light and color, a riot of smells and music.
This year, though, Jack can’t stomach it.
He can’t look at the trees or the outdoor lights without remembering how Bitty had bowed out to lie down halfway through their annual decorating day. He wakes up alone, picturing Bitty’s flushed face on the other pillow. He recruits Tater to drive him to the bakery so he can pick up Bitty’s car, turns it on to Christmas carols playing on the radio, and gets about five seconds into do you see what I see? before he jabs at the mute button and drives home in silence.
So many things that he missed.
He has no idea who to blame, or even if anyone deserves it. Sometimes, Jack can admit, the universe just deals you a really shitty hand and you have to deal with it. But that doesn’t change the fact that his kids are looking to him for guidance, and his husband’s alone in the hospital, and Jack is about ready to throw his hands up and give up.
Jack has always put his stock in hard work and dedication. It’s hard to have faith when the things it brought to him are being taken away.
He doesn’t turn out to be that useful in limbo.
Bitty sleeps most of the time, like his body’s desperately trying to catch up. Jack paces, mostly, watches a lot of godawful TV, texts their parents and George when there are updates. He makes awkward small talk with the nurses, who are polite, professional, and terrifyingly competent. They call his husband Eric. The weirdest thing is seeing him respond to it so readily, like whoever Bitty is got left behind at home, or only lives in the group chat where their friends are keeping worried vigil.
Someone has, very thoughtfully, rearranged the room so that Jack can have a couch, a blue plastic affair that he’s a fair bit too big for. On the afternoon of the third day, he’s kicked his legs up onto it and is idly scrolling through his photos when a hot hand brushes his.
“Miss you.”
Jack looks up. Bitty’s watching him with that faraway look, a sort of half-cocked smile: I’m being sappy. He smiles back. His eyes feel tight and dry. “I’m right here.”
“I know.” Bitty’s fingers twitch minutely. There’s something under the surface of his expression that Jack can’t pinpoint. “I miss—holding you. Miss our bed.” The air drags through his chest, a heavy sound. “Hate it here.”
“I know,” Jack echoes. “Not much longer. You’ll get better, and we can go home and see the kids—”
Bitty’s eyes squeeze shut, and his breathing hitches, breaks. “I miss them.”
“Yeah, bud. They miss you.”
Jack can only guess at what they’re missing, which makes him feel like shit. He’s managed to call them a couple times, mostly to provide quick updates from the hallway while Bitty’s been asleep. He can’t decide if he should ask Bitty if he wants to talk to them or not. Thinking about not asking makes him feel guiltier, a vicious feedback loop that his therapist would probably tell him to knock off... if Bitty, who's blinking at him sleepily, doesn't tell him first.
But Bitty isn't reading him as well as usual. It’s so strange: like he's here but also not. His no-nonsense attitude has given way to this sad, quiet presence that accepts everything they're doing to him without complaint. Everything that was warm about him is too hot now, and Jack can’t get any closer to him than his hand. He’s passed hours with his arms braced on his knees, holding the backs of Bitty’s slack fingers to his forehead, like if he wishes hard enough he can draw the fever out.
Miracles happen. This much Jack has learned. But the angels had never bothered to mention how hard Mary must have found the waiting.
He sits up, finds the place where Bitty’s thumb meets his palm and rubs at it. The tension bleeds, slow, from the set of Bitty’s shoulders, and Jack feels briefly gratified; the worst part, he thinks, is knowing there’s nothing he can do to fix this anymore. Add that to the list of things he's sitting here and dwelling on.
“Won’t be the same this year without you,” he murmurs.
Bitty draws his hand away slowly, traces the line of Jack's jaw with his thumb. The weight of his touch is mirrored in his eyes when Jack looks up, an understanding. “What day is it?”
“Friday,” Jack says automatically. “Euh, the twenty-third.”
Bitty sniffles. “You should go home.”
“What?”
“It’s almost Christmas.” There’s steel through the words. “I don’t want y’all to worry about me. I w-want to think of y’all, together, even when—”
He interrupts himself by coughing, but Jack hears the echo, sees it in his mind’s eye. The kids fight for their spots in the living room, Jack sits down with a cup of coffee and a roll of trash bags, and the kitchen is silent and smells like Lysol. I’m not there.
“So you want me to go?”
Bitty swallows, shaky, but his eyes are clear. “It’s not like that. I’m all grown up, honey, I can deal. But” —the cough rips out of him again, and Jack stands up like he’s going to be able to do anything about it— “I’m fine. Listen. Our babies need you more than I do.”
Jack’s frozen in place, his hands flexing around nothing. Bitty has never outgrown the tendency to refer to their kids as babies, even though they’ve got one in high school. Something about the way he says it now brings to mind the feeling of that kiss after graduation, or the night they laid Ellie in his arms—the strangest sense that Jack’s heart has been walking around outside his body, and come back home to say hello.
He’s always been all or nothing, wherever he is. He can’t fix this anymore, can’t fight Bitty’s battles. He's only vaguely sure that he can still be the person that his family needs. He's going to have to prove that he can still trust himself with that much.
Jack breathes, puts his hands on the mattress. He leans over and kisses Bitty’s forehead and says, “Papa saves Christmas, eh?”
He gets a smile for that, tiny and tentative, but real all the same. “I’ll apologize to Judaism for you.”
“You have your phone, right?” Bitty points and Jack nods. “Good. Look at me,” he says, and when Bitty does, Jack turns on the captain voice. “Rest.”
The kids are arguing when Jack walks into the kitchen.
It’s been a blur of an afternoon—making sure the right people at the hospital have his phone number, asking George if she’d be willing to drop the kids off, calling Mama to give her and Coach the latest updates. By the time he finally shuts the door behind him, it's dark outside and World War Three is unfolding across the island.
“Whoa, whoa, hey,” he says, palms up. “What’s—?”
He doesn’t get any further than that before Sophie shrieks, “Papa, you're back!” and dodges Ellie to hurl herself into his arms. Jack wraps her up tight and lets her squeeze him back. His ribs ache when it’s cold, and the pressure feels nice.
“Hello, hello!” he says, kissing the top of her head and then Ollie’s. “Hey, bud, I missed you too." He looks up to figure out who's missing. "Hi, El.”
Ellie’s hanging back. She blushes the same way Jack does: right over the nose, warm and unmistakable. Their last conversation passes between them.
Jack lets himself feel that sick swoop in his stomach again before he decides to go for broke and quirks an eyebrow in a way he hopes means what are you doing all the way over there. He’s relieved that she seems to get it, because she grins and darts forward.
“Missed you,” she says into his chest. He echoes the sentiment into her dark hair and tries really hard not to feel guilty.
“Is Dad with you?” Sophie demands. She squirms her way out from under Ellie and looks around, like Jack might be hiding Bitty behind his back or under his coat. “I thought Auntie George said—”
“Auntie George was right,” Jack interrupts, gentle. “Dad’s still too sick to come home, but he’s doing better. He wants the three of you to know he misses you, eh? He and I decided I would come back here so we could all be together for Christmas.”
It’s not the news they were hoping for, and Jack doesn’t pretend it is. But something about the four of them standing there, looking at each other, makes things feel settled, resolute. Jack knows with rare and sudden certainty that he’s made some semblance of a correct decision; that Bitty is in capable hands, and that he can do the most good from right where he is.
“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” Sophie says, with all the gravitas and sincerity she can muster. “You can help us settle a debate.”
Jack almost chokes on his laughter. Ellie’s the actress of the five of them, but Sophie has this unintentional flair for the dramatic that regularly leaves them all in stitches. She had held Ollie for the first time in reverent silence before looking up and saying I think you need to send him back, he doesn’t have any arms, and, well. That had set the tone pretty thoroughly, Jack thinks.
“Okay,” he says gamely. “Does this debate have anything to do with the fact that I could hear y’all shouting from the driveway?”
“Maybe,” says Ellie, lofty, as Ollie parrots the out in shouting. “But I know I’m right—”
“How many pies,” Sophie cuts in, “does Dad usually make for Baking Day?”
Jack blinks between them, acutely aware that there is, in fact, a wrong answer. “Oh, man. It's different every year, guys, it always has been. I don't know—”
“Papa, it’s been like a million years, you have got to have learned something useful,” Ollie says. It’s such a perfect imitation of Bitty that everyone jumps a little, looking at him and then at each other.
Jack blinks. He considers the evidence. He hasn’t escaped a quarter-century with Bitty without at least some baking knowledge. He’s been on the vlog more times than he can count. He guest-starred in the second episode of Bitty’s show, with instructions to look handsome and trust yourself, they’re gonna love you. He even picked up a couple of bakery shifts last June, when Bailey broke her hand and they had double-digit wedding cakes on the books for three straight weeks. (For unrelated reasons, he’s developed a passionate hatred of Italian buttercream.)
But Baking Day, like the Fourth of July, has always been Bitty’s purview; Jack will come in for the assist, but rarely takes the lead. The first few years, it had been more a celebration of their family than any sort of legitimate attempt to get through Bitty’s holiday to-do list—a chance to look at each other, each of them guiding a sticky-fingered toddler through the steps of making a pie, and think Aren’t we lucky, that this is our life? Now that everyone is older, self-sufficient, it’s become more of a production. Bitty walks the kids through increasingly complicated lattices and complex fruit fillings, pouring his heart out into them. Sure, Jack has been in the room, could have been following along… but why would he, when he’s passed so many pleasant hours with a cup of coffee and Ollie asleep in his arms? Watching Bitty teach their kids how to do something he’s so good at lights something in Jack’s chest: a spark, a towering fire, a tiny, loving ache.
And of course, before all of that, there had been that first summer together. With a whole golden week stretching before them and Jack’s shiny new kitchen stocked with every kind of butter he could find, they had experimented quite a bit. Mostly… naked.
Jack pinches at the bridge of his nose. “Guys, I don’t know how to tell you this. When Dad and I bake, we’re usually, ah. Flirting.”
It’s like setting off a bomb. All three of them go EWWWW! at the same time, faces twisting in horror, but the tension in the room pops like a bubble; Ellie bursts out laughing, and Ollie devolves into helpless giggles, and Sophie sprints to the sink and very convincingly mimes spilling her guts in disgust.
Seeing them, Jack can’t help but laugh, too. Maybe they’re all thinking about it: Bitty, grinning in this kitchen, calm and in command, quick to pull Jack down for a kiss on his way out and tease the kids when they shriek my eyes!
Jack thinks about the way he and his parents didn’t even sit down for dinner together most nights until circumstances forced them to. There’s a sturdiness to this room, a foundation that they've built over many years; love exists here, even when things are hard.
“Alright, well, maybe you weren’t paying attention, but I think we should still do it,” says Sophie.
“Do what?” Jack asks.
“Baking Day.”
Her face is set. Jack is struck by how much she looks like Bitty, squaring his shoulders, ready to throw down with a lax bro or someone who implied that Renaissance was anything short of a masterpiece. Ellie and Ollie, clearly in on the plan, are wearing similar expressions.
Jack looks between their faces again, things finally falling into place. “You guys want to bake for Dad?”
“He’ll be sad if we don’t,” says Ollie, matter-of-fact. “I’ll be sad if we don’t.”
“Me too,” Ellie adds. “It already doesn’t feel like Christmas, we can’t skip this too. Please, Papa?”
Jack bites down on the immediate urge to say no. He feels like he’s given everything he knows how to give. It’s always been Bitty, his big warm smiles and his ability to pull magic out of nowhere, that have put the real feeling into this time of year, even when work got crazy or Jack was injured or the kids were in a difficult stage. Jack loves his family, but even now, he’s not sure he trusts himself to be the one to save the day.
He thinks about the trust in Bitty’s eyes, the strength of his convictions. Maybe he can’t save all of Christmas, but he can fix this. Can’t miracles happen? Their kids are here with him, and healthy, and a couple of miles away, Bitty is healing. Waiting to come back to them.
“Okay,” he says. “Put your coats on.”
It’s late, and the grocery store is almost empty.
Jack lets the kids lead, following them with his hands in his pockets. They’ve been coming here with Bitty since they were old enough to walk. It’s less a chore and more a family event, a privilege they used to fight over. He watches them bend their heads together, two dark and one light, arguing in loud whispers over different types of powdered sugar and the merits of this chocolate brand versus the other.
Overhead, there's upbeat Christmas music playing from unseen speakers. Mariah Carey. Jack knows that one.
They unload the cart in the one open checkout lane, which is when they figure out that they might have gone a little bit… overboard. Jack grimaces at the amount of butter that Sophie is meticulously lining up on the belt with all the Cabot logos facing the same way.
But then, he thinks, looking at the fierce shine in her eyes, and the way Ellie’s knuckles are white around her phone, maybe there’s no such thing as going overboard when you’re doing something for the people you love.
He times his jog so he’ll catch the (stupidly early) morning med pass and is rewarded with ten minutes of warm, mostly one-sided conversation before Bitty slides back into sleep right in the middle of a sentence. As he loops across the river and heads back down their street, Bitty’s breaths labored but steady in his ears, his phone buzzes with an incoming call from his father.
Jack stops short in the middle of the sidewalk, panting hard. There’s a killer stitch in his side right where it always is, where three of his ribs once buckled under the force behind a crosscheck: an old, unwelcome friend.
Strictly speaking, the run is no longer necessary. Nobody cares what kind of shape he’s in or what he weighs. When he’s mentioned on TV now, it’s usually to talk about his Hall of Fame candidacy, or compare a new crop of wide-eyed teenagers to his life's work. He has to laugh at the way the analysts, some of whom are even friends by now, hold these kids up to records that still stand like oaks. The upside is that they've stopped talking about him the way they used to: big body, strong body, like he’s a porn star or a piece of meat. Bitty, in particular, is almost comically excited about Jack’s potential—what does he call it?—dad bod, to the point where Jack’s almost inclined to really let himself go just so he can surprise Bitty that much faster.
Bitty’s not at home, though, and there’s no point to this fucking run. Where is there to go besides in circles? What's at the end of the tunnel, if not the light? Sometimes, right before the panic sets in for real, Jack gets this—it’s like a roaring in his ears, like big, dark waves that drag him under. His head goes blank. In his ears, inside his brain, Bitty is breathing in long, uneven rasps, heavy and harsh, an undertow.
Both of them are drowning.
All at once, Jack can’t bear it. He catches the accept button just before he misses the call, and Bitty disappears in an instant, dissolves up into the wispy clouds and the pale pink morning. It’s freezing in a pretty way, all the leaves glittered with frost. He can't help but think of how Bitty would like it, how he'd gasp in pleasure and then immediately start bitching about the cold. He’d turn his face into the one orange corner of the sky and make a joke about vitamin D. He would be here, wrapped up in one of Jack’s coats because the love makes them warmer, sweetpea, obviously, and his accent would mangle his next crack about photosynthesis into something hilarious, and they’d—
Jack allows himself to feel, emphatically, like a total dick. Out loud he says, more harshly than he intends, “Hello?”
“Hi, baby.”
It’s not his father’s voice, but his mother’s. She comes right to his mind, glasses and that big old sweater, folded into the front window so she can watch it snow. He used to come back from Rimouski for the holidays to the kitchen light on behind her, squares of gold thrown over the snow like a blanket; she’d always be curled up there, waiting for her boys to come home.
Jack blinks, recalibrates. He thumbs away from the call screen so he can channel the rest of his anxious momentum into texts: i miss having you here to make those little noises when you sleep. hope you’re resting. i love you.
“—wake you?” his mother is asking when he tunes back in. “Are you there?”
“No,” he says, starting to walk back to the house. It’s visible at the end of the street, big and bright and butter-yellow, Christmas lights dark in the bushes. “I mean, yes. But no, I just finished a run. What are you doing up?”
“Thinking about you.”
He hadn’t bothered to turn any of the lights on before he’d left. By memory, he feels his way to the kitchen cabinets and pulls down a glass. He stands at the sink and fills it with water, once and then twice. The front of his shirt absorbs the drops that fall, the same way he sinks into the French of his childhood like a warm bath. “Oh, yeah?"
"Of course," she says. "How are you, mon ange? How is—everybody?"
He knows what she's looking to hear. "The kids and I are okay. I think it was the right decision to come home. Bits is... fine. Getting better, I think."
"He's a fighter," his mother says softly.
Jack's throat goes so tight he's legitimately afraid he might choke to death. How strange, that after forty-nine years he still sometimes feels like he needs an adult. "He is," he says on a whisper. "Maman..."
"I know." Her voice is brusque, suddenly. "I know, darling. We don't have to—"
"It's okay." One breath, then two. Jack has never been less okay, unless you count the time he woke up handcuffed to the hospital bed, saw the expression on his father's face, and cried until he passed back out. "Really, it's okay. What’s up with you?”
They’ve perfected this song and dance over many years, to the point that Maman fills each silence as naturally as breathing. He floats through the first floor like a ghost as he listens to her relay the news from her latest foundation meeting. She fills him in on his father’s bad knee as he’s feeding the dogs, spins a long story about his madcap decision to write an autobiography as he’s picking up stray hoodies and socks to start a load of laundry. Jack doesn’t particularly feel like keeping up his end of a conversation, and she must realize it, because she doesn’t seem to be expecting responses.
Even so, he tries his best to hum at the right places. The house feels colder than normal, like it sat empty for longer than two days. Jack empties the dryer and goes back to the living room with a basket of clean clothes. Light from the beautiful sunrise outside is spilling through the massive windows, but it seems distant somehow, remote. At Jack’s heels, Puck gnaws disconsolately on her toy rolling pin.
“You know,” his mother says thoughtfully, “I found out I was pregnant with you the day before Christmas.”
Jack stops halfway through folding one of Sophie’s shirts, blinking at the non-sequitur. He has to admit that he’s kind of impressed they’ve kept this up for—he looks at his watch—twenty minutes, and although he thinks she’s probably just been cooking up whatever she can to keep their minds off of everything else, he’s also suddenly aching to know where this is going. There’s usually a motive, where his mother is involved. “Really?”
“Mhm.” A long sigh. “We had just moved to Pittsburgh that summer. I think I was organizing the apartment—”
“It took you six months?”
“Such insolence,” she says, smile breaking through her affronted tone. He cracks a smile, too, with some effort. It feels like a wound. “Well, think about it. It was the end of 1989—your father was always gone, and I was back and forth to New York, and by the time I was getting around to the actual unpacking, I felt so strange—”
Jack doesn’t know this story. He knows that they wanted him, in theory. He knows they were busy when he was young, that it took about as long for his papa to retire as it did to plant the seed in Jack that grew, eventually, into be better. He knows that his mother fielded ugly comments in the tabloids about her body until the tabloids turned on him, instead. Those are the parts he’s lived. But they’ve never told him in as many words: this is where you come from. Before there was the stick and the puck and the net, the sheet of ice, the linemates who turned into friends and lovers; before there was a husband, two dogs, three children, four Stanley Cups—before there was Jack, there were Bob and Alicia, household names when they were still just kids, nauseous and in love on Christmas Eve.
“—finally decided it was time to do something about it,” his mother is saying. Her voice is gentle, far away. “And it was the day I found out about you. Now it always feels like the right day to expect something, somehow.”
Jack blinks and finds his eyes wet. “Maman, I don’t think I’m pregnant.”
There’s a moment of stunned silence on the other end of the line, and then a loud laugh—her real one, not the media one. The sound of it warms Jack down to his toes, startles him out of his head. He puts the shirt down on Sophie’s pile. From her spot at his feet, Puck huffs and nudges the back of Jack’s knee with her nose.
“You know that’s not what I’m trying to say, you willful child. I only mean—this is always a weird time of the year, bébé, and it’s alright to be scared. Sometimes things change, even when you aren’t expecting them to. But I hope you’ll have faith. It’s a nice time of year for that, too.”
Two weeks before Ellie was born, Jack found Bitty having a mental breakdown over a pile of clothes.
It's funny, he thinks, that something as basic as folding socks can trigger such a strong memory. He lets himself get swept up in it anyway. The old apartment had had more of a closet than anything that could rightly be called a laundry room, but it had been more than enough space for the two of them. Once the baby they’d been discussing for so many years became a reality, though, and they’d had a fantastically over-the-top baby shower, and the gifts had started to pile up, they’d pretty quickly realized how outclassed they were.
So at the beginning of November, Jack had come in from an evening practice to Bitty crumpled in the hallway, what looked like the entire newborn section of Target strewn over the carpet, and the smell of badly burning quiche coming from the kitchen. It hadn’t taken a rocket scientist to figure it out from there.
“Bud?”
Bitty’s face was chagrined under the tear stains. “She’s j-just gonna be so small,” he’d warbled without preamble, helplessly gesturing to the pile. “Jack, what if I do something wrong, or we’re not good at this, or we ruin her life…”
Jack had been working on exactly those things in therapy for the last eight months, and so had almost made the critical error of bursting into laughter. Trust the two of them to distill all their feelings down so small that they could almost pretend they didn’t exist, only for them to come roaring back at the most inconvenient moments. He’d saved himself just in time, eased down onto the rug next to Bitty.
“Listen. You’re going to be a good dad,” Jack had said, nuzzling at the sensitive spot behind Bitty’s ear until he’d laughed and twisted away. “Seriously. We're never gonna be perfect. All we can do is our best, eh?”
Bitty had agreed after a good amount of coaxing, and they’d finished the laundry and made out and gone to bed—but the thing is, Jack thinks, he hadn’t been wrong to be worried. They'd brought their Giselle home without any real clue of what they were getting into. With Bitty in the editing phase for his second book, and Jack in the thick of a packed fall schedule, adding a newborn to the mix had asked them for everything they had and more. Those initial days of hazy, half-awake giddiness at being parents had given way to an exhaustion so profound that Jack’s still not sure they’ve fully recovered, and then again to all the other things they had to get right: eating, sleeping, two different languages. Two new siblings.
Jack’s been doing this for sixteen years now, though. Sometimes he has to remind himself that he's not as helpless as he used to be.
The baby in question is alone on the other side of the island, flattening pie crust into a neat circle. Sophie is fiddling with the nice kitchen speaker that Bitty favors, scrolling through her phone for a suitable playlist. Jack leaves Ollie playing with the settings on the KitchenAid and sidles over under the guise of stealing an apple slice from Ellie’s mixing bowl.
She looks up when he bumps her shoulder. Her eyes are so like his father’s, but the expression is all Bitty. “What?”
“What, I can’t come and say hello?” He steals another apple. It’s good—sugary and crisp. He relishes the way it explodes across his tongue, cinnamon and nutmeg and all the things tonight should be.
She goes back to her rolling pin, but she can’t hide the way the corner of her mouth curves up. “You’re a dork.”
He’s trying to muster up a witty comeback—not sure how he deserved that one—but Sophie’s music rescues him just in time by blasting out of the speaker at top volume.
“Sorry, sorry!” she yelps as the rest of them cringe. “Let me just—”
Amidst the chaos of Ollie starting to warble something about resting merry gentlemen, and the dogs barking like crazy, Ellie bumps him back. Her face is doing something complicated. Jack turns so his back is to the island and crosses his ankles—just in time, too, because she drops the rolling pin and presses into him, floury hands and all.
“Love you,” she says into his sweater.
Jack hugs her back. “Love you, too.”
The thing is, he's never really stopped worrying that he's going to mess something up where the kids are concerned. Doing his best doesn't always mean doing it perfectly—and it's hard for Jack to forget, most days, that under the warm exterior there are parts of him that are still cold and hard. Ellie hugs him tighter, though, her arm bracketing him over the old injuries; it feels poetic, somehow. By some absurd stroke of luck, Bitty and their children have agreed to put the parts of Jack they didn't break back where they belong. Every time they trust him, or tease him, or say something shocking or smart or funny—every time they feel safe enough to disagree with him, and know that he'll still have their backs—then Jack breathes, and knows that it's okay to be good enough.
He relaxes into their presence around him, these three bright sparks, little pieces of their fathers' hearts that they’ve taken and turned into something all their own.
“Sophie, pétite, turn that down some more, eh? Who’s gonna help me preheat the oven?”
On Christmas morning, Jack doesn’t wake up alone. There’s a shock of blonde hair on the other pillow, and when it notices that Jack’s awake, it sits bolt upright.
“Papa?”
If Jack squints, he can make out Ollie’s face, smudgy in the watery light that squeezes in through the blinds. Behind him, Bitty’s alarm clock says that it's 5:37. “Bon matin, bud. You okay?”
“It’s Christmas,” Ollie says, by way of explanation. “Time to be awake.”
Jack can’t say he came unprepared. Ellie and Sophie are too old to believe in Santa, and Jack never did, but he knows that the magic is still important—today more than ever. Last night, after the kitchen had been thoroughly cleaned and the kids tucked in, he’d arranged the presents under the tree for everybody. Still, it’ll be a sad excuse for the usual riot of excitement that colors these mornings. I’m not there.
Awake now, he scrubs a hand over his jaw, pats around on the nightstand for his glasses and fumbles them on. “I guess it is,” Jack agrees. “Do you want to go wake up your sisters?”
Ollie’s expression turns uncertain. “Is Daddy gonna be here too?”
His face is so earnest. It kills Jack to have to shake his head, kills him to watch the way Ollie’s shoulders immediately deflate. “No, bud, I’m sorry. His doctor said probably not till tomorrow.”
Ollie blinks, uneven teeth worrying at his lower lip. It’s funny, Jack thinks, how he seems to have inherited all of Bitty’s mannerisms, down to the way he fidgets. He’s only eight—their last baby. He loves Legos and football and Jack’s old history encyclopedias. He’s so young to be dealing with this. He’s so much older than Jack remembers, sometimes.
“I want him to be here,” he says.
Jack’s heart squeezes. “I know. I do too.”
He doesn’t have anything else he can say to that. He sits up a little so that Ollie can snuggle into his side, rests his chin on the riot of messy blonde hair, tries not to think about anything.
Maybe five minutes go by before Ollie murmurs, “Papa?”
Jack hums. “M’awake.”
“Did Santa come last night?”
“I think so,” Jack says. “The three of you were so good this year. And you’ve been extra good the last few days.” He pokes Ollie gently in the belly to seal the deal, which doesn't get the giggle it usually would. “Why?”
“I was thinking,” Ollie says slowly. It comes out more like finking. “If we don’t open any presents, will Santa come and take them back?”
Jack’s heartbeat picks up, just like that. Bitty has been cooking up a highly elaborate Santa lore for well over a decade, with minimal interference from Jack the Jewish Kid. Suddenly, he's really wishing he paid more attention. Getting it wrong would be mildly disastrous.
“I don’t think so,” he hedges. “You know, unless you do something really naughty and he tells your parents to take them away, eh?”
“Right,” says Ollie, like, duh, Papa, everyone knows that. Jack has to try not to sigh in relief. “But if we don’t do anything naughty, and we just don’t open the presents, he won’t take them back?”
“Right,” Jack echoes. He is starting to really hate this fat old man and his surveillance-based parenting techniques. “I think you’ve got it.”
Ollie thinks so, too, if the look on his face is anything to go by. “So do you think we can wait to see what Santa brought until Daddy comes home?”
Huh.
Jack will gladly tell anyone who'll listen that his children are considerate, kind, and well-mannered (most of the time), but he's never known an eight-year-old with the kind of restraint necessary to suggest postponing Christmas. He barely resists the temptation to go, "What?" and catches himself at the last second with a deep breath.
"That's an interesting idea, bud," he says, hoping his tone is even. "Why do you want to wait?"
Ollie shrugs. He's starting to get to that stage where his whole body is limbs, and one of his sharp elbows almost catches Jack in the stomach. "Daddy should be here," he says simply. "He'll be sad if he doesn't get to watch us open presents."
Every day of his life, these kids surprise him in new ways. He runs a hand through Ollie's hair to get it off his forehead so he can plant a kiss there. "That's a really nice thing to do for Daddy. You’ll have to ask your sisters what they think, but I’d be okay with that.”
The satisfied expression on Ollie's face is totally incongruent with we're not opening Christmas presents today, but the way he says, "You're the best, Papa!" and slides out of bed to go wake up his sisters puts something warm and untouchable in Jack's chest all the same.
Apparently the girls are also on board with this plan, because Ollie returns after twenty minutes looking eminently satisfied. He crawls back up into Jack’s arms and gives him a good couple kicks trying to get comfortable enough to go to sleep. Sophie joins them, bleary-eyed, at 6:30, and Ellie arrives, yawning, just after seven. She’s got her headphones dangling from one hand.
“Is there even space left?” she whispers, eyeing her brother where he’s already passed back out.
Jack's migrated to Bitty's side of the bed, so he has to twist to peer over his shoulder. “Behind me, if you nudge Sophie over.” He nods at the headphones. “You’re not gonna sleep?”
“Nah,” says Ellie softly. She shrugs. “I kinda just wanna lay here for an hour and be sad.”
“Okay,” Jack says. “Me too. Come on.”
An hour turns into two, and then two hours edges into lunchtime. The mood is muted, a little lethargic. Sophie cuts into one of the pies from yesterday, a messy maple apple with an uneven lattice, and they eat without regard for crumbs falling into the sheets. They’re halfway through their second showing of the Grinch before Jack realizes it’s almost dark outside.
It’s crowded in the bed, even for a king, but Jack knows that they’re all thinking about who’s missing.
Bitty gets to come home on the morning of the twenty-sixth.
Despite Dr. York’s repeated reassurances that he’s on the mend, Jack drives with his hands at ten and two, the way he did when they brought the kids home. The heat’s all the way up to compensate for the fact that Bitty, having been operating at spectacular heights for most of the last month, has swung back the other way to being freezing.
They still haven’t really talked about it. As a matter of fact, Bitty has been very quiet today. The little smile he’d offered when Jack came in to find him dressed had quickly faded, to be replaced by his head on Jack’s chest, his tired eyes on the floor while they’d listened to their discharge instructions. Jack had threaded one hand up into his messy hair, held him there, tried his hardest not to worry and failed entirely.
They make it halfway home at ten miles under the speed limit before Bitty says, “Baby, I’m not gonna break.”
Jack looks over at the pale, exhausted shape of him, cocooned in one of Jack’s big coats in the passenger seat, head resting on the cold window. He lets his shoulders relax by scant degrees. Most of his nerves are long since shot. He has no idea where the pain stops and the tension starts; it all blends together, a long litany of old and new aches.
“I know,” he says. “Sorry.”
“S’okay.”
Bitty tips his head back into the seat and closes his eyes. They roll through three more lights in silence before Jack has a chance to stop and look at him again. He seems, to put it lightly, miserable.
“Bud?”
Bitty exhales, long and shaky. “I can't believe I ruined Christmas.”
Jack’s hands flex involuntarily around the wheel. It’s like there’s this strange powder keg in his gut that he’s been slowly filling over the last week, socking away every terrible thing into this dark place inside him that’s finally threatening to blow. Before he can do anything really stupid, he flicks his blinker on, carefully cuts across two empty lanes, and turns into a CVS parking lot.
Bitty looks startled when he throws the car in park. “Honey, when I said I wasn’t gonna break, I didn’t mean—”
Jack digs his thumb hard into the buckle and pushes his seatbelt off so he can turn and look at Bitty. “Listen to me,” he says, more forcefully than he intends. “You didn’t ruin anything. You know that, right?”
The expression Bitty is wearing is hard to place. His mouth hems itself into a fine line. “You don’t have to lie just to make me feel better.”
“I’m not lying,” Jack says, indignance welling in his chest and throat. “Don’t put that on me—”
Bitty’s palms sound sharp in his lap. “Jack, come on. We were going to see my parents, and it was gonna be all nice, and I’m sure you’ve been on the phone with my mama for days on top of everything else—”
“Because we were worried about you,” Jack says hotly. “I still am. Bits, this didn’t come out of nowhere—”
“I know,” Bitty snaps, “and I feel like an idiot. I made y’all worry about something I could’ve controlled.”
Jack has the strangest feeling that he’s dropped into a parallel universe, where the events of the last four days really have been one long and terrible dream. He thinks of the frantic phone calls, the bathroom light, the fever. “Wait. Controlled? Did we just leave the same place? You were really sick—”
“I knew that! I could have told you it was getting worse, but I didn’t.”
Jack’s not sure what part of the shitty situation Bitty’s so angry at, and feels acutely the sensation that he’s making it worse. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but there are plenty of times I haven’t told you how bad I was getting.”
“You have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. I thought I had the flu—”
“Yes, and you wound up in the—”
Just like that, Jack places the expression on his face. Once upon a time there had been a playoff game, a cocky captain, a bad concussion. Jack had lingered in the hallway until Murray and the trainers were done, driven Bitty back to the Haus looking remarkably like this. Chin tucked, eyes down. The face of embarrassment.
He changes tactics.
“Lapin,” he says, soft. “I’m sorry, I’m doing this all wrong. I’m not angry at you, I'm just trying to understand. Why—?”
“I was trying so hard to hide it.”
Bitty, for all that he wears his heart on his sleeve, only cries for two reasons. They’re either angry tears or overwhelmed ones, and now, Jack’s learning, it’s possible for there to be a combination of both. “I guess I’m too good at it. I just felt—it’s so embarrassing to be a burden like that, and now things are finally taking off for me and you have a chance to rest, and I guess—I was trying to prove that—”
“Okay, okay, stop. Time out.”
This is the thing about misunderstanding each other: they don’t. Or maybe that’s just something Jack’s been telling himself for years, letting each fight pass, secure in the knowledge that they’ll have the time and space and energy to talk it out, eventually. He’s let this go on too long; self-flagellated his way into this snowy car, rocking with the motion of the wipers, his husband sick and crying in the passenger seat. They don’t get to sweep this under the rug anymore. “I guess we’ve dealt with this big stuff for me before, but never for you, eh?”
“I guess not,” Bitty says, not looking at him.
Jack, for the hundredth time in his life, realizes his parents weren’t always right. Being with someone for decades doesn’t mean you know them as well as they know themselves. It means finding each other’s idiosyncrasies, and confronting them, and choosing to love each other anyway.
“Okay, so let me—uh, okay. Just because you’re the one with the bigshot career now, it’s not—there’s no need to push yourself too hard just to prove a point to me, or to be embarrassed because something that doesn’t seem like that big of a deal actually means that you need to slow down for a while. That’s how I ended up with the fucked shoulder, and the knees, and the—it’s not really that different, eh?”
It all circles back to hockey, in the end. Puck, stick, net; pushing himself through the separated shoulder, the joint pain, the barely-healed bruises; hiding the tears until he was in Bitty’s arms and then, at the end, when it got really bad, in his car on the way to work. He knows, maybe better than anyone, what it means to be a burden. He only wishes he’d been able to see it sooner.
“Oh my God,” Bitty whispers. “I pulled a you.”
Jack blinks and then, suddenly, laughs. “Yeah, bud, the Jack Zimmermann Special. Now I see how it must have felt to be you all this time, dealing with my stubborn ass.”
He thinks again of the way it felt to sit in that room day after day, listening to a stream of people pick apart symptoms and courses of treatment, the way everyone used Eric kindly but didn't know why Jack flinched a little every time he heard the name. Thinks of Bitty on the phone with George every time he was in the recovery room, the way his eyes would go tight and worried when he didn't think Jack could see. He'd always deny it. He'd done it all, put their family on his back for years. He can't imagine what it must have felt like.
“It was hard,” Bitty says.
Jack allows himself a cautiously self-deprecating smile. “Mhm. Okay, so, same deal. You still take care of us all the time. You did a lot of it by yourself for years. You gotta let us take care of you, eh? Before you go and scare us like that again.”
“Yeah.”
There was a time when Jack could have climbed over the center console and folded himself into Bitty’s lap, and they would have kissed and made up right here in the parking lot—but Jack has more bad joints than good ones these days, and Bitty’s a tired heap of flannel held together with a promise, and now they’re both sort of crying, which is not that sexy.
Well. Jack’s pretty sure nobody ever said that marriage was a glamorous endeavor.
He settles for pinning one of Bitty’s hands between both of his. Bitty’s wedding band is loose where it hadn’t been a month ago, and there’s a tacky spot on the back of his hand where they took his IV out this morning. Jack leans over, which he refuses to admit is getting kind of hard, to kiss the tiny scar that’s been left behind, and then kisses their ring three times: a little time-out, a breath.
Bitty watches him, silent. His eyes are big and watery.
“I love you,” Jack says, which is true. Something in him needs to hear it in the air between them now, though, needs Bitty to affirm it: a little wedding, another vow. “I love you when you’re sick, and I love you when you do things that are frustrating, and I love you when you think you’re asking for too much—and just because things look different than they did twenty years ago doesn’t mean you don’t still get to need me, for as long as you need me. Okay?”
Bitty cuffs at one eye. “Okay,” he says, voice still wobbly. “I love you, too. For the record, it would be a lot easier to have angry conversations if you weren’t so damn nice about them.”
Jack blinks. “Want me to yell at you?”
“No, you asshole.”
When Bitty smiles, Jack sees the shadow of a kid with wide eyes and a big heart, who used to hip check Jack when they walked to Annie’s and lock eyes with him on the setup of every one-timer and mispronounce avoir besoin. After twenty-three years, he still fucks up sometimes, and so does Jack, but they’ve never stopped choosing each other—and that means something. Maybe everything.
He picks up Bitty’s hand again, kisses him soundly in the middle of his palm. “Let’s go home?”
“Like I have much of a choice,” Bitty says, wry. He doesn’t let go of Jack’s hand. “Let’s go home. How are our babies?”
“They’re fine,” says Jack, easing them back out into traffic. Bitty’s thumb strokes over his, slow but steady. “Excited to see you, they’ve been pretty worried. You weren’t wrong about your mama, by the way, she’s been calling me for updates twice a day since Wednesday—”
“—Oh my God—”
“—so we should probably let her know you’re alive—”
“—oh my God!—”
“—and, ah, the house might be a little bit of a mess.”
Bitty waves a hand, and the smile finally breaks, tired but earnest. “I don’t care, we’ll handle it.”
“Yeah, that’s what we had three kids for,” Jack quips. He’s surprised by the urgency he feels to keep that smile there, the light that's been missing for so long. “You are going to get lots of rest, and let me worry about the house and the laundry and feeding everybody, and watch whatever horrible thing Ollie wants to put on TV.”
“Lord have mercy,” Bitty groans, dropping his head back into the seat. “Do you think I can trick him into Project Runway?”
Jack gives him a look, like, right. “Punishment fits the crime, I think. Pros, you’re not contagious anymore, so you get to snuggle with the master. Cons, World Series of Poker.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Could be bowling, Bittle.”
“Do not.”
God, his laugh is the best thing Jack’s ever heard.
No one’s waiting to waylay them in the driveway when they get home. They take it slow; Jack has to resist the temptation to carry Bitty inside, settles for helping him out of the car with a little more care than is strictly necessary. But Bitty just gives him a look, like, sure, okay, and Jack raises a chirpy eyebrow back at him, and it’s good. It’s so good.
That is, until they walk into the kitchen to find that it’s exploded.
Well, sort of. Jack can’t help but stare at the mess: their flour-covered kids and counters and dogs, six pies cooling in a row down the kitchen table, every cookie sheet they own carefully balanced on the back of the couch. He’s not sure if he’s hallucinating. As Pie walks by wearing a set of reindeer antlers, he concludes that he is probably hallucinating.
“Y’all,” Bitty says, weakly. “What on earth—?”
Three heads turn in unison, guilty and a little bit shocked. Jack watches the ripple of recognition wash over them, the way their eyes light up.
“Dad!”
Ellie lets out a sharp laugh and runs to be the first to hug him, hug them both.
“Careful,” Jack says on instinct, reaching out to steady Bitty by the elbows. “Don’t break him.”
Ellie’s arms are gentle, though, albeit covered in flour. She smushes her face into Bitty’s shoulder, rocking back and forth like she can’t contain herself; Bitty clutches back at her and laughs a little wetly, and Jack almost has to turn away, his heart leaping in his throat.
When she pulls back, her nose is wrinkled. “Dude, you smell like institutional soap and sad old people.”
Bitty shrugs, looking almost flippant. “I didn’t have a lot of other options, peanut, they wouldn’t let me go shopping.”
Jack chokes on his laughter, even as Bitty reels Ellie back in with an arm around her waist. Both of their faces are brighter than Jack’s seen them in weeks. “Soph, Ollie, get over here. What the hell is going on in this house?”
“Surprise!” Sophie says. There are little-brother-sized handprints of raspberry purée all down the back of her t-shirt and a liberal dusting of flour in her dark hair, but she’s grinning, unrepentant.
“Daddy, we did Baking Day!” Ollie adds brightly, knocking over the baking powder in his haste to come join the group hug. “Only we only made four pies with Papa, and we thought we were missing some ‘cause you usually make a lot, so Ellie helped us when Papa left—”
Ellie pulls away from Jack’s side, cheeks flaming. “Sorry,” she says, not looking particularly sorry. “It didn’t seem like enough. And you were gone for so long today, we just kind of… didn’t stop?”
Jack has the feeling she’s not just talking about the pies. Maybe he should be exercising some kind of authority, but right now he can’t find it in himself to be the slightest bit angry. He slings his arm back around her shoulders. “Sounds like someone else I know.”
Bitty hasn’t relinquished his hold on Ellie, even as he folds Sophie up under his other arm and lets Ollie squeeze into the space between the four of them. He blinks up at Jack, overcome. “I think that means we raised y’all right,” he declares. “It smells incredible in here. Y’all are gonna have to show me what you made.”
“Don’t overdo it, Bittle,” Jack says, gruff, as everyone starts clamoring for Bitty’s attention at once. His throat feels suddenly tight. “Sit down, eh? I’ll get the bags.”
The garage is cold and dark compared to the blazing warmth of the house. Jack lingers in the doorway to let his eyes adjust, stands there watching his breath puff out in bright clouds. It’s snowing in earnest now, big, soft flakes blanketing the grass and the bushes. Their neighbors’ Christmas lights are blinking on up and down the street.
Jack braces his hands on the hood of the car, warm metal under cold water, and lets himself cry.
He doesn’t know what it is: simple appreciation, maybe, gratitude. Sometimes the things that are important to you need to be shaken up a little so you understand the shape of their place in your life. Bitty is so central to Jack that it’s always felt like the rug is being pulled out from under him whenever he’s gone.
Before he closes the garage door, he plugs their lights in, and watches as the colors slowly flicker back to life.
Suzanne Bittle & 3 others
aujourd’hui 20:31
home
everybody healthy
kids made eric six additional pies
Suzanne Bittle loved "everybody healthy"
i have aged approximately 5,000 years this week and am going to bed.
will call tomorrow
Papa laughed at "kids made eric six additional pies"
Coach B liked "home"
jtm
Maman
We love you. Go to sleep!
The riot of activity in the kitchen feels like a warm blanket. Bitty’s parked at the table with the girls on either side of him, and Ollie in his lap talking at him a mile a minute; he looks happy, but he also shoots Jack a look that says, please help.
“Okay, aweille, everybody let Dad breathe,” Jack says, loud enough to be heard. “Let’s clean up this kitchen, please, and maybe get the flour off the dogs.”
It’s a long process; everyone is slow to part with Bitty, like he’ll disappear if they stop touching him. But Sophie eventually steps away to start the dishes, and Ellie breaks out the plastic wrap to cover the pies, and Jack sticks a container of Clorox wipes in Ollie’s hands and tells him to go nuts.
Bitty watches the whole scene, amused. He hasn’t had to move an inch from his chair. Even as Jack’s wrestling Puck and Pie into letting him brush the powder out of their coats, something in his heart leaps just to see Bitty back in his kitchen, right where he belongs.
“What is it?” he teases, when Puck has indignantly wriggled herself free of his grasp and Bitty still hasn’t said anything. “Something on my face?”
Bitty tips his head. He's wearing one of Jack's hoodies that got left in the hospital bag; it looks right on him, like Jack's clothes always have. “You're a good dad, honey.”
Sophie and Ellie make loud barfing noises at the same time, but it does nothing to dim Jack’s answering smile or the way Bitty's cheeks dimple at the sight of it. “C’mon, Bittle.”
The living room is warm and dark, lit only by the Christmas tree. Jack flops onto their corner of the couch and holds his arms out so Bitty can sink into them. He can't count how many days it's been since they've been able to do this. Every minute of normalcy feels like a miracle.
“Quiet here,” Bitty murmurs, appreciative. “Forgot.”
Jack, bone-tired and mostly occupied with his newly regained ability to bury his face in Bitty's hair, hums in agreement. From the kitchen there’s the clatter of dishes in the sink, the quiet hum of voices. Ollie says something that makes Sophie laugh; the sound makes both of them laugh reflexively, soft, as if in answer.
For long minutes, they breathe together again.
“Sweetpea?”
“Yeah?”
"What happened to all the Christmas presents?"
He looks up, blinking. Now that their eyes are adjusted, he can see what's drawn Bitty's attention: the pile of gifts he'd arranged the other night, heartsick and wanting.
"Ah. Your son," he murmurs, lips brushing Bitty's ear, "decided it wouldn't be any fun to open presents without you here. So we... saved them for you."
Bitty stills, then sighs.
"Y'all are too good to me," he says.
Jack shrugs. "S'what you deserve." His thoughts are slowing, muddling pleasantly in the middle. He is so fucking tired. He thinks, given the circumstances, they might just stay in bed again all day tomorrow, and he won't mind at all.
Bitty nestles himself more firmly into Jack’s chest, and Jack's arms tighten around him reflexively. Ellie might have been a bit dramatic, but there’s definitely something off about the way he smells; not bad, just a little antibacterial, not at all like himself. Jack couldn’t care less if he tried.
Tomorrow, he gets to wake up to Bitty’s face on the other pillow, and they’ll start the long, slow process of putting him back together again. It could be a while—maybe a month, Dr. York had warned them. But this is what they’ve mastered, after all this time; this give and take, this love that runs deep.
It doesn’t sound like such a bad deal to Jack.
“Thanks,” Bitty whispers. His cheek is warm on Jack’s collarbone. Just warm. Jack could cry. “Thank you. For everything.”
Jack smiles, even though Bitty can’t see it. “Anything for you, bud,” he says, and means it.
It’s not, strictly speaking, the best Christmas they’ve ever had. But the kids trickle in after half an hour, smelling like dish soap and cinnamon, with pie plates, a handful of forks, and enough napkins to go around. Ellie sits down on the floor by Bitty’s head, and Sophie hangs over the back of the couch to rest her chin on Jack’s shoulder, and Ollie curls right up on the other end of the couch with his socked feet wedged between Bitty’s.
For tonight, Jack thinks, it's enough.