You & Me

Landon met us at his front door, his face a picture of worry as he led us inside. His eyes met mine behind Emmet’s back.

Emmet had started crying again on the drive across town. Before we left the house, he’d pulled on a hoodie, but he hadn’t changed his shorts or washed his hands or face. Tear-mashed flour still clung to his chin and the backs of his hands, his knuckles, and his knees. His thighs were coated in flour, wisps of it drawing ghost lines over his shorts.

I took his hand at the first stop sign. He squeezed me so hard I thought he broke a bone. I never let go.

He was still crying in Landon’s foyer, fat tears rolling down his face as he stared at the floor.

I’d texted Landon and told him we needed to come over right away, that Emmet needed to speak with Bowen. Landon had said come right now, we’re both here and Bowen’s waiting in the kitchen.

Life interrupted surrounded us. A half-eaten apple on the kitchen continent next to a cell phone, vegetables partially chopped on a cutting board. An open laptop next to a legal pad and a discarded textbook on the dining room table. Landon was still in his suit jacket.

Bowen padded across the wood floor in his socks, peering at Emmet with huge eyes. “Bro?” His voice was gentle.

Emmet sniffled.

“Em, how about you and Bowen talk on the patio?” I ran my hand over his back. He nodded and followed Bowen outside like he was being led to his execution.

As soon as the door closed, Landon was at my side. He took my hand in his, turned it over. Peered at the flour coating my skin and under my fingernails, my torn shirt—Emmet had ripped the seams along the sides of my polo—and the snot stains covering my chest and shoulder. “What happened?”

“We need to sit down.”

Everything felt like a dream, like I was disconnected from reality. I saw Landon touching me, but I couldn’t feel him. Most of my body, nearly all my awareness, was focused on Emmet. It was like I’d carved a piece of myself off and was following him outside, watching him and Bowen sit facing each other on the ends of two chaise loungers. Their knees slotted between each other, so close Bowen was breathing in Emmet’s cries. Emmet still had his hoodie up, and he was mangling the string that wound through the hood in both of his hands.

I watched him through the windows in Landon’s living room as Landon guided me to the couch. I saw the moment Emmet forced the words out: he crumpled, his face in his hands, shoulders shaking, sobs racking his body.

Bowen froze. He had his hands on Emmet’s knees, like he’d just promised him it would be okay, and now he was still, watching my son fall apart almost in his lap. Do something, I wanted to scream. Bowen, don’t leave him hanging. Please.

Bowen was Landon’s son. A moment after the shock passed, he hauled Emmet up, wrapped both of his hands around the back of Emmet’s neck, and pressed their foreheads together. I saw his lips move. I’m here, bro. I’m right here.

Landon’s hand found mine. He threaded our fingers together.

I pulled my attention from Emmet one molecule at a time, refocusing back on Landon’s living room, on his white bookshelves, on the deep leather of his couch. On him, sitting so close I could feel the warmth of his skin through his suit pants where he pressed his leg against mine.

“I need to tell you about Riley.”

It all came out. Our unhappy marriage and how we’d drifted apart until we repelled each other. My distance, my passivity, how I’d faded away from my own life, and how she turned to drugs. Cocaine, which I’d found stuffed in her spare purses in her closet, and ecstasy, found in her underwear drawer, and heroin.

I told him about that day and how I’d come home early, not for any reason, just because I was tired and the thought of fighting traffic again made me want to not deal with any of it anymore. Work, my marriage, the son that I never saw. If a big rig slammed into me, would I have cared? If my brakes failed and I soared off the overpass, would anyone have cared?

I held his hand and stared at the floor, not blinking, not moving, as I whispered what happened next. Pulling up next to her car, wondering why she was still there. We took such pains to avoid each other. Shouldn’t she be getting Emmet from practice? Why hadn’t she turned her head away from me, done everything she could to not look at me or acknowledge my existence? I’d looked closer, peered through the window. And saw.

Everything that came after. The 911 call, the screaming, the crying. Chasing the ambulance to the emergency room, running red lights on their bumper. Waiting for the doctor, for a nurse, for anybody to say anything. Wondering what the fuck I was going to tell Emmet, because I was never going to tell him about that.

He stayed with a friend that night—I still don’t know who—while I started calling funeral homes. The police came to talk to me and brought me home at midnight. They processed her car, poked around her belongings. Said they were sorry. At three in the morning, I called a tow truck. Haul it away, junk it, scrap it, I didn’t care. Just get it gone.

I sat on the front step of our old house with Emmet’s favorite stuffed animal and watched the sun rise. I felt everything—every fucking thing—sink into my soul.

Every day since then, I’d been fighting a deluge, trying to overcome the floodwaters of my failures. Failures as a father, failures as a husband, failures as a man. How did I get myself to keep breathing in and out, keep waking and sleeping and waking again? How did I get Emmet, who would rather I’d died than his mother, to keep eating and going to school and caring about algebra? How did I grieve a woman who hated me?

Every day, trying to find a way through, trying to keep Emmet going. “It’s been one year and fourteen weeks since she died,” I breathed. “And eleven weeks ago, I met you.”

Landon was sobbing. Hand over his mouth, body-trembling, face-soaked-in-tears sobs. He clung to my hand, squeezing instead of speaking. He couldn’t speak.

If I hadn’t met Landon, would I have found a path back to Emmet? Would I have seen his smile, or heard his laugh, or cheered him on from the sideline?

Would I have gone into his room to collect his laundry and his sheets? Would I have found his steroids?

I told Landon about finding the needles and the foil-wrapped box that held a glass vial of testosterone. He groaned, his pale skin suddenly ash white, and sank his watery face in his palm. A parent’s empathy: the pang of fear you feel for other kids is a fraction of what you feel for your own. If Landon were in my shoes, if Landon had found those syringes beneath Bowen’s mattress, it would have torn his soul in two. I knew he could feel the tear like a ghost running through him.

Catharsis, thy name is steroids. Here I was, tear-drenched and flour-covered, watching my son bare his soul to his best friend as I held the hand of the man I loved.

Landon couldn’t hold himself up any longer. He fell across my lap as his tears fell. I dragged my fingers through his hair. We didn’t move. We didn’t speak.

The patio door opened. “Dad?”

We both looked up. The wavering, choked, and waterlogged voice belonged to Emmet. He hunkered in the doorway, his hoodie down, face red and swollen. “Bowen asked if you could come outside.”

I peeled myself off the couch. Landon’s fingertips brushed down the back of my thigh, out of sight. As I stepped out to the patio, I saw him crumple to the couch, bury his face in a throw pillow.

Bowen and Emmet were still sitting on the end of the chaise loungers, facing each other. Bowen couldn’t stop moving his hands. Popping his knuckles and shaking them out, rubbing his palms, sliding his fingers together. Repeat. Nerves crackled off him. I sat beside my son, my side glued to his, shoulder to elbow to hip to knee. He leaned into me.

“So,” Bowen began. His voice was heavy. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the sleeves of his own hoodie were damp. “Here’s what I see are the options moving forward. One: you’re bounced from the team. You doped, so you’re gone. It’s cut-and-dry.”

Emmet nodded. He’d been expecting it. I’d been expecting it. Maybe it didn’t matter that he didn’t want to play football in college if today was the end of the line.

“Two,” Bowen said. “You face yourself and you keep playing.”

I frowned. Emmet stiffened. The muscles in his forearms snapped, and his hands curled into the fabric of his shorts.

“I think—” Bowen spoke carefully. “That you’re afraid that everything you’ve done, and everything you’ve achieved, is only because you juiced. But I know you, and I know the team, too, Em. You got bigger, yeah, but you’re not the fastest guy. You’re not even the strongest guy. And what you’re doing out there isn’t about the physical stuff. The hardest parts are all mental, and that’s what you’ve been shredding. Those steroids didn’t do anything to your brain. You’ve been smart on your own your whole life. Nothing changed that.”

Emmet shoved his hands in the pocket of his hoodie.

“I think you’re terrified to face yourself and realize that you’re great all on your own. You are the best because of what’s inside of you, not what you shot up with. I think it would be way too easy for you to walk away, and I think the harder challenge for you would be to keep playing and to face yourself. Now, I’m not your dad.” Bowen looked at me. His eyes were guarded, hesitant. “Your dad gets the final say. If he says you’re done—” Bowen spread his hands. “But this is what I think, as your team captain and your best friend. I think you should keep playing because I think that’s the harder path for you to walk.”

Emmet turned to me. Misery stank from him. He looked like a failure because he felt like a failure. I saw echoes of myself, of my own choices, my own mistakes, lingering around Emmet. The same DNA that built me built him. My cells swam inside him. He had the same foibles and faults that I had, the same pitfalls and tragedies built into his genetic makeup.

It would be easier to walk away. It would be easier to drift away from this, swallow the hurt deep down inside. Run forever, and never face this mistake. Never wrestle with it and reckon with it.

It would be a much more excruciating experience for Emmet to face himself—and face his fears—than it would be if I yanked him off the team. What would happen if I never allowed him the chance to find out if he had anything inside of him other than steroids and terror?

“I agree,” I said. “I think you need to keep playing, Em.”

Tears dripped down Emmet’s nose. He hadn’t expected this. I think he’d settled on the drive over on not playing anymore.

That wasn’t what had driven all these tears out of him, though. Emmet was my son, and, like me, what he feared the most, more than anything in life, was rejection. Losing someone. Losing his best friend.

“You’re gonna see, man,” Bowen said. He wrapped his hand around the back of Emmet’s neck again. They were forehead to forehead, and Bowen had his hand on Emmet’s bouncing knee. “You’re gonna find yourself. It’s gonna be okay. I promise.”

Bowen really was Landon’s son. I smiled, watching him comfort my son and steel-clad the girders of their friendship. They could have broken apart today. I could be scraping the sobbing remnants of my son back into my truck and taking home a broken boy.

What would Landon and I have done then? If Bowen and Emmet had turned to hating each other, what would that have meant for us?

Instead, I felt the four of us draw closer, the braid that bound father and son and father and son expanding. I’d never respected Bowen more than that moment. “Bowen, you are wise far beyond your years.”

He blushed, and I finally saw that shyness that Landon always said was there. He looked away, fidgeted like his father did. “I’m not that smart. Everything I know, I learned from my dad. It’s all him.”

Face yourself. Face the world. Find your strength. Be true to yourself. That was Landon, all right.

I kissed Emmet’s tousled hair. The boys still had hours, days, of conversation ahead of them. Bowen had questions swirling in his eyes, and Emmet needed to hear that Bowen—like me, like Landon—wasn’t going anywhere. Hearing that was one thing. Knowing it, feeling it, would take time.

They needed time together. And I needed Landon.

Landon had buried himself in the corner of the kitchen, out of sight of the patio windows. He clutched a glass of wine in one hand and the granite countertop in the other, and his eyes stared blankly into the middle distance. I walked all the way up to him before he even saw me. He jumped, and wine spilled over the rim of his glass, sloshed down the back of his hand.

I took his glass and set it down. Took his hands in mine and held them to my chest. “I love you.”

Landon sank into me with a sigh. We held each other up, our faces together, cheeks nuzzling, breaths mingling. The anguish I’d carried, the despair, the confusion, all the moments of hesitation and terror and panic, left me.

It was going to be okay. We were going to be okay.

“I love you, too,” Landon whispered into my ear. “I love you, too.”