Chapter 40 All Night If That's What It Takes
JAKE POV
Lily is on the stairs.
He almost doesn't see her. He is looking at the duffel bag in the hallway halfway out of Penny's door, worn canvas, the paperclip on the broken zipper and processing what that means, what it confirms, and then his eyes adjust to the light and he sees Lily sitting on the fourth step from the bottom in her socks with her knees pulled up and her face doing the thing he has never been able to stand.
The quiet crying.
Not the loud kind, not the storm crying, or the nightmare crying, or the I-fell-off-my-bike crying. The quiet kind. The kind she does when she is trying not to be a burden about it. He has seen this face three times since their mom died, and each time it does something to his chest that he has no name for.
He goes to her.
He picks her up without asking. She comes immediately, arms around his neck, face buried below his jaw, and he holds her weight and feels her breathing the unsteady rhythm of someone trying to hold it together and not quite managing.
"Penny's leaving," she says into his neck.
"I know."
"She packed her bag."
"I know, Lil."
"She can't leave." Her voice cracks on the last word. Not a demand. A statement of something she believes to be structurally true, the way six-year-olds believe things completely, without contingency. Penny cannot leave because Penny is here, and things that are here do not leave. That is the rule. That is the only rule that matters.
Jake carries her to her room.
He sets her on the bed.
He picks up Gerald from the floor, always on the floor, always, she sleeps with him, and then he migrates and puts him in her arms. She holds him with both hands.
He crouches in front of her.
"Look at me," he says.
She looks at him. Her eyes are wet, and her face is trying very hard.
"Give me five minutes," he says.
"And then she'll stay?"
He looks at his sister. Six years old and the most honest person in this house, possibly in his life.
"I don't know," he says. "But I'm going to go talk to her. Okay? Five minutes."
Lily searches his face with the specific attention of someone checking whether the words match the person saying them.
"Okay," she says finally.
He stands up.
He walks down the hall.
Penny's door is half open.
He stands in the hallway for one second and takes a breath, not for courage, just for accuracy. He wants to say the right things. He has been arranging them since the parking lot, since Marcus told him she took the microphone, since he sat on the hood of his truck and realized that the game tonight, the meeting Monday, and the cease in his jacket pocket are all secondary to the thing happening in this house right now.
He pushes the door open.
She is sitting on the bed.
The bag is on the floor not on the bed anymore, on the floor, which he does not know how to read. She has her hands in her lap, and she is looking at the window, and she looks like someone who has made a decision and is sitting with the weight of it.
She looks up when he comes in.
He stands in the doorway.
Not in the room. Not blocking the way out. Just the doorway, like a person who is here but has not claimed any space he wasn't given.
He takes a breath.
"I know I don't deserve to ask you to stay," he says.
She is quiet.
"I watched them hurt you all year." He keeps his voice steady. Not because he doesn't feel it, he feels all of it, the whole inventory, every walked-past moment, but because this is not about his feelings and he knows it. "I had a hundred chances to say something. To do something. To be someone who mattered in the right direction." He pauses. "I wasn't. I kept choosing the easier thing. And there is no version of that I can explain away or make sound better than what it was."
Penny looks at him.
Her face is not closed. That is the thing that undoes him a little; it is not closed, it is open and tired and honest, the face of someone who has run out of energy for pretending.
"But Lily needs you," he says.
Something moves across her expression.
"I know that's not a fair thing to say. I know it puts the weight on you and not on me, and I know you have been carrying weight that was never yours to carry." He stops. Breathes. "I know all of that. And I'm saying it anyway because it's true."
Silence.
He starts again.
"And I, " He stops.
The words are right there. He can feel them, the exact shape of them, the thing he has been knowing and not saying for weeks. He thinks about the porch steps. About answering the phone. About every moment, he came home early because something in him needed to be in the same room as her, and he called it something else to make it manageable.
He is done calling it something else.
"I need you," he says.
He lets it be simple.
"I know that's not fair either. I know I don't need things from you after everything this year. But I'm standing here anyway because the alternative is watching you walk out the door, and I cannot. " He stops. "I'm not able to do that and be fine about it. I'm not."
Penny looks at him for a long time.
The house is quiet around them.
He waits.
He would wait all night. He would stand in this doorway until the championship game and the Monday meeting, and everything else came and went if that is what it takes. He has been moving too fast in the wrong direction for too long. He can be still now.
She looks at the bag on the floor.
She looks at the window.
She looks at her hands.
When she finally speaks, her voice is quiet and careful and absolutely precise.
"You don't get to be the reason I stay," she says.
He holds her gaze. "Okay."
"I mean that."
"I know you do."
She looks at the bag again. A long moment. Something is happening behind her eyes that he cannot read: a calculation, a negotiation, something she is working out alone because she has always worked things out alone, and he has given her no reason to do it differently.
Then she says, "But Lily does."
His breath releases.
She stands up.
She looks at the bag on the floor.
She doesn't pick it up.
She looks at him instead, directly, with the full weight of everything this year between them.
"I'm not forgiving you yet," she says. "I want you to know that. This isn't that."
"I know," he says.
"This is just I'm staying for her. That's the whole reason."
"That's enough," he says. "That's more than enough."
She nods once.
She steps toward the door.
He moves back into the hallway to let her through.
She passes him close enough that he could reach out. He doesn't.
She goes to Lily's room.
He hears Lily's voice, the specific sound of a child whose world has just been restored and then quiet.
He stands in the hallway alone.
He looks at the bag still on her floor. Still packed. Still ready. A reminder, maybe, that staying is a choice she is making and can unmake, that it belongs to her and not to him.
He looks at it for a moment.
Then he walks downstairs.
His dad is in the kitchen with his jacket still on, hands wrapped around a mug, looking like a man who arrived too late to too many things and knows it.
He looks up when Jake comes in.
"Well?" he says.
"She's staying," Jake says.
His dad exhales.
Jake sits down across from him at the kitchen table.
They look at each other across the surface where Penny leaves sticky notes, and Lily does homework, and Jake has eaten approximately three hundred breakfasts alone in the dark since his mom died.
His dad opens his mouth.
Jake's phone buzzes.
He looks at it.
Coach.
One text.
The game starts in two hours. Where are you?
Jake looks at his dad.
His dad almost smiles the real one, the rare one, the one that looks exactly like Jake's when Jake forgets not to show it.
"Go win your game," his dad says.
Jake stands.
He grabs his jacket.
He is halfway to the door when his dad says his name.
He turns around.
His dad is still sitting at the table. Still holding the mug. Still wearing the jacket of a man who has not yet decided if he is staying or going.
"I'm going to do better," his dad says. "I need you to know I'm aware of how much I've missed."
Jake looks at him.
He thinks about Lily on the stairs.
He thinks about two years of grocery runs, bedtime stories, and parent-teacher emails he figured out by searching the internet at midnight.
He thinks about what it would mean to let this be a beginning instead of another thing to be angry about.
"I know you are," Jake says.
He walks out.
In the hallway at the top of the stairs, Lily's voice carries down, not crying now, something warmer, the running commentary of a six-year-old telling Penny everything she missed today in rapid sequence, dinosaurs and Gerald Two and the caterpillar and the turtle episode, and something about a boy named Theo who is still wrong about dinosaurs.
Penny's voice underneath it. Low and present, and exactly where she said she would be.
Jake stops at the bottom of the stairs.
He listens for just a second.
Then he walks out the front door to go play the best game of his life.