He's already given me his hoodie. I am wrapped up in it, hood up, hands pulled back into the sleeves, warm and comfortable. I'm watching Lochlan alternate between emptying his beer bottle and making paper airplanes to sail off the cliff. I'm sitting on the Adirondack chair a good ten feet back from the cliff. He is sitting on the edge. I don't worry that he'll tumble over the edge, I figure I've already beat the odds on tragedy for a while.
He's been lighting the airplanes on fire before he flies them for close to an hour. I lost count somewhere after sixteen or maybe eighteen planes. He's talking quietly. I can't hear him, he's facing the other direction. I am getting unrelated ramblings and disjointed cursewords and loving diatribes aimed painfully right at the center of my being. It's nothing new. I'm a little concerned he's going to set his hair on fire, that's about it. Otherwise I'm enjoying the moon, the stars and the flames as they spiral down into the sea. I'm trying not to focus intently on the words. I'm trying not to focus on the past. Lochlan thought the past would save him. Funny how one man's ruin is another's salvation.
Abruptly I am lifted to my feet. Ben's chin appears when I look straight up over my head and he doesn't let go.
Been looking for you for twenty minutes, Bee.
Lochlan stands up. You should have checked with me, she's usually within reach.
Ben nods and looks out over the water. Probably considering pushing both of us over the cliff. How easy life would be after that moment. Except it wouldn't be. He'd spend the rest of it in jail. It would just be one more thing to tie Lochlan and I together for all eternity.
One more thing. A last straw, plucked from a strawman that Ben has created as a defense for his temper, because I chose him and I continue to choose him even while he shoves me away and then denies it and takes everyone else to task for filling in.
Yeah, thanks, brother.
Ben picks the high road, surprisingly, bringing me along, grabbing my hand, pulling me back up the walkway to the house. He stops halfway and strips Lochlan's hoodie off me, leaving it on the concrete, and takes off his own flannel shirt, wrapping me in it and tying the sleeves in a knot around me instead of waiting for me to find them to shove my arms inside. I laugh and he smiles at last and puts his arm around me, steering me back up to the house, back through the warm, softly lit hallways until we reach our room.
He tells me that he's taken a couple of weeks away from his latest project to spend some time with me, to help me navigate the next two weeks as I drop into year five. Already. I wasn't sure he remembered that today marks exactly four years since Jacob walked out on me but Ben always seems to remember everything and he steps in to shoulder the heavy load just when everyone else runs out of patience and begins to check their watches.
Ben doesn't wear a watch. He wants to know what it's for.
To tell the time, I say.
Tell it to do what? He always responds with a twisted grin. He doesn't give a shit. He never will.
This morning he buried us in pillows on the couch, cued up a list of old movies and locked the door. He fell asleep, holding my hand, halfway through A Place in the Sun with a slurred instruction not to move until he wakes up.
I hope it's soon. He's going to miss North by Northwest. That's his favorite.
