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February brings with it a rash of sickness: strep throat and the flu and lots of running noses and raspy coughs. Ellie comes to Joel’s work site one day in the middle of the morning, looking all sorts of miserable. “What’s wrong?” He asks, as soon as he’s off the scaffolding, and she says pitifully:
“I threw up. They made me leave.”
Joel takes her home and gets her into her pajamas and back into bed. She fights him doggedly, telling him she’s not tired, she wants to sit on the couch and do a puzzle or some shit, but he insists, his patience growing thinner and thinner; when she finally gives in, she burrows beneath her blankets and sulks till she falls asleep.
She sleeps till the middle of the afternoon and when she comes downstairs, rumpled and mad, her face is red and her teeth are chattering. “Can you turn the fucking heat on?” She asks him from the middle of the stair case. “I’m fucking freezing.” He puts a hand to her forehead, then her cheeks. She’s hot to the touch.
“Ellie, I think you’re sick.”
“No shit.” She pushes his hands away, sits down heavily on the stair. “Can you turn the heat on?”
“It is on,” he tells her. He bends down, puts his hands beneath her arm pits, hauls her back to her feet. “Come on. You need to get back in bed.”
“I can’t,” she whines, lolling her head backwards. “I threw up there.”
She did. Joel puts her in his bed, argues with her when she tries to take the blankets from the closet and lump them on top of her. “Baby, you have a fever,” he tries to reason. “You aren’t really cold. You put all these on, your temperature’s gonna keep going up.”
“I’m not a baby,” she hisses, and he almost laughs at the sight of her: curled up on her side, face puckered in a scowl, hair a mess.
“I know,” he says, and goes to change her sheets. The whole room smells God-fucking-awful, so he cracks the window and closes the door. When he goes back to his room, Ellie has buried herself under a mound of blankets. When Joel starts to peel them off, she shouts at him:
“I’m cold, you asshole!”
They go back and forth all afternoon and into the evening. She starts throwing up around six, and after the fourth trip to the bathroom, where she ends up crying with her cheek smushed against the rim of the toilet, he finds a bucket and puts it next to her on the nightstand. She grimaces when she sees it.
“That’s what they made us piss in,” she says, “In the Hole.”
Joel hopes it’s the fever speaking and not the truth, but he very much doubts it.
He doesn’t sleep that night. Ellie alternates between vomiting and shivering miserably. He sits beside her on the bed and tries to get her to drink water, to eat some ice chips, some applesauce. She tries, at first, to make him happy, but after the tenth or hundredth or whatever round of vomiting, she refuses him.
“I just want to sleep,” she whines, and he turns off the light and rubs her back and tells her stories about the summer spent as a kid at his grandparents’ farm in Chile, and she croaks out, astounded:
“Dude, you’re fucking Spanish?”
“No,” he says patiently. “My mother was Chilean. I’m half.”
“Joel, what the fuck- do you speak Spanish?”
“Some. Haven’t in a long time.”
“Dude.”
She sounds so impressed. Joel chuckles. “No more talking. Try to sleep.”
She sleeps for a few hours and he tries to too, but she’s hogging the whole bed and he doesn’t have it in him to move her, and besides, he’s starting to feel a little close to panicky to trust that his brain will keep him safe from nightmares while he sleeps. This isn’t his first rodeo with a sick kid, but when Sarah was sick, he had everything he needed: Children’s Tylenol, ice pops and ginger ale, Pepto Bismol and a pediatrician on speed dial. He has none of those for Ellie.
When she wakes up a little after dawn she’s worse than she was before. The chills are gone but now she’s complaining that she’s too hot. Her face is flushed red and her hair sticks to the back of her neck with sweat. He gets her downstairs on the couch, but she won’t eat. She drinks half a cup of water and throws it back up. He soaks a wash cloth in cold water and tries to get her to lie with it on her forehead, but that makes her cry because she doesn’t like the way it feels.
“I want to take a shower,” she says thickly. “Can I take a shower?”
She’s so weak she can barely push herself to sit up against the back of the couch. Joel vetoes the request, grimacing. “Not yet, baby,” he tells her, and she shouts at him, her voice ragged:
“I’m not a fucking baby, Joel!”
After that, all bets are off. She’s surly and unweildly. She won’t eat the ice chips, won’t leave the blankets on her, won’t stop trying to get off the couch. Finally, when Joel has to step into the kitchen and silently scream into his hands because he’s about to fucking lose it, someone knocks on his door.
It’s Maria, holding a steaming pot of tomato soup. “Claire told me Ellie went home sick yesterday,” she says. She doesn’t come in, but Joel opens the door, takes the pot from her. “How is she?”
“Pretty bad off,” Joel tells her honestly, and in the living room, Ellie shouts:
“I can fucking hear you!”
Maria grimaces. Joel calls back, “No one’s saying anything bad about you, Ellie.”
“Bull shit!”
“Been up all night throwing up,” Joel tells Maria. He must sound a little desperate, because the furrow between her eyes deepen. “Fever won’t break, and she can’t keep anything down. Won’t even try at this point.”
“Okay,” she says. She reaches out, lays a hand on Joel’s arm. “I’ll send Tommy over in a bit.”
“You shouldn’t be over here,” Joel argues. “You have Rafa at home.”
“Let me worry about that,” she tells him firmly. She nods towards the soup. “Try to get some of that in her. She likes my cooking better than yours, you know.”
“It’s not a competition,” Joel grumbles, but somewhere in his sleep deprived mind he has the awareness to know she’s joking with him, and he forces a tired smile.
He makes Ellie a bowl of the soup, helps her sit up, gets her to take a few spoonfuls of it. When she throws up red, gagging loudly over the bucket, she freaks out. “Am I bleeding?” She asks frantically. “Am I dying?”
“No, honey,” he tells her, but her fever hasn’t broken and its been at least twenty four hours. That small tendril of anxiety is a full blown writhing mass in his stomach now.
Tommy comes over around noon, a thermometer in hand. It’s one of the old ones, with the red mercury line, and Joel manages to convince Ellie to keep it clamped beneath her tongue long enough to get an accurate reading. When he sees the 102.4, he has to sit with his head on his knees to keep from passing out. When he comes up, Tommy is eyeing him critically from the doorway.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” He asks, and Joel snaps:
“I’ll sleep when I know for sure this fever’s not going to melt the fucking brain out of her head.”
The silence that follows is complete, heavy. Tommy looks at him, his jaw working. Finally, he says, “She’s not going to die, Joel.”
Joel squeezes his eyes shut, clenches and unclenches his fists. His old fractured hand, sore all the time now in the cold, twinges painfully. “You can’t know that,” he breathes out. “You can never know that.”
Tommy doesn’t answer. When Joel opens his eyes, Tommy’s staring resolutely at the floor. Finally, he says, “You know she worries about this shit with you, right?”
“What?”
“Ellie. She knows how your mind works. Always going in circles, always trying to predict the next bad thing, always going back to the shit you didn’t do or did do or whatever, and it scares her. She’s too proud to tell you that, but she’s not too proud to tell me that.”
Joel feels winded, like someone’s got a pipe pressed to his throat, suffocating him. Tommy goes on, still not looking at him, “You got to let that stuff go, Joel. Not every bad thing is a death sentence.”
Joel can’t answer. After a minute, Tommy takes the bowl of soup and goes into the living room. Joel hears him sit on the couch, say something to Ellie. He takes a few long breaths, in through his mouth and out through his nose, shakes himself, goes into the living room.
Tommy is sitting next to Ellie on the couch, talking to her in a low voice, brushing his hand through her hair. She looks so miserable, the blankets twisted around her legs, her face stained with sweat and tears, her hair snarled. It breaks his heart. When she sees him, she asks, wearily, “Can I shower now?”
Tommy strokes her head, slowly, methodically. “No, honey,” he tells her. “Joel’s gonna shower, and you and me are gonna have some soup, and then after we’ll see how you feel.”
“I feel fine,” Ellie insists, but there are fresh tears trembling on her eyelashes. Joel wants to reach for her, brush them away, but he feels glued to the spot where he stands in the doorway, leaden with exhaustion and paralyzed with fear. Tommy must sense this, because he tells him:
“Go take a shower, Joel. We’ll be fine.”
Joel tears himself away. In the shower, he scrubs till his skin feels raw, until it stings with the force of the water. When he steps out, his reflection in the mirror shocks him: dead eyes, sunken cheeks, scraggly beard. He shaves with trembling hands, brushes his teeth, tries to make himself look presentable, chipper, confident. She’s not going to die, he tells himself. She’s not.
She’s not.
Downstairs, Tommy has had no luck with the soup. When Joel steps back into the living room, cringing at the scent of sour sweat and sickness, Tommy tells him, “Watch her.” Then he goes outside and gathers a bowlful of fresh white snow, mixes it in the kitchen with a few spoonfuls of strawberry preserves, packs it like a snowball in a cup, and presents it to Ellie with a spoon.
“Here,” he says. “You ever had a snow cone, El?”
She eyes him distrutfully. “Where’s the cone?”
Tommy flounders a minute, then says, “Okay, so it’s just a snowball. But it’s tasty. Try it.” When she doesn’t budge, he says, a little more desperately than Joel thinks he wanted to, “Please, El? For me?”
She takes it. It works. She eats the whole thing, slowly, then savagely, spilling little flecks of pink snow on the blanket gathered around her waist. Good old Uncle Tommy, Joel thinks, but then Ellie throws it all back up and it gets even worse from there.
As the day drags on, Ellie grows increasingly sicker. Her temperature measures at 102.6 at 2 pm, and then 102.8 at 4. She slips in and out of a lethargic sleep, mumbling to herself or crying weakly. The snowcone trick works two more times, and every time Joel sits beside her and spoon feeds her cold snow, that small point of hope pinions around his chest- and then each time she throws up, gagging violently, sweaty and confused, it crashes and burns.
“I just want to take a shower,” Ellie moans. She’s flopped limply on the couch, her arms clenched around her chest. “Please. I have to.”
“Honey,” Tommy starts, reaching out to soothe back the sweaty tendrils of hair clinging to her forehead. “We need to get your fever down first.”
“Please,” Ellie makes a choking noise. She curls away from Tommy’s hand. “Please. Please.”
Joel sits on the couch beside her, tries to take her hand in his, but she snatches it away, scrabbles backwards. She’s panting, and the look in her eyes - glazed, visceral with fear- almost sends Joel reeling. She curls away from him into the corner of the couch. Her breathing begins to pick up pace.
“Please,” she says, “please, I need to- to shower, I need to get it off me, please-”
A knot of cold dread sinks in Joel’s stomach. He tries for her hands again. “Baby, there’s nothing on you-”
The second his fingers graze hers, she screams. She’s pushing herself backwards, digging into the couch. Her breathing claps like gunshots throughout the room. “Don’t touch me,” she gasps. “Please - stop. Stop. I need to shower - please, don’t touch me anymore- I need to get it off -off me-”
Joel feels like he might throw up. “Ellie, honey-”
“Please, please, it’s all over me- I need it off, please-”
Tommy is looking at him with an alertness that tells Joel he knows exactly what’s going on. He slips slowly off the couch, kneels beside it. “Joel…”
“Please.” Ellie shudders, buries her face in her palms. “Please, I need to get the blood off, please, David- he’s all over me- please.”
The name hits him like a train, like it does every time he hears it.
David.
“Joel.” Tommy is still kneeling there. His eyes are dark with something Joel can’t place - empathy? Anger? He keeps his hands up in the air, where Ellie could see them if she was looking at him. But she’s not, she’s hunched in a ball on the corner of the couch, sobbing into her hands, her breath coming hard and fast. She’s still talking, nonsense words that have no meaning, and Joel can’t help her. He can’t help her. The reality of it has bile rising in the back of his throat.
He blinks at Tommy, shakes his head. “Go get Maria,” he says, and Tommy is out the door before he finishes saying her name.
He keeps himself planted apart from Ellie, careful not to move, not to touch her. How badly he wants to pull her into his arms, hold her against his chest, soothe away the things that haunt her. How badly he wants to go back there, to that fucking lodge, and watch the life drain from that pervert’s eyes at his own hands. How badly -
The door opens. Tommy is back, Maria right behind. “I was already on my way,” she’s saying as she sheds her jacket. “I got this from the clinic-”
Her face contorts when she sees Ellie. She looks to Ioel once, and then she’s at Ellie’s side, sitting on the coffee table and speaking softly. “Ellie, honey.” She passes Joel a small bottle of something. He almost weeps when he sees the Tylenol logo on it. “Ellie. It’s me. Can you look at me?”
Ellie doesn’t. Her shoulders are shaking, almost rattling. “Please,” she whimpers, “please don’t let them touch me.”
Joel knows this time she means them, him and Tommy, and it breaks his fucking heart. Maria says, softly, “I need you both out of the room. Please.”
Joel goes, woodenly. He stands in the doorway in the hall beside Tommy and watches Maria coax Ellie, second by second, out of the corner of the couch, murmuring to her, never moving in, still as a statue. “You’re okay, Ellie,” she says, and even though her voice trembles a little bit, it doesn't break. “You’re safe. Can you tell me where you are?”
“I don’t know,” Ellie sobs. “I don’t know.”
“It’s okay,” Maria tells her. “You’re doing so good, honey. Okay? You’re home, alright? You’re in Jackson.”
“With the - the -”
“With me, honey. And Tommy and Joel. And Baby Rafa. Do you want to talk about Rafa? You love him so much.”
“I think Joel’s dead,” Ellie says. She’s digging her nails into the skin around her eyes, as if she’s trying to claw something out of her mind. “I left him- I was trying to protect him- I left him-”
“Joel’s fine. He’s so good, Ellie. You did so good. Do you want to see him?”
“Please,” Ellie whispers. “Please, can I just take a shower? Please, I can - I can still feel him-”
“Okay, honey.” Maria hesitates, then holds out her hands, palms up. “Can you take my hands? We’re going to get you a shower, okay? We’ll get you all clean. I’m going to help you.”
“Where’s Joel?” Ellie doesn’t take Maria’s hands. “Where did we bury him?”
“He’s right here.” Maria keeps her hands out, steady. “Do you want to see him? He won’t touch you if you don’t want him to, okay? He’s safe. He’s going to help you, Ellie.”
Ellie nods, hiccups. Maria inclines her head towards Joel, and he comes back into the room, stepping around the coffee table, maintaining his distance. Ellie doesn’t look up. Maria prompts, gently, “Ellie, can you put your hands down? You can see Joel, he’s right here. He’s safe. You did so good.”
Ellie slowly lowers her hands. The skin around her eyes is pink, swollen. She looks at Joel blearily, her face running. She says, raggedly, “I thought we died.”
“No, baby,” he answers. His voice sounds raspy, even to him. “We’re safe. Okay?”
She hesitates, then nods. “Okay.” It comes out as a whimper, but she’s not hurting herself anymore and she’s looking around like she’s as present as she can be with her body on fire. “Can I take a shower now? Please?”
“Of course,” Maria tells her soothingly. “Can you take my hands? I’m going to help you. A nice, cool shower.”
“Okay,” Ellie whispers, then puts her hands in Maria’s. Joel watches, almost detached, as Maria helps her to her feet, slips her arm beneath Ellie’s shoulders, takes all her weight against her. “We’re gonna go up the stairs, okay? We’ll take it real slow, Ellie.”
Joel follows them, two steps behind, as they make their slow progress up the steps and into the bathroom, where Maria helps Ellie sit limply on the closed toilet. She turns the shower on, sticks her hand under the spray, says to Joel, “Can you find me some clean clothes for her, please?”
He brings her a pair of flannel pajama pants, an oversized Teton National Park t-shirt. He passes Maria the bottle of Tylenol, says, “Try to get her to take some of this,” and Maria nods, her face drawn, and then closes the door. Joel hears her talking to Ellie, hears the scrape of the shower curtain drawing back, feels the fog crowding his head start to dissipate. She’s not going to die. She’s not.
When he comes back to full awareness, he finds Tommy in Ellie’s room. He’s closed the window - Joel never shut it after he opened it to air it out- and he’s putting new sheets on Ellie’s bed, the colorful ones with Disney’s Pocahontas Joel found in the town commissary. Tommy doesn’t look at him as he enters, just lifts the corner of Ellie’s mattress and stretches the fitted sheet over it with shaking hands.
“Figured we might want to let her rest in here,” he says. “Maybe give the downstairs a chance to air out.”
It’s a good idea. Joel goes to the window seat, where Tommy’s dumped an armful on bedding, and together they remake Ellie’s bed with fresh pillowcases and blankets. The bathroom door stays shut the whole time, but after a while Joel hears the shower crank off and the tub start filling. He doesn’t hear Ellie but Maria’s voice is a firm, low cadence, even and calming.
Tommy sits on the side of Ellie’s bed when they’re done and drops his face into his hands. His shoulders are stiff, rounded; Joel sits beside him and feels the exhaustion of the past day steep like hot tea in his veins. The sun is setting, red and watery, through the window, casting everything in the bedroom in a hellish glow. Joel wants to go close the curtains but before he can, Tommy asks through his hands:
“David- was that the name of the - the fucker who…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. Joel doesn’t know how much Tommy knows, because they’ve never had this conversation, and he doesn’t think Ellie has, either. But he knows Tommy’s spent enough time around Ellie to know that some of her quirks are less quirky and more like trauma responses, so he’s not surprised that his brother’s been able to put two and two together and come up with four.
He clears his throat, looks at that closed bathroom door. “Yeah.”
Tommy takes a deep, shuddering breath. He doesn't lift his face from his hands. “When?”
The light beneath the bathroom door flickers, like someone’s pacing in front of it. Joel closes his eyes. “Last winter. When I was hurt.”
They don’t say anything else for a long time. Then Tommy stands, paces towards the wall, turns back again. He’s grinding his hands together, his fingers clasped so tightly around each other that they’re bleached bone white. There’s a look on his face that Joel can’t ever remember seeing there before, not when Sarah died, not when they did all those awful things together, not when he told Joel that he never wanted to see his fucking face again.
“Where?” Tommy spits out, and Joel tells him haltingly:
“Tommy, he’s dead.”
Tommy turns his back to Joel. He splays his hands over the edge of Ellie’s dresser, fingertips inches from her stack of magazines, her stuffed bear, her chipped bowl of stones and shells and the other shit she finds on their hikes. Joel watches his brother’s shoulders bow and rise, like ripples on a lake, and then Tommy says, thickly:
“I always sorta- knew. Something didn’t sit right, but she never- she never said a thing.”
“She keeps real quiet about it,” Joel admits. The words sit bitterly in the back of his throat. “I don’t know how to get it outta her, sometimes.”
Tommy asks, “He’s dead? You’re sure?”
“Ellie, she-” Joel shakes his head. This is, after all, his greatest sin, one of the two worst things he’s ever done. “I wasn’t fast enough.”
“She did it herself?”
Joel can’t answer. They sit there in the silence of Ellie’s room for a minute longer, then Tommy says, “Come on,” and goes downstairs.
Joel strips the couch of the used blankets and pillows, tosses them out onto the back porch where they’ll sit till he can get them to the laundry. The living room is a mess, cluttered with half full cups of water and socks and the melted remains of Ellie’s snow cones. The scent of sweat and sour sickness is lingering. Joel cracks one of the windows, relishes for a second in the sharp bite of the frigid air, and then sets about cleaning up, starting a fire in the wood stove in the corner. In the kitchen, Tommy is pounding something; when Joel goes to investigate, he finds him kneading a ball of dough on their kitchen island.
“Are you making bread?” Joel asks, incredulous, and Tommy blinks at him.
“No,” he replies. “Why? Do you want me to?”
“What? No, I- that’s not what I’m asking.” Joel waves a hand in the air. “What are you making?”
“Oh.” Tommy looks down at the dough, shrugs. “Pasta. Figured it might stand a chance. I know, uh- I know how much she likes it.”
She does. Joel coughs, to cover how overwhelmed he’s feeling, how relieved he is to have someone else who knows Ellie and wants to take care of her. “She’ll like that,” he says, gruffly, and the smile Tommy offers him is tentative, a little vacant, a little tired.
He goes back to tidying up the living room. He’s just about done when the bathroom door creaks open and Maria calls, “Joel?” He’s on his way up the stairs before she even finishes saying his name.
He finds her leaning against the doorjamb, her braids tied up in a messy knot on the top of her head, her shirt stained and clinging to her, wet. She offers him some approximation of a smile, all weary edges and some fathomless emotion. “She’s asking for you,” she tells him in a low voice. “I think - I think it did some good. Got her temperature down a little.”
“She take any of the medicine?”
“Some. Not much, but there’s more.” She hesitates, then says, almost whispering, “Just- be gentle with her. She’s not freaking out anymore but she’s still a little out of it.”
Joel feels a spark of indignation at being told how to handle Ellie, as if he doesn’t know her like he knows the back of his own hand. But he tamps that down; he isn’t the only one invested in Ellie, and there’s nothing even close to maliciousness in Maria’s voice.
Maria shifts aside, and he moves past her to where Ellie is sitting, slumped over herself on the closed toilet lid. She’s swimming in her too big t-shirt, her face pink and flushed, eyes drooping. Maria’s braided her hair back into a French braid, all of her little baby hairs slicked down. He crouches in front of her, careful not to touch her, to keep his hands visible.
“Hey, baby,” he says, “how you feelin’?”
She sniffs. “Shitty.”
Joel chuckles, but it’s dry. He licks his lips. “You wanna stay in here a little longer?” She shakes her head but doesn’t speak. “Can I - can I touch you, Ellie? We can get you into your bed.”
“I threw up in there,” she says weakly.
“Me’n Tommy took care of it. Good as new.” He stands, slowly. “What d’you say, kiddo?”
She nods jerkily, holds up her arms. It’s so pitiful, makes her look so much younger than her fifteen years, that it sort of makes him want to cry. He tamps that down too, slides an arm under her shoulders, takes her against him. She weighs next to nothing; in his arms, she feels like a baby bird, all small delicate bones and fluttering heat. He walks her to her room, gets her in her bed, props up the pillows beneath her back.
“Good?” He asks, and she whispers:
“Will you stay with me?”
He says immediately, “Of course,” and when he sits tentatively on the right side of her bed, back against the headboard, she burrows into him, wedging herself beneath his arm, right up against his rib cage. Her head rests on his chest.
“You feeling any better?” He uses his free hand to tug the blanket over her lap, then cautiously, palm her forehead. It’s still warm but not hot to the touch. “You ain’t as warm.”
Ellie mumbles something against his shirt. Her eyes are drifting shut; she shifts, loose-limbed and lethargic. He hesitates, then curls the fingers of his free hand over her’s, tucks it into the small hollow space between them.
“Go on and sleep awhile,” he tells her, and she murmurs:
“M’sorry. About earlier.”
He hushes her. “There’s nothing to apologize for.” She cracks one eye open, looks muzzily up at him.
“I know you’re not - I don’t think you’re like him.”
He squeezes her fingers, fleeting and firm. “I know you don’t, baby.”
“I feel like shit,” she says, and he sighs.
“I know.”
She closes her eyes again, tips her head back, her mouth hanging open. She’s quiet long enough that he thinks she’s sleeping, but then she whispers, “Maria gave me a bath.”
“Yeah?” He shimmies the arm beneath her head till he can get his hand up, presses it against the side of her face, strokes at the hair clinging to her temple.
“No one ever did that for me before,” she says. She blinks, yawns. “S’nice.”
No one, he thinks, and feels that ever present ache in his stomach pulse. No one, he thinks, ever stirred bubbles into a tub and poured cups of water over her back and wrapped her in a towel and snuggled her close to smell the sweet strawberry scent of her shampoo-
But he doesn’t say that. He tamps that down, as far as it’ll go, and says instead, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Ellie sniffles, her breath hot against his arm. “She’s nice.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Another sniff, then he catches the twitch at the corner of her mouth. “Maybe I’ll stop givin’ her so much shit.”
Joel chuckles. It’s not that funny, but it’s an attempt, a small sliver of a side of her that’s lain dormant the last two days. “I am sure she would appreciate that.”
Ellie huffs, and then goes still. Joel feels her go limp, slowly, minute by minute. Her breathing evens out. He sits in the gathering dusk and watches his sick kid sleep peacefully, her brow smooth and eyelashes fluttering against her cheeks, and that yawning ache- that terrible, unsoothable chasm in his stomach- snaps shut.
*
He doesn’t know how long they sit there, just the two of them, but eventually Maria pokes her head in the door, asks him where he keeps his laundry detergent. “In the garage,” he tells her, softly, so as not to wake Ellie. “In the bathroom there.”
Maria nods. “I’m gonna get the blankets on the porch soaking,” she says, and Joel starts to shake his head, to tell her she’s done more than enough, but Maria puts up a hand, stern. “Don’t tell me no,” she says, and then she softens, steps into the room, comes up to the bedside and places a singular, gentle hand against the side of Ellie’s face. There’s a look in her eyes that immobilizes Joel: something scared and sorry, more anger than pity. Something like grief, regret. He wonders what Tommy told her.
“I hope she knows,” she says, quietly, “How loved she is.”
The words hang ghostlike in the air between them. Joel nods, stiffly, presses his mouth against the crown of Ellie’s damp hair, tastes lavender and bergamot in the back of his throat.
“I think she’s comin’ around to it,” he says, and Maria smiles, still sad, and leaves.
*
By the time Maria returns, Tommy in tow, Joel’s shirt is soaked through beneath Ellie’s head. Maria’s carrying two steaming mugs, which she sets on the bedside table, and Tommy’s got a bowl in his hands and a dish towel over his shoulder. Joel strokes Ellie’s nose till she stirs beneath his hand.
“Ellie,” he says. “I need you to wake up and eat a little, honey.”
Ellie pushes his hand away, weakly. She scowls without opening her eyes. “M’not hungry.”
“Come on,” Joel coaxes. “Just try a little. For me.”
Ellie groans and pushes herself weakly up. Joel sits up straighter against the headboard, drags her up with him. Ellie rubs her eyes, blinks from him to Maria to Tommy to the bowl in Tommy’s hands. “What’s that?”
“Your favorite.” Tommy sits on the edge of the bed by their knees, spreads the dish towel over Ellie’s lap before balancing, very carefully, the bowl of pasta in it. “Eat up, buttercup.”
Ellie peers at it, then at Tommy. “Who made this?”
“Me.”
“Is it…safe?”
Tommy rolls his eyes with a huff and Ellie smirks. Her eyes are drooping with exhaustion but she dutifully takes the fork from Tommy, carefully twirls a couple noodles onto it, pokes it into her mouth. “Not bad,” she tells him around her mouthful of masticated noodles, and Joel’s just so relieved to see her eating that he doesn’t say a word about her lack of manners.
She eats half the bowl before she’s too tired to eat any more. Tommy takes the bowl and goes back down stairs, and Maria returns with the thermometer. “Let’s see what we’re working with here,” she says gently, and Ellie gracelessly slumps against Joel, thermometer in her mouth. When he takes it out, it reads 100.6 and he has to close his fist around it, fingers weak with relief, and press his knuckles to his forehead for a long minute. When he looks up again, Ellie is watching him with an alertness he wasn’t expecting from her in her current state.
“I’m okay,” he tells her, and she hesitates, then nods, turns onto her side, buries her face in his rib cage.
Maria sanitizes the thermometer and leaves it on the bedside table with the mugs of cooling ginger tea and the puke bucket. She hesitates, then sits beside Ellie, combs her fingers through the loose hair at her temples. “She’s okay,” she says, to no one in particular, and Joel clears his throat. Ellie’s eyes are closed, her mouth open slightly as she breathes, deep and even.
“Thank you,” he says, quietly, and Maria’s eyes dart to his. He holds her gaze, feels the lump in his throat swell and subside with each breath he takes. “Thank you,” he says again. “For- helping with her. I didn’t- I didn’t know how to fix it.”
“You can’t,” Maria tells him softly. Her hand lifts off of Ellie’s head, then squeezes, gently, around his forearm. “You can’t fix this sort of thing, Joel. She’s going to have to fix it. Healing is- well, it's an incredibly isolating experience, sometimes.”
He knows that, and that’s part of the problem. Everything Ellie has ever done in her life, up until this point, has been done by herself. Alone, isolated. He can’t let her deal with one more thing like that. He thinks he’d rather die than let her drag herself through one more bad moment by herself ever again.
Maria’s hand is warm on his arm. Her face is devoid of its usual steely mask; it’s soft, open, vulnerable in a way Joel’s not used to seeing on her. Her shell’s cracked, he thinks, and he knows it's because of Ellie. “I know you want to take all her problems onto yourself,” she says. “I know, because sometimes I look at her and I feel the same damn way. But - what a disservice we would do to her if we did.” Joel feels his chest pinch. Maria shakes her head. “It’s hard, and it's a lesson- it's a lesson she should never have had to learn. She should never have had to go through what she did… but it happened, and we can’t change that. All we can do is this. Just take care of her. Give her what she needs to get through this kind of stuff. It won’t- it won’t always be like this, Joel.”
There’s a fine tremor in her hand that Joel doesn’t miss. He remembers reading one time in a newspaper article that said that one of every five women were victims of sexual assault. He thinks about the way Maria handled Ellie today, the firm compassion, how she knew all the the right words to draw her back from that burning place he knows she went in her mind. His throat tightens, almost painfully. He won’t ask, he’ll never pry, but-
“I’m grateful for you,” he says, an omission of vulnerability he wasn’t planning. “I know we don’t always see eye to eye, but I’ll always be grateful for what you’ve done for her.”
Maria nods her head. She removes her hand from his arm, tucks it into her lap. “It’s what family does,” she says, simply, and then Tommy’s back in the room, fresh glasses of water in his hands. It’s late- the sunlight has long since fled the room, and the cool blackness of the winter night sky leeches across the floorboards in long shadows.
“Reckon we ought to head home,” Tommy says quietly. Joel nods, and Maria eases herself off of the bed, takes her coat from her husband’s arms.
“We’ll check in first thing in the morning,” she says, all calm efficiency again as she slips her arms into her jacket sleeves. “Use the talkie if you need anything in the night. We’ll take ours to bed with us.”
“Will do,” Joel promises, and Tommy bends down, brushes a hand over Ellie’s head. She stirs at the contact, sighing sleepily, and Tommy smiles.
“Reminds me a little of Sarah,” he says, softly, and while the name strums somewhere in the hollow space behind his breastbone, Joel is surprised to feel how little it hurts, hearing that word - Sarah- fall from his brother’s lips. “She was always real clingy when she was sick too,” Tommy tacks on, and Joel smiles, almost unconscious of it.
“Different kids,” he says, “But same shit, right?”
It’s not eloquent. It never is with him, but Tommy chuckles and Maria smiles and Ellie blinks one open, then closes it again. Tommy and Maria bid their farewells, and Joel listens as they troop down the stairs, then out the door. He hears the soft snick of it locking behind them, and Ellie stirs, flops one arm across Joel’s stomach.
“S’it bedtime?” She asks, and Joel tugs the blanket up higher, tucks it under her chin.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s late.” He presses a kiss against the crown of her. “Go back to sleep, baby girl.”
“Rub my back?” She asks thickly, and he does.
“This better?”
She sighs sleepily, contentedly. “Yeah.” A beat, then she asks, her voice petering out at the end, “Stay with me?” He rubs her back, small circles against her t-shirt, feels her pulse fluttering against his palm, warm and fast and precious.
“Yeah,” he says, “Of course.”
As if he could ever leave.