Chapter 27

While the hospitalhad let Dell sleep on his mother's shoulder that very first night, they kicked him out the next day. Which Dell had to admit, with guilt, he was okay with. He needed to sleep, and take a shower, and process the fact that when Georgia had finally woken up, shortly after that first visit from Dr. Collins, she hadn't been able to say Dell's name. Only a sleepy, surprised smile, followed by, "I—" and then a frown, and a small confused laugh as she attempted to reach a hand to his face, not fully making it there before her trembling fingers fell back to the bed, and then, "You know."

And then she'd fallen back asleep.

Without much else to do after visiting hours officially ended hours later, Dell returned to his childhood home.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd been here.

Michigan, he only fully understood when he walked into Georgia's kitchen, which still smelled like the lemon dish soap she had used for decades, existed in the Before.

Before the break-in.

He was so used to pushing Portland to the background, to the Before. He hadn't thought he'd done the same to the UP. He thought about it all the time.

But maybe he only really thought about Georgia.

About getting Georgia out of here. To join him, in his After.

The house was so much the same as it had always been, the photographs and the blankets and the paintings on the wall a brazen declaration of Before, that Dell stood in the living room for a good ten minutes, staring at Georgia's handmade vases on the mantle above the fireplace, unable to move.

Eventually, his skin itched, and he remembered the need to bathe.

He dropped the duffel bag he'd haphazardly packed back in Oregon onto his old bed in his old bedroom upstairs. He'd told Georgia, countless times, that she could make it into something else: another studio for whatever artform she was practicing at the time; an exercise room. She scoffed each time.

"But where would you sleep when you come visit?"

He had to admit, begrudgingly, that he was grateful for her stubbornness at this precise moment. Their old couch would wreck his back, and no way was he sleeping in his mother's bed while she slept at a hospital.

He flicked on the light in the bathroom. And frowned.

And god, he knew. He knew Georgia had spent months remodeling this bathroom, two years ago now, at least. She'd talked about it throughout the whole process. He shouldn't have been surprised.

But this. This wasn't part of his Before.

This was Georgia's After.

And he didn't like that, either.

He didn't like that at all.

* * *

After a week, Dell grew tired of eating out. As in Greyfin Bay, there weren't necessarily a lot of culinary options here to begin with. And so even though he didn't want…to settle in here—and nothing felt more like settling in than grocery shopping—he found himself at the IGA. An IGA that wasn't owned by Liv. An IGA where his mother had had a stroke.

He unloaded the bags in Georgia's kitchen, added his new purchases alongside Georgia's staples; everything was in the same place, every cabinet as he remembered. He was too tired at the end to make anything but spaghetti.

And as he sat alone at his old kitchen table, the spaghetti tasted so good he almost cried.

And then he let himself stop trying so hard.

He wanted Georgia to be better.

He wanted to see her dip her fully functioning toes into the Pacific.

He didn't know how to be here anymore.

He ate and he cried and he fell asleep in a bed that had been too small for him for a long time, wishing for the heat of Mae Kellerman at his back, Crosby at his feet.

* * *

By the second week, Georgia still wasn't able to eat solid food or walk without assistance, but her speech was improving.

"Go," she said, irritated, flapping a hand at Dell. "See friends."

Dell stared at her blankly.

"Mom," he eventually mustered. "I?—"

"Baseball," Georgia interrupted, even more irritated. And then, light entering her eyes, as it did when she remembered something, when the word traveled correctly from her recovering brain to her lips: "Chris." And shooing her hand again, back to irritated: "Go."

So. Feeling more like a child than he had in years, Dell set out to find Chris, and maybe Waylon, some of his best friends from high school, old baseball teammates, whom he hadn't talked to in well over a decade.

And he had to log on to fucking Facebook to do it.

After an enraging ten minutes of figuring out how to change his password, he sat on Georgia's couch and looked up Ryan first. His actual best friend from Before. But as he had thought, Ryan was in Chicago, with a wife and two kids and a cat.

Part of him still wanted to go see Ryan's folks, though, more than he wanted to see Chris or Waylon. He'd been a child who always felt more comfortable around adults than other kids. Like he was ready to be old.

But maybe Ryan's parents had actually gotten old. Maybe one of them had had a stroke, too.

No, Georgia would have told him.

Georgia had always been so good at telling him things.

Dell rubbed a hand over his face. Released a hard breath. And tried again.

Waylon was still in the UP, but had moved up to Marquette. And good for him.

Chris, though, appeared to still be right here, in the middle of fucking nowhere. The place Dell had romanticized in his head a bit, the longer he'd been away. The place he was struggling to reconcile, now that he was actually here. It was both as lovely as he'd remembered and as rough: a small, hard-working place. He could smell the snow coming in the air.

Dell sent Chris a message, both hoping Chris didn't check his Facebook messages and hoping he did, mostly so he wouldn't let Georgia down.

A couple hours later, they had plans to throw a ball around at the park the next night.

* * *

Throwing a ball around in November in the UP was a fucking dumb idea.

"Shit, it's cold." Dell rubbed his hands along his arms, mitt stuck under his armpit. He'd had to root around the garage to find it.

"Yeah, nice to see you too," Chris laughed. He held out a hand, drew Dell into a back-slapping hug when Dell shook it. "We can always head somewhere else if you want."

"Nah, this is good. Just do me a favor?" Dell rubbed his shoulder, already stiff from the wind. "Try not to slug me right here. Got an injury there, few years back."

"I'll do my best." Chris threw a dirty ball up in the air, caught it in his palm. "Been a while since I've actually done this with anyone." He smiled, and Dell found himself surprised at how easy this felt. "Thanks for reaching out, man. It's good to see you."

"Yeah. Good to see you, too."

They walked toward the outfield. The park was almost empty. A woman walked her dog around the perimeter. A bundled-up kid ran around the playground in the opposite corner.

"Sorry to hear about your mom," Chris said. "She recovering okay?"

"Yeah. Just has a lot of occupational therapy to do now. Doctors say she'll hopefully be back home in a few weeks. It was good it happened where someone could call for help."

"Yeah. Shit."

"Your mom doing okay?"

Dell almost said your parents, but at the last second remembered that Chris's dad had taken off back in middle school. Funny how many details he'd locked away about the people he used to know. How they were tumbling back open the longer he stayed here.

"Ah, well." Chris rubbed at his jaw. "Been struggling a bit with cancer for a while now."

"Fuck. I'm sorry, Chris."

"Eh, it is what it is. She's in remission now, which is good. But I don't know. You hear enough stories about it coming back harder than before…"

"Yeah." Dell almost left it at that, because what more could you say? But after a second he added, because Chris had answered his message, because he'd met him out here to play catch in the freezing cold: "Hope it doesn't, though."

"Yeah, me too."

And then they threw a ball around for a while. No need to talk. A blessed thing.

Dell had forgotten how much he loved this park, how peaceful it felt, like a secret hiding spot, nestled amongst the trees. Even when half of them were mostly bare now, it felt safe.

Dell missed the ocean.

But this was still nice.

"Shit," Chris said after a while. "My hands are freezing. You still good?"

Dell's hands were freezing, too.

"Yeah. Good for a little while longer, if you are."

"Yeah."

After a minute, Chris moved a touch closer. Easier to hear each other.

"You're still out in Oregon, right?"

"Yeah. Live by the coast now, though."

"Sounds nice."

"It is. How are you holding up here?"

Chris took a couple throws to answer.

"Made some dumb decisions for a while. But"—he threw the ball to Dell—"I'm sober now, so. Been working at the Department of Natural Resources down the road here for a while now."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. It's a good job." Another throw. "And, uh. You remember Alyssa Welch?"

Dell held the ball in his cold fingers an extra second, frowning as he tried to remember.

"Name sounds familiar. Can't quite picture her face, though. You together now?"

"Yeah." Chris caught Dell's throw. "We didn't hang out much, back in high school. But…you kind of get to know each other. When you're the people who stay. You know?"

He didn't say it like a judgment. Even if he knew Dell didn't know.

Georgia knew, though.

Most of the rest of the McClearys had been good at staying.

Mae came to him, as she often did, a gentle pink surprise in his memories. This time, she was lying sleepily on a colorful rug over a hardwood floor.

Books inspired me to get out of the small town I grew up in. And here I am, over twenty years later. And books have brought me back to another one.

A feeling pushed in, somewhere in the back of Dell's mind, somewhere behind his ribs. A desire to know more about Mae's own small hometown. Why hadn't he asked more about it?

Flowering dogwood. North Carolina.

There were so many things he hadn't asked.

More distant, something his mind resisted, but wrapped up in it all the same: a need to tell Mae more about this place, too. His Before.

"Makes sense," he said, after his next throw. "Happy for you, Chris."

"How ‘bout you?" Chris chucked the ball back, blew into his hands to warm them. "You with anyone, out there in Oregon?"

Dell contemplated the ball in his hand. Ran his thumb along the seam.

"Had actually just kind of started something up with someone, right before I got the call about my mom," he admitted. "So…unfortunate timing, I guess. Not that there's probably ever a good time for a parent to have a stroke."

"Or get cancer."

"Yeah. That too."

Another easy pause in conversation. Nothing but the whistle of the ball, the soft thud of it hitting leather.

"Bet she's waiting for you, though," Chris said. "The girl you just started seeing. You're a good guy. Worth waiting for."

And there Dell was, caught between an almost surprisingly earnest compliment and the discomfort of Chris's assumption. Made, Dell knew, without ill intent. Still, he couldn't help but wonder what Chris's reaction would've been if he was with Luca.

Or if he was with Luca and Mae.

Which led him to wondering, as he often did—especially during these long, lonely days of being back home—how Luca was doing. If he was back in Alaska. If he was still writing his book.

Dell chucked the ball toward his old friend.

"They're nonbinary, actually," he said. Even though he didn't know if that was the nomenclature Mae preferred. Still, he felt the need to do right by her, as well as he could.

Chris caught the ball. Shrugged.

"All right," he said. Chucked it back. "Point stands."

Dell caught it with a smile.

* * *

While Georgia's therapists used ropes and balls and other various implements to retrain Georgia's brain in how to use her body, Dell was issued the responsibility of board games.

She'd been moved to a different wing of the tiny county hospital; flowers and treats Georgia still wasn't quite able to swallow on her own adorned every surface. And in the corner of the room, a stack of old games Dell had unearthed from the closet across from the laundry room back at the house, their cardboard corners held together with curling masking tape.

In the middle of another round of Candyland on a Wednesday afternoon, an incoming text made Dell's phone buzz on Georgia's bedside table, beside the drooping lilies from Rosemary Clark, one of Georgia's best old teacher friends. Georgia motioned for him to check it as she struggled to flip over another of the small paper tiles.

Buffalo Springfield and Jackie Wilson played from a small portable speaker the hospital had brought in. The Beach Boys and Herman's Hermits. This was supposed to help Georgia's brain, too. She hummed, moved her toes.

"Smiling," she said a few seconds later, and Dell looked up from his phone screen. "You." She reached over and poked him in the belly. Her eyes were bright, the frustration of trying to hold onto tiny objects flown away. "Tell me."

Dell glanced back down at the photo of Young wrestling with a new toy. He wondered if she'd bought it from Cara.

"Mae just sent me a picture of one of the dogs."

He held it out for Georgia to see.

"Young," he reminded her. "Collie mix. She's the newest member of the pack."

Georgia only looked, a faint smile lifting both corners of her mouth.

Dell moved to put the phone back down, but Georgia grabbed hold of his wrist, demanding to look at the photo longer. The strength of her grip—not overwhelming, but an undeniable pressure—made Dell's lungs inflate with hope.

But when she finally released him, turning back to the game, she didn't comment on Dell's dogs at all.

"Mae," she said instead, moving her tiny man to the next green space. Her smile deepened. "That's right."