36.

Will’s uncle Dave, Mrs. Weston’s younger brother, died of a heart attack in Prospect Park while Ian and I were in the hospital. He was fifty-three. I put Ian in the sack and went with Will to the memorial. We walked around piles of wet leaves and vast, muddy puddles toward hundreds of people huddled on a hill near where he’d been jogging. Dave’s wife, Carol, stood by a tree in a navy-blue suit, their three kids next to her. Mrs. Weston was on her other side, her gray eyes sunken and red. She saw us and reached her hand over, where it rooted around aimlessly, touching my cuff, Will’s knuckles, Ian’s bum in the sack. Amanda cupped Ian’s cheeks. “So this is Ian.”

“This is Ian,” Will said. “And this is Thea.”

“He’s just beautiful,” she said. “I’m sorry we haven’t gotten over to see you guys.”

You guys, I thought. We were not “you guys.” “You guys” were bustling, intertwined; they picked cereal up off the floor and went out to the park, swinging their kid between them. We were not “you guys.” I looked at Will, who was shuffling his feet, his eyes fixed on the ground. I missed him in a way that felt like homesickness.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Carol,” he said, his hands digging stiffly into his pockets. “I really am.”

A guy next to us reached for her. “Hello, Carol,” he said. “Don’t know if you remember meeting a couple of years ago at Dave’s fiftieth. Bob Rosen.”

She nodded, looking up at the guy, and smiled in a way that unpacked her grief for anyone to see. “That was such a lovely night, wasn’t it?” she said.

The oldest son spoke during the memorial service at a club in Brooklyn Heights. He talked about family camping trips and how his dad loved hideous, cheap light fixtures and was stingy with paper towels and toilet paper to the point of ridiculousness. Black candle smoke drifted up to the ceiling and I wondered for the millionth time, How would I be a good mother? What would it take?

Will went to school after the service, and I went home thinking about how I’d stop snapping at Will when he took his socks off in the middle of the room or threw Ian’s dirty diapers directly into the kitchen garbage. It was a Friday night and for some reason, maybe to forget about Dave, Will came home later that night with some people from Columbia and a case of beer.

It was Mark and Maggie and Helena from his hall and Lester and Tina and Jason, all in our small room with Ian nursing and sleeping on me. Maggie and Mark had something going on, but she held on to Will like he was hers; she put her hands around his waist when she spoke to him and they swayed to Neil Young in front of me on the rug. I wasn’t supposed to mind. Lester sat next to me on the couch and passed a bong around, taking a hit between each person.

Helena swung her leg over the leather armchair and let her foot float to the music in the thin air. “How often do you have to do that?” she asked me.

“Feed him?” I asked, getting up to open a window. “All the time.” She looked away, her puffed lips and her spacey, bored eyes telling me how she believed it was her right to be there, taking up space in our apartment. I looked for her hips, tried to trace them toward the middle of her body, but they were hidden from me. Will sat down at Florence’s old upright piano, so dark and unshiny it could have been made out of a blackboard, and played something I recognized by Eric Clapton or a band from the seventies that had a one-word name, and although it was short, it took me around the room in a spiral of aching memories of Will and the way we were together, before Ian, while people talked. It was the opposite of listening to a song over and over until it sinks in and you like it. It was inescapable, lilting love. I didn’t know he played piano. What else didn’t I know? Will’s back was to me, but I could see the side of his face, and he moved around on the bench as though he were in a conversation with someone, as though he were talking, and I thought about being the one he was talking to, how nice that would be, and although I understood all of it for what it was, I still felt as though part of me could step into a cloud of sad love for him and stay there, with Will drifting into the cloud and out, visiting me and then leaving me by myself.

When everyone left, Will threw his clothes in a heap outside the bathroom and flopped onto the bed. I pushed his hip to the side and let my hand wander down, hoping to coax him to life. Usually he took two seconds, but that night he slipped through my fingers. “Will …” I whispered, wanting it right between us. Wanting to fuse. Wanting. I rolled on top of him and kissed his forehead.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t feel good,” he said. He let his head fall toward the wall, avoiding me.

“Sick?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Just weird,” he said, looking back at me.

“What is it?” I said, rolling off him. “Tell me.”

He folded his arm behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “You could have killed him, Thea,” he said, as though he were reciting an age-old, unavoidable fact. “He could have died.”

Now it was my turn to stare at the ceiling. I gazed up at the exposed water sprinkler, trying to untangle my defensive thoughts from the truth of what he was saying.

“Do you ever think about how crazy it is?” I finally said. “With Ian, I mean? You must. It’s so scary, how could you not. It’s like, I know we could lose him at any moment. It’s on my mind all the time. Something bad could happen at any minute of any day. But I have to believe it won’t. I have to believe we’ll keep him safe, that our love will somehow protect him.” I found Will’s hand under the blanket and held on to it. “The thing is, we can’t stop loving him just because we could lose him. I’m trying so hard to just … be brave. You can’t really be any other way.” The sprinkler in the ceiling was starting to resemble a prickly black flower. I thought about Ian’s little mouth, how it contracted even smaller when he wanted something, and the familiar aching sadness came right up to me, like a bus getting too close when it rounds a corner. “It’s sick, how much I love him,” I said. “He is so helpless and I just love him so much.” I felt the embarrassing tears popping out of my eyes, rolling down the sides of my face toward my ears.

Will burrowed his arm under me and squeezed, which was such a relief I almost lost it. He squeezed and stroked my rib cage, and relief came to me in soft, warm waves. Finally, a connection, I thought. He didn’t say anything, but I felt it: he understands what I mean and he feels the same way I do. It’s going to be okay, I thought. We are back in this together.