CARRIE and JON, Yuma, Sep 2017:

All they could hear was the stillness of the night and their own breathing.

“So what are you thinking about?” Jon asked. “How terrible I was?”

Carrie rolled towards him under the sheet and jabbed him with her elbow.

“Okay! I get it. I was terrible!”

Carrie pulled away the duvet so she could look at him. “Sheesh—will you stop?”

“You’re the one who hit me,” Jon said, reaching for the remote on the night table.

“Don’t do that,” Carrie said. “It’s worse than smoking afterward. And it’ll wake the kids.”

He grinned. “Yes, well, now I’ve got your attention at least.”

She started to sit up, and he helped her with some pillows. Jon didn’t much feel like moving right now—he had moved enough. So he just kept lying down, arms folded behind his head.

He listened again. Michael was asleep and Emma had courageously taken her turn to sleep beside him, and wake up several times a night to correct his duvet when he had kicked it off. If that did not happen he might wake up and start screaming because he was afraid of the dark, and you would have to be the Flash to get the lights turned on in time.

Jon bit his lip. He suspected courage hadn’t as much to do with Emma volunteering to help her little brother as with the small fact that he and Carrie had been very close to killing each other a couple of hours earlier.

Each day … stressed out of your fucking mind. And no end in sight, he thought. When did we sign up for this?

“Now you are the one doing all the thinking,” he heard Carrie’s gentle voice beside him.

Outside on the villa road a car passed. Jon could see its headlights paint luminous stripes on the ceiling of the bedroom for a couple of seconds, then gone. The car passed in almost complete silence, except for a faint whoosh.

Electric, Jon thought. Now there’s a thing …

“I’m not thinking about my mother.”

He turned to Carrie. “I didn’t say you were. But what … ?”

“It’s not like it has to be Parkinson’s. It could be a thousand other things.”

“It could,” Jon agreed.

“And she has enough to worry about, with that idiot—my stepfather…”

“Yes, he survived another vote of no confidence,” Jon said. “Although if I were him I’d get another board.”

“Or another heart. Or a prescription for practicing what he fucking preaches and taking it easy and going to meditate in the Himalayas for a month or two.”

He could hear the anger rising in her voice, and gently reached out to take her hand. When she took his, the duvet slipped down a little. She didn’t pull it up. What had been before, just minutes ago—a very precious sliver of time—had gone now. Forever.

Jon sighed. “At least my old man finally got  Mom to that nursing home. I thought honestly he’d keep driving her around until she could not even remember his name.”

“They aren’t sure it’s Alzheimer’s,” Carrie quickly said. “Those tests kept coming up weird.”

“No, but it sure as hell isn’t good,” Jon said. “She is slipping. Something is happening to her …”

She squeezed his hand. “Emma is good. Sailing happily. New school mates. Your brother hasn’t got himself killed yet in—what was it this time—Burkina Faso? And Michael has learnt all the countries by heart.”

“Yes, I was schooled the other day just by him,” Jon said dryly. “How the hell am I supposed to know where Bosnia-Herzegovina is? Or Equatorial Guinea?”

“You know, when I lived home—I mean on Skye, my dad was talking about going to Bosnia. The war had only just started. But Dad’s career as well as his sobriety was long gone. It was a pipe dream.”

“How is the old man?”

“Good. Going duly to the kirk every Sunday . Taking Sheila for long walks to show her all the bheinns that he used to climb.”

“That’s like mountains, right?”

She let go of his hand and messed his hair a bit. Not that it wasn’t already messy. Good Lord, for a moment she had felt like she was twenty-five again.

“You’re learning,” she chided. “Gold star for you.”

“And Mueller is going to get that clown out of the White House in a couple of months,” Jon said. “Ernesto is not happy about it—but he just has to talk about something else at our next barbecue.”

“Oh, God – I had forgotten. When did we ask them to come?”

“Saturday.”

“Saturday – I can work with that. Like the news. I don’t turn them on anymore.”

“I do,” Jon said. “It was a big mistake. Last November … ”

“I’m glad to hear you say so, Mr. Always-GOP.”

“Not always. It’s just that … in the country now, everything seems so goddamn turned on its head, and we didn’t need that.”

“It doesn’t affect us.”

“Not right now, but it … distracts.”

She rolled to his side and put her arm over his chest. “What are you distracted about? It can’t be politics—you say you never care for that. I mean, and the chief just dangled that desk job …”

“My back sure could use it. And my knees.”

He looked straight at her. “Honey, I’m tired of always feeling I’m on my way somewhere—to a place where we can feel safe about Michael’s future, where Emma is happy, where our parents aren’t … messing things up for themselves. When I came home from Iraq I knew all I wanted was a family. Heck, I knew it even before. All those years in that misfit motorhome …”

“But we are here,” she said. “We are a family.”

“Yes, but we’re never stable. There’s always something.”

“That’s also part of being a family.”

He shook his head. “I know. And yet … I wish things were different.”

“Everyone does,” she said.

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Photo by Erke Rysdauletov on Unsplash