“I—”

“I’m your mother, Petey. I counted your toes…your eyelashes…watched you all the time.”

“Shelley,” Robin interrupted. “Breathe through your nose, please.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Shelley complied for a minute. “I haven’t just looked, Petey. I’ve seen.”

Peter gripped her hand tighter. “I don’t understand.”

“I know exactly who you are.”

She implored him to comprehend with her eyes, and he wanted to look away but couldn’t. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” She squeezed his hand painfully. It took her a minute to catch her breath. “I’m not sorry one bit….Love you.”

This caused her to cough, and Peter could see it hurt and she tried to avoid the pain. Robin lifted her carefully to sitting and rubbed her back until she was breathing normally—for her—again.

Without any warning, the dam burst and Peter was sucker punched by emotions he’d held in check for almost thirty years. His chest constricted so painfully he felt crushed, as if a colossal python wrapped around his rib cage just at the level of his heart and squeezed him until he was gasping. He tried to breathe, but huffed out a sob instead and doubled over until his forehead hit his mother’s hipbone. She grimaced in pain and he murmured his apologies over and over until he couldn’t remember what he was apologizing for. At some point he felt her hand in his hair.

“You don’t need to cry, Petey,” she said in a soft voice. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I want to be like Dad.” He sounded about five to his own ears and was powerless to do anything about it.

“You’re just like your dad.” She was still patting his head, raking her thin fingers softly through his hair and he thought he’d die from it. “Who says you’re not?”

Peter found he couldn’t say anything further so he stayed where he was. The soothing touch of his mother’s fingers—at once so familiar and so painfully awkward—moved over his scalp. It seemed a very long time before the fingers relaxed and slowed, and his mother’s labored breathing became even again. Her shoulders continued to heave with each rise and fall of her chest as though it was a terrible weight to lift. Her mouth hung open and she emitted a snore.

“It will be a while before she wakes up again,” Robin whispered.

“She’s not just going to…”

“I don’t think so, Peter, but no one could really say for sure.” Robin pumped hand sanitizer onto his hands and offered the bottle to Peter.

“Thanks.” It burned on some cuts he’d gotten while working on the car and he enjoyed the painful distraction in a way he didn’t think Robin would understand. He held his hands at his sides, waiting for them to dry, waiting for someone to tell him what was next. His meltdown left him mentally and physically drained.

Robin’s eyes were shadowed with fatigue. “You can rest now.”

Peter started out the door, then turned back. “Robin, what do you think she meant, I know exactly who you are…?”

“What do you think?”

When Peter got to his room he pulled off his jeans and T-shirt and walked to the open window to smoke. After a while Robin walked by under the eaves, taking a white plastic trashbag to the bins. As he came back he looked up as though he felt Peter’s eyes on him. Robin stopped where he was and then called out softly, “Can I come up?”

Peter felt a hum in his body when he answered, “Sure.”

It wasn’t long before he heard Robin’s careful footsteps on the stairs. When he knocked, Peter answered the door in his boxers. Robin came in carrying two bottles of water and a handful of cookies. Wordlessly, he followed him to the window.

“Here.” He handed Peter a cookie and a water. He pulled the receiver of a baby monitor out of his deep pocket and placed it on the sill next to the ashtray.

“You don’t have any other people besides my mom?”

Robin shook his head and bit into a cookie. “I came to Hopewald with your mother. I’m just here for her.”

Peter bit into his cookie. “How did you find each other?”

“Originally? My sister was assigned to her care by a service she works for. One day she was supposed to work and her son broke his arm. Your mother was getting chemo then and she was very ill. She needed someone to take her home from the hospital and stay with her while the worst of it passed. I just went there for an hour, as an emergency measure. We hit it off.”

“She adopted you.” Peter was aware that his voice still held a faint trace of the bitterness he’d felt when they first met.

“That’s right,” Robin replied honestly.

Peter leaned his head against the window frame. “I wish….”

Robin put an arm around his shoulders. “Did you not hear her say she loves you?”

“Yes.”

“We both need to rest now.”

“What if—”

“We’ll be listening,” Robin picked up the baby monitor. “You want another cookie?”

“No thanks.” Peter brought his water to the nightstand. He realized Robin was being pretty magnanimous in the face of his rejection the night before. “Thank you.”

Robin pulled him into bed. “You’re welcome.” He pulled Peter in close. “I’m so tired. Don’t be touching my manly bits; I need my sleep.”

Peter snorted against Robin’s dark skin and closed his eyes. He noticed the rhythmic bellows sound of his mother’s oxygen machine over the baby monitor, and soon enough Robin’s breathing was deep and even, almost as though he were keeping time. Peter took longer to fall asleep, but once he did it was a fathomless, deep, and dreamless sleep that felt like sinking to the bottom of the sea.

Peter heard his mother call him, Petey. He pulled the sheet and blanket from his body, letting his feet hit the floor before he realized he was at Aunt Lyndee’s house sharing his bed with his mother’s CNA.

A hand reached out for his. “What is it?” Robin asked.

“I heard my mother calling me. Didn’t you hear it? She said, ‘Petey’.”

“I didn’t hear anything.” Robin got out of the bed and padded to the door while Peter pulled on his jeans, “But it’s warmer sleeping with you and maybe I sleep deeper.”

They entered Shelley’s room to find her sleeping, if not comfortably, as peacefully as she could.

“It was so real; I heard it.”

“I’m sure you thought you did. Maybe it was a dream.”

Peter shook his head. “I don’t know. I haven’t been sleeping well. All I need now is auditory hallucinations on top of everything.”

“This is going to be hard, yeah? Still thinking about bolting?”

Peter eyed his mom. “I’m here.”

“I have faith in you. Shelley does too.”

“She looks more peaceful, what do you think.” They leaned forward together and peered at her.

“I can usually tell from the area between her brows.” Robin showed him what he meant without touching her. “When she’s in pain she frowns, and her brows come together in a knot right there.”

Peter pressed his head into Robin’s shoulder. “You’ve really made a study.”

“I told you; I love her. My mother and I weren’t close. There were thirteen children and I was dead last.”

“What?”

“I know, don’t look at me like that.” Robin pressed his lips together and looked away. “I was raised mostly by my sisters. By the time I was five my mother had passed away.”

“When you said you weren’t able to do this for your mother I just thought you meant—”

“I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it anyway. It’s hard to lose your mother. I was only five, but it felt like the world came to an end.” Robin pressed his lips to Peter’s forehead. “It still does.”

Peter closed his eyes. “What were you like at five?”

“I wanted to play football for Village United.”

“I wanted to pitch for the Twins.” Peter clasped Robin’s hand.

Robin adjusted Shelley’s covers again, minutely twitching them over her inert form. “I think she’s fine. Come back with me and get some rest. We’ll hear if she needs us.”

“In a minute,” Peter told him, and watched him walk out the door.