Admittedly, he just assumes the unknown Utica number that calls his cell phone at 7pm on a Tuesday is Cătălina’s all but forgotten landline – she’s the only one from New York that would be calling him. “Bibio,” and he’d been doing the dishes when his phone had buzzed insistently, tucked against his shoulder now while he’s elbow deep in bubbles and hot water, “is everything okay?”
“Hi Jim,” his ex-wife says, and he very deliberately takes the minute of brittle, tense silence to dry his hands.
She sounds the same as she does in all his memories of her, or at least the ones he’s allowed himself to keep over the years. Says his name exactly the way she used to, back when they were in love; she says ‘hi Jim’ like nothing has changed. Like it isn’t the first thing she’s said to him since the day she ran off.
“Stefania,” he finally responds, and buries thirty years of hurt into the worn fibers of the tea towel. She’s been gone long enough that he’s stopped imaging what he would say to her, if he saw her again. Gone long enough that he’s long since stopped hoping she ever comes back. But she says his name like that in her low, honeyed voice and he’s twenty-two again, young and stupid and so full of hoping for things that it’s almost enough to make him forget how angry he is.
Almost.
“This is a… surprise.”
There’s a soft noise in the overwhelming awkward quiet that he recognizes is her, trying not to cry. Or, maybe, just getting over crying. He might still know her voice but he doesn’t know the rest of her tells, not anymore. “I know,” she says, “I know but… CJ,” and it takes him a moment, a sharp breath, to stop himself from hanging up right there. The name in her mouth is of the young boy she’d abandoned, of the unwanted wretch that pulled himself together by tooth and nail and sheer, stupid determination. He hasn’t been CJ in years. A lifetime, even. He does not hang up, and Stefania does not cry. “He died.”
A series of frantic voicemails and the longest plane ride of his life, hands clenching the arm rests because he refuses to clench them in prayer, screaming to a god that has long since abandoned his family. Cold wind and cold rain and the cold, hollow feeling that settled in his stomach like a stone, like a boulder, when he’d asked the cab to take him to the hospital. The seventeen hours of waiting, of mourning an ending that had not yet come, of grabbing hold of his family and pulling them close, closer, because they had barely survived losing Lacey and he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt they would not survive losing Cat.
There’s no word for a father who knows what it’s like to lose a son only to get him back again, no fancy term to describe the grief that lingers like a rot in a space that no one else can see. Jim was, for long enough for scars to form, a man who lost everything. “I know,” he says flatly, because it’s something they’re all still coming to terms with. “I was there.”
I was there, he tells her, because she wasn’t. Hasn’t been. She lost the right to cry over Jim’s son the day she left.
Another soft noise, like maybe she isn’t crying because she knows that. “He died and—”
“And he’s fine,” he stresses, because honestly? He isn’t. None of them are. Cat is alive and Lacey is home and all of them are caught up in the sorrow and the loss and the hollowness that doesn’t go away as easily as a loved one comes home.
Only time will tell just how much of them was left beneath the ice.
“I know,” Stefania says again. “I saw him last night.”
That definitely explains the otherwise confusing series of text messages he’d received. “He must have been thrilled to see you,” he grins as the threads of the towel tear under his fingers. He’d left marks in the armrest of the plane too, gouges from his fingernails ripping patterns into the fake leather. He thinks maybe Cat isn’t the only one who has survived by leaving claw marks in the world. It’s mean, and it’s petty, but his ex-wife is calling him after nearly three decades to unburden herself of a grief he carries like a bruise, like an infection, like a festering wound around his heart the rest of the world ignores.
“He has a daughter.”
He sucks in a breath turned sharp with surprise. He obviously knows this – he’s known Lacey almost as long as Cat has, and loved her just as long. What throws him is that Stefania knows this too; Lacey is not someone their family shares lightly. “You can’t possibly think I don’t that,” he says finally. He’s done sparing her feelings. She’d made her choices and stood by them all these years, and so had he – his just happened to be his son and the family he’d collected, piece by piece across the years.
She’s quiet. The open line of communication between them hangs fragile and delicate. And then, just as breakable, she whispers. “I think I made a mistake.”
James waits a second or two, and then he barks out a laugh. “If you’re calling me to have me tell you that you didn’t, I’m hanging up.” He's not going to soothe whatever hurt she's caused herself since leaving; if anything, he hopes it gets worse. There had once been a time where he held onto his anger for the marriage that she destroyed in the wake of her departure, for the future they had planned together and she had ripped away from him. There had been a time, back at the beginning, where he had been so angry for the hurt his ex-wife had caused him. And then Cat died, the first time, and he couldn't be angry anymore. Not for himself. Instead all of those feelings had crystalized into a fury that he knew would never be broken at the hurt she had caused him.
If he's learned anything at all since learning about magic, and about curses, and about the world now, it's that Cat and Wendy are hardly the only men who would rip apart the world for their child.
"You want forgiveness? You won't get it from me." From Wendy either, he doesn't say. Or from Lacey. He still won't say her name to Stefania, or be the one to bring her up; he hadn't known what it meant, back when his son first brought over the girl he cared for. Hadn't known she would one day have a room in his house and a firm grasp of his heart. He hadn't known, when he first met her, that he would be her grandfather. But he had known that she was special, not only for the way she brought back the parts of his son that had been buried under the rage and cynicism that he wore as an armor, but the way he knew from meeting her that he would do whatever was required to keep her safe. "You want to make it right with Cat? Good luck. But if you're just trying to feel better about yourself, I'm the last person you should have called."
He doesn't need to see her, or know her anymore, to know that she's nodding – agreement sounds the same across all distances. "He's okay?" she asks tentatively, like she isn't sure she deserves to know.
"He's safe," James doesn't elaborate, "and he's home."
A final pause, like the connection has broken; it's only the continued count-up on the screen of his phone that tells him the call is still active. "And," Stefania finally sounds like what she is – a stranger. "And he's happy, right? He's been happy?"
He leans back just enough to glance down the hallway to the living room, where he can just make out one socked foot dangling over the edge of the couch. He's not sure which of his boys it is, but it hardly matters – the three people he loves most in the universe are here, a well-deserved quiet evening at home, and the sounds of the movie are just loud enough that his conversation has gone unnoticed. Or, most likely unnoticed. He wouldn't be surprised if Wendy approached him later, since he's always had a knack for knowing exactly everything that happens around him, but the chances are good that Cat and Lacey will never know. The peace they've found since Alaska will remain undisturbed, and the home they've built together will never know the pain and loss of the childhoods they've spared their daughter from. "Yeah," he can't help the smile that creeps into his voice. "Yeah, he's happy."
