The Boy on Ashgrove Street

Nolan · Y0

The morning Nolan Spencer stopped being conscious for the last time, he woke up at 6:14 and lay very still, the way he always did, cataloguing his own body before he trusted it to hold him.

Heartbeat first. Uneven, but uneven the way it had always been uneven, which was its own kind of normal.

Breath second — a little short, a little wet at the bottom, nothing new.

Fingers. He flexed them under the blanket and watched the tips go from white to pink, which the cardiologist had told him to watch for, so he watched for it every morning like a man checking the oil in a car he already knew was dying.

He was eighteen. He had known for six years that he would not see twenty-five, and for the last two that he might not see nineteen, and he had made his peace with that the way you make peace with weather — not by liking it, but by stopping the argument.

What he had not made peace with was Arthur.

Down the hall his mother was already up, because his mother was always already up, moving through the kitchen with the quiet of someone who had trained herself, over years, not to wake a house that needed its sleep.

He could hear the kettle. He could hear, underneath the kettle, his father’s voice, low, saying the same prayer he said every morning at the same volume, as if God might not hear it if he said it any louder, and as if He might not hear it at all if he said it any softer.

Whatever comes — Your will, not ours.

Nolan believed that. That was the strange, private thing nobody in his family understood about him: he actually believed it. He had believed it in the hospital at twelve, strapped to machines that beeped in a rhythm that wasn’t his heart’s rhythm but was keeping his heart’s rhythm honest. He had believed it at fifteen, when Trent Halloway knocked his lunch tray out of his hands in front of the cafeteria and called it an accident, loud enough that three teachers heard the word, and not one of them heard the sound his ribs made against the table edge. He believed it now, lying in a bed that had outlived every prediction anyone had made about it.

What he could not make himself believe, no matter how many mornings he lay here doing this same arithmetic, was that it was fair to let it cost Arthur anything.

You didn’t tell, he thought, the way he thought it every morning, a small prayer of his own. Good. Don’t. It doesn’t help anybody, and it makes it real, and I don’t want it to be real yet. I want one more year of it not being real.

He would not get one more year. He would not, in fact, get one more day. But lying there at 6:14 in the last ordinary morning of his life, he did not know that, and so what he was afraid of, in the small hard place under his ribs where he kept the things he never said out loud, was not dying.

It was Arthur finding out how afraid he actually was. Because Arthur thought Nolan was brave about this. Arthur needed him to be brave about this, the way a person standing on a bridge needs the person next to them to not be looking down. Nolan had gotten very good, over six years, at not looking down where Arthur could see him do it.

He got up slowly, the way he’d learned to, giving his heart the thirty seconds it needed to catch up with the rest of him before he asked it to do anything as ambitious as standing. He dressed in the dark because turning on the overhead light this early felt like an announcement, and he wasn’t ready yet to announce the day. Through the wall he could hear Marianne’s alarm going off twice, snoozed twice, the small domestic percussion of a fifteen-year-old who resented mornings on principle. He could hear June, nine and tuneless, humming something from a cartoon two floors down. He loved the sound of his sisters being ordinary. He had come, over the years, to think of it as proof that whatever was happening to him, the rest of the house kept going, kept humming, kept snoozing its alarms — that the world would be fine without him carrying it.

In the kitchen, his mother handed him his morning pills without being asked, the way she’d handed them to him for six years, and didn’t comment on how long it took him to swallow the last one, which was new, and which he didn’t mention either. His father said grace over eggs that were, as always, exactly the way Nolan liked them, and finished the same way he always finished — whatever comes — and Nolan said amen along with everyone else and meant it more than any of them knew.

His mother touched his shoulder once as he stood to rinse his glass, a quick brushing contact that said more than anything spoken at the table. Not pity. Not fear. Something steadier than both. Nolan looked at her hands, then at the worn edge of the sink, and felt the old ache of being loved by people who couldn’t fix the thing they loved him through.

He met Arthur at the corner of Delford and Third, same as every morning for four years. Arthur, sixteen and gangly, punched him lightly in the shoulder and said something about a girl in his chemistry class, and Nolan laughed, and meant it.

Arthur was talking fast, as usual, words tripping over each other because he had more feeling than discipline and never seemed to know which one would get out first. He was all elbows and windburn and badly hidden worry, but today he was bright with it, alive in a way that made Nolan’s chest ache. Nolan listened, smiling in the right places, keeping his face exactly where Arthur expected it.

One more year of it not being real, he thought again, watching Arthur talk with his hands the way he always did. Just let me have that.

Arthur glanced sideways at him. “You’re quiet.”

Nolan shrugged one shoulder. “I’m always quiet.”

“Not like this.”

Nolan almost answered. Almost told him the truth, or a version of it. Instead, he looked ahead at the wet strip of pavement shining under the streetlights and said, “Just tired.”

Arthur accepted that the way he accepted most things from Nolan: with a noise of skepticism and a decision not to press too hard. He was good like that. Better than he knew. Better than Nolan deserved, some days.

The school bus groaned at the corner. A dog barked two houses down. Somewhere behind them a garage door rattled open, and the ordinary machinery of the neighborhood woke and clattered into motion around them. Nolan looked at it all — the cracked sidewalk, the chain-link fence with ivy pushing through it, the mailbox tilted on its post, Arthur’s breath turning white in the cold — and felt, briefly, as if he could stand inside this minute forever if he kept still.

He knew that was impossible. He knew the day would move whether he wanted it to or not. He knew that every morning since he was twelve had been borrowed time, and borrowed things always came due.

Still, he walked.

He went to school like it was any other day, because as far as he knew, it was.

It wasn’t.