Sarah Rogers gave birth to a runt.
She knows he’s a runt. He’s small, he’s pink, he’s gasping for air. His hair is so delicate she can barely see it. His mouth is a perfect round O with a small wet tongue that opens up in a horrendous howl all hours of the night.
He leaves her body aching, sore, exhausted.
His eyes are a bright, icy, Irish-sky-in-spring, clear-water-from-a-well, crisp-cotton-of-her-best-Sunday-dress, bright, bright blue.
He blinks those eyes at her and he howls his howl at her and he made her sick when her belly was round and protruding and her makes her sick now, with how tired she is. And he blinks his eyes at her, and she thinks:
He is mine.
She thinks:
He will not belong to anyone else.
She is only right about one of those things.
~
She knows that Steven is lacking in the summer in which turns four, and she looks out of her window and sees him playing in the yard.
The air is thick molasses and she’s got sweat running down her back, down her legs. The bed sheets are damp and sticky. She’d worked a night shift last night, woke up to find the small Steve-shaped hollow in the mattress empty and to hear boys yelling from down below.
The sun is an angry circle, already high in the mid-morning sky; the trash is stinking up the alley and a sewage smell lingers in the stairwells. Yesterday, one of the Brogan brother’s vomited up a stomach full of beer on the second floor landing and his mother is screaming at him to get himself out of bed and down on his knees: scrub it up, boy, she yells, scrub it up.
Sarah pushes back the thin curtain and presses her forehead against the glass and feels the tickle of greasy dust against her skin. Around her nose, the window clouds up and then down, up and then down, with each breath.
There’s a group of children playing together, playing hacky sack, running up and down the length of the yard. Three tall boys shove each other, laughing. A small one rushes to catch up. His blonde hair glows like fireflies and glistens like light at the dock, a fleeting moment where the water looks so beautiful your mind is stilled and you forget, for a moment, the noise around you, the filth in the air.
Steven rushes after the ball, after the boys. He stumbles on his short legs; he pants with an open mouth. He tears his trousers at the knee.
The other boys are patient, they try to be careful with him. She watches as they let him join in. But he’s slow and he’s small and they’re fast and they’re bigger and playing with a weakling isn’t interesting, after a while, if you’re competitive, if you want to win.
So Steven ends up sat on the side, watching them play. His face is open, a book with its spine bent back enough that it falls open on page after page. You can read him. He is smiling, he wants to join in. He feels included, even sat at the side. He calls out to the boys, they call back to him from their end of the yard.
He hasn’t yet realised, Sarah knows, what it means to be smaller. What it will mean for him later, what it means for him now. He doesn’t know he’s not one of them.
She thinks:
I will protect him.
She opens her window, she yells:
Steven Rogers.
He looks up, he uses his small fingers on his small wrist to shield the light from his big, big eyes.
She yells:
You get yourself up these stairs.
He clambers up.
She watches: taller boys smiling at Steven, saying goodbye, promising to play again soon, then smiling bigger, with all their teeth, with crinkles in the corner of child’s eyes, when he’s gone.
She goes into the kitchen and waits as it takes seven minutes for Steven to climb the stairs.
She says:
Did you have fun, baby boy?
Her voice is soft; she loves him; he makes her warm.
He smiles, he’s open, he’s gentle, he’s young.
“I did, ma.”
She thinks:
He doesn’t know his weakness.
She thinks:
He should never know.
She does not think about his strength. Mother’s don’t, always. They protect what they know. And what Sarah Rogers knows is a baby gasping for breath with a pink face and hardly-there-hair and a wailing, open mouth. He will always be that, to her.
~
The Barnes boy looks to be about twice the size of Steven.
She first meets him when he’s a small, fat baby in Mrs Barnes’ arms. Mrs Barnes had kept talking about what a heart-breaker he’ll be, about how he’s bound to marry a lovely girl, about how thrilled she is to have such a healthy son, about how she can’t wait to see what a nice young man he’ll be.
Sarah had looked at the months old baby and she hadn’t rolled her eyes, but she hadn’t said much either. But then Mrs Barnes can talk for Brooklyn all by herself.
She first properly meets him when he carries a wriggling Steven up the stairs when they are five.
Steven has a bruise on his lovely, milky smooth cheekbone. The Barnes boy has no bruises. Sarah’s vision blurs with red.
She drags Steven away from him. She thinks:
My boy, my lovely boy, my lovely baby boy what has happened what has he done how are you hurt you’re only five how has this happened already you’re so small you’re so weak how has this happened already. My lovely boy.
She says:
What did you do to him.
The Barnes boy flinches back like she'd backhanded him.
“He didn’t do nothing, Ma, he helped me, he dragged them away!”
Steven’s voice is muffled, he has a split lip.
She looks at the Barnes boy. She says:
What happened.
The Barnes boy holds her gaze, which surprises her for some reason:
I just saw a buncha boys outside in the yard and they were kicking something around and. It was.
He gestures his face towards Steven. Sarah can feel the small pieces of her heart falling deep down to the pit of her stomach. How has this happened already?
“They were pickin’ on Lee Jones!”
Steven’s voice is a squeal. Lee Jones is a black boy. Lee Jones gets picked on a lot. His momma is Irish and his poppa was black, but he’s never been around as far as they all know.
Sarah thinks:
What made you so righteous?
She thinks:
Was your father like that? You didn’t get it from me.
To Sarah, the world is a blur of greys of different shades. She’s not sure what’s wrong and what’s right. At church they learn that you shouldn’t steal, but then she goes home to empty cupboards. When she was a bairn they taught her you shouldn’t lie, but then Steven asks her how much she loved his daddy and how is she meant to say she barely knew him other than their wedding night? And what she saw then didn’t do much other than give her Steven.
But to Steven, everything’s always been solid right and wrong. Helping the deaf old lady down on first floor with her laundry was pure and white and good even when she swore at him for having grubby fingers. A bunch of kids ten-strong and older than him being mean about other kids was murky, dark, wrong. Telling them this was the next step.
Up until now, the fact that everyone for four streets over knows the Rogers boy with his deaf ear and his asthma and his bad spine and his bad eyes, has meant that they all walk away.
Sarah sits down, and pulls Steven into her arms. The Barnes boy watches.
She says:
You can go home, now.
He says:
I’m coming back tomorrow. I’m checking he’s okay. We’re gonna walk to school together.
He stands tall and she can see him, as a man. She can see him, girls clinging to him, smell of whiskey clinging to him, starting fights behind bars with men weaker than him because he knows he can win them. He’s strong, where Steven is weak.
She thinks:
You can say that all you want, but Steven is mine and he’s not yours.
But then Steven turns his face to look at the Barnes boy and his eyes are sparkling like bubbles in wedding wine, and his split lip is opening up again with his grin.
“You bet.”
Sarah knows:
She can’t keep Steven Rogers just for her, forever.
Sarah thinks:
I want to keep Steven Rogers, just for me, forever. I need to protect him.
She spends the next three years holding Steven close at night and watching him dance off, footloose and young during the day, the Barnes boy always clinging to him with an arm around his shoulder.
She will come to think:
I’m glad he’s been able to live life like a child.
She will come to think:
I’m glad the Barnes boy knows how to look out for him.
Those thoughts won’t come easy. She is the mother of a small, butterfly thin, stem-of-a-flower delicate, little boy. Up until Steven is five, he has been hers and she has been his and they have lived their lives as two small, gentle people, in a two room shoe box, her holding him at night and looking down at him and thinking:
He is glass, he is fragile, precious glass and one rough touch could break him. I won’t let that happen. I won’t let anyone hurt him.
She is a mother, of course she thinks that.
She doesn’t know, she will never know:
It takes more than she could understand, to break him.
She thinks:
That Barnes boy will be the death of him.
She’s not wrong about that, but then she’s not really right, either.
~
He won’t make it through the night, they tell her.
His brow glistens. His mouth a pale slit; a grimace cut into a grey face. His hair is a fan of damp sand, yellow leaves, aged paper.
He is eight, and this is the first time he nearly dies. He is eight, and they call Father O’Brien, who comes with shaking hands wrapped around a rosary. He is eight, and they tell her he’ll die before the sun crests the horizon over the Brooklyn Bridge, before the milkman clatters down the street, before the baby on the second floor starts its cockerel crow of a dawn chorus, before the Barnes boy – with the dimple chin and the mop of hair and the sharp eyes that see – can tumble through the door and smile his morning smile. He’s eight and he’s about to die.
Sarah thinks, without really recognising it as a thought:
How in God’s good honest name do I explain this to the Barnes boy?
The neighbours, the priest, the doctor, they all say:
Why don’t you lie down, Sarah? Why don’t you get a nap? Why don’t you come away, just for a moment.
They don’t say:
The night is still young, you can leave him for a moment, he won’t die yet, there’s still time.
Sarah says:
I’m staying right here.
Sarah says:
I’m not leaving Steven, even if I have to stay awake all night. I’m not leaving him. I’m staying right here. I’m telling you, I’m not leaving my boy. I’m not leaving him. I’m here, Stevie, baby, I’m here and I’m not leaving you. Momma’s, here, darling, baby, gorgeous. Momma’s here and she’s gonna stay with you all night and she’s gonna stay with you forever and she’s not leaving. I’m not leaving, you hear. I’m staying right here. I’m staying here all night I’m staying here forever.
They nod, they draw away.
They take turns to check up on her as the hours grow long and then longer and Steven stays with her.
Hegrimaces and cries and writhes and sweats his way through the hours and Sarah doesn’t sleep.
Sarah thinks, as the night draws on and the minutes become hours and the hours creep darkness and then the darkness bleeds light:
His face is still the same pale, his mouth is the same grimace, his hair is the same straw fan, his heart still drums a bird-in-a-cage beat, his chest still rises in rhythm.
Sarah thinks:
We’ve been here a while. We’ve been here all night. He’s made it until the morning. He’s beat the clock, he’s beat time, he’s beat death.
Sarah sends the priest home.
Later, the doctor will tell her it will take time for Steven to rise again, to heal, to open his eyes and smile at her again. It will take time.
Sarah scoffs in the face of the doctor. Sarah scoffs in the face of time.
Sarah spent a night in a room with a ghost of a boy and together they beat death.
After all, Sarah thinks, what is time, in the face of death?
Sarah does not know:
Time is a weapon that even death cannot halt.
Sarah does not know:
Death cannot come for him, but time comes for us all.
Sarah cannot know:
Time will do more damage to him than the death of an eight-year-old body on a sweat stained bed in a tenement in Brooklyn.
Even if she did know, Sarah would never accept:
Maybe death would be kinder.
For what is death, in the face of time?
~
When the morning sky becomes blue, the Barnes boy looks at her with his chin raised. He stands with his feet apart and his hands down his side. He is a soldier going to battle.
He says:
Mrs Rogers. Ma’am. I know you don’t like me all that much.
His eyes don’t leave her face. She doesn’t let herself look away.
He says:
Mrs Rogers. I just want to say that it’s okay, ‘n’ all, for you not to like me. But I also wanna let you know that my Ma hits me when I get into fights so, really, you don’t need to not like me because I’m learning my lesson. She tells me off n I get a whoopin’.
Sarah looks at this boy; she looks at him and she sees hard lines where Steve is soft. She sees a full belly where Steve’s is concave. She sees strength where Steve is weak.
When she thinks of men, she thinks of her husband, with kind eyes and rough hands. She hopes the Barnes boy will be a gentle man. She hopes his hands will be kind, like she thinks his eyes are.
Sarah says:
Why do you get into fights, James?
The Barnes boy shifts his feet, slightly:
Because… injustices… happen.
It’s a line she’s heard countless times as she presses a cool damp towel to Steven’s split lip and black bruises. It’s a line that the Barnes boy has clearly memorised.
She says:
And why does your Ma hit you after?
He says:
Because I ruin old clothes and my… reputation. And –
He pauses. She looks at him and he looks back at her.
She thinks:
Mrs Barnes really needs to think of something other than her reputation every once in a while. Does she not realise that, no matter the size of your pantry or how clean your Sunday best is, we all smell the same sewage on a hot day. We all have rats and roaches. We’re all the same, poor folk, underneath the curlers.
She wonders if that’s a rude thing to think. She doesn’t know Mrs Barnes very well, after all.
Then the Barnes boy says:
And because she thinks I’m leadin’ Stevie astray.
Sarah could laugh at that thought, but she doesn’t. It’s not him that she dislikes. That she’s a woman old, tired, and selfish before her time.
She smiles, slightly, though, when she says:
Do you like being friends with Steven?
And she watches his whole face light up, and his arms move in expressive circles as he talks, and his eyes glow a gentle, soft, warm blue.
She thinks:
You glow when you talk about him, boy.
She thinks:
He’s not just mine anymore, is he.
Steven yells something from the bedroom, and they both stop talking. Dutifully, they both walk over.
“I’m feeling really much, lots better.”
Steven is still deathly pale. His brow is the colour of grits and his eyes are milky, unfocussed. He’s propped himself up in bed and is trying to smile at them.
Sarah clucks her tongue but, before she can get to him and force him to lie down, the Barnes boy trips over himself to rearrange Steve’s little limp, sweaty body against the mattress.
"I’m feelin’ much better, really, Buck. I just want to get up an’ get myself some water an’ my comics.”
The Barnes boy says:
Don’t be such a mook, you ain’t going anywhere.
He looks back at her, he says:
I’m gonna go get some eggs from my Ma.
She says nothing, she watches him go. On his way out, she hears him curse something rude under his breath, and slap his boot against a cockroach against the wall. Then she hears him slam open the door and sprint down their stairs.
She looks back at Steven, who has a small smile playing on his lips.
He made it to morning.
She thinks:
He’s not weak.
She thinks:
They’re probably good for each other and you’re a stupid selfish woman if you think it can just be you and your boy forever, Sarah Rogers. If you think that you can protect him from the world, you can’t. But James can help. They’re good for each other.
Then Steven flops sideways off the bed, in a vague attempt to get out of it, and curses something rude.
She thinks:
Sweet Mary, they’re as bad as each other.
~
A moment, a fleeting moment.
The boys (her boys, as she starts to think of them over the years when James comes through their window in the middle of the night with tears staining his face and hushed whispers start up about his father, about his mother, about his tiny baby sisters), sitting on the fire escape and trying to smoke. They are older, now. They will leave school; they will become men. James already has muscle, and she watches as Steven’s eyes keep catching on his arms.
Their eyes are a matching blue, reflecting the dipping sun. Their legs are tangled, their hearts beat in time.
They are washed clean, baptised together, under the glow of the sun.
Then Steven asks James something, and she watches James nod, straight away, without thought.
She thinks:
You’d do anything for him. You'd sacrifice the skin on your back to help him. You'd die before you'd watch him die.
She thinks, selfishly, full of light and hope and certainty:
I’m glad.
She thinks:
Save him when I can’t.
She can’t see the future, she can’t see the reds and the whites and the blues, she can’t see the khaki and the mud. But she can see, in her mind’s eye, two boys who will fall through time together, clinging to each other, lost when one is not there.
She sees that, and she knows, deep in her bone marrow, that they are two sides of one coin.
~
“You tryna get me into bed, Barnes?” Sarah hears him say.
Steven is fifteen and James has grown taller, broader. He is a handsome boy. His mother, Sarah knows, is proud. She talks about him in the market, in a quiet voice so that nobody can accuse her of boasting.
James’ mother says:
Oh, my James, he’s a real charmer. Bit too much of one, mind! He’s gonna hurt someone with that smirk of his. Mind, he’s breakin’ my heart already, but you know how that is.
Sarah does know how that is.
James’ mother says:
I caught him lookin’ at himself in the looking glass by the basin the other night and he had some of my polish and he was scrapin’ it all through his hair tryna make himself look like some sort of movie star. It made me laugh, but I had to hide that, mind. Don’t want him thinkin’ I’m being mean. The look on his face, oh, I can only imagine. You know how boys are.
Sarah does know how boys are.
James’ mother says:
Steve will shoot up no time, just you watch, no need to worry.
Sarah does worry. Sarah knows Steven.
She thinks:
This may be as tall as he’ll ever be.
She thinks:
They’ve told me he won’t live to twenty.
She thinks:
They told me he wouldn’t live to ten.
She says:
I can’t lie to you, Win, if he stays this size he keeps his clothes and that’s a real boon right now.
Then her and James’ mother talk about clothes and about money and then they talk about food. And then they make their excuses and James’ mother goes back to her house and her healthy family and Sarah goes back to her apartment and her boys.
She is climbing the stairs when she hears him say it.
“You tryna get me into bed, Barnes?” Just like that. Her boy.
She doesn’t feel anything much to know that they have finally understood what it means to look at each other and feel a balloon inflating in your chest, a hot heat that runs to your toes, a magnet between them and your fingers. She isn’t relieved that they know what they mean to each other, but nor is she disappointed. It has always merely been truth and now it is a truth they have acted on, they are sharing in together.
James says:
If you keep lookin’ at me with those eyes –
He is about to say something else, but Sarah is two steps from the top and she scuffs her feet and coughs to make her presence known. Scuffing one’s feet and coughing are things she tells Steven not to do. She smiles at herself. Sometimes, looking at the two of them, she feels as though she is the child.
As she opens the door she sees two boys, standing too far apart, too rigid, to be natural. Steven’s lips are pink and James’ hair is a mess. Their shirt collars are askew.
She watches their faces.
She realises:
They think I do not know.
She decides:
It is best that way.
She says:
James, I saw your mother at the market. You’re staying here for dinner.
James says:
Uhm.
He is tucking his shirt back into his trousers. He thinks he is being subtle.
James says:
Thanks, Mrs Rogers. That’s real kind.
Sarah smiles. She thinks:
I am real kind.
She thinks:
I know James’ mother has four children and a layabout husband who’s hands are fast and harsh, but she needs to spend more time giving her boy a hug.
She thinks:
God bless me for thinking such terrible thoughts. What a sin it is to think wrongly of others so.
Then, later, when Steven is watching a lone bird perched outside the window and James is pushing extra broth into Steven’s bowl when his back is turned, she catches James’ eye.
He holds it, deep cornflower blue. A deep meadow like those on picture books. A void. He assesses her, he tests her.
She thinks:
He knows I know.
She nods, sharply. She smiles, slightly.
James’ shoulders sag, just a little. His gaze is still sharp. He does not let his guard down easy.
She prays:
My God, when I am taken, let this boy protect mine. Let this boy hold him and care for him and keep him from harm as he does even now, as he does when I cannot. Let that be this boy’s mission.
Maybe God listens. Maybe God has strange ways of answering prayers. Maybe God has wonderful ways of bringing people back together, cyclical stories looping around and around, A to B to A again. Or maybe God’s not listening at all. Maybe something’s lost in translation.
~
They fall through the door together, on top of each other, as she is chopping apples into a large pot on the stove. It is late at night, but she could not sleep. She rarely sleeps, and she thinks about that fact even less.
At first she thinks:
They are drunk.
It is dark, they are young men. This happens. The night is blue-black and the money has run dry across the city and, somehow, that always seems to make the liquor run wet. She has seen them drunk before. She has seen them sat too close together, James’ mouth pressed to the shell of Steven’s ear, whispering. She has seen their feet tangled together, they arms pressed close. She has seen them take each other apart with their eyes. She has no idea, really, how Steven does not know she knows. They are painfully obvious.
But then she smells it. The metallic tang of blood that hits the back of her nose, of her throat.
And this is something she’s seen maybe even more. The two of them, bruises blooming like ink from an authors pen, blood gushing like giggles from a school girl. They cling to each other, but they lean apart. They have more words, after a fight. They are, always, both angry. Steven is angry with the world, and James is angry that Steven lets his anger get enough that he shows it.
James says things like:
Why can’t you just walk away, Stevie.
And:
They had about 100 pounds on you.
Or:
For the love of Mary and Joseph, if you make a fuckin’ goddamn fool move like that again I swear I’ll – oh hey, Mrs Rogers. Ha. Fancy seeing you here. Me and Stevie got a bit caught up in something, see. You know what he’s like, having to pull me back, keep me on that straight and narrow. Ain’t he good?
And Sarah will look at James with sad eyes, sorry for what her boy has got them in to. But not really all that sorry, because neither of them ever is.
And Sarah will look at Steve with eyes that say:
Again?
And eyes that say:
I love you and it hurts me to see you hurt this way. Let me help you, baby, darling. Let me help you find another way to be. I know you, I will protect you, you are mine, you are special.
She knows, every time, without looking, that James’ eyes say the same thing, and more.
This time, they fall through the door and try to be quiet, speaking hushed and moving slow, until they realise she’s awake anyway, stood at the stove with her hands on her hips.
Then they tell her a story, in tall tales and tangents, of a woman turning tricks who got herself into a wrong bit of town.
Sarah does not say:
And why were you two in that wrong bit of town yourselves?
Instead, Sarah sighs. She says:
We have stewed apples, on the stove.
James looks at Steven and, as she knew they would, his eyes say:
I know you, I will protect you, you are mine, you are special.
Sarah does not say, of course she does not say:
Take care of him, for me, when I am not here. And even when I am here, take care of him in ways I know not how. Understand the edges that are rough to me but smooth to you. He is yours as much as he is mine. Even more, now.
But Sarah looks at him and, deep in the bottomless well of his eyes, she recognises an understanding.
She thinks:
We are alike.
She thinks of how they were created, put on God’s earth with a mission to protect Steven Rogers, to watch his every breath and feel his emotions so deeply it is as though they tear your heart right in two.
They eat the stewed apples.
They are good.
~
James comes through the fire escape, one morning, when Steven is working at the corner store for Mrs Malley.
Sarah says:
Steve’s working at the corner store for Mrs Malley.
She does not know why she says it, for of course James already knows.
James says:
Mrs Rogers. Sarah. I wanna talk to you.
Sarah puts down the sock she was darning and pulls the small stool towards her.
It is worn smooth from years of wear. It has been a foot stool, a step ladder, a place she nursed, a place Steven has sat. It came from Steven’s father’s family, who she thinks of very rarely. The thought of him comes to her in a rush. His broad shoulders, his wide-set eyes, his gentle hands. They had only met once before he volunteered for the war effort. It was at a dance for the Irish. He had been older and had smiled at her; he had seemed kind.
They wrote from Brooklyn to Europe (Sarah had never been as far as Manhattan, never mind over an ocean), and he would try his hand at poetry. She used to show it to her friends, and they’d laugh, cruelly, at his attempt to rhyme Sarah with silver clouds and a shoulder he would like her to rest her head on. They would laugh, and then Sarah would go home and spray her mother’s scent on the pages and attach a small lock of her hair. When she thought of him, out there, protecting them all as she sat at home, she had a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach that spread down, slowly through her pelvis and to her toes.
They married when he was on leave. She was a blushing bride. Bashful, in her blue Sunday best. She had blinked at him from where she stood, over a foot shorter.
Her mother, she thinks, had been happy.
He had been rough to her on their wedding night. His eyes had sparked with something she had not seen before and she had been afraid. She wondered if that’s what men were like, or if that’s what soldiers were like, or if that was what her husband was like. After, he had kissed the top of her head and she had told herself to forget about it. Yet she never could.
Sarah gave birth thinking her husband was still alive. He had died four months prior. She was given an envelope of his money, a bed, and that stool. Sarah worked as a nurse and she cleaned other people’s laundry and she lodged in other people’s houses as the money dried up. When she moved to the fifth floor of this tenement, the envelope of money was long gone, the bed was too wide to get up the narrow stairwell, and Steven had been nearly four. He carried the stool himself.
Sarah looks up from the stool. She says:
Of course, James.
James’ eyes bore into her. He can see deep down into her innermost thoughts. She thinks about her husband kissing the top of her head the ache her body had felt that night. She thinks about a three-year-old Steven carrying a stool up five flights of stairs, perching atop it on each landing to catch his breath in his butterfly lungs.
She thinks:
He can see those thoughts. He isn’t of this world.
Steven isn’t of this world, he’s too delicate, he’s too beautiful, he’s elfin and special.
James isn’t of this world in a different way, he’s rough and he’s solid and he can see truths even when you don’t know them yourself.
She wonders:
Should I be afraid?
She knows:
I am not.
James says:
I don’t know how to keep looking after him.
Three days ago, Steven had his nose broken against the thick fist of a boy from the other side of town. He had blacked out. His skin had a pale sheen. He had lost blood. Sarah and James had cried, together, as they looked at him and knew that if he had not changed by now, by eighteen, he would not change.
James looks down, bites at the side of his thumb by the nail. It is his left hand; he never bites the thumb on his right. He has done this all his life.
She thinks, with great certainty and no small amount of fondness:
He will do this all his life.
She is wrong.
James says:
He’s. He. He sees things so black and white and he dives into things we both know he shouldn’t and. And. He won’t listen. He won’t goddamn – sorry – listen when I fuckin’ – sorry – tell him that he needs to stop. He thinks I think he’s weak. He. He.
James looks up. He has tears in his eyes. He pleads:
What do I do?
Sarah looks at him. They have fought, she realises.
They have fought various times, over the years. Once when they were ten and James told Suzie MacNelly that Steven thought her curls were cute. Once when they were twelve and Steven had told James, in a fit of righteous anger, that he wasn’t brave. Once when they were sixteen when they both decided they didn’t need each other, they would be fine alone, they would manage.
She knows them, but she doesn’t know them as well as they know each other, not by half. She knows that what they have for each other is love, beating powerful and strong. She doesn’t know that they have loved each other in just about every way possible. That they still do love each other, multi-faceted, all different ways at once. She doesn’t know that they can fall apart and fall into bed together, that they are brothers before they are anything else, that they hurt each other with how much they want to hold onto each other, that they have never told each other that they love them, that they try to say it in actions but are both much too scared to say it in words.
She knows enough, though.
She thinks:
Oh, boys.
Later, Steven will come home from work and he will be miserable and barely say a word and when he does talk, he will snap at her. His eyes will be a sharp steel, his words a razor.
She will think:
Oh, boys.
Now, with James looking at her, desperate and pleading and helpless to know how to fix what he’s not sure he’s done wrong, she says:
He’s like that, isn’t he?
James’ eyes bounce away from hers.
She holds his hand. She says:
He knows you.
It’s not enough, but maybe it’ll do.
James’ eyes fill up like a basin that has running water taps. Drip, drip, they overflow. He says:
I don’t wanna drag him down with me. I don’t want. I don’t wanna ruin him.
Sarah stands up and gets her bottle of whiskey down from on top of the shelf. It isn’t even seven o’clock in the morning.
She pours them some in her tin mugs that she’s had since she was a girl:
I’m not gonna sit here and tell you what you should do or not. But that boy was born a runt and he was born ruined. Don’t give yourself so much credit. Steven’s never gonna change for anybody. Maybe not even you.
Then James’ face crumples and she pulls him off the stool and into her lap. She rocks him and she sings a sweet song to him. His hair is in her mouth. She loves him. She loves him fiercely. Right here, in this moment, she cannot remember a time when she did not.
Sarah thinks:
It hurts me to look at him too.
Sarah thinks:
You’re in love with him.
Sarah thinks:
When he was born he was a small ball of blonde and blue and he was mine.
Steven will find them like that, James gently snoring. It’s what makes his razor-sharp words only cut half as deep as normal, later.
And then, Sarah will look at how his eyes bounce over her and rest on James and how they soften like melted butter, like sugar syrup.
And she will think:
James, he is yours, now. I did what I could, it is your turn.
Four months later, Sarah Rogers contracts tuberculosis from patients in her ward.
Steven holds her hand even though he shouldn’t be there. He is weak enough, he should not be with the sick. He should be with the living.
He does not cry. James cries.
Sarah smiles at them both. She thinks:
You are each other’s. Take good care.
She says:
You are each other’s. Take good care.
The time for thinking, and not saying, is over.
~
Sarah Rogers gave birth to a runt.
She knew he was a runt. He was small, he was pink, he gasped for air. His hair was so delicate she could barely see it. His mouth was a perfect round O with a small wet tongue that opened up in a horrendous howl all hours of the night.
He left her body aching, sore, exhausted.
His eyes were a bright, icy, Irish-sky-in-spring, clear-water-from-a-well, crisp-cotton-of-her-best-Sunday-dress, bright, bright blue.
He blinked those eyes at her and he howled his howl at her and he made her sick when her belly was round and protruding and he made her sick then, with how tired she was. And he blinked his eyes at her, and she thought:
He is mine.
She thought:
He will not belong to anyone else.
She was only right about one of those things.
Later, much later, years later, James Barnes will stand at Steven Rogers’ shoulder as Sarah Rogers dies. It is an unpleasant, ugly death. God does not spare this woman from the pain she has long known. It is in her bones, it is under her skin, it grows out of her.
Bucky Barnes will look at Steve Rogers and know he is responsible now.
He will think:
He is mine.
He will think:
He will not belong to anyone else.
He will think:
I will not let harm come to him.
Steve will smile at him a terrible, watery, warped thing. It will tell, plainly, of his grief. Under that, a knowledge he always carries with him that Bucky is there, right beside him, at his six.
Bucky will think:
I know him.
He will think:
I will always know him.
The things one cannot predict. They could fill volumes.