…”…the man who killed my brother.” She said it so softly I almost didn’t hear. Ryan Cole. The drunk driver who hit her brother’s motorcycle in 2015. Sentenced to twelve years. The name we never said out loud in our house.
“I saw the photo on her fridge,” my wife said. “Ryan, holding the baby. I knew the face instantly. I’ve seen it in my nightmares for eleven years.”
I couldn’t look at her. “I didn’t know whose car it was when I pulled him out,” I said. “A little boy in a car seat, upside down in a ditch, the engine smoking. His mother was unconscious. I just got him out. A week later, she called the station to thank whoever it was. She told me about her husband. Where he was. Why he was there.” I swallowed. “I should have walked away. I couldn’t. The kid didn’t do anything. He just has his father’s eyes.“
My wife stared at the table for a long time. “Sixty-one times,” she finally said. “You brought that family groceries. You fixed their furnace. You bought the boy dinosaur pajamas, didn’t you?” I nodded. She laughed once, a sound with no happiness in it. “My brother loved dinosaurs.”
She didn’t speak to me for two days. On the third day, she got in the car without telling me where she was going. I tracked her location, for the first time in our marriage. 412 Alder.
I drove there and parked down the street. Through the front window, I could see my wife sitting at a kitchen table across from the woman in the doorway. They were both crying. The little boy was on the floor between them, building a tower out of blocks.
When my wife came out, she got into my car instead of hers. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “His name is Leo. He’s afraid of the dark. His mother has two jobs.” She looked out the window. “I’m not ready to forgive his father. I don’t know if I ever will be. But I think I can help you check on them. My brother would have.” We go together now. Every Sunday afternoon. Leo calls her “the dinosaur lady.”
