MITCHELL TOEWS - THE NARROWING

Mitchell Toews lives and writes lakeside in Manitoba. When an insufficient number of, "We are pleased to inform you..." emails are on hand, he finds alternative joy in the windy intermingling between water and sky or skates on the ice until he can no longer see the cabin.
Mitch's writing has appeared in numerous literary magazines online and in print, including anthologies and collections. Some of these, from the UK and Ireland, Canada, and the USA, are riverbabble, CommuterLit, Best of Fiction on the Web, Literally Stories, Storgy, LingoBites, The MOON magazine, Fictive Dream, Blank Spaces, Just Words, Cabinet of Heed, Pulp Literature, Doorknobs & Bodypaint, and River Poets Journal. Details at Mitchellaneous.com.
The author of, "The Narrowing", is currently beginning work on a screenplay of his novella, "The Bottom of the Sky", and is hard at it with a novel set in the noireal forest. 

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The Narrowing
​

​Matt Zehen walked the train track in the late morning, enjoying the crunch of the rubble under his leather boots. He waved away a blackfly and looked up and through the Narrowing. It was just as always.
 
Like a long roofless tunnel, frequented by freight trains and little else, the Narrowing cut a deep trench through the ridge of rock before him. Its walls tightened from the open top, down and down again, until at the bottom it was barely wider than the tracks that ran its length. In places the sheer stone faces seemed to close in overhead, as if forming an arch to thwart even the sky.
 
It had been blasted through the rock ridge before Matt was born. He had run its daunting length many times as a youngster, and still walked it often as he aged. Matt had planned to hike it with his grandson for a year now. He had run this gauntlet and now it was Tim’s turn. But from last summer into this one, Tim’s mother had resisted.
 
The blackfly was joined now by others, buzzing and diving. Matt stopped and turned around. Heading back the way he had come, he matched his stride to the creosote cross-ties. Every footfall was a hollow wooden tap followed by a faint echo from the nearby rock wall. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
 
Maybe today’s the day for our hike, he mused, quickening his pace as he returned home.
 
* * *
 
“How do we get through the Narrowing?” Tim asked. The boy’s gaze came up from the scattering of Lego blocks on the floor of the little cottage. He looked at his grandfather in the characteristic way he had inherited from his father, eyes quartered, cocking his head and not quite facing him squarely.
 
“Well, I like to just walk along the ridge until you get to the beginning of the real skinny part – I was there today. Then, if it’s not too windy and the squirrels aren’t chattering too loud or the crows complaining too much, I’ll lay down with my good ear on the rail and have a listen.” Matt wagged a finger. “A long, careful listen.”
 
Stretched out on the floor like a manic switch of willow, Tim joined in his grandfather’s enthusiasm. He listened in exaggerated pantomime, as if keening to hear the hum of a distant train.
 
“Then I usually like to take a sip of water – but not too much because I don’t want to get bloated in case a train comes barrelling through the gap there...”
 
Tim smiled warily at that, his body stiffening.
 
“So anyhow, if we don’t hear a train when we listen to the rails, then we just hustle our butts down through the Narrowing until we come out on the far side. It’s about a quarter mile long. And there are a few spots where it’s just wide enough for the train and no more. Not a bear or a moose, not a deer, and maybe not even a boy,” Matt held his palms apart in ever-lessening amounts and winked.
 
The boy’s face clouded. “But really Gramps, there’s no trains there, right? Not real trains that could hurt us, right?”
 
“We should be okay. I suppose.”
 
“I suppose too,” Tim said, returning to his Lego. He had been building something – a spaceship, impressive in its complexity. Now he tore it apart, tossing the bricks into a bin.
 
“Here’s the thing, Tim,” Matt’s mom said, coming into the room. “The trains only run that line in the morning. I went there with Gramps when I was little, you know. Afternoons are safe.” She spoke as if to reassure herself along with him.
 
Matt went to the kitchen for coffee. Rosie followed him, leaving Tim rocking quietly on the living room floor.
 
“Dad,” she said, quiet enough that Tim would not hear. “It’s great that you want to take Tim on that hike, but don’t forget how he can be…”
 
“Upset, you mean?” said Matt. “About scary things. The whole anxiety business?”
 
“It’s gotten worse. He latches onto things that concern him and he won’t let them rest. He can’t sleep, and he gets out of bed really early and he can become unreasonable if something is bugging him. The Narrowing is just the kind of thing that can set him off. The unknown, you understand? He likes routine and certainty.”
 
“Don’t we all,” Matt said. “Remember when I took you there? You were ten, right?”
 
“Yep.”
 
“Of course, you recall what happened?”
 
It was a day not unlike this one. They’d just come through the Narrowing and stood in a blueberry patch on the side of the embankment. They balanced on the steep slope as a mile-long train with three locomotive engines thundered by. It was so close, looming above them, wheels whirling and squealing steel on steel.
 
“Yeah, no. I’m built a little different than Tim, but I still think of that place anytime I ride a subway on one of my trips. I remember the air pushed out in front of that train at the Narrowing — just like the subway train tunnels. Whoosh! It still gives me the willies.”
 
They stood quietly for a time until Matt said, “Could be you’re different than him,” then sipped from his cup, and looked at her over the rim. “Or not.”
 
“Are you saying I was that way too when I was his age – about the anxiety, I mean?”
 
“No. All I know for sure is that place is unique and I want to take him there. It’s a wonder of nature. A wonder of engineering and ingenuity and all that. Determination – you know? Because of his issues…” He looked at her frankly, “I kinda want him to have to face the fear. Right? We could go today so he won’t be fretting tonight at bedtime…”
 
“Instead, he’ll be congratulating himself for doing it,” Rosie said, completing her father’s thought. “It could work. Or it could backfire on you and he could be a terror. You saw him rocking, eh? That’s a tell-tale. Sometimes he comes unglued, sometimes it passes.”
 
“It’s worth a try,” he said, pulling her shoulders into a quick hug. “When is it ever wrong to confront your fears?”
 
“Whatever.” Gently, she shrugged free of him. “He’s been bad lately. Meltdowns over everything. Brushing his teeth, not being able to watch Survivor. If we run out of milk he goes ballistic. But not every time – sometimes he’s fine. When he does erupt, he takes it out on me the most, hitting and screaming. We’ve upped his meds twice in the last coupla months.”
 
Matt grimaced. He hated the thought of the medication, but what else could they do? “Look, if it starts going sideways, we’ll just turn around and come home. I can still out-wrestle him,” he said, hoping to get a smile.
 
“You can’t outrun him though, and he’s likely to take off on you – for no apparent reason. Just make sure you have lots of water. He can get funny about drinking. Always thirsty, you know?”
 
Rosie stopped talking, her face grim. She looked at him hard across the small room, her eyes brimming. He was a little older now, stooped just a bit but still the same man she had known and loved as a child. She had started to pick at her nails — a habit she got from him — but pulled her hands apart as soon as she noticed. Crossing over to the kitchen window, she swung it shut. The sound of fussing gulls outside stopped abruptly. Closed too hard, the glass rattled and for a second she thought she had cracked a windowpane. After touching the glass to make sure it was alright, she went to the table and twirled a bag of bread, cinching the twisted top with its plastic tab.
 
She was about to speak when her father broke in, “Okay. Look, Rose, Tim’s your kid. You don’t want us to go — we won’t go. There’s a hundred other things to do.”
 
* * *
 
Her dad called her “Rosie Henderson” in Little League. The only girl on the team, Rosie made a rare combination rarer by batting right and throwing left. The only big-league ballplayer like that was Ricky Henderson, her dad said. Hence the name. She didn’t mind it.
 
They became close in those baseball days. He was so devoted to her, and to being together, and playing a sport they both loved. On summer Sundays, the ballpark became their place of worship. He never had fit in amongst the pews of her mother’s church, so stern and solemn, echoing with the sound of Mrs Feeblecorn’s organ. He was there in the dugout or clapping his hands at third base, giving her signs. Rosie had a dose of her mother’s faith, and would not have minded either way. But the ball diamond she and her father shared was a wonderful sanctuary, under the blue dome of the wide, wide Manitoba sky.
 
Then her parents bought the tiny cottage in the woods and her dad found a new temple, deep among the trees. He did his obeisance under their eaves, clucking at squirrels, chopping wood, hiking and fishing.
 
Rosie loved the lake too with its warm water and their rustic old outboard runabout. She thought back to childhood evenings – the lake calm and reflecting the distant receding clouds that shimmered with the delicate orange of hibiscus. She thought fondly of her mother waist-deep in the water, steadying Rosie, reminding her to keep the tips of her skis together, as the little boat idled away from them. Rosie could still see the tow-rope uncoiling on the top of the water; still feel how she used to ready herself for the roar and the tug on her arms when she shouted, “Hit it!” and the rope went tight.
 
So much, she wanted her son to share the love of this wild place too. The love for the northern forest and its endless diversity. The ponderous march through the four seasons, each distinct and yet part of the same cycle. She wanted to believe the hike to the Narrowing would help grow that love and the love between the man and the boy too. But she worried that it could just as easily derail the magic of the forest and that Tim would recoil from it, tearful and dramatic.
 
Now, with her hand on her dad’s shoulder as he read the paper at the table, Rosie wondered about him too. Direct, impatient and often completely ass-backwards wrong – that was how he had always tried to fix things. His ways might not work with this complex boy, who thought things through until they were frayed and frazzled. Like she was doing now, she thought.
 
 
* * *
 
Swaths of Shasta daisies painted the sides of the rail embankment. From the cab of the train engine, Aaron Wiebe watched their white heads go by in a blur.
 
He had always like the tough little flowers. They flourished in the meadows beside the tracks, and the broken grey rocks of the railroad cut. They reminded him of home, too, in distant Abbotsford. But he had liked them even more since his granddaughter told him that they were her favourite.
 
The bossy little five-year-old was the most important thing in his life. Her and the railroad, his wife would say. He called her Tink, for Disney’s Tinkerbell – they shared the same high, delicate voice. She called him Opa.
 
He thought of her now, as the locomotive rumbled along.
 
They had walked a trail together just last week, between bunchberry plants hugging the ground and great growths of daisies. He had cupped a flower in his big rough hand and showed her something, almost invisible, crouched amongst the petals. It was a spider, white as the flower itself.
 
Tink had leaned in to look, then reared back with her hands on her hips. “What da HECK!?” she yelled, delighted. She might have shared a voice with a cartoon fairy, but she shared her Opa’s slangy inflections – a fact he was secretly very proud of.
 
* * *
 
With the sun directly above, Matt and Tim were out on their hike. Rosie had given her consent, a tissue twisted into a thin rope in her hands.
 
“Shhh, Tim. Listen,” Matt said, stopping to silence the noise of his boots on the jagged rock ballast.
 
“What?” Tim asked Matt, his voice jumping an octave. “Is it a train!”
 
“No, no, the birds. Chickadees. Listen. They’re the most talkative birds in the woods. When they call, ‘chick-a-dee’, scientists think that means, ‘I’m here,’ or something like that. But when they sing, ‘chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee,’ with lotsa ‘dee’ sounds, that means ‘Look out!’ The more ‘dees’ the greater the danger – like when they spot a hawk.”
 
“Whoa,” Tim said, impressed, in his nine-year-old way. “What’s that call?” he asked after listening for a few seconds, standing dead-set still.
 
“The one that sounds like, ‘Hi, sweetie?’”
 
“Yeah! Hi sweetie, ha!”
 
“The people who study these things think that song is a mating call. The male chickadee sings ‘Hi sweetie!’ really loud and clear to let all the lady chickadees know he is in the neighbourhood and is open for business.”
 
“What does that mean? ‘Open for business,’ birds don’t have a business.”
 
“Oh, it’s just an expression.” Matt changed the subject quickly. “Say, do you want to eat our snack now or after we pass through the Narrowing? We’re almost there, so start thinking skinny, eh?”
 
* * *
 
Aaron Wiebe pulled the hanky from his breast pocket and wiped down his face and his neck, pointing his chin up to get the sweat from the inside of his shirt collar. The engine thrummed, jiggling the spray of white dials on the instrument array. He tapped the throttle lever, edging it up just past 37 mph – a few more than spec for this stretch, but he knew the way well and he would slow it down before he got to the narrow stretch up ahead.
 
It was a bright summer day, but the train was running late, and that always put him out of sorts. They had worked on the brakes in the yard because he had noted some sluggishness in the control switch three trips ago. Why did repairs take so long these days? It wasn’t rocket surgery, as Mike Enns, his supervisor liked to say.
 
Aaron had tested the brakes on the long downhiller just past Minaki and sent a text back to Mike: “Brakes good. Tested on Minaki hill. Slowed down like Jets in playoffs.” Enns was a former Winnipegger and they had a long-standing tradition of hockey trash-talk.
 
The reply came back quickly, “Least our guys get INTO the playoffs. Keep an eye on things. Take it easy thru the Narrowing!”
 
“Late, early — what’s the diff?” Aaron said, scolding himself under his breath as he rolled through a pure stand of jack pine. He loved his job; always felt the urge to perform every aspect of it with obsessive precision. He felt the three-hour delay like a personal slight, even though he knew he had nothing to do with it – it was just the way it was.
 
Instead Aaron concentrated on the trees and Tink’s Shasta daisies, and the way ahead through the narrow gauntlet of rock and track they called the Narrowing.
 
He loved this Canadian Shield country. He loved too the Kootenays in British Columbia, and the rolling prairies where he could feel his eyes stretching at the distance when the train crested a hill. But the Shield was a favourite; this region in particular, north-west from Lake of the Woods.  He loved the scraggly Group of Seven look of it. He felt at home here somehow.
 
The land seemed to dare the plants to grow, harsh and unforgiving as it was, and in the face of that challenge they thrived. The jack pines in particular grew where few other trees could – in a cupful of dirt on a shoreline cliff regularly thrashed by gales. Aaron appreciated how the twisted, resourceful trees competed with the moss and lichens for nutrients, clinging to the bare rock and growing towards the sun, against all odds. He felt a certain kinship with that. His family had come to Canada from South Russia. Struggling was in his blood, too.
 
Out of the engine window, he saw daisies scattered in among the roots of a clutch of pines. He pulled out a well-worn book about the region’s fauna from beside his seat, but before he could open it, the flowers disappeared as the train nosed down into the Narrowing.
 
The track until now had been smooth, downhill, and the train had picked up speed. Aaron only noticed when he looked up and saw that it was speeding towards a man and a boy on the tracks ahead. He sounded the train horn. It bellowed like a bull in the narrow shade of the trench.
 
With a shout of surprise, Aaron threw down the book and killed the accelerator. He was furious with the walkers, but there was no time for that and he set the brake, taking care not to follow his instinct and jam it on all the way. Derailment would serve no one, least of all the two on the railroad ahead.
 
His head out the window, it was clear to him that their only chance was to lie down next to the track. The narrowest part of the train was at the wheels, right where they rode the rails. Above that, parts protruded perilously close to the rough rock walls. He knew from experience they left no room for a moose or a deer. They would make no allowances for a man or a boy.
 
The engineer rested his hand on the cool steel of the brake lever. They were still at least a thousand yards away. He grabbed the binoculars that dangled nearby and focused on the two. They had not lain down. They were running hard, with a good distance still to go to the end of the trench. There was a man, perhaps his age, and a young boy. The boy was fast and Aaron reckoned if he sprinted full out, he would clear the Narrowing in time. The old man was slower, limping as he ran. The boy kept turning halfway around and hopping along with agitated impatience, waiting for the other to catch up. The youngster urged the man with wild gestures, tugging on his hand.
 
Quaking, the speedometer needle read 33 MPH. It was dropping slowly, the brakes howling on the track, tested back at Minaki Hill and now put to the test again. With a practiced ear, Aaron heard the timbre change as the train slowed. But against the size and heft of the train, braking was a weak and a gradual solution. He knew they could not stop in time, but still he had to try.
 
His hand red, the knuckles white, Aaron pulled steadily on the brake handle. “Lie down!” he shouted out at the rock walls that flew by like a monochrome kaleidoscope. “Lie down! God, make them lie down!”
 
* * *
 
Matt sensed the train before he heard it. It was like there was a shift in the air. He held up a hand. “Listen!” he said, surprising the boy with his gruff tone.
 
He first looked westward down the track and then spun around. There was the train, braking hard, white smoke billowing up on either side of the advancing engine. He heard it a split-second later. The barking whine of the braking steel tore apart the silence, accompanied by a long blast of the horn. On the tracks ahead, a bird fluttered in alarm and darted up and out of the trench.
 
“Run!”
 
Moaning in fear, Tim ran swiftly ahead of his grandfather. Their boots sounded together on the packed ballast of the railroad.
 
Matt judged the distance they had to the widening throat ahead. It would be close. Tim could make it, but he would be too slow. He was slowing already, his bad knee locking up every few strides. His hip felt like a red hot bolt had been driven into the socket.
 
Tim slowed and begged for Matt to hurry. His eyes were round as he looked past the old man at the oncoming train. Matt snuck a look back. How had the train already gained so much ground? The distance ahead was too great. He would not get clear in time. Tim might have been able to escape, but the boy had waited for him. They both had missed their chance.
 
“Lie down!” Matt shouted, grabbing Tim’s arm.
 
“No! Run, Gramps! Just run!”
 
As Tim said this, Matt screwed his head around to see the train. It was coming up on them fast. The engine seemed unnaturally tall in the choking canyon. Dust and debris flew up around the shanks of the engine and through the tumult, Matt glimpsed the engineer leaning out of the cab gesturing urgently. He made a patting motion with his palm.
 
“Lie down! It’ll go right by. We’ll be okay. Trust me, Timmy!”
 
Praying, panting, pleading, Matt sank down beside the row of oily wooden crossties. His arm pointed up as he held tight to the back of Tim’s t-shirt and then stretched out on his belly and put his cheek against the chalky track underlayment. He thought of Rosie standing at the table, picking at her nails. Matt saw her, his little girl, floating in the placid lake behind the ski boat. He heard her voice in his head, overcome with fear over Tim’s uncontrollable outbursts.
 
The train was now close enough to read the numbers on its nose. It chattered as it slowed, howling in Matt’s ears. Every inch of the trench was noise and motion as the debris cloud engulfed them, stinging their bare legs with sparks and cinders.
 
                                                                          * * *
 
Tim fought the frantic urge to run, then something gripped him; took his heart and gave him a second of peace. He dove down beside the track and pressed his cheek as hard as he could against the crushed stone. He made himself feel thin as paper. He felt his grandfather’s gentle touch on his leg.
 
Tim could hear nothing above the oncoming locomotive engine. Then it was upon them, shaking the earth so hard he cut his chin on the rocky bed where he lay. A hellish beast reeking of soot and burnt metal, spitting fire, hydraulic hoses hissing. It was so near. So near he could sense the hollowness at its heart, inhuman and mechanical. Locked wheels came and went, shrieking, uncaring.
 
The boy cowered there beside the track, soft and vulnerable, his right elbow only inches from the ancient stone. He closed his eyes.
 
                                                                          * * *
 
Matt craned his neck, eyes squinting ahead to keep sight of Tim’s new hiking boots, the soles dusty green and yellow.
 
A numbing tingle ran along from his ass cheek to his shoulder blade, quick as a cobra strike. It stung and he could feel his ripped shirt flapping in the blast from the passing train. Matt felt the sick, lurching sensation of being picked up like a sack. He was released in the same instant.


* * *
 
Aaron Wiebe hung out of the engine compartment window, his belly creased by the aluminum sill. He leaned as far out as he could to see the two of them beside the track. Straining, he could catch flickering glimpses of their arms lying on the grade beside the track, motionless as the train cars sped by.
 
The train began to slow fully now, having bled off some of its momentum. He checked the gauge – 28 MPH. Then the steep black walls dropped away and the train emerged from the Narrowing’s western portal.
 
In a rush of vertigo, Aaron watched the rock ridge dive by, and then saw the swampy water forty feet below. It was, he thought fleetingly, like standing on the top diving platform at the Abbotsford pool. He fought off the sick feeling and waited as the brakes slowly overcame the weight and the slope. He felt his body slump forward as the brakes began to take purchase and he reduced the brake control to match. The immense string of freight cars, 13,000 tonnes worth, came finally to a stop a minute later.
 
* * *
 
Finished finally with the flurry or reports and media interviews, plus the railroad’s Safety Committee, Aaron Wiebe at last made it home to Abbotsford. The whole family came over and he told them the story from start to finish.
 
“None of you, ever, walk a train track. Am I clear? Never!” was his final rebuke. An unequivocal reminder of past cautions he had given them. His face was flushed and he dropped one arm down so he could rest a hand on little Tink’s shoulder as he spoke.
 
After supper, everyone went out for ice-cream but Aaron stayed back with Tink, who was tired. He leaned back on the couch and muted the volume on the television. Tink had dozed off watching Dora the Explorer and Aaron watched her sleep. Her top lip held many tiny beads of perspiration and he could see her eyelids flutter occasionally as she dreamed.
 
Aaron thought back to the Narrowing, feeling restless and upset. He remembered how he leaned out of the engine cab to see them lying beside the track in the train’s shadow as if they had already died.
 
He looked at Tink sleeping precious and safe beside him. And in his mind he saw the boy flattened out beside the tracks, the sunlight flickering on his back like a strobe light. Aaron imagined how lonely it must have been, just waiting there to see if you made it or not. Awaiting the great mass of the train. He could not imagine lying still in that moment. He had not slept for several nights now, thoughts stuck in a spiral. The little boy just a few years older than Tink. Scolding himself for speeding the train, looking at trees and fussing with the book. God help me if that boy would have died, he thought, rattled, his chest tightening.
 
Aaron shook his head and unclenched his fists. He forced himself instead to think back to the National Geographic magazines at the dentist office when he was young. He remembered the pictures of boys from a Pacific archipelago diving from eighty-foot towers, bound at their ankles with vines, their tethers stopping them only inches from the ground. Aaron thought of the photo of them grinning with their fathers – who had built the towers and had jumped too, years before.
 
This strange memory had come to him uninvited. It helped to quiet his mind. The relieved fathers and sons, safe and giddy on the ground in front of the jungle rigging, having dared the fates and defied them.
 
* * *
 
Rosie and Matt sat next to each other on stacking chairs in the clinic corridor. Inside the adjacent office, they could hear the muffled voices of the doctor and Tim. The doctor had wanted to go through things with Tim alone, after completing a full physical exam.
 
Rosie held her father’s hand. He sat awkwardly in the chair, with his scraped bottom lifted delicately off of the curving plywood seat. A bandage on his back made papery crinkling sounds in the quiet hallway.
 
“I swear, Rosie—” he began again.
 
Again she hushed him. It had been three days since the train. She leaned against him, head tilted to rest it on his shoulder. “I know – never a train before, all those times. I know, Dad. It’s… it’s a non-issue,” she said, choosing the word with care.
 
Outside the glass doorway at the far end of the hall, a Zinnia bush waved as a breeze kicked up, swirling dust on the parking lot. A cluster of daisies grew out of the base of the bush, crooking their stems to follow the westbound sun.
 
The air was still in the narrow corridor. Suddenly, Matt coughed loudly, ending in a sob. The noise echoed off the hard linoleum and painted cinder block.  A tear streaked his ruddy cheek. “I coulda lost him, Rosie! I could have lost Tim.”
 
“No, no,” she said, embracing him. “You knew what to do, you made the right choices. That rail line does not get afternoon traffic. That late train was one in a million. The schedule’s been the same for twenty years.”
 
“It was foolish. I blew it. We should have just stopped at the edge of the Narrowing. He would have seen the damn thing, but with no risk.” Matt’s head hung, and he mumbled his words.
 
Rosie stroked the back of his hand. “Dad…” she paused, gathering her thoughts. “Without the risk he would have forgotten it. This way, he lived through an incredible event with you – unheard of, bizarre. He was brave. He stayed calm and he made a good decision. Our little Tim trusted you, despite his fear. In fact, I suspect we might cherish this whole experience. One day, anyway. For now?” She paused a moment as if suddenly unsure. “If what happened pulls him through, somehow, I’m for it. The path he was on? It was no good. It was hurting us.” She gripped his arm, making him look at her face. “You got out of the way of the train. Now get out of the way of the guilt.”
 
Matt Zehen rubbed his temples with his fingertips.
 
“Life’s not scripted,” Rosie went on, her voice small. “You don’t have to offer your guilt in exchange for him coping with his fear. Accept it, that’s all,” Rosie said. “I’m not sure many doctors would have agreed with you, about the tough love and all that. I thought it was crap about him facing his fears, but I know how you think.” She paused and allowed herself a deep sigh. “Like, if only Tim could just gut it out… I don’t know. We’ll go from here, Dad. We’ll listen to the doctors and we’ll try to be brave. All of us. I think that’s best.”
 
It was like Tim and I switched places. In the desperate time just before the train was there, he became me and I felt like him, panicked and terrified. Matt so wanted to tell her this. To say how scared he was for the boy, then and still now, and how proud he was too. He left it unsaid. He felt his fondness for her, filling him to burst, like he felt the day Tim was born. The day she was born.
 
Just then, Tim emerged, the doctor’s hand resting on his shoulder. Tim was carrying his ball glove and both he and the doctor looked calm.
 
“C’mon, Gramps. Let’s go home and play catch,” Tim said, his voice light as he trotted down the hall and out into the sunshine.
 
Wincing as he rose, Matt stood and slowly followed. His steps echoed in the narrow hallway, Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
 
The End