The club rode him home from the hospital in a formation normally reserved for weddings and the funerals of presidents: nine bikes in a rolling diamond at twenty-five miles an hour through afternoon traffic, with Del in front and the chase truck behind carrying Everett in the passenger seat like visiting royalty, his leg stretched out and his hospital discharge papers in a plastic bag on his lap and his face arranged in an expression of martyrdom that fooled absolutely no one. The neighbors of Wexler Street came out onto their porches for it. Mrs. Abernathy at number twelve, who had lived there thirty years and had opinions about motorcycles that could strip paint, stood at her fence and applauded as they turned in — one slow clap that became, by the time the last bike passed, something embarrassingly close to a salute.
The house received him the way it had received him for twelve years: perfectly kept, perfectly silent, and full to the rafters with Before.
That was the discovery of the first evening, and it was not a comfortable one. He had expected to sink back into the museum like a stone into a pond — the house was the machine he'd built to hold his life still, and for twelve years it had never once failed him. But the machine had been built by a ghost, for a ghost, and he had come home from the hospital as something else — some raw, mid-repair creature with a cane and a discharge sheet and a paper chain's worth of colored construction paper still stuck, one loop of it, to the back of his vest where Junie had patted him goodbye. The yellow bedroom was the same. The gloves on their hook were the same. He was not the same, and the house's silence, which had been his element, lay on his skin now like a coat that no longer fit, and by nine o'clock he was standing in his own kitchen doorway looking at the telephone with the expression of a man defusing it.
There was one bad night in that first week, because healing, like grief, does not move in straight lines and is rude about visitors. He woke at three from the dream with the rain in it — the real rain, the Louisville rain, headlights and the young nurse's face — and for a moment the house was the museum again and he was its ghost and the whole improbable summer had been a story told to a dying man in an ambulance. He got up against orders, cane clattering, and made it as far as the kitchen before the hip sat him down hard in a chair and kept him there, sweating, until the dream drained out of the room and left the ordinary dark behind: refrigerator hum, the new calendar on the pantry door, the faint smell of the soup Claire had left in a mason jar with a note in Junie's dictation — FOR BEARS. NO SHARING. He sat and read that note until his hands steadied, which took a while, and then he did the thing he would have thought impossible in the spring: he called Del at three in the morning, and said, out loud, "Bad night. Talk to me about transmissions till it passes." And Del, who had a wife asleep beside him and a job at seven, got up and went into his own kitchen and talked about transmissions for forty minutes, and neither of them ever mentioned it again, and it was, in the annals of that friendship, the entire point.
He called Del. That was the shape the rescue took — no violins, just a phone call a man makes instead of a mistake. "I'm not calling for anything," he said, when Del picked up with a wariness left over from twelve years of Everett calling for nothing at all. "House is loud tonight. Come drink coffee. Bring that terrible cribbage board. I aim to lose at something normal."
Del came. Del, who understood precisely what had been asked and what it cost, brought the cribbage board and a pie from the diner and two of the boys, and they filled Everett's kitchen with noise and profanity and the smell of coffee until nearly midnight, talking about transmissions. It was the first social evening in that kitchen in twelve years. When they left, the house did not return all the way to silence; it seemed to hold some of the noise the way a room holds heat from a fire, and Everett stood in the doorway of the yellow bedroom for a while with his cane, looking at the little bed and the bookshelf and the quilt, and said — not morning, bear; the old liturgy, the greeting to a ghost — but something new, and smaller, and much harder:
"I'm going to bed, Lilybug," he told the room. "You sleep too."
He slept eight hours. It was the first time in twelve years he had slept eight hours in that house, and in the morning he stood in his closet with the cedar box at his feet and his hand resting on its lid, not in refusal this time, but in the manner of a man agreeing on a date.
"Soon," he told it. "We're getting there. You be patient with me. She was always better at that part than me anyway."