Then and only then did he grab my hand and start leading us forward.
We moved quietly, and at some point, he handed me a pair of sunglasses he must have had in the pocket of his jacket because the only things he’d brought in his backpack were bottles of water and a tarp. I hadn’t even noticed I was squinting with the sun reflecting off the snow, but the sunglasses helped. The air was so crisp it felt cleaner than ever, and I filled my lungs with as much of it as I could every chance I had, letting it soothe me in its own way. On we went, and maybe if I’d been feeling any better, I would have appreciated more how well the snowshoes worked or how pretty the field we were going through was… but I was trying my best. And that was all I could do. I was here, and some part of my brain was aware that that mattered.
About an hour later, we finally stopped at the top of a hill, and he stretched out the tarp on top of the snow and gestured me onto it. I had barely sat down when he took the spot beside me and said in that husky voice of his, “You know I wasn’t around for any of Amos’s firsts.”
I crisscrossed my legs under me and looked at Rhodes. He was sitting with his long legs stretched out before him, hands planted a few inches behind him, but most importantly, he was looking at me. The sunlight was reflecting off his beautiful silver hair, and I couldn’t think of a single man I’d ever seen that was more handsome than him.
He was the best, really, and that made my throat hurt in a way that wasn’t bad.
“I wasn’t there for his first word or the first time he walked. The first day he used the toilet on his own or the first night he didn’t have to wear diapers to sleep.”
Because he’d been gone, living on a coast far away from Colorado.
“Am doesn’t remember, and even if he did, I’m not sure if he’d care, but it used to bother me a lot. It still does bother me when I think about it.” The lines across his forehead deepened. “I used to send money to them—to Billy and Sofie. For things he might need, even though they both said they had it, but he was mine too. I used to come and visit him every chance I had. Every vacation, any time I could swing it, even if it was only for a whole day. They told me I did enough, said I didn’t have to worry about it, and maybe that should’ve been good enough for me, but it wasn’t.
“It took him until he was almost four to start calling me Dad. Sofie and Billy corrected him every time he’d call me Rows—he couldn’t pronounce Rhodes, and that’s what they called me—but it took a long time for him to start calling me something else. It used to make me jealous when I’d hear him call Billy Dad. I knew it was stupid. Billy was with him all the time. But it still kind of hurt. I’d send him presents when I saw something he might like. But I still missed birthdays. I still missed his first day of school. I missed everything.
“When he was nine, he complained about them going to visit me during the summer instead of going to ‘do something fun’。 That hurt my feelings too, but it mostly made me feel guilty. Guilty that I wasn’t around enough. Guilty that I wasn’t trying hard enough. I had wanted him. I thought about him all the time. But I didn’t want to leave the Navy. I didn’t want to move back here. I liked having something reliable in my life, and for the longest, that was my career. And that made me feel guiltier. I didn’t want to give up one or the other, even if I knew what was more important, what really matters, and that’s my son, and it’s always going to be him. I thought me knowing that was enough.”
Rhodes blew out a breath before glancing at me, part of his mouth going up a little into that twist I knew too well. “Part of me hopes that I’m making it up to him. That it’ll be enough that I’m here now, but I don’t know if it will. I don’t know if he’ll look back on it and think that I half-assed being his dad. That he wasn’t important to me. That’s why I’m trying, so at least I know that I did. That I did everything I could think of to be there for him, but how am I ever going to know, right? Maybe he’ll be an old man when he decides. Maybe not.
“My mom didn’t even try to be a good mom. I can’t think of a single positive memory of her. My oldest brother does, I think, maybe the one right after him too, but that’s it. I’m never going to look back and think of her fondly. I don’t feel like I missed out on anything with her, and that’s shitty. I feel bad for her, for what she had to have gone through, but I didn’t ask for it either, and I got it anyway. But Amos, I asked for. I wanted him. I wanted to do better than what I’d known.”