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It slips out during the funeral.
“Do you think she’s watching us?”
Eddie holds Christopher close, dark suit over gangly limbs, an outfit he wishes his son wasn’t so familiar with.
“Maybe, mijo.” It’s a half-answer, an evasion. He doesn’t know what he believes anymore, what he wants to believe.
He glances at Buck, on Christopher’s other side, waiting. Buck puts a hand on Christopher’s shoulder, steady and gentle. He doesn’t say anything. His eyes look away, red-rimmed.
Eddie frowns.
Eddie knows grief.
He knows the sharp edges of it, the way that it catches on your skin when you least expect it, drawing fine lines of blood that don’t quite leave scars. He knows that grief feels like anger, like holes in a wall, that it sounds like static over a phone line and tastes like electricity on your lips. That it weighs on you all the same, whether it lasts for a lifetime or three minutes and seventeen seconds.
He knows grief, and so he asks Buck if he wants to help set up the ofrenda with them afterwards, because he doesn’t know how to tell Buck that he needs him close right now.
Buck looks at him for a long time, at the door of the house that Eddie is still having a hard time thinking of as anything other than theirs. “No thanks, Eddie,” he says, too calm, too still. “I don’t want to intrude.”
You’re not, Eddie wants to say. But there is a farawayness in Buck’s expression that frightens him. Some part of him thinks that if he says it out loud, it’ll just-- glance off of Buck, slip into some darkness where Eddie isn’t able to follow.
“You wanted to -- talk to them, right?” he asks instead, trying to make his voice gentle. “I have a picture of Bobby up, too. We can talk to all of them again, just for tonight.”
The sound Buck makes is ugly, sharp. “Talk to who, Eddie? Nobody’s answering.”
The flat surety of it makes Eddie step back, makes something sharp startle beneath his ribs. He stares at Buck, the tense line of his shoulder, the weariness in his eyes. Buck glances over to the door, and Eddie knows that he’s checking to make sure that Chris doesn’t hear.
“I thought…” Eddie hesitates. There’s something frightened in his sternum, fighting its way up his throat. “I thought you heard him.”
There’s a long moment of silence. Then Buck turns to look at him, and Eddie has the sudden, bizarre urge to grab him, to beg him to stay. But Buck doesn’t hear him, or he isn’t listening. “You said it,” he says, instead. “There are no ghosts. There’s nothing out there, and nothing’s gonna stay.”
And something cracks and falls within Eddie, a piece of him that he hadn’t known was foundational until now. The part of him that survived the loss of his Catholicism, that weathered through the erosion of god to find something that he didn't know that he'd been propping in their place for the better part of a decade. The part of him that was built on Evan Buckley’s faith.
Buck stares at him, like he’s waiting for a response. You’re scaring me, Eddie doesn’t know how to say in a way that makes him sound sane. I just lost abuela, and now I feel like I’m losing you, too. Please don’t let me lose you.
Nothing stays, but I need you to stay.
He doesn’t say anything, just looks at Buck, lost and losing. “Go help Chris,” Buck says, voice soft, eyes far away. “I’ll be here if you need anything. Just…not now.”
Eddie doesn’t stop him from getting into the jeep, from starting the engine, driving down the lane. From inside, the door cracks open. Chris watches Eddie, eyes red-rimmed, brows furrowed.
“Isn’t Buck coming?” he asks, voice small.
Eddie swallows rainwater and smoke, blood and gravel. He presses a hand to his heart, where abuela pressed her own. He can’t feel his own heartbeat, and he wonders if it’s dragging a bloody trail behind the jeep disappearing down the street.
“Buck has to go, mijo,” Eddie says, and doesn’t know why it feels like a conversation after a phone call, a conversation for black suits and ofrendas. “Buck can’t stay.”