I opened the notebook.
Mason’s handwriting, the crooked slanted print I’ve been correcting on homework for four years, filled every page. There were drawings. There were taped-in photographs. There were quotes with names next to them.
Bear says Uncle Danny could eat a whole pizza by himself and still have room for ice cream.
Tommy says Uncle Danny was scared of spiders even though he was six foot two.
Rosa says Uncle Danny cried at the end of every movie including cartoons.
Nobody has said one bad thing about him. Not one. I think he was a really good person, Mom. I wish you would tell me about him. I would listen forever.
There was a page near the back that stopped me cold. A photograph of Danny at maybe twelve years old, holding a baby. On the back Mason had written, in his careful nine-year-old script:
This is Uncle Danny holding Mom when she was born. He looks like he loves her the most out of anyone in the world. I want Mom to see this face. I want her to know he loved her the most.
I put my head down on my knees and I cried in a way I have not cried since I was a child. Bear put his hand on my back and left it there. He didn’t say anything. I could hear the others down the hall. Someone was praying out loud, low, in Spanish.
When I could sit up again, I wiped my face with my sleeve and looked at Bear.
“Why are you all here? All of you?”
“Because that boy is one of ours now,” Bear said simply. “He’s family. And when family’s in trouble, we show up.”
“But the nurses—”
“The nurses been trying to move us for two days. We ain’t moving. They can call whoever they want.”
I stood up. My legs almost went out from under me. I held the notebook against my chest.
“I need to get my wife.”
“Take your time, brother.”
I walked back down the hall past the men and women on their knees. A couple of them looked up at me. One old guy, bald with a long white beard, whispered, “How’s our boy?” I couldn’t answer. I just nodded and kept walking.
Sarah was where I had left her, curled up in the chair next to Mason’s bed, her hand under his hand so she could feel his fingers. She hadn’t wanted to hold his hand from the top because she was afraid of hurting the IV line. She had figured out a way to be underneath him so that if he squeezed, she’d feel it.
He hadn’t squeezed. Not once in four days.
“Sar.”
She looked up. Her face had gone hollow the way faces do when a person hasn’t eaten and hasn’t slept and their child is dying.
“There’s something I need to show you,” I said. “There’s people in the hallway. You need to see them.”
“I can’t leave him.”
“You need to see them. Just for a minute. He’s stable. The nurse is right there.”
She looked at Mason for a long time. Then she stood up, slow, holding onto the bedrail. I gave her the notebook first before I opened the door.
She looked at the cover. Then at me. Then she opened it.
She read the first page standing there. Her hand went to her mouth. She read the second page. The third. She sank down against the wall and read on the floor. I sat down next to her. She got to the photograph of Danny holding her as a baby and she made a sound I have never heard a human being make before. It came out of the center of her chest.
She looked up at me with the whole world falling out of her eyes.
“Where did this come from?”
“I need to show you,” I said. “Come on.”
I helped her stand. She was shaking. I opened the door.
She stepped out into the hallway and she saw them.
Thirty bikers, on their knees, praying for her son.
She didn’t understand. I could see her not understanding. Her eyes went from one face to the next, looking for the answer.
Bear stood up. He walked toward her slow, hands out where she could see them, the way you approach a scared animal.
“Ma’am,” he said. His voice broke on the word. “My name is Frank. Your brother called me Bear. I loved him like he was my own blood. I have wanted to tell you that for sixteen years.”
Sarah’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.
“Your boy found us,” Bear said. “He came to us looking for his uncle. He’s been sitting with us every Saturday for a year, ma’am. He’s been keeping your brother alive in that little notebook. And now he’s ours too. And we’re all here because we love him. We’re all here for him.”
Sarah’s knees went. I caught her. Bear caught the other side of her. Between us we lowered her to the floor and she sat there in her wrinkled sweater and her four-day-old jeans and she looked up at all those bearded, tattooed, tough old men on their knees in front of her.
“Tell me about him,” she said. Her voice was almost nothing. “Please. Somebody. Tell me about my brother.”
The woman with the gray braids came forward first. She sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of Sarah and she started to talk. She told her about the time Danny brought a stray cat to the clubhouse and named it Kickstand and how it lived there for eight years after he died and how they all took care of it because it was his. Then the old bald guy with the beard came forward and told her about Danny singing Johnny Cash off-key at every party. Then Tommy told her how Danny stayed up all night with him when his marriage fell apart, just sat there and listened, twenty-two years old and wiser than most men Tommy had ever known.
They took turns. They told her every story they had.
Sarah cried. She cried and she laughed and she cried and she asked questions and they answered them, one by one, patient, careful, like they were handing her something breakable that they had been holding for her for sixteen years.
I stood behind her with my hand on her shoulder and I watched my wife meet her brother again.
After a while she stood up.
“I want you to come in with me,” she said to Bear. “I want you to see him. All of you. He would want you to see him.”
Bear looked at me. I nodded.
The nurse tried to stop us. Then she looked at Sarah’s face and stopped trying. She just held the door open.
They came in two and three at a time. They stood around Mason’s bed. They didn’t touch him because of all the tubes but they put their hands on the bedrail and on each other’s shoulders and on Sarah and me. Bear leaned down close to Mason’s ear.
“Hey, little brother,” he said. “Your mama knows now. You did it. You did the thing you set out to do. Now you gotta come back and finish the book, alright? We ain’t done. There’s stories we ain’t told you yet. Your Uncle Danny had a lot of stories. Come on back, buddy. Come on back.”
I was watching Sarah’s hand under Mason’s hand.
His fingers moved.
I saw them move. I saw them curl, small and slow, against his mother’s palm.
Sarah felt it. Her whole body went still.
“He squeezed,” she whispered. “He squeezed my hand.”
The nurse came running. She checked the monitor. She checked his eyes. She called for the doctor.
He didn’t wake up that day. He woke up on Sunday, at 4:17 in the morning. His first word was “Mom.” His second word, two hours later, when he saw Bear in the corner of the room in his leather vest, was “Bear.”
Sarah started crying so hard the nurses had to bring her water.
Mason spent three more weeks in the hospital. Every single day, at least four of those bikers were in the waiting room. They brought Sarah food. They brought me coffee that was actually drinkable. They took shifts. Bear was there almost every night. He slept in the chair.
On the day we brought Mason home, they escorted us. Thirty motorcycles in a slow rumble behind our Honda, all the way from the hospital to our driveway. The neighbors came out to watch. Mason waved at Bear out the back window the whole way.
Sarah’s fortieth birthday was two weeks after Mason came home. We had a small party in our backyard. Her parents came. Her mother had not spoken to a member of that motorcycle club in sixteen years.
Sarah brought out the notebook after the cake. She had finished it herself in the weeks since Mason woke up, with his help, sitting on the couch under a blanket. She had added her own pages. She had written down what she remembered about her brother. She had put in a picture of her holding baby Mason next to the picture of Danny holding baby her.
She read it out loud to her mother. Her mother cried for the first time in sixteen years about her son.
Then Sarah stood up and she walked across the yard to the gate.
She opened it.
Thirty bikers were standing on our street, quiet, holding their helmets against their chests, waiting to be invited in.
Sarah looked at her mother.
Her mother stood up. She wiped her face. She walked over to the gate and she looked out at those men and women who had loved her son and she said the words she had not been able to say for sixteen years.
“Please come in,” she said. “Please. Come tell me about my boy.”
Bear was the first one through the gate.
Mason grabbed his hand and led him to the picnic table where the cake was.
I watched my wife’s mother sit down across from a seventy-year-old biker with a white ponytail and hands like shovels, and I watched him tell her, careful and slow, about the last thing her son said before he got on his bike that October afternoon in 2010. He said her name. He said he was going to come see her the next day. He said he loved her.
She had waited sixteen years to hear that.
My nine-year-old son gave it to her.
He is ten years old now. He rides his bike to Mill Street every Saturday, and I go with him.
