I forced down my reaction at him saying Mom. It was something he’d started a few weeks ago, and the smile she’d given him when he’d said it the first time had been blinding. “If she said it’s good, then it is.”
He sighed. “I think so too. I didn’t…. I wanted it to be a surprise.” His eyes widened. “If you don’t like it, I can change it back and—”
“Gavin.”
He scowled at me.
“Just tell me.”
“Not tell,” he muttered. “Show.”
He lifted his hips from the counter and reached back to pull out his wallet. It had a picture of a wolf on it. Jessie had given it to him. He adored it for some weird reason. He opened it up and pulled out a plastic card from one of the sleeves. He set the wallet on the counter, holding the card against his chest.
“It’s big,” he whispered. “It’s important. And it’s mine. Because you gave it to me. I asked you a question once. What you wanted. Do you remember what you told me?”
My skin was buzzing. “I said I wanted to feel like I’m awake.”
He nodded. “I feel that way now. I’m awake because of you. And a name is a name is a name. I have it now. I know who I am.”
“Who are you?”
He turned the plastic card over.
It was a driver’s license. Such a tiny thing in the grand scheme of things.
He was scowling in the picture. Of course he was.
But it wasn’t important.
All that mattered was the name in black letters.
Gavin Walsh Bennett.
I stared at it in wonder. I said, “This….”
“This,” he said.
I kissed him with all I had. He grunted in surprise, but then he was laughing, laughing, laughing against my mouth, and I swallowed it down, made it a part of me. It was frantic, it was real, it was mine, and I lifted him off the counter. He wrapped his legs around my waist, the driver’s license forgotten on the floor. I carried him up the stairs, and even though he bitched about it, I knew he didn’t mean it.
I showed him then, in that warm summer afternoon, the sunlight catching motes of dust that hung suspended in our room.
I showed him what he meant to me.
I showed how I loved him so.
Every piece.
Every part.
I said his name again and again, like a prayer.
As my body shuddered and shook, he whispered in my ear that this was real, that we were awake, and Carter, Carter, can you feel it? Can you hear it?
I could.
A drumbeat of a heart at peace.
Thump.