Charlie looked startled for a moment. Then he started laughing too.
“It’s the only tattoo I’ll ever love,” I told him when I could speak again.
He looked down at his chest, then back at me, and he nodded like that was exactly what he needed to hear.
The sculpture sat on the table behind us. The wooden bird was still hanging in my car in the driveway. And somewhere in between all of it — the letter and the hospital ward and the loose tile and the lopsided figures holding each other — our son had done one more remarkable thing.
He had found a way to bring us back into the same room.
He had laid out a path, careful and deliberate and unmistakably his, and trusted that we would follow it. And we had. And at the end of it, we were sitting on his floor holding each other in the particular way of two people who have been reminded what they still have.
