The Unopened Six-Pack

"Did you hear that?"

Cole hadn't been asleep, not really, just lying in the dark on the top bunk with his eyes shut, listening to the cabin settle around him the way old wood does, ticking and sighing like it remembered something. He opened his eyes. "Hear what."

"That." Wyatt's voice came from the doorway, low, like he didn't want to wake anyone who might still be asleep, even though it was just the two of them out here, forty minutes past the last gas station, twelve miles from anyone who'd hear them scream.

Cole sat up anyway. The cabin was their father's, had been, technically was now theirs, though neither of them had said the word inheritance out loud yet, like saying it might make the last three months more real than they already were. Moonlight came in gray and flat through the window over the sink, laying a stripe across the linoleum, across the coffee can where their father kept his fishing weights, across the urn sitting square in the middle of the kitchen table where Wyatt had set it two nights ago and neither of them had moved since.

"It's probably an owl," Cole said. "There's a pair that nests out past the point. You can hear them ask each other things."

"I know what an owl sounds like, Cole. I grew up out here same as you."

That landed the way most things Wyatt said to him lately landed, half true, half a small blade. Wyatt had grown up out here summers, same as Cole, but Wyatt had also been the one who kept coming back the last four years, driving up every other weekend while their father's hands got worse and his memory started doing that thing where it skipped like a scratched record, always landing on the same three songs. Cole had been three states away, telling himself the job was the reason, when the truth was smaller and uglier than that. Some weekends he hadn't trusted himself behind the wheel. Some weekends he hadn't trusted himself at all, and it was easier to send a card and a check than to show up and let his father see what he'd let himself become. They both knew it now. Neither of them had found a way to say it that didn't turn into a fight.

He got down off the bunk anyway. Bare feet on cold pine floor. Followed his brother out onto the porch, past the two rods still leaning in the corner where they'd been leaning since April, gathering a fine film of dust neither brother had wanted to be the one to wipe away.

The lake spread out in front of them, black and smooth as poured tar, the kind of stillness that made you understand why people used to think water held things, memories, warnings, the shapes of whoever had gone under and not come back up. Somewhere out past the dock, something had made a sound. Not quite a splash. Not quite a knock. Now there was nothing, just the crickets starting up again like they'd only paused to listen too.

"There," Wyatt said. "By the dock."

Cole squinted. There was nothing to see, just the dark shape of the old rowboat tied at the end, rocking slightly against the pilings the way it always did, the way it had rocked every summer of both their childhoods while their father sat exactly where Wyatt stood now, coffee in one hand, cigarette he thought nobody knew about in the other, watching the water like it might do something interesting if he waited long enough.

"Dad used to say the lake talks at night," Cole said. He hadn't meant to say it. It just came up out of him, the way things had been coming up out of him since the funeral, small unguarded memories surfacing at the worst times, in line at the pharmacy, halfway through brushing his teeth.

Wyatt didn't say anything. Just kept looking at the water.

"He was full of it, obviously," Cole said, because the silence needed filling. "It's just owls and ice working under the surface and..."

"He wasn't full of it about everything."

That stopped him. Cole looked over, and in the almost-dark he could see his brother's jaw doing the thing it did when he was working hard not to say more than he meant to. Four years of weekend drives. Four years of watching a man they both loved lose the thread of himself a little at a time, thread by thread, while Cole was three states away losing a different kind of thread and telling himself a birthday card counted for something.

There was a six-pack in the fridge that Wyatt had brought up out of habit and hadn't offered him. Hadn't offered in over a year now, not since the last time he'd had to drive up unannounced to a bar he'd never wanted to know the inside of, to get his brother off a barroom floor and into a truck. Neither of them had mentioned the six-pack once since they'd arrived. Cole noticed anyway, every time he opened the fridge for milk. Noticed the noticing.

"I should've come more," Cole said. Just like that. No windup, no bracing for it, the sentence just fell out of him onto the porch boards between them. Then, because the dark made it easier: "I was drinking, most of it. Whole visits I don't even remember deciding to skip. I'd tell myself next weekend, sober, and then next weekend I wasn't."

Wyatt was quiet long enough that Cole thought maybe he wasn't going to answer at all, that this was going to be one more thing that dissolved unspoken into the water, same as everything else they hadn't said this week. Same as everything they hadn't said in years.

"Yeah," Wyatt finally said. "You should've." A pause, the edge going out of his voice by degrees. "How long's it been now?"

"Eleven months." Cole's hand found the coin in his jacket pocket without quite meaning to, the aluminum edge worn smooth from checking it there more often than he'd admit to anyone, including himself.

"That's something," Wyatt said. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But something.

The call came again. Closer this time, or maybe just clearer, a low, rhythmic string of hoots rolling out across the water, patient, almost conversational, like something asking a question it already half-knew the answer to. It didn't sound like grief. It didn't sound like anything but what it was, a bird calling across dark water for reasons that had nothing to do with either of them. But something in Cole's chest loosened anyway, hearing it, the way a held breath goes when you finally let it out and realize how long you'd been holding it.

Wyatt went inside and came back with the urn, careful in the way he'd been careful with everything since March, like the wrong grip might undo something. They walked the dock together in the cold, their father's ashes gray and unremarkable in the moonlight, and they didn't talk about who should hold it or who should pour. They just both had their hands on it when it went into the water, watching it spread and thin and vanish into something larger than either of them could account for, larger than four years of weekend drives or three states of distance, larger than anything either of them had thought to say out loud until tonight.

The owl called once more, from somewhere out past where the light gave out.

"Did you hear that?" Wyatt said. Not urgent this time. Almost like a question he already knew the answer to, asking it anyway because some things are worth asking twice.

"Yeah," Cole said, and for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, he meant it, not just the sound, but everything underneath it. "I heard it."