I looked around the table at them, grown people, all of them, with careers, spouses, and for a moment they looked like children, waiting on their big brother to tell them what to do.
I understood that he’d earned that. And because he’d earned it, not one of them would push him on the unilateral decision he’d just made that they might, if anybody had asked them plainly, have made another way.
“So what do we do?” Taryn said, still rubbing Zion’s back.
Nobody had an answer. But I was already standing, reaching for my keys, because I’d watched him refuse a rope while he drowned, and Iwas not going to be another person at this table who loved him and let him.
“I should go,” I said, keys in hand. “Check on him. Can I get Micah in the morning?” I asked Simone.
“No problem,” Simone said, grabbing my hand. “He’s just —”
“I know,” I said.
Driving to Julian’s,I thought about the piano he'd covered back up. The way he’d shut down any conversation about therapy or processing what he'd been through. The way he held everyone together by holding himself so tightly controlled that the real emotion couldn't leak through.
I drove toward his place with the whole thing turning over in me. He couldn’t go through the front of it; he’d proven that at the table. So maybe the way in was around.
I knocked on his door and he answered, stepping back to let me in.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Alyssa. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
“It’s okay, Julian. It was nothing. I’m not mad at you. I’m worried about you.”
He followed me to his couch and sat with his elbows on his knees, and didn’t say anything for a while.
“He’s been testing me for years,” he said finally.
I didn’t say anything.
“My father. Reggie’s been bringing me things from him for years. Message here or there. Mama’s ring at Simone’s wedding. A phone call once or twice, where I’d answer and the line stayed open forty seconds and then went dead.”
“Have you ever asked them? Zion, Tre, Simone. Whether they’d want to see him. Whether they want the messages?”
“No. They don’t need that on them.”
I sat silent, letting him get it out.
“I’ve never said we don’t want him home. I saidcome yourself. Give the messageyourself. Every time. I never saiddon’t come. I said if he wants to come home, he knows where home is, and he can walk through the door himself. I’m not going to be the one who gets him. Not again.”
“Again?” I repeated.
He was quiet a long moment. Then, to the middle distance, not tome: “A few years after he left, I found out where he was. Didn't tell anybody. I drove out there by myself and I stood in front of my father and I asked him to come home. I begged him, Lyss. Told him we were falling apart…” He swallowed. “He said no. Looked me in the face and told me he was doing us a kindness by staying gone, and sent me back down that road alone.”
I didn't move.
“I never told them. They didn't hold that rejection. That's a different kind of leaving.” He finally looked at me. “So when Reggie sits at that table and saysgo get him? I already went. I got the answer. And I'm not going to let Simone or Tre or Zion drive out there hopeful and come back with the same no I've been carrying for years.”
I moved closer and put my hand on the back of his neck. “You’ve been making this call for everyone for eighteen years.”
“Yes.”
“They’re grown.”
“I know they’re grown.”
