“At what cost?”
The question hung there like a thing I didn’t want to touch.
“No cost,” I said. “We’re all fine now. Everyone made it.”
“What about you? Are you okay?”
I stared at him. “I'm here, aren't I?”
Something that might have been a smile crossed his face. “Yeah. You are.”
“Did you grieve your mother?”
“Of course I did. There was a funeral. I was there.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“There wasn’t room,” I said finally. “Simone was twelve, having panic attacks. Zion started swinging at anything that moved. Tre was fifteen and getting into things he had no business in. My father waswasting away. I looked around and did the math, and the math said if I went down too, there was nobody left. So I didn’t go down.”
“So you decided your grief would have to wait.”
“I didn’t need to grieve. Not in the way they did. There was no time for that.”
“Julian, how long ago did your mother die?”
“Eighteen years.”
“And in eighteen years, have you ever sat down and just processed it? Absorbed and examined how that loss affected you?”
I didn’t answer, because the answer was never.
“What would it look like? Living instead of surviving? If you ever let yourself.”
I thought about the piano in the back room of my house. Covered, oiled, perfect, silent. The songs that used to come out of me. The thing my father had handed me before he handed me nothing. I thought about the day Alyssa sang and my hands had remembered every note, like something waking up that I’d put to sleep on purpose.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t want to go there yet.
“You said your father slept on the floor by the marital bed.”
“Yes.”
“What did you learn, witnessing that?”
I looked at the photograph on his wall. The mountain with no people in it.
“That love did that.”
“Love did what.”
“That.”
“Say it, Julian.”
“Killed him.” It came out flat and it kept coming. “It killed him. He didn’t physically die, but it killed him. My mother was dead and my father was dead in spirit, and I decided in that moment I was never going to die that way. Not ever. Not in my life.”
I hadn’t said that out loud before either.
I sat in the chair and registered, with a small shame, that I had held something that size for that long without once putting it where another person could see it.
