“What do you mean?”
“You finally let one person all the way in. The first time in your adult life, and the second she got close enough to ask you to set the weight down, you couldn’t do it, and now you’re sitting in my office having lost her. That’s not the bow holding. That’s the bow breaking.”
My throat closed, and I looked at the bookshelf so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
“The thing that saved your family when you were younger,” he spoke gently now, “was a young man deciding to be steady when no one else could be. That was the right call. It kept four children alive. I’m not going to take that from you.”
He waited until I looked at him. “But they’re grown, Julian. Your company’s built. Your home is stable. The thing that saved you isn’t saving anybody anymore. It’s a cage you forgot you were allowed to walk out of. What kept you alive back then is the thing costing you your life now. Your body doesn’t know the emergency is over.”
“How do I tell it that?”
“You let yourself grieve the mother you never really grieved. Your father too. And you let somebody carry you while you do it. You’ve carried everyone in your life. Every single one. When is somebody going to get to carry you?”
“That’s not —” My voice failed and I had to start again. “That’s not how I’m built.”
“It’s how everybody’s built. You’re just the only one who never got a turn.”
I drove homeand thought about Alyssa the whole way. Her methods still rubbed me the wrong way, but my anger was gone from it. What was left was simple enough. In my whole life, people had needed me, leaned on me, brought me the broken thing to fix. Only one had looked at me and decided I was the one who needed coverage and risked my whole regard for her to do it. Alyssa.
She tried to take care of me, knowing I’d fight her, knowing it might cost us. That isn’t a thing you dotoa person. It’s a thing you doforthem.
I had stayed away not because I no longer wanted her, but because I had to get right in my own head before I had any business standing infront of her again. And I was getting there. Not finished, Dr. Matthews had said it plain, but right enough to show up and let her see it.
She’d be at Sunday dinner. I wasn’t going to plan a speech. I had five sentences and they were the truest I owned.I went to therapy. You were right. I miss you. I’m sorry. I love you.
I slept the whole night through for the first time in three weeks, woke almost feeling relaxed.
46/
book me the red eye
julian
I droveto Simone’s with five sentences in my mouth and Alyssa’s face in my mind.
I’d built them careful over three weeks and a stranger’s leather chair, and I’d stripped them down to the only ones that were true all the way through.I went to therapy. You were right. I miss you. I’m sorry.And the fifth one, the one I’d been carrying under my tongue for months and never let past my teeth, the one I was finally, finally ready to set down in front of her.
Her chair was empty.
I stood in the doorway with my coat half off and looked at it, and the five sentences backed up in my throat with nowhere to go. Micah hit me at a run before I could make sense of it, arms around my waist, face up and shining.
“Julian! You came! Mom said you’ve been traveling.”
I’d missed the last couple dinners. She’d covered for me — given my absence a clean, ordinary shape so her son wouldn’t feel the crack running under it. Even now. Even after. She was three weeks gone from me and still handling the story so a nine-year-old wouldn’t have to carry a worry that wasn’t his.
“Hey, big man.” I got a hand on the back of his head, the way I do. “Your crossover still nasty?”
“Nastier.”
“Good. Go eat.”
He went. I took the seat they’d left me, and I ate, and I heard maybe one word in three of the conversation going on around me, because I kept looking at the empty chair second from the end and doing the math I didn’t want to do. She always came to Sunday dinner. It was as fixed as anything on either of our calendars. If she wasn’t here, it wasn’t because she’d stopped coming. It was because she’d found out I would be.
That landed about where you’d think.
I waited until Simone got up for the rolls and leaned into Raschad, low, under the noise. “Where’s Alyssa?”
Something moved across his face, and it wasn’t the awkwardness I’d braced for — the here’s-a-man-asking-about-the-woman-he-blew-it-with look. It was worse than that. It was the look a man gives you right before he hands you something heavy.
