Chapter 8 Griffin
EIGHT
GRIFFIN
I’m there at eleven-fifteen. I have brought the same book.
I sit on the same bench. I do not open the book.
There is no point in pretending today. It’s colder than yesterday.
The bench is colder than yesterday. The wind on this part of campus gets between the buildings and goes faster than wind should go.
I’m sitting in it. I am not moving. My hands inside my coat pockets are inside fists I did not make on purpose.
I’m watching the door. I watch the door for nineteen minutes.
I don’t know how I’ll know when it’s the right time to stand.
I don’t know what I’m going to say. I have rehearsed this in my head for two days and I have not arrived at a sentence.
I have arrived at a name. That’s all I have.
The name. He comes out at eleven-thirty-eight.
Two minutes earlier than yesterday. He is alone.
I see him before he sees me, which is the last advantage I will have, and I use it.
I stand up. I cross the path. I’m in front of him before he has registered that someone is in front of him.
When he looks up his face works the way I have been wanting his face to do.
It does not look surprised. It looks caught. That’s the thing I notice first and the thing I will think about later, much later, when I am alone: that he did not look surprised to see me. He looked the way you look when something you have been afraid of for a long time has finally happened.
“Reece,” I say.
Not a question. I don’t say is that you or I knew it or anything that gives him room to deflect.
I say his name, the real one, the one I have not said in two years.
His face does not move. Only his eyes do, and his eyes do everything.
I watch them do it. There’s a half-second where he is weighing something.
Whether to play it. Whether to lie. Whether to say who.
I watch him decide not to. He gives it up in the eyes before anything else.
“Griffin,” he says.
His voice is the same. Two years of imagining what it might sound like now and it sounds the same. I want to put my hand against the side of the building because my legs almost give. I do not. I stand. I keep standing.
“You’re alive.”
“Yeah.”
“Say it.”
“What?”
“Say you’re alive. Say the words.”
He looks at me. He looks at me for a long time.
His face is not the face from the obituary photograph.
It’s not the face from the laugh in the coffee shop.
It’s not the face I’d been holding in my head for two years.
It’s a face I do not know. It has the same scar above the left eyebrow.
It has the same mouth. But it is not the same face.
I’m looking at it. He’s letting me. Somewhere behind us a girl on a phone is laughing about something and a guy on a skateboard is going past and the world is doing what it does.
“I’m alive,” he says.
He says it quiet. I want to hit him. That’s the first clear thing I think and I do not let it show on my face but I think it.
I want to put my fist through the side of his face.
I want to grab him by the collar of the jacket I have never seen and shake him until something in him breaks.
I want to hear him make a sound I have never heard him make.
I want him to know what hurt is. I do not move.
“I buried you,” I say.
Something goes out of his face. Not the eyes. The whole face. He looks like someone has hit him without hitting him.
“I know.”
A beat.
“Griffin.”
“What.”
“It’s Reed now. Not Reece anymore. The name.”
I do not say it back. I’m not going to say it back. He has just handed me a name and I’m not going to take it on a sidewalk.
“You don’t know,” I say.
“Griffin.”
“You don’t know. You don’t get to know. You weren’t there. You weren’t there, you don’t know what it was, you don’t.”
I stop. He has not said anything else. He’s waiting. He’s letting the other person have the words first because the other person’s words will tell him what he’s allowed to say. He has just used the words he had to use. The rest is mine.
“I’m not doing this here,” I say.
“Okay.”
His hand goes up and touches the strap of his bag, then comes back down. I do not know what to do with that. He used to do that. He used to do it when he was about to say something he didn’t want to say. He’s doing it now. He’s not saying anything.
“I’m going home,” I say. “You know where I live.”
He knows where I live. I haven’t told him I know that. He doesn’t ask.
“Tonight,” I say. “Eight.”
“Okay.”
I walk past him. I keep walking. I do not turn around.
I do not stop. I do not slow down. Somewhere two minutes into walking I realize my hands are shaking and have been shaking the whole time.
I put them in my pockets. I keep going. He said okay.
He said okay and okay. He touched the strap of his bag.
He looked at me like he’d been afraid of this for a long time.
He’s going to come. He’s going to come to my apartment tonight at eight and I’m going to open the door and he’s going to be standing on the other side of it, alive. I don’t know what I’m going to do.