Find The Melody #3
Pops/Daddy
I read it once. Then again. Then I put it back in the envelope, walked it upstairs to my room and slid it into the drawer of my nightstand. Then I went and made dinner.
I told myself he would be back in a few days, but a week went by. Then Simone and Tre started asking where he was. Zion never asked. He’d just study my face as I struggled to answer their questions, as if the man I knew was not coming back, might be.
I read the letter twice more in that second week.
Each time I read it I understood it a little better.
Julian. I am proud of the man you’ve become in the wake of my weakness.
He was not asking me to be the man of the house while he got himself together.
He was naming me the man of the house in his place. He had decided.
By the end of the second week I had stopped waiting. I called my siblings into the living room, took a deep breath and read the letter aloud. I kept my voice flat the way I'd practiced for everything else. Flat got me through. Flat would get them through. Until the last part.
Stay together. Take care of each other. My voice broke on that. Like the words had jumped me from behind.
Tre cursed, slapped both hands on his thighs and pushed up off the couch like he was about to walk out. Then he stopped halfway across the room and pressed his palms into his eyes.
Zion made a sound at the window I won't try to describe. Then his fist went through the drywall beside the curtain. He didn't look at it. Just stood there with his hand still in the wall, breathing heavily.
And then Simone. I almost missed it. She made no sound at first. I felt her shift against my leg, then go very, very still, and when I looked down she was already on her side on the rug, eyes open but unfocused, hands curled in toward her chest.
“Simone.”
Nothing.
“Simone?”
She had been so still while I read. Unnaturally still, then a high and broken sound came out of her, and she was breathing wrong, too fast, too shallow, hands on her chest, while her whole body shook like she was cold.
I dropped to my knees, both hands cupping her face, telling her to look at me. To breathe. “Simi, please, please look at me, please.”
She couldn't look at me. Her eyes were somewhere else, panicked, and her breathing was short, desperate pulls that weren't getting her enough of anything.
“She can't breathe!“ Zion had dropped to her other side. “Julian, she can't—“
“Call nine-one-one,” I shouted to Tre. “Hurry!”
Tre already had the phone, tears falling down his face, and when the dispatcher answered he could barely get words out. "My sister is dying!” Tre said into the phone. "My sister, she's on the floor, she can't breathe, please help!” He gave our address.
"Tre. Hand me the phone."
He handed it to me and I put it on speaker. "My sister is twelve years old. She just received bad news. She is on the floor. She is conscious. She is breathing but very fast, clutching her chest. Her eyes are open."
The dispatcher was a woman, calmly rattling off questions: any conditions we knew of, was she conscious, could she hear us.
"It sounds like she's having a panic attack," she said. "We have paramedics on the way. While we wait, get down where she can see you. Breathe with her slowly and have her mimic you. Through her nose. Hold the breath. Out through her mouth. Show her what you want her to do. Can you do that?"
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her breathing eventually started to slow.
So slowly it was its own kind of agony. By the time the paramedics came she was breathing normally.
Still shaking. But breathing. They checked her heart rate, blood pressure, didn’t think she needed to go to the hospital, but suggested we follow up with her own doctor.
“First time she's had a panic attack?” one of them asked me.
“Yes.”
“She'll need to follow up with a doctor. Make sure she talks to someone.” He looked at all of us, then focused on me in the way adults looked at whoever appeared to be in charge. “You kids going to be okay tonight?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
They left and the four of us were alone again, the letter still on the table, and our mother five months in the ground, and our father gone to wherever men go when grief is bigger than they are.
Tre had stopped crying out loud. He leaned against the counter with his arms crossed over his chest, fifteen years old trying to figure out what his face was supposed to do.
Zion sat beside Simone, staring at nothing.
Simone had both hands wrapped around a glass of water, eyes red, looking like something had been knocked out of her that might not come back.
I stood at the edge of the room and I looked at the three of them. And I felt everything. In that moment, the full weight of it all, and the pressure of having already lost too much and having three faces in front of me that were waiting for something I wasn't sure I had.
I felt the it isn't fair of it. The why us, why her, why now, why him. The grief that had been sitting since the moment past tense was used to talk about my mother. I felt all of that.
But looking at my siblings’ faces, I understood one more thing: my feelings were not going to save us. It was the one thing I could not afford then, because three people in that room needed someone to be steady. And the only candidate was me.
I swallowed all of it, the unfairness, the grief, the anger, the loneliness of being the oldest, the fear, of am I even equipped for this? I found a place inside myself and I put it all there. Because there was no time for it.
“Okay,” I said to the room.
Three sets of eyes came to me.
“We're going to be okay. We will figure it out.” I said it like I knew.
“All four of us. This house is ours and we are going to be fine.” I looked at Simone.
“We're going to get you to a doctor this week and figure out what you need.” I looked at Zion, then at Tre.
“And tomorrow we're going to sit down and we're going to make a plan.
What we have, what we need, who we call.
Tonight we don't have to figure everything out. Tonight we just be together.”
Tre wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Jules…”
“I know.” I met his eyes. “I know, Tre.”
His face crumpled and he nodded.
I sat down on the couch next to Simone, and I pulled her onto my shoulder, she cried while I rubbed her back.
Tre crawled onto the couch on my other side, and I pulled him in too.
Zion came eventually sitting down on the floor at the foot of the couch, his back against my legs.
I put my hand on his shoulder and we stayed like that until the sky outside the window went dark.
The letter lay face down at the edge of my vision.
On paper, we weren't broke. The house was paid off, our tuitions were secured, and every bill had a dedicated fund line item.
But money doesn't tuck you in at night. Money doesn't tell you that you're safe.
We weren't children with a father anymore; we were de facto orphans with a bank account.
Aunt Lorraine and Uncle Reggie came the next day and didn’t waste time.
“Baby, let Simone come live with me.” Aunt Lorraine already had it settled. “She needs a woman in the house. And after what happened yesterday, she needs eyes on her. You can’t do all of that alone.”
“And the boys,” Uncle Reggie said, leaning forward, “can stay with me. You can’t take care of them, finish school, and work. Nephew, that ain’t fair to you. It ain’t fair to none of y’all.”
They meant well. That’s what made it harder to hear. I sat there for a long time before I answered. Their words burned, not because they didn’t care, but because they thought care meant carving us up.
“No,” I said, firmly. “We’re not splitting up.”
“Julian—” Aunt Lorraine started.
“NO.” My voice came out hard and I didn’t take it back. “We’ve already lost Mama. Now Pops. If we lose each other, there’s nothing left.”
“Baby, you’re only twenty years old.”
“I’m old enough.” I stared them both down. Aunt Lorraine flinched. Reggie’s mouth tightened.
I softened it a little. “I’m grateful. To both of y’all. I am. But we stay together. Y’all can help. You can come around as often as you want. But Simone sleeps in this house. Tre wakes up in this house. Zion comes home to this house. We are not splitting up.”
I looked between them both and made myself sound more certain than I felt.
“We’ll be fine. I’ll figure out the rest.”
I decided that day that my grief was a private thing. It did not belong in this room to be tangled with my siblings’ grief. So I took my grief, fear and stress, walked it over to the darkest corner of my mind, and set it down.
I have not gone back for it since.