Heart Problems
julian
On Tuesdays, Alyssa lifted with me in the home gym at my house on Belmead.
She’d signed up for a marathon in the spring, and I created a strength program for her on top of her running routine.
This particular Tuesday she had her form wrong on the deadlifts.
Not by much, but her shoulders rolled forward at the top of the lift, which meant she was pulling with her lower back instead of her glutes.
Wrong end of her body. I’d watched her through three sets without a word, because she’d scolded me more than once that I had a habit of coaching when nobody asked.
She caught me looking and set the bar down. “What?”
“Nothing.”
She stared at me.
“Your shoulders. They’re rolling forward at the top. Lock them down, drive through your heels.”
“I am driving through my heels.”
“You’re driving through your toes.”
She gave me a flat, unimpressed look, telling me she was not in the mood for correction. Then rolled her eyes, bent down, and reset.
“Show me, then.”
I came up behind her, one hand flat on her shoulder blade and the other low on her stomach. “This shoulder down, pin it. Same with the other. Engage right here.” I pressed lightly with my palm. “When you come up, you come up from your legs. Let the floor push the bar.”
She nodded and lifted, came up clean and re-racked it. Looking back at me. “Better?”
“Better.”
“Don’t get cocky.”
“You got cocky, Lyss.”
She laughed and we ran three more sets until she had it by the second, and on the third I just stood behind her and watched her do it right.
“Thank you, Coach,” she said without looking at me when she finished.
I realized I had been standing there just smiling at her. I’d been doing that a lot lately.
She started putting the dumbbells away, and I came up behind her and smacked her ass. She made a small affronted sound that said she liked it but wasn’t going to admit it.
“Julian!”
“Hmm?”
She turned around and put both hands flat on my chest, leaned up, and kissed me, quickly, then stayed there a second with her hand still on my chest, smiled, then turned to get the next pair of weights.
“So, Mrs. Whitaker called me again last night at nine o’clock, about her landlord.
She’s decided I’m her attorney, Julian. I told her I’m not a tenant attorney, I’m a person who knows how to read a lease, and she said ‘that’s what an attorney is, sis,’ and hung up on me.
Then called back ten minutes later about her cousin. ”
I hadn’t moved. I was still standing exactly where I’d been when she’d kissed me, looking at her back while she set dumbbells in the rack. My heart was going too fast for a man who’d finished his workout fifteen minutes ago.
My hands had gone cold in a warm room, and I told myself it was the water I hadn’t drunk since the second set.
Elevated heart rate, cold extremities, that tracked.
I stood there with the bottle six feet away and didn’t go get it, because whatever this was, it wasn’t dehydration, and I’d known that since the second her mouth left mine.
She was still talking, her voice coming to me at the level of a blur. I looked at the small curls that had escaped the elastic at the back of her neck, the ones I could’ve drawn from memory by now, and the thought arrived plain and whole and three words long.
I love her.
I tried to name it in other ways, because I’m a like to be sure of a thing before I agree with it.
I care about her.
I’m attached to her in a way I haven’t been attached to anyone.
None of those phrasings held enough weight.
I love her. I am in love with her.
I’d probably been in love with Alyssa since she stormed at me across forty yards of grass and knocked me half a step off-balance I never got back. And on this particular Tuesday she’d pecked me on the lips and every other word I had for it quit working.
I knew what the tight feeling was. I’d had its cousin a few times in my life.
The time Zion was facing five years; the call from Tre that put me on the highway across states not knowing what I’d find on the other end; Simone wheeled into surgery for Zaria with the same risk that took our mother.
Those moments were the grip of: someone I love is in danger.
This moment wasn’t that exactly. This was a version with no emergency attached to it. The I love her and she’s fine, yet that somehow makes it harder to cope with one. I’d never felt it before.
I put my hand on the squat rack to steady myself.
I could lose her.
I tried to put the thought away but it wouldn’t stay down.
It sat at the edge and watched me. I tried to silently run the four-count breathing technique I’d coaxed Simone through countless times to manage her panic attacks, until my hands warmed and my pulse came off the ceiling and I was, in the operational sense, fine.
I was not fine. But I knew, in my first decision on the other side of it, that I wasn’t telling Alyssa. Not today, not this week.
I don’t say things I haven’t thought all the way through, and she deserved a man who’d worked himself out before he handed her anything.
Saying it out loud was the one move I had left that I couldn’t take back.
As long as I hadn’t said it, I was still the one holding it.
The minute it left my mouth it was hers, and real, and out in the world where things get taken from you.
I wasn’t ready to be that breakable in front of anybody, even her. Especially her.
So I’d wait. I didn’t know how long. But I knew I had to wait.
She’d stopped talking, and then she turned with weights in her hands, looked at me, then dropped the weights and crossed the gym in three steps.
“Julian! What’s wrong! Oh my God! Sit down. Sit down now.”
“I’m okay, Alyssa.”
“You are not okay. Sit. Are you dizzy?”
She had a hand on my face and a hand on my arm and a terror in her eyes. I sat on the bench to appease her and she knelt in front of me, both hands on my knees. “Does your chest hurt? Your shoulder?”
Does she think I’m having a heart attack? Her instincts were good. She had the organ right, but not the diagnosis. But there was no version of this moment where I told her so.
“My chest is fine,” I said. “I just got lightheaded for a second. I think I pushed too hard on the deadlifts, didn’t eat enough this morning. Give me a minute.”
She didn’t fully buy it, but she bought enough of it not to call 911.
“You need to drink water. Now.” She grabbed the bottle, brought it back, and watched me drink, counting my swallows.
“Get up. Slowly. Come to the living room.”
“Lyss, I am okay.”
“Slowly. Julian. Don’t argue with me, please.”
I got up and let her guide me to the living room couch. She rushed to the kitchen and came back in seconds shoving another glass of water into my hands, and stood in front of me holding her phone in one hand and a bottle of aspirin she’d also apparently grabbed from the kitchen.
“Put your feet up,” she said.
“Alyssa.”
“Feet up, Julian. I’m not playing.”
I lifted my feet onto the ottoman and she sat next to me, staring.
“Are you sure your chest doesn’t hurt?”
“My chest doesn’t hurt.”
“Numbness in your arm?”
“No.”
“Jaw pain?”
“No. Lyss. I told you I’m okay. It was nothing.”
“Okay. Okay. I am — I am still going to give you an aspirin. Just to be safe. Aspirin doesn’t hurt anyone. Right? It’s just a precaution. Is that okay? Can you take aspirin? Are you on any blood thinners I don’t — wait, you take that allergy medicine, does that interact with—”
“Alyssa.”
She pulled out her phone, “I’m gonna pull up the interactions.”
“Alyssa. Look at me.”
She looked up from her phone.
“I am not having a heart attack. My pulse is fine. My chest is fine. I have feeling in both arms. I’m drinking the water. I’m fine.”
“You should call your doctor. Tell him what happened and let him decide whether you come in, not you, because you’re the patient and patients don’t get to make that call about themselves.”
I could tell she was scared. Panicked, actually. And watching her, it dawned on me that maybe she was navigating the same feeling I’d had. The fear of losing a person you love. She just might love me too. Probably.
“Alyssa. Calm down. Come here.” I pulled her onto my lap. She was worried down to the deep line between her eyebrows. I put my hand on the side of her face.
“I overdid it and my blood sugar probably dropped. It happens. I am vigilant about my health. I’d tell you if it was more than that.”
“You’d tell me.”
“Yes, I’d tell you.”
She relaxed slightly and surrendered as much as she was capable of surrendering. “Okay. But you’re not getting up. Rest here, and I’m going to make you a quick smoothie, then a full breakfast, or I guess brunch, and you better eat it all. Understand?”
“I understand.” I smiled at her.
She tried to stand up, but I held her on my lap, pulling her in for a kiss. I kissed her lips, both cheeks, then back to her lips, parting them with my tongue, kissing her passionately as I caressed her back and thigh.
“Mmph,” she pulled back, catching her breath. “Don’t try it, Julian. You are not gonna seduce me right now.” She stood up and threw the throw blanket over me. “Rest…old man.”
I chuckled. “Why I gotta be an old man?”
“’Cause you scared me half to death over some low blood sugar.” The worry had finally come off her face, and she leaned down to kiss me once before she went to the kitchen.
I sat under the blanket watching her move around the kitchen, thinking about how I’d been giving her keys to this house, one room at a time for months.
The kitchen, the drawers, the bathroom, the shelf where some of her clothes lived, the cabinets she knew the plates were in because she’d been in here enough to know where I kept everything.
She’d been taking the keys and making herself at home, and I’d let every bit of it happen one increment at a time so I never had to look at the size of what I was handing over.
When she came back with an actual tray of food, she sat down close against my side and watched me eat.
She watched every bite go down, and every sip go in, and somewhere in the middle of chewing another thought crept in: I wanted her doing this when I was truly an old man.
I wanted to be doing it for her in our eighties.
Feeding her and watching her eat so I’d know she was alright.
I was picturing the rest of my life with her in it, and it didn’t come apart when I looked straight at it.
I finished eating, and when she leaned in to clear the tray, I caught her wrist.
“Leave it. Come here.”
She set the tray back down, and I slid my hand around the back of her neck and pulled her in, kissing her with everything I wasn’t going to say, until the small sound she made meant she’d gone somewhere else. Then I kissed her once more, and pulled back.
She didn’t open her eyes right away. When she did she looked at me with a soft, unfocused look. “Where did that come from?”
I almost told her. It was right there, three words and the floor of my whole life behind them. But I didn’t. I smiled instead. “Just thanking you.”