What Silence Is Made Of #2
It was like that the whole three weeks. Nothing from him to me, and meanwhile my son’s phone lighting up two and three times a week.
Help with the long division he hated. A call one night that was just talking, the two of them going back and forth about whether the new Spider-Man was better than the old one, serious as a contract negotiation.
He came to the games and stood by the doors and left before the handshake line.
The Thursday Micah got his math test back he called Julian before he’d even gotten his shoes off, and he had it on speaker, bouncing on the couch. “I got an A, I got a ninety-four, you owe me a new Lego set.”
Julian’s voice came out of the little phone speaker into my living room, warm, easy, proud of him: “That’s what I’m talking about. I told you.”
I had to leave the room. I stood in my own kitchen with the water running over a clean glass so the sound would cover me, and I listened to the man I wasn’t allowed to talk to anymore be perfect to my son through a phone, and I had never in my life been so glad of a thing and so destroyed by it at the same time.
Because that was the cruelty of it, the part I couldn’t get under.
He was so good. He was exactly the man I’d known he was, the one who keeps his word to a nine-year-old when his own heart is in pieces, and watching him be that good to my child was watching, in high relief, the precise size of what I’d lost. I didn’t get to grieve him quietly.
I got to grieve him twice a week, out loud, in my son’s delighted voice.
Sunday I went to dinner at Simone and Raschad’s.
It was standing, the way Maple’s had been standing, nobody invited me anymore, I just came.
I thought about not going. Then I went, because there was a chance he’d be there.
And if he was there, I was going to pull him into a hallway and apologize.
I had it ready. I’d been carrying it for three weeks.
I’m sorry. I overstepped. I will never go around you like that again.
Come back. I had practiced it the way I practice an opening, and I went to that house with it loaded and ready to fire the second I saw his face.
His chair was empty.
And I understood, standing in the doorway with my coat half off, that the empty chair was because of me.
He knew I’d be there. Sunday was standing for me too, and he knew it, and that was the thing that had kept him home.
I’d come to reach him and he’d made himself unreachable, and we’d managed it again, the two of us, from opposite ends of the same town — each of us arranging not to be caught wanting the other one.
Dinner was warm and ordinary and I sat through it with the apology still loaded and nowhere to put it.
Zion and Taryn. Tre. Raschad at the stove, Simone correcting him.
Micah and Zhaire inhaling everything in reach.
They folded me in the way they always did, no questions, a plate in my hands before my coat was off — and the whole meal I wanted to lean over to Zion and ask how his brother was.
If he was eating. Sleeping. Whether he’d gone back to the rigid beautiful terrible routine or whether he was worse than that.
I sat there with the question in my mouth all night and never let it out, because I’d given up the right to it.
You don’t break a thing and then ask the people who love it how it’s mending.
I got up to help with the dishes because sitting still had gone unbearable, and Simone followed me into the kitchen, and once the water was running I said it before she could say anything, because I’d been holding it all through dinner.
“I shouldn’t keep coming,” I said. “If the reason he’s not here is me, then I shouldn’t — I don’t have to keep coming, Simone. I don’t want to be the reason he can’t come to his own family’s table.”
“Stop.” She set down the dish towel. “We want you here. You hear me? Every one of us. You don’t get to give that up because my brother’s being a stubborn ass.”
“I manipulated him.”
“You pushed him. His ego is bruised, and because you saw all the way through him and it scared him to death, Julian would rather miss his own nephew’s whole childhood than sit at a table across from the person who got that good a look at him.
That’s not on you. That’s the oldest thing about him.
” She picked the towel back up. “He’ll get over it.
Trust me. None of us are upset with you.
I have not seen my brother as happy as he’s been these last months since before our mother died, and every one of us knows exactly who to thank for it, even him, especially him, which is half of why he can’t look at you right now. ”
I had to look at the sink.
“He still asks,” she said, gentler. “Raschad’d kill me for telling you.
Julian called him last week to take your car in — the service light, the rotation, whatever it was — because he knew you wouldn’t make time with the trial coming.
Three weeks of not speaking to you, and he’s still finding ways to keep your life running where you can’t catch him doing it.
” She let it sit. “That’s not a man who stopped.
That’s a man who doesn’t know what to do with how much he hasn’t. ”
The kids came thundering back down the hall and the moment closed, and I stood at the sink with my hands in the warm water and her towel folded on the counter where she’d set it.
I drove home with one more thing to carry, and it was heavier than the despair had been, because despair you can set your weight against and hope you just have to hold.
He was still out there keeping every promise he’d ever made to the people I loved, from a distance, in the dark, with his own hands.
He could do all of that for three weeks running without a word to me.
He just couldn’t do the one thing that would have cost him something, which was come back across the distance and let me see him need me. And I’d already tried the only way I knew to make a man do that, and the trying was what had put us here.
So I went home and then I lay down on my own side of a made bed and didn’t look at my phone, all night, with the whole discipline of a woman looking at nothing else.
This wasn’t heartbreak over a casual relationship ending. This was grief. Real, devastating grief over losing the man I was supposed to spend my life with. Because that’s what Julian had been, even if we’d never said it out loud.