Love Did That
julian
The first week without Alyssa, I went back to the routine like a man climbing back into armor that no longer fit. Up at five. Ten miles. Shower, coffee, the desk by seven. Every part in its place. And my body moved through all of it like it was wading through wet concrete.
I dreamed about my mother almost every night.
Not the old ones, where she sat in the chair by the window with her eyes shut and her hand keeping time.
New ones. Ones where she asked me why I never came to see her.
Why I’d stopped singing and playing. I’d wake at three with my chest tight and the sheets damp, drowning in something I couldn’t name and wouldn’t have known how to set down if I could.
I thought about calling Alyssa countless times that first week.
I’d get as far as her name on the screen and stop.
I missed her, but I was still angry. Underneath the anger was a thing I liked even less: I did not want her to see me like this.
Unshaven, not sleeping. She'd decided I was a man who needed handling.
I wasn't about to call her up and prove it.
Let her hear in my voice that she'd been right, that she'd reached into me and pulled something loose that wouldn't go back.
So I put the phone down. Not yet. Not like this.
By the fourth day I’d sent three of Zion’s calls to voicemail.
So he came by my house, after finding out from Glory I’d been working from home for a few days.
He didn’t even give me time to decide whether to answer the door.
He knocked once, then used his key and walked right in, shut the door behind him, and dropped into the chair across from my desk in my home office.
“We don’t ignore each other, Jules.”
“I wasn’t ignoring you. I’ve been busy.”
“Stop fronting. What the hell happened with you and Alyssa?”
“We’re taking a break.”
“Why?”
I could have deflected, but was too tired to hold the wall up, and some part of me wanted him to understand why I felt the way I did.
“She played me. Manipulated me into a grief group. Lied to my face about needing support when what she wanted was to get me into therapy.” I explained what happened and waited for the outrage on my behalf. What I got was my little brother grinning.
“Good for her.”
I stared at him. “What?”
“She’s right and good for her.” He leaned forward, and the grin went.
“Julian, we have all been tiptoeing around you for years. We learned not to push and just accept that you handle things your own way. She met you and decided that wasn’t good enough and found a way around it.
” He tipped his head. “You know who taught her that move?”
I shook my head, annoyed.
“You did. How many times have you arranged things so the rest of us would take help we’d never have asked for?
Dressed up care so it wouldn’t land like charity?
” He raised an eyebrow at me. “I recall cosigning a lie about WadeHouse paying for her condo. Open your eyes, Jules. She learned from the master. She did to you exactly what you’ve done to all of us for years, and you can’t stand it, because it’s flipped and you were the one on the receiving end. ”
“That’s different.”
“Because you do it out of duty and she did it out of love?”
“Because I don’t need—”
“Stop.” His voice flattened. “Just stop with the I don’t need. You need to deal with finding Mama. You need to deal with what happened with Pops. You need to grieve, Julian, instead of managing everybody else’s grief and calling it the same thing.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look like hell, you’ve missed Sunday dinners, hardly going to the office, and you're about to lose the best thing that’s happened to you — a woman who’d walk barefoot over glass for you — because she got too close to the thing you’ve spent your adult life making sure nobody could touch.”
“She lied to me,” I said again. “I’m supposed to ignore that?”
“She risked you being furious with her to get you something you needed. That’s love. That’s somebody caring enough to fight for you when you won’t fight for yourself.”
I had nothing for that.
He stood and went to the door, and stopped with his hand on it.
“You want to know my one regret? Eighteen years, and you’ve never once let me carry a single thing for you.
Not one. You’re my hero, Jules. You have been since the day Mama died, the way you stepped up and held all of us together?
And the whole time, you’ve been alone inside it, deciding that was the price.
You never let any of us pay a cent of it with you, and we all respected and appreciated you too much to push. I regret not pushing.”
He opened the door. “Go to therapy. Not for her. For the kid who never got to fall apart because three other kids needed him to stay standing. And when you’re done being too proud to see it…
thank her. She’s the first person in your life brave enough to tell you that you matter too and not let up about it. ”
He let himself out.
I sat there a long time holding coffee gone cold. She learned from the master. That’s love. She’d risked us to help me. And I knew, standing there, that I’d have done the same for her. That I already had.
Later, I took the folded list of names out of the drawer where I’d shoved it, and I looked at it for a long time, and then I made a call.
I sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes with my engine running.
The clock moved from 1:48 to 1:53 to 2:01, and I worked through every reason I should not be there.
A four o’clock meeting. A deal closing Thursday.
The fact that in all my years I had never once walked into a room and told a stranger about myself.
At 2:04 I killed the engine, sat one more minute, then I got out of the car.
The building was generic, no big neon sign flashing psychology. The directory downstairs listed a discreet T. Matthews, PhD, which was a discretion I approved of.
There was a sign-in sheet, and I felt ridiculous writing my name, like somebody was going to pop out and point at me: “Look, Wade’s here because he can’t handle his shit.”
I signed in, and after a few minutes, the receptionist nodded for me to go back.
The far door opened and the man who came through was Black, mid-fifties, a clean fade, sleeves rolled twice. He looked at me like he’d done this countless times before and was deciding what kind of patient I’d be.
“Julian. Thank you for coming.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
“You’re not late.”
I was twelve minutes late.
“You’re here,” he said. “That’s the only time this room counts.”
His office had two leather chairs facing each other, a low table, a bookshelf, a framed photograph of what looked like Kilimanjaro on the back wall, no people in it.
He took one chair. I took the one near the door.
He didn’t pull out a notebook, or start a recording.
He crossed one leg over the other knee and looked at me with no particular expression. Then waited.
I had been expecting rapid-fire questions.
A clipboard, an intake form, what brings you in today, Mr. Wade, the kind of clinical opening that would have let me answer in the corporate register I had loaded and ready.
He gave me none of it. He just sat there and let the quiet be my problem, and the quiet was, in a small and specific way, harder than what I’d prepared for.
I cleared my throat. “Someone I was seeing suggested I come here.”
“Mm. What made you take the suggestion?”
“We had a disagreement about it. She thought I needed help dealing with some things. I disagreed.”
“But you’re here.”
“Yeah.”
“What changed?”
I looked at my hands. “Maybe she was right.” The words went down like glass.
“What kind of things did she think you needed help with?”
“Grief. Loss. The usual.” I tried to make it light, like everybody walked around carrying eighteen years of it. “She thinks I don’t deal with things. That I put them on a shelf and keep moving.”
“What do you think about that?”
“I think I handle what needs handling. I’ve got a business, employees, a family that depends on me. I don’t have the luxury of falling apart every time something goes wrong.”
“Falling apart. That’s how you see dealing with grief?”
“Isn’t it?”
He let it sit. The way a man lets a thing sit when he’s giving you room to hear yourself.
“Tell me about a time you saw someone deal with grief.”
I had come prepared to talk about Alyssa. Her manipulation, the story of the woman who tricked me into this chair. I was going to hand him that story and let him assess it.
I had not been prepared to talk about my mother, at least not that soon.
Yet I talked about my mother. I told him how she died.
How we found her. I told him about my father down in our basement studio with headphones on, and that by the time anyone got his attention, it was over.
I told him about being nineteen and seeing my father asleep on the floor by their bed.
About how my father’s face changed the day my mother died. Unrecognizable.
“Tell me what you saw.”
“His face was the wrong shape.”
“Mm.”
“I’d seen my father’s face every day of my life. I knew the shape of it. The shape was different. That the man who raised us wasn’t in the room anymore. His body was. The man wasn’t.”
“What did you do with that?”
“I started answering the phones.”
“The phones?”
“The label. He’d stopped running it. People kept calling and somebody had to answer. So I started answering.”
“At nineteen.”
“At nineteen.”
He was quiet a moment.
“That’s a great deal of responsibility for someone barely an adult.”
“Someone had to step up.”
“At what cost?”
The question hung there like a thing I didn’t want to touch.
“No cost,” I said. “We’re all fine now. Everyone made it.”
“What about you? Are you okay?”
I stared at him. “I'm here, aren't I?”
Something that might have been a smile crossed his face. “Yeah. You are.”
“Did you grieve your mother?”
“Of course I did. There was a funeral. I was there.”
“That’s not what I asked.”