book me the red eye
julian
I drove to Simone’s with five sentences in my mouth and Alyssa’s face in my mind.
I’d built them careful over three weeks and a stranger’s leather chair, and I’d stripped them down to the only ones that were true all the way through.
I went to therapy. You were right. I miss you.
I’m sorry. And the fifth one, the one I’d been carrying under my tongue for months and never let past my teeth, the one I was finally, finally ready to set down in front of her.
Her chair was empty.
I stood in the doorway with my coat half off and looked at it, and the five sentences backed up in my throat with nowhere to go. Micah hit me at a run before I could make sense of it, arms around my waist, face up and shining.
“Julian! You came! Mom said you’ve been traveling.”
I’d missed the last couple dinners. She’d covered for me — given my absence a clean, ordinary shape so her son wouldn’t feel the crack running under it.
Even now. Even after. She was three weeks gone from me and still handling the story so a nine-year-old wouldn’t have to carry a worry that wasn’t his.
“Hey, big man.” I got a hand on the back of his head, the way I do. “Your crossover still nasty?”
“Nastier.”
“Good. Go eat.”
He went. I took the seat they’d left me, and I ate, and I heard maybe one word in three of the conversation going on around me, because I kept looking at the empty chair second from the end and doing the math I didn’t want to do.
She always came to Sunday dinner. It was as fixed as anything on either of our calendars.
If she wasn’t here, it wasn’t because she’d stopped coming.
It was because she’d found out I would be.
That landed about where you’d think.
I waited until Simone got up for the rolls and leaned into Raschad, low, under the noise. “Where’s Alyssa?”
Something moved across his face, and it wasn’t the awkwardness I’d braced for — the here’s-a-man-asking-about-the-woman-he-blew-it-with look. It was worse than that. It was the look a man gives you right before he hands you something heavy.
“Jersey,” he said. “Newark.”
“What’s in Newark?”
He set his fork down. “Ryan Marsh got a new trial. The man who killed Malik. Claimed his lawyers were no good the first time, claimed heat of passion — whole thing’s getting reopened.” His jaw worked. “Alyssa’s a witness. She flew out Friday. She testifies tomorrow.”
The room kept moving around me — Zion arguing something with Tre, Zhaire and Micah negotiating over the last piece of cornbread, Simone’s laugh from the kitchen — and I sat inside it very still while the thing Raschad had just said arrived in pieces.
She was in Newark. She’d been there since yesterday.
She was going to stand up in a courtroom tomorrow and be walked, question by question, back through the single worst thing that had ever happened to her — the husband, the mistress’s bed, the man who put the bullet there — and made to say all of it out loud for a jury while the man who did it sat fifteen feet away, betting on getting to walk.
She was going to relive it. On a stand. Under oath.
With a lawyer whose entire job tomorrow was to suggest, gently, that maybe it had been her fault somehow — that she’d known, that the marriage was bad, that a better wife.
And she hadn’t told me.
Weeks ago she’d cried all of it out in my arms in the dark of her living room, and she’d said afterward that she felt lighter.
She’d gotten one clean breath. She’d set it down for a single night.
And now the state of New Jersey was making her pick every ounce of it back up and haul it into a witness box, and she was doing it at a time I had told her he needed space and let her walk out a door.
“I offered to fly out with her,” Raschad said. “She told me to stay. Said my mother and our sisters would be there. Didn’t want to make it bigger than it needed to be.”
Valencia Carter, who had looked at her widowed daughter and found a way to make it about what Alyssa should have done differently.
Who’d taught her, before she was old enough to fight it, that needing anything was weakness and asking for it was worse.
That was the support system. That was who was going to sit behind her tomorrow while she bled in front of strangers — the woman who’d built the exact wound the whole thing pressed on.
She was going to do the hardest day of her life surrounded by people, and completely alone.
I texted Glory.
Book me on the red-eye to Newark. Tonight. And a room near the Essex County courthouse.
The reply came back inside a minute.
GLORY
On it. Anything else?
No. That's everything.
I looked at Alyssa’s empty chair one more time.
“You all right?” Simone had come back with the rolls and was watching me the way she watches me, which is closely.
“Something came up.” I stood, folded my napkin, set it by the plate. “I’ve got to go.”
Her eyes cut to Alyssa’s empty chair and back to me, and I watched her put it together in about half a second, because she’s a Wade and we’re all too quick for our own good. She didn’t ask. She just came around the table and hugged me, hard, and said into my shoulder, “Go.”
I kissed the top of Zaria’s head. I bumped Micah’s fist and told him I’d see him soon, and meant it. On the way out Zion caught my eye across the room and lifted his chin, half a question, and I gave him a short nod, and he grinned like he’d won something.
Then I was out in the cold and moving toward the car, and the five sentences were still in my mouth, but they’d stopped being a speech for a dinner table.
I wasn’t going to say them here, in a warm house, over a good meal, with everyone watching and nothing at stake but my pride.
That had been the coward’s version of brave — saying the true thing where it was safe.
I was going to say them to her in Newark, tomorrow, on the worst day of her year, in a hallway outside a courtroom where she’d just been asked to defend her own grief to a stranger.
I was going to be the thing she’d never once had and never let herself ask for — the person in the room whose only job was her.
I’d spent years being the man everyone leaned on and letting no one hold me up. She was the first person alive who’d tried to carry me, and I’d punished her for it, and it had taken me three weeks and a stranger in a chair to understand that the reaching had been the whole gift.
Now it was my turn to reach.
I got in the car and started the engine and pointed it toward home, toward a bag I’d pack in ten minutes, toward an airport and a red-eye and a city where she was preparing for a hard day, thinking she was on her own.