Chapter 15 #2
I take a breath so deep it hurts. “You think you can patch a hole you blew through my life with a list of barflies?”
“No,” he says. “I think the hole is mine to crawl into and sit in for as long as it takes. But I can hand you a rope. Rick can decide if it’s strong enough to pull on.”
Hearing my lawyer’s name from his mouth makes my spine stiffen. “You don’t know Rick.”
“I don’t have to. I know you. You’d rather chew glass than take help from me. But if this gets you home before that baby is born, I don’t care if you never say my name again.”
He slides the paper into the slot. It rattles through and stops against my side of the metal lip. I don’t touch it.
“I don’t trust you,” I say. “Not with anything that matters.”
“I don’t trust me either,” he says simply. “Not with who I was then. I’m trying to be someone else now. I have a daughter that looks up to me.”
“People don’t get to remake themselves because they decide to be sorry.”
“True,” he says. “They get to remake themselves because they decide to act like they’re sorry.”
Silence sits down with us. Some other conversation in another booth ends in laughter that feels obscene.
I finally pick up the paper. Names are written in Gray’s blocky print.
“Why now?” I ask. “Why this? You could have mailed this. You could have given it to Rick.”
“I needed you to see my face,” he says. “So, if you ever want to look me in the eye and tell me to fuck off forever, you know what you’re turning down.”
A bitter grin slides up my cheek before I can stop it. “You still haven’t apologized for what you did, and you’re still fucking dramatic.”
“Says the guy writing poetry to a baby he hasn’t met yet in a jail cell.”
“Fuck you,” I say, but it doesn’t have teeth.
Gray’s mouth tilts. “There he is.”
I hate that he can make a joke and aim it right at the part of me that used to laugh with him. I hate that my body remembers his as the one that stood between me and those bigger boys when we were eight, and how he kept doing it until we were old enough to pretend, we didn’t need to.
“You don’t get to be my brother again,” I say.
“I know.” He holds my gaze. “But I was. And I still am in the way that matters when you’re drowning. I don’t care what you call me. I’ll show up when I hear the water.”
Anger and something like grief surges up the back of my throat. “Say the words,” I say. “If you came here to be a man, then say the words you should’ve said when I was eighteen and they locked the door behind me.”
He doesn’t blink. “I’m sorry,” he says. “For framing you. For letting you carry it alone. For not coming to see you because I couldn’t face the shit I’d done. For choosing myself over my brother. I’m sorry, Easton.”
Hearing the sound of my name like that breaks something I’ve been holding on to for too long. I look down at the paper so I won’t have to look at him and bleed.
“Why should I believe you?”
“You shouldn’t,” he says. “Believe the actions that come after. Give me a list. I’ll go get you the rest of the witnesses.
I’ll sit in the back of the courtroom and keep my head down if you don’t want me seen.
I’ll send money to Harley without my name on it when she needs a crib or a doctor’s bill covered.
None of it fixes what I did, but it’s what I can do now. ”
I don’t say anything. My hand has gone to my pocket without me telling it to, thumb rubbing the fold of Harley’s letter through the cloth.
Despite everything, despite the fear and the distance, I still believe in you. In us.
She wrote that about me .
“I’ll get this to Rick,” I say finally. “He’ll know whether it’s anything.”
Gray nods. “I figured.”
“If you’re lying to me?—”
“I know,” he says, weariness settling onto his shoulders like the jacket he wears. “You’ll rip me to shreds and feed me to the dogs you don’t have.”
The corner of my mouth twitches despite myself. “You always were bad at metaphors.”
“I learned from the best.”
Something shifts between us, not forgiveness, but a glimmer of hope for a future as brothers again.
“What’s it like being a dad?” I finally ask. The question has been gnawing at me for weeks now. Gray smiles, lines forming on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes truly showing his age.
“The biggest blessing in the world.”
The speaker overhead crackles. “Time.”
Gray’s eyes flick up, then back to me. “Tell Harley … that I’m rooting for her. That if she needs anything?—”
“She doesn’t need anything from you,” I say too fast, too sharp.
He flinches and nods. “Okay. The offer still stands.” He stands, the chair legs scraping. “Take care of yourself. Don’t swing unless you have to.”
“That advice comes a little late,” I say.
Gray hesitates, mouth open like there’s one more sentence but he can’t decide if it will help or hurt. He chooses to swallow it. “Bye, Easton.” He hangs up the phone. For half a second, he stands there like he might wait for me to say his name.
I don’t.
He turns and walks to the door. It clicks shut behind him.
I stay seated, the phone a heavy weight in my hand for a long time after the line goes dead. Harris finally taps the glass, and I hang up, standing on legs that feel like I’ve been running.
“Everything good?” Harris asks as he snaps the leash back to my chain.
“Define good,” I say. He grimaces sympathetically, unable to hide the emotion quick enough this time.
“Fair,” he mumbles.
We walk back the way we came. My mind running loops around the conversation Gray and I just had. I need to talk to Rick.
Back in the cell, the door shuts with its usual thunk; the sound never fails to remind me of a lid settling on a jar.
I sit on the bunk, take out the paper Gray brought, and place it alongside Harley’s letter.
Names for a daughter on one page. Names of men who might save her father on the other. My throat burns.
I flatten both sheets with my palms and stare until the letters swim. One is soft and crooked, smelling faintly like her. The other is a block of hard edges, with a smudge where Gray’s hand must have dragged through the ink. Brother to brother, I think … but the words don’t fit yet.
The kid in the next cell coughs. A tray rattles down the tier. Somewhere, someone laughs too loud, the sound cracking and rolling like a dropped glass on tile.
I pick up the pen Harris let linger on the slot longer than he should have, and pull a fresh sheet from the stack he “forgot” was extra. I write Harley’s name and pause. The line between what I want to say and what I should say stretches taut like wire.
Little Bird, I write. The letters look steadier than I feel.
Gray came, I write, and the ink looks like a bruise on the white paper. I didn’t expect to write that sentence ever again. I sketch the facts and not the ache that burns in my chest. He has a list of names, a bar, a quote.
Rick might be able to use it, I write. If it means I get to you sooner, I’ll take help from the devil and make him fill out a witness list.
I close with the same words I always do, the only promise I know how to pour truth into now, without cracking it.
Always yours,
Easton
I fold the letter slow and careful, slide it into the envelope, and lick the seal. The paper tastes like dust and soap and the inside of a place that wants to scrub the whole world off of you and never let you be clean.
For a long time after that, I sit with Harley’s letter under my palm and Gray’s list under my other, trying to decide which hand feels heavier. When Harris comes by for mail, I pass him the envelope through the slot. He doesn’t meet my eyes, but his fingers close around the paper gently.
“Everything good?” he asks again, like it’s a habit.
“Not yet, but maybe soon it will be.” I say.
He nods once and moves on.