Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Vin steps off the stage to raucous applause and makes a straight line for me and Raff. By straight line I mean he skirts in and out of the crowd. People are stretching this way and that, trying to figure out which people are the infamous wife and brother.
I think for a moment about Em and Lauro. Loving one another in secret code. Putting pieces of themselves down on paper and saying Look, here I am.
Em immortalized Lauro with a fountain pen. Well, Vin just immortalized us with a folded-up sheet of printer paper and a microphone.
He’s getting closer and my heart is in my throat.
And then he blurs out of focus because my eyes are filled.
And then I don’t have to see because his arms are around me.
His scent fills my nose. His chest jumps under my cheek.
One of his arms unwraps from me and I look up in time to see him wrap it around Raff’s head, tugging his brother close.
Vin kisses his forehead, like a good Italian brother.
Raff clutches at as much of Vin as he can get his hands on, which isn’t much because I’m not giving an inch.
There’s more of the show to see, but Vin tugs us out of Sooth and onto the street. He unhands us on the sidewalk and then his big arm goes up and he covers his eyes with the inside of his elbow. He’s sobbing. Like me in bed the other night.
I take the ribs and belly area for a hug and Raff takes the shoulders area. We both hold Vin while he quakes.
He takes a few enormous breaths and then starts patting our backs, reassuring us that he’s okay. “Sorry,” he says gruffly. “Just…it’s a lot to be onstage. To try to tell that story. And then to see you two…” He scrubs at his tears with the shoulder of his shirt.
And then the three of us transform into that one Spider-Man meme where we’re all pointing at one another. Trying to answer all forms of the question How did you get here?
I explain about Em.
Raff explains about Tammy.
Vin says that his therapist thought it would be good for him.
Sent him as homework. And it worked so well he kept coming back.
His therapist (by the way) is the one whose office is in the hallway of Nine Five Four.
Vin saw his name on the door when he went to pick up the lease.
The night I put the lease on the fridge he just walked straight back to that door.
“Was it really okay?” Vin asks again. “To hear me talk about it like that? When you weren’t expecting it?”
“Shit, I’ve been hoping you would,” Raff says. “I want every detail, man. You know I don’t remember it.”
“Wait.” I hold up a hand. “You told me that you don’t ‘really’ remember it. I just thought…I thought you meant that it was kind of foggy and you’d rather not comb through it. But…do you mean that you actually don’t remember any of it?”
“I had a concussion,” Raff says with a shrug. “I remember glimpses of the ambulance. And then waking up after the surgery.”
“Raff…” I’m struck. Silent. Shocked. “I didn’t realize…And we never talk about it. Jesus. You must have been going nuts.”
“Like I said, I’ve been waiting for Vin to talk about it onstage.”
“I still can’t believe you’ve been coming for weeks.” Vin scrubs his hands over his face. And then he looks at me. “You swear this is your first time?”
“You think I could keep something like that a secret?” I point back at the bar. “I would never not be able to talk to you about it all. You were onstage, Vin. You made people laugh and shout for you! You…”
I run out of words and just clutch him to me again.
Vin is bashful and pleased. He feels bad about leaving the show early, but it’s clear we three need to be alone together. So Vin ducks back in and pays his and Raff’s tabs and then, just the three of us, we walk home.
It’s an odd walk. Nostalgic, the three of us together like this, but also…very new. Because we’re never going to be like we were.
We’re changed forever. As individuals and as a group.
But also, we’re still us.
When we get home, I make pancakes and Vin makes bacon. Raff sits on the counter and makes us cry.
“Look, not to state the obvious here,” he says. “But this year really sucked.”
We give a soggy laugh.
“And I’m…” he continues. “I’m, like, a very happy person? I don’t wear angry well. It doesn’t look good on me. So I’ve just, sort of, pretended like my arm doesn’t hurt all the fucking time. That it’s, like, fine that my life got destroyed. But…”
“It’s not,” I supply.
“Yes.” He points at me like I’ve just said something completely genius.
“It is not fine. And it’s not like I needed anything else to make me…
more complicated. Look, I know this has been a tough year for you two, but you still had each other.
You still had the home you’d built together.
You still had the option of rebuilding. Me?
Seriously, I think I might be in too many pieces for someone to want the whole package. ”
“Raff.” That’s Vin. And he’s not happy his brother feels this way.
“I’m not asking for you to make me feel better,” Raff insists, showing us his palms. “If you never did another thing for me for the rest of my life, I’d still be eternally grateful to both of you.
I just need to say it. Thank you.” His eyes are liquid and squeezing shut.
“Thank you for being there when the truck—I know it probably makes me selfish. But if you two hadn’t been there with me…
I just feel like the thing would have killed me.
I just…I know it in here—” He thumps his chest. “That I wouldn’t have survived this without you two. ”
Vin takes him by the shoulders in a rough, big-brother sort of way. “Everything you’re saying is wrong,” he tells Raff. And it breaks through Raff’s spiritual dysmorphia like two hands ripping a sheet in two. Raff is laughing through tears.
“Well, what do I do now, then?” Raff asks. “If I’m wrong about all this, then what the hell is wrong with me?”
Vin gives him a weightless, certain smile, made possible by a clean-shaven face. “Nothing, dude. You’re perfect.” And he kisses him again, on the forehead.
“That is not helpful,” Raff says, but he’s got a wry smile on and one hand against his chest. He’s locking it inside, I can tell, this assessment from the person he trusts the most in the world.
I loudly crunch bacon and they both turn to look at me. “What? It’s getting cold!”
And so we eat. And then Raff goes to bed in the guest room. And it feels good. It feels like, every now and then, he belongs here. Because he is perfect. And so are we.
When Vin (and the Vin squeak) join me in bed, I, unfortunately, have a little river of tears drip-dropping off my nose.
“Oh no,” Vin says, sliding over to hold me.
“I’m okay,” I reassure him. “But your story…this night…I finally realized something.”
“Tell me.” His arms tighten around me, our legs tangle together.
“I realized…and I hate it, Vin. And I don’t want it to be true. But I realized…I’m so mad at you.”
“Wait. Really?” He’s pulling back to see my face. Because this wasn’t what either of us was expecting. And also, because I’m calm and sweet. Not how one usually tells another they’re so mad at them.
“Your story tonight…It reminded me of something and I think…I think a lot of the prickliness I’ve been having…I think it’s because I’m mad at you.”
“Okay…well…what did it remind you of?”
“It was something I heard in the hospital. What you said tonight in your story. Your beautiful story…it brought back this memory…I heard one of the paramedics who brought us in talking with the ER doctor. They were talking about me. The ER doctor said, It’s a miracle she doesn’t have a head injury.
And the paramedic said—” My voice breaks and I lift Vin’s hand to my lips.
“And the paramedic said, Yeah, her husband was able to get his hand under her head to break her fall.”
“Right,” Vin says slowly, trying to read me.
“And then I looked at your knuckles, they were bandaged, and I wouldn’t even know until the bandages came off a few weeks later how bad the scrapes really were, almost down to the bone, Vin. But it was enough, then, just to see the bandages.”
His eyes are everywhere on my face. “And it made you mad?”
“Vin, it made me irate. And for a long time, I thought it was anger at, you know, fate. Or the driver, even though it was an accident. But…no. No, Vin, it’s anger at you.”
He’s stroking a hand from the top of my head down to my back.
We are so not fighting right now. We are so tender and open.
It’s so hard to hold it all at once, the low-lying torrential rain of an emotion that’s been on my heels for a year, and this sweetness for the person I love the most in the world.
How do I feel it all? How does anyone live for decades?
Life only gets more and more complicated.
The good never unmixes with the bad. It only tangles more and more.
“Vin, I’m so mad you got hurt. There’s a fourteen-inch scar down your back, for God’s sake. And your knuckles. Your poor knuckles.” I lift his hand to my forehead and I just hold it there, feeling his warmth.
He does what he does best and doesn’t say a word. He waits. He lets me fill the silence because he knows that when I do, it won’t be trapped inside anymore. It’ll be between the two of us, where he’ll help me carry it.
“You are not allowed to die for me, Vin. And I’m so mad that you almost did. It falls under the same category as dying from drunk driving or dying because you were base jumping or doing something stupid and dangerous that you should not be doing.”
“Baby, all due respect: dying for you is not stupid.”
We laugh because I don’t know why. “If you’d died for me, do you know how awful my life would have been after that? I would never get over that, Vin. Never.”
“Sure, yes, but you’d be alive.”