Chapter 28
28
“Are you sure you’re okay, honey?”
In an act of altruism Ezra absolutely doesn’t deserve, the nurse he’d passed on his way out of the emergency department tracks him down and gives him directions to the wing where Becca’s been transferred. She steers him back toward the inpatient rooms, clearly able to tell from a glance that he won’t comprehend more than three turns’ worth of navigation, and when she leaves him at the right wing she takes another moment to study him.
It’s the second time someone’s asked him that tonight, and he still doesn’t understand why. He’s not the one who almost got blown up in a fire or had his wife show up to the ER with her new girlfriend or had his maybe-boyfriend drop a psychic bomb in his lap about his dead husband.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Thanks, though.”
She eyes him for another moment, and then leaves him with an almost maternal pat on the back that makes his eyes sting. He’s halfway down the hall before he realizes that he didn’t even ask her name to thank her.
One more thing to apologize for. Add it to the pile.
Becca’s scans come back clear of any swelling or bleeding, but between her ongoing dizziness and her blood alcohol level turning out to be just under the legal limit, the hospital admits her anyway. No one seems frantic or overly panicked here, and while the nurses and staff seem to be moving briskly, the calm eases some of his lingering anxiety. He asks after Becca at the desk, and the charge nurse checks his ID and pulls up a file on her computer, then points him down the hall. “Room 302,” she says. “I’ll send her room nurse in to give you an update.”
“Thank you,” he says, and she gives him a kind smile as she hands his license back. “Is there somewhere I can wash my hands before I go in?”
“Bathroom around the corner,” she says, pointing. “And hand sanitizer outside each room.”
He thanks her again and ducks into the single-use restroom, washing his face and hands and trying to push his hair into some semblance of order so that he’ll look like an actual adult when he talks to whatever doctor or nurse comes into the room, then washes his hands again for good measure. When he studies his reflection in the mirror, he looks remarkably calm, tired and maybe a little red around the eyes, but not in crisis. “Okay,” he tells his reflection. He takes a few deep breaths and runs through a few stretches, taking advantage of the privacy of the room—he’s been wearing his binder for close to eighteen hours now and he probably should take it off, but the idea of walking around without it in a public place makes him feel sick to his stomach—and then, rolling his shoulders one more time, he unlocks the door and counts numbers until he reaches Becca’s room.
She’s asleep when he slips inside, the lights on their dimmer switch turned down to something soft and soothing. There’s a clear IV running down to her hand where it rests on the blanket, a monitor clipped to the forefinger of the same hand, a nasal cannula still feeding her oxygen, probably a precaution against the smoke she inhaled. Someone has washed her face and braided her hair back, the ends a bit uneven where the burnt strands were cut away. She’ll want to wash it as soon as she’s discharged, maybe even before that, if she’s allowed to shower. He wonders if he can ask a nurse for some shampoo that smells like something other than bland hospital soap.
No one else is in the room. Trying not to think about why, Ezra picks up one of the chairs tucked against the wall and carries it to the bed, setting it down as quietly as he can manage. Carefully, he reaches out to take her unwired hand. It feels small in his, her fingers long and slim. Pianist fingers, if she’d stuck with the lessons she’d started when she was six and abandoned the same year. Ezra doesn’t really like his own hands—his fingers are short, and he always feels like they give him away to anyone looking to clock him. But they’re good at what they do, his hands. He can adjust the angles of someone’s hip or shoulder as they move through a vinyasa, can ease someone into an easier laboring position, can—now, after weeks of Jonathan’s careful tutelage renewing Ezra’s atrophied skills—wash someone clean of all they should leave behind.
He shifts his grip, just slightly, so that the tips of his fingers rest against the pulse at the base of her palm. It’s strong and steady, each thump of her heart a balm against the lump in his throat.
“I’m awake, you know,” Becca mumbles.
Ezra startles out of his chair. “Jesus, Becks,” he says. “You scared me.”
She blinks slowly at him, her eyes taking a moment to adjust in the dim room. “I’m sorry.”
Her voice is small and uncertain enough that he’s willing to bet she isn’t just talking about being unexpectedly awake. “Hey, no, it’s okay.” He smooths a hand over her hair. “No one’s mad at you.”
She makes a little scoffing sound, skeptical. “Okay.”
“For a given value of okay, ” Ezra clarifies. Becca laughs, tiny and wet. “Do you remember coming up here?”
Becca nods, then goes a shade paler at the motion. “They said I have a concussion so they want to keep me overnight.” The nurse had told him that when she sent him up here, but he’s glad to hear that someone told her, too, and that she was able to retain it. “And that I could sleep if I wanted to but someone would come wake me up every few hours.”
“All right.” Ezra waits. When it’s clear she’s not planning to go on, and the silence has drawn out long enough to thicken the air, he says, carefully, gently, “Becca.”
She flushes, looking down at the blanket, fingers fidgeting against the weave. “I maybe drank a lot of the vodka before I poured it on Mom’s stuff,” she admits. “I wasn’t trying to—”
“I believe you,” he says, and is a little surprised, even as he says it, to find that it’s true. She wouldn’t lie about that. Not to him. She loves him too much for that. “You could tell me, though.”
“I know.”
“And I’d listen.”
“I know that, too.” She’s quiet for a moment, her fingers tapping against his. “They told me everyone was downstairs in the waiting room, but…I don’t want to see them.”
Ezra stills. “Do you want me to go?”
She tightens her grasp on his hand, clinging. “No! No. I told them I wanted you, just not…” She looks away. “Not everybody.”
He runs his thumb over her knuckles until she stops looking like a frightened prey animal and her shoulders settle again. “It’s probably a good thing,” he says. “Things got a little heated. It’s probably better for them to cool off.”
Her eyes brighten. “Really?” she says, propping herself up on one elbow. “What—”
“Absolutely not,” he says firmly, and puts a hand on her sternum to push her back down. “Not unless you want to tell me why you’ve been yelling at Mom and not talking to anyone about it.”
“Ouch,” she says, but consents to lie back, falling silent again.
When she speaks again, her voice is quiet, almost distant. “Do you remember when I got my first period?”
Ezra blinks. “Kind of hard to forget. You were under my bed when I got home from school.”
Mom had picked Becca up early after getting a phone call from the nurse that she was absolutely inconsolable about the blood on her underwear, refusing to calm down or shower or accept any of the pads or spare clothes the school kept on hand. She’d given Becca a What to Expect When Your Uterus Is Suddenly an Actual Thing and Not Just a Concept pep talk on the ride home, and Becca promptly had another freak-out. When Ezra got home a few hours later, he found her firmly tucked against the back wall of his bedroom, as far under his bed as she could get.
“Not my best moment,” Becca says.
“I don’t think any of us have our best moments at twelve.”
“I know I had that whole meltdown, but I wasn’t really— It wasn’t like I didn’t know what was going on. Mom gave me that copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves when I was, like, nine, and we had that ridiculous puberty class at school, so it wasn’t totally out of left field, but there was just”—she gives a breathy little sigh—“the book, and the class, and God, Mom, they all made it sound like it was going to just be this whole huge life-changing thing. Like, hey, you’re a woman now! Anything you do with your body can have consequences ! Mom literally made me call Grandma when I got home from school, which was fucking mortifying, like I was some kind of menstrual debutante.”
Ezra winces. He’d been bullied into making that phone call, too, and is pretty sure he’d have found it horrifying even if he wanted to be a woman.
“Anyway.” Becca fidgets with the wire clipped to her heart monitor. Gently, Ezra pulls her hand away from it. “Do you remember what you told me, when I was done crying like a baby on your floor?”
“Only vaguely,” Ezra admits. His strongest memories of being a kid and a teenager are grounded in sensation, not in words: He remembers wedging himself uncomfortably under the bed with her, the dusty smell of the underside of the mattress and the press of the bed frame against his shoulder, how wide Becca’s eyes had been in the dark and the clutch of her smaller fingers around his hand. How she’d reached for him, absolutely sure that he’d reach back. “Nothing that traumatized you more, I hope.”
She smiles. “You told me that something happening inside my body didn’t change anything about who I was,” she says. “That my period didn’t make me a woman, not just because I was twelve and no one should be calling me a woman, but because I got to decide what I wanted it to mean, not Mom or Grandma or whoever wrote the books about puberty. Just me.”
“Huh.” It’s familiar. Not a clear memory, exactly, but it’s the kind of thing he would have said, even at sixteen and barely ready to touch the writhing mass of his gender identity with anything more than tentative fingertips. “What made you think of that?”
“I guess…” Becca chews her lip, her fingers tapping again. More a heartbeat than a waltz— one-two, one-two.
“When I left those messages for Mom, or listened to the ones when she called me back,” she says at last, “I kept thinking, Ezra would never say the things that Mom’s saying. Because Mom loved us— loves us—but she and Dad, they didn’t know how to talk to us like we were people . Like we weren’t just miniature versions of them. And I knew you would never make me feel like it’s my fault that you were anxious or stressed or not sure what to do. And, like, I know we joke about it, but there are some things where it’s like—I’ve always come to you, and not Mom. And I have friends who have older sisters—”
She breaks off, wincing, and he gives her hand what he hopes is a reassuring squeeze. He knows the difference between misgendering and whatever Becca needs to get off her chest. She squeezes back and continues, hesitant. “It’s not like I’m the only person I know who says that their big sister—big sibling—is more like their mom than their mom is sometimes. But it’s just that there are these moments where I just…I think I was treating you like you were, for real. Because Mom and Dad made it so hard to talk to them, but you were always there. You never made me feel like I couldn’t come to you. And you always made it seem like it was fine. But it wasn’t, was it? You had all that stuff you were carrying around, not just me and Aaron and Mom and Dad, but you were literally haunted, Ezra, and—and after everything that happened with Mom, when you actually let us see how stressed and overwhelmed you were, I just— I didn’t want to—”
Her voice cracks and she falters, blinking rapidly. Ezra’s heart breaks in two. “Oh, no, no, no,” he says, and, less careful of the wires than he should be, he pulls her into a hug, feels her bury her face into his shoulder. “No. Okay? No. You haven’t done anything wrong and I would never ever resent you or get frustrated with you or—”
“But you do, ” she says, half muffled into his shirt, and he pulls back enough so he can hear her properly. “I can tell. You’ve been so burned-out, and you’re— God, Ezra, you’re trying to fix things for people who aren’t even alive anymore! How can I not feel like an asshole for—”
She stops, and pales. For a moment he thinks she’s pushed herself too hard with the concussion and she’s going to be sick, and he’s leaned halfway over to pick up the bedpan when she says, horrified, “Oh my God. Oh my God, Jonathan . Ezra, I’m so sorry .”
“What?” He startles, and then the pieces click together. “Oh. Don’t—don’t worry about that.”
“Of course I’m going to worry about it,” she says. “I can’t believe I said— Did you two break up? God, you were finally doing something that made you happy, I’m such an idiot. Did I ruin it?”
“You didn’t ruin anything,” he says immediately. He takes her hands in his, squeezing hard. “Okay? Hey. You have never ruined anything for me.”
She sniffles, nodding, and Ezra breathes out, sitting back in his chair and loosening his grip on her hands. “Honestly,” he says, feeling suddenly too exhausted to stand, “you were right about what you said. I was lying to him, and I shouldn’t have been. If anyone ruined anything, it was me.”
Becca looks heartbroken, fresh tears spilling down her face. Ezra clicks his tongue and reaches over to pull a tissue from the box on the rolling table by the bed, dabbing her cheeks until she wrinkles her nose and takes it from him to do it herself. “You were going to tell him,” she says. “I know you were.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But I didn’t. And as secrets to keep go”—he toys with a loose thread on her blanket, then forces himself to let go before he starts pulling on it enough to make it unravel—“I don’t know. I owe him about ten times that many apologies now. I said some things that I shouldn’t have, and—I didn’t deserve someone like him to begin with. I definitely don’t deserve him now.”
“Ezra,” Becca says, with a particular note of exasperation he recognizes from a hundred lectures from Ollie and Nina about his self-esteem, but something in the way he looks must stop her from launching into one because she doesn’t say anything more than his name, just sighs and presses the heels of her palms briefly to her eyes like she’s steeling herself. “Okay,” she says, and then picks her head up, fixing him with a look that’s so like Mom’s I am the parent, actually, so do not bullshit me expression that Ezra nearly laughs in spite of himself. “I’m going to ask you something and I don’t want you to get mad at me.”
“I don’t think that statement has ever been followed by something good,” Ezra says. She glares at him, and he puts his hands up. “Okay. Ask.”
She looks at him for another moment, then takes a deep breath. “Are you okay ?”
He opens his mouth to answer with the obvious: He’s fine. Of course he’s fine. It’s his job to be fine.
Instead, to his horror, the tightness he’d finally managed to work out of his throat clenches, spreading up to his mouth until he can feel his lips start trembling, to his eyes until they’re hot and stinging. He digs his teeth into the inside of his cheek and looks up at the ceiling, as if by counting the panels he can shove any trace of tears from his face.
“Ezra?”
“Just—” His voice breaks and he clamps his mouth shut before anything else can slip out. He pushes back the chair and stands up, his body moving like a possessed thing, and he takes a few steps away from the bed, as though a few feet of distance could take the question away.
“Oh, no, don’t,” Becca says. The bed makes an ominous sound and Ezra turns back around at the first rustle of her attempt to scramble at the wires, even before she lets out another frustrated “Fuck!” at the realization that she’s connected to too many monitors to climb after him. “I’m sorry. Okay? Forget I asked. I didn’t mean to make things worse.”
“You didn’t,” he says, carefully untangling the few lines she’s managed to fuss with and pushing her back onto the pillow. And then, in case that’s not clear enough, “You don’t .”
“You don’t look like I didn’t make things worse.” She reaches out her hand for his, and he takes it. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
Ezra swallows carefully, looking down at their joined hands. “I think,” he says honestly, maybe more honest than he’s been in years, “that if I talk, I will have an absolute breakdown.”
“Oh.” Becca hesitates. “You could, though. If you wanted.”
A laugh bubbles out of him like he’s taken a punch to the gut. “Thanks.”
“I’m just saying. It’s kind of your turn.”
“I’ll take a raincheck,” he says, because he’s only barely holding it together, and if she asks him one more time if he’s okay he really will lose his absolute shit, and then they’ll both end up admitted. “Besides,” he says, “I think we’re still doing yours, and I’d hate to steal the spotlight.”
She tightens her grip on his hand until he feels the fragile bones in his fingers shift, and says, in a very small voice, “If we’re still doing mine, can I have a hug?”
He gets up and shifts to sit on the edge of her bed, and when she leans into him, he folds her into his arms like he had when she was little, when she needed someone to tell her that everything was okay and their parents were too busy to do it themselves. Her fingers dig into the fabric of his shirt and she presses her face into his shoulder, squeezing until he feels the breath stutter in his lungs, and when he says, “Becks, Becca, Becca-girl,” in the fragile quiet of the room, she starts to cry—big, heaving sobs that rattle her in the circle of his arms like a bird throwing itself into the bars of a cage.
These aren’t talking tears, he knows. He just holds her, because it’s something he can do, something simple and uncomplicated and instinctive. A use for his body that doesn’t hurt.