Someone Who Worshipped You
julian
I hadn't stayed when I dropped Micah off. It wasn't my place to sit in the middle of that. But I’d caught Alyssa’s face at the door before I left, the careful flat look she put on when something had gotten to her and she’d decided not to let it show.
It stayed with me upstairs. I gave it a couple hours, long enough for the visit to be over, and texted.
You survive?
Barely. She counted my bedrooms.
Did you eat?
I made chicken and rice. There's a plate down here with your name on it if you want it.
On my way down.
From a woman who didn’t ask anybody for anything, that was Alyssa asking for company. She opened the door in sweats with her hair tied up in a head wrap, a glass of wine poured, a plate for me already fixed. She handed it to me curled into the end of the couch. I took the other end.
“Micah?”
“Out cold.”
“How was the visit?”
She let out a breath. “She checked the fridge. Counted the bedrooms. Told me the office was a waste of a perfectly good room. The usual inspection.”
She said it lightly, but whatever her mother had come and done, she’d left Alyssa weighed down. I could see it sitting on her.
I ate, and let her talk.
“Sometimes I think Micah’s the only thing I got right,” she said suddenly.
“You’ve gotten plenty right.”
“Have I?” She laughed, and it had an edge. “I’ve made some spectacular mistakes.”
“Like what?”
“Like marrying a man I knew was wrong for me.”
It hung there. I kept my face even. I’d read the headlines, heard Raschad’s version. Hearing it from her was different.
“How did you end up with him?”
She studied her wine a moment. “You ever do something because it’s easier than fighting? Because everybody expects it?”
“No.”
That got a real laugh. “Of course not. Julian Wade doesn’t bend to expectations.”
“Neither does the woman who stormed into my office.”
“That woman came later. After. Twenty-something me was different. My mother introduced us at church. He was available. Interested.” Her voice flattened into an impression. “Time’s running out, she’d tell me. Good men don’t wait forever, Alyssa.”
The pain under her mimicry was loud.
“So you married him.”
“I married him. And it’s not like I didn’t see it.
” She pulled her feet up under her. “There were signs. Plenty of them, before the wedding. I just got good at explaining them away.” She was quiet a second.
“One I should’ve listened to. The day I passed the bar.
Seven years of school. One of the hardest exams in the country.
I called him crying, I was so happy. You know what he said?
” She looked up at me. “Cool. Then he asked if I was picking up dinner on the way home.”
My hand had closed into a fist somewhere in there. The man was dead and I still wanted to put him on the floor.
“And I excused that too,” she said. “Told myself he just wasn’t an emotional man like that. That he showed it in other ways.” She shook her head. “He didn’t show it in other ways. There were no other ways.”
“And you stayed,” I said.
“I stayed. Had Micah. Kept pretending, because leaving meant admitting I’d been wrong. Meant all those years were for nothing.” She turned the glass slowly. “The marriage was already gone by the time he was killed. Especially after Micah got hurt.”
“What happened to Micah?”
Her body tensed. “He got injured when he was two. Malik called me from the ER. Micah had fallen and split his head open. Claimed he’d just gone to the bathroom for a minute and it happened that fast.”
Something in her tone made me go cold. “Claimed?”
“Part of me never fully believed him. But I wasn’t there, so I took him at his word. We had two visits from CPS over it. I was livid. Then he was killed and at the murder trial, his mistress testified. She was at my house at the time. In our bed, with Malik, while Micah was left downstairs alone.”
I didn’t move.
“Micah got hungry and tried to climb the counter. Fell and hit his head on the corner. A neighbor heard him screaming and called 911. Not his father. A neighbor.”
The rage that went through me was like something I had never felt before. “I’m sorry, Alyssa,” was all I could manage.
Tears welled in her eyes. “The scar on Micah’s forehead? Every time I see it, it’s a reminder of my poor choices. I chose Malik.”
“That’s not on you.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You weren’t in that house. Every part of it is his. You don’t get to take it on just because he’s not here to hold it anymore.”
She wiped under her eyes. “Sitting on the other side of it, I can’t believe how oblivious I was.
How foolish. The affairs. The debt. Years of it, hidden from me.
Things I’d signed without reading, because I trusted that he handled the paperwork.
Me a lawyer, being so dumb as to accept his CliffsNotes and not actually read what he handed me to sign.
By the time it all came out, it was over a million dollars of debt. ”
“He left you a million in the hole?”
She nodded. “Fought it down to under half. Then I stopped fighting and filed. I wanted to be free more than I wanted to be right. So I let it all go. The house with it.”
“You lost your home too?”
She shrugged. “That one I didn’t grieve. The equity was gone anyway, and every room had his smell in it. Where he cheated. Where Micah got hurt. I didn't get to sell it on my own terms, but I was relieved when it went, even though it was taken.”
She went somewhere else for a second.
“The thing that really got me? I had this bracelet,” she said.
“An Alhambra Van Cleef. I’d bought it myself after I passed the bar.
Day after he said cool and picked his controller back up.
I sat in that apartment and I thought, fine.
Fine. If he’s not going to mark it, I will.
I’d saved months for it. Wore it the first day I ever argued a case, and every time I argued anything after.
I sold it in the aftermath. The house I let go of and didn’t look back.
Because the house was ours and there was no us. That bracelet was all mine.”
I didn’t say anything. My quiet was where she kept going, so I let her. She looked down at her hands, then, almost to herself: “Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d just waited. If I’d believed back then that I deserved better. Where I’d be.”
“You’d have found someone who worshipped you.” It was out of me before I’d even thought about it.
She went still and looked at me with a surprised expression. For a moment neither of us said anything, just sat there looking at each other with what I’d said floating in the air between us, too true to take back and too dangerous to pick up.
She dropped her eyes to her drink, settling into a small smile. “Well, he’d have had to get past my mother’s opinions first,” she said, reaching for an exit ramp.
“He would’ve been able to handle that too,” I doubled down, grinning at her.
She shook her head, and laughed, and the air in the room came back down.
But I felt it, still there. The thing I’d said and the way she’d gone still before she let it go. I wasn’t foolish enough to think it had been nothing. Just careful enough not to reach further for it.