Cemeteries & Birthdays
alyssa
I knew it was their mother’s birthday before anyone said a word. Julian moved through his morning routine like he was bracing for something.
I’d offered to stay at his house with the kids while he drove with his siblings to the cemetery.
It made the most sense. Zion would have Taryn there to lean on, Simone would have Raschad, Tre would be there and Julian would have all of them.
I was the only adult in the rotation who wasn’t somebody’s spouse, which made me the logical one to keep Zaria and the boys.
Whatever Julian and I were didn’t earn me a place at the edge of his mother’s grave, and I didn’t pretend it did.
They didn’t treat me like an outsider, though.
Simone handed me Zaria as Zhaire came through the door at a dead sprint looking for Micah. Julian waited by the door with his keys already in his hand. Zion, Tre and Simone drifted toward him like he was the thing that held the shape of the day.
“Y’all ready?” he said.
They nodded.
He walked back over to me. “This won’t be but a couple hours. Take whatever you need from the kitchen. Zaria likes the—”
“I know what Zaria likes.” I bounced her on my hip. “Go on. We’ll be here.”
He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Thank you.” Then they left.
The boys disappeared into video games. Zaria toddled around the living room laying claim to everything she could reach. I kept checking my phone anyway, for nothing, wondering whether driving out to your mother’s grave got easier over eighteen years or just quieter.
When they came back, I knew right away something was off.
Not in an obvious way. Simone was talking low with Zion. Tre was on his phone, ordinary. But Julian was moving too careful. “How are you?” I asked when he sat down beside me.
“Fine.” Clipped. “Good that they got time with her.”
They. Not we.
He pulled Zaria up into his lap, and his free hand kept opening and closing against his thigh.
Later, while he was upstairs changing, I was wiping down the kitchen when Simone lingered.
“How was it?” I asked. “Out there.”
“Hard. It’s always hard.” She paused like she was thinking. “Can I tell you something I probably shouldn’t?”
“Um. Sure.”
“Julian doesn’t come to the grave.” She said it to the sink, not to me.
“He drives us out there every year, and he parks in the same spot, and he stands by the car. We walk out to Mama’s headstone, and he stays back.
Forty, fifty yards. Hands in his pockets.
Watches us like his role is just to be driver. ”
I didn’t say anything. I was afraid if I did she’d stop.
“When we were younger we’d beg him. Come up with us, Julian.
” She sighed. “He always had a reason. Year after year. He says the same four words, y’all go ahead.
And on the walk back you can watch him put his face away, piece by piece, so that by the time we reach him he’s already fine. He’s already asking who wants lunch.”
She finally looked at me.
“He gets us to her. Every birthday. He just never himself. Eighteen years, and I have never seen my brother standing at our mother’s headstone.
” She sniffled. “I don’t know why I’m telling you.
It just felt like you ought to know what kind of day this really is for him.
Since y’all are together now. Because he won’t tell you. He’ll tell you it was fine.”
She wiped her eyes and started putting dishes away, and I stood there holding a dish towel I’d stopped using, putting the whole day back together in a different order.
The they, not we.
I’d spent the morning telling myself I wasn’t close enough to him to stand at that grave.
I wasn’t a spouse. But there was no standing at that grave.
He didn’t go himself. I hadn’t been left at the house because I was too far from his center.
I’d been left at the house because the place I thought I wasn’t allowed into was a place he had not allowed himself into.
* * *
That evening he seemed back to his normal self. But I kept catching the way he ran every conversation toward somebody else and away from himself, so smooth you’d miss it if you weren’t watching. I was watching now.
We were laid out on the couch doing nothing really. His phone in one hand, the other rubbing my leg, when I realized his screen was blank and he was staring at nothing.
“Julian.”
He blinked back into the room. “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“Just tired. Long day.”
I sat up and squeezed myself behind him, sliding my arms around him, pressing my cheek between his shoulder blades, and held on.
He went still. Then, by degrees, he relaxed against me. His hands came up and closed over mine and held them to his chest, and under them his heart was going too fast.
We stayed like that a long time. Not saying anything.
Julian carried everyone. His sister, his brothers, the boys, the label, me. He got there first, every time, for everybody. Sitting there with my arms around a man who guarded his own heartbeat like it was something that could be used against him, I asked myself: Who did that for him?
“Better?” I said into his back.
His hands tightened over mine. “Yeah. Thank you.”
He turned in my arms and kissed me, still holding the last of it back.
Eighteen years he’d driven them out there and stood at the edge of it. I didn’t have the first idea how to walk a man across a distance like that without sending him running the other way.
But I was going to try.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“When your mother died.” I kept my voice even. “How did you get through it?”
“We all dealt with it our own ways.”
“I’m not asking how the family dealt with it. I mean how did you.”
“I just did. I was busy taking care of things.”
“You were nineteen, Julian. And you were taking care of things? Who took care of you?”
“Where is this going?” He turned to face me, and I should have read the set of his shoulders and let it go. I didn’t.
“You think there’s a problem? It’s been eighteen years,” he said. “If there was a problem, I think it would’ve shown itself by now.”
“Maybe it has.”
He stared at me. “Meaning?”
“Meaning you’ve driven your family to your mother’s grave for eighteen years and stand at the car.”
His face changed and he shook his head. “Simone.”
I kept going, because I’d started and I didn’t know how to stop.
“There’s a piano in your house you keep covered like it isn’t there, and an amazing voice you swallow down like it doesn’t exist. You talk about your family’s grief from the outside.
They, them. As if you aren’t a direct part of that. Probably more direct than anyone else.”
“You’ve been paying a lot of attention. Taking notes?” he said sarcastically.
My heart started racing. “I’m not trying to catch you at something, Julian. I just see a man who carries every single one of us and won’t set any of it down. It scares me. For you.”
“I don’t need to be worried about. I’m good. I’ve been good. And I don’t need taking care of.”
“Everybody does. Especially the ones who’ve decided they’re the only ones who don’t. Ask me how I know?”
He went quiet, and I felt the whole thing tilting toward a place I couldn’t see the bottom of, and instead of stepping back from the edge I walked straight off it.
“What about your father?”
He went completely rigid in a way I’d never seen on him.
“What about him?”
“Do you talk to him, ever? Where is he?”
“That’s not your business.” He said it cold in a way he had never been with me.
“I’m… I’m asking because I —” I caught it, barely. “Because I care about you, and there’s this part of your life with a wall around it, and —”
“Because it needs a wall. Some things you leave alone, Alyssa.”
“Or some things are just easier not to look at.”
“Alyssa.”
There was a warning in his tone I’d never heard from him, and I knew I’d pushed too far. He looked at me for a long moment, and his expression softened. When he spoke again, the cold had gone out of it. He was trying.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to talk to somebody.” It came out like the line I’d been practicing in my head over and over. Clinical and small, and the wrong tone for the moment.
“You mean a therapist?”
“A therapist. A grief counselor. Somebody who…”
“Who what? Who’s qualified to tell me how I should feel?”
He looked at me with a face I hadn’t seen before.
“Julian. Can I just explain? I think you’ve been carrying this for eighteen years, and I think you’re tired. I think it’s starting to show in places you can’t see it. And I think if you talked to somebody who knew how to listen to a man like you—”
“A man like me?”
“Don’t do that.”
“You said it. You don’t think I’ve thought about this?”
“What?”
“Therapy. You don’t think I’ve considered it?”
“I don’t know if you have. I’m asking.”
“I’ve sent Zion to therapists for his anger. I sent Simone to one for anxiety. I made Tre go, once, when he wouldn’t on his own. I understand therapy. How it works, who it helps, when to call. I haven’t gone myself, because I don’t need to.”
“Okay, but—”
“I don’t have eighteen years’ worth of bad time to hand a stranger in a room with a notepad.”
It was the first true thing he’d said since the conversation started. I felt the door crack, and I leaned toward it before I could lose my nerve.
“Then give it to me.”
He didn’t answer.
“Julian. You don’t have to give it to a stranger. Give it to me. I’d carry it. I’d sit with you. I would—”
“Lyss. No.” He stood. “I think I’m going to turn in early. You and Micah staying, or you want me to drop you home?”
“Staying…” I said small. “If that’s—”
“Okay. I’m going to take a shower then.”
He got up and went upstairs and I heard the bedroom door close. I sat there on his couch, and didn’t move. I’d reached for the yards of grass between him and the grave he wouldn’t go to. And he’d done to me exactly what he did to it. He’d stood at the edge, and he’d stayed by the car.