Steal It For Him
alyssa
I couldn’t let it go.
A week had passed since Julian made it crystal clear that his trauma, his grief, his father, were all subjects marked “Do Not Enter” in permanent red ink, and then went right back to being perfectly, attentively normal with me, the walls behind his eyes reinforced now with steel.
It was a Tuesday evening, and Julian was in his office taking a late call with someone in LA.
Micah was at basketball practice with Zhaire and Raschad.
I was supposed to be reviewing case files, but instead I sat at Julian’s table staring at my laptop screen, unable to focus on anything except the man down the hall who gave me everything while refusing to take anything in return.
That was what I couldn’t get past. The inequality of it.
Julian had spent months creating a safe space for me and all the ways trauma shaped me into someone who struggled to receive love even when I desperately wanted it.
He’d created a space soft enough that I’d started to finally set my weight down in it.
And I couldn’t do the same for him, because his walls were higher than mine, built out of years of being the man who solves the problem instead of the man who has them.
The irony would have been funny if it hadn’t been so heartbreaking. I fought receiving. He fought needing. And somehow we’d found this dynamic where we could each see exactly what the other required and battle to give it to them, while being unable to accept it ourselves.
Except Julian’s battle was so much harder than mine because he was fighting against everything he thought it meant to be a man, a leader, the head of his family. Nobody really questioned why Alyssa struggled to accept help. Everyone expected Julian to be the one providing it.
Which left me with one fact, turning it over at his kitchen table while he took a late call down the hall: Julian would never walk into a therapist’s office for himself. Not in this life. But he had never once, in the time we’d been together, been able to say no to me when I needed him.
That was the door. It had been the door the whole time.
I grabbed my phone and started googling “grief support groups Lennox Falls area.” I needed one that met in the evening, one that allowed support people to attend, one that focused on general grief rather than specific types of loss.
Twenty minutes later I had it: Hope & Healing, Thursday nights at a church, seven o’clock, run by a counselor named Candace. Partners welcome, the site said. Especially for the first few sessions.
I wasn’t naive enough to think one night would fix a man who’d spent eighteen years refusing to be fixed.
That wasn’t my plan. My plan was smaller, and the smallness of it was what I told myself made it forgivable: just get him in the room.
Make him sit in it. Let him hear strangers say the quiet parts out loud, and trust that a man as smart as Julian, once he’d actually felt what that room did, would do the rest himself.
He would decide, on his own, that maybe it was something he needed.
Now I just needed a reason to suddenly need grief counseling that wouldn’t make him suspicious.
I thought about the night I got the email from Malik’s mistress and how I fell apart in Julian’s arms over it until there was nothing left in me but exhaustion and, somehow, peace.
He didn’t know that the thing that healed me that night was him. I was essentially over it. Accepted it. But… I could use that. God help me, I could use that as a cover story.
He came back from his call and dropped into the chair across from me, that tension around his eyes that meant the LA people had been difficult. He reached over and squeezed my hand. “You okay? You seem far away.”
There it was. The opening, handed to me by his own care.
“I’ve been thinking. About Malik’s daughter.” I let the real part of it into my voice, because that part was true. “It’s bringing up more than I expected. I think I want to talk to somebody about it.”
His face shifted straight to concern. “Okay. I can find you somebody. Private, one-on-one, whenever works for your schedule. You don’t have to —”
“I don’t want one-on-one. Not at first.” It came out faster than I meant it, and I had to slow down and build the rest while he watched me.
“I mean — I’m sure I might, eventually, if I need it.
But there’s something about being in a room with other people who’ve gone through similar things.
Knowing you’re not the only one. I found a group. It meets Thursdays.”
“A group?” I watched him weigh it, looking for the more efficient solution. “Strangers in a circle, Lyss?”
“I’ve done it before. You’d be surprised.” Then I reached for the part that would close it, and it had the advantage of being true. “Do you mind taking me? It’s at night. Seven o’clock. Church basement.”
I didn’t need to say the rest, I knew his wheels would be turning.
I’d be walking into a building full of strangers in the dark, by myself, to talk about the worst time of my life.
I made myself hold his eyes, even though I was starting to feel guilty.
“Just the first time? I know it’s asking a lot... ”
“Of course,” he replied without hesitation. “Whatever you need.”
The ease with which he agreed made my guilt rise up in my throat.
Because that’s who he is. A man who would drop everything to sit in an uncomfortable room if it meant I wouldn’t have to sit in it by myself.
The irony is devastating: Julian giving me exactly what I needed, without a second thought, and there I was using his good nature as the vehicle to get him what he needs but won’t accept.
“Thank you,” I said and I meant it because the space he gave me, he gave freely.
I was going to have to steal it for him.
julian
I stood outside the church for a full minute, checking my phone for any urgent messages that might give me an excuse to stay outside. There wasn’t one.
I wasn’t worried about myself in there. Years in rooms full of other people’s pain.
I’d sat with Simone through panic attacks, talked Zion off ledges, held Tre at two in the morning, and never once let any of it reach the part I keep sealed.
I’m good in those rooms. Nevertheless, this wasn’t exactly how I’d prefer to spend my Thursday evening.
“Ready?” Alyssa said, beside me.
“Should be asking you that.”
“Yeah.”
The basement smelled like coffee and that air freshener every church in the South uses. Metal folding chairs were arranged in a circle, with eight or nine people settling in.
A woman who looked about my age with tired eyes looked up. “Welcome.”
“Hello, I’m Alyssa. This is Julian. He’s… he’s just here for support, if that’s okay.”
“Of course. I’m Candace. Sit wherever you’re comfortable. No pressure to say anything tonight. First time, you’re allowed to just be in the room and get a feel for us. Share when you’re ready, whenever that is.”
Alyssa nodded and took a chair in the circle. I slid one out half a step behind her, just outside the circle, making it clear that I was not part of the thing.
“Let’s begin,” Candace said. “Sharing’s always optional. Margaret, you want to start us?”
An older woman with salt-and-pepper hair nodded and just jumped right in, surprising me.
“It’s been three years since my husband.
” She steadied herself. “I still buy his cereal. Last week I made his coffee the way he took it and stood there looking at the second cup, trying to remember who it was for…They tell me it gets easier. Some mornings feel like he died yesterday. I’ll catch a song, or his cologne on a stranger, and lose him all over again. ”
Nods and small sounds of recognition went around the circle.
Then a man working his hands went next. Robert.
“My son died in Afghanistan.” He played with a band on his finger.
“Everybody tells me to be proud he died serving. But I’ll be straight with you, because that’s what this room’s for.
” He looked up. “I’m pissed. Because he chose to go.
I begged him not to enlist. We fought about it for a year.
He went anyway and now he’s gone. That’s what eats me alive, the part I can’t say to his mother.
He didn’t have to be gone. He chose the thing that took him.
He didn’t have to be gone. And then I feel guilty for being angry when I should be proud of his service. ”
A feeling came up in me, fast, and it took me a second to understand it wasn’t sympathy for Robert. It was empathy. Because I understood it. The anger blending in with the sadness.
My father. I’d begged him to come home. He stayed gone anyway. Gone because of a choice he didn’t have to make.
I pushed it down. Not the same thing. Pops isn’t dead. Not the same thing.
My body didn’t care about the distinction. The feeling was identical. I’d carried that feeling for years and never said it out loud. And a man I’d never met had just said it out loud in a church basement. I’m pissed. I looked at the floor.
“Anger and grief can live at the same time,” Candace said to him.
“People think they have to pick one. You don’t.
They’ll live in there together for a good while.
And you keep apologizing for the anger, Robert.
You decided your job was to keep the family standing, so you don’t let yourself shake.
But holding everybody up doesn’t move the grief anywhere.
It just sends it somewhere nobody can see it. ”
I wanted to get up, walk out, wait for Alyssa in the car. Let her have her hour. I didn’t, because leaving would have told her something was wrong, and nothing was wrong. So I shifted in the folding chair and worked a slow breath out without letting my shoulders move.
Then another woman spoke. She’d come in with an older woman I’d taken for her mother and who turned out to be her sister.