53. Not Me
not me
julian
The last mile is always the best one. The morning air was crisp and cool, the sky blue and clear.
A year ago I’d run my last mile thinking about the things I needed to accomplish for the day. Now, I ran it thinking about the woman asleep in my bed, picking up the pace to get back to her faster.
It’s amazing how drastically things can change in the course of a year. I used to be so sure I didn’t want this. Knew for a fact that I wasn’t built for it. Being wrong about that turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.
I was happy, and I was in love.
I came around the corner of my building and slowed to a walk to cool down. The doorman saw me as I passed through the lobby and lifted a hand.
“Good morning, Mr. Wade.”
“Morning, Fredrick.” I waved as I got on the elevator. I rode up and let myself in. I had my water bottle in my left hand, and pulled my phone out with my right, turning my music off as I walked inside.
I immediately heard a sound I did not recognize. A pained, wet sound. I stopped and tilted my head. Someone was crying?
“Alyssa,” I called out and began walking through my foyer into the living room.
The kitchen became visible from the entry, and I saw it before I understood I was seeing it.
Blood. A dark spreading gloss across the hardwood that my brain tried to call anything else. Spilled juice. Spilled anything. Then I saw the shapes on it. A body? Two of them. Two bodies on my kitchen floor in a pool of it, and one of them was—
I shook my head rapidly trying to wake myself up.
The dreams are back. Only now more vivid and real.
I paused again, confused, trying to ground myself in where I was in space.
I dropped my water bottle and the sound of the metal hitting the ground and the clink of it rolling away, snapped me into the reality that I was actually awake. You’re not dreaming.
I started walking again, with no clear thought anywhere in me. Then I started running toward the heap of two bodies.
One of them was Alyssa.
I knew the shape of her body the way I knew my own. She was on her back, half under another person. I saw the back of a woman. I could not see her face.
This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.
I repeated over and over as I ran, then dropped, then slid onto the floor, with the blood slick under my knees, and my arms reaching out.
I pulled the other body off Alyssa. Didn’t even look at it.
It was a mass between me and her, and I threw it off, and it landed making a sound, and I didn’t care.
I got my arms under Alyssa and pulled her into my chest. Her eyes were closed and her head rolled against my shoulder.
There was so much blood I couldn’t tell whose.
My heart started a flat hard hammering that filled my ears and pulled the sound out of the room.
The edges of everything around me went bright and narrow and a sound came out of me that I didn’t know I was capable of making.
“NOOOOOOO!” I cried, cradling her. “No no no no no. ALYSSAAAA! Wake up. WAKE UP! Wake up, baby. Pleeeease, Gorgeous, pleeeeease.”
She didn’t answer.
I laid her down and began checking her body.
My hands were everywhere. Lifting her shirt, checking her stomach, her ribs, her chest, her back.
She had a small cut on the back of her hand, her shirt was covered in blood, blood on her face, on her arms, and thighs, but I could not find the wound. I could not find it.
Couldn’t understand what was happening. Then I realized her chest was moving. I put my ear to her mouth, and could feel and hear that she was breathing.
I lifted her up again and wanted to shake her, but stopped myself, unsure of her injuries. I tapped her cheek. Finally, she began to groan, her eyes opening to slits.
“Alyssa!” I cradled her head in my lap and looked down at her. “Where, Lyss? Baby. Baby. Where are you hurt? Where?”
Her eyes moved slow from the ceiling to me.
“Where, Lyss? Show me!”
I looked across the room and saw my phone on the floor. I must have dropped it. I needed to get it, but I couldn’t bring myself to let her go. Her eyes slid past me and came back again, her mouth opened, and what came out was almost nothing.
“Not me.”
I couldn’t understand it. “Show me—”
“Not me, Julian.”
She lifted her hand and put it to my face, held my eyes, and said it once more.
“Not me.” She started to cry and I held her against me, both arms, crushing her in, rocking her, kissing all over her face, repeating: “thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you God, thank you Lord, thank you, thank you, thank you…” like I knew no other words.
She was alive. Shaking, crying, and covered in — whose blood?
“Alyssa, who—”
“Julian,” her voice came from somewhere far off, not all the way back in her body. “She’s bleeding… she’s gonna die… you have to call.”
I turned my head.
The body I’d pushed off her had a face now.
It was Sabrina. On her back, conscious, a robe hanging off one arm, in her underwear.
She was clutching her stomach and blood was pooling out between her fingers.
A knife sat on the floor beside her. Her eyes were on me, almost relieved that I had noticed her.
The part of me that had begun to put itself back together understood that she had come into my house, to take Alyssa from Micah. To take Alyssa from me. And now there she was, having the nerve to look at me like I was about to save her.
I let her see that I was not. I didn’t move.
“Julian.” Alyssa’s hand turned my face back to hers. “We have to call 911.”
“Let her bleed.”
“Julian…”
“Let. Her.”
Alyssa started to shake her head no, then winced, clutching the back of it. “Ahhh,” she hissed. “No. We have to call.”
“No. She tried to kill you, Lyss.”
She put both hands flat to my chest and pushed me back, pulling herself out of my lap, and crawled to the woman who’d come here to kill her. She pressed both hands down over her wound, and looked back at me.
“Call now, Julian.”
I nodded, suddenly ashamed at the murderous thoughts running through my mind.
I walked to where my phone lay, grabbed it and called 911. The dispatcher told me to stay on the line, until police and EMTs got there. I put it on speaker, grabbed dishtowels and knelt down next to Alyssa, taking her hands off Sabrina and replacing them with the dishtowels and mine.
Alyssa slumped back against the cabinets, and exhaled.
I made myself look at Sabrina. She was still conscious but clearly weak, watching me.
“Julian…” she whispered. “I’m— ahhh!”
I’d pressed down harder, and whatever she’d been about to say broke off.
I wasn’t going to hear it. Telling her to be quiet would have been giving her my voice.
Instead, I gave her the pressure that kept her alive and nothing else.
I held her eyes to let her see what was in mine.
Her face changed, and she swallowed, turning her head to the side, away from my eyes.
I never looked at her again.
The paramedics arrived in minutes, with police alongside them. I let them in and got out of their way as they focused on Sabrina first, since she was critically wounded.
Alyssa was still sitting with her back against the cabinet under the sink, dazed. I picked her up off the floor, carried her to the couch, and sat down with her on my lap, with my arms tight around her. I couldn’t let go.
“Does anything hurt, Lyss?”
“Head.” She took too long a pause. “Hit it. My leg.”
“Okay. Okay.” I pushed her hair back to find her eyes. She’d gone somewhere. Her gaze slid off my face to a point past me, to nothing, and stayed there. I held her, with one hand on the back of her neck, the other around her back, and pressed her to me.
She didn’t say another full sentence for a long time.
“Lyss, let’s get this off you. Go change,” I said, preparing to take her to my room. I wanted the blood off her, off her skin, off her hands.
“Sir.” The beat cop’s hand came up. “I need her exactly as she is. Don’t move her, don’t clean her, don’t wash. I’m sorry.”
I looked at him and understanding dawned on me.
She was evidence.
Then it hit me. Sabrina might die. If she died, self-defense or not, there would be investigations, potential charges. I was already moving.
If she died, it would not immediately matter that she’d broken into my home. There was a knife, and a body, and there would be questions that might not care what was obviously true. They would question Alyssa. They could even take her in.
I had to get in front of it. I took my phone out with one hand, while caressing her back with the other.
I called my lawyer first. “It’s Julian. There’s been an assault at my condo. The intruder is being transported now with a bad stab wound. I need you here. Now. Bring whoever you need.”
Then I called Kendra. She was an ADA, and even though she wouldn’t be assigned the case because of the conflict being my cousin, she knew the building this would arrive at.
She knew the prosecutors, the detectives, the way a clean story could get twisted in the first hour if the wrong person asked the wrong questions before a victim had her head checked.
She would be conflicted out of anything official.
I knew that. But she would know how to stand in the room and make sure nobody forgot Alyssa was a victim.
“Kendra. A woman broke into my home and attacked Alyssa with a knife. Alyssa’s okay. The woman is not. I need you here.”
“On my way,” was all she said before she hung up.
Alyssa was still in shock and didn’t respond when I asked for any of her sisters’ numbers.
I called Raschad and got his voicemail. I couldn’t leave that kind of message, so I called down to Fredrick in the lobby.
“Alyssa’s sisters are staying in her unit.
I need you to knock on her door and get them.
Tell them she’s safe, but there’s been an incident, and escort them up. ”
“Yes, Mr. Wade.”
My double doors were wide open, and her sisters hit them running up five minutes later, stopped at the threshold by the officer posted there.
Jordan and Jada shrieked and they looked through the house to see Alyssa in my lap covered in blood.
Tamika began yelling and pushing at the officer to let them through.
“Let them in,” I shouted out. “Let them in.”
Just then, Kendra arrived, badge up, moving past the officer. “ADA Wade,” she said. “They’re with me.” Over her shoulder, she gestured to Alyssa’s sisters to follow, instructing them: “Just to Alyssa. Do not touch anything.”
Jada was across the room and on her knees, both hands on Alyssa’s face, saying her name over and over.
“Alyssa! Alyssa! Why isn’t she talking? Is she hurt?
Look at me.” Jordan dropped beside her with her hands over her own mouth, asking me whose blood, and what happened.
I told her what I could, which wasn’t much.
They wheeled Sabrina past a few minutes later. She was calling my name when they took her by us, “Julian… Julian.” I sat with my back half to her and my hand on the back of Alyssa’s neck and did not turn my head. Her voice got smaller down the hall, and then it was gone.
When the detective assigned arrived, Kendra pulled him aside.
She knew him. “I’m family, and I’m conflicted out.
I’m not touching the investigation. But she needs medical evaluation before anyone takes a statement.
” She got cleared to be taken in for evaluation before being questioned.
Shock, protocol, any statement later, through counsel, on our terms. They brought a gurney and a blanket for her shoulders, and they let me ride with her.
I climbed into the back and sat on the bench beside her and took her hand in both of mine and a realization hit me at my core:
My father rode in the back of one of these with my mother and came home without her. He’d run to her and picked her up off the floor and begged her to stay, and she couldn’t, and he fell completely apart.
And for the first time in my life I thought: of course he did. This feeling that I had, in that moment, with the woman I loved, still breathing under my hands was almost more than I could stand up under.
And she was alive. The love of my father’s life, wasn’t.
So of course. Of course he came apart. Of course he left. He had this same feeling and an empty bed. I’d get to have my woman. He got the grave.
I shut it down before it could open all the way. Not now.
I had almost lost her. I wasn’t going to think about that. I held her hand, and I didn’t let go, the whole way.