Chapter 44 Impossible Balance
Impossible Balance
Overcooked asparagus and rubber chicken roiled in Evan’s gut. He moved into the parking lot, cut behind the row of stores and restaurants to the west, and barfed in front of a dumpster.
Hand in front of his mouth like an idiot, spewing everywhere, like he’d never cleared bad food from his system before.
Splattering his shirt, his arm, his stupid fancy boots, everything a mess.
It was thundering in his ears, sensation and knowing—how profoundly he didn’t fit here, anywhere, how lacking he was to encounter the world on its actual terms. He’d been designed wrong, sharpened and tempered like a sword, sent into the worst of humanity as a thing of destruction, and there was no coming back from that, no reentry into the embrace of community.
Ripping his shirt off, he wiped himself down, blew acidic chunks from his nose, cleared his throat, and spit and spit again.
Despite the night chill, he was hot, steam rising off his bare shoulders, his mind a roaring furnace of his countless shortcomings.
Melodramatic urges surged up in him—punch the side of the dumpster, throw a rock through the back window of the gelato shop, scream and rip his hair out from the roots.
Instead he blew his nose again into his shirt, tossed it into the dumpster, and started walking for home.
It was almost precisely the distance of a marathon, an easy walk if the cold didn’t catch up to him, and worst case he could summon an Uber if the driver would stop for a shirtless guy who smelled like puke.
He started off along the weedy shoulder of a frontage road. Behind a ridge of scraggly bushes and a guardrail to his left, the 101 raced by, red and white streaks of high beams and brake lights.
He sensed the crackle of car tires behind him and prayed it was a crew of assholes looking to rough someone up. Blading his body, profile glance over his shoulder.
An Acura.
Fuck.
Mia crept level with him. He kept walking, didn’t look over.
The frontage road was dark and empty, just the two of them crawling along.
“Evan.”
He ignored her. The cold bit at him now, skin pulling taut across his ribs. He tried not to shudder. Lost in the weakness of emotion, he felt like he was thirteen years old.
“Evan. Get in.”
He kept walking. Shame burned his face. He had no skills for this, no contingency plan, no idea what to say.
“You’re shirtless behind a Denny’s,” Mia said. “Get in. Don’t be a snowflake.”
He could not concede any of the stated facts. He was in fact shirtless behind a Denny’s. And the fact that the babe- just-get-in-the-car situation had gender-flipped wasn’t lost on him.
The Acura matched his pace.
“Evan,” she said again.
“I got you,” she said. “I got you, okay?”
“Get in,” she said.
“Evan,” she said.
“Evan,” she said.
“Nowhere Man.”
He halted.
At first he wasn’t certain he’d heard her right. A trick of the wind, a whisper from his subconscious, a murmur escaping the bewilderment swirling inside him. It was impossible that she knew this, that she knew him.
All of a sudden everything was crisp. The whine of passing vehicles, the bob of the pollution-coated branches, the shine of diffuse light off the hood of her car.
“What did you say?”
She looked at him through the rolled-down passenger window. “You heard me. I got you. Get in.”
They drove in silence all the way to the 405 and up over the Sepulveda Pass. Evan wore a too-small Columbia Law School sweatshirt Mia had in the trunk that choked him at the collar. She glanced over at him and glanced over again. “What?”
“It’s tight on me.”
“Of course it is.” She smirked, not unkindly. “Sorry. Just enjoying the symbolism.”
He reached up, tore the collar down vertically a few inches at the throat, a boxer’s cut. She did not object.
They passed the Getty, a white palace up high on the right, then dropped down into the Los Angeles Basin.
“Is that…?” He stopped.
“What?”
“All there is?”
“What do you mean?” Mia asked.
“That’s what I’m protecting? For other people? It’s for that? That’s what they do?”
“That’s not all we do. But yes. People spend a lot of time in quiet comforts, getting by, fighting off loneliness.”
Sunset Boulevard flew past and then Moraga. Wilshire Boulevard came up, their exit.
“I always thought it was so much more,” he said.
Evan walked Mia to her condo and cleaned up in the bathroom while she paid the babysitter. Peter was sleeping.
When he came back out, she was sitting on the couch, hugging a shaggy lavender throw pillow to her stomach.
Jangly brass streamed from digital speakers, Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight.
” The place smelled of one of those plug-in air diffusers, a wintry flavor, apple and cinnamon.
Textbooks were piled on the coffee table, thick like religious tomes.
A dozen mostly dead lilies drooped in a cobalt-blue vase, adding a sickly sweet aroma to the diffuser.
A laundry basket sat heaped high in the hall, a lavish sundae, ready to be moved to the next station.
In the kitchen, a pizza box sat atop the burners, lid open, chewed crusts piled like bones.
Her condo was messy and welcoming, abundant with signs of life.
He pictured what he was going home to, sharp edges and wiped surfaces, concrete, glass, stainless steel. There was such comfort in it. Discomfort, too, but of a known variety. There he could function. There he knew who he was.
“When we were seeing each other,” Mia said, “I thought I could, dunno…” She looked to the ceiling for her next words. “Go with the flow. Be a free woman.”
He tugged at the ripped collar. “Aren’t you a free woman?”
“Of course. Free to have responsibilities.”
“I understand.”
“But I can’t. Just go with the flow. It’s like … like being on perennial vacation. Nothing to build on. So nothing builds.”
That feeling was back, soaking into him, flesh, bone, and marrow. A contamination of sentiment. He said, “I understand.”
“Do you?”
He stared at his scabby knuckles. “I can’t live with one foot in each world either. Just turn it on and turn it off.”
“I can imagine, given your training.”
“How long have you known…?” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He’d never spoken that phrase out loud. Not once.
“I am,” she said, with levity in her voice, “a trained professional.” She tapped the cushion next to her and he sat and together they breathed apple and cinnamon and looked at each other. “I’ve seen you do the impossible too many times to not put it together.”
“You gonna try’n arrest me?”
That smile. Man, that smile. She loosed her hair and shook it out so it fell gloriously around her neck. “Not tonight. I’d need more evidence. Build a case. Those things take time. Sometimes too much time.”
He actually laughed.
“I love you, you know, Evan. More than just … whatever we are. Like we’re family.
But not in a gross way given we, you know.
But I can’t keep doing this.” Her finger toggled from him to her to him to her, the back-and-forth of the dance they did around their attraction, the impossibility of acting on it, the impossibility of ignoring it, the impossibility of them.
“Not with Peter. He needs something solid if he’s to learn to be solid for someone else someday. ”
Evan stared at the laundry, the browning lilies. “Right,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
“But also? If he’s away at a sleepover…” Evan broke. He felt a big dumb smile bloom across his face.
“What?” She was trying not to crack up now. “What are you possibly smiling at?”
“I was gonna say a joke. But it’s so bad.”
“Let’s hear it. Come on.”
“I can’t.”
“I believe in you.”
He recovered. “If he’s away at a sleepover,” he said, “don’t forget my middle name.”
Silence. Her face did not move for maybe three full seconds, a very long time with a terrible joke hanging in the air.
And then she laughed, a graceless, beautiful bark of a laugh. “Mr. Danger, I can promise you this. I will never be your booty call.”
“‘Booty call,’” he said. “Verbal escalation. Asymmetrical tactical response.”
She flopped her hand down on the cushion next to him, palm up.
He took it. They held hands like third-graders.
Her skin was warm, soft. He caught the faint scent of lemongrass, knew it was coming off her skin, tried not to look at the gentle slope at the side of her throat where that rich chestnut hair fell.
“This is solid, too,” she said, squeezing his hand. “But for Peter, what I want for him, it’s a different kind of solid.”
“Like what?”
She considered for a long time. “My friends, my people, I have access to them differently. In the messy uncertainty. I can be there for them and them for me. And that strength to receive help, and to give it, to trust when you don’t know what else to do? That’s intimacy.”
I don’t know how to do that, he thought.
She watched him closely. “It doesn’t make my way any better than yours. But that’s a point of connection I need. To feel, hmm, to feel not alone. And if you can provide that, great. And if you can’t, I understand. But I know what I need. I’ve tried it your way. It doesn’t work for me.”
“I understand.”
He released his grip. A moment later she loosened her hand, too, letting him go. He looked at her softly, with affection, rose, and started out.
With his hand on the doorknob, he halted.
He contemplated one thing he could offer to her, not as an olive branch or a gift, but as a point of connection they both needed. It took awhile but he was patient, standing there, thinking, his usual freedom just beyond the door. She was patient, too.
He turned around. He walked back over. She remained sitting on the couch.
“If I do that,” he said, “if I include you in the … uncertainty, then you cannot prosecute me.”
“No.” Her eyes were shining, those rust flecks pronounced in the deep, wise brown. “When it comes to my people, I must recuse myself.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
Deep breath. Exhale. He said, “Joey.”
And then he told her. He told her about the confusion of allowing Joey in the field, the necessity of letting her flounder and fail so she could strengthen herself, the overwhelming urge to control her so she’d be safe.
The impossible balance of holding her close and letting her go into the horrors that lurked everywhere.
When he finished, Mia was silent. The diffuser hissed out a mist and then another.
Finally Mia said, “To care about someone properly, it’s sacrificial. You have to surrender them to the world. Or else you’ll devour them.”
No one had ever taught Evan that. He’d never had to know it. In fact, the whole point of his training and solitary existence was to never have to know it.
“She wants that world,” Mia continued. “She’s an adult.”
“Not for two hundred and sixty-six days,” he said.
“If you’re gonna put her into a mission, you goddamned better make sure you prepare her for it.
But. Don’t allow an inch of your own untherapized bullshit in there.
Not one inch. Everything—everything—must be about what is best for her.
If she wants you to have that responsibility and you take it on, you hold yourself to the highest standard.
It’s a sacred oath to raise someone. A sacred oath to let them grow properly. Even if that means losing them.”
He nodded. Nodded again. “I can still bop her in the snout though?”
“Once in a while.”
At the door, Mia kissed him good-bye on the side of the mouth. It was with warmth but not that kind of warmth. She set her hand on his cheek. “I’ll be waiting in the light. For whatever you drag out of the darkness.”
He said, “Copy that.”
“Good-bye, Nowhere Man.”
“Good-bye, District Attorney Hall.”
Walking away, he felt the warmth of her palm fading from his cheek.