Chapter 23
UNbrEAKABLE AND brITTLE
JAKOB
It's hard to breathe.
Because, underneath all the shock and sadness I feel surrounding Brys's story, there's something else simmering inside me. An emotion I've never dared name, never had the courage to face head-on.
Yet, it's guided and shaped my every decision.
Anger.
But as my Zoom therapist once explained to me, Anger is a secondary emotion. It comes out of something else. We use anger as a displacement because anger is easier to cope with than what’s really beneath it.
In my case, only now that Brys has put it all into words do I truly understand my own emotions.
"I feel you stewing up there," Brys says, after a strangely comfortable silence of several minutes, in which she rests against my chest.
"You have helped me understand myself," I tell her. "I'm trying to process that."
She waits for me to speak, her fingers dancing in slow, idle patterns over the print of the hospital gown from chest to shoulders to stomach, always cognizant of the tender area where my wound is.
The physical pain is a constant, sharp throb under everything, but it's tolerable.
Every time it starts to creep up on me and I feel tempted to ask if it would really hurt to let them hook up the IV again and pump me full of opiates that will take the pain away, I put myself back in that room, shivering on the floor in a pool of vomit and shit, hallucinating and craving and hating myself and stuck in an endless hell of misery.
This pain is far better than that.
"You asked why I don't trust," I say, eventually.
"My answer was true. But…I…you made me realize that the deeper truth is that I can't trust anyone for the same reasons as you: Everyone who was supposed to love me abandoned me.
I know…I know my mother's death was no one's fault.
She didn't choose it. But I can't quite grasp that.
I don't know how else to say it. Physically, I was sixteen when she died, but emotionally, I was much less mature than my size or years would indicate.
I was a sheltered, spoiled little boy. I'd never been told no.
Never experienced lack or loss or hardship.
My mother loved me. Even my father, as stern and hard and serious and reserved as he was, loved me too, in his way.
And then Mother was just…gone. I had no answers, no explanation.
Cancer? Aneurism? Heart attack? I don't know.
I will never know—the hospital where she died was destroyed in a fire, along with all their records.
She was alive and well one day and gone less than a week later, and…
" my eyes burn. "My father hogged all the grief. "
"Jakob—ohhh, Jakob."
“He never moved from her side. I never got to sit with her and talk to her, or say goodbye. I was out of the room with my tutor or nanny—I don’t remember which—when she died.
I never…I never got to say goodbye. I never got to touch her hand.
Father, he pushed past me, and I followed him.
It felt like I was supposed to follow him.
I barely understood that she was even dead.
I tried to talk to him on the walk home from the hospital, but he didn’t answer me, didn’t even acknowledge me.
He marched inside without so much as slowing down, slamming his office door literally in my face.
Less than…what? Not even thirty seconds after shutting the door, I heard the gun go off.
Mother flatlined, and Father shot himself less than twenty minutes later. "
Brys's tears soak my shirt. "Jakob, I'm so sorry."
"For what?"
"No, that's—god that annoys me. I'm not apologizing, I’m expressing sympathy, you big goof."
"Oh."
"It's just so awful. To lose one parent is awful, but to lose both? And so close together?"
"Don't cry for me, Brys."
She hums the chorus of "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" before answering. "Why not, Jakob? Why can I not share in your grief?"
That cuts me to the core. "Why would you want to?"
This has her sitting up on an elbow and looking at me in disbelief. "You really don't know, by now?"
I wrack my brain for what I'm supposed to know, but come up empty. "No. No clue." She doesn't fill in the empty silence I so helpfully leave. "Brys?"
"I'm not ready for that yet," she whispers. "Just let me be sad for you."
“Okay. Alright."
She nuzzles back onto my chest. "We're a hell of a pair, aren't we? Two broken, fucked up, abandoned orphans with trust issues and more money than sense."
"I never let myself realize how angry I am about it," I admit eventually.
"Mainly at my father." It takes a while for the next truth to percolate up from the depths of me and find its way to my lips.
"I think…I think my father loved my mother too much.
He adored her to the point of madness. He loved her so much he stifled her, sometimes.
She was the only person he ever showed any kind of softness or affection to.
He loved her too much, and when he lost her, he couldn't cope.
He took himself away from me. He abandoned me and left me alone in the world.
I was helpless, defenseless, and clueless.
He loved her too much, and it broke him.
" Saying the next part feels a bit like vomiting: awful, impossible to stop, and you feel better once it's over.
"I think that I have refused to let myself…
feel that kind of…" that's the bile trapped at your teeth before it spews free.
"I have spent my life unable to trust or to let anyone love me or let myself love anyone because I am terrified of ending up like my father.
" Shamefully, a sob sucks the oxygen from my lungs and forces its way out.
“I’m terrified of letting someone in and losing them.
I lost Isabel. I…created Madame X to be the perfect companion.
She was elegant and wise and sophisticated and intelligent and educated.
She was conversant in classical music and classical fiction, in art and history.
She was voracious for knowledge, and I fed it to her.
I controlled every aspect of her existence so that I would never lose her.
I kept her locked up in my tower like a raven-haired Rapunzel, because that way nothing could ever harm her and nothing could ever take her away from me. "
"And yet," Brys whispers; it is a gentle, brutal prompt.
"And yet I lost her anyway. I clung to her as tightly as I possibly could, and I lost her anyway.
Not to death, but to…" I laugh at the irony.
"To life. I clutched her too tightly, and I lost her to life.
And myself to death. In faking my death, I did die, in a way.
Not physically, but in every other way. And yet…
and still…" I shake my head, as if to dislodge stuck thoughts and trapped words.
"But now, having come so close to death?
Sitting trapped in that chair, feeling the press come down on my head, knowing Pugli was going to kill Nicolae or both of us, I…
it should have been me, not him. I was helpless.
I couldn't even speak. I was…so weak. I'd lost so much blood, and I was so dizzy and disoriented, and in nearly dying, I finally feel like I've…
like I've come through something. Like I've burst through a membrane, and on this side of it…I’m really alive for the first time. "
"Can I ask you something, Jakob?" I can barely make out her words.
"Of course. Anything."
"When I told Sophia that you kissed me, she seemed stunned. Why?"
"The one tiny fragment a whore can hold back is a kiss. It's more intimate than fucking. My clients never wanted to kiss me, and I refused the few who did try. It's a common rule, I think. I just…kissing is…I don't kiss."
"Did you kiss Madame X?"
"No. And when I finally did, it was at the end, when things were falling apart, and my feelings were beginning to be unavoidable."
"You loved her."
I shake my head. "No, not—no. I don't think I loved her.
I know I didn't. Love doesn't do what I did to her.
I felt powerful emotions for her, yes, but they weren't love.
It was obsession. Infatuation. Need. I was…
" I laugh. "I spent thousands of dollars on therapy and got nowhere near any of this, and you get it out of me in minutes.
I was desperately trying to fill the void, to…
create something that would fill my need for… "
When I fail to form the last word, Brys lets out a sigh.
Twists so she can gaze up at me with green-brown eyes ringed in stunning azure, eyes filled with the word that sticks in my throat like too much peanut butter.
"Look at me, Jakob." Downy feathers aren't as soft as her voice in that moment. "Please."
I do; it hurts, but I do. "What." It comes out flat.
Her fingers are small and slender and clever, and they trace the hard line of my jaw. "Say it."
I shake my head. "I can't." I know what I'm supposed to say. I know it's true.
"Yes, you can. You've built not one, not two, but three empires. You've survived the loss of your parents, homelessness, addiction, being sexually trafficked and forced into prostitution. You built your Club and changed the lives of your…what do you call them? Your quiver?"
"My Arrows. My Broken Arrows."
"Why that name, of all the macho shit you could have called your macho men club?"