Chapter 73 Whole
BIRDIE held a Bronze Star in my own open palm in front of a man sitting on the edge of my bed, and I did not make a single joke about it, and I need you to understand what an act of raw physical courage that was, because the joke is my flinch.
The joke is exactly how I back the sidewalk up to the far curb of any feeling too big to survive standing next to.
“They gave me this,” I said, “for the call that went right. Six months, almost to the day, before the one that went wrong. Same hands. Same nerve. Same everything. I was exactly as scared on the medal day as I was on the leg day — no more, no less, sweating through my kit both times.” I turned it over in the light.
“It was the same hands both days. I just decided, afterward, that the hands must have been the problem, because the hands were the only thing in the room I could reach. So I hid them. For three years. In a sock drawer, and under a woman who apologizes to doors.”
Wes didn’t reach for the medal. He looked at it, sitting in my palm, and then he looked at me, and he said, plainly, “The hands weren’t the problem.”
“I know that now.” My voice went thick and I let it. “I’ve known it for about four whole minutes. I’m a slow learner on the important stuff. Fast on wiring, slow on this.”
The corner of his mouth did the small dry thing it does. “You’re the fastest person I’ve ever met on the important stuff. You just spent three years pointing it the wrong direction.”
I sat back down next to him, closer this time, the six inches gone, and I let my shoulder come to rest against his shoulder, which was more of my own weight than I had put on another human being in longer than I wanted to count, and he took it, easy, the way a wall takes a lean, like it was nothing, like it was what he was for.
Here is the thing I had gotten wrong my entire hidden life, and I’m going to lay it out plainly, because Wes had just handed me plainness and he deserves it back at least once.
I had decided, somewhere in that antiseptic hallway, that my competence was a debt.
That because I’d been given these steady hands, and they had once failed to save all of somebody, I owed the universe one of two things forever: either a lifetime of never using them at all, or a lifetime of using them only at the edge of catastrophe and then fleeing before anyone could thank me, so that the ledger could never, ever tip into my favor.
I ran from every casserole because a casserole is a credit, and I could not afford to be in the black.
If people were grateful, then I mattered to them.
And if I mattered, then I could fail them.
And around and around it went, three years of it, a woman saying sorry to furniture so that no piece of furniture would ever be foolish enough to depend on her.
And Wes, sitting on the edge of my bed not touching the medal, had just quietly and completely refused the entire arithmetic.
He wasn’t grateful. He wasn’t reaching for the fuse.
He wasn’t loving me despite the anxiety, and he wasn’t loving the badass instead of the mess and hoping the mess would eventually move out.
He was just sitting there wanting to be near the whole of me — the flinch and the steel, the shaking and the star, the sock drawer and the render-safe hands — not despite, not instead, but all of it at once, like it was one single person, because it is.
“I’m going to be scared all the time,” I warned him, because he needed to buy the real product and not a sample.
“I don’t get less scared. That was never the deal with my particular wiring.
I catastrophize a knock at the door. I have made peace with my own death, fully, over a wasp, more than once.
If you’re picturing the calm woman from the story that’s going around town, she doesn’t exist. She was a costume.
Under the costume is a person who is, at any given moment, about ninety percent convinced the building is coming down. ”