Next of Kin
Chapter thirty
Sterling
There is somebody in my kitchen.
Then I hear humming, and I know exactly who it is, and my chest does something I do not have a name for.
Becca is standing at my counter in a Brown sweatshirt with her hair scraped up off her neck, making tea in my last clean mug. A duffel bag is slumped against the island like it walked here on its own and then quit.
“You’re in Providence,” I say.
“I am demonstrably not in Providence.”
“Becca.”
“You stopped answering your phone.” She doesn’t turn around. “Four days. I called you six times. On the seventh I called Jake, who told me you were fine in a voice that made it extremely clear you were not fine, and then I looked at flights.”
“You have rotations.”
“I swapped with a man named Todd who owes me for something I will take to my grave.” She turns around and looks at me properly, and I watch her do the intake, the same three-second sweep I do on every patient I have ever knelt next to.
Skin. Eyes. The way I am standing. “God. You look like something they’d pull out of a river. ”
“Thanks.”
“I’m being kind. Sit down before you fall down, and don’t tell me about the double shifts, I already know about the double shifts, Jake sang like a canary.”
I sit down. It seems easier than the alternative.
She puts the tea in front of me. She has made it the way our mother made it, which neither of us has ever discussed and neither of us is going to start discussing now, and she sits on the stool across from me with her hands around her own mug and lets the silence go on long enough that I understand it is deliberate.
“How did you get in,” I say.
“You gave me a key.”
“I gave you that key six years ago.”
“And I have never once used it, and I want you to think for a second about what it means that today is the day I did.”
I drink the tea. Outside, a truck goes past on Ashland and the windows shake in their frames the way they always do, and I am aware that she is doing an inventory of my apartment and that she is very good at inventories.
It does not take her long. There is not much to find, which is the problem.
“There are two mugs in your drainer,” she says. “You live alone and you have been on shift for three days.”
“Becca.”
“There is a bag of cat food in the cupboard above the fridge. I saw it when I got the tea. The cat has been gone for nine days, Sterling, and there is an open bag of expensive cat food in your kitchen.” She sets her mug down.
“Also there’s a sketchbook on the nightstand in your guest room.
I looked. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. ”
“She’ll want that back.”
“She will,” Becca agrees. “So why is it still there.”
I don’t answer.
“You’ve had nine days and a working phone and a truck,” she says. “You could have driven it four blocks.”
“I texted her about the boxes.”
“Oh, I know you texted her about the boxes.” She pulls her feet up onto the rung of the stool, and for a second she looks about fifteen.
“I know exactly what that text said, because I have received about four hundred of them over the course of my life. Warm, brief, entirely about logistics, with a little joke at the end so nobody can accuse you of being cold. It’s a beautiful piece of work.
It’s a wall with a welcome mat in front of it. ”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man who has been awake for most of a week.”
“I know. I’m going to say worse. Do you want a sandwich first?”
“Yes.”
So she makes me a sandwich, in my own kitchen, with food I did not know I had, or she probably went and bought, and she does badly, and I eat all of it.
It is only when I am finished that she starts.
“Tell me what happened,” she says. “Not the version you’d put in a report. The one underneath it.”
And here is the thing about my sister. Jake would make it a bit, because that is how Jake loves people, and I would let him, because that is how I let people love me.
Kayla would probably tell Mandy. The Chief would look at me across a desk with a pamphlet in his hand.
Becca is the only person on this earth who knew me before I built the thing I am currently standing in, and she has never once agreed to admire it.
So I tell her.
I tell her about the ring in the velvet box at the anniversary dinner and the way Mandy’s whole face went white and formal.
I tell her about the drive home and the loft and the fight that wasn’t a fight, the one where I finally said the thing out loud, all of it, six years of it, standing in my own kitchen with my hands shaking.
And then I tell her the part I have not said to anybody.
“She didn’t answer,” I say. “She stood there. And I watched her not answer, and I decided that was the answer, and then I picked up my bag and went to work.”
Becca is very still.
“How long,” she says.
“Three days.”
“You confessed to a woman you have loved for six years and then you did not come home for three days.”
“There was a shift. It was legitimately on the roster.”
“Sterling.”
“And then I picked up another one.”
“There it is.” She lets out a long breath and pushes the stray black curls back off her face with both hands. “Okay. Okay, I need you to hear the next thing I say, and I need you to hear it as a person and not as a military lieutenant. Can you do that?”
“Probably not.”
“Try.” She leans forward. “You are grieving a silence that you built. You said the hardest thing you have ever said, you didn’t wait four seconds for her to find her feet, and then you removed yourself from the building for seventy-two hours.
And you have spent the nine days since then telling yourself the story that she left.
She didn’t leave, Sterling. You went to work. ”
The refrigerator cycles. I look at the crumbs on the plate.
“She moved out,” I say.
“Into what, exactly? Into a place she’d been waiting weeks for while you were unreachable.
Into her own apartment, which is a thing adults are allowed to have.
” She spreads her hands. “You’ve dressed up an ordinary logistical fact as a verdict, because a verdict is easier.
A verdict is finished. A verdict doesn’t require you to do anything except be sad in a very organized way, which happens to be your single greatest talent. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“Is it wrong?”
It is not wrong. It has not been wrong once, all afternoon, and I am beginning to remember why I stopped answering the phone.
“You want to know what I actually think,” she says.
“I suspect I’m going to find out.”
“I think this isn’t about Mandy at all.” She says it gently, which is worse. “I think this is about Priya.”
“Priya was two years ago.”
“Priya was a woman who liked being with a man who ran into buildings and did not like a man who came home smelling like one. And when she left you took that and you filed it, and somewhere in the filing it stopped being a fact about Priya and turned into a law of physics.” Her voice drops.
“Sterling. You have decided in advance that Mandy is going to work out what the job actually costs and go. So you got out ahead of it. You gave her the exit before she could ask for one, and you’ve been calling that being decent. ”
“Somebody had to be decent.”
“Nobody asked you to be decent. She asked you to be there. Like she was.”
I get up. I take the plate to the sink because my hands need somewhere to be, and I stand with my back to my sister and run water over a plate that does not need it.
“You want to know the actual reason,” I say, and my voice comes out wrong.
“Yes.”
“When I was six years old somebody signed a form and I stopped being a case number and started being a Hayes.” The water runs.
“And I worked out very early that the way you make sure that never gets reversed is that you make yourself the one they can’t do without.
You be the guy who shows up. You be the guy who fixes it.
You never, ever be the one who needs something, because the second you’re a person who needs something you’re a cost, and costs get reviewed. ”
Behind me, nothing.
“I have been useful to that woman for six years,” I say.
“I moved her furniture and I fixed her sink and I showed up at two in the morning about a spider. And then for three weeks I got to be something else, and it was the best thing that has ever happened to me, and then I told her the truth and she didn’t say anything, and I thought, well. There it is. Reviewed.”
The tap is still running. I turn it off.
When I turn around Becca is crying, silently and furiously, wiping at her face with the heel of her hand like the tears have personally inconvenienced her.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Shut up.” She wipes her face again. “I’m allowed. I’ve been waiting nineteen years to find out that’s what you thought.”
“Becca.”
“I was five years old when I came into that house and you were seven.” Her voice cracks straight down the middle.
“Two years, Sterling. Two. Same forms, same judge, same everything. And it has never once occurred to me, not for one single hour of my life, that I was on probation in there. So explain to me how you looked at an identical set of paperwork and concluded you were being assessed.”
I don’t have anything for that.
“And I can tell you exactly why it never occurred to me.” She wipes her face with the heel of her hand.
“Because you were already standing there. I was five years old and there was a boy in that house who had decided it was his entire job to put himself between me and every door in it, and I have never once in my life had to wonder whether I was safe. You built that, Sterling. You built it out of being frightened, and I got to grow up inside it, and you have never let yourself live in it for a single day.” A breath.
“And now there’s a woman in this city who watched you come home wearing the worst call of your year, and put you in the shower, and got the grit out from under your fingernails.
And your considered professional read on that is that she was reviewing you. ”
“That’s not-”
“That’s exactly what you just said.”
I sit back down. I sit down because my legs have made an independent decision.
We stay like that for a while. The light comes in low and yellow across the floor, and the loft does its late-afternoon thing where it looks enormous and empty and like somewhere a person could get lost.
Eventually Becca gets up, blows her nose loudly, and starts walking around my apartment with the flat professional interest of someone reading a chart.
“What are you doing.”
“Assessing.” She stops at the counter by the door, where the mail has been accumulating since roughly the beginning of the month. She picks up the heavy cream envelope on top of the pile and turns it over. “What’s this?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s got a crest on it.” She opens it, because she has never asked permission for anything in her life. “The Chicago Fire Department Annual Firefighters’ Ball. Saturday. The Hilton.” She looks up. “Sterling, this is Saturday.”
“I’m not going.”
“Why not.”
“Because it’s five hundred people in dress uniform asking me where my girlfriend is.”
“Will she be there?”
And that is the question, isn’t it. I have not been thinking about it with considerable discipline for four days.
“She had an invitation,” I say. “Before. When we were still. She had one.”
“So she might come.”
“She might.”
Becca puts the invitation down on the counter, very precisely, like she is setting a piece of equipment where somebody will be able to find it.
“Then here is what’s going to happen,” she says.
“You are going to sleep tonight, properly, in a bed, because I am going to be here and I will know. Tomorrow you are going to eat something that isn’t from a vending machine or a box of sugar.
And on Saturday you are going to get that uniform out of the dry-cleaning bag hanging on your closet door, which I also saw, and you are going to put it on, and you are going to go and stand in that ballroom where she can find you. ”
“And do what.”
“Say the sentence.”
“Becca.”
“I know you already said it. She already heard it. But say it again. Then give her some grace.” She holds my eyes. “You told me it felt terrible. Do you remember what I said?”
“You said that’s how I know.”
“That’s how you know.” She picks up her duffel and swings it toward the guest room, and stops in the doorway, and doesn’t turn around.
“I told you on that call I’d like to see what you look like when you stop keeping a professional distance from your own life.
I flew almost nine hundred miles on a swapped rotation with a man named Todd, and I would very much like to find out this week. ”
She goes into the guest room and shuts the door.
I sit at my own counter for a long time as the light goes off the floor and the loft turns grey and then blue.
Then I get up and go to the closet, and I take the dress uniform out of the plastic, and I hang it on the outside of the door where I will have to look at it.
Every day.
Until Saturday.