Chapter 15 Damian
The other two were too tactful about it, which is how I knew.
"I'm doing a roast," Brady announced, the second I mentioned the screening, like a roast was a thing that happened to him rather than a thing he chose. "It’s a big one. Can't leave it. You two go."
"I've got a perimeter audit," Thomas said, not looking up from his notebook. "Friday's good for it. I'll be here."
"A perimeter audit?" I asked.
"It’s long overdue," Thomas said.
"No, it's not. I do the perimeter. It’s mine. You're inventing a chore so you don't have to come to a movie with us."
"Enjoy the film," Thomas said.
I decided not to dignify the conspiracy with a comment. Two grown men, one a former operator and one a professional liar with tongs, both suddenly very busy on the one night I had plans with Maren. I let them have it.
The cinema was the small one, the independent house that ran a single screen and showed prints instead of files. They had the 1995 restoration on, which Maren had wanted to see.
The parking was a personal insult.
"There's a lot," I said, circling the block for the third time. "There's a lot, it's right there, and it's full, and the street is permit only, and the app wants twelve dollars for a space that's a fifteen minute walk in the wrong direction. This is hostile. This is a city that hates joy."
"You're enjoying this," Maren said.
"I’m not!"
"You are. You're lit up. I have never seen you this animated about anything, and that includes the morning you found out Brady alphabetized the spices wrong."
"He can't spell. It's a real failing." I took the twelve dollar space out of spite. "And I'm not animated. I'm animated about everything. You've met, what, three of my moods? There are more. This is mood four. Parking rage. It's one of the good ones."
"How many moods are there?"
"You'll find out. I release them slowly. It keeps people interested."
She laughed, and I parked the car, and I bought her popcorn.
In the dark, during the trailers, I leaned over to her.
"Okay, here's why this one matters," I said, low.
"Everyone thinks it's a love story. It's not.
It's a film about timing. The director shoots every important scene slightly too late.
The reaction instead of the action. You never see the kiss, you see the second after the kiss, when one of them realizes what it cost. He does it the whole movie.
Watch the cuts. He's always a half second behind the moment, on purpose, because the movie's argument is that we only understand our lives in the half second after they've already changed. "
She was looking at me instead of the screen.
"What?"
"Nothing. I walked in here planning to teach you about this movie. I've made films with directors who'd kill to talk the way you just talked." She faced front. "The flow of this evening is reversing and I don't hate it."
"I contain multitudes," I said. "Mood five. Pretentious in a theater. Also one of the good ones."
The film started, and I stopped talking. I held her hand because at some point her hand was in mine.
And then the third act came, and the scene I had forgotten was coming, the one where the heroine reads the letter.
She reads a letter from a person who is gone. She has to decide whether to keep living inside the letter or set it down and go on without the voice in it.
My mother wrote me letters. I had them. She wrote them the year she was hiding the illness, little nothing notes left in my lunch, and I did not know I was collecting a finite thing.
I felt my jaw go tight, and then I realized I was crying.
The dark was not covering me. She had been watching the screen light move on my face the whole time.
In the film, the heroine set the letter down.
And Maren turned, in the dark, and kissed me.
Not soft. Not a comfort. She kissed me like an answer, like she'd read the half second on my face and decided not to be late to it, and I let go of the screen entirely.
I cupped her face with the hand that wasn't holding hers.
The film kept playing, light moving over both of us, and I kissed her back.
We watched the last twenty minutes like that, with her head on my shoulder.
We came home easy, both of us quiet. Thomas met us at the door, and I could tell from his face the audit had been real after all, because Thomas couldn’t fake a clean face.
"Brady took Keith and went to run errands," Thomas said. "We've got the house. How was the movie?"
"He cried," Maren said.
"I had a reaction to the cinematography," I said.
"He sobbed at a letter. It was the best thing I've ever seen."
"Allergies. The print was dusty."
We were laughing, the three of us, walking out into the backyard because the night was warm and the day had been good.
The fence was six feet. The stranger came over it like it was three.
I heard him land before I saw him, a heavy wrong sound in a yard that only ever made right sounds, and my body was moving before my brain filed the report. Maren was closest to the fence. He had a knife, low, the grip of a man who'd done it before, and he went for her first.
I got between them. That part wasn't brave, it was just nearest. I shoved Maren back hard enough to bruise her and took her place in the geometry.
Thomas was already there on the other side.
For a few seconds it was the three of us in a knot of arms in the dark, the way you train for and pray you never use.
He was strong and fast, and he was not afraid. We had him, we were peeling him off, and then he twisted. The knife came around, and it was not coming for me anymore.
It was coming for Thomas.
I didn’t decide. I remembered that director's exact half second, the one where you understand your life right after it changes. I shoved Thomas out of the line of it and put my own arm where his chest had been.
The blade cut my forearm. I felt it as heat, not pain. That was how I knew it was bad.
It would’ve been fine. I would’ve taken it and counted it a good trade, my arm for Thomas's chest, the best deal I'd been offered in years.
But the knife had already grazed him on the way through, a shallow line across his arm, and I saw the blood come up dark on Thomas's sleeve.
Something in me that I kept on a very short leash got off the leash.
I don’t have a clear memory of the next part. Thomas told me later. I went at the man with my fists and I did not stop, and there was no technique in it, no training, nothing I'd ever been taught. It was just a sound coming out of me and my hands doing damage, because someone had made Thomas bleed.
The part of me that the foster homes built, the part that learned the world takes the people you love and you are never enough to stop it… that part stood up and tried to kill a man in a backyard.
"Damian?" Thomas's voice. "Damian, stop!"
I didn't.
"Damian, I'm fine! Look at me! It's a scratch. Look at me, brother, I'm okay."
He got his arms around me from behind, both of them, locking me up. Thomas was the only man strong enough to do that and the only man I would let. He pulled me off and held me there while I shook.
"It's a small wound," he said, into the back of my neck, steady, the voice he uses on the worst nights. "It's nothing. You took the real one. You took it for me. I'm okay. You can stop now."
"He had the knife on you." My voice didn't sound like mine. "He had it on you, and I almost. If I'd been a half second late."
"You weren't late."
"I'm always supposed to be the one in front of it.
" I was bleeding on both of us and I did not care.
"I can't, Thomas. I can't live in a world where I'm standing right there and I still can't keep you.
I can't do it. I won't survive it. You don't understand.
You're the four chairs, you're the whole table.
If I can't protect you then what am I even? "
Thomas turned me around. He had a wound on his arm and tears on his face. He turned me around and held my head in his two hands.
"You are not a shield," he said. "You hear me.
You're not a thing that stands in front of other things.
You're my brother. I don't keep you around to bleed for me.
I keep you around because the table's wrong without you.
" He pressed his forehead to mine. "You protected me.
You did. And it still wouldn't be your fault if you couldn't. That's the part you've never once believed.
It's not a job you can fail. It's just love.
It doesn't come with a performance review. "
I hugged him. Both arms, the cut one too, blood and all. We stood in the yard and held onto each other. The man on the ground groaned. Thomas, without letting go of me, put a knee in his back and restrained him with one hand, because Thomas can grieve and work at the same time.
That was when Brady came through the side gate at a dead run with Keith barking behind him, and took in the whole yard in one sweep, the blood, the man on the ground, all of it, and his face did something I'd never seen it do.
Then he made it go calm, because one of us had to. Brady was always the one who decided to be the one.
"Hey," Brady said, crouching over the man, terrifying. "Who sent you?"
"I don't know," the man started.
"Wrong answer. Try the next one. Who paid you?"
The man spat blood. "I don't know. It was a lot of money, more than this kind of thing pays. Make it look like a robbery, they said. In and out, take her stuff, make it look like it went wrong. That's all I got. A voice and an envelope of cash. No name. He stayed a voice."
Brady and I looked at each other. A robbery gone wrong was what you staged when you didn't want anyone looking for a reason.
"Call it in," Thomas said.
Brady called the cops.
Inside, Maren took over. She sat Thomas down at the kitchen island. She cleaned the cut on his arm with hands that did not shake even a little. She bound it neat and tight.
I could not sit down. I stood over them and checked Thomas's arm, and then I checked it again, and then again, because the leash was still loose and my hands needed a job.
"It's clean, Damian," Maren said. "I checked. You can stop checking."
"I'm going to check one more time."
"Damian!" She caught my wrist, the cut one, gently, and turned it over, and looked at the long red line down my forearm that I had been pretending wasn't there. "You're bleeding through your sleeve. Sit down. It's your turn."
"Thomas first."
"Thomas is done. Now I'm doing you." She pushed me into the chair with one hand flat on my chest.
I sat. She cleaned my arm. It needed more than a butterfly and she knew it and she taped it tight to hold until the EMTs.
The whole time she kept up a low steady stream of nothing, the talking she did to fill a silence.
But this time I understood it was not nervous chatter.
It was a hand on the back of a scared animal.
"You know what's funny," she said, taping my arm.
"The entire job was you three guarding me.
Every door, every drive, every mug of tea.
And tonight, look at this. Look at us." Her voice caught, just once, and she pushed through it.
"For once I'm not the one being guarded.
I'm the one holding all three of you together. "
Nobody corrected her. There was nothing to correct.
Keith finally broke free of Brady, crossed the whole kitchen, and lay down across my feet.
"He's using you for your floor," Thomas said quietly, an old joke, a lifeline thrown across a wrecked room.
"No," I said, and put my good hand down on the dog's head. I let her finish taping the arm that had finally, for once, been in the right place at the right time. "He's not. He just knows where his people are."