Sophia #3
“You two came off that kitchen floor with the same wound and you splinted it different ways,” she went on, gently.
“He decided he had to save everyone. You decided you’d never let yourself need anyone enough to be destroyed when you couldn’t.
His looks like a hero and yours looks like a woman who doesn’t need anything from anybody, and underneath they are both just two kids who lost the entire world between one hand of cards and the next, and never wanted to stand that close to the drop again. ”
“Steph—”
“Nearly done.” Another squeeze. “The thing I really want you to hear. The last time you felt the kind of safe this man is making you feel — maybe the only time you ever felt it all the way — you were twelve, at a kitchen table, with your whole family around you. And not two hours later it was gone, every bit of it, in about the time it takes to deal a round. So of course safe scares the life out of you.” She ducked her head to catch my eyes.
“But that’s a thing that happened to you eighteen years ago, honey.
It’s not a rule the universe runs on. Fear of losing people is baked all the way into you and I am never going to tell you it isn’t — but it doesn’t get to be the thing that decides for you.
You’re allowed to be terrified and walk at him anyway. Your brother learned how. So can you.”
I put my face in my hands and cried the rest of it out, and she shuffled in as close as the bump would let her and held on, and didn’t tell me it would all be fine, because she’s never lied to me and wasn’t about to start.
“I have the best friend and sister in the entire world,” I said, wetly, into her shoulder.
“Right back at ya, honey.” She kissed the side of my head.
Then she pulled back, and I watched the whole tenor of her change — the soft going out of her face and something far more dangerous coming into it, the gleam of a woman just handed the single best piece of news of her week.
“Right. Feelings portion concluded. Counselling office is closed.” She picked her bagel back up and pointed it at me.
“Now. This man. I want everything, and I want it in order. Start with the face and don’t you dare spare me a—”
A truck door slammed in the yard.
We both went still. Then her whole face lit, because she knew that engine, and she was up off the bed in her three instalments faster than I’d seen her move in a month.
“He’s a day early,” she said, delighted, already moving. “Pull your face together. Your brother’s home.”
I felt better. That was the strange, embarrassing truth of it as I gathered my keys: lighter, scraped-out, the way you feel after the fever finally breaks.
Steph hadn’t fixed anything — there was nothing to fix — but she’d named it, and a named thing is so much smaller than the shapeless dread of it at three in the morning.
I could carry a named thing. I’d been carrying the other kind for eighteen years.
I was halfway across the yard to my car when Liam got out, road-worn and stubbled, looking like he’d driven straight out of somewhere he didn’t want to talk about, and he went to Steph first the way he always does — a hand spread wide over the bump, a kiss into her hair, something low I didn’t hear that made her swat at him.
Then he turned and clocked me standing there with my keys already in my hand and last night’s clothes on at eleven in the morning, and I watched my brother read the whole shape of the morning off the two of us in about a second and a half, the way he read everything.
He didn’t ask. That’s the thing people get wrong about Liam — they think the Ranger in him would interrogate. The Ranger in him knows precisely when a question is the wrong tool.
He just came over and put his arms around me and pulled me in hard, the way he had on a kitchen floor eighteen years ago and roughly a thousand times since, and held on a beat past a normal hug.
“You know we love you, right?” he said, into the top of my head. “This is your place. Always. Whatever’s going on in there.”
“Love you, big brother,” I said into his shoulder, and meant every letter of it.
He let me go, and looked at me one more second to be sure, and let it be. “Go on. Get some sleep that isn’t in a barn.”
So I went.
I drove the ranch road back toward town with the morning fully up now and the windows down, and I waited for the small tug I always got back over my shoulder on this road, the part of me that never quite wants to leave the one place on earth where everyone I have left is gathered behind me.
It came, but not as it normally did. It had company, and the company was louder.
Underneath the old pull back toward the ranch was a new one running the opposite way, drawing me on down the road and into town and around the last corner and onto a quiet street where a man I’d run twenty miles to escape was, at this hour, almost certainly out front with a coffee and an old motorcycle in pieces — not waiting for me, exactly, but there.
For the first time I could remember, I did not want to spend the day at the ranch with the people I loved most in the world. I wanted to go home.
I had no idea what to do with that. So I did the only thing I reliably knew how to do with a feeling I couldn’t set down — except this time the motion wasn’t away from the thing.
It was straight at it.
I drove home.