Interlude
LAZARUS
She tells me my love is the same hand that turned her chin up to a bad light, and the worst part, the part I’ll carry next to all the other things I carry, is that she’s right, and I knew she was right before she said it, and I let her say it anyway because she’d earned the saying.
I don’t defend myself. There’s nothing to defend.
A man who decides, alone, in ninety seconds, what another person is allowed to know about their own life, and then spends six years in a cell calling it love, that man does not get to stand in a kitchen and argue that his cage was a kinder cage than his father’s.
A kinder cage is still the family business.
I look at her, shaking, furious, the most alive I’ve seen her since she was eighteen on a staircase, telling me the truest thing anyone has ever said to me, and I think: there she is.
There’s the one who climbs on. There’s the one who turns the photograph around.
I almost edited her out of existence to keep her safe, and she clawed her way back to me through six years of concrete just to tell me to my face that I had no right.
God, I love her. It’s the kind of love that should come with a warning on the side.
I told her what it was, on a staircase, when she was eighteen — once I have a thing that’s mine I can’t, and I meant it as a confession and she heard it as a vow and we were both correct.
That’s the thing about me she’s the only one who ever understood: the wanting and the keeping are the same muscle, and the muscle doesn’t have an off switch, it only has a direction.
My father pointed his at owning. I have spent my whole life pointing mine at guarding, and telling myself that the difference between owning and guarding is the difference between him and me, when the truth, the truth she just handed me in a kitchen, is that the difference is whether the thing you’re holding gets a vote.
She never got a vote. I never gave her one. I gave her safety instead, and safety without a vote is just a nicer-smelling cage, and I built it out of my own body and called it the best thing I ever did.
It probably was the best thing I ever did. That’s what nobody warns you about doing the most loving possible version of the wrong thing. It doesn’t feel like a sin. It feels like devotion. It feels like a man standing in a doorway. It looks, from the inside, exactly like the thing it isn’t.
So here is what I decide, standing in her kitchen with the truth finally between us and nothing left to edit, while she catches her breath and the snow comes down and the whole ruined architecture of what I am hangs in the air:
I am going to learn to love her with my hands open.
I don’t know how. I want to be honest about that, she’ll read this someday, every word, that’s the new vow under the old one.
I have no idea how to do it. Twelve years of pointing the muscle at guarding, six of them in a box with nothing to guard but a memory I sharpened every night, and now I have to learn, at twenty-nine, to hold the only thing I’ve ever loved the way you hold water, the way you hold a thing that could leave, the way you hold a wild creature that comes to your hand because it chose to and not because you closed your fist. Everything in me is built the other way.
Everything in me wants to put her somewhere nothing can reach her and stand in front of it for the rest of my life.
That’s not going to change. I can’t make it change.
What I can do, the only thing I can do, the hardest thing I will ever do, is feel the fist want to close and choose, every single time, to keep the hand open.
To let her climb on. To let her climb off, if that’s what she wants, even if it kills me, even if she walks down a hill or up a mountain into something I can’t follow her into.
To stand in the doorway and never once block the door.
I watch her cross the kitchen, still not looking at me, and pick the little brass music box up off the side table, Silas’s calling card, our father’s instrument, the six notes that meant I’ve decided in a house where deciding was the only power anyone was allowed, and I watch her wind it herself, slow, deliberate, her hand on the key, her choice, taking the thing that was always used to control us and making it answer to her instead.
I don’t understand what she’s telling me. Not yet. I’ve decided too, she doesn’t say it out loud, but I feel it, the way I feel everything she does, through any wall ever built.
But I understand this much: she just took the family’s whole language of control and turned it into a thing she gets to choose.
And whatever she’s deciding, whatever she’s about to do, the test of everything I just swore to myself is going to be whether I can stand here and let her decide it, even if it’s the worst idea in the world, even if it walks her straight into the dark, even if loving her with an open hand means watching her do something that could take her out of my reach forever.
I close my eyes. I listen to the lullaby in her hands instead of my father’s.
Okay, little lamb, I think. Decide. I’ll learn to be the kind of man who lets you.
Just, be reachable when you’re done. Leave me a wall I can put my ear to. That’s all I’m going to let myself ask for now.
That’s the open-handed version.
God, it’s going to be the death of me.