Chapter 30
30
Ezra wakes up feeling worse than hungover, like he’s cried all the moisture out of his body and all that’s left is a headache and a dry-mouthed sensation of misery. The light coming in through the blinds is tinged with gold, hovering between afternoon and twilight. He must have slept through almost the entire day, but the panic he’s expecting at the realization never comes.
Soft music drifts down the hallway, through the open door to the bedroom. Pushing the blankets off his legs, Ezra hauls himself out of bed, wincing when his body protests every move, every muscle aching and miserable.
“You,” Jonathan says, when Ezra hobble-limps into the kitchen and half collapses into a chair at the table, “do not look like you feel great.”
“I feel like I’m eighty,” Ezra says, resting his forehead against the smooth wood. There’s a quiet clink beside his head, and he opens his eyes to see a tall glass of water. “Thank you.”
“Mm.” Jonathan sits down across from him, his face unreadable as he watches Ezra drain most of the glass in one swallow, then the rest of it a bit more slowly. “You slept, at least.”
“Yeah.” Ezra rubs his eyes. “I owe you…a lot of apologies.”
Jonathan raises his eyebrows. “True,” he says. “You want to start now, or eat something first?”
Ezra puts the glass down. “Why do you keep doing that?”
“What?”
“This!” Ezra gestures between them. “I yelled at you. I was an asshole because I was freaked out and scared, and I was just trying to hurt you and I know that it worked, but you’re just being…nice.”
Jonathan props one elbow on the table, rests his chin in his hand. “It’s very cool how you take something that would be a compliment from any other human being and turn it into an insult.”
Ezra groans. “ Jonathan— ”
“Oh, stop.” Jonathan gets to his feet. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m ordering dinner on your credit card, because I really don’t want to talk to you about any of this until you’re fed and hydrated. That’s not altruism, by the way, I just don’t want to feel like a shitty person if I yell at you and you pass out again. You are going to get the yoga mat stuffed in the back of my closet that I never use and go do some sun salutations or something.”
Ezra opens his mouth. Closes it. Watches Jonathan pick up his wallet—when did Jonathan take his wallet?—and pull out a card, holding it up with a raised brow until Ezra startles back into himself enough to say, “Yeah, okay,” and then, “Wait, what?”
“Also not altruism,” Jonathan says, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “You’re moving like you just got hit by a train, and it’s a little pathetic.”
“I feel like you’re not usually this bossy,” Ezra says, and immediately winces, because the last thing he remembers Jonathan saying before he fell asleep is I am so mad at you and he probably shouldn’t be taking liberties like that.
Jonathan just snorts, putting his phone to his ear, because he’s a dinosaur who still orders takeout over the phone instead of online. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” he says. “Go.”
Ezra goes.
Twenty minutes of yoga does make him feel better, his body moving through the motions of an evening flow. It’s habit and practice now to connect breath with movement and movement with breath, but it feels like the breath fills him differently than he’s used to, as if there’s more room inside him than there used to be. He angles his hips back into a downward dog and exhales, drawing his belly in toward his spine, and closes his eyes, listening to the steady thu-thump, thu-thump, thu-thump of his pulse beating in his ears. His muscles tighten and release, tighten and release, tension slowly draining away. He can feel everything: the weight of his unbound chest under his borrowed shirt, the ache in his shoulders, the texture of the mat under his fingertips. All the sensations that he usually pushes into the background like radio static have swept into a fullness of feeling. It leaves him dizzy, overwhelmed with how much his body can hold when he lets it fill up with light.
His body is buzzing by the time he spreads out for a final resting pose, letting all his weight relax down onto the mat. The stiffness he’d woken with has faded to a pleasant ache, and he closes his eyes again, tipping his head back and letting his throat and heart open toward the ceiling. Ezra breathes, each inhale sweet and cool, each exhale sweeter and cooler.
How long has it been, he thinks, as his pulse eases back to a resting heart rate, since he’d felt anything this fully? How long has he just been…drifting?
He thinks about the ever-present circles under Aaron’s eyes, dark enough to have circles of their own. About how quick Becca is to complain, but never about anything that matters. About Dad, oscillating between pushing too hard and not bothering to push at all, expecting too much or losing trust at the slightest misstep. About the cracks in Mom’s foundation, buckling under the weight of her secrets and her shame. About the weight of the grief behind Jonathan’s soft smiles, the way he performs every ritual washing like he’s seeking absolution.
Bodies separate from souls, as disconnected as the people they bury every day.
He thinks about the ghosts, the real ones and the ones they bring with them. Of old men and young women, English teachers and rabbis and kindergarteners and artists; of children lost to the miserable roll of genetic dice and parents lost to old age; of generations lost to the brutality of human hatred. The ghosts of the living, of fractured marriages and missing sisters and different bodies. The ghosts of dead husbands, gone in the blink of an eye and leaving a spill of confusion and guilt and shame and secrecy behind, of arguments never resolved and apologies never given. The ghost of a man who loved his father enough to lie and his mother enough to keep her secrets, who drank tea he hated on the porch with his husband just to make him happy, who never felt like anything he did was enough to make up for everything he couldn’t be.
It clicks in his head then.
Fix it, Ben told him, that first night they spoke, and Ezra had been so certain it meant picking up the pieces of Ben’s lost life, fitting them back together. But Ben’s life existed at the edges of his own, and it had never been just Jonathan he looked at.
“Jonathan was right about you,” he says to the empty room. “You do meddle.”
There are things he feels like he has to fix, and things he knows, now, deep in the surest parts of him, that he simply wants to. How do you grieve a family? A marriage? Who prays over it, gives it the final dignity of clean linen and cool water? Does it get a funeral, or does it just lay itself down, mourned, but without mourners?
No one sits shiva for living ghosts.
Ezra lets his fingers relax. He lets a picture take shape in his head.
When he has it, solid and possible, he opens his eyes. He rolls his shoulders once, then puts away the yoga mat and steels himself to come clean.
—
When Ezra pads out into the living room, Jonathan is sitting on the couch, a bag of takeout on the coffee table and his phone in his hand. “I just checked in with your brother,” he says as Ezra approaches him, glancing up. His smile is his real one, all the way to the corners of his eyes. “Becca’s going to be discharged in a bit. He’s going to pick her up and take her back to the hotel your dad— Oh,” he says, breaking off when Ezra sits down next to him, taking the phone out of his hand and placing it on the table, then putting his hands on Jonathan’s shoulders. “Okay. Hello. You look better.”
“I feel better,” Ezra says, and then, because his nerves are still singing, asks, “Can I kiss you?”
Jonathan raises his eyebrows. “Bold,” he comments. “Considering.”
“I know,” Ezra says. “And I have a whole apology ready, and an explanation, and everything. But—just one?”
“For morale?” Jonathan says dryly, but he slips a hand into its familiar spot at the back of Ezra’s neck and draws him in.
The kiss tastes like a forgiveness Ezra hasn’t earned yet, and he sways against Jonathan, closing his eyes and letting it sink into him, filling every remaining space inside him until there’s nothing left.
Ezra pulls away, but he doesn’t go far. He tips their foreheads together, their breath mixing in the space between them. “I have a lot to tell you,” he says. “And some of it is going to sound really weird. But I promise you, it’s true.”
Jonathan tilts his head, just far enough away that they can meet each other’s eyes. He doesn’t let Ezra go. “I’m listening.”