Chapter 35
35
Ezra knows, the moment it happens, that Ben isn’t just gone, but gone, finally leaving for whatever place comes after this.
It’s this realization—that his strange, unexpected ally won’t ever flicker into being again—that pushes him into motion.
He can’t spend another second in this room, in this terrible quiet. Ezra gets off the floor, turning the water off with shaking hands and switching off the lights, and he leaves on wobbly legs, like his body is trying to learn how to walk at sea.
Ezra has always looked at the ghosts he sees as something impermanent and transient. Even the dead can’t stay forever, no matter how solid they look or how much they seem to cling to the living.
So why does this feel different?
He feels the cool air of Zayde’s presence by the door and has to brace himself for longer than he wants to admit before he can bring himself to look up to face the inevitable disappointment in his grandfather’s face. But there’s only quiet concern in those old, sad eyes, an expression that reminds Ezra of being five years old and insisting to his mother that he could take care of Becca when she cried, that he could keep Aaron out of trouble.
He’d always thought that it was doubt that made Zayde give him that look. Now he’s not so sure. Ezra swallows. “I did everything I could,” he whispers, and has to swallow to keep his voice from cracking on the words. “I just. I need that to be enough.”
Zayde’s eyes soften, and it’s so suddenly familiar, so absolutely the same way Zayde used to look at him just before he folded Ezra into a warm, tobacco-and-cologne-scented hug, that Ezra’s knees nearly buckle.
Unlike Ben, Zayde has never spoken to him. Ezra’s never known why. But even when he was alive, they didn’t always need words. Zayde steps away from the door and leaves it free for Ezra to pass.
“Thank you,” Ezra whispers, and goes.
—
A soft drizzle starts as he drives through the quiet streets, not sure what he’s looking for, only sure that he can’t go home. He craves a quiet that comes from predawn air and the slow murmur of the city coming to consciousness instead of the aching silence of the part of his mind that hears things others can’t. By the time he ends up at the waterfront and turns off the ignition, the drizzle has turned to a steady rain, rattling against the roof of the car. Ezra gives himself a moment to just listen to the sound of it, head tipped back and eyes closed.
It’s not a downpour, so he pulls up his hood and gets out.
He passes a few people on his way down the steps, mostly runners taking advantage of the empty sidewalks. When he gets to the bottom, he slips off his shoes and socks, rolls his cuffs a few more times, and dips his toes into the water. The Providence River is never balmy, even on the best days, and he shivers at the chill, his skin prickling into pins and needles before the numbness settles in. Ezra leans into the feeling, taking long, slow breaths as he swirls his feet back and forth, watching the ripple of the water under the glow of the streetlights. Sitting here, feet dangling into the river, he’s seven and seventeen and twenty-seven all at once, memories of summer days and autumn afternoons and winter evenings with his parents and siblings washing over him like a wave.
So many of their family habits and traditions are tied up in ancient ritual, clung to out of a stubborn refusal to let one more thing die on the altar of assimilation. He sometimes forgets that they have places like this, too: stone and water and air, simultaneously solid and shifting, something they made for themselves and disconnected from the weight of loss and memory soaked into every inch of their home.
His phone vibrates in his pocket, rousing him out of the reverie. Ezra wipes his eyes and sits up, knowing it’s Jonathan before he checks the screen.
He’s going to have to tell him about Ben. He’s used up all the secrets any one person could be allowed and probably more, but even if he hadn’t, this feels so raw in his throat that he couldn’t keep it to himself if he wanted to.
Ezra knows he left a note, but given the state he was in when he left, he can’t even remember what he wrote.
“Please don’t yell at me,” he says when he picks up.
“I’m not a yeller,” Jonathan says, in the tone of someone who’s considering changing that. “Where the hell are you?”
“Down at the waterfront.”
There’s a beat of silence. “It’s raining.”
“I know.”
Another beat, and then Jonathan sighs. “Don’t go anywhere,” he says. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Ezra blinks. “What?”
“What do you mean ‘what’?” Ezra can hear the rustle of fabric. “I’m coming down there.”
“It’s raining,” Ezra protests.
“Yes, we covered that. Where in the park are you?”
He’s in so much trouble. “Down past the bridge—where you can get your feet in the water.” He hesitates. “You don’t have to—”
“If you tell me not to come down there,” Jonathan interrupts, sounding tenser than Ezra’s ever heard him, “I will drown you in the river.”
Ezra laughs, but it’s hollow, and he’s not even sure if Jonathan meant it to be funny. He’s pretty sure he didn’t. “Okay.”
“You’ll stay there?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Jonathan says.
The line goes dead. Ezra stares at the screen and wonders if it’s too late to start swimming for safety.
Except that running away doesn’t feel like sanctuary, not anymore. Sanctuary is a living room crowded with voices and color and cinnamon-scented tea; it’s soft sheets and warm brown eyes and hands that hold him together as easily as they take him apart.
So he waits.
It’s been barely ten minutes when the rain suddenly disappears. Ezra looks up and sees the umbrella first, and then Jonathan holding it, looking back at him with tight-jawed, frustrated uncertainty, like he can’t tell if he wants to yank Ezra into a hug or push him into the water.
Ezra swallows. “Hi.”
Jonathan doesn’t answer, just folds the umbrella and sits down next to Ezra on the ledge. He draws his knees up, shifting to wrap his arms around them, and stares out into the water.
Finally, he says, “You can’t keep doing this.”
Ezra doesn’t need to ask what he means. “I know.”
“I thought we were on the same page here. I can’t keep chasing after you. I can’t keep wondering if I’m going to wake up and find you gone. I need—”
He needs to not be left behind again. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t—I wasn’t thinking.”
“That doesn’t fix it.”
“I know.”
“You keep shutting me out.”
“I don’t know how to stop.”
Jonathan closes his eyes. Ezra watches him, the way the rain clings to his hair and his eyelashes. He’s handsome, but it’s his soul that shines, and Ezra’s never found him anything but beautiful.
“Ben—” Ezra closes his eyes. “Ben’s gone.”
Silence, except for the wind and the rain.
“I know.”
Ezra opens his eyes, turns to look at him. Jonathan is focused on the horizon, where the first suggestions of sunlight have begun to break through the clouds. “How?”
“I don’t know. I woke up and I just…knew.” The droplets clinging to Jonathan’s eyelashes aren’t all rain. “It’s funny. I didn’t feel anything when he died. Had no idea until I got the call. I always felt like there was something wrong with me, like I didn’t love him enough to feel the hole he left in the world. I went to this grief group, and everyone else would talk about how they just knew, as soon as the person was gone. And I didn’t.”
Ezra squeezes his hand. I’m here. I’m here. Saying it, in all the ways he can.
“When you told me he was still here,” Jonathan says, slowly, like he’s not sure what word will follow the one before, “I thought maybe that was why. Maybe I didn’t feel him go because he hadn’t. And I started to look for him, when I could see you seeing him—you get this look, did you know? Distant and focused, all at once. I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it before.” He exhales, almost a laugh, and shakes his head. “I thought knowing he was here would help me figure out a way to say goodbye to him, but instead I just saw all the places where I couldn’t let him go. And knowing you could see him, when I couldn’t…”
He doesn’t sound angry. Just tired, and sad. “Sometimes I think I was angrier that you told me at all than that you waited to. It was easier, when I didn’t know.”
Ezra opens his mouth, ready to apologize, but Jonathan cuts him off. “But this time, I felt it. Like you can feel the pressure change before a storm.” He tilts his head back, turning toward the gathered clouds. They’re both waterlogged now, but neither of them reaches for his abandoned umbrella. “Someone told me once that explaining grief is like trying to describe the scent of petrichor. How do you tell someone how you experience the smell of the rain?”
There are a hundred possible words to describe the scent of the rain and the clouds and the river stretching out in front of them. Ezra’s been in the water for longer than he’s ever been dry. If he has nothing else to offer, he knows how to help someone swim. “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I should have been, but I wasn’t.”
“You were with him,” Jonathan says. “Do you think he got what he needed?”
“I don’t know.” Ezra hesitates. “He asked me what I was afraid of.”
“Did you answer him?”
Ezra shakes his head. The rain is lifting, light bursting through the clouds.
“This,” he says. “I’m afraid of this.”
Jonathan turns to him, a question in his eyes.
“You make me feel safe,” Ezra says. Like a blessing of gratitude. “Like you don’t need me to be anyone but who I am.”
Jonathan doesn’t waver. “Why does that scare you?”
He wants to draw into himself, protective and small, like he’s a child again, listening to stories at Zayde’s knee, the ghosts around him only the whispers of a family lost, of lives never lived, the ache of survival. “Because I don’t know how to be worth that.”
“You don’t have to do penance for needing help.” Jonathan touches his face with careful hands, running his thumbs over Ezra’s cheekbones, sliding through rainwater and salt water. “You don’t have to make up for needing to be loved.”
Ezra stares at him, through the faltering rain and the gathering sun. His hands have moved as if under their own power, curling into the fabric of Jonathan’s shirt.
“Ezra,” Jonathan says. No one, Ezra thinks, has ever said his name like Jonathan does. “What do you want ?”
What does he want?
He wants Dad and Aaron to do the work they care about, in the community Zayde loved. He wants Becca happy and safe and smiling. He wants Mom and Dad to be friends again, the way he remembers, before years of secrets drained their easy companionship away. He wants the QCC open in a building that’s not falling apart, where he can teach gangly college boys stumbling through their second puberty how to move through the growing pains and through the hormonal rush and show middle-aged lesbians taking their first steps out of the closet how to follow the arc of their breath.
He wants to hold people steady while they bring new life into the world, to witness their awe when faced with the sheer power of muscle and blood and love. He wants to go home to a house full of people who make him laugh so hard his face hurts and smother him with the kind of affection that’s only ever possible when a group of lonely people find the edges that fit together into an impossible whole. He wants to adopt four more dogs and start an herb garden and maybe grow a human heart under his own.
He wants to wake up in Jonathan’s bed, to the scent of his skin and the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles and his horrible habit of microwaving coffee. He wants to learn how to make the tea Jonathan used to bring out to Ben on the porch when he couldn’t sleep, not because he likes it, but because Jonathan does.
He wants to see a ghost out of the corner of his eye and let them be noticed, briefly real, and then be free of their weight. To let them exist without letting himself be haunted, to no longer fear turning into a ghost himself.
The last thing Ezra wants, in this life or whatever comes after it, is for Jonathan to let him go.
“I want,” Ezra says, choosing his words with care, “to stay here with you and watch the sunrise.”
Jonathan’s lips part in a smile, something very like surprised delight flickering in his eyes, and Ezra can’t do anything but lean forward and kiss him. He kisses him properly, one hand curled around his lapel, the other in his hair, and when Jonathan slides an arm around his waist and draws him closer, Ezra’s shiver has nothing to do with the breeze whipping his soaked clothes against his skin.
“I love you.” He presses the words to Jonathan’s mouth, the safest place he can think to put them. “I love you.”
Jonathan doesn’t say it back.
Not in words.
By the time they leave the water, making their way back up to where they left their cars, the gathering sun has warmed them dry.