Chapter 3 #3
"You know what I hear, though," Jonah said.
Careful. Not fixing it. Not reaching for the thing people reached for, the it's not your fault, the clean lie that made the sayer feel better and landed on the grieving like an insult.
Just — offering. "You said he made scenes survivable.
For the patient, the family, for you. Everybody but the one guy.
" He turned the dead cup. "I don't know anything about your partner.
But I know that math. The guy who's the wall for everybody else — nobody's ever his wall.
He doesn't let them. That's not a thing you missed, Dom.
That's a thing he was really, really good at hiding, from a guy whose whole job is seeing.
Those aren't the same. They just feel the same at three in the morning. "
Dom didn't answer. Couldn't. Because the kid had just walked into the one room Dom never let anyone into and moved a single piece of furniture a few inches, and the whole room looked different, and Dom hated it and needed it in exactly equal and unbearable measure.
Nobody had said that to him. Eighteen months, the counselor the department made him see, Von, the whole machinery of people who cared — and nobody had said those aren't the same, they just feel the same at three in the morning.
It took a twenty-four-year-old with a dead coffee and his own hundred-year-old eyes, a kid who clearly knew that exact math from the wrong side of it, from a hallway at seventeen, from a bush outside a house on a rotation, from wherever he'd learned to talk the terrified down like the worst moment of your life was survivable.
Who was your wall, kid, Dom thought, looking at him. Who's yours.
He didn't ask. It wasn't his to ask, not yet, maybe not ever. But he filed it — not in the cold cabinet, the other one, the one he'd sealed shut eighteen months ago and had apparently just, against every protocol he owned, cracked open on a concrete step.
"You should've reported the hand," Dom said. "Tonight. That's the correct call. You know that. Impaired provider, you report it."
"Yeah," Jonah agreed. "I know."
"So why didn't you."
The kid was quiet a moment. Turned the cup another quarter-turn.
"Because you weren't impaired," he said.
"You were human, for like ninety seconds, and then you weren't anymore.
There's a difference. The manual doesn't have a box for it, but there's a difference, and I'd rather ride with a guy whose hands shake sometimes than a guy whose hands never do, because the second guy scares the hell out of me.
" He finally looked over, and there was nothing bright in his face at all, just the tired hundred-year-old thing, level and certain.
"I've met the guy whose hands never shake.
He's inside right now telling a fake story about a call at the top of his lungs.
I don't want to learn from that guy. I want to learn from you. "
Dom had no protocol for that.
That was the thing that undid him, sitting there — not the call, not even the hand.
He had a protocol for everything. Twenty years of protocols, a box for every horror, a number for every question, and he had spent eighteen months building the finest, coldest, most efficient system a grieving man ever built for making sure nobody ever got close enough to matter again.
And a two-days-on kid had walked straight through all of it in one shift, not by force, not by prying, but by the simple unbearable act of covering his hand and then handing him a bush and a block walked twice so he wouldn't be alone in the shame — and Dom did not have a single procedure for what to do with a person like that.
For what to do with being seen and not, in the seeing, destroyed.
He should get up. That was the correct call. Get up, go inside, put the shift and the wall back where they belonged, ride out the next month and sign the kid off and never again sit on a cold step and let anyone hand him anything.
He didn't get up.
"Your coffee's dead," Dom said, instead, roughly.
"Everything's dead at three a.m. That's the whole vibe of three a.m." Jonah picked up the cold cup and drank it anyway, and made a face, and Dom felt the corner of his own mouth move — the thing that wasn't a smile but shared a zip code with one — and hated how much he did not hate this, sitting on a concrete step at the worst hour of the worst kind of night, next to a kid who had every reason to be a threat and had decided, instead, without being asked, to be a wall.
This is a problem, Dom thought, for the second time in two days. But it didn't sound the same as it had the first time. The first time it had meant this kid is good and good is a complication.
Now it meant something Dom had no box for at all, and he sat on the cold step and did not go inside, and let it be a problem, and that — that was the thing that scared him, more than his hand, more than the still apartment, more than any of it.
That he didn't want to get up.