Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
DID I SAY FRIEND?
HUDSON
The knock at my door is a handful of raps, quick, erratic, and uneven. I check the time on the microwave, later than I would have expected a knock from anyone. And the rhythm is too frantic to be a return guest. I cross the apartment and open the door.
The woman in my doorway is not recognizable, even though I know her.
Same face, considerably fewer defenses. Smaller, somehow, though not in any way a tape measure would catch, but compressed.
The way a person gets when something has gotten to the part of them they don't show people and they are left alone, standing in their own fears. Her face is blotchy and her eyes are glassy with the tears that haven’t finished falling, and she doesn’t reach up to stop them.
She is too overwhelmed by whatever has thrown her at my door to care.
The grip she has on the paper in her hands is alarming. It's crumpled between them, but she’s holding it so tightly, I’m not sure how she even knocked.
‘I need a lawyer,’ she said. And the words come out fractured in a tear-blurred rush. Pieces I’m expected to put together.
“Louisa.” She keeps going. I try to strengthen myself to get her to listen, because I can’t help her like this. I don’t even know what’s wrong like this. “I can’t understand you. Breathe.”
“I, I am breathing…” she says. Looking at me with eyes wider than I’ve ever seen them.
The depths of brown I never noticed. For once, the thing in them is not anger or hatred at me.
She doesn’t look at me with the same resentment and loathing she normally does.
It is plain fear, undisguised, with no performance in it.
And she’s staring at me like I’ve said something in a language she didn’t know I could speak.
“You’re not,” I say as I step aside. “Come inside. Whatever this is, it won't be handled in the hallway.”
It’s never a good thing when someone shows up with a paper in hand claiming they need a lawyer.
At least she isn’t covered in blood. But something crosses her face, surprise, maybe, that I didn't say something that sounded more like me.
Her breath hitches once, twice, and I step to the side to hopefully ease her in.
She’s never been in my apartment, which is maybe a good distraction for her, as it has her eyes moving over everything, giving her something to do that isn’t crying.
Under different circumstances she’d be ripping into me with a critique of the space, but she’s too overwhelmed.
I’m almost sorry to be depriving her of the opportunity. Almost.
I guide her to the armchair with my hand at her back.
She is warm through her sweatshirt, and is wound so tight I can feel the tension.
Her whole body has been held at a high frequency and she hasn’t been able to come down from whatever this is.
I crouch in front of the chair so I’m below her eye line.
“I need to see what you’re holding,” I say.
“I can’t help if I don't know what we're dealing with.” She looks at me and extends both hands, the paper between them, like she’s offering something she's been gripping so long she's not sure she remembers how to let go. I smooth it flat across my knee and read it once, quickly, the professional scan, the source, the date, the citations. Then I read it again slowly because the first read told me something critical I’d like the second pass to contradict. But it doesn’t.
The expiration date is already past.
Something tightens in my chest that has nothing to do with the letter, but the trembling in front of me.
I didn’t know she could unravel like this, every interaction I have reminds me how she lives her life like a ball of yarn already rolling down the street as someone chases after it trying to spool it back into a sphere.
Just warmth and noise that tangles around everyone it touches.
Tripping them up in all the ways they never see coming.
But this is different. This isn’t the chaos she is comfortable in, this is something that has scared her, genuinely, down to the bone and deep in her soul.
“Could I—” She stops and tries again. “Do you maybe have…a cup of tea?”
I look up, catching her round, watering eyes.
Her multicolored nails are shades of purple and neon green that alternate across her fingers.
Currently digging hard into her own palms all because her hands don't know what to do with themselves now that I've taken the one thing she’d been holding together with what appears to have been sheer force of will.
“What kind?” I ask, knowing that I doubt I have ever kept tea here.
“Anything.” It’s barely above a whisper. “Anything warm,” she clarifies.
In the cabinet, behind the spices that are never used, is a box of Sleepy-Time Chamomile.
While the water heats in the microwave, I read the letter again with the learned, focused attention I practice daily, rather than whoever I was a minute ago.
This isn’t my area, about as far from it as one can get.
I jot down some notes on a legal pad in the kitchen as the microwave plate spins.
I steep the tea for six minutes, which is the middle of the directed range, and I return to the armchair with a warm beverage and better understanding of the situation.
I resume my position in front of her, holding out the mug, waiting for her to take it.
Her fingers close around the cream stoneware and I feel, for a moment, the warmth transfer to her cold hands against the hot ceramic, the small visible relief of it.
“I’m not this kind of lawyer, Louisa,” I tell her.
I keep my voice level. Level is what this room needs right now, and if there’s nothing else I can do, I can give her that.
“Mergers and acquisitions, hostile corporate situations. Not immigration.” Her face does something terrible and surprisingly, that does something terrible to me.
The last composure she was holding dissolves like cotton candy.
And through a stuttered sniffle, “But I don’t know anyone else.
” The words are very quiet and very honest and they very honestly hit me harder than they should.
Her breathing changes, I can hear it picking up.
It’s shallow and rapid, it’s her nervous system responding to a genuine emergency.
Her hands tighten on the mug, but even that doesn’t prevent the trembling as they do.
“Louisa.” I put my hands over hers, both of them, and they disappear under mine completely.
She takes up so much space in every other sense that the smallness of her actual hands is shocking.
I haven’t touched her since I pulled her from the elevator, spent exactly ten seconds holding her in my arms in a way that felt more dangerous than the elevator itself.
Just being in my grip I felt the natural warmth her body emanates, and I had to put her down and walk off before I walked her into my apartment, and then, the bedroom.
It was a ridiculous thought, and I couldn't let it fester.
I can tell from the state of her, one I know from my own experience, that this is a panic attack.
I don’t get them often anymore. But when I was a child, after my parents’ divorce, from time to time I would feel the slow roll of anxiety build within my chest until I broke out into full-blown panic.
It means that I can see it on her face as her hands tremble.
“Feet flat on the floor,” I command. My tone is clear and direct as her eyes are frantic, looking around the room nervously between blinking back tears.
“Louisa, do as I say.” I take the mug from her grip and set it on the small table at her side.
“Feet, flat.” She uncrosses her ankles, putting them flat against the rug, not arguing or hesitating at the direction the second time.
I take her hands and put them on her thighs, leaving my own on top of them to steady her shaking.
“Eyes on me.”
She looks at me. Stunned, but trusting. Though she has no reason to, and she’s never trusted me before.
I take a slow, deep, practiced breath. I watch her try to mirror the rise of my chest and fail.
Her breath catching halfway. “It’s okay,” I say, as the tears stream down her face and her lungs fight for every bit of oxygen she’s trying to claim.
“In through your nose.” I inhale so she can see my chest expand when my lungs fill with air as my nostrils widen taking it in. “Long and slow,” I say slowly.
She’s watching so intently, her chest moves up and down in a frenzy as I’m trying to get her to follow me. Finally, she does it. A breath longer than a hiccup and her shoulders lift with the effort of it.
“Hold,” I say, and she freezes. I count in a whisper with small nods. “One, two, three, four. Now out through your mouth.” I round my lips with exaggeration and she does the same. The exhale is shaky on the way out, uneven, but it happens.
“Again.” Her hands under mine shaking just the smallest amount less.
Her chest moving with just a bit more consistency.
We sit in my apartment doing this, her in the armchair and me crouched in front of it with my hands over hers and the chamomile tea steaming quietly next to us, until I feel her hands stop shaking all together.
Until the breath comes in properly and goes out steadily and the space between them stops being erratic.
The quality of the look in her eyes shifts as the panic settles, looking less desperate.
She’s herself the way a city remains after it’s been ravaged by a storm.
“Better.” It sounds like an assessment, not a question. Her nod is small in response. I was telling the truth, this isn’t my kind of law, but the feeling that I can’t do anything is not one I am comfortable admitting. “Okay, from the beginning.” I say.