Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
“My senior year, I rented in a house off campus. A real shithole. Cheap and falling apart, but we—my roommates and I—didn’t fucking care, most of us were never home.
And I had—I had a sense things were about to break open for me.
My mentor and I had the idea out there, we had interest. I was going to stay on for my master’s, that was settled, so I didn’t really give a fuck about where I lived. ”
He could see the house in his mind: peeling countertops, no baseboards, vinyl siding falling off the side. Shithole was an understatement.
It was a hazard, and he should’ve known.
“I graduated at the beginning of May, but had the lease until August. Had a way nicer apartment lined up for the fall, since we had investors locked in by then, money coming in, but it seemed stupid to waste what I’d already paid for.”
Harder now. Hurting more now, but he wanted to tell it to her, because he thought, somewhere in this city, Michael was telling Emily, and he did not want his friend to be doing it alone.
“Sara Beth did classes at Hudson Valley Community College. Real nearby, and by then, she was close to finishing an associate’s.
It took her longer, with the way she worked, and how she was still commuting from a fair ways away.
But that summer, if she took three classes, she’d be finished.
Ready to go when it was time for her and Michael to move on to their next stop.
So it made sense. It made sense for her to live with me for a bit. ”
Michael thought it was such a good idea. He hated Sara Beth’s commute, how she took night classes, how she was tired from work when she drove back and forth.
He’d been so grateful.
“She moved in right after my graduation. Took the—” He broke off again, a wet catch in his throat. He could picture this, too. It haunted him. The cheap paneled walls, a poorly done “finish” to part of the space, the rest of which was a utility room.
“Took the basement room,” he rushed out. “It was the nicest one, if you can believe it. Had its own entrance. And a bathroom, so she wouldn’t have to share.”
Layla made a noise. A knowing sound. The basement room.
“Michael’s graduation was later. End of May, but he was going to come home after. I figured, for however long he had at home, he could stay there, too, with Sara Beth. That would be good. Better than staying with Fitz and Paula.”
One thing I love about you, Griffy, Sara Beth had said, is that you stay committed to pissing Fitz and Paula off.
He’d laughed, playfully pushing her away from the microwave, which she’d bent to peek into, trying to see what he was heating up, to decide whether she’d want to share—steal—it.
The kitchen light above them was flickering temperamentally like it always did in that house, especially when any appliance was running.
He’d said, I don’t stay committed. I don’t even have to try pissing them off, and she’d laughed, too, because both of them knew it was true.
He could hear Sara Beth’s laugh, still. Could call it up easily.
But he realized now that he couldn’t remember Emily’s, and he’d probably heard it more than once in the last few days.
He thought that was not good of him, not to remember.
He would probably never have occasion to hear it again, though at least she would laugh again. Someday.
He would do this next part quick. Brutally quick.
“The fire was the third week of May. The middle of the night. Just me and Sara Beth in the house that weekend. Electrical. It started in the basement.”
The basement room, he bet Layla was thinking, but he was thinking more about that word, started. It made the whole thing seem slow. A little spark, a smoldering maybe, until there was a point of catching, a point of spreading.
But it hadn’t been like that. In that house—a shithole, a hazard, everything old, already rotted, not up to code—it had not been a starting.
It started and ended at the same time, that’s how it seemed.
A conflagration, an explosion. To this day, Griffin could not say if he smelled smoke first, or if the fire was already there, coming up through the floor, too fast-moving to bother with a warning odor.
They said she probably didn’t suffer, Michael told him, one of those days after, Griffin in the bed paralyzed with pain, every kind of pain, pain he knew would never leave him, worse for the way Michael came every day, sitting and sitting, talking to Griffin as though he had not once considered being angry. They said it was very quick.
“I couldn’t have saved her that night,” Griffin said now. “I know that. I—I did try to get to her. I got out of my window and went around to her entrance.”
The T-shirt he’d been sleeping in balled haphazardly over his left hand, a desperate, meaningless effort to spare himself pain. He had not known pain. He had opened that door and become fire. He could not remember anything after that, for days and days.
But he’d known, even as it consumed one whole side of him, blasting him backward into the night, that Sara Beth was gone. He’d known that before everything inside him—his body, his brain—went black.
“But I could have saved her before. Never letting her move in. Not giving her that room. I could have. That’s why—Paula and Fitz.”
He figured he didn’t need to complete that thought.
She’d seen Paula and Fitz with him. It didn’t matter, really, that they’d both once cared about him, too, or at least they’d seemed to.
When he was younger, sweet-faced and lonely, when he probably seemed like a pleasant, harmless charity case.
It didn’t matter that well before the fire—middle school, probably—they’d started to sour on him, to see him as a bad influence, to look scornfully down on his mother, as though they’d run out of patience for the fact that she hadn’t yet managed to bootstrap herself out of being poor, or maybe for the fact that Griffin hadn’t turned his back on her in favor of them.
“And Michael?” Layla said softly.
Even with two words, he knew what she was asking.
He shook his head. He’d heard people use this expression, that their eyes burned with tears. But he would not say that.
He would not say that’s how it felt at all.
“Michael never blamed me. He has always stood…he has always sat beside me. For forever.”
It felt over for him then. A breaking. He bent himself forward in the chair, set his elbows on his thighs and his head in his hands, knowing it felt all wrong, pain and parts of him all out of proportion, exactly like one of those sculptures in the museum garden.
He was thinking, I can’t believe I did it. I can’t believe I did this to Michael. My best friend.
Or maybe—he wouldn’t ever be sure—maybe he said it through the wet catch in his throat, maybe he said it to the floor between his spread knees.
Because before he knew it, Layla was there.
Not touching him, but kneeling before him.
He could see her pale, beautiful hands resting on her thighs, waiting.
He thought, Get up from there, the first command he’d ever given her, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
He stared at her hands, blurry through his wet vision, grateful when—after he didn’t know how long—they started to come back into focus.
“Griffin,” she finally said, and then one of her hands lifted. She set it so gently on his right leg, curving her fingers around his calf, her thumb resting on his shin. “You did the right thing.”
“I told him,” he said, embarrassed at the sound of his voice, but not so embarrassed that he didn’t keep going. “Tonight, in his room. After we got back from getting your perfume. I told him if he didn’t tell her, I would.”
“That was good,” she said, so soft—god, she must be such a good fucking doctor, and this was humiliating, for her to talk to him this way.
Five minutes, and it would get more humiliating. He would be insensate with the pain coming. She would see it all. He was going to let her. He wanted to let her. He deserved it.
“Then tell her,” he said now. “That’s what Michael said to me, before he left the room. Then tell her.”
Layla rubbed her thumb back and forth across his shin.
He could only assume it was from the years he’d spent being specially tuned to everything that touched him, but he somehow thought he could feel the bewilderment in that small movement, a confusion that mimicked his own.
Why would Michael have said that? And not like a dare, but almost like an invitation?
Why did he seem to accept, after all this time he’d kept it from Emily, that Griffin would be the one to tell her?
“I don’t think he’s himself,” Layla said finally, which is probably the sort of thing he would’ve been insulted by only a few days ago. You don’t know him, he would’ve snarled, monstrous and overprotective, clawing at anything that got in his best friend’s way.
Now, he wasn’t insulted. He wouldn’t quite call himself comforted, either, but he was not angry that she’d said it. He thought, He isn’t himself. He maybe hasn’t been himself since he bought Emily that ring. Since he decided to give her that ring, without telling her the truth.
“Griff,” she said, her fingers pressing more firmly into his calf, hugging him in the only way she could right now. “Listen to me.”
He must’ve shaken his head, given some indication that he couldn’t. Inside him, it was all going wrong now, wires crossing along the left side, creeping strangely and inexplicably into the right.
“Listen,” she said again, more firmly, keeping her hand on him, as though that one point of contact could neutralize every other sensation that was screaming along his nerve endings. “It wasn’t just right for Emily. It was right for Michael, too. You did right by them.”
Dimly, he thought of another strange irony: that without her, without Layla, he would not have done right. If Layla had not been here, he doubted he would’ve ever known that Michael had not told Emily about Sara Beth. And even if, somehow, he had known, he would not have ever breathed a word.
Not if he hadn’t met Layla.
He would not have ever been able to see anything beyond seeing Michael through the wedding.
It was something you said, he thought, no anger, no ire in it now. It was everything you said to me, ever.
With effort, he moved, only enough to get his right hand down to where her left rested on him.
He linked their fingers awkwardly, uncomfortably, but no kind of discomfort like this mattered to him now.
The two of them, linked forever for having ruined this wedding, not that he’d ever tell her so.
Not that it would ever really be anyone’s fault but his.
“We just have to wait,” she said, holding his hand tight, her thumb smoothing over the back of it rhythmically.
We just have to wait was another real doctor-like thing to say.
Will the skin graft take, will the antibiotics work, will the tissue soften?
We just have to wait. But he didn’t mind.
By now, he was almost outside of his mind, parts of him beading with sweat, his body in charge.
“We’ll keep our phones on, and we’ll wait to hear. They need to talk, and we need to wait.”
He wished he could reassure her of that.
The we part. He wished he could say he’d wait with her, he’d wander with her all night like they’d done yesterday, he’d take out his phone and check it every time she checked hers.
He’d kiss her and touch her when the hours got long so she would forget; he would turn her into that tower of light.
But he hadn’t spent the whole night being brutally honest—wrecking ball to someone’s life honest—to start lying again.
Not to her, not now.
So he squeezed her hand and told her the truth.
“I’m probably going to need some help.”