Chapter Thirty-Two #2
He wasn’t quite sure what it would take.
But he knew it would take something.
So he kept this ritual.
He went to the small table in his kitchen. He slid the article from his mom out of one of his back pockets and set it down—he would read it, eventually, since she’d gone to the trouble, but not tonight—and from the other, he drew out his phone.
A swipe, a tap. A text box that only ever had one of two messages. The same two, over and over again. Ten times, so far.
Would you still do it again? he wrote, pressing send, and then he darkened the screen, leaving the phone on top of the still-folded article about a syndrome he wouldn’t ever understand, no matter what he eventually read in there. He didn’t get nervous or miserable not to get an immediate reply.
Ten Tuesdays taught him that she didn’t always respond quickly.
So he took a long shower, washed off the day. Thought about all the places and people he tried not to let intrude too much on the difficult parts of his Tuesday. Thought about how much longer it might be until his Tuesdays could look different.
Not yet. Not quite yet.
Still, when he finally made his way back to the kitchen, he breathed a sigh of relief to see that she’d replied.
Eleventh time, two words.
I would.
* * *
Michael called him on the thirteenth Thursday, when Griffin had his hands in a particularly delicate piece of his model train set.
He dropped what he’d been holding.
He probably broke what he’d been holding, which Kevin was going to give him hell about on Tuesday, the little shit.
But he did not care.
“Mikey,” he said, when he got the phone up to his ear, and another thing that he did not care about was that he sounded slightly out of breath.
Inside his chest, his heart was pounding, and along his left side, he felt a strange, uncomfortable skittering that no longer filled him immediately with dread, with frantic anticipation.
“Hey,” Michael said back, a single syllable that Griffin could not really read anything from.
There was dead air between them—a game of chicken, a game of who will say how are you first.
Griffin. Griffin would.
“You all right?” he said, which was basically the same. Gruff, maybe, but whatever. He wasn’t meant to become a different person with all this therapy.
Michael laughed. A huffing, sarcastic laugh. “Been better. You?”
He could’ve said, Same. Let the dead air stretch again, and it would have been fine.
It would’ve been familiar, even: almost every hospital room visit, Griffin getting ruder and ruder, daring Michael, begging Michael, in the only way he knew how through all that pain, to get fucking angry.
To yell or scream or destroy something about Sara Beth being gone, the way Griffin sometimes wanted to.
Even though he really had no right to.
Even though he physically couldn’t.
He couldn’t ever do anything but lie there.
He took a deep breath and did not let the dead air stretch.
“I’m sorry for Paris,” he said.
But immediately, he disliked the taste of it in his mouth. It had the flavor of a lie he didn’t want to tell. The sort that didn’t help anyone, especially not himself.
“No, I’m not,” he corrected, and talk about gruff, Jesus. “I mean that I’m sorry you got hurt. That it happened the way it did. That’s—that’s really all I mean. About being sorry.”
Good thing Fridays were for therapy. Tomorrow he would have to talk about being bad at apologies.
“You did what you had to do,” said Michael, followed by a long pause. Like he, too, was rolling around the taste of something bad.
Eventually, Michael cleared his throat. He said, “You did the only thing you could do. It was the right thing to do.”
Griffin was glad to be alone. Glad to let his eyes close in pure, simple relief.
He felt something move through him. The beginning of something he’d been waiting for. Scanning for, every single day. A new scale, and all the levels between Not yet and Now.
He thought of a dark hotel room. Felt a slim, longed-for hand squeeze around his calf and heard a soft, longed-for voice say, You did right by them.
“I dared you,” intruded a different voice—another one he’d missed, sure, but right this second, it was no small effort to focus back on his best friend, who had maybe just said—
“I dared you to do it,” Michael repeated, “because I knew it had to be done. I knew it did, and I was too much of a coward to do it myself.”
After that, it was different.
The conversation, that was. No more dead air.
It was Griffin saying, Mikey, you’re not a fucking coward, and Michael pushing back, Michael saying that he maybe had always been a coward, that he’d always put Griffin between himself and the hardest things—the pressure he got from Fitz, the grief over Sara Beth, this wedding—and Griffin saying, That’s not how I see it, but also, after listening, sort of seeing it, too.
They talked about that night, first about the things they’d said to each other and then about the one thing Griffin had said to Emily—You need to ask him about Sara Beth—and how Michael was mad about that at first, how he’d wished Griffin had said the whole thing so he wouldn’t have to, and Griffin said, How do you think I fucking felt, in a sort of deadpan quip, and Michael actually laughed for real.
Then, Michael told Griffin about Emily.
He stayed to the broad strokes of it. Out of respect, he said, and for the first time in Griffin’s life, or maybe since the first time he’d gone to fucking therapy on Fridays and talked about how he loved Layla Bailey in the broadest strokes possible, he fucking got it, got something about how Michael felt toward Sara Beth all those years ago and how he felt toward Emily now.
How precious it was.
How much he wanted to protect it.
“We’re taking it slow,” Michael said eventually. “Starting over.”
“Germany?” Griffin asked, and he could practically see his best friend shake his head.
“Not going,” he answered. “It’s caused some fucking problems, to be honest, but it’s fine. It’s worth it. She’s worth it.”
Griffin was about to default to an old pattern, to say, What kind of fucking problems? and then offer to throw money at them. But he stopped himself in time, which maybe he would brag about tomorrow. Just to take the sting out of having to ask how to do a proper apolo—
“My new therapist says we might have—had, I don’t know—a codependent relationship,” Michael blurted. “You and me, I mean. Not me and Emily.”
Now that they’d talked for a while, Griffin could hear how Michael had been working up to it. How hard it was to say. How he thought it would be a surprise to Griffin.
Or that it would hurt.
But Michael didn’t know about the last three and a half months.
The work of the last three and a half months.
He didn’t know that Griffin had learned that a lot of things about Michael did hurt, that sometimes, just remembering certain things about Michael—about Michael and Sara Beth—could be like a huge, heaping meal for the pain he had to work so hard not to feed.
So he said, “My therapist said the same.”
They both laughed, and Griffin told him a bit about it—fucking Tuesdays, and the work stuff, and even Kevin and his Scarface shit, about the decisions he still wasn’t ready to make about school, about how he was, almost every single day, leaving the house.
Getting out of his bell tower, all by himself.
Not for Michael.
Not even for Layla.
By himself, for himself.
He remembered that first day, that hotel lobby, him and Michael and Layla and Emily. Layla calling him heroic, and how he bristled then—how that bristling turned into a blade, cutting him deep, making him lash out.
But now, he felt it. Felt the heroism in himself, for all he’d done, all he knew he was capable of doing.
Now, he thought. Now. Crystal clear. No Not yet in sight anymore.
“You sound good,” Michael said, when it seemed to be winding down. “Different.”
“Yeah,” he managed through the Now.
Michael laughed again. “Not that different, though. Just one more thing.”
Christ, Griffin thought. He should’ve tried the Well, like he did on Tuesdays with Mom and Peter, but it probably wouldn’t work over the phone.
“Layla’s here,” Michael said. “Not, you know, in my house. But in Boston.”
Now, now, now, he thought.
He was already moving toward his computer, opening the lid.
“Not sure if she’s got a placement here,” Michael was saying, “or if it’s a longer-term thing or what. She and Em went to dinner last night.”
Griffin set the phone down, put it on speaker. He was moving his fingers across the keys on his computer.
“Are you listening?” Michael said, obviously hearing the tapping sounds.
“I’m getting a fucking flight. A train, I don’t know.”
Michael laughed again. “You’re in a hurry now, after three months?”
“Three and a half. And yeah. I’m in a fucking hurry now.”
He scanned the screen, making sense of the times and numbers before him. On the other end of the phone, he heard the sound of what he thought was a door opening. Michael’s voice again, muffled, like he’d pressed his hand over the speaker.
Then—unmuffled—a delighted laugh Griffin once thought he might not ever get the chance to commit to memory.
Emily’s.
“I told you!” he heard her say. “I told you he was only waiting for you to call.”
“You catch that?” Michael asked.
This time, Griffin was the one to laugh.
“Yeah,” he said, clicking on one of the options in front of him. “I heard her. And Michael?”
“Yeah?”
“You had better fucking marry that woman someday.”