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Several minutes later, when the train finally jerked forward, I felt the secret glee of having avoided a seatmate.
They all sigh, my children. It’s their most frequent response to me.
Michael rolls his head back on his shoulders, as if praying to the heavens, which he certainly isn’t.
The family at its leisure.
The problem being that basic training had so little to do with actual combat. My intellectual grasp of my situation never seemed to hold much. Life kept slipping through it.
I looked at my fellow passengers instead, taking in their shorn, wary affect, the aspiration to undisturbed nonpresence guarded by newspapers, gaming devices, books, and headsets.
He was tangled up in politeness, which by default I matched and parried, moving on to social autopilot.
It occurred to me that he might be less neurotic than I was. That he might know himself decently well.
But that Seth loved me back? That if anything he was the more affectionate? Of course Michael would never be less than polite about it. He’d say he was glad, and yet I would be cutting him off, leaving him more isolated than he already was.
She worried about him every day. Now, finally, he had good news. She couldn’t deny him the chance. This left only the question of how he would get from Boston to Michigan. Michael driving a U-Haul for two days by himself to an empty apartment in a town he’d never been to seemed like a bad idea to all of us.
Just hearing him describe his day with his family untensed me. Forty-eight hours with Michael and it was as if my own life had ceased. I hadn’t returned phone calls or even responded to my editor’s e-mails.
“That’s good,” Michael said. “How is it going?” “Actually,” I said, “it’s going really well.” I could have stopped there. But he’d asked. “To be honest, I think we might be in love.” His head moved fractionally up and back, as if avoiding a punch. “That’s good,” he repeated, more gravely this time. “I’m amazed you haven’t been talking about it. I can’t imagine not needing to talk about it. Given how frightening it is. You must be afraid he’s going to leave you.” “Not really. I think we’re good.” He squinted at me, trying to make sense of what I was saying. “Where did you meet?”
Seeing an opening, he started in on his perennial subject: slavery and trauma. I could never tell if he actually thought he was discoursing on all this to me for the first time, in which case the drugs had given him mild dementia, or if—and this seemed more likely—it didn’t matter a great deal whom he was describing it to, he just needed to narrate it, over and over.
What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance.
This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.
They peered into me and into the past, to whatever it was that had brought him to such an unsentimental understanding of himself.
Like Celia said, the sedatives had walled his feelings in. And the higher the walls got, the more he feared what they protected him from.
People don’t want to be loved the way I love them. They get suffocated. It isn’t their fault. But it isn’t mine, either.”
“Why are you playing this?” he asked. What he had said to me a moment ago was true. I hadn’t been listening to him, not for years. I’d wanted him to be better for so long that I had stopped hearing him tell me he was sick. For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.
How long had we both been ashamed? How long had he suffered alone? I stepped in closer and, taking his wrist in my hand, guided his arm around onto my waist, and put my own on his, holding him to me. Gently, I pressed his head down onto my shoulder. And then the two of us leaned against each other, and danced.
It was one of those youthful promises you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.
That’s what I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn’t offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on, I realized that my clients’ lives weren’t works of art.
I never did that for Michael. I never gave up my belief in a secret, a truth lodged in the past, which if he could only experience and accept would release him.
He’d sounded so desperate on the phone from Maine. And yet I hadn’t said what I should have to Alec—that it had gone too far, too quickly, and that he had to stop it. I’d kept believing in the one catharsis. As Alec did, and my mother, in her own manner, and even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead. I believed that before. But now I know it’s true. It’s what he kept trying to tell us.
At my weakest moment, he had refused to doubt us.
He is so committed to his guilt. He needs Michael’s death to be his fault. It’s what keeps his brother alive for him—that connection.
It’s a day I recall not in sadness, but in wonder at all that followed.