Page 133 of Hushed

“It’s a bit late.”

“But it bothers you. Look, I can tell you this right now: nobody owes you their forgiveness just because you really want it or can’t live without it.”

“Why am I like this?” he asks.

“Because sometimes it’s easier to be the one that drives people away than to be the one that took the chance and got left behind anyway.”

I hear the tap go on in the kitchen. It switches off quickly. Levi is somewhere on the other side of these walls, and if I know him, he has his earbuds in, listening to me impersonate the man he married.

“Pretty close,” Justin says.

“Then here is the part nobody tells you. Pushing somebody away because you are frightened is not the same thing as not loving them. From the inside it feels the same. To them it looks the same, and that is the tragedy of it. But it is not the same. It’s still fear.” I am so warm. I am so wise. I don’t know where it’s coming from. “And the cure is stupidly simple. Sometimes you have to take the risk and tell the truth.”

“What if it’s too late?” he says. “What if there’s already too much of the other thing? The a-hole thing?”

“If it is, then you have tried. And you have given someone else the ability to decide whether or not they can move on. And maybe that answer is no. Some cruelties we can’t move on from, no matter how much we explain them. But you’d be surprised what people are willing to forgive if given the chance to.” I push the boots away. My ass has gone to sleep and I feel like I’ve exhausted all the air in this closet. “What they cannot forgive is the silence. You can come back from cruelty. It is much harder to come back from a silence that has not been explained.” I think of Levi, but I cannot now. I have to focus on Justin and his mysterious M. “What is the true thing?” I ask him. “The one you meant to say before you ruined it. Say it once out loud to a stranger so that it exists somewhere outside your own head. Then you cannot un-know that you said it.”

I wait. The pause runs so long that Parker begins to say something in my ear and thinks better of it.

“That I’d rather have you mad at me than not have you,” the boy says. It comes out fast, the way you pull tape off skin. “That I’m sorry. That I didn’t mean the things I said about, whatever, it doesn’t matter, I didn’t mean it. That I think about you all the time and I don’t know how to be normal about it. Okay. That’s it. Okay.”

“That’s the whole thing,” I tell him. “That is all it ever is. You’ve been brave, and I think that’s a good start. I’m going to give you my personal email address. I want you to email me today, because no matter what happens, I’m rooting for you. Can you promise me to do that?”

“Yeah.”

“Parker will get you those details, okay?”

He thanks me. He sounds younger than he did when he started, the way people do when they set a weight down. The line clicks. Parker takes us to a break, the light goes amber, and I am not the wise man anymore. I am a suspended academic on a closet floor on a Wednesday evening with a cramped leg. I have a foam windscreen and a borrowed microphone.

I pack the equipment into its box. I fold my knees up. I sit there a minute longer in the dark among the boots, because I can hear Levi moving about out there.

I check my phone before I push the door open.

One new message, sent to the personal account, because I don’t have another one.

Justin Davenport

I open it and skim over the short message, and then write, If you ever need to talk to someone, please text me first. I mean it. I type in my number and press send.

I put the phone facedown on my knee and sit there a second longer in the dark with the boots.

Robby called me at a quarter to eight in the evening and I was sitting down to mussels.

This one wrote straight away. And this time, I could do something.

I push the closet door open. The fresh air hits me like a balm.

“You did good, baby boy,” Levi says from the bed, pulling his earphones out. “Really touching.”

I crawl out of the closet and wince.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, something behind my knee started hurting while I was on the last call.” He offers me a hand and I wind up climbing him like a redwood. He deposits me on the bed and starts working the cramped muscles at the back of my leg. “This won’t be forever,” he says. “You’ll be back in the studios before you know it.”

I force myself to smile at him. “This won’t be forever,” I repeat.

Chapter forty-six