Page 11 of After His Eulogy
“It’s Reed now. Not Reece anymore. The name.”
I do not say it back. I’m not going to say it back. He has just handed me a name and I’m not going to take it on a sidewalk.
“You don’t know,” I say.
“Griffin.”
“You don’t know. You don’t get to know. You weren’t there. You weren’t there, you don’t know what it was, you don’t.”
I stop. He has not said anything else. He’s waiting. He’s letting the other person have the words first because the other person’s words will tell him what he’s allowed to say. He has just used the words he had to use. The rest is mine.
“I’m not doing this here,” I say.
“Okay.”
His hand goes up and touches the strap of his bag, then comes back down. I do not know what to do with that. He used to do that. He used to do it when he was about to say something he didn’t want to say. He’s doing it now. He’s not saying anything.
“I’m going home,” I say. “You know where I live.”
He knows where I live. I haven’t told him I know that. He doesn’t ask.
“Tonight,” I say. “Eight.”
“Okay.”
I walk past him. I keep walking. I do not turn around. I do not stop. I do not slow down. Somewhere two minutes into walking I realize my hands are shaking and have been shaking the whole time. I put them in my pockets. I keep going. He said okay. He said okay and okay. He touched the strap of his bag. He looked at me like he’d been afraid of this for a long time. He’s going to come. He’s going to come to my apartment tonight at eight and I’m going to open the door and he’s going to be standing on the other side of it, alive. I don’t know what I’m going to do.
NINE
REECE
I do not move for a while after he walks away. I am still on the path. My bag is on my shoulder. There’s a guy on a skateboard going past me a second time, the same guy, the loop he does between buildings. I watch the back of his hoodie until he is small enough to be a different person. Then I turn and walk in the direction Griffin went, except slower, except not really following him, except yes, following him for a block until I make myself stop and turn the other way. Okay. I get to my apartment somehow. I do not remember the walk. I remember unlocking the door, the door sticking the way it always sticks. I remember thinkingfix the door, and then realizing I have been thinkingfix the doorfor eight months and have not fixed the door. I am thinking about the door because I am not thinking about the thing. I sit on the couch. I do not take my coat off. The thing the thing the thing. He’s here. He found me. What does that mean. It means he saw me. That’s all it means. He saw me at the coffee shop. The one I should not have been at. The one I told myself a year ago I would stop going to and then kept going to because it was the only one that did the cardamom thing right. That is thelevel of stupid that has done this to me. Cardamom. Now he is here. Now he knows I am here.
He looked thinner. Tired. Like himself but not. Stop. Sit. Sit on the couch. Take the coat off. I take the coat off. I put it on the chair. I sit back down. My phone is in my hand. I do not remember taking it out of my pocket. The screen is on. I am looking at the contacts, scrolling. There is one number in there I am scrolling for. I am not going to call it but I am scrolling for it anyway. Mendez. I look at the name. The thing about calling Mendez is that calling Mendez is the answer to this. You call Mendez. You sayI have been recognized. A thing happens. The thing will be unpleasant for a few weeks and then I will be somewhere else. Somewhere else. Somewhere not here. I look at the name. My thumb is over it. My thumb is over it, not on it, which is a distinction my body is making before my brain is making it. I lock the phone. I put it face down on the coffee table. Not yet. I do not saynot yetout loud but I think it loud enough that I can almost hear it. Not yet. I can do this once. I can have this conversation once and then I can call. The clock can run for one evening.
I look at the time. It’s twelve-fourteen. Eight hours. Eight hours is a very long time and a very short time and I am going to spend it sitting on this couch. I do not sit on the couch the whole time. I get up. I make food I do not eat. I take a shower that’s too hot. I stand in the shower with my forehead against the tile and I let the water hit the back of my neck until it goes cold. Then I stand in it cold for a minute longer because I’m someone who does that. I get out and I dry off. I sit on the edge of the bed in a towel and I do not move. What am I going to tell him. That’s the question. I haven’t been asking it. I sit on the edge of the bed and I let myself ask it and the answer is bad. The answer isas little as possible. The answer has to be as little as possible. Anything I tell him is something he has. Anything he has is something someonecould get out of him. I am not going to think about who. He is not safe with information. That is the whole point of why we are here. That is the whole reason for the last two years.
So I will tell him. I will tell him that I am alive — he knows. I will tell him that I had to disappear. That I had no choice. That I cannot tell him why. I rehearse it standing at the window. I do not get better at it. He’s going to ask the question. He’s going to ask the question and I’m going to deflect the question and he’s going to know that I deflected. Griffin has always been good at knowing. He’s the person who notices when you have changed something small in a room. He’s the person who, if you lied to him, would not say so. He would just store it away. That’s the part I cannot stop thinking about. He’s going to store this. I get dressed at six-thirty. I don’t know what to wear. It doesn’t matter. I put on a sweater and jeans. I look in the mirror. The person in the mirror looks like a person about to go to a funeral. I thinkI am about to go to a funeral.
I thinkthat’s not funny.I am laughing a little. Quiet. Just to myself. There is no one in the apartment to hear. I leave at seven-thirty. I walk. The walk is forty minutes if I take the long way and I take the long way. I take the long way because forty minutes is forty minutes I do not have to spend on his couch. It’s forty minutes during which I can keep telling myselfI am still going, I am still going.And I am still going. I get to the address at eight-oh-three. I stand outside the door of the building. I look up at the second floor. The light is on. I check over my shoulder. I do it without thinking. Habit. There’s no one on the street. I go in.
The stairs creak in two places. He told me once. No, he didn’t. I don’t know that. I don’t know how I know that. I’m inventing things about his life. I knock on the door of 2B. He opens it. He looks at me and I look at him and neither of us says anything for a second that is too long. He is wearing a different sweater thanthis morning. His hair is wet. He has showered too. The thought that we both showered for this is the worst thing I have thought all day and I have to push it away. The smell that comes off him when I step past him into the apartment is the smell I have been trying not to remember for two years. The green-label shampoo. The one I used to buy for him because he forgot to. He’s still buying it. He’s still buying it himself, or somebody is buying it for him, and either of those is a thing I cannot do anything with.
“Come in,” he says.
I come in. The apartment is small and clean and exactly what I would have guessed if I had let myself guess. There’s a desk by the window. A small coffee pot on the counter. A chair with a sweatshirt on it that he has not moved and probably will not move, because that is where the sweatshirt goes. I take all this in in three seconds and then I stop looking at the apartment because looking at the apartment is unbearable. I look at him.
“Sit down,” he says.
“I’d rather stand.”
“Sit down.”
I sit down. He does not. He stands across from me, by the desk, his hand on the back of the chair. He has not asked me anything yet. He’s going to in a second — he’s letting the silence go on because he wants to see what I do with it. I do nothing with it.
“I’m going to ask you questions,” he says. “You’re going to answer them.”
“Okay.”
