I had no idea how the conversation had gotten so out of my control, so fast.
“I think my client’s right upstairs, and I shouldn’t have opened the topic here,” I said, firm.
He stood abruptly and walked past me to the mess Oakleigh had made. Blackie jumped off the sofa, following with Whitey in his wake. Julian knelt and began rerolling the cables with his back to me. I thought he was getting himself together, but then he turned to me and more tears were running down his face. His eyes looked so much older than the rest of him. He spoke again, low and quick, but with a great deal of intensity.
“I’m tougher than I look, you know. Maybe not a year ago. But now? After my dad was gone, there was only me. It was only me with my mother, those last weeks. It was . . .” He paused, the unspooled cable shaking in his trembling hands, seeking a word, but he couldn’t find it. He changed directions, saying, “I changed her diaper. Near the end, in hospice. There was a male orderly that day. Always before, it was these three girl ones in rotation, and I stayed out of the way. But that day, the regular girl was sick or something, and this guy was working. He was an old guy, too, like, near her age.”
As he spoke, his shaking hands kept winding up the cable. Blackie pounced at the moving end, cute and thoroughly unhelpful. I looked at him instead of at my brother’s shaking hands as he talked on, unstoppable.
“I could smell it, you know? That she needed— I could smell it. I was going to get that orderly, and she started crying. Mostly she was out of it, but not that afternoon. She shook and made this awful clacking gulp noise, and I hated it, and I knew that she was crying, so I leaned over her and I said, ‘What is it, Mama? What?’ My mom and dad were high school sweethearts. No other man had ever seen her without clothes on, she said. She’d always gone to women doctors, even. She was so skinny then, like this little dried-up scrap of mother, and her skin was so loose on her it hung down in floppy creases.”
Oakleigh was right upstairs, and now the kid was weeping openly. I was paralyzed in the face of all this naked loneliness and sorrow, and, worse, I couldn’t help wondering—had Kai been so frail and helpless, at her end? Had anyone been with her? I didn’t want to hear any more, but he kept on, relentless.
“She looked up at the ceiling, and she cried, and I talked about our old bird-watching log we used to keep when I was little, and I cleaned her up. I made myself not gag because I didn’t want her to hear and feel bad. It was terrible, but I did it, because she was my mother. That’s what a family is, Paula. That’s what family does, except Hana doesn’t have any.
“So that’s what we have to be. I want us to make something good for her. We have to, and I don’t know why you have to be so fucking scary. I’m trying to be friends with you, but every other minute I feel like you’re laughing at me or that you hate me. You’re what I got, though. And we’re what Hana’s got. We’re the only things at all—”
His voice had risen at the end, but then it cracked and he dropped his head and wept his guts out. After six fraught seconds, he turned his back and began stuffing the remotes and the rerolled cable back into the drawer, pushing gently at the kittens. He was still weeping as they both tried to climb into the drawer in a fluffy bother. He got the drawer shut, then scrubbed at his face with his palms.
“I don’t hate you,” I said quietly. “For what it’s worth, you’re pretty fucking scary, too.”
He only hunched his shoulders, snuffling and gulping. I had no idea what to do with a crying man-boy in the middle of my awful client’s house, especially one who was telling me what a mother looked like when she was sick and slowly dying.
One thing was clear: Hana had hit him like biology, too. I’d miscalculated both his depths and his investment. I wondered if he heard it as a heartbeat: find her, find her, find her.
Meanwhile, upstairs, it had gone dangerously quiet. Oakleigh could come back at any second. I realized my discomfort was more on Julian’s behalf. I didn’t want Oakleigh’s disdainful eyes to see my brother, tearstained and flayed open. I walked over and handed him my keys.
“I’m sorry,” I told him in the gentlest voice I owned. “I’m very bad at this. Go wait in the car, okay? I’ll finish here, fast as I can, and then we’ll talk.”
He took the keys without looking at me, and he made his own way out.