Then Birdwine and I walked out into the night together. My adrenaline rush had long faded, but I hadn’t crashed. I felt only peaceful. I liked the feel of walking toward home as if I owned this night, as if I’d already run off everything in it that could hurt me. The sidewalk was cracked and jagged in spots, but so bright with yellow streetlights that it wasn’t hard to navigate. Traffic zoomed past, busy and impersonal, setting the hot air of late summer into gusty motion.
We walked from pool to pool of warm light. We had eight inches between us, and I couldn’t breach it. Julian, direct and sweet, would have already reached across it, and I wished then that I was more like him. I could feel that Birdwine was full of a sharp energy. Too much to contain, it leaked from his big body, prickling in the space that separated us. His feet banged down as if the earth itself had done something to piss him off. He was silent, and I wasn’t good at this. I didn’t know how to tell Birdwine how little knowing the worst of him had mattered in the face of a real ending.
Finally he spoke, and his voice was calmer, more under control, than his body language. “I am an asshole. But I’m not bad at my job.”
“I don’t think you’re bad at y—”
“Yeah, you do,” he said. “You must. You’ve seen my house. You know I’m always strapped. But I work my program, and when I’m on it, I’m very good. People hire me, Paula. People who don’t even want to sleep with me hire me.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, laughing a little. “You’re good at a lot of things.”
He got serious again. “I’m broke all the time because about a third of my income goes into a trust fund. For the kid. My son. For college or an emergency—whatever he might need. Not because of a court order. I decided I would do it, and I’ve stuck with it, ten years now. I’m not a shitty person.” He gave me a sideways glance and then amended, “I’m kind of a shitty person. But I’m not as thoroughly shitty as you think I am.”
We turned right, and we were walking toward my building now. When that gun was pointed into my left eye, I’d forgiven his past choices and accepted all his deep-scarred imperfections, whole. But him putting aside that money laid bare all I knew that was best in him. Some people might not have been touched by this, the sacrifice of money, but they had likely always had enough—and they definitely had not seen his house. I knew what it was to want. Kai and I had lived next door to homeless when I was little. I’d waitressed my way through junior college until I could get some scholarships. It mattered to me, that he’d done this.
“I don’t think you’re shitty,” I said. “You don’t owe me an explanation. You don’t owe me anything. Whatever happened with your kid, however that played out, it’s terrible and sad. You don’t live easy with it, though. That’s obvious. You did the best you could, at the time. You’re still doing the best you can with it. I know that without you saying, because I know you.”
He wouldn’t look at me then. Not at all. He reached across the space between us, though. He grabbed my hand, squeezing until my bones compressed, just shy of pain.
I had spent my whole life hungry for forgiveness. It had not come, so I didn’t know firsthand what he was feeling. But I had imagined it, over and over. I’d wanted it so bad. I’d wanted Kai—or anyone, anyone who knew the worst in me—to say that I was still dear, and good, and worthy.
I gave him this thing that I had always wanted, and it made him turn his face away from me. I saw his reflection in the glass wall of the building we were passing. The shadows made his eyes into black pits, and his mouth was twisting down. Then he put his head down, silent, and we walked on, our hands clasped tight together, for almost a block.
“His name is Caleb. He doesn’t know I exist,” Birdwine finally said, picking his way along the broken concrete in the streetlight’s yellow glow. “I didn’t know about him until he was three. I mean, I did. I knew she was pregnant when she left me. She told me, straight up, that it wasn’t mine. I even let her hurry the divorce, so she could marry that Martin guy before the baby came. It’s his name on the birth certificate.”
That rocked me. Martin was the legal father then; in Georgia, his rights hugely outweighed Birdwine’s.
I swallowed, and said quietly, “Well, she lied. You pretty much cloned yourself. The guy she married, he knows?”
“Unless he’s stupid. He knows what I look like. I met him a couple of times back when he was screwing my wife.” To his credit, it was only slightly bitter.
Had Martin married Stella blind, knowing the baby might not be his? Not a gamble so much as a decision; he would love, no matter how the coin fell. Maybe that’s what true love looked like, at its best. It looked like this to Julian, an adopted kid who talked to me of teams and rescues. He was already on an apartment hunt, putting in transfer applications, changing his life for the sake of a lost girl who was a coin spinning in midair. Tonight, I wanted to be a little more like him. I didn’t mean to blind myself to how hard and hateful the world was; sweetness was hard to find and harder still to keep. I only meant to reach for it, anyway.