How Not to Let Go

I know this because I’ve been sitting on my bed, heart pounding, mouth dry, with my phone in my hands, staring at the clock, since 6:43.

I let it ring twice before I answer it.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he says back, and he sounds no farther away than his South End apartment. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

“How’s it going?” I ask, aiming for casual but sounding squeaky to my own ears.

“Er, unexpected. It’s er . . . there’s something I have to tell you and it’s right out of bounds.”

“Okay.” My heart is thumping and scenarios are running through my head, based on nothing more than the tone of his voice. His mother is sick. Biz—

“So . . .” He clears his throat. “It’s pretty bad. Like Mum said, the prognosis is a year or two, but he appears to be in a lot of pain a lot of the time.” No need to specify which “him.” “He hates it.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Oh, this isn’t the out-of-bounds part at all,” he says. “This is just the preamble. God, I don’t know if I’ll be able to say it.”

“Hey, I know what we should do,” I say, responding less to his words than to the unsteadiness in his voice. “We should both turn off all the lights and lie down in our beds and then we’re just talking to each other in the dark before we fall asleep. Let’s try it. Wait, let me pull my curtains. Okay. I’m lying in the dark. Are you?”

“Yes. On my bed, in total darkness, except for the bit of light from my phone. I’ll close my eyes. Total dark.”

“And my voice.”

“Hey,” he says. I hear his grin and I grin back.

“Hey,” I answer. “So now nothing is out of bounds.”

“Yeah . . . Christ. I don’t know if I can.”

“Anything I can do to make it easier?” I ask gently.

“Just . . . listen and be calm, okay?”

“Okay.” Stay still. Got it. I’m good at it now.

There’s a silence, then I hear him take a breath, and he says, “He’s asked me to help him die.”

My face prickles as the blood drains away. “Whoa.”

“Yeah.”

“That is . . . unexpected.”

“Yeah.”

“When was this?”

“The morning I arrived. I’m the one he trusts, he said.”

“That’s . . . complicated.”

“Slightly,” he says, laughing. And then he adds, “It’s why he pushed Mum so hard to get me to come home sooner rather than later.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, I laughed. I laughed, and I walked out. It was the first time he’d . . . He touched my wrist. That alone, his hand on my skin, was . . . I can’t remember the last time he touched my skin, and now he wants me to . . .”

Just the fact that he’s leaving so many sentences unfinished tells me how hard he’s struggling.

His voice is vehement as he says, “I hate him, you know. I’ve wanted to beat him bloody for as long as I can remember. I’ve wished him dead for my mother’s sake more times than I can count. I’ve even said . . . But now . . .”

“So the hero, filled with righteous anger at the dragon who’s been terrorizing the villagers, laboriously climbs the mountain to its lair, and instead of confronting a snarling, fire-breathing monster, he finds it sick and in pain, and it actually says, ‘Please kill me.’”

“In a nutshell,” he says. “Jesus, Annie.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s . . . If I were here as his doctor, and not the fucking hero, I’d want nothing else for him but a quiet, easy death.”

“Sure.”

“But how much of it is that he’s in pain, and how much is that he wants to see how far he can push me? It’s a power play. I left, I literally moved to a different continent, to avoid being manipulated by him.”

I hear him take a few deep breaths, trying and failing to start the sentence before he says, “And I’m disturbed . . . by the pleasure I feel in watching him suffer. I reach for compassion and it’s not there. I reach for basic human respect, and even that slips out of my grasp. Does he deserve the ordinary, mundane dignity of a human being? If it’s possible for someone to lose that right, I believe he has lost it, and yet I can’t quite convince myself that anyone can lose that right. Not anyone.”

“He’s not a good guy,” I say as lightly as I can.

“He’s not.”

“And you are a good guy,” I say.

I hear a little huff of laughter and then he says, “I’m the best man you know.”

“You are,” I tell him. “You’re the best man I know.”

“What do you think I ought to do?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “You’ll do what your heart tells you is right.”

“That’s why I’m asking you,” he whispers. And then he says in a cracked voice, “A dog in the street. A stranger on the train, literally anyone, anyone else, I’d feel compassion for their suffering. Not pleasure.”

“I know.”

“You were right about the dark,” Charles says. “I feel like you might be right next to me if I reach out my hand.”

“I am right next to you. I’m right here.”

We’re silent for a long minute, long enough for me to have the unworthy thought, The sooner he dies, the sooner Charles comes back. But I don’t say it. I’ll never say it. I mean, “Yeah, do it, euthanize your dad so that you and I can date”? I almost laugh, it’s so warped. Not even in the dark is that worth saying out loud.

“Would you do it?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say again. “I’ve never had someone in my life who treated me the way he’s treated you and your family.”

“What if it were your own father?”

“If my dad were dying painfully and he asked me to do it, I’d want to do it, as long as my mom agreed—though I’m sure she’d be the one to do it. But we love him. For both of us, it would be an act of love. You don’t love your dad.”

“I don’t,” he says, and then sighs heavily. “I think about ten years from now. I don’t want to have done it with hate and anger. I know I’d regret that, I’d feel ashamed of it. If I do it, I want to do it with compassion. But . . .” He stops. When he speaks again, his voice is different, like he’s talking through gritted teeth at first, and then gradually like he’s snarling into the phone. “I’m not sure I want to have compassion for him. I might prefer to watch him struggle in agony. God, Annie, it feels just, it feels fair, to see him in pain, and it’s easy to argue that letting nature take its own, unsparing time is the right thing to do, isn’t it? Why not just . . . let him suffer? Not everyone gets a good death.”

Silence. More silence. He asked me to listen and be calm, so that’s what I do. I hear him take a deep breath and release it slowly.

He says, “Doesn’t it disturb you, that part of me enjoys seeing my father in pain?”

“Nah,” I say, like I’m turning down a drink. “Mostly it makes me want to hold you until you stop hurting.”

“But you’d never feel this way.”

“Are you kidding? When I think about how he’s treated all of you, part of me wants to watch him die in pain, too,” I contradict. “Part of me even wants you to do it with revenge in your heart, because fuck that douche bag for all the ways he hurt you and the people you love, right?”

“Right,” he whispers with a dark chuckle. “Fuck that douche bag.”

“But when I think about you, I know that if you did either of those things—if you watched him die slowly, knowing he wanted release and knowing you could give it, or if you ended it with revenge—you’d be left with a wound that would never, ever heal.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he says.

A long silence, as we listen to each other breathe.

“Well,” he says. “Er, I know we agreed on Mondays at seven, but it seems the parameters have changed a bit. Could we, er . . . ?”

“When do you want to talk again?”

“. . . Is tomorrow too soon?”

“Tuesday at seven,” I say.

“I wish I could just come home,” he says.

“Aren’t you home right now?”

“No.” He sniffs. “You’re my home.”

I know that the way he and I communicate best is skin to skin, in silence, in the dark. I know, too, that I need the words, that there’s something about putting it into language that makes it more than simply how he feels, that makes it an incantation or a promise or a prayer.

And I know that that’s exactly what makes it so difficult for him. He understood all of this before I did. I only learned it after that naïve moment two years ago when I first blurted the words to him, just because I felt them and they were true. I thought it was just a feeling—and in a way it is. It’s a statement of truth. “I love you.”

But to say to someone, “I love you,” is a different thing than simply feeling it without declaration.

I’ve learned since that day, two years ago. I’ve learned what his heart-twisting smile means. I’ve learned that I was right when I felt loved by him. I’ve learned that when he didn’t say it, it was because the words would be like a curse, would make him run from me, or from what he feared in himself when he was with me.

I’ve learned.

I need the words . . . but I need him, more. Can I live without the words, so that I can live with him?

“You’re my home, too,” I tell him.