Page 37 of The False Flat

I stared at his unbelievable house of cards. Had he glued them together? No way they were standing on their own.

He retrieved a blanket and sat on the floor beside me, propping his arm up on the chaouch cushions as he faced me.

“I didn’t know your hair was curly. It’s nice.”

“Yeah. Thanks. I hate it.”

He chuckled. “We all want the opposite of what we have.”

I hated when people said this, that straight-haired people wanted curly hair and vice versa. I didn’t want straight hair. I wanted manageable curls. I did not have manageable curls. I had some sort of defiant nest, where each hair had its own agenda and was hell bent on executing its unique, original style. People were naive when they said they “would give anything for my natural hair.” It had been a source of grief my entire life. One time, when my hair had been particularly knotted, my mom gave up and handed the comb to my dad, relenting to his authority because I had “Black people hair” and he was Black. But his solution had included scissors, the wrong choice. The hacked hair had been too short to put in a bun or contain in any way, which had resulted in threats from the Black girls in fifth grade and then being detained after class by a Black male substitute teacher who thought it was appropriate to touch my hair and give me pomade advice while the two of us were alone in the classroom.

Brandon, my equally mixed older brother and best friend, had come to my rescue. He didn’t have the hair problems I had or quite the same social issues, but he understood. We were a matching set.

I wanted to cry again, but I couldn’t. Grant was right here, and my mother’s words, “Hurt in private, heal in silence,” bounced inside my damaged head.

He shifted beside me, his hand gently patting my arm.

I inhaled and kept the air in my lungs for as long as I could stand it, then let it all out in one big puff. I didn’t think I’d breathed that hard, but the entire house of cards came tumbling down in a flurry of queens, kings, and spades. An actual house of cards.

“I’m sorry I just blew your amazing architectural masterpiece down,” I said. “I bet it was the best house of cards in the history of card houses. I bet if you’d applied for the Guinness—”

“It wasn’t that great, and you didn’t blow it down. I accidentally kicked it with my foot when I—”

“When I was twelve, my brother died from leukemia.” My head whipped toward Grant as my hand slowly covered my mouth. Had I said those words out loud? But he pulled my hand away from my face and held it in his own.

“I’m here. You can tell me,” he invited.

Six words.

My whole life had been packed away for over twenty years, and with six words, he was asking me to unpack it. I hadn’t put the memories in neat stacks or organized them in any fashion. I had crumpled them up and thrown them in, stuffed the mental suitcase so full that I had to jump on it to get the lock to fasten.

You can tell me. An open invitation.

I couldn’t meet his eyes. I glanced over at the storage closet, the coffin for the box of my brother’s things.

When I attempted eye contact with Grant, I shut down again. But some part of me wanted to tell him. Earlier, I hadn’t used my usual coping mechanisms because I’d been past consolation. Now, I didn’t want him to be a four or a ten. I wanted him to be Grant. He made me comfortable in a way I couldn’t explain. It didn’t make sense. This man didn’t make sense. I’d never wanted to talk about this with anyone, hadn’t.

I looked down at his mustache, and despite everything I’d said about it, despite how much I’d despised it, I could talk to that damned mustache.

“Brandon, my brother . . . he was everything to me, like you and Deanna.” The words fell out of my mouth, simultaneously raw and dust covered. “We didn’t have much extended family. It was mainly the four of us. My parents worked a lot. My mom was a corporate boss. My dad was a doctor. Brandon and I . . .” It was coming back, that feeling I’d had, someone being there for me. Someone I cared about so much. That someone being ripped away. I stopped, swallowed. “Brandon was my best friend. Our lives were happy. Our parents weren’t always there, but we knew they loved us, and we had each other.” I stopped. The mustache wiggled a little, encouragement to keep going. “And then . . .” I swallowed. Even a sideways glance at the memory was proving to be hard. Tears pulsed behind the dam I’d built. My voice thickened, weighed down with the grief that had torn me open. Grant massaged my palm. He didn’t ask me to go on. He didn’t say anything, but his touch, the contact, the increasing pressure, told me he was there. And he was safe.

I was safe.

I found my voice: “Then he started feeling bad—little things at first. I don’t remember the details, but my dad consulted one of his colleagues. From there, life completely changed. As soon as Brandon started going to the doctor, it wasn’t long before he was hospitalized.”

My breath changed. I saw Brandon in that bed—wires, cords, pale skin, and sunken eyes—and all the little passageways allowing air into my lungs seized, like they disliked the memory as much as I did.

He must’ve noticed the change, too, because he squeezed my hand again, hard, and then when that wasn’t enough, he pulled me to his chest. I hesitated but didn’t draw back.

Had I fallen into my mother’s arms, she would’ve stiffened, transformed into the statue she’d become. She would’ve told me to think of something else. She would’ve told me to stop being weak. Be strong . . . for Brandon.

His grip loosened when I tried to pull away. But when the pressure of his arms was gone, I crumpled. He folded me back into his embrace, and for the first time, I let the arms of another person hold me together, the real me, the one with the problems. My mother’s voice told me to support myself, to will my muscles erect. But right then, I needed arms around me. And until they were there, until I no longer felt like I was shouldering the burden alone, I didn’t know how much I needed another human being to . . . be there.

I wasn’t sure if he heard any of my babbling through my tears, but I kept talking into his shoulder as he held me. “I had to watch him die, Grant. I was the only one in the room. He was talking one second, and the next, he was gone.” Gone. Final. Permanent.

His hand ran down my back, slowly, and I closed my eyes, pushing away the feeling that this was wrong somehow.

With one final breath, I’d lost my best friend. I’d lost the one who’d always told me it was going to be okay. I’d lost my mom and dad too. They left with Brandon, both of them fragmenting and rebuilding themselves into people I didn’t know.