London Undone

by Nan Higgins

  If Joan was offended, it didn’t appear in her face or the tone of her voice. “It’s very important that we teach them to be vigilant as they start to maneuver through life as queer people. We give them Compass as a safe place, but we also need to help them understand that many places aren’t safe.”

  “With all due respect,” Grant said, “a lot of these kids have been kicked out of their homes because they’re queer. They probably know that it can be an unkind world out there.”

  “Certainly,” Joan said. “However, it’s important to remind them they need to continue to make smart choices in order to be able to protect themselves, as well as—”

  “That implies that it was Tate’s fault he died,” London said. She heard her voice shaking with barely contained anger.

  For the first time, Joan’s seemingly unshakable self-assurance wavered, and she shook her head rapidly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “You meant Tate wasn’t smart enough to keep from getting murdered.” Her voice continued to rise. She was absolutely seething, and her words poured out like water from a pot that had boiled over. “That he should have known better than do something so irresponsible as go on a date.” She stood. “You won’t be using my best friend’s death as a cautionary tale of what happens to stupid trans people who don’t have the sense to keep themselves safe. Not with my help.”

  She turned and strode out of the room, and Grant followed closely behind her. “Fuck that,” she said.

  “Shh,” Grant said.

  “I don’t care if she hears me.”

  “I know, but you care about the kids hearing. Don’t you?”

  She pressed her lips together and nodded. The group of kids and volunteers were circled around their tables, standing behind the chairs with their heads bowed when Grant and London passed through the living area. Bernadette was speaking this time, and London heard her say, “I wish I’d either been born into a different family or born a different way,” as they slipped past the group and out the front door.

  * * *

  London dreaded her visit with Ross so much the next day that she left the house late and drove five miles under the speed limit to get there. She knew this session would rip her open over grief for Tate. She had messaged Ross the previous evening after getting home from Compass and told him she couldn’t make today’s appointment. In under five minutes, Ross responded that if she didn’t come, his normal cancellation fee would be quadrupled, and she would owe him two hundred dollars. She almost texted back telling him it was well worth the price but instead flung her phone down and sighed.

  Grant, who’d been sitting next to her assembling a game of Jenga for them to play, had said, “What’s wrong, sweetie? You mad because Ross won’t take your bullshit?”

  “I’m going to bed.” She’d stalked to her bedroom.

  “It’s eight o’clock,” he’d called just before she slammed the door.

  She hadn’t felt any more motivated today, but she’d dragged herself out of bed, swatting shampoo and soap around while she showered and being as loud as possible in the kitchen when she made her coffee. It wasn’t until she was walking out the door that she realized Grant had already left for work.

  She trudged into the Impressions Therapy Center’s building and saw that Ross’s door was still closed, which meant he wouldn’t even know she’d arrived five minutes late. She picked up a magazine and started to read an article about the positive powers of daily mantras.

  “London?” She hadn’t heard him open the door. “Ready to come in?”

  She seated herself on the comfy corduroy couch, slipping her feet out of her slip-ons and drawing her socked feet up to sit, legs wrapped around each other. Ross, who’d commented on her last several outfits, said nothing about her sweatpants and long-sleeved T-shirt with the words “Fuck Off” scrawled across the front in curly, hot pink letters.

  She looked at Ross, and he gazed back, his face neutral and his hands resting in his lap. She wanted him to ask her something. Anything. She wanted him to start this process, to begin the discussion that would lead to her ability to make sense of the reality that Tate was gone, to help her figure out how to work out the business of living a life without the only family she’d had left.

  And now she knew why she’d dreaded today. Out there, she could throw herself into work and volunteering and staying busy because busy was what she was using to fill the blank space left by Tate’s absence. But here in this room, she had to sit with her grief. She had to look at that blank space head-on and know that it wouldn’t just go away.

  “I really hate you sometimes,” London said, and with those five words, the tears came. “I don’t think I can do this.” She pushed her words out through the tears, and her voice had that jerking quality that comes from crying really hard, like an engine that tries to turn over but can’t quite get going. She took a moment to close her eyes and get her breathing together, but it only amplified her pain, as if shutting her vision down brought her emotions to the surface. “I think I need to quit therapy for a while. Just for a month or two.”

  Ross handed her a box of tissues and waited for her tears to subside to that weird hiccup-y breathing aftermath. “I’m very, very sorry you lost Tate. I know how much you loved him and what he meant to you. Any death of someone that close is tragic. But he was violently ripped away from you, and that’s a quite unbearable kind of loss. It’s left you with the equivalent of many open wounds, emotionally, and open wounds are a tricky thing. When left untreated, they fester and get infected, and soon that infection spreads, making the entire body septic and much harder to heal. When treated appropriately, they scab over and scar, and the body regenerates healthy tissue. That’s what you need to do now, and I can help you.”

  “This is where we are again? The open wounds talk?”

  When she’d first come to Ross, years ago, every session for several months had ended with her saying she wasn’t going to come back. He’d be scheduling her next appointment, having moved from the couch over to his computer at the desk in the corner, and when he’d ask about her availability, she’d say, “It’s probably better not to schedule another appointment. Therapy isn’t for me, and I don’t think I’ll be back next week.”

  Ross would tell her to go ahead and schedule it so he could get her on the books, and as long as she gave him twenty-four hours’ notice, she could always cancel. And of course, she did come back, arriving at her assigned time as if they’d never had that discussion. Ross would thank her for keeping her appointment, and he frequently made the open wounds analogy in those days. It had been years since he’d given her that talk.

  He nodded and smiled. “It seemed appropriate.”

  She twisted a tissue. “I don’t know how to live without him. And I don’t say that to mean I’m suicidal in any way because I’m not. I mean, I literally can’t comprehend my life without him in it. It doesn’t make sense not having him here.”

  “I think that’s natural.”

  “Is it? Why don’t we ever hear about that?”

  “It’s a problem. In our country, there’s a lot of pressure to move on with life after someone has died. We’re not given much in the way of continuing to honor our loved ones or the tools needed to make adjustments in our lives after a loss. I see it all the time, people who lost a partner or sibling or parent years before they started therapy, and they are basically stagnant in their healing because they simply didn’t have the tools to help themselves or even the language to ask for help.”

  “I can’t imagine ever healing from this,” she said. “I’ll always miss him, always wish he was here.”

  “You will always miss him, and it’s normal to wish he was here. Healing isn’t the same as not missing someone.”

  “What is it, then?” Tears pricked her eyes but didn’t spill over this time. She was beginning to wish for the numbness to swallow her up again. This pain was unbearable and unrelenting. How long could she go on feeling so complet
ely shattered?

  “It’s learning to live with the pain. And not only live with it but grow from it. The biggest problem I see when people experience loss or trauma is that they think healing means they go back to who they were before it happened. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Trauma requires change in order to heal, without exception. You’re not going to be the person you were before you lost Tate. If you think about it, that’s an absurd idea. Of course you won’t. And the sooner you’re able to understand that, the easier your healing will be.”

  She absorbed this for several moments. “That makes sense.”

  “Good. We’ll keep working on that.” He stood. “Let’s make your appointment for next week.”

  She looked at the clock on the wall and saw that their time was indeed up. Good grief, how long had she been crying?

  “Okay.”

  “Same day, same time work for you?”

  “Yeah, if I decide to come back.”

  He handed her the card with her appointment written on it. “Oh, you’ll be back.”

  Chapter Ten

  That night, Grant and London sat in their pajamas in front of the television watching old Family Feud reruns from the 1980s. London was on the floor in front of Grant, who had a huge bowl of blue hair dye resting on an old towel on the couch beside him and a big bowl of popcorn on the other side.

  “Don’t get the bowls mixed up,” London said.

  Grant’s gloved fingers worked the dye into her hair and massaged her scalp. This had become a biweekly ritual for them. Fantasy hair colors had to be maintained quite often, and before Grant moved in, London had always done it herself. Even when Reggie lived here, it had been a solitary task, done when Reggie was at work or at a meeting. But Grant enjoyed putting his naturally OCD personality to good use by meticulously covering each strand with blue.

  “Ugh.” London watched Richard Dawson, who’d hosted Family Feud in those days, kiss each female contestant on the lips before receiving their answer to the question. “Save me from misogyny dressed in a leisure suit.”

  “What’s funny is the women seemed to love it.” Grant shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither, thank goodness.” London reached back and grabbed a handful of popcorn. “How does my hair look back there?”

  “You’re almost done. I’m just doing one last coat all over, and we can set the timer.” He added the final layer and took off his gloves. “Like a salon surgeon.” He popped the second glove off with a loud snap. “And you’re my medical masterpiece.”

  “I’m honored.” She tapped the alarm button on her phone and set the timer for forty-five minutes.

  A knock at the door startled them both.

  “Did you invite someone over?” he asked.

  “Yeah, because I always throw a party when I’m looking this marvelous. Can you see who it is?”

  “I’m going, I’m going.” He looked out the peephole and turned a frowning face to her.

  “Who is it? Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

  “It’s Reggie.”

  “Seriously?” She scrambled from the floor to stand up. “Great, and me never looking better.”

  “Should I let her in?”

  She rushed to the mirror on the opposite side of the living room only to confirm that she did indeed look as awful as she thought.

  There was another knock, more forceful this time.

  “London,” Grant said in a stage whisper, “what do you want me to do?”

  “Ugh. I’m going to go try to deal with this. Let her in, and I’ll be right back.”

  London closed herself in the bathroom just as she heard Grant open the door.

  She opened a drawer and saw cotton balls, dental floss, and bobby pins. Not only was that not helpful; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d even used bobby pins. The second drawer contained all her hair coloring supplies: gloves, brushes, boxes of dye. She found what she was looking for toward the back of the drawer: a shower cap. She unwrapped it and put it on her head, tucking the edges underneath her hair as much as possible. Next, she found a raggedy old towel that was well on its way to being cut up to use as dusting cloth and wrapped it, bandana-style, around her head.

  There. This wasn’t exactly the look she would have planned when she saw Reggie again, but it was better than she’d appeared a few minutes before. She drew her shoulders back, making sure to hold her head high, and stepped out of the bathroom.

  Grant and Reggie sat on the couch, speaking in hushed voices.

  “Why do I get the impression you’re talking about me?” London asked.

  They turned to her. London thought she saw a flash of affection on Reggie’s face before her trademark neutral expression returned. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.

  Grant stood and cleared his throat. “I’m going to run to the store. You want anything?”

  London paused to look at Grant’s awkward stance, hands in his pockets and mouth drawn, then looked at Reggie and saw she was intensely staring into her lap. “I think you’d better get me some wine.”

  He nodded, grabbed his coat from the rack near the front door, and left.

  She took Grant’s still warm spot, turned so she was facing Reggie, and drew her legs up to sit cross-legged, much like she had earlier in the day with Ross. She felt both wary and excited about being so close to Reggie. Something had to be wrong for her to break her stance on them being alone, and even so, London couldn’t make the fluttering in her stomach calm down.

  “So, what’s up?” she asked after moments of silence.

  “A couple things,” Reggie said.

  “Like?”

  Reggie pressed her lips together and didn’t speak for another moment.

  “Come on, Reggie, spill it. You didn’t text or call. You just stopped by with no warning. Not that I’m complaining, because damn if it isn’t good to see your gorgeous face. But I want to hear what’s so important you couldn’t pick up the phone.”

  “Okay, you’re right. First, I’ll tell you the reason I originally wanted to talk to you today, back when I thought I was just going to give you a call. I spoke to Joan this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. She told me what happened last night. I really think you ought to reconsider her proposition.”

  “I see.” The jittery feeling in London’s stomach bottomed out and was replaced with heavy anger. All her efforts to have a relaxing evening and decompress after her devastating therapy session were thwarted, and she wanted to distance herself from the discussion that was bringing all that tension back to the surface.

  Reggie must have sensed her internally piling some bricks to build a wall between herself and this conversation because she put her hand on London’s thigh. Not so high that it felt sexual but high enough that it felt very intimate. London stared.

  “Don’t pull away. Just hear me out before you make your decision.”

  Not tearing her eyes away from Reggie’s intense gaze, London nodded. “Okay.”

  “For one thing, this is the kind of volunteer work you could cross off that list of yours, isn’t it? You wanted to interact with the youth, make a difference. This is a chance for you to make a real impact on them. You can tell them what they’ll be facing out there. Living in Columbus, we feel like we’re in this safe little bubble most of the time. They need someone to teach them that even though we’re fortunate to live in a place where our community is largely accepted, there are still dangers out there. All of us could stand to be reminded of that, couldn’t we?”

  London didn’t say anything. Rhetorically, she could see Reggie’s point, but she felt like there had to be a better way to have a safety conversation with the kids. Preferably one that didn’t involve keeping Tate’s violent death at the forefront of her mind. The thought of detailing Tate’s death made her feel as if she’d be poking a stick into a wound that was still nowhere near healing. It was too soon to add more fractures to her shattered heart.
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  “And I honestly think it would do you a world of good to be able to honor Tate in that way. To be able to share who he was to you with people who didn’t know him and to use his life and death as a way to help kids learn how to deal with being queer in a heteronormative world.”

  London closed her eyes and massaged her temples with her fingertips.

  “Say something,” Reggie said.

  “I’ll think about it. Even if you’re right—and I’m not saying you are—I’m not sure I’d even be ready to have that kind of conversation right now.”

  “That’s fair. You thinking about it is all I ask. And you’re stronger than you think. I think this would be really good for you, and you’d be really great at it.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration.” London smiled despite herself. God, Reggie looked good. Those huge brown eyes had always done something to her; they were practically hypnotic.

  “Good.” Reggie reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded twice. “Unfortunately, that was the easy conversation.”

  “You call that easy?”

  “It’s all relative. I got this letter when I checked my email today. I printed out a copy to show you.” Reggie handed the paper to London, who unfolded it and groaned when she saw it was from the Law Offices of Larry Kopp.

  Dear Ms. Williams,

  As you may know, London Craft has been offered a sum of money if she begins adhering to a life befitting her name and bloodline. This will, of course, mean she must part ways with you.

  I understand it may not be easy for you to separate any bonds you’ve built with her. Therefore, I’m going to present an opportunity to you, as well. I’d like to offer you twenty-five thousand dollars to discontinue all contact with Ms. Craft. I believe this will provide a significant motivation toward Ms. Craft’s completion of the task at hand. You have ten days from the receipt of this letter in which to respond.