“I’m not sure I remember what okay feels like.” His voice, like his expression, is stripped bare. I want to help. I want to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, to give him a hug, even. But everything feels insufficient. I stay silent, and he continues. “I try so hard to keep it together. To be the role model Fitz needs.”
Role model? I genuinely like Lewis, but I never exactly thought of him as trying to be some shining exemplar to his brother. Fitz told me how he had to carry Lewis home from the Brown party. I must frown involuntarily, because Lewis lets a self-conscious smile crack through his distress.
“Not a role model for school or responsibility,” he says. “But, like—an example on living.”
“How?” I want him to keep talking, to keep bringing the emotions wearing him down into the open where I can shoulder them with him.
Some of the sadness fades from his eyes, replaced with something like conviction. “Living despite whatever else may be going on. If I didn’t have my fraternity, if I didn’t have Prisha—” He stops suddenly, like her name is a lump in his throat threatening a sea of tears. “I just mean,” he continues, his face paler, “if I were constantly thinking about Mom the way Fitz is, I’d be a wreck. I wanted to show him how to search for fun, for happiness, because he deserves those things. Sometimes I can’t sleep because I’m worrying what his life will look like when everything with Mom is . . . done.”
I register the pause, the euphemism. When everything is done. I’m seven years old for a moment, in my family’s apartment in New York, overhearing my parents discussing my abuela’s health and why we needed to return to Massachusetts.
Lewis goes on. “I guess I take it too far sometimes,” he says ruefully. “Go out too often, flirt too much, get too drunk. But it’s . . . an escape.” His chest heaves.
I run through the things I could say. I could offer blanket sympathies, empty encouragements to keep talking. Or I could push him to face this head-on, even if it’s harder. “I think Fitz feels you don’t care about him because of all the fun you’re having,” I say. “Because you have this other life. This perfect job.”
Lewis looks up, raw with wounded incredulity. “I know he thinks that,” he says. “He just told me.”
I open and then close my mouth. I thought Lewis stormed from Fitz’s room because he was overwhelmed with the news of their mom’s symptoms. It never occurred to me it was because they’d fought.
“I fucked up,” Lewis chokes out. “I thought he’d imitate me, not resent me. I didn’t want to put my stress on top of his. So I hid it. I hid how desperate I’ve been to get the kind of job that can support our whole family—regardless of whether it’s something I care about or not. I hid where I really want to be next year. Because if it were up to me, I wouldn’t be moving to New York, not when I could be in San Francisco with my girlfriend. I’m only staying on the East Coast for my mom.” His voice is gathering volume now. “I hid my sacrifices because I hoped I could help Fitz have a normal life. Now he hates me. My mom’s sick, my brother despises me, and the girl who made everything bearable is moving to the other side of the country. I’m going to be alone.”
Tears tumble from his eyes. He raises his hand to his face, his grief garishly out of place in the hotel hallway.
His words touch bruises in me I’ve tried to ignore for too long. I’ve fought loneliness on this trip. I’ve wrestled with the lurking suspicion nobody in my family really supports the future I want. I’ve come out of those fights more hurt than I knew.
I reach for Lewis, putting my hand on his shoulder. “Lewis, you’re not alone.” I’m not expecting my own conviction. “Not even close.”
He doesn’t contradict me.
I gesture toward his and Fitz’s room. “Fitz is in there,” I say. “I think you have to tell him what you told me. Tell him everything. He needs you, and you need him.”
I wonder if it’s the kind of thing only a close friend could say, or only a complete stranger. While I don’t have faith in predetermined paths or destiny or mystic workings of the universe, I wonder if, in some improbable way, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Maybe the fact of our joining up into this instantaneous, unlikely group will be important for Lewis and his brother. Maybe it will for me too.
Lewis looks up, and he’s worked whatever magic he uses to hide his wounds. His expression is stony, and determination is starting to flicker into his reddened eyes. He nods.
“Go,” I say.
He hesitates. I wonder if he’ll try to put this off, if he’s too proud to bring this emotion to his brother.
“I’m really glad Fitz met you, Juniper,” he finally says.
“Yeah,” I say, holding Lewis’s gaze. “I’m really glad I met him too.”
I walk with Lewis to his hotel room. He takes a breath, and then he opens the door. Inside, I glimpse Fitz gazing out the window from the foot of the bed. Lewis enters, and while the door inches closed, I watch him walk up to his brother.
Without words, Lewis sits next to Fitz and wraps him in a hug. I don’t know what it is, but something in Fitz seems to loosen. It’s the slightest shift in his shoulders, the gentlest release of exhaled breath. It’s ice thawing in the first rays of daylight. The relief of having his brother is nearly imperceptible on Fitz, and yet impossible not to see.
I let the door close, wanting to give them time on their own, and head for the elevator.
In the empty hallway, I hear my dad’s voice, the echo of our phone call returning in pitch-perfect detail. It’s okay to need your family sometimes. I weigh the idea against one fundamental of my life for years now, the feeling I need freedom from my family. I’ll never not want room to become my own person, to lead my own life. But watching Fitz and Lewis, I know my dad isn’t wrong.
I hardly even notice the elevator descending. I won’t give up my dreams for my family, I decide. I just won’t cut them out, either. Because there might come a day when, like Fitz, like Lewis, I need someone to hold me when the rest of my world has imploded.
My whole life, I thought needing them carried a cost. That I couldn’t find myself unless I forced distance between me and the people in my past. I decided I needed college to remove myself from the old Juniper in hopes of finding the new one.
But maybe that’s not how finding yourself works. In college and in everything after, I won’t be discovering new pieces of myself. I’ll be uncovering what’s already there. And if that’s true, I don’t need to fear growing into myself while remaining connected to my home. I don’t need to force college and family into harsh opposition.
Everything in my past will become pieces of the new Juniper. My family, my home, my heritage. My friends. Fitz. Even when we’ve parted and he’s out of my life, Fitz will have left an imprint on me. Like Matt did. They’ll both be part of me forever.