The Shaking

The water moved first.

It trembled in the glass on the coffee table. Then I saw the couch moving beneath him, a small, persistent shudder. Lamplight broke into rings along the water's edge.

Darius lay beneath the gray blanket, his jaw clenched, his eyes open. The hospital bracelet circled his wrist. Six hours earlier, a doctor had said pulmonary embolism while I stood beside the bed holding Darius's phone and his discharge papers. I had gripped them until the paper folded around the phone.

At two in the morning, four floors above a central Florida parking lot, we could hear the apartment's machinery: the air conditioner starting, the refrigerator humming between cycles. A car door shut below. Outside, rain clung to the balcony rail, each drop white under the parking lot lights.

The hospital smell had come home on his skin and clothes: antiseptic, adhesive, a trace of plastic. Beneath it was whiskey, faint but distinct beneath the mint of mouthwash.

The blanket quivered over his chest. Even his feet were shaking.

"Are you cold?" I asked, leaning toward him.

"I'm fine," Darius said, keeping his eyes on me.

His teeth clicked together when he said it.

I had learned how much work those two words could assign me. Sometimes I was to stop asking. Sometimes I was to give him time to straighten out a story. Sometimes I was to fix whatever was wrong without requiring him to name it.

I pulled the blanket to his shoulders. His skin had a gray cast beneath the brown, and the hollows around his eyes looked deeper in the lamplight. I left my hand on the blanket for a moment, feeling the tremor through it.

"This doesn't look fine," I said, my hand still on his shoulder.

"It's the medication," Darius said.

"Which medication?"

He closed his eyes and left me waiting.

I had not grown up around addiction. I did not know what withdrawal looked like, and I could not have said with certainty that I was seeing it now. But his closed eyes troubled me almost as much as the shaking. He seemed to be waiting for something familiar to pass.

I stepped into the kitchen with my phone and called his grandmother. From there I could still see the couch.

Miss Evelyn answered on the second ring, brisk and almost cheerful. When I began to explain, she let out a little sigh. I lowered my voice; she did not lower hers.

"Baby, he's been through a lot," she said when I finished describing the shaking. "Go lie down with him. Put on a movie. Let him feel you there."

Through the kitchen doorway I could see his wrist hanging over the edge of the couch, the hospital bracelet loose against it. My name was tattooed elsewhere on that body. He had bought me a ring, though he kept it somewhere I could not reach. Again and again he had told me to hold it down. I stood there with the phone against my ear, waiting for his grandmother to ask how badly he was shaking.

"You want me to do what?" I asked, slowly enough that she could not mistake the question.

"He needs comfort," Miss Evelyn said, patient now, as though I had missed something simple.

"He needs help."

"You are his help."

She said it without hesitation. There was nothing in her voice to suggest we were still discussing the matter.

For almost two years, I had been his help. I made the plans, paid the bills, proofread what he wrote, drove him to the airport. In photographs, I stood beside him and smiled; the future he described always sounded close. I had loved his daughter with the seriousness of a promise. I had rearranged my days around his plans and waited for him to get out of bed.

I had made a decision about that glass of water some hours before I admitted it.

At the hospital, a nurse had asked me what he took and how much he drank, and I had answered both questions accurately while he slept eight feet away, and something in me had shifted its weight from one foot to the other. Two years of translating him, and the first time I said the plain version out loud, it was to a stranger with a clipboard, and she wrote it down as though it were ordinary, because to her it was.

Now the apartment was doing the small work apartments do at two in the morning, and a man I loved was shaking under a blanket I had bought, and I was standing in the middle of a room I had furnished, doing what I always did, which was calculating what would be required of me by morning.

Medication at ten, which had been missed. A call to the nurse line. His grandmother, who would need to be told in a way that would not frighten her, and who would convert whatever I said into a story about a boy who had been through a lot. My nine o'clock, which I would run, and run well, because no one at that table had ever had a reason to worry about me.

The list assembled itself in about four seconds. I had gotten very fast.

What I noticed, standing there, was that my name was on none of it, and that there was no version of the morning in which anyone would ask me how I was, and that I had built that, item by item, out of competence and love, for twenty-three months.

Now his grandmother was telling me to get under the blanket. To put a movie on while his teeth knocked together.

"No," I said.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. I had said it quietly. I did not soften it.

I walked to the bedroom and pulled my suitcase from the closet. The zipper snagged at one corner. I tugged it free, opened the case on the bed, and stood over the bare lining. Both my hands were shaking. From the other room came the faint, repeated creak of the couch.