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But Laura was not fine.
She would be. She knew she would be, eventually. She was old enough now to be able to keep this in mind, even at her worst. But, alone in her apartment with the empty glass next to her and the phone cold beside it on the nightstand, she was still waiting for the night to settle. Or maybe she was waiting for her mind to catch up with it. The dimness of her apartment at this odd hour was very still. Her sheets were cool against her. Even the fireplace was dead now with the gas shut off and her patio dark with wet from melted flurries outside her windows. Everything had gone silent, stony in the ways she usually preferred.
Except for her heart—which had continued to thrum a ceaseless tattoo against her chest. Still relentlessly reminding her to remember herself.
Well, she was trying.
Laura was sat up in bed with the lamp on. Black t-shirt not quite warm enough where it hung loose from her narrow chest, as she bent forward over the pages of a book. She’d been trying to register the same paragraph for the better part of the last five or ten minutes, but the words floated past her as her eyes scanned the same shapeless lines of ink again and again.
In order to become one of the invisible, it is necessary to throw oneself into the arms of God... Some of us stayed for weeks, some for months, some forever...
It wasn’t working.
Laura closed the book again, the diluted image of David Rattray in a distinctly 90s pullover watching her from the jacket as if to discern what she would do next. Pursing her lips, Laura flipped David face down onto the duvet. “That’s enough out of you,” she muttered. She’d been hoping to lull herself out of this fugue with something light and cerebral; it wasn’t working. But she was a patient woman, even with herself these days. After all, she had lived by a code of waiting for over twenty years now. Waiting, while always still moving forward—that was the trick, if you could figure it out. Even in Baghdad, when the sky had turned briefly yellow and she felt the ground move beneath her, Laura had waited. She had not panicked. She had not lost her head. In a war zone, you had to keep focused on the path ahead of you, even when it seemed to vanish from under your feet. Laura had learned this the only way anyone could: by living through it. “Yallah! Asra’ee! Hayya bisoura’a! Bisoura’a!” She had learned just enough Arabic by then to follow instructions in the heat of the moment, and to find her way back, and she had learned that waiting, listening could save you when sometimes running headfirst into the light was not what it seemed. In other words: she could separate herself from herself, when she needed to.
At least, in most cases.
Tonight, there was nothing calling her out of the cloud of smoke, nothing to dull the reverberations of the bombs. She was, of course, the one who would need to do the calling, the coaching, the soothing. Of course she was. Cory had been right in a way: Bradley needed coaching. But Cory had no idea the challenge Laura had tasked herself with. And for what?
She loved Bradley’s blue eyes—it was true, she did—and how they could be equal parts bright and brutal, and as changeable in that as autumn skies. There were moments when the full sun was in them, and just as quickly Bradley would disappear again, behind something more complicated and a few shades darker. There was a brittleness there, it went hand-in-hand with a secret warmth, all of which veiled itself most of the time in barbs and biting humor, and Laura had spent too much time noticing this. She liked that stupid fake blonde hair too, even as she was ashamed to admit it, because the brunette was cute and more honest anyway. And she loved Bradley’s hands—there, on Laura’s thigh (she rested her own there now as she remembered it, purely by coincidence), or in her own hair when Bradley pulled it softly from her neck. Bradley’s hands were not shy, but they could be tender. They were smaller than Laura’s, and surprisingly hard, not easy-living hands. Bradley kept her nails blunt, shorter even than Laura’s, and varnished only enough to keep them just this side of masculine. It was unexpected, when you came up close to this tiny, womanly creature, to find her fingers slightly calloused, her touch brusque and even inelegant, hard and grasping, but also caring in a way that was hard to anticipate, hard to fathom when you were brought in by it. Laura had liked to compare the length of their fingers (Laura’s were notably longer), before twining them together across Bradley’s hip.
Had.
Wanted.
Past tense.
She turned out the light. She lay down, arm beneath her pillow now, and at first Laura kept her face turned toward the wall. But she felt the empty space behind her on the mattress like a cold open well. This was new; she liked her space, she enjoyed her privacy and her independence, she had never expected to feel this absence. But she realized today when Bradley had said it in her dressing room: Laura wasn’t expecting this to end so soon, perhaps not even—well, even if Bradley was already watching for the other shoe to drop, Laura had gotten used to the idea of Bradley being here. And now the sheets of her bed, expensive and smooth, felt icy under her skin and against the cold cotton of the t-shirt. When she turned over (the first of countless turns she would make that night) the pillow across from her stared back at her; it seemed to radiate a kind of chill in the darkness, a pale khaki frost that made her ache. Laura sighed. Against her own will, she reached out a hand to lay lightly on the pillow.
“Fine,” she whispered into the empty room. She could admit that she was hurting. But she still had the wherewithal to know that pain was a bad motivator, and that waiting would serve them both better in the end.
Her phone on the nearby table suddenly lit up the room, but Laura lay motionless with her eyes wide in the dark.
Bradley was always propelled by pain; it was, Laura realized, probably the only thing she knew. Or, at least, the thing she knew best.
So Laura did not roll over.
Bradley could learn to wait.
She dreamed in fits and starts between brief spates of darkness: Bradley laughing with her little body against her on the patio, Bradley laughing from her nest of white plush on the floor in Vegas, Bradley’s skin illuminated by the bright city lights outside their window, her hand twitching in Laura’s while she slept. She dreamed about Bradley being flung from the back of a dingy, tobacco-filled cab racing down the FDR, the neon flash of the “Pepsi-Cola” sign across the river as it changed from the familiar logo to some lengthy and illegible Vault headline in blaring red letters. Laura screaming from behind the wheel where their driver should have been. She dreamed about herself, as seen from someone else’s point of view (Bradley’s?), huge as a skyscraper with planes buzzing in her ears. A nuisance, she swatted at them with her big, giantess hands.
When Laura woke, it was still painfully dark. Her alarm hadn’t gone off yet, and she had barely slept. Her body felt numb, and the buzzing of bees still echoed in her head.
She dragged herself upright and glanced at her phone. Notifications from the Times, the Washington Post, a string of emails, calendar reminders... There were texts from Bradley, two from last night, one from just a few minutes ago (the nearness of which made Laura’s stomach tighten):
B—I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you today. I know I wasn’t. But I really want to be. I do want to try.
B—I hope you’re getting some sleep…
B—Can we talk before the show?
Laura let her forehead fall into her palm with a rough sigh, rubbing her fingertips into the tired creases above her brow. She drew a long breath.
L—I’ll see you on set.
L—You’ll be fine.
By the time she reached the studio, Laura had received another handful of messages. But she didn’t read them. She opened them, noted the length and confused, desperate pacing of their content, and closed the application once more.
The truth was, Laura was probably afraid of Bradley. She was afraid of those big blue eyes and that firecracker soul that snapped at her skin whenever she came too close. It was consuming in a way that could be exciting—like being young again and expecting something real from the world—but Laura had been young already. She knew better. It wasn’t her responsibility to show Bradley the way.
Besides which, Bradley didn’t even know what she wanted. Which meant that she didn’t know yet what she was capable of. She’d told Laura once, but Bradley still didn’t know. Not really. And, yes, that scared her; Laura was too old and too smart to get tangled up with a woman like that…
Even if that woman was as exhilarating as Bradley Jackson with her particular brand of chaos and clarity that made the world almost seem true.
God, it was early. Laura cursed Alex Levy yet again for leaving her with this mess, as if it were somehow all Alex’s fault that Laura had agreed to do this, Alex’s fault that the sun didn’t rise before 6:30 in February, her fault that the article had dropped right smack in the middle of everything yesterday, as if it had all been cleverly orchestrated to cause Bradley the optimal amount of pain and Laura the most resentment. She didn’t really think Alex had anything to do with this one, of course, but it was an easy way to focus her frustration. Laura knew it was Bradley eating away at her heart and mind today, Bradley who had devoured most of her sleep. But it was a simple distraction, soothing to pin her mood on someone who wasn’t even there. She knew what she was doing; she indulged herself anyway.
Her phone rang as she exited the elevator. Bradley didn’t even wait for Laura to answer before speaking. (Of course she didn’t; she was Bradley Jackson.) Laura tightened her jaw and kept her voice steely.
“Just getting off the elevator.”
Exasperated. She could hear it in her own voice.
Have patience, Bradley, she wanted to snipe, but held her tongue (again). Screaming apologies into a text message in the middle of the night would never be enough to fix things, and she wished Bradley could see that. This required real work. She couldn’t just drag things back to the way they had been two days ago, and Laura was certain that’s what Bradley wanted here. To go back to before, to erase or run away from this. But yesterday their whole world had changed. She’d been grateful for Daniel (who understood better than most), she’d been grateful even to Bradley—who, when Laura had left her in her dressing room after the show, had been tearful but growing steady, promising to go home and talk to her brother, to face one thing at a time. Laura had left her with another smile. She’d squeezed her hand and reminded her again that everything would be fine. She’d kissed her, chastely and on the cheek because it had seemed like too much for Bradley to handle anything else yesterday, and bent to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, saying, “One thing at a time. Okay? That’s all you have to do. I’ll call you.”
Her eyes were steady when she said it, holding onto Bradley’s.
But Bradley hadn’t been with her then. And, by the time they’d spoken on the phone later that night, she’d seemed even further away than before. As far away as she apparently expected to be when she eventually “got bored, or restless, or…”
Bradley was already pushing her away.
And now everything was different.
But Laura had a job to do.
“This is a lot to take on,” Laura started, avoiding her own eyes in the mirror when she got to her dressing room, “right before I go do a show.” Someone knocked at the door, disrupting her already precarious train of thought, but Laura persevered, listening for the signal in the smoky distance. “And I need my head in the right place.”
“Well, now this has put my head in a wrong place,” Bradley scowled through the receiver, but Laura cut her off.
“Bradley, I need to let in hair and makeup.” The whole show could not fall to pieces every single day simply because they were all humans with messy human lives that not a single one of them could seem to ever leave at the door. Laura had a job to do. What had they brought her in for if not to do this job?
The knock came again.
“And there is not enough makeup in the world to make me look like I’m enjoying this.”
“Okay,” Bradley breathed, sounding a little stunned, though Laura could still hear the indignation in her soft, bell-like voice.
How was it the very thing that made Laura fascinated with this ridiculous creature was the same thing that drove Laura to want to hang up on her every time they spoke lately? This wildfire was a disaster.
“Whatever—” Bradley, covering over her vulnerability with further spite.
Laura flung her phone with the silent ghost of a snarl caught halfway up her throat, and fell back against her chair.
“Come in,” she groaned, and the door opened. “Can you do me a favor,” she said, eyes still closed, as she heard hair and makeup stepping in around her, “and make me up to look like a clown today?”
“I, uh…”
Laura drew a breath and opened her eyes, looking up. She forced a shapeless smile. “I’m kidding. It’s early, huh? Good morning.”
“Hey, uh,” Laura had paused with her hand on the door handle, the driver waiting outside on the sidewalk to let her out. She looked back at Bradley with her swollen lips, those blue eyes dark now with something indistinct and wild. “Do you want to come up for a drink?” Laura offered, casual, noncommittal, an open smile on her face. (She’d done this before, it was easy.)
Bradley’s smile was fleeting, an animal disappearing again between the trees, but alert and hungry, something on the prowl. “Sure,” she nodded, a little breathless still, perhaps a little rushed, and scooted across the seat after her. “That sounds great.”
She had almost expected Bradley to pin her against the wall the moment they were inside, the heat coming off her was so potent. But they had come upstairs without looking at each other, and somehow this made Laura all the more aware of the woman brushing her shoulder on her way through the doorway. Something pulsed between them, impossible to ignore, but silent in its throbbing anticipation.
Bradley paused at the threshold, her gaze going wide, as she took in the space of Laura’s apartment, the fireplace, the books, the wide patio doors and the private, tree-covered area beyond that.
“Your place is amazing,” she gaped softly, still looking up and down the room and crossing after Laura toward the bar cart. She paused again there, while Laura hung up her coat, went to pour them a drink, watching the other woman from the corner of her eye as she examined the spines of Laura’s collection in the shelves.
“Thanks,” she said, bringing the tumblers to stand next to her, and letting their fingers brush as Bradley took the drink from her hands, eyes still roving the shelves. Hardbacks, politics and history and memoir, oversized art books, interspersed with antique statuettes and priceless vases.
“That one’s a friend of mine,” she offered, gesturing with her glass toward a curving, polished statue that resembled the shape of a woman in the throes of ecstasy. “Shira Naftali,” Laura explained. “She does incredible woodwork. This one’s wonderful, isn’t she?”
Her shoulder bumped against Bradley’s as she came to stand next to her, the soft feathery thickness of her sweater making a quiet whispering sound against the leather.
Bradley nodded, took a hard swallow of the drink. “You must know a lot of people.”
Shrugging, Laura smiled and let her eyes drift down her own shelves. “I’ve lived in the city most of my adult life. You get to know people in this business.” Her gaze slid sideways again, taking in the profile of the younger woman beside her. “But you know that.”
Smiling vaguely, Bradley kept her eyes turned upward, admiring a vase now, something narrow and amber colored. She knew Laura was watching her; Laura could tell by the way Bradley’s lashes fluttered and how she subtly wetted her lip. But she let Laura watch her, without turning, let her wait. She was better at this than she let on.
“I’m seeing a lot of repeated shapes here,” Bradley smirked, her blue eyes wide toward the shelves near the ceiling, then she cast a sudden glance over her shoulder back toward Laura.
“You caught me,” Laura lifted an eyebrow, taking a drink with a casual shrug. “I have specific tastes. I guess it’s obvious if you know what you’re looking for.”
Bradley set the glass on a shelf then, between the golden brown vase and a fat volume on French noir, and turned to face her. She was smiling in that way she had back in the car, a smile that wasn’t quite a smile, and her blue eyes had deepened by leagues.
Laura held her own glass and tilted her head, admiring Bradley openly.
“So, do you always start with this one?” Bradley glanced again at Shira’s piece on the shelf, its supple curves and gleaming arcs shining with honeyed lacquer in the afternoon light of the apartment. “With all the women you invite up here?”
Laura shrugged again, chuckling as she took another sip, then turned from her and set the glass back down beside the decanter. “Most of them don’t make me wait this long.”
She felt Bradley close the gap behind her. Though she didn’t touch Laura, Laura could still sense the warmth of her suddenly filling the space behind her. And she turned rather slowly to face her, holding Bradley by the eyes until the other woman was silent and still before her as a statue. Laura could use her eyes like fists when she wanted to, and she knew this about herself. It was, in so many ways, a part of the job. This was an invitation, even as it was also something of a dare. So Laura waited, not quite smiling with her chin lifted and her brows high. Then Bradley’s hands were on her again, the same as before in that eager and uncalculated way, at her neck and in her hair. She was unrestrained in every gesture, from the way her blunt nails dug into Laura’s scalp to the abrupt way her lips opened and her mouth moved, but Laura responded to it gracefully, pulling Bradley roughly by the hips against her, kissing her and finding skin too easily between the thick edges of late winter garments.
That first time had been careless. Not exactly desperate, not messy, but still fast and unambitious. It did not last long. Bradley’s jacket on the floor, Laura’s thick sweater damaged by a zipper. Bradley was not reticent; she knew what she was doing and was not afraid of Laura the way Laura might have expected her to be. She was confident, intense, inelegant and impatient, but assertive. Neither of them cared very much where it was going, which perhaps meant that neither of them expected where they had ended up.
Most recently, the last time, it had been much slower, more tender and far more aware. They could be ambitious—they had to be, because the stakes had never been higher. She knew Bradley’s body and her rhythms, had learned which sounds to follow and which paths to open up, and Bradley, always a quick study, knew Laura well by now, too. There had been no sweaters that last time, no winter coats or shoes to remove, because they’d already been there, curled up together on Laura’s couch with the television on. Something black and white and flickering on the screen, but Bradley’s eyes had fallen on Laura. She smiled. Laura smiled back at her. With her arms fully around her, Laura had brought her down onto the cushions, kissing her deeply for several long minutes with Bradley’s hand in her hair, savoring the bright notes of Bradley’s perfume and the flavor of whiskey on her tongue.
How had it gotten this far in so little time?
Laura could practically hear the punchline from across the internet.
But, she also thought, you reach a certain point in your life where you know yourself enough and you know what you want, and when something works, none of that really matters anymore. It wasn’t about changing her life, or Bradley’s; it was about noticing where they fit into each other’s. Two lives that had intersected here, in this space, two women fully grown into their better selves, or on their way to it, and creating space for one another where it made sense to do so. Laura didn’t need Bradley. Laura didn’t need anyone in that way. But she wanted Bradley. And wanting was enough when you could see it clearly.
“I’m gonna miss winter clothes. Is that just me? Preferring winter clothes?”
“When you look like I do, you hate to hide the sexy.”
“Ah, that is not an answer. Bradley, what about you?”
“Call security.”
Laura didn’t raise her voice often. She didn’t need to; hers was a voice that carried against the noise easily. But she raised it now, felt it like that snarl from earlier that morning in her dressing room, now unloosed from her throat at last, as brother and sister came into contact. Bradley initiated it—just a hesitating shove to her brother’s chest, some instinct to put him in place before he went too far—but Laura could see too clearly where it might go from there, and it was something she would not tolerate.
Laura knew when to wait, and when to act.
And a moment later, the mug exploded on the floor. Bradley dancing on kitten heels, only inches out of range and making a frail, wounded sound in her throat. She made herself smaller so quickly, it was almost impossible to recognize her, except for the little blonde head and the way her chin tucked itself protectively into her own chest. But Laura stood back, eyes flicking between brother and sister, then down again the hallway, until uniforms appeared and brought the breath back into her lungs. Everything in her begged her to jump into the path of breaking glass and apples like grenades, but Laura knew. Laura had been here before, and that was not how you deescalated in a war zone. In a war zone, you had to wait. You had to hold fast. You had to listen to your surroundings, anticipate and not run headfirst into what you didn’t understand, and Laura knew better—even if Bradley's tiny, shrinking form and muted cries tore into her like shrapnel.
She stood back, even as they dragged him away, hands clasped over the scarab at her chest.
“Bradley...Bradley, fucking help me!”
(Help him? Laura thought, somewhere in the foggy recesses of her mind, as she took a few steps nearer to Bradley’s side.)
Laura watched the back of Bradley’s head, her golden eyes flashing down the hallway toward the man she knew to probably look like a little boy to Bradley right now, but who to Laura looked only like violence and pain, and something hateful reared up and seethed in her chest. She focused on it, wrangled it, put it back in its place so as not to be controlled by it right now. She wrung her palms together instead. The scarab swung heavy against her heart. She took a step nearer to Bradley, and watched Bradley’s hair, watched her shoulders as they rose and then shrunk again. Until she turned, and those blue eyes (so dark and stormy and fractured now) caught Laura’s (barely a furtive flicker of lashes, almost as if she hadn’t meant to look at her at all, though of course she had), and Laura finally heard the summon—the one she’d been listening for since last night—and she turned to follow Bradley out of the chaos.
At the dressing room door, Laura opened it without knocking, tipping her head inside at first to look, the rest of her following quickly and shutting it behind her with a soft click. Bradley was hunched over on the couch, gripping the cushions with white-knuckled desperation and sobbing violently, but the sound of the door drew her swollen eyes upward.
“Laura,” she barely managed to choke, before her breath hitched again in her throat and she fell under again into heaving sounds.
“Hey,” Laura kept her face serene, her voice low, as she went to her and drew Bradley across the couch into her arms in one easy, fluid motion. Her arms were long compared to Bradley, and she was used to the shape of her, pulling this small, trembling thing without any need for exertion against her chest, as Bradley’s shoes fell away and she tucked herself into her embrace. Whatever Laura had been feeling until then, there would be time later to sort through their own mess. She realized, with her arms tight around Bradley’s back, that she was shaking too. So she steadied herself by combing through Bradley’s hair at her shoulder, fingers tracing the soft lines of it down her back.
Again, Bradley seemed so small to her. Smaller even than her tiny frame would suggest. Always like a child. Not in the juvenile, immature sense, but in the sense that she was—or could be, a tiny precious thing, as breakable as she was also merciless. That night on the stoop, when it had been so cold, and Bradley had scarcely been able to articulate a word beyond that delicate, pathetic, “Please.” Sometimes it was inspiring: Bradley giggling over a tapestry of half-finished burgers and fries, some kind of turkey sandwich and macaroni and chocolate chip pancakes and fruit and salads…there could sometimes be a certain level of revelation in that kind of juvenescence, a certain aspiration that Laura admired and that excited her when she could bring it about in Bradley. It was not so far removed from Bradley’s journalistic (some might call it naive) passion to seek and tell truths in a difficult world.
But she could also be very fragile, tempestuous, frightened in a way that grew thorns quickly.
Laura kept her voice calm, making soothing sounds as she ran her fingers through Bradley’s hair and down her back.
“It’s okay,” she whispered into Bradley’s shoulder. “You’re okay. Okay…”
“I can’t go out there,” Bradley sobbed.
“No, you can,” Laura promised her, still stroking her hair. “You can. It’s gonna be okay. People judging you’s a bitch, but it doesn’t kill you.”
“I don’t—I don’t know what to do. Am I a horrible person?”
“No,” Laura inserted quickly, and she drew back to look at her as she spoke, to let her know the sincerity of the fact: Bradley was good. Whatever rot had tried to take her, she was a good person. But being good did not always mean becoming ‘one of the invisible,’ or losing yourself to someone else’s needs; sometimes taking care of someone else meant asking them to take responsibility for themselves. Laura had learned this. Bradley needed to understand it now, too.
She brushed Bradley’s hair from her face, touching the sticky, ruddy cheek and holding her jaw as if to hold her in place, the same way she had stood by yesterday morning when Bradley’s eyes searched the studio for her lines, landed on her, flicked back again to the prompter and carried on. The same way Laura had advised her to shut out the world and take care of herself, and Bradley had nodded, gripping the sofa, almost coming down from her ledge, but not quite.
She seemed to come down now, as she nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her wrist.
“But you do need to take a cold, hard look at your life,” Laura was saying. “You’re just gonna have to, Bradley. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
Laura let go of her face when she felt the strength returning it, releasing the damp skin from her palm, and it reminded her briefly of the shards of her vase when she’d collected them like egg shells from her floor.
“Have you ever had therapy?”
Bradley started to roll her eyes, before her expression caught itself, hung unfinished in the air, then slowly turned to look up into Laura’s eyes. Anxious, afraid—she wasn’t used to throwing over her barbs in favor of honesty. Not when it came to herself. Laura knew that too well by now. But Bradley finally came to her now, opened her eyes and eventually looked straight at her when she spoke.
“I’m afraid they’ll tell me I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” Laura said without hesitation.
“I’m not?”
She really meant it.
“No.” Laura held her eyes, even as her gaze flitted over Bradley’s features, still checking for cracks and watching for new breaks as she spoke. “You learned behaviors to help you survive as a kid in a crazy environment. Okay, they’re not helping you now.” She nodded with Bradley, letting her know she was still there, still with her, not afraid of ‘crazy’ where there was none.
“Oh, my God,” Bradley looked away, hiding again within her pain, so that no one could use it against her. “My family has just really fucked me up.”
Laura felt her jaw tighten again, felt her throat contract, as she blinked away the uninvited emotion. She nodded, made a sound of attentiveness.
“And I love them so much,” Bradley went on, “but I can’t fix them.” She glanced at Laura, wanting her to know that she was trying to internalize it.
Laura nodded with her again. “Right. So maybe it’s time that you stepped away from them.”
She could tell Bradley didn’t want to hear it, but Laura could only be honest.
“I—I tried to make Hal go home.”
“Yeah, and then he just sucked you right back in, didn’t he?”
“But he’s a mess, and it’s not his fault…”
Laura listened and nodded. She understood. It was never anyone’s fault how they ended up the way they were. What mattered, and what people could be held accountable for was how they chose to change, or to overcome. What mattered was what you did with your own agency, even when some of it had been taken from you. Was it fair that this was sometimes harder for some people than others? No. But Laura had seen first-hand the amazing things human beings were capable of, even in the most extreme cases of turmoil. She didn’t fault Bradley’s brother for being broken. She pitied him, if she was honest. But she wouldn’t tolerate behaviors that were designed to make Bradley feel guilt or responsibility for actions that belonged only to him.
But she couldn’t make those choices for Bradley either.
“But he’s a mess and it’s not his fault. He’s bipolar, and he has terrible parents. We have,” Bradley began to crumble again, “terrible parents.”
Laura took her arm, pulling her back again from the edge, and it was in part as if she were pulling herself up with her.
Her brother had mentioned it, and in that moment Laura had imagined it: two children, very small, terrified at the sudden lurch, the unexpected sound—another child, dead, and little Bradley with that knowledge in her heart and on her skin for the rest of her life. It was an image of Bradley that did not seem impossible when Laura looked at her now, this fragile, sobbing little creature in her arms. She could imagine her smaller, little hands in her lap in the backseat of a car, little shoes kicking above the floor mats, big eyes wide with horror—and Laura’s heart broke for the child Bradley had been, for the child that Laura would never know, and could never go back to protect. That was exactly the sort of thing that, when she came up against in her work, Laura had learned to set aside. To compartmentalize, to empathize but not internalize. You could not bear the responsibility for all the devastation in other people’s lives. But, of course, it cut a little deeper when she teased out the threads of Bradley’s life between her hands.
“Look, Bradley,” she offered, holding the rest inside with a steady tone, as she touched Bradley’s hand, gently thumbing her knuckles and drawing her attention back to her, back to the present, to the couch, and to Laura’s eyes, “listen to me.” She smiled softly. “I get that it’s not his fault. I get it. But at a certain point, it doesn’t matter why he’s the way he is. It just matters that he’s bringing chaos to your life, and he isn’t interested in changing, you know? You—you have to think about you. Right?” Bradley drew another shaky breath, and Laura gently touched her face again, bringing her back again to her. “What is right for you? Think about that.” She held her eyes, and Bradley looked back at her, her vision swimming with a nod.
And for the first time, Laura glanced down, as she dropped her hand to Bradley’s thigh and caressed the fabric there with a steady thumb. “Look,” she said, “I’ve had to walk away from people in my family, and it is...not easy.” Laura shook the emotion from her voice with a blink, and sniffed down her own briefly waterlogged sentiment.
“You have?” Bradley sounded surprised, but Laura only nodded. They could talk about her own life some other time. This was just a nugget, a piece of herself for Bradley to hold onto, to keep and find some understanding in.
“But in the end, it’s just harder,” she said, not entirely sure what she meant by it, only that this was a truth she had had to live with. Survival meant everything, eventually.
“Oh, my God,” Bradley said with some recognition. “I can’t imagine leaving my baby brother…I—I can’t abandon him…”
“Okay, so,” Laura’s voice grew firm again, “if he wants to change...you could put him in rehab.” She searched Bradley’s face. This was the easier option, but in the end—in the end, it was also harder. “But honestly,” she went on, lowering her voice and drawing hard circles again over Bradley's hip. “Honestly, honey...I think you might have to walk away.”
She knew what she was saying. She knew how it hurt, could see it in Bradley’s eyes when she looked back at her.
But she was looking at her now, and that counted for a lot.
“It’s your life, Bradley,” Laura said, a coarse whisper now with her hand falling firm as rock on Bradley’s thigh. “It’s yours.” And you only ever had the one. “Not his.” And you could never get back what they took from you. All you could do was keep what was yours and carry it on your back, away from the storm.
“I don’t speak to my dad,” Bradley whispered after a moment, her voice still thick with tears but growing more solid. “I haven’t—I hadn’t talked to him in a...in a pretty long time, actually. Until I got here, and he—I guess he saw me on TV, or whatever,” she took a breath, “and remembered I existed. I don’t—I don’t know where he is most of the time, or what he does.” She let the breath go, shaking but trying to calm herself, and Laura could hear the tears filtering back into her face and throat, so she gave Bradley’s leg another squeeze. “And my mom pretends to be afraid of me…”
“I understand,” Laura said, and her own throat went tight again. “But parents,” she started, pausing for only a moment, “are supposed to put you first. That’s their job, not yours. If they can’t do that for you, honey, you have to learn to do it for yourself. And it sounds like that’s what you had to do. You are not your brother’s parent,” she added. “They put that responsibility on you, and it wasn’t fair of them to do that. He’s an adult now. Just like you. If you can do it, so can he.”
Bradley nodded, then lowered her face again, her hand coming to Laura’s chest to brush the heavy scarab that hung flat against pinstripes. Laura’s smile softened again. She brought her arms back around her, one across her back, the other to brush the hair from behind her skull, as she leaned down to kiss Bradley’s forehead at the hairline. Her skin was too hot against Laura’s lips, almost feverish, but Laura kept her mouth pressed there for a moment, breathing strength into her, until she felt Bradley relax against her and her fingers trailed away to Laura’s lap.
She thought about telling her that she didn’t have to do all this alone. But Laura didn’t want to make promises she wasn’t sure yet she would be able to keep. She was here now, though, and she let that speak for itself, as she ran her palm again over Bradley’s shoulders.
“We have to get back,” Laura whispered against her temple, and Bradley nodded into her chin, then drew back to look at her. “You can do this, Bradley,” she said, tucking the hair again behind Bradley’s ear. “Okay? We can do this.”
“Bradley...I just want you to know that I really think, actually, that you’re the right person to do this. You know, to break the news…”
Bradley looked wary, but Laura felt her lips twitch as she stood over her. She was watching her throughout the phone call, listening for signs of distress, until something pleasant passed through her own chest, and she had to suppress the smile. This was not really a time for smiling, but pride had a way of getting ahead of itself.
“Why do you say that?” Bradley asked with some disbelief.
“Because...everything’s changing.” Through the speaker, Alex’s voice was muffled and dense with grief. But there was a sincerity there that surprised Laura. “And you were the start of that change,” Alex said.
Laura’s gaze shifted, almost without meaning to, from Bradley to Cory. She remembered again how he’d asked her to ‘coach’ Bradley, finesse her a little into something more mild, something with broad, apolitical appeal. Again, Laura nearly cackled at the thought; how ridiculous it was, asking her of all people to do this. But she wondered who had made the decision to ask Bradley to go blonde. She wondered who had started dressing her up like a pretty little doll. She wondered if this change—bring in someone with Bradley’s fire, her intensity of spirit, and only to break it just enough to keep everything, ultimately, the same as it always was—was what he or anyone else had had in mind.
With her eyes on Cory, the smirk tugged imperceptibly at the edges of Laura’s mouth. That’s my girl, she thought, glancing down again at Bradley’s shoulders. That’s my girl.
“And I just want you to know that I really,” Alex went on through the phone, “I so appreciate you. You know? That’s all.” Laura watched, she could see what the words meant to Bradley, who nodded, as it seemed so many little things lifted from her shoulders and disappeared at the words. And Laura smiled again, softer now. Mia took back the phone and said goodbye to Alex. Cory and Stella disappeared like genies of the corporate lamp.
When Braldey stood from the table, she glanced up at Laura, who lifted her brows again with a spark of something warm in her eyes. Bradley smiled faintly, her own eyes cool now, but clear. Winter skies, Laura thought; she’d been wrong before, they were winter eyes, not autumn. Cold as steel and painfully bright, whether you liked it or not. She brushed Bradley’s hand as the smaller woman walked past her. Not enough to grasp it, just fingers brushing together, then separating again. But they both felt it. And it was enough for Laura to feel that the cool skin had returned to something steady in Bradley now. And, as she followed her down the hallway toward the studio, she admired the straight line of Bradley’s back, the steel in her step, the sharp clarity in the way she moved toward the studio doors and pushed them open and took the stage without looking back. Laura folded up her smile, as she stepped into the lights after her, caught Bradley’s eye with a nod, as they took their chairs, then looked forward with her—in near perfect synchronization their eyes struck the camera lens as one.
“Welcome back. We’re interrupting with some breaking news that we want you to hear first from us,” Laura said, then turned to the woman at her side, and offered her the stage to the world:
“Bradley?”