Part Six: Rising
The wheelchair creaked.
Marcus made a sound — not a word, just a sound, the sound of someone watching something they cannot account for with the frameworks they have been using.
Sophia’s arms were trembling. Her legs were trembling. Every part of her was in some form of trembling — not collapse, but the specific trembling of something that has been still for a very long time and is now being asked to move.
She pushed.
She rose.
Not completely — not the dramatic straightening of someone standing fully. She was bent forward, her weight distributed between her arms on the rests and her feet on the floor, halfway between sitting and standing. Her body was not yet sure of itself. Her legs were not sure of themselves.
But she was not in the chair.
She was above the chair.
Eli was holding her hand with both of his and he was not helping her stand, precisely, but he was providing something — a point of contact, a resistance, something to hold against. She gripped him and he gripped her and the two of them were connected at the hands the way they had been connected, in some form, for twenty-two years without knowing it.
The guests did not clap. She would remember this later — that the room did not produce the performance of a moment. It simply held. The sixty people in the Bellhaven ballroom stood and held the moment without adding to it, the way you hold something fragile.
She looked at her brother.
He was looking up at her with the expression of someone who has been looking for something for a very long time and has found it and is still not entirely certain it is real. His eyes were streaming. He was making no effort to stop them — the tears were simply happening, the way rain simply happens, the body doing what it does when the conditions are met.
“I’m not letting you go again,” she said.
Her voice was not quite steady. It was the voice of someone who is standing when they have not been standing, who is feeling things in their legs that they had been told were unlikely to be felt, who is holding the hand of a brother they were told was dead for twenty-two years and who is eleven years old and wearing a green hoodie and whose shoes need replacing.
It was the most honest voice she had produced in years.
She lowered herself back into the chair. This was not defeat — it was the careful management of something that had just begun and that needed to be treated with the attention it deserved. She sat, and Eli came with her, sitting on the edge of the footrest the way children sit wherever there is available surface, close.
She kept his hand.
