When the kids asked him why he became a lawyer, he didn’t have the right stock answer stuck up against the back of his teeth like he was supposed to. It had been a while. He worked in a firm, now. People didn’t ask those kinds of questions anymore. Not when the answers went so often unspoken, carried instead through harsh eyebrows and clenched teeth.
Not when the answers came more often in the memory of hands pressed to faces, heaving wails trapped behind mouths. Matt’s fingers going white and blue with the cold because someone once told him he wasn’t worthy of warm clothes. Marci clutching Foggy’s sweatshirt, back pressed against the wall, mascara smeared and lipstick chewed away. Mourning the loss of something she didn’t choose to give.
Karen’s blue eyes rimmed red in a giant NYC Police t-shirt.
Jess’s mother’s blood dried and caked in her nails.
‘I want to help people.’
That was the right answer. The basic answer. The honest answer.
The answer which rang true for even the scum of the city. The very shit and piss and dirt that sluiced into the asphalt and gutters of their city, carrying with it a handful of people who called themselves defenders of the law.
‘I want to help people.’
Everyone was a “people,” technically, so even the shittiest lawyer was helping people. It just so happened that their ‘people’ was actually a ‘person,’ and that person was themselves.
‘I want to help people.’ It was the right answer, but it wasn’t the honest one.
Matt had knocked a glass off the table three months into their novel, new, cramped dorm co-existence. Foggy wasn’t sure how, but it slipped off their scratched formica table and shattered on the floor. He’d poked his head out his door to see what had happened and found Matt frozen in shock in the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, I’ll pay for it,” had been his immediate response, without Foggy having said anything.
And Foggy had stood in the doorway while this blind kid, just barely a man, dropped to his knees to try to collect fragments of glass with his fingers. Glass he couldn’t see. Glass he could only feel, the edges of which bit into his skin and he didn’t even give notice. Foggy hadn’t been too caught up on the proper etiquette of living with a blind person yet, but he’d figured that these kinds of things were likely to happen. He’d knelt down next to Matt to liberate his fingers from the task, but the barest the brush of their shoulders sent Matt leaping up and shuffling back. Spine rigid. Chest frozen mid-heave.
He’d blinked a few times and had shaken himself out of it. Had made a joke about Foggy giving him a heart attack and they laughed it off. Cleaned up the glass. Everything was fine. Except Foggy went to sleep that night thinking about Matt’s white and blue fingers and how he’d started shivering himself to sleep since the weather had taken a turn.
Matt didn’t eat much some days and he only had one coat. When it rained, he waited under awnings until the worst of it passed, so as not to fuck up the only jacket he had.
It had started as ‘I want to help myself.’
Foggy wasn’t about to admit that he’d had a hard time of it growing up. As a kid, you have no basis for comparison. He’d figured that every mom and dad that kept a shop had wrinkles in their foreheads and under their eyes. Every mom and dad in the Kitchen stayed up late, making numbers match. Trying to make two different rents and dinner all at the same time.
Every kid in the city worked in the store from the time that they could and got bullied. They all got mugged and kicked and called ‘faggot’ and ‘fat’ and ‘fucking annoying and worthless’ and ‘dumb.’ ‘Stupid, so fucking stupid.’ Once or twice or, okay, maybe three times a week. They had to. Right?
Right.
Wrong.
He’d moved the chip on his shoulder into his bag for safe keeping in college. People didn’t need to know why you did what you did. Why you worked all the time, at home and at school. Why you told no one, exactly no one, that you were applying to law school at the end of that long fucking trek at the age of 22. Just in case they laughed. Just in case they said, “Fogs, what’s wrong with the store?” “Are you smart enough for law school?” “What, you think you could be a lawyer?”
He kept his chip in his bag until he met Matt and Matt broke a glass on their shitty kitchen floor. Until the odds and ends of Matt’s little quirks started adding up to something which was so much worse than the sum of its parts. Until he stayed way late at Marci’s one day and came home at 3am to find Matt nodding off at his desk in the dark.
Then Matt’s cold hands were crammed up into his eyes, chest heaving and caving, as he apologized over and over for the swelling of Foggy’s cheek. For the tiny little crack Foggy thought he’d heard when the blow landed.
Matt hadn’t heard him come in.
He wasn’t good with touch.
He swore he’d never do it again, ever, ever again. He was sorry. He’d pay for the medical bills. He wouldn’t do it again.
In circles, pressed up with his back to the wall, side melded to the side of the bed. His hands had been almost white at their tips.
‘I want to help people’ hadn’t seemed like enough anymore.
It got more complicated. He needed more words.
He settled on ‘I want to make a world where this wouldn’t need to happen’ for the time being.
It changed again after he’d started seeing Marci for real.
They’d had a lot of sex. It was a way to blow of steam, release pressure. From hours and hours and hours of work and study and school and work and study and school. On and on, with no end in sight.
She was gorgeous, Marci. Funny, brilliant. She told Foggy she was using him for his body and spread so many rumors about the abilities of said body that Foggy couldn’t quite reconcile the idea she had of it with the one he’d held in his head since middle school. It was flattering.
Wrong, the voice in his head told him, but flattering.
Marci didn’t always share her body with him in the same way that he did with her. She was guarded. Sometimes she left her shirt on when they fucked. She teased him with it and let him run his hands under it, but it didn’t come off. Other times she was fine. But then one time, she stopped in the middle of a kiss and said,
“Actually, maybe not today.”
She’d leaned off to the side, her hair hiding her face, but she hadn’t gotten off of him.
Foggy had been surprised, given her earlier vigor. He’d shuffled up to make sure she was okay.
She wasn’t. She wouldn’t look at him.
He wanted to ask what was wrong, but she looked like a word would put her over the edge. So he’d gently patted her hip and she’d swung her thighs back over to the side and he let her just lean against his belly and ribs. Her breathing was shaky. He asked her if she wanted some space and she said ‘yes,’ and then ‘no,’ and then ‘maybe--I don’t know.’
Someone had tried to rape Foggy’s sister. Fourteen years old and she’d gone out with friends and she’d come back early with one of said friend’s arms wrapped around her waist. Her friend was pale with horror. Wide eyes.
Mom and Dad hadn’t been home, so Candace sobbed into Foggy for hours until they were. She didn’t want to tell them and swore Foggy to secrecy. He took her to a clinic to get tested. She was six years younger than Foggy. She asked him if all boys were that terrible and he didn’t have an answer that would make her feel better. No answer still made her feel like shit.
Marci had been seventeen, she said, when her varsity soccer team went out with the rival school’s. She’d had too much to drink. She didn’t remember exactly how many, but it wasn’t that many; she had a higher tolerance now.
She asked him why all men were terrible and he still didn’t have an answer, even four years later. No answer was still a really fucking bad one.
“No one believed me,” she told him, “They said I was making it up for attention. That I was too drunk to know what I was talking about.”
She wiped her tears and mascara on Foggy’s bundled up sweatshirt and her arm and, with furious eyebrows, snarled,
“I wasn’t.”
And Foggy told her he believed her. And she told him that she’d die before she saw the day she represented a rapist in court.
And ‘I want to make a world where this wouldn’t need to happen’ was too many words and not enough action.
He went home that night and found Matt socked out on the couch. He sat at the table and turned the old mantra into a new one.
‘What can I do to make this stop happening?’
Really, honestly, Nelson and Murdock was the answer to that question. It had been. It would always be. One abused kid and one fucked up one trying to make the world a better place, one seemingly hopeless case at a time.
One “No, I believe you,” followed by another until Foggy looked up one day and found that he had minimum savings and maximum stress and, on the whole, a clear conscious.
But then Nelson and Murdock went away. And Matt went away and in came this new person, the Devil. And then there also came Karen. And Castle. And Hogarth. And Jess. And then Luke and Danny and Misty and then out of nowhere, Wade and Peter and May and Ned and MJ and all these other people who were, yeah, definitely not the same, but then actually. Actually, they were.
I want to help people.
I want to save people.
I want to make a world where this wouldn’t need to happen.
I want to make a world where this doesn’t happen.
How do I do it?
What can I do to stop this from happening?
It had taken him years, but he’d finally sorted it out. As much as he could with as much experience as he had. You put your life on the line, he decided, and you say, “I believe you,” and you take the next fucking step. The right fucking step. The hard part is making sure it’s the right fucking step.
So that when a bunch of kids ask you one why you became a lawyer, and the man you love most, that abused kid picking up glass from a kitchen floor in a now-nonexistent dorm, gives them an indulgent smile, you can say, “so that I can always sort out the next steps.” Knowing that, even though that might not be the answer the kids were looking for, it’s the truth. The best you can do. The most you can give. And sometimes, that has to be enough.