by Rachel Kane
His eyes weren't even trying to stay dry now. He could feel the hot tears dripping down his cheeks.
"Oh, damn, Mason, no, listen, forget I said anything—"
"No. You deserve better than me. I'm like… I'm like some old pipe held together with duct tape and hope. It's all going to fall apart, and it's going to be my fault, and I don't want you to get hurt. We need to break up."
"I don't understand." Liam's voice was so quiet, so lost.
"Go back to your real life. Forget about Superbia. Sell the house, sell all this. It's nothing but a dream. It isn't yours. Your real life is back in the city, with your kid, with your family. Down here, it's nothing but… Nothing but time slowly pulling everything down, and no matter how much you try to build it back up, time eventually wins."
"Mason! I can't accept that! What are you even talking about?"
"I can't do this! I can't hurt you like this! That's all you need to know. I promise you, Liam, if there was any other way…”
Cooper's Folly had always been a favorite of the kids in town. Creeping up to the house on Halloween, nudging your friends, convincing them you'd seen a shadowy figure in the halls, perhaps a ghostly woman carrying a knife, perhaps a man dangling from a noose. Silly kid's stuff.
But there was nothing silly about how haunted the world felt tonight. How treacherous and dark.
He stumbled out of the spring-house, ignoring Liam's pleas for him to come back, pleas which became angrier and more strident as Liam realized the finality with which Mason was marching out. He slammed the truck door, threw the thing into reverse, and backed out of the winding driveway. He didn't head back to town, though. Instead he drove. Drove through the dark, past the farms, the peanuts and cotton and corn, the rows and rows of moonlit growth, the spidery watering systems arching over the fields, driving until he felt like he was past the grip of the Mulgrews, into the territory they had no interest in.
He pulled the truck to the side of the road and put his head on the steering wheel.
What had he just done?
How had he just ruined his own life…and for what?
His phone's sound was incongruously happy, the bells of holiday celebration, as Liam sent him message after message. Where are you? Come on, where did you go? Mason, we can talk about this!
Mason switched the phone to silent.
"You'll never understand this," he whispered to the air around him, "but I swear I'm trying to protect you. I swear I'm trying to do the right thing here. It doesn't feel good, and it doesn't feel right, but it's a hell of a lot better than it'll feel if Violet Mulgrew gets her claws into you."
Not that there was anyone around to answer him.
No, he was alone again.
Same as always.
His own fucking fault.
But it felt worse this time than it ever had before.
28
Liam
"You didn't have to come," said Liam.
The bar was so much darker now, dark like that first discovery, when only a single beam of a flashlight gave hints of the shadowed glory inside.
The big construction lights, the generator, were all gone, and now, like a constellation of dim and distant stars, three phone lights provided the slightest glow to the room.
"Of course we did," said Noah. "We can't kick Mason's ass long-distance."
"Violence never solved anything," said Judah. "Especially not when administered by a twink like yourself."
"I'll bite his ankles like a chihuahua," Noah insisted. He shone his light around. "No jukebox? Wait, did they have jukeboxes back then?"
If nothing else, the old familiar chatter kept Liam's mind off things. He could sense they were doing it for his benefit. Not prying, not asking the kinds of questions that would make him cry (again). The speed with which they'd descended on Superbia surprised him. We're here for you, Judah had said, shyly, not good at emotional talk, but good at being there when you needed him.
Liam's light moved slowly over the bar. There were no signs of the night of passion he and Mason had shared here. Everything had been cleaned…well, nearly everything. Those bottles and glasses would take an age to finish dusting, and there was the brass to polish and the floors to scrub. But at least Mason had removed the evidence.
A little gift, from a man who had left him as suddenly and mysteriously as he'd arrived.
"I can't believe we didn't spot this on our first go-round in the house," said Judah. His light climbed to the ceiling, the thick wooden beams reinforcing the idea of a secret stronghold deep beneath the earth. "It has to interrupt the cellar somehow, I don't think we're low enough to be below the cellar, right?"
What had not survived down here was the leather of the barstools. It was cracked and noisy to sit on, the horsehair filling it making a sort of crunching noise as Liam lowered himself, putting his elbows up on the bar, the perfect image of a gambler who has lost everything, coming for one more drink before letting the world know about his failure.
Without saying a word, his friend and his brother were beside him. They didn't lay a hand on him, and yet he felt like they were carrying him. "Guys…" His voice was as dry and cracked as the leather, his throat raw from the night of crying. Trying to keep it together in front of Roo had been nearly impossible. He'd managed, crooning happy little songs to her to keep her occupied, while his soul twisted in pain. The minute the boys had arrived, Mama had picked up the baby and said, Shoo, go. You need time to yourself.
Noah lifted himself onto the bar. He set his phone onto its screen, its light facing up, so that it gave him a ghost-story-by-the-campfire look. "I'm really sorry," he told Liam. "We were rooting for you."
"I just don't understand it. If we'd been incompatible somehow, or if we'd had big fights, maybe it would've made sense, but out of nowhere, to just say he couldn't do it? To say he was protecting me? Protecting me from what? What kind of secret is so awful that breaking up is better than telling me?"
"There are only a few options," said Noah, lifting his fingers and ticking them off one by one. "First, he was cheating—"
"No. Not Mason."
"Well, you'd be surprised, but okay, not Mason. Second, maybe a criminal record—"
"Is your entire list going to be like that?"
"Third, he's being blackmailed."
"Yeah, right."
"Fourth was going to be that he had a secret kid, but I could see that actually working in favor for you two, so forget that one."
Judah sighed. "People aren't logical. That's the whole problem with them. If it was easy as making a check-list, nobody would ever break up. Who knows what Mason thought he was protecting you from? It doesn't matter. If he won't talk about it, then…" He finished with a weary shrug, and Liam recognized the gesture. It was one he had done himself, while talking about Dad, while talking about Richard. It was a shrug that said, People. What are you going to do?
A faint, morbid laugh escaped him. "The thing is, this seals it. I'm doomed. I've said it for years. Now I've proved it. I am going to be alone forever. There's always going to be something getting in the way."
Noah cleared his throat. Uh-oh. His definitely non-serious friend was about to say something serious. He recognized that little cough.
"Now, I'm not saying any of this is your fault," he began.
Liam shook his head. "There's no way to finish that sentence without telling me how some of it is my fault."
"Here's the thing, Liam. You can get a little…strident on the topic of secrets."
"Yeah, damn, Noah, I wonder why that is?"
"No, no, I get it. We all get it. But sometimes a guy just has a secret, you know? Sometimes you have to allow that."
He looked at his friend in disbelief. "Have to allow it? Is that what you just said to me?"
Noah clicked his tongue. "Look, I would never say this under normal circumstances. But you have to see that sometimes you don't allow people an alternative. Do you remember last year, when we were plannin
g a surprise party for you? And you knew we were up to something, and hounded us night and day, threatening to literally break up the friendship if we didn't tell you what was going on?"
"I had just lost Richard," Liam said. "I wasn't in the mood for surprises."
"I think what Noah's trying to say is, you make things sound like they're all-or-nothing," said Judah, his voice gentle and quiet, almost lost in the dark room. He pulled up a barstool. "You make up rules to keep yourself safe."
"I didn't make up this rule! Everyone knows keeping secrets is a bad thing! You don't go to the damn doctor for tests and have him say, Well, I could tell you how the tests turned out, but I think I'll keep it to myself! You don't watch the fucking weatherman on TV and have him say, Now I really ought to let you know if it's going to rain tomorrow morning, but sometimes a man needs to keep something back!"
Judah looked down at his thumbnail, picked at it with his other fingers. "Okay. No, you're right about that. But I think…" He looked at Noah for support, trying to find the right words. "I think you keep trying to protect yourself from grief. I've watched it happen over and over. When Dad died, and we found out his whole story—"
"We never found out the whole story!"
"You got more practical than I've ever seen you. You handled everything. All the insurance paperwork. The hospital bills. You made the phone calls and sent off the checks. You didn't cry."
"I was too mad to cry."
"You didn't look mad. You looked…driven. Then, with Richard—"
"I don't want to talk about this, Judah. I really don't."
"You threw yourself into caring for Roo. Which was good, right? She's a baby! She needs care. But you were so focused on that, focused on doing things, that you never seemed to feel anything. And now—”
Liam got off the barstool. Its feet scraped noisily on the floor. Without waiting for his friend and brother, he shone his light on the door and went up the stairs, back up to the real world. They followed him, of course they did; couldn't they see he needed to be alone? He had things to do. So much to do. The house…well, he'd really have to give up the house now, wouldn't he? No way could he face anyone down here in Superbia ever again.
"I never should have come back down here," he said, as Judah and Noah came up behind him on the porch. He was already stepping down into the unclipped grass. "How fucking embarrassing. I just thought… I thought things might be different for once. That I'd let down my guard, let myself feel something, and that it might work out. See? That's where you're wrong, Judah. I wanted to feel something this time. I wanted to be allowed to have that feeling. But it was snatched away from me. I didn't have a choice. That's what you two aren't getting. Mason broke up with me, not the other way around."
There was no response to this. No logical argument to set things right again. All they could do was be with him in his pain.
He didn't even want that. He didn't want to be in pain. And the only thing that could help was planning, was doing. Sell the house. Get involved in the process. Get back to work. Focus on Roo. Forget mysteries, forget secrets, forget everything. None of it mattered. Why had his dad not wanted this house, why had he refused the inheritance? Who cared? It didn't mean anything. Everybody died, and they took their fucking secrets with them, and the world grew a little bit smaller every day.
All you could do was try to protect what you had.
"I'll drive back tonight," he said.
"That's ridiculous," said Judah. "It's late. It's dark. You don't need to be on the road, not with a baby."
"I can't be here. Not one minute more."
"Look, we'll go in the morning," said Noah. "Promise. But Judah's right. You're exhausted. You've had a rough time. No driving tonight."
He knew it made sense. He wouldn't put up a fight about it. He was woozy from grief.
What he needed was Roo. He needed to hold her tight, and have her remind him that not everything in the world was compromised. Roo didn't have any secrets. She shared everything she thought or felt, open to the world in a way an adult could not possibly be. In a lot of ways, it was his love of Roo that had kept him going all this time. She centered him.
It had felt, for a while, like Mason might center him too. A man with no drama, no fuss, just the simple practicality of loving and being loved—
No. No, whatever he'd felt for Mason, it wasn't love. It couldn't be. Love wouldn't hurt this bad. Love wouldn't leave him feeling so bereft. Love wouldn't—
But that was the real tragedy.
Love would do exactly that.
He'd loved his father, and his father had nearly destroyed the family with his dishonesty.
He'd loved Richard, and Richard had torn his heart out with his secret.
He had never used the word love with Mason. Had been frightened of it, had been content to use a softer, simpler, more innocent word, like, in its place. No one was ever hurt by like. No one ever had their heart broken from like.
But no.
The way this hurt?
The way he felt torn apart, destroyed, crushed, like the entire world had ended?
The way it felt like a door had been closed, separating his world from Mason's strange secret life?
The way it felt like his own life had suddenly come to a halt?
It was this enormous pain that let him know this was love. That it had not been soft, simple or uncomplicated.
That somewhere along the way, he had truly fallen for Mason. Had begun thinking of a future with him.
A future for all of them.
It had been a silly vision, maybe, he and all his friends—and Mason!—all living in the big house together. Working together to take care of it, to restore it to its former glory.
Treating the house the way he should have treated his own life, like something that deserved to be rebuilt, something that deserved a little repair here, some polish there.
Were Judah and Noah right? Had he caused this somehow—or at least contributed to it? Had he drawn the lines of morality too sharply, protected himself too much?
Had he even once tried to view things from Mason's point of view…tried to understand what it must be like to have a secret you can't tell?
But that would open floodgates he wasn't sure he was ready for. To see things from Mason's perspective might mean having to understand Richard—or worse, Dad—on their own terms. To see them as real people, not just the ghosts who haunted his life.
Could he do that?
Maybe it was too late.
Maybe things were wrecked beyond repair.
Like the spring-house, that beautiful temple to water that no longer flowed. Without the spring itself, the building was empty, meaningless. A shell of itself.
He allowed himself to be put back into the car, allowed himself to be driven to the motel.
Lost in his thoughts.
Lost in wondering how you fix the past.
29
Mason
"Well, that was stupid," said Alex. He picked up the bottle and refilled Mason's glass.
From this booth at the very back of Toady's, Mason felt hidden from the world. Which was where he belonged. Shoved into some dark cave somewhere, one of those caverns with all the stalactites, where nobody would ever see him again.
"I thought I was being noble," he said, then threw back the shot.
"Noble is when you throw yourself between the man you love and a herd of buffalo rushing towards him. No, this is something different. This is just Mason being Mason, determined to always be alone."
His throat stung from the alcohol, but he wiggled his glass at Alex, suggesting a refill. Why not? He could go back to being the stolid, boring contractor the town needed tomorrow. Tonight, he was going to wallow a little.
"I'm not determined to be alone. If anything should show you that, it's this situation. I really have feelings for Liam."
"Good to see you didn't let your feelings get in the way of totally fucking things up between you two."
> "You know, I did it for you as well," he said, with that careful articulation required after three or four back-to-back shots. "Violet was threatening everyone."
Alex didn't have an answer for that. He just nodded and filled up the glass; the amber liquid rose in a flat dome above the rim, so full there was no way Mason could get it to his mouth without spilling a bit. He picked it up extremely slowly.
"See? You don't want to give up your bookstore, just so I can have a boyfriend. You don't want Toby to give up this place. Not a fair trade. She was going to burn it all down, Alex. I had to protect everybody."
He sipped the liquid until it was just below the rim, then set the glass back down. No use drinking the whole thing yet. If he got that drunk in the first fifteen minutes, he wouldn't be able to enjoy his misery for the rest of the night.
"It's still not fair to Liam," said Alex. "He has no idea why you broke up with him. You know how shitty that is?"
"I know."
"I don't think you really comprehend it."
"I feel plenty guilty, all right?"
"But do you feel guilty enough?"
"That's what this is for," he said, raising his glass again. "Seriously, Alex, what was I supposed to do? She's crazy. She's literally criminally insane."
His friend shook his head and began to take a drink, pausing with his glass halfway between table and lips. "That's what I don't get. All this work so that nobody suspects Justin Fucking Mulgrew is gay?"
"Like everybody doesn't already suspect it," Mason said bitterly.
"I can understanding not wanting scandal, but it's not like they haven't survived it before. Like, when Justin's uncle Thaddeus was caught with the preacher's son—"
"Thaddeus? Wait, the same Thaddeus Mulgrew that wrote that history of Superbia?"
"Oh yeah, the very same. He settled into the life of a confirmed bachelor, as they used to call it, and worked on setting up the historical society. There were always rumors about him, though. They said he had a taste for younger men. He'd invite them over, under the cover of talking to them about the town's history, getting all the genealogies and family trees in order, but I always figured it was just to get into their pants."