by Eve Morton
So that means we’re separated this year, but we will hang out afterwards. Maybe drive up on Boxing Day, his mother explained in a personal email aside to him. Let me know what your plans are, Eric, and we can make them work.
An adults-only Christmas at his parents’ meant alcohol. Conversation. And relaxing to movies. Eric wrote his mother back a quick response saying he was all-in. I’m actually in Toronto right now. Just having some breakfast before I grab my stuff in Waterloo. I’ll see you on the 21st!
To his surprise, she wrote back right away: Sweetheart, why don’t you just go home now? We won’t be there for a day or two, but when we get there, everyone can celebrate.
Eric let out another breath of relief. Fuck Cameron. Fuck Waterloo. Fuck his audition and trying to get back to an apartment that was unclean and filled with shitty memories. Why not just stay in Toronto and start the damn holiday right away? With the wad of bills in his pocket from his work the night before, he already had enough to start buying presents, too.
That sounds perfect, Mom. Can’t wait.
She sent him a bunch of Xs and Os in her next email and then went silent. No doubt the roaming charges were too large from the States—or Uncle Mac was distracting her with another movie trailer on YouTube. Eric was practically giddy as he went through the rest of his messages, including another call from a number he didn’t recognize. He didn’t want to listen to the voice mail, lest it be a collector and have it kill his mood. He was in the middle of a reverse lookup on his phone when Dillon sat down across from him.
“Hey,” he said. “I wanted to actually ask how you were doing before. I couldn’t on shift.”
“Oh. Well. I’m good.”
The years between them seemed to disappear when Dillon smiled, but Eric couldn’t help but think with a dozen ellipses when he tried to integrate Natalie with Dillon. He knew enough about trans identity to parse out what had gone on but he wasn’t sure how exactly to engage with Natalie as a memory and Dillon as a current lived reality.
Dillon seemed to sense this and leaned back, gesturing in a go-on motion. “Get it out. Ask what you need to ask. Most people need Trans 101.”
“Oh. Um. I don’t think I need that.”
“So you get it? Read about Laverne Cox?”
“No, but you know, I’m bi, so it’s not exactly like the LGBT community is foreign to me. I hear things. I get around.”
Dillon’s face lit up. “Oh, I always thought you were a little queer. But I figured that was me just projecting the fact that I just really wanted to be gay onto you.”
“Well, then, apparently we both knew far too much about the other person without really being aware of it. Which is kind of cool when I think about it.” Eric leaned back, considering this, as the two of them filled in the gaps between their sixteen-year-old selves and the thirty-something ones they were now. The change for Dillon had been quite recent, enough for him to lose footing in the better job he had at a bank, and required taking a position as a barista to make ends meet. Eric nodded sympathetically, divulging some of his failed acting career.
“So we’re both kind of fuckups. Awesome.” When Dillon held up a hand for a high five, Eric shrugged and reciprocated. “Don’t know if it’s something to celebrate, but hey. May as well.”
“Are you in town for long?” Dillon raised his eyebrows in a hopeful expression. “Moving back to the city? I think there’s a community here that would welcome you.”
“Full of our now very queer high school friends?”
“Some,” he confessed, though he kept his lips sealed as to whom. “But it’s also nice to know there’s support here if you do decide to move back. Some of them are actors. But like, always background stuff. Always.”
Eric nodded, understanding the reality of being an actor in Toronto. For however short a period that time was. A thought nagged in the back of his mind. “Would any of your friends happen to have a soundproof room? I need to record something and I’m running low on options.”
“A soundproof room like one used for podcasts?”
“Yeah! That could work.”
“My friend Val’s girlfriend runs a show out of her walk-in closet. I’ll see if it’s free.” Dillon retrieved his phone from his black pants. He flicked off a few text messages at a speed which impressed Eric. “She should be home now. No one in this group of friends goes to see family this time of year.”
Eric’s heart panged. His parents had never had an issue with his bisexuality; granted, he’d never exactly brought a guy back to meet them yet, and they only knew of a handful of the events that went on with Trina, but they seemed to be genuinely accepting. His dad always asked about the gender of the person he was dating before he assumed, and that in itself was a feat, especially given the horror stories that Dillon had told him in the past ten minutes. Part of Eric wanted to invite Dillon back to his parents’ place for adult Christmas, but he held back. As much as he loved this reunion—and he actually looked forward to meeting more people now that Dillon was tapping into his network—he wanted to protect the time he had with his family, and the solace it signalled.
“Well, okay, she replied fast,” Dillon said a moment later. “Valerie is around. She has a room you can use. Do you need to get an episode out for a Patreon subscription? I always figured you as a kind of movie science theatre guy.”
Eric laughed. “Oh, that sounds like a fantastic idea. But no, it’s actually for an audition. For an audiobook.”
“Oh, what one?”
Eric hedged. Then he realized he was being silly. “It’s for erotic romance, actually. Have you ever heard of m/m romance?”
“Oh my God.”
When Dillon showed him his current reading on Kindle, Eric could only laugh. Dillon was well familiar. Of course he was. Now Eric was even more excited than ever before to get into the soundproof room and read a section of The Billionaire Vampire’s Missing Man or whatever m/m erotic romance had come his way. Turns out, he didn’t have to kiss that audition goodbye. He could actually get it all done before the four p.m. deadline.
“Just let me change out of my uniform,” Dillon said, “and I’ll take you to Val’s place.”
While he waited for Dillon to return, Eric found the reverse directory lookup for the number that had been calling him. It was for a lawyer. An estate lawyer. Eric minimized the window, not wanting to deal with this type of responsibility. Not yet. One item at a time.
“You good to go?” Dillon asked.
“Definitely. Lead the way.”
Chapter Four
Cosmin was talking to Suzanne again.
He spent the morning cleaning out the storage space in his condo in search of file boxes associated with Sleep Alone. When he turned up nothing but photographs of his family, including some of his sister, Suzanne, he pocketed them by instinct alone. Cosmin jetted across the city on the subway to his rental storage space. No such luck there, either; the dingy lockers were filled with furniture from his first apartment with Julian he now had no place for and collapsible cardboard boxes stuffed with wrinkled tax returns. On the way back to his condo a woman moved away from him on the subway, and he realized he was muttering to himself—which in turn, meant that he was talking to Suzanne.
Cosmin righted himself instantly. He held on to the subway pole tight enough that his knuckles would be white under his leather gloves. He drew quiet. He told himself this was normal. He was being triggered, as the kids would say these days, by the photos of his sister. That was fine. He could handle this. Yet the photographs burned in his front pocket, like his cheeks now burned with embarrassment. He remained stoic until his stop, and then all the way up the subway steps. Only when he reached the surface level of the city did he breathe.
It all came back to him, then, in a narrative sequence rather than bits and pieces. Blond hair framing a square face with blue eyes covered
by thick lenses was now a full story of his younger sister Suzanne Leanne Tessler, and that scrawny kid with knobby knees next to her was now Cosmin Horace Tessler, and their shared life together as the adopted offspring of a man with dark hair and eyes and a rough voice was George Tessler, who was married to a woman with a cane she kept from childhood polio, Lily Tessler, née Dupont.
That was it. That was his family. The photographs did not lie. Though Cosmin wanted to suppress it, there was no use. He slowed his walking, even in the hurried pace of the city, and took out the photographs. He let himself remember.
Suzanne came to the house in Whitby from the adoption agency on a Wednesday. Cosmin was allowed to stay home from school; since he was going to miss handing in his book report on The Call of the Wild, he’d handed it in the day before and had to rewrite the date several times to make sure it was correct.
Suzanne had been timid. She hid behind the social worker’s red-and-blue skirt. She sobbed with an open mouth missing one tooth whenever anyone else got too close to her. After several attempts by the worker to bring Suzanne into the house, the entire family had come out to the front lawn and the driveway. It started to snow. Suzanne wouldn’t move. And the social worker was speaking in that high and reedy voice adults did, especially women, when they were annoyed.
Cosmin had been so worried that the worker would take Suzanne back to her house that he’d rushed over to the Honda’s door. “Hello, I’m Cosmin. You’re Suzanne.”
She stopped crying. Her cheeks were stained, her mouth still an angry open red, but she was quiet. Everyone else was quiet, too. Cosmin felt his first sense of victory. He introduced his mother and father by their first names, since he’d worked on spelling and respelling them the first months he lived with them, just in case he got lost. He expected Suzanne would have to do the same, and he told her as much.
Again she was quiet, but she wasn’t crying anymore, so he figured he was doing something good. He kept talking. She kept listening. Eventually, Cosmin extended his hand for her to take, and she did so without question or qualm. They walked into the house together.
Since Cosmin was eight and she was four, the years between them weren’t too much even if it was half his lifetime. He was skinny, still under his height and weight requirements, so he didn’t appear scary to her. He was, in that moment in the car, another forgotten child who wanted a friend.
With years of wisdom and professional training distancing himself from the Wednesday afternoon in December, Cosmin knew that these emotions, though not articulated in that language then, were exactly what he’d felt. Suzanne was a friend. She was his family, yes, but in an era where everyone was suspicious of the Soviet Bloc where he’d been born (and forgotten about), and children were just as cruel as adults, especially to kids who didn’t speak like their peers, Suzanne represented a friendship he could have without a past. She was she, as Montaigne would have said, and he was he.
Cosmin’s adoption at age three had been just as difficult as Suzanne’s, but for different reasons. He’d been born in Romania, during the era when Nicolae Ceaușescu stipulated that birth control and especially abortion was against the government’s interest, and women were encouraged to have as many children as possible. As far as Cosmin knew—which was, as far as his mother knew and would tell him in hushed whispers—he was born to a mother who simply had too many kids, and therefore, wanted to share his love with others. The reality was that he, like numerous other Romanian children born in the shadow of Ceaușescu’s power, were left in orphanages as a direct result of no birth control. They were the unwanteds, the undesirables, and the remainders.
“But,” his mother always reminded him, especially during his youth when he’d become maudlin about his origins, “you were loved from the start. The moment we saw you, we loved you.”
That moment had a three-year lag, however; Cosmin did not arrive in Canada with the Tesslers until he was already three. Though Cosmin didn’t remember the orphanage, he did remember the difficulties associated with the adoption. He remembered a lot of hushed voices and strained tones. He remembered the curl of phone cords and the jangling of a rotary ring as it sat on a desk. The plane ride, too, came to him as a sense memory of claustrophobia and the starchy smell of pasta with overcooked sauce, which made him want to retch.
To his mother’s credit, however, it had all ended with what she’d told him again and again on his birthday each year: love, attention, and a family he’d never known before. The tense atmosphere of early life was replaced with a different kind of tension, that of new parents wanting to do a good job.
And they did do a good job. An amazing job, really, when Cosmin allowed himself to think about the facts as pure facts. George had distant relatives from Romania, and used that citizenship to his advantage in order to obtain Cosmin. George was the only reason Cosmin managed to leave the horrible isolation for this new land of Canadian freedom.
Though adopted, Cosmin looked like his father; they had the same dark features, the same olive skin, and the same nose when examined in profile. Whatever was not given through heritage was then made up for through shared living space. Cosmin and his father were father and son, through and through.
But when George wanted another child with his wife, they hadn’t turned to Romania again due to the difficulties as before. There were so many children in Canada, his mother insisted, who needed the same love and attention that Cosmin had needed, too.
And so, Suzanne had come into their lives, but she had changed Cosmin’s the most.
For the subsequent week and a half after her arrival, Cosmin took care of Suzanne. He got her up in the morning, poured her cereal and milk, selected her socks and jumper (though his mother insisted that she’d be the one to help Suzanne), and then dictated their activities for the remaining part of the day. He explained the family’s Christmas traditions; he pointed out people in photographs; he read to her a dozen stories from his collection. All the while, he talked and talked and talked, and Suzanne listened closely. She didn’t often speak back, but she was present, attentive, and followed Cosmin around like a shadow. Whenever George or Lily tried to separate them, Suzanne would cry, and so they eventually let Cosmin do what they both needed.
Cosmin supposed if he had been four, like Suzanne was when she’d been placed, he would have remembered a lot more about his time in the orphanage and been more timid and scared like she was. But Cosmin’s mother always insisted that he was a sweet and well-behaved boy upon coming to Canada. “Quiet,” she’d add hesitantly, “but always a good boy.” It was surely in part because he was such a good boy that he became a parent-in-training by the time Suzanne arrived.
When she started school in January, and they were forced to go down two separate corridors for their classes, she’d been heartbroken. With time, her crying jags became less frequent and she even started to speak more, but she was often suspended for skipping class in order to find Cosmin.
Their camaraderie continued and became so pronounced that even Cosmin’s mother joked that he was really Suzanne’s father. George would often echo the sentiment, stating that they got Suzanne solely for Cosmin’s sake. His father’s jokes and quips seemed stiff in Cosmin’s memory.
Moreover, Cosmin hadn’t wanted to be Suzanne’s father even as he got older and their four-year age difference was marked by the changes of puberty and better nutrition; he wanted to be her brother, her friend. But as he entered high school, and Suzanne started to grow up herself, Cosmin and his father seemed to battle for more and more of Suzanne’s time, attention, and sympathies. They became rivals, while Suzanne and Lily became more like sisters, bonding over how ridiculous the two of them were.
If not for the tragedy at the heart of the story, this would have been maintainable. Fun, even. Just a quirk of the Tessler family, yet another story to tell an outsider over Christmastime cider.
“You would think, Suzanne,” Cosmi
n mumbled to the photograph of his sister, one that he slipped back into his pocket so he could keep walking towards his condo, “that I would have kids of my own by now. But that’s not how life usually shakes out, is it?”
When Suzanne had died, along with their mother in a car crash, it had ruined Cosmin’s father—and their relationship to one another. George and Cosmin could no longer be father and son in a family that was predicated on missing pieces. Since they’d both used Suzanne to direct their energies and measure their lives, having her wrenched away from them both led them to wander aimlessly, and without Lily to insist upon love and kindness, there was no going back to the same house that had once anchored them.
While George drank his pain away, lost one job and got another only to repeat the cycle, Cosmin had become hyper-focused on his career, his books, and his radio show. They had grown apart from one another, so as to not remind themselves about how close everyone had once been.
Cosmin leaned against the walls of his condo. Since what he needed was neither here nor in the storage locker, that meant it was at his father’s house in Whitby.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” Cosmin said, speaking to Suzanne as much as to his father’s memory, too. “Going to that house after so long feels wrong.”
He opened his jacket and took out the series of photos again. One image was from their first year together; he and Suzanne were holding hands as they walked into the elementary school. Minutes after that photo was taken, she’d been yelled at by the school principal for following Cosmin into the boys’ bathroom. Cosmin smiled, and then flicked to the next one, and the next. One was from her graduation from high school and his early graduation from university. They both wore matching caps and stood back to back, smug smiles on their faces.