“So,” I went on, folding my arms against my knees, “there was this old abandoned house, down the street from where my parents live. This thing was so fuckin’ old and dilapidated, there were literal holes in the floor and the stairs were missing treads. But we were kids, you know. We weren’t thinking about how dangerous it was to be in there; we just thought we were cool, breaking into this shitty old place.”
I stood up and began pacing the length of Audrey’s porch. I didn’t look at her, couldn’t face her, but I felt her eyes on me with every step I took. “Sometimes, we hung out in the backyard and pretended we were explorers. Like, I’m not making it up when I say this place was a jungle, it was so overgrown. And there was this gigantic tree back there with these huge, gnarled branches. It looked like something right out of a Tim Burton movie, creepy as fuck, and it didn’t help that there was this old wooden swing hanging from one of the branches. We’d freak ourselves out, making up stories about it, like how it was cursed or haunted, and we’d dare each other to sit on that fucking swing but then we’d chicken out and go home.
“One day, we were hanging out back there and I decided, today’s the day I’m gonna sit on that fucking swing, and I told Jake he had to, also. But he was such a pussy.” I laughed somberly through my nose, stopped my persistent pacing, and slumped with my shoulder against one of the porch posts. “He told me not to and said some stupid shit about ghosts and whatever the hell else, like something was gonna get me if I sat on the damn thing. He just wanted to go home.”
My voice cracked, and Audrey stood. She walked the three steps toward me, but I took a step back, holding out my hand to stop her from getting any closer. I didn’t want to be coddled. Not now. Not when it came to this. I needed to feel this pain, this shame, and all this fucking guilt.
“I made fun of him,” I said in a low, graveled tone. “I said he was a baby and that if he wanted to go home so badly, he could go. I told him to leave me alone if he was gonna ruin my fun, but he wouldn’t fucking leave. He was so legitimately scared that something was gonna happen to me and he didn’t want me to be alone when shit went down.
“So, to prove how fucking tough I was, I went right over to the thing, sat down, and nothing happened. It felt sturdy, and I was just laughing at Jake ‘cause he made such a big deal out of nothing. So, he says to me, ‘Great, now let’s go home,’ but I couldn’t leave it at that, could I? I had to keep pushing shit. So, I started swinging and acting like a fucking asshole, still laughing at him. But then, Jake starts telling me that the branch looked like it was gonna break …”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, still able to hear his frantic pleas for me to stop, to get off the swing, to knock it off and go home. The tears stung the back of my eyes and I tried to steady my lungs with one deep breath and then another. But what was the point? I lost the battle against my quivering chin and burning eyes, and a tear slipped over my cheek.
“There was this sickening noise, this cracking, and I could feel the branch begin to give and fall. It happened so fucking fast, but I managed to jump off. I had busted my knee open, but I felt like I had dodged a bullet, it was so crazy. Then, I started to make some asshole joke about it really being haunted or something, when I realized Jake wasn’t saying anything. At first, I thought he’d high-tailed it out of there when he saw the thing coming down, but I turned around and found him pinned under it.”
“Oh, God, Blake.” Audrey could barely speak, her voice coming in nothing more than a whisper, as she stepped closer and wrapped her hand around my wrist. “I don’t even know what to say. I just …,” her voice splintered and she cleared her throat, “I just feel like nothing I could say right now would be good enough.”
I shook my head and pulled my wrist from her grasp. I expected an expression of hurt, but it didn’t come. She just simply watched me, so patient and accepting of everything I was, and I couldn’t begin to understand how she could do that.
“Don’t say anything,” I told her. “I don’t need you to. Hell, I don’t even want you to. I just needed to get that shit off my chest.”
“Do you feel any better?”
I shook my head. “No. Not really,” I admitted. “I guess it’s sort of nice that someone else knows now. That fucking branch hit him in the head and he almost died. Hell, he should’ve died, all things considered, and that’s because of me. So, yeah, it’s my fault I’ve spent the past ten years of my life doing nothing but whatever I could do to take care of him, because it should’ve been me. Not him—me.”
In a hurry, I moved away from her, to take a seat once again on the porch steps. Slowly she came to sit beside me.
“Oh, Blake,” she said softly, laying a hand against my shoulder, “I understand the guilt, but it was an accident. Your life doesn’t have to stop just because—"
“Oh, yeah?” I turned to her. “And what about his life? It consists of watching TV, listening to music, and playing with his dog. So, if that’s the only life he gets to have, then why should I have a better one?”
Her expression drooped with pity and sorrow as her head shook. “If you had a better life, so would he.”
“How the hell do you figure that?”
She offered me a small smile and slid her hand across my shoulders. When her temple touched my arm, I closed my eyes and asked nobody up above to let me keep this. For as long as I could, for as long as I was allowed.
“Part of taking care of someone, is making sure you take care of yourself, and that includes your own happiness. And I know this, because when I’m happy, Freddy is happy,” she explained quietly. “So, if you were happy, Jake would be happy, too.”
I swallowed the information, letting it settle in my gut, before I tipped my cheek to press against the top of her head. “How do you know that’d work?”
“I don’t,” she confessed. “But I’m just guessing because God entrusted me to care for Freddy, and He entrusted you to care for Jake.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“THIS IS NICE,” Mom whispered from beside me.
“Yeah. Sure,” I agreed halfheartedly, albeit reluctantly, as we followed Maggie, Shady Acres’ Assistant Director, down the hallway and toward the facility’s gym.
Shady Acres was the definition of bright and friendly. The staff were attentive, affectionate, and accepting, and after witnessing one of the other residents have a meltdown in the middle of the cafeteria, I knew they were also patient. I knew that if he were to live here, they would care for Jake and do what was best for him, but I still wasn’t entirely convinced that living here was the right answer for him.
After my front porch conversation with Audrey, and all of that God talk, I’d hesitantly begun to think that maybe she was right, to a degree. What quality of life had I really provided him by trudging through each day? He knew I hadn’t been happy. He always knew my colors, whatever the hell that meant to him, and how could that not impact his mood negatively?
Jake trailed behind us with his headphones blasting his favorite Walk the Moon album. He studied every door, every room, with silent scrutiny, and I wished I could get inside his head to know what he was thinking and feeling. But his expression always remained neutral, unmoved, and that only added to my frustration.
“And here’s the gym,” Maggie announced, sweeping an arm into the brightly lit room packed with exercise equipment.
“Where does that go?” Dad asked, pointing toward a glass door on the other side of the room.
“That,” Maggie began, folding her hands over her middle, “leads to our indoor pool. Water therapy has been wonderful for some of our residents.”
“Jake never learned how to swim again,” Mom mentioned astutely.
“Oh, that’s okay! A lot of our residents don’t know how to swim. But,” she continued, “the ones who do, really enjoy it.”
Dad meandered around the gym, touching the bench presses and weight machines like he was checking for flaws in their quality. Then he nodded approvingly and l
ooked toward me. “This is some nice stuff, Blake,” he said. “You should check it out.”
“I’m looking at it, Dad.”
“Yeah, but you could test it out. Make sure it’s good, you know?”
I snorted. “Yeah, Dad. Let me just do a few reps right now for you,” I replied sarcastically, but I walked further into the room to get closer to the equipment and make him happy.
While I’d always found it difficult to read my mother, I knew my father had not only been trying to make this easy on Jake, but on me as well. He knew it had taken a lot for me to open up to the idea, so every step of the way, he had sought my approval. From the bedrooms to the rec rooms, he’d always asked what I thought, if I liked it, as though I was the one moving in instead of my brother.
While I appreciated the rare effort, it wasn’t making it any easier on me. If anything, it made it harder, as I realized more and more that both of their minds had clearly already been made up.
“So, what do you think?” Dad asked, proving my point.
“It’s good, yeah,” I replied, brushing my hand along a barbell. “If Jake starts lifting weights, he’s gonna kick all of our asses,” I made an attempt at a joke, and Dad acknowledged it with a soft chuckle.
“Yeah, right? God help us.”
He sidled up to me, tipping his mouth toward my ear. “I think Mom wants to fill out the paperwork before we leave. But what do you think?”
The sinking sensation in my stomach was indescribable, but all I could do was shrug and say, “I don’t think it really matters what I think, does it?”
“Don’t say that, Blake. You know we care.”
“We?” I challenged, hardening my glare.
He smiled apologetically and shrugged, answering my question without words.
I sighed, forcing myself to climb down from my defensive anger. “Don’t you think you’re settling? There are other places. Hell, there are other options. And you’re, what? Just gonna dump him in the first one you check out?”
He flinched and I knew I’d gotten to him. My words had stung, and that hadn’t been my intention. “Sorry,” I began to apologize, but he shook his head.
“I’ll try to talk to your mother.”
Breathing a sigh of relief, I turned to face the door and saw Jake. His eyes were fixated on me as he gripped his iPod in one hand and his headphones in the other. Furrowing my brow, I walked toward him and asked, “What’s up, buddy?”
He met my eyes with that knowing gaze of his. The one that never failed to irk me. “You’re blue.”
“Blue?” I furrowed my brow and he nodded.
“Blue. Like Grover,” he stated calmly.
I’d never been given blue before. I’d been so many colors of the rainbow, mostly leaning on the negative side, but never blue. It left me unsettled until I got in the car with Jake and my parents and looked it up on my phone.
Apparently, according to the internet, blue had many meanings, but what I repeatedly found was that blue was the color of intuition and support. The color of someone that others find help in. Someone very generous, in their time and otherwise. My heart thumped as I read, as I connected with the color more and more with every webpage I visited. It was such a vibrant, positive smudge on everything I thought to be me, but it clicked. It fit and it simply worked.
I glanced at Jake, sitting beside me in the backseat. He was drawing, a blue crayon held between his fingers. He circled the outline of a black figure holding a sword and shield, pressing the crayon firmly against the page.
I swallowed at my nerves, as I stared at his picture, and I asked, “Whatcha drawing, buddy?”
“You,” he replied simply, not bothering to look at me.
My snorted laugh was forced. “I don’t own a sword or shield. That’d be weird.”
“You don’t need one,” he answered, his tone flat as he circled the figure over and over again in blue. “Don’t worry, Blake. You’ll make it better. You’re brave and you’re a warrior. You’ll make it better.”
I smiled, reminding myself that my parents hadn’t filled out the paperwork yet, because of me. And even though my color of choice was typically black, blue didn’t seem like such a bad color to wear either.
***
“Blake! How are you? Everything okay?” Dr. Travetti asked, opening her office door to me.
“Well, Doc,” I began, entering the room and dropping myself onto the couch, “I guess that depends on your definition of okay.”
She sat in her chair, crossing one leg over the other. Leaning forward, she grabbed her clipboard from off the coffee table and suggested, as usual, “How about you start with how your weekend went?”
I tipped my head back against the couch and studied the ceiling in search of the best words to describe my weekend. Yet, even with thousands of words in the dictionary, all I could adequately come up with was, “Surprising.”
Dr. Travetti urged me to continue, as I knew she would, and I told her about the photoshoot, about how I had called Audrey and invited her to hang out while I had my picture taken. I told her how I then went out with Audrey, Cee, and Shane for dinner, making it the first double date of my entire existence. How I went back to Audrey’s place, shared another night of drunken sex, and had woken up to discover Audrey has a kid.
“Wow,” she breathed out on an exhale when I was finished.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I really need to stop drinking so much before sleeping with that woman. It’s becoming a habit.” I chuckled and shook my head at the absurdity of it. I rarely drink, and her experience with alcohol was clearly limited. What was it about spending time together that made us succumb to booze? Was it the need for bravery, for an excuse to act on the obvious attraction?
But Dr. Travetti didn’t seem to care much about that. Instead, she focused on the bigger elephant in the room. “How do you feel about her having a child?”
“That’s a tough one, Doc.”
“I thought it would be,” she sympathized. “Do you want to talk about it, or are you purposely avoiding the topic?”
I shook my head, drooping forward against my knees. “I’m not avoiding it. I’m just …” I scrubbed a hand over my chin and met her gaze. “She declared us as a we. Like, together.”
A soft smile shaped her lips. “That’s wonderful, Blake.”
“Yeah, and I’m cool with that. I actually want that. I don’t know why I want it, especially with her, but I fucking do, you know? And I had thought, hey, she could be my weekend girlfriend. We could do shit together when Jake isn’t around, when I have some time off work or whatever. We could date.” The word rolled against my tongue and I enjoyed its taste.
“Then, this shit drops in my lap, and, Doc …” I shook my head slowly. “I was pretty annoyed, let me tell you. Like, she should’ve told me that shit, right? I never thought of myself as someone who could handle kids, you know?”
Disappointment overshadowed her features as she said, “I can understand that, but, Blake—”
“No, hold on,” I stopped her. “I talked it out with her, Doc. You would’ve been so fuckin’ proud of me. I had started to get defensive, I could feel it happening, but she wouldn’t let me leave until we talked it out.”
I thought the good doctor would weep as she nodded. “Blake. You might be my best success story yet.”
Barking with a laugh, I said, “Hey, don’t get too excited. Maybe it was a fluke, I don’t know. And besides, it was pretty hard for me to stay annoyed when I was thinking about that awesome little kid with his Daniel Tiger t-shirt and Legos.”
“What’s his name?” she asked softly.
“Freddy.” I smiled, remembering his tough guy attitude. Remembering the things she said to me on her front porch. “She’s a teacher raising this cool little kid. She goes out, has a life, and comes home to be a mom.”
Something startled the good doctor then. Her gaze widened for a moment, her lips parted, and I thought I heard her gasp. I asked what was wrong and
she gave her head a gentle shake. “Nothing. It just reminded me of someone I used to know. But anyway, it sounds like you two have a lot more in common than you thought,” Dr. Travetti commented thoughtfully, and I hummed in reply, shaking my head.
“But see, that’s where you’re wrong, Doc. This girl has never let crap get in the way of her living her life. Her family has dealt with shit, she had a kid, and she still goes out on weekends, and gets inked and drunk and goes after the bitter bastard she likes. She handles shit. She doesn’t whine about things, she doesn’t let them get in her way. She just deals with it and lives her fucking life.”
“I see,” she replied. “So, you admire her.”
“Hell yeah, I do. ‘Cause while she’s there, handling the shit in her life with patience and a smile on her face, what am I doing? I’m over here, thinking I need to get rid of Jake in order to move forward in my job or to have a girlfriend.”
It had been a couple of hours since I went to Shady Acres with my parents and Jake, and the thought of even considering the place bubbled in my gut and left me nauseous. And I admitted as much to the good doctor. “I thought it’d be a good idea,” I explained helplessly. “And it’s a nice place, don’t get me wrong, but …”
“But what?”
I lifted my gaze to hers and admitted, “I want him to move in with me. I mean, in some ways, it’d be more difficult than it is now, but I think he’d be happier. And it would cut down on our time in the morning. We wouldn’t have to wake up as early, and he’d be closer to his school. Plus, I do everything for him now as it is. If he lived with me, I wouldn’t get home so fucking late at night. It just …” I shrugged, suddenly feeling like a moron, “I don’t know, it just kinda makes sense to me.”
The good doctor’s lips spread slowly into an encouraging smile. “I think that’s a great idea, Blake. Have you talked to your parents about this?”
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