by Roan Parrish
Yet I can’t think of a single other thing about him.
And he didn’t really know me either, did he?
I’m shaking with cold and nausea as they turn the crank that lowers Pop into the ground. I wrap my arms around my stomach, trying to keep from puking. Trying to pretend that they’re Rafe’s arms around me, like they were when I woke up this morning. Even though I’m the one who told him not to come, everything in me cries out for him.
As the coffin sinks deeper and deeper into the earth, something dark inside me follows it down. I can’t stop the tears from coming no matter how hard I try to squeeze my eyes shut against them.
Rex is holding Daniel tight against his side, and an uncontrollable fury rips through me at the sight. I think about what Rafe said, that my anger is really desire for what he has. And I nearly double over with pain when I realize he’s right.
Because I haven’t just lost Pop. I’ve lost the chance to ever know for sure. To know if Pop would still love me if he knew the truth about me.
I did everything he ever wanted. I worked with him on the cars he loved. I advertised the shop and put together our website. I made sure Brian kept on the straight and narrow at work and didn’t let Sam turn into a corporate douchebag. I lived nearby and drank with him, watched sports with him, went to baseball games with him even though I hate baseball. I did everything he wanted, lived the life he wanted for me, and I still don’t know. I don’t know if one simple confession—a confession Daniel made at sixteen—would have changed everything.
And now I’ll never have the chance to find out.
Daniel’s leaning into Rex and staring off into space the way he does when he’s pretending to be somewhere else. It’s an expression he’s worn since he was about thirteen years old. When he decided he didn’t care about us anymore. When he decided we were too stupid, too low-class, too crude to want anything to do with us.
After, Luther hugs me and I practically throw up. I don’t want anyone to touch me. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I just need to get out of here. I need something that isn’t dark and foul and miserable. I stumble away from my brothers, from the pile of dirt covering Pop. I don’t know where I’m going, just that I need to get out of sight so I can lose it. I fumble with my phone, but my hands are shaking too hard and I drop it on the wet ground.
“Fuck!”
I pick it up, but before I can dial it, I hear my name and look up, confused, to see Rafe coming toward me.
“Hey,” I croak, and he catches me before I stumble.
“Oh, babe,” he murmurs and wraps me in his arms. He guides me into some kind of storage shed, leans against the wall, and pulls me to him.
“It’s okay.” He’s talking low, saying soothing stuff I’m not listening to because all I can do is clutch at his shirt and try not to shake apart.
“Tighter,” I say, and he squeezes me so tight it’s almost painful. But I start to calm down a bit. Stop shaking so much. Breathe. “Rafe, I don’t even know if he would—if he’d known that I’m—that I—that we—I just—I don’t even know if he would—fuck!”
“Colin,” Rafe says softly, and I look up at him. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I nod. There’s nothing else to say. And there’s nothing I can do. I missed my chance. I just have to try and live with that.
Rafe is warm and solid, and I can almost pretend we’re back in my bed, waking up slowly as Shelby pads over our legs.
Suddenly, Rafe freezes, and I turn around to see what startled him, blinking away tears in the dim light.
When I see Daniel, every muscle in my body tenses. Rafe’s hand is still on my shoulder, but I am a tiny, cringing thing alone in the universe.
“Holy fucking…,” Daniel mutters, staring between Rafe and me. I can see the exact moment he realizes what’s going on. He drops into a crouch, like the force of his surprise drives him downward, elbows on his knees, looking up at me in shock.
I see my hand reach out toward Daniel as if it’s not even attached to me. My whole arm is shaking, and Daniel looks like he’s about to crumble.
“Look, Dan,” I say as he stands back up. My voice doesn’t even sound like my own, and before I can get any words out, he launches himself at me.
“You fucking liar,” he screams, grabbing my coat and pulling me closer to him.
For the briefest second, his anger doesn’t register and I think he’s going to hug me. Even when he starts hitting me, I can’t quite make sense of it. Because it’s not just anger. It’s something that seems like… grief. But Daniel doesn’t care about me. I can’t believe he even cares enough to hit me. Sure, he gets angry and wants to fight when I start shit with him. But I didn’t even do anything.
I only realize Daniel’s crying when I hit the dirt and he lands on top of me, his tears dropping onto my face as he punches me. He’s practically screaming. I shake off my surprise enough get in a few hits, but he is powered by some kind of unholy rage. For the first time, I see that all those feelings that make him so easy to read, when pushed further, have power.
He slams my shoulders to the ground and chokes me with his forearm. I jab him in the kidney, the mouth, the stomach. And then we’re just wrestling. I’m trying to get Daniel off me without hurting him too bad, but he’s trying to do real damage. His fist slams into my mouth just before he’s pulled off me, still screaming that I’m a liar.
It’s Rex dragging Daniel backward, holding him tight as Daniel shakes with anger.
I pull myself up and blood splatters the dirt floor when I spit. I concentrate on it so I don’t have to look at Daniel’s face. At my little brother’s face so contorted with grief that I know I’ve made a huge miscalculation in thinking he didn’t care.
“I—I—please, Danny,” I say. I haven’t called him that since he was a kid. Since I was the one he’d come to in the middle of the night when nightmares about Mom’s death woke him. Since we’d sing along to the radio together and I’d walk him to school. Since he used to look up at me with something like admiration, the only person to ever look at me like that.
“Don’t fucking call me that, you fucking liar,” Daniel yells, his voice just a scratch, and the only thing that keeps him from launching himself at me again is Rex holding him back.
“But,” I try, “can I—”
“How could you?” Daniel croaks out. Tears are running down his cheeks and his eyelashes are spiky with moisture, just like they were when he was that little boy. He’s looking at me like he used to when I stomped on his sandcastles at the beach. Anger, shock, betrayal.
I’m underwater again. I can’t breathe, and this time, I don’t want to. Then his face changes to the expression I’m more familiar with. Scorn. He just shakes his head at me like I’m nothing. Like I’ve failed to live up to his standards so completely that he can’t even think what to do with me.
He turns to leave and a new panic grips me.
“Dan,” I choke out. “Don’t tell Brian and Sam. Please. Please,” I whisper. Tears are running down my face, and I can’t even lift my hand to wipe them away.
For a second when he turns around, something nasty flickers in Daniel’s eyes, and I feel a flash of relief. Relief that Daniel’s as petty as I thought. Relief that if he hurts me, then it means, for once, maybe I’m not the worst one.
Relief that the choice is being taken out of my hands.
But then he takes a deep breath and his shoulders droop, the victim once again. He nods once and closes his eyes like maybe he can forget I ever existed. Rex follows him out, as close on his heels as a shadow.
“Oh god,” I choke. I stumble to the doorway of the shed and gag, throwing up the toast Rafe made for me this morning. Then I’m just dry heaving and gagging.
The world has narrowed to a single drop of blood that fell on the dirt from my nose as I puked. It’s an ocean, trying to swallow me up. And I want to let it.
“I wish I was dead,” I whisper, too soft for anyone to hear, and Rafe’s
hands on me falter.
11
Chapter 11
The gray of the ocean is one shade darker than the sky. The waves roll in, crash, and pull back in an endless rhythm. It’s like as long as the outside is moving, then things inside me can stay still. The sound of the ocean is so constant that everything we say sounds softer here, makes me feel tipsy or sun-drunk.
We’re in Ocean City, on the Maryland coast. I hardly remember getting here. After the funeral, Rafe packed a bag for me, grabbed Shelby’s litter box, and put us in the car. Then he just drove and I slept.
The house was Javier’s and he left it to Rafe when he died. It’s right on the beach, up on stilts so that you take stairs up from the entrance to the first floor high off the ground. A kitchen and breakfast room open onto a large deck that looks out over the ocean. Upstairs is a master bedroom that also looks out on the ocean and a small front bedroom with windows out onto the tourist town of Ocean City: donut shops, fried fish and chicken restaurants, tiki bars, and bowling alleys that are all deserted in the winter.
On every side table are arrangements of shells that seem too perfect to have come from the beach outside, smooth stones that sparkle with mica, and coasters printed with starfish and sand dollars. In the bathrooms are dishes of small blue and green and pink soaps in the shapes of shells that have never been used and towels with beach umbrellas embroidered at the hems. Paintings of palm trees and herons in seashell-crusted frames are scattered around the walls of the breakfast room. The trivets look like they’ve had shells pressed into them to leave imprints, and there are vases in the corners filled with tall, stalky grasses.
The bedspread in the master bedroom is striped in shades of blue like the ocean and the sheets are the color of the sand on the beach outside. Last night as I fell asleep, I imagined that I was lying on the beach and the blanket was the ocean slowly covering me, pulling me into its dark.
Rafe ordered pizza, and though I can taste it, I can’t remember eating it. He’s talking about Javier, and I don’t know if I asked him a question or not. Then I realize he’s talking so I don’t have to. To distract me.
He tells me how Javier bought this place with his partner before the area was developed. When the beach was empty. How he’d tease Clive for the way he decorated: like the beach took a shit in the house. How Javier brought Rafe out here and it was the most peaceful place he’d ever been.
How the ocean makes him feel small. “You look out over the ocean and you know that the water you’re seeing, no matter how far out you look, is only the very edge. It’s like space or something. Scary big. It’s kind of strange to know you’re only experiencing the very outside of something. All those kids in the summer, wave-jumping, swimming, surfing in the sun. They’re just playing on the very edge of this giant monster. But I like it. The sense that there’s something bigger than me that connects me to someone far away, on the other side, looking out over the water thousands of miles from here, from a totally different place, living a completely different life.”
It’s how I think about cars sometimes. That I have a hand in something that someone is going to drive far away, into another life.
Rafe’s arms slide around my waist from behind and he rests his chin on my shoulder, squeezing me. For a moment, I think the rushing in my ears is a sign I’m feeling woozy, but it’s just the waves outside, ever-present, even with Rafe’s breath in my ear.
“How are you doing?” Rafe asks softly, and the sympathy in his voice is almost painful.
I shrug and his arms tighten around me, holding me up when I sag back into him.
“Colin! Colin! God damn it!”
I’m wrenched around and yanked against Rafe’s chest. He’s squeezing my wrists hard enough to bruise but I don’t even feel it.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Rafe shakes me, looking down into my face fiercely.
“I—I’m—nothing.”
The lightening sky is white and the ocean is gray, the world like a black-and-white picture.
Rafe shakes his head, teeth gritted and jaw clenched. He drops his forehead down on my shoulder, shaking.
“Come in. It’s freezing out here.”
The sand coats my wet feet as we walk out of the ocean and up the beach onto the deck. I’m shaking with cold, my feet and legs numb. Rafe tries to brush the wet sand off of them but only succeeds in getting it all over his hands.
Finally, he just pulls me inside and upstairs, stripping off my underwear and T-shirt and shoving me into the shower. He takes off his coat and the flannel pants and T-shirt he was sleeping in, and steps under the water with me. If I close my eyes, I can almost pretend that the too-hot water pouring down on me is the too-cold water I was wading into. Rafe’s arms are wrapped around me and he’s murmuring something in my ear, but I can’t hear it because the shower is even louder than the ocean.
He dries me off like I’m a kid or a stray dog and wraps me in the bedclothes. The ceiling is that weird stucco that looks like someone bounced a ball into it while it was wet, leaving little smacks of texture. We lie there in silence for I don’t know how long.
When Rafe finally speaks, his voice is tight, weary.
“You could’ve died,” he says to the ceiling.
I shake my head, the sound of my hair scratching the pillow almost deafening.
“Oh, you don’t think so?” Rafe goes up on one elbow and turns to look at me. “You walked into the ocean in December in your fucking underwear, Colin!”
He smacks the bed with his palm and slumps back onto the bed, hands fisted over his eyes.
“Is that what you want?” he asks softly.
“Hm?”
“To kill yourself. Is that where we are? Because that’s something I need to know.”
I laugh nervously.
In the month after Maya and her father came to Pop’s house and they all agreed we’d get married because of the baby, I tried to kill myself twice. Kind of.
Is there a word for just not trying very hard to avoid ceasing to exist? It was more like that. The life I could imagine for myself, Maya, and a kid, was just a yawning blackness, so I may as well have wandered into another kind of blackness. An easier one. One without responsibilities and expectations that filled me with hopeless panic. There were the nights I walked alone in places I knew I shouldn’t, or went to parties and drank so much I blacked out, or shoved down my throat or up my nose whatever pill, paper, or powder was passed to me.
Then there were the other times.
There was the time I walked along the train tracks after football practice, still shaky from running sprints, and stood with my back to an oncoming train, the shudder of the rails growing stronger and stronger through the soles of my sneakers, the whistle finally startling me off the track almost against my will, where I stumbled down the rocky slope and retched.
There was the time I looped Brian’s ratty Eagles scarf over the bar in my closet and tied it around my neck. When Pop asked how the bar broke, I told him I was trying to do chin-ups, and he smacked me for thinking it would hold my weight.
When I wake up, it’s dark. I find Rafe in the kitchen staring out the glass door at the beach, a bowl of cooked spaghetti next to an unopened jar of sauce on the counter.
“Pop used to always make spaghetti when we were kids,” I say as I pour the cold sauce on the noodles.
Rafe fills his own bowl and sits on the stool next to mine, but he doesn’t touch the food. “The night we met,” he says. “That wasn’t the first time I saw you at The Cellar.”
I eat without tasting the food.
“People talked about you, you know.”
“What?”
“The pretty guy who wanted to get the shit beaten out of him. They said they thought you got off on it. Like a fantasy of getting jumped or something.”
I shake my head. Everything feels fuzzy and confused, and that damn ocean sound, like the rushing in my ears, makes everything feel unreal.
“Yeah,
I didn’t think it was a fantasy.” He looks down at his hands, twisted together in his lap. “You looked so damned miserable. And now that I know you….” He leans toward me so I have to look at him. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are sympathetic. “I don’t expect you to be okay. But I need to know where you are. I can’t worry every time I close my eyes or leave to get food that I’m going to come back and find you dead. So if that’s where you are, I can handle it, but I need to know it.”
“I wasn’t—I didn’t mean…. I don’t know what happened. This morning. I didn’t—I just remember you being there, but I don’t know….”
“Okay.” After a long silence, he says, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Which is ridiculous, because all he’s done since we met is help me. Here we are in this beach house, far away from the grime of the city, and he’s been helping me with everything. I gesture around us helplessly, trying to convey this, but Rafe catches my hand and holds it between his.
“You make it better,” I murmur, but I don’t meet his eyes. If I knew what would help—if I ever knew what would really help—I’d do it.
“Maybe you need a distraction.” He runs a hand up my neck and squeezes. “Just something to focus on.” His thumb brushes my mouth.
It would sound like a cheesy pickup line if Rafe weren’t looking at me like he’d turn himself inside out to make me feel better.
“Okay,” I say against his thumb.
“Leave that,” he says as I start to put my bowl in the sink.
Rafe runs a bath, tipping something into it that looks like the rock salt we use on the sidewalk outside the shop when it’s icy. He helps me ease into the steaming water. It’s warm and relaxing, but I feel silly with him just sitting on the closed toilet seat, watching me. He’s probably afraid I’ll try and drown myself in the bathtub or something if he leaves. I reach out a hand trying to indicate that he should get in, but it’s not really big enough.
He sits on the floor next to the tub, pulls off his sweater, and dips a hand into the bathwater, then trails his fingers up my arm. The only light comes from the lamp in the bedroom.