Survivor Stories

by J P Barnaby

  “He left?” Spencer asked, guessing what the change in direction meant. Dr. Thomas nodded, and Spencer’s heart clenched as he grabbed his phone from the table near the couch.

  [Spencer] Please stay. We can go somewhere together.

  [Aaron] I can’t. I just need to be alone for a while.

  [Spencer] You were drinking. Please don’t drive. Come back.

  [Aaron] I’m fine. I’ll be careful.

  [Spencer] Please be safe. I love you.

  [Aaron] k

  Spencer hated that answer—“k.” It didn’t say anything except that he’d gotten the text. It didn’t say he would be careful on the way home because Aaron had only gotten his license last year, they’d been drinking, and he was upset. It didn’t say he loved Spencer too, or that he wasn’t angry for his dad walking in on them. Damn it. After sliding the phone back into his pocket, Spencer looked up at his father. The room still smelled of sex and sweat. He could almost feel Aaron’s skin against his.

  “You know how fragile he is. Who the hell else would have been making out on the couch in here? Is some junkie going to stop to jack off on the couch while he’s ripping off the stereo?” Spencer raged rapidly at his father, giving only the barest control to his signs as they jerked in the air. Embarrassment still heated his face. Goddamn it, he was twenty-one years old. Was a little privacy too much to ask?

  “It did not sound like someone making out. It sounded like someone in pain.”

  Spencer’s heart clenched because he hadn’t known Aaron was in trouble. The expressions on his sweet face didn’t betray his distress, his pain. Fate was a bitch, seriously. Spencer asked for someone to see him, someone to love him, but he didn’t realize what he’d have to give up in return. No, that was selfish. But Jesus, he really wanted to spend the afternoon getting off on the couch. Why did it have to be so fucking hard?

  “I really hope I get that job so I can get out of here,” Spencer signed, pushing past his father, who tried to grab his arm, but Spencer pulled away and headed for the stairs. He didn’t want to be rational right then. Instead he wanted to go up to his room, sulk, and think about a world where he and Aaron were normal. His father had other plans and followed Spencer.

  “What job?”

  “There is a company called Voyager Tech that wants to buy Spaaron. They offered me a job. Seventy thousand a year,” Spencer signed, confused when his father merely shook his head.

  “A company offered you seventy a year? Do they know you don’t even have a degree? What about Aaron? He helped write that software.”

  “I do have a degree. And yes, they know that it is only a two-year degree. They did not care. They want me to be a technical lead on the project involving our software and then stay on to do other projects. They offered the job to Aaron too, but we have not talked about it yet.”

  “Aaron is never going to take it.”

  “I know that, but I think he will sell the software.”

  “Where is this job?”

  “Downtown.”

  “Are you going to move up there?”

  “I would have to. Besides, you have your girlfriend now. What difference does it make to you?”

  “What about Aaron? You are just going to leave him?”

  Spencer dropped onto the bed, all of the fight seeping out of his bones and into the carpeting below. He didn’t want to leave Aaron, but it was such a great opportunity for both of them. Aaron was always so worried about money, about being able to support himself without being dependent on his parents forever. Investing a couple hundred thousand would go a long way toward helping with that.

  “I can come back on weekends to see him. Or are you telling me if I leave, not to come back?”

  Pain sliced across his father’s expression, and Spencer felt guilt rise up in his heart like the tide.

  “Of course I would never tell you that. I just want you to finish your degree and get a better foundation before you take a job and move out on your own. What if it doesn’t work out with this place? You will have to start again in school.”

  “Dad, what is the goal of college? Is it not to get a high paying job? That is what I have a shot at. A career. A life.”

  His father’s expression clouded over again.

  “I thought you had a pretty good life here.”

  “I do, but it is a life you pay for. I want a life of my own.”

  “I do not keep tabs on you like you are a child. You are free to come and go as you please. How is it not a life of your own?”

  “What about what just happened downstairs?”

  “There is no way you are going to get Aaron an hour or more away from his comfort zone. So if you are moving to the north side for sex, you might as well stay here.”

  “I do not want to talk about this anymore. I need to talk it over with Aaron before I make a decision anyway.”

  “And for the record, Spencer, you will always be first in my life, no matter who I date.”

  His father turned his back in either surrender or frustration and left the room. Spencer lay back on his bed and tried to figure out how he would talk to Aaron about the job. How could he justify walking away after everything they’d built and worked through together?

  Why did life have to be so fucking hard?

  HIS HANDS shook on the wheel as Aaron pulled into the driveway of his family’s multilevel home. Mostly on autopilot, he’d kept his hands at ten and two, focusing only on the road and not on the unease carving a desperate hole inside him. He shouldn’t have driven with alcohol in his system, he knew that, but he had to get away. Spencer’s expectations were growing every time they were together, and conversely Dr. Thomas’s interest in him waned with each subsequent session. Aaron wasn’t interesting anymore because he wasn’t “in crisis.” In fact, Dr. Thomas had already brought up the option of transitioning him to another therapist because of his travel schedule. Once he’d published the paper on Aaron’s psychological trauma, he’d become somewhat a celebrity in the mental health community. At least once or twice a month, he was invited to speak around the country about helping people with the same kind of indicators Aaron had. Apparently it didn’t matter that he’d abandoned his original subject. Aaron supposed he should have been happy for Dr. Thomas because of his success, not only professionally but also personally, because he’d stopped drinking, but what about him? What about the broken boy they all seemed to be leaving behind? What happened to him?

  It took a few minutes after he’d pulled into the drive to actually put the car in park, and another few before he could take the keys out of the ignition. The buzzing in his brain stopped him from coming up with a cover story. He’d been at Spencer’s to stay the night and could not discuss with his mother why he’d come home early. He just couldn’t. Sex was the one thing he couldn’t talk to her about in any form. The only people he could have that conversation with were back at Spencer’s house, probably having the talk without him.

  A breeze blew across his face through the open car window, bringing with it the scents of freshly cut grass and burning charcoal—the smells of summer. It had been a long time since he’d been outside to enjoy those. The sun on his skin felt nice, except for the tightness in the scar on his face. All of the other damage to his body could be hidden with a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, but not his face. It shone like a beacon to anyone foolish enough to look.

  His heart rate slowed, but the humiliation was like a haze around his field of vision. Everything seemed to be touched by it. Aaron squeezed his eyes shut as the car closed in around him. The tunnel vision worsened as he inhaled long and slow through his nose and pushed the air out in a huff. In and out…. In and out…. In and out…. After nearly ten minutes of breathing exercises, his skin didn’t feel so tight, and the headache which had begun to pulse in his temples waned. A car door slammed somewhere in the distance, and Aaron blinked against the sunlight when he finally opened his eyes. Nothing around him had changed. Mr. Handley’s perfectly trimme
d hedges were still to his right, and Aaron’s overgrown yard lay to the left. Anthony had failed to cut the grass again, and their father wouldn’t be pleased. Great, more fighting.

  Aaron opened the car door and stepped out into the heady early-August heat. Sweat beaded on the back of his neck with blinding speed, and he jogged the few steps to the porch to escape the suffocating humidity. After taking off his shoes, he peeked into the living room to find it empty. His brothers must both be downstairs. A small snuffling from the kitchen made him switch directions and head that way instead. His heart ached to see his mother crying softly as she stood washing dishes at the sink. The dishwasher sat unused in its place under the counter. Without a word, Aaron grabbed a dishtowel and began to dry the glasses and silverware which had already accumulated in the drainer.

  Each minute grew heavier as they moved on to plates and then the casserole pan she’d used to make a meatloaf. Aaron felt a twinge of regret. Meatloaf was one of his favorites. He took the clean pan and dried it carefully before putting it in the lower cabinet by the door. As the dishwater drained, Aaron watched his mother wipe down every stationary surface from the counter to the stove to the refrigerator. She seemed to be stalling, unwilling or unable to tell him what troubled her.

  Finally, he took her damp hands in his and led her to the dining room table.

  “Mom, please, what is it?” Aaron kept his voice light, and his heart ached when he realized her hands were shaking. It had been a long time since he’d seen his mother so upset. In fact, it hadn’t been since he was first home from the hospital. After that she became his most zealous advocate. She did everything for him in those first few years, and he couldn’t articulate what it meant to him. But now she was the one in trouble, and Aaron wanted more than anything to be able to help her.

  “Your… I….” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, tears heavy in the exhalation. “You should probably go get your brothers. I really only want to say this once.” Aaron’s pulse pounded in his ears as his brain scrambled to come up with an idea of what she’d have to tell them.

  “Are you okay, Mom? You’re not sick, or…?”

  “No, honey. I’m fine. Go get Allen and Anthony, and we’ll talk about it.”

  “What about Dad?” Aaron asked slowly.

  “Your father already knows.”

  Aaron stood up from the table, letting go of his mother’s hands only in the last moment and letting them fall gently to her lap. With a casual glance over his shoulder, he watched her for a moment, noticing as he did that her posture wasn’t defeated. Whatever had upset her hadn’t beaten her. It couldn’t be as bad as he’d first imagined. His steps were lighter as he bounded down the stairs to the basement looking for his brothers.

  “Hey,” Aaron said as he found Allen cleaning his room. In a few weeks, their parents would be moving him to Purdue, just a few hours south in central Indiana. Most guys would wait until the last minute, but Allen seemed to be in a hurry to get out of the house yet still reluctant to leave. Aaron couldn’t blame him.

  “Hey,” Allen replied and dropped a stack of books into the big trash bag sitting at the foot of his bed. His brother turned, and Aaron saw a light in his eyes that had been absent for a long time. It took Aaron a minute to understand that it meant more than just Allen heading away to college. Allen would be escaping the asylum. That had to be a great feeling—a feeling Aaron would probably never know.

  “Mom needs us upstairs,” he said and hesitated. Allen picked up on his distress and stepped around the bed to stand next to Aaron, one hand going slowly to his shoulder. God, he didn’t know how he was going to make it for the next four years without Allen. If their mother was the rock which held their family together, then Allen was the rope, holding them to the rock. He couldn’t even think about what would happen if Allen didn’t come back after college, if he got a job halfway across the country or something.

  “What’s up?”

  “She was crying. Mom never cries in the middle of the kitchen like that. Something is wrong,” he explained, the pain and frustration of the afternoon with Spencer coming out in a heavy sigh.

  “She’s freaking out about me going away to college,” Allen said, dropping with a huff onto his bed. “She’s been like this since my acceptance letter came. I think she’s scared something will happen to me.”

  “I don’t think that’s it. It’s more than that.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t go.” Allen’s shoulders dropped, and he looked up at the ceiling, the conflict clear in every line of his tense posture. He wanted so badly to get out of the house, to start his own life, but he hated leaving his family.

  “Of course you should, but right now, just go to the kitchen. I’m going to get Mr. Personality,” Aaron said, turning toward the door.

  “Shit has been hard on all of us, Aaron. It fucked up his childhood. Cut him some slack.” Allen’s voice hit him in the back of the head like a physical blow, hard and jagged. He flinched, but Allen didn’t comment as he headed toward the stairs.

  Aaron went to the other side of the basement, where Anthony’s cave-like room sat just outside the cubby where the washer and dryer were. You’d think that kind of proximity would entice Anthony to help their mother with the laundry, but no such luck.

  The door to Anthony’s room was pushed to but not closed all the way. He’d taped a poster of his most recent band obsession to the outside of the door. Some kind of gothlike, angry, slashed singer stared at him with what appeared to be blood on his face. The image disturbed Aaron, but he laid a hand in the middle of the poster and pushed anyway. The door swung open easily to reveal his youngest brother lying on his back, eyes closed, with his head off the edge of the bed and earbuds in his ears. The white headphones cord contrasted sharply with his black shirt.

  “Anthony,” Aaron said, trying not to stare at the concrete walls in between posters and magazine cutouts. Being in the basement made his skin crawl. Even though he’d been working on it for the better part of two years and knew in his soul he was safe in his own house, the concrete surrounding him filled him with panic. Anthony didn’t even open his eyes. He simply lay there listening to the angry concoction of the week. Aaron knew it was something angry because he could hear the whispers of it coming from the buds. For more than a minute, Aaron contemplated throwing something at his brother but finally decided to just push on his shoulder. Anthony’s eyes opened slowly, almost as if he’d been asleep, but with no surprise of being woken suddenly or startled. He popped one earbud out.

  “What?”

  Surprised at how one word could contain so much anger and resignation at the same time, it took Aaron a moment to respond while his brother watched him, upside down, with hostile eyes. He could barely remember the Anthony who had distracted his grandparents when they went out to dinner or stood beside him in his fight to keep seeing Dr. Thomas. Aliens could have come and picked him up and replaced him with this rude and sullen substitute. Aaron wished they’d bring him back.

  “Mom needs to talk to us upstairs.”

  “So?” Anthony asked, pushing the little white bud back into his ear. Aaron tried to focus on Allen’s parting words, about how Aaron had fucked up Anthony’s childhood, but anger coursed through him at Anthony’s disregard for their mother. She’d done so much, for all of them, and Anthony just didn’t care she was hurting. Fuck that.

  Aaron grabbed the cord lying on his brother’s chest and jerked it hard, leaving the earbuds dangling over Anthony’s shoulder as he sat up, slower than Aaron expected.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Mom is upstairs crying. Something is wrong. She’s waiting for us. Get your ass up those stairs and go into the kitchen.” Aaron pushed the rage threatening his control back into its box. Anthony, though acting like a prick today, didn’t deserve it. He did, however, grab Anthony’s arm and pull him off the bed.

  “I liked you better when you couldn’t touch,” Anthony grumbled as he stalked past Aaron and he
aded for the stairs. Stunned, it took Aaron a minute to follow. It was the first time anyone had ever said they liked Aaron better all fucked up. The pain of the cut across his soul took his breath away. He started walking toward the stairs by sheer automation as he left the basement behind and went up to the kitchen.

  Allen, Anthony, and his mom sat around the table, not talking, not even really looking at one another. Anthony’s iPhone sat on the table with the earbuds resting on top. Apparently something Aaron said got past the teenage angst and stuck. His mother sat alone on one side of the table while his brothers were together on the other side. Aaron took a seat at the head of the table between Allen and his mother.

  She reached over and took his hand, which scared him more than anything. His whole life, she had only ever held his hand to comfort him, never to comfort herself. He felt cold all over.

  “You guys know I took Grandma Alice for some tests last week, right?” She didn’t stop for confirmation, just plunged ruthlessly on. “Well, the results of the tests came back. The doctor says she has cancer.” Her hand shook as it rested on top of Aaron’s, and another tear slipped down her tired, drawn face.

  “Is it something they can operate on, or…?” Aaron let the question of her mother’s mortality hang in the air.

  “They’re going to try, honey. In the meantime, I’m going to have to help Grandma out more. I’ll be going over there to cook and help out around the house. You boys are old enough to take care of yourselves a little more, right?” While she’d addressed the question to all three of them, her eyes met his, and Aaron nodded.

  “We’ll be fine, Mom,” Allen said and reached across the table to take her other hand. While they all loved Grandma Alice, they were more worried about their mother and the emotional toll her mother’s illness would take on her. “I can do laundry. I think Aaron can cook, right, man?” He looked up at Aaron, who nodded. He could cook well enough and could figure out the rest. “Anthony?”