by Iris Parker
“But Ezra recovered. He’s safe now.”
“And I did awful things to try saving him,” I admitted. “Don’t you see? All my life, nothing has ever hurt me as badly or as often as love. And I don’t—I can’t—it doesn’t come easily for me. Not anymore. It feels like something I need to push away.”
“But you didn’t push it away with Chloe.”
“That’s different.”
“You didn’t push it away with Alton, either,” Dominick continued, and the trembling in my hands redoubled. “You love him.” Dominick’s tone was unwavering, and each new word from his mouth seemed to expose new layers of fear and hope, ones that I’d believed long buried.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
“You need to let go of worrying about what might happen. You said it yourself, everyone dies. What counts is how we live. And right now, all I see are two miserable people who used to be happy.”
“Alton has never had to watch someone he loves die in front of him,” I said, hugging myself. “It eats away at you and leaves you scarred for life. It’s easier for him because he hasn’t gone through that.”
Dominick didn’t respond, holding his silence for a long while. The longer it continued, the more I wondered if I’d stunned him. The lengthy pause gave me time to reflect on my own words, and I slowly realized just how true they were.
I could make all the excuses I wanted about why the relationship couldn’t work, but at the end of the day that’s all they were. Excuses. I’d never realized just how badly I was still haunted by Stephen’s ghost, but in retrospect everything made a horrible sense. Everything I’d done was driven by this, an overwhelming fear of loss and the desire to protect the people I loved from experiencing the same.
“He never told you,” Dominick said finally, slowly running his hand through his hair in disbelief. He shook his head and swore under his breath, clearly exasperated.
“Told me what?”
“Did you ever wonder why Alton and I donated sperm when we were so young?”
“I just assumed you needed the money,” I shrugged. That had always struck me as odd, doing something so personal for cash was not Alton’s style at all. But I’d been so busy dealing with life’s catastrophes—not to mention doting over Alton—that I’d never really had time to wonder about it.
“Nothing like that,” Dominick said firmly. “It was a promise that we made.”
“A promise?” I asked, and I realized with some frustration just how desperate I was to hear this story. Even after convincing myself that I’d never see Alton again, and not speaking to him for months, I leapt at the chance to find out more about the man.
“Both of us grew up in the projects, you know,” Dominick started off.
“Roxbury,” I added automatically.
“Yeah, Roxbury. Not exactly the best place for a family. And so I didn’t have one. No dad, no brothers or sisters, nothing except my mom and grandma. Alton wasn’t as lucky.”
“He had even less of a family than you?”
“No, he had more of one,” Dominick explained. “And they were awful. His dad was an abusive bastard, always yelling and never more than a few seconds away from violence. If he thought you were crossing him, or just had a bad attitude, or even looked at him the wrong way, he wouldn’t hesitate to beat the shit out of you.”
I shuddered, my heart breaking at the idea of Alton having to go through something like that.
“His older sister Nicole was the only one in his family that Alton cared about at all. She always looked out for him when she could, but eventually things got too bad even for her. She left when she turned sixteen, and we were still younger than Ezra is today,” Dominick explained. “I think she would’ve taken Alton with her if she could have, but there was just no way. She barely got out herself. And so that left Alton alone with his dad, taking the brunt of the abuse all by himself.”
“What about his mom?” I asked, bile rising in my throat.
“I don’t know when she gave up, but it was long before I ever met her,” Dominick sighed. “She was just a shell of a person. Always scared, always cowering. She didn’t have it in her to protect her children, or herself for that matter.”
I looked at Chloe, absolutely certain that I would defend her with my life if need be. I wondered how Alton’s mother got to the point where she couldn’t say the same, but I was glad that I’d never been in a position where I could understand something like that.
“I hated going there, and Alton hated living there. We mostly hung out at my place, and he’d spend the night there when it was possible. His dad hated it, but he usually wasn’t sober enough to notice.” Dominick hesitated, then let out a pained sigh. It was clear that his shared past with Alton haunted him quite a bit too—and I couldn’t even imagine what a devastating effect it must’ve had on Alton himself.
“It always seemed like things just couldn’t get any worse, but they did,” Dominick continued after the pause, his voice hollow and somber.
I gasped, my eyes filling with tears. I’d known Alton had a rough childhood, but it was obvious now that I’d been far from truly understanding the scope of it.
“Shortly before we turned eighteen, Alton’s sister committed suicide,” Dominick said, his voice cracking as he spoke.
I gasped with shock and horror, tears rolling down my cheeks as the words sank in. I wiped them away, but more were falling with each second.
“It devastated Alton, as you can imagine. It took him years to get over that, and he never really fully recovered,” Dominick said gravely. “Even after he climbed out from rock bottom, he always refused to even acknowledge that he had feelings. That playboy act you met last year, that wasn’t just for the public. It was for him, too.”
“What changed?” I whispered.
“A few things,” Dominick said. “But hands down, the most important part was meeting you.”
Stunned, I sat next to Dominick in silence for a few minutes. I wanted to reach out to him and hug him, but I was afraid of opening up so much. Death and devastation waited at every corner—and even though I was clearly wrong that Alton didn’t know what it was like to lose someone he cared about, his bleak history was yet another example of love leading a person down the road to ruin.
I stood up in a daze of emotional pain, heading for the kitchen. Despite what Dominick had said earlier, it seemed like a pot of coffee would be welcome for both of us. When I returned to the living room, Dominick was massaging his brow with his fingers. He looked up at me, and it seemed like he’d aged a good ten years in just the past hour.
Other than thanking me for the coffee, we drank together in silence until the pot was half empty.
“Please tell me more,” I blurted out finally, humbled by Alton’s life story and still desperate to learn more. “You said he became like that after getting over Nicole’s death? What happened in between? And how did this lead to a donation at a sperm bank?”
“She wrote a note, specifically addressed to Alton. She apologized for leaving him like that when we were kids. She said that she’d always regretted it, and that she’d wanted to try and do better. That life was hopeless for her, and the only brightness she could imagine was trying to fix it—to start the family she wished that she’d had, to raise kids that would never know what it was like to be terrified of their own parents.”
“Oh no,” I cried, the blood freezing in my veins. “What happened to the children when she died?”
“There weren’t any. After years of trying with her fiancé, they went to see a fertility expert. And that’s when she found out that she could never have children. There was no chance at all. She killed herself the next day.”
“Jesus,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Dominick sighed. “We were just graduating from high school when it happened. Things were looking up for both of us, with a couple sports scholarships coming through and clearing the way for college. And then that happened. When he heard the news, Alton
went on a terrible drinking binge all over town. I found him almost dead in the back alley behind some dive bar.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I took him back home—my home, not his—and nursed him back to health. And then the very next day, as I went to pick up something to eat from a gas station, he bolted and tried again. Same bars, same alley, and nobody seemed to care that a teenage boy was drinking himself to death right in front of them.”
“Thank you for helping him,” I said as I grabbed his hand and held it close. “You’re a good friend.”
“He would’ve done the same for me,” Dominick shrugged. “So when I went looking for him the second time, I found him a bit faster. He wasn’t quite in danger, just extremely drunk. So I let him pass out and sleep the worst of it off. When he was halfway coherent, I brought him out to the garage and propped him against a bike we’d been working on. Real subtle.”
“Subtle how?”
“We both put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into that bike. I’d been making a little money coaching kids how to skate, and Alton could’ve gotten a job as a mechanic even back then. So the bike really was a joint effort, something we’d been looking forward to finishing for a long time.”
“So you brought him to the garage to remind him of your plans together? That was smart,” I nodded.
“Assuming you can call picking up chicks a plan, yes,” Dominick said with a soft laugh. “God we were immature back then.”
For the first time since Dominick knocked on my door—maybe the first time in weeks—I actually felt like smiling. That sounded like the Alton I knew, or at least an earlier version of him.
“So did it work? What happened then?” I asked.
“Not exactly. But with some cajoling, threatening, and maybe a little hint of kidnapping, I managed to get Alton onto the bike and start riding. We went south, as far away as we could. Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana…we spent the whole summer just traveling, doing odd jobs and making it work however we could,” Dominick said. “Nothing helps you focus on the present quite like the constant threat of starvation or worse. And so all our attention went towards just surviving. It gave Alton enough time and distance to recover a bit.”
“So you spent the entire summer homeless and almost starving?”
“Yeah. It was great,” Dominick said, the glint in his eyes showing no sign of sarcasm. “Maybe it doesn’t sound so great now, but at the time it was our first real taste of freedom. On the road like that, life was a hell of a lot more bearable than it was at home—especially Alton’s home.”
“That makes sense. I guess when you’re young, the line between traumatic experience and adventure can be pretty thin.”
“Exactly,” Dominick agreed. “At one point, we had to actually sit down and decide whether or not we’d actually go back up north. We were heading for different schools, and that made it feel like it was Goodbye. We’d always counted on each other to watch our backs, and that was coming to an end.”
“That must’ve been hard.”
“It was brutal. We ended up making this big emotional pact, because that’s what you do when you’re young and it feels like the world is ending,” Dominick explained. “So we made a promise to honor Nicole’s last wish.”
“Her last wish? Her suicide note had a request?” I asked, surprised.
“Not exactly. But with the note, Alton learned her biggest secret. That she’d spent almost her whole life fixating on this idea of getting a do-over, of starting a family that could count on her to take care of them. It clearly wasn’t the healthiest obsession for her, but the idea did have a certain poetry to it. But Alton and I had always promised ourselves the exact opposite—that we would never start a family, because we’d seen how bad things could go and didn’t want to ever risk inflicting that on someone.”
I looked at Dominick, surprised that he’d said we. I didn’t know the man very well, but he was obviously quite devoted to his own family. The tabloids had done their best to make the whole thing seem like a scandal, but I couldn’t imagine there being any truth to their stories. I wanted to ask, but that was clearly a story for another time—and besides, I was still desperately hanging to each word, thrilled to be learning more about Alton.
“In the end, we came up with a good compromise. We’d stay bachelors forever, just like we always planned, but in some small way Nicole’s legacy could still continue. Donating to a fertility clinic seemed like the perfect tribute. Somewhere out there, another family struggling with infertility would get a second chance. Nicole would never have children, but in a way Alton and I would.”
“Ezra,” I whispered, my eyes once again tearing up from the emotion.
“And Ali.”
“I had no idea.”
“No one does,” Dominick went on. “Even Ali’s mom doesn’t know every single detail, because it wasn’t my secret to tell.”
“So why did you tell me?” I asked, embarrassed and horrified and incredibly grateful.
“Because you needed to know. You’ve had a very rough life, it’s true, and love has caused you a lot of pain. But love is a lot more than that, and sometimes even the pain can bring unexpected joy,” Dominick said, his voice confident and unwavering as he glanced back at Chloe’s crib. “But Alton’s not had it easy, either. He spent his entire adult life running away from his feelings, but all of that changed when he met you. He became a man. He became happy. He even became the provider that his sister never got to be. He changed his life completely. And do you know why he could?”
I shook my head, the tears at last flowing down my cheeks unfettered.
“Because he had hope. And he loved.”
Chapter Nine
Alton
I muted the hockey game and looked around, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise or hear it more clearly without the television on. The house was quiet, but that was hardly a surprise. With Dominick back in Boston and the Hamiltons in their cottage, I was most definitely alone.
And besides, it had sounded like a young voice. Maybe Nanette and Pete had decided to come back unannounced, but it’s not like they would’ve brought Erik. Pete had been smart about that, and his decision not to bring his grandson here had been something of a lifesaver. Seeing him would’ve been like salt in the wound, strumming up more memories of Ezra.
Swimming in the lake.
Playing games until our fingers hurt.
Spending the afternoon just fishing peacefully.
Cooking in this kitchen that was way too damn big now.
Jessie.
I grumbled and pushed away the thought as vigorously as I could. Jessie had no place here, something she’d made abundantly clear just before running away again. In retrospect, she’d been making it abundantly clear right from the start. I’d just chosen to delude myself. I thought that maybe love could win out over fear, but I was wrong.
Probably because, unlike me, Jessie was not in love.
Kind of an important detail for me to have glossed over.
I shifted around uncomfortably in my seat, hoping that today wasn’t going to be one of those days where Jessie was all I could think about. And then I heard the sound again, like a muffled child’s voice calling my name.
Okay, great.
Apparently my brain had found the perfect solution to stop me from agonizing over Jessie—I was just going to go crazy instead. That was much better. Who ever would’ve thought that locking myself up alone in a cabin all winter could be a bad idea?
Besides Dominick, of course.
And Pete.
…Nanette….
…half of the Boston Bruins….
…my agent John….
…that telemarketer who’d eventually hung up on me….
My life was just full of good decisions, clearly.
“Alton!” The voice got more distinct, and shivers erupted down my skin.
Ezra.
Either somehow he really was here, or I rea
lly and truly was going crazy. I stood up, trying to come up with some kind of rational explanation, but all I managed to do was rush straight for the door with my heart pounding in my chest. I prayed that I wasn’t just setting myself up for an overwhelming disappointment. I stepped outside, blinded by the snow’s white glare. My eyes slowly adjusted to the light, and finally I saw the source of the calls. A taxi had stopped short of plowing through the snow drifts near the house, and was idling a bit further back.
And inside was Ezra, safely ensconced in a winter coat. My heart skipped several beats, and I could hardly believe it. Not only was my son here, but he’d grown so much in the span of just a few months. He leaned out the window and shouted towards the house again. “Alt—” he began, his voice garbling in his throat as he saw me.
I didn’t need more of an invitation than that. I ran straight towards the car, Ezra’s face lighting up as I got closer. I didn’t know why or how he was here, but just seeing him again was a miracle. I couldn’t wait to give his scrawny body a huge hug, and hopefully manage to avoid crying in the process.
“Alton! Alton!” Ezra kept shouting, his face streaked with tears. “We’re back!”
We?
My head spun with confusion and impossible hope as Ezra jumped out of the cab, revealing his mother behind him. I stopped dead in my tracks, watching Jessie sit and wring her hands nervously while Ezra ran over to me. His smile was the most beautiful thing in the world. As he got closer, he threw his arms out wide.
A second later, his small body bumped into my chest and I gave him the hug of a lifetime, never wanting to let go. My heart sputtered in my chest. It felt amazingly good to have my son back, even if my brain was totally incapable of processing everything that was happening.
“Mom said we could come visit you. But you know what? I’m sure we can convince her to stay, don’t you think?” Ezra asked, jumping with excitement while I struggled to gather my thoughts. “Do you still have the consoles? Are Pete and Nanette still here?”