Head Above Water

by Caitlin Ricci

  “Boys,” Caleb warned.

  Robbie shook his head, and I wished Daniel had never come back here. “Go and join the Army and do everything you want to, then, but I’m still going to be your brother. You have two little brothers. One you’ve always cared about and one you blamed for getting hit all the time like I had some kind of control over what Dan did to me.”

  I didn’t know that and, as far as I knew, Robbie had never said anything about that to anyone, so we were all just left staring at him.

  “I’m so angry at all of you all the time,” Daniel quietly admitted, sounding unsure of himself, and maybe even worried. “I can’t be here. I can’t do the things you do. I can’t pretend to be happy and like everything is okay. Cleric is the only thing that made this place even halfway decent for me and now he’s gone, and I can’t even go outside and look at the barn without feeling like I’m breaking apart inside. So, I’m joining the Army. That’s what I came here to say, and now I’m going away. Bye, so long, Ben, I’ll talk to you at some point.”

  He touched Ben’s shoulder but not Robbie’s. But Robbie moved back, and I let him go, even though I thought it was a stupid idea for him to get near Daniel at all. But I couldn’t stop him as he gave Daniel an awkward hug, and then stepped away from him. “When you figure out whatever is going on with you, I’d like to be friends.”

  Daniel pushed him away. “You’re so stubborn, and stupid. I’m telling you that I don’t want to be friends with you. You’re my mom’s mistake. You’re the reason she was going to leave my dad and go live with some jerk named Joe. If you’d never been born, if she’d just aborted you like she should have done, then my parents would still be here and we’d be back home in Kentucky where we should be instead of some tiny town that isn’t even on most maps in the middle of Colorado. Cleric would still be alive. I’d be in college. Ben wouldn’t be as screwed-up as he is, and we would have been the perfect family. But we never could have been, all because you just had to be born.”

  Caleb came around the island. “That’s enough, Daniel. You’re being cruel, and you need to go.”

  “I was leaving anyway,” he said, storming out of the house.

  I got off the stool and went to hug Robbie. He was shaking, and I didn’t blame him for that at all. Daniel had been a world-class ass to him just then. “It’s not your fault,” I softly told him. “He’s an idiot, and none of this is your fault. Not any of it.”

  Robbie gave me a watery smile and, ignoring everyone else—including Ben, who ran up to his room, followed quickly by my parents—I brought Robbie over to sit on the couch next to me where we could see the birds in the pines. “You sure?” Robbie asked me. “Because he was making a lot of sense there for a minute.”

  I was absolutely sure. “How are you supposed to be responsible for what people chose to do around you when you were a baby? You’re not some demon baby with mind control from the horror movies. You were just a little baby. Your mom had the affair, and Dan was mean. That’s all that happened. You didn’t cause any of that. Not at all.”

  Robbie lay down on the couch next to me, and I put my hand on his shoulder. I looked back to see everyone watching us, but I was glad they weren’t coming in to interrupt. I had this. Robbie was mine to help when he was hurting. Mine to protect when people were mean to him. And mine to laugh with when he was happy.

  “When it’s just you in my head, things make so much more sense. But when it’s him, or Dan, or anyone else, everything gets jumbled, and I don’t know what to think. I just want things to be quiet for once. Peaceful. Like how things are when we’re out riding together. Like nothing can touch us, and the world just wants us to be happy for a little while.”

  “I’d like that too.” I ran my hand down his shoulder, and he put his palm over my fingertips. “Can’t always be like that, though.”

  He nodded and gave me a soft smile as he turned over onto his back, and I moved my hand to rest it on his chest, right underneath his palm and directly over his heart. “No, but it’s not as bad when you’re with me. I love you, Sam.”

  “Love you too, Robbie,” I said, smiling down at him as I messed with his hair a bit.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Six Months Later

  Robbie

  SIX MONTHS without my brother around had me feeling pretty good. No, I was actually much better than that. I lay out in the sun and I smiled more. And Ben was smiling too.

  “Do you know what happens in two days?” Sam asked as we lay out on the picnic tables on my Uncle Caleb’s back deck.

  Of course I knew. I’d been counting down the days too. But he was just so excited, and I wanted to play with him a little. “Well… it’s not my birthday.”

  “Robbie…,” he warned.

  My grin grew. “And it’s not your birthday. So… is it your mom’s birthday?”

  He rolled over onto me, pinning me to the rough wood as he smiled down at me. “You know what day it is going to be.”

  “Of course I know. It’s our one-year anniversary.”

  He laughed and rolled away from me before either of our families could say anything about us making out on the picnic table. Again. They didn’t care that we were both gay. Or that we were in love. Or that we spent nearly every night together in my bed even though we never really did anything. The only thing his parents, Uncle Caleb, Trent, or my little brother would have cared about was that we were making out where people were going to be eating, as soon as the burgers were done being grilled behind us.

  Sam took my hand, and I stared up at the blue sky and the clouds that looked too close to me to be real. That was the thing about the sky in Colorado. I was from Kentucky where the clouds were a mile more away from us. But here in Thornwood the clouds were so close. They looked like someone had spray-painted them onto the sky.

  And the stars at night. Wow. They were so bright I could hardly believe it. I noticed things like that now. I hadn’t realized how much having Daniel around had made me feel like I was suffocating. I used to walk quietly around him. I used to be afraid of pissing him off. I wasn’t scared like that anymore. I was worried about Ben when he went off riding alone, or I worried about Sam when he ducked down in the river too long and I thought he was drowning. But I wasn’t scared anymore. Not like I had been when I’d moved to Colorado with my brothers and the man I thought had been my dad.

  That seemed like a lifetime ago. But it was less than two years. And it was slowly getting easier to breathe. And to laugh. And to smile all the time. And when Sam and I kissed now, I didn’t worry about who could see us or what Daniel was going to say about it. That wasn’t my life anymore. Now I just had to get through school, and I focused on keeping my boyfriend happy. Keeping my hand tucked into his, Sam turned onto his side and curled up against me. “I love you, Robbie.”

  “Love you too, Sam,” I said.

  WE ATE lunch quickly. The food was good, as always. A mixture of Uncle Caleb’s grilling and Sam’s mom’s Southern cooking. Pecan pie and homemade ice cream were staples around our table in the summertime. But Sam and I were eager to get down to the barn. We’d had to stay around the house in case we were too focused on the horses to come up for lunch. We’d missed plenty of meals before, and Sam’s mom wasn’t having any of it.

  “You boys have fun and be safe!” Sam’s dad called to the three of us as we headed down the dirt trail to the barn. Ben was practically skipping beside me. Sam took my hand as we walked. I waved to his dad to let him know that at least one of us had heard him. We’d be careful. We always were. We wore helmets and we didn’t do stunts in the arena. We were all pretty sure a broken bone was as bad as we were ever going to get around our horses. Though that was plenty bad enough for Sam’s mom to threaten to ban us from riding at least once a month if she saw us doing anything more than a slow trot in the arena. She didn’t know that we galloped in the open pastures beyond where she could see us.

  But we were careful with our horses because we’d all be
en there when Cleric had to be put down. That had been the tipping point for Daniel. He hadn’t been able to stay in Thornwood after that. Sometimes I missed him. But then I looked over at Ben, and I knew he was better without Daniel around. And when I realized that, I just hoped he was being safe and taking care of himself while he was out there in the Army doing whatever it was they had him doing.

  We all paused beside Cleric’s stall on the way to get our horses out of the pasture. Cleric had been an amazing horse, and I’d been jealous of Daniel for years as he swept the blue ribbons from every competition we were ever in together. I touched Cleric’s brass nameplate and moved on. His stall would always be empty out of respect to him, and also to Daniel. Uncle Caleb thought he would come back some day. Trent, I was pretty sure, was thinking good riddance. They hadn’t gotten along.

  “I’m going to work with Hawk some today,” I announced as we went into the pasture where the four horses were kept. Witchcraft was queen of the pasture now that Cleric was gone. Magic and Blue were just happy to follow her lead. Hawk, who Uncle Caleb had adopted, was now a weanling, and he was the only wildcard I could see. He was too young to have much standing in the herd, but sometimes I caught him pushing his boundaries with them. Magic and Blue didn’t seem to care, but Witchcraft would put her ears back sometimes if the colt tried to bite her. I didn’t blame her in the least for wanting to discipline him. Sometimes he could be a real brat.

  “Can I play with him after?” Ben asked me.

  I shrugged. “Sure.” I wanted to work him. Ben wanted to have a few sugar cubes in his hands and have Hawk chase him around the pasture. It looked like fun, and I knew from watching the training videos I’d been studying lately in preparation for working with Hawk that what Ben did was a kind of bonding exercise.

  “Thanks!” He grabbed Blue and took him out of the pasture. Sam was right after him with Magic, who looked like he wanted to be even lazier than usual, as Sam practically had to drag him away from a particularly bright green and lush bit of grass the old gelding had been snacking on.

  Then came the fun part. Or, rather, the hard part. Because Hawk was a pain to catch in the pasture. But keeping him in the stall wasn’t an option since he needed to socialize and learn the herd structure just like he would have if his mom hadn’t abandoned him at birth. We’d bottle-fed him, I’d halter trained him—though that was still a work-in-progress some days—and now he was learning how to be caught without me having to chase him all over the pasture. I really didn’t want to play that particular game with him again today.

  Witchcraft came up to me and offered me her head like the wonderful horse she was. I rubbed her forehead and gave her a sugar cube. “Later,” I promised her. “We’ll go out in a bit. I need to catch the colt right now, though.” As if she understood, and shared, my frustration she released a long-suffering huff that made me laugh. “I know. But he’s got to grow up sometime.”

  I pushed her away from me when she tried to get another sugar cube out of my back pocket. When it was clear I wasn’t going to give her any more, she gave up and went back to grazing along the fence. And I tried to figure out how I was going to get a colt that loved to run and be chased to want to come to me.

  I’d seen this movie once where this guy crouched down in the grass to get a runaway horse to come to him, and I’d tried that plenty of times with Hawk. It had worked, once, but I didn’t have six hours to spend sitting in the pasture waiting for him to come investigate me like he had last month.

  Daniel would have known how to train Hawk to be easily caught in the pasture and to do all the things I wanted to do with him but wasn’t sure how to. Back when I thought that Dan was my dad, I’d watched him and Daniel work with some of the younger horses Dan was training. Dan had been okay at it. I knew that now after reading dozens of books on training young horses and watching hours of YouTube videos on the different techniques using bonding measures and positive reinforcement to create that connection between Hawk and me. But Daniel, he was practically gifted at working with young horses. He had patience with them when he’d never seemed to have any with Ben and me. And when I worked with Hawk, I missed him. He was a jerk, and more often than not also an ass, and he’d said some horrible things to me on the last day I’d seen him, but he was still my brother, and I thought about him all the time and wondered if he was okay and what he was doing.

  He’d been gone for six months, and according to the Army website I read, that should have put him at being done with basic training and off to his advanced individual training. The website had said there was usually a family day when soldiers graduated from basic, but we didn’t get a letter. As far as I knew, no one even had a clue which base he was on. He’d made it pretty clear he was done with us, but somehow I’d thought that was just going to blow over and everything would be fine after a little while. I knew how wrong I was now. That hurt, but I couldn’t let it affect me. I had my family here in Thornwood and my dad, my real dad, was in Kentucky, and they were the ones who had to matter to me now. I needed to figure out how to forget about my older brother and throw out our memories of growing up together the way he’d apparently done so easily.

  It took an hour, and Ben bringing Blue back into the pasture with us, for Hawk to come anywhere near me. I’d played his game and chased him around. He’d kicked up his heels, ran smack into Witchcraft’s side and spooked her across the pasture, and then thought she was playing a game with him and chased after her too. By the end of the hour, I was annoyed and trying hard not to be. But all Ben had to do was release Blue, and then dig a sugar cube out of his pocket, and Hawk trotted right up to him. I halted the colt and took a deep breath. It wasn’t his fault I didn’t know how to train him to be caught properly without a treat.

  “He’ll get better,” Ben said. He sounded like he was worried about something.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He patted Hawk’s neck and stroked his hands over the colt’s face. Not once did he look back at me. “I don’t want Uncle Caleb to return him to the rescue if we can’t do anything with him.”

  I put my hand on Ben’s shoulder and turned him toward me. “Hey. It’s going to be okay. Uncle Caleb isn’t sending any of us away. Not the horses or us.” I’d been afraid of that too, and he’d talked me down from that scary place of thinking that one wrong move on my part would get Witchcraft sold, us kicked out, or both. But Uncle Caleb wasn’t like Dan, and he promised he wouldn’t ever take our horses away from us. With Dan it had been a constant threat to put over us when we didn’t show well enough or when our rooms hadn’t been spotlessly cleaned. It had taken me months to get to the messy place I was now, but since Sam being able to spend the night in my room hinged partly on me keeping my space clean, I was much better about that.

  “I want to believe that,” Ben quietly said. He went back to petting Hawk as if he needed the distraction.

  “Are you scared?”

  He nodded, and I didn’t know what to do, so I grabbed him and I hugged him. He was stiff, at first, but then he calmed down and, after a few minutes, he hugged me too. “Uncle Caleb loves us. We’re his kids and he’s our family now. Nothing will ever change that.” I knew he probably didn’t believe what I was saying, but I was doing my best. I’d been scared of that too, but things were getting easier for me all the way around.

  Ben nodded and pulled away from me. He rarely let anyone touch him, even now, so when he wanted to be let go, I instantly stopped trying to hold on to him. He was smiling a lot more now, so hopefully the boy I’d known who would hug anyone would come back to me someday. He was my little brother, and I missed the kid he’d been before our mom died.

  “Do you want to work with him on picking up his feet today?” I asked Ben. That’s all I’d had planned to do with him that afternoon, and I thought Ben could easily do that, if he was interested.

  His face lit up instantly as he turned to look at me. “Could I?”

  I knew, seeing his smile, that I’d done
the right thing by asking him. “Yeah. Of course. He likes you more anyway.”

  Ben didn’t argue with me on that, and I followed him into the arena, where he tied Hawk to a post in a far corner away from the circular path in the dirt that Sam was making on Magic. He was being lazy, just like his gelding, as he walked his horse around in the circle. He was riding bareback, as always, with just a second lead rope attached to the halter to make a bridle that worked for him. I’d never actually seen him put a saddle on Magic at all, and unless I’d missed it, I was pretty sure Uncle Caleb didn’t even own one for him.

  I checked Ben’s knot to make sure it was a quick-release one that could be easily undone in case Hawk tried to get away. The colt was flighty, way too smart for his own good, and stubborn as hell. But he was also young still, and we wouldn’t even be trying to put a saddle on him for another few years. I didn’t want to attempt to put a person on him until he was at least four and his muscles and bones had stopped forming. I wouldn’t risk his health or his mind, but sometimes he drove me absolutely nuts. “Let me know if you need any help,” I told Ben as I moved aside to give him some more room.

  When Sam rode by on Magic, I smiled at him, and he waved and smiled back. Not only was he my best friend, he was also my boyfriend, the first person I’d ever dated, and the guy that I was in love with. When I looked back at the first day we’d met, and how mean I was to him in those first few weeks, I couldn’t believe he’d ever given me a chance. He was just as stubborn as his gelding, and his heart was just as big too.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sam

  ROBBIE AND I used to have to hang out in the living room for a while before we could go up to his room and go to bed. It wasn’t like we were having sex, but we weren’t exactly not doing stuff either. We were in this nice slow place where we did things, but he didn’t have to worry about us having sex. And sometimes we did nothing and just lay there with me holding him against my chest.