Damage Control

by Lynn VanDorn

  “Tonight was my night for learning Chadwick family secrets,” Rachel said. “I feel like I should be pissed at Brad for not telling me until now. On the other hand, it's not the sort of thing you would bring up in casual conversation.”

  “Yeah, how does that go? ‘So, Rach, I've got a brother who cuts himself. A lot. You wanna catch a movie later?’”

  Rachel laughed. “I know, and that's just the half of it. It's why I'm only a little bit pissed at him. Technically, I guess it wasn't his secret to tell, but Brad has made it his business, so now it's mine, too.”

  “And mine?” asked Josh.

  Rachel shrugged. “You probably saved Tyler’s life last night, so yeah, I think it's your business. There's more than just the cutting, though. The whole thing is, well, super fucked-up. I want you to brace yourself.”

  “Noted,” said Josh. “Consider me braced.”

  Rachel looked at him over her coffee mug. “I don't think you are, but don't say I didn't warn you. Let me see. I need to condense five hours of discussion into something coherent. It's not easy.”

  “Begin at the beginning.”

  “Easy for you to say.” She took a deep breath. “Okay. Tyler and his dad have never had an easy relationship.”

  “That I knew. Whenever Mr. Chadwick was around, Tyler always made himself scarce. It's the thing I remember the most about Tyler as a kid. He was quiet and watchful. He's not quiet anymore.”

  “That he is not,” Rachel agreed. “Okay, so Tyler and his dad didn't get along, which you know, but Brad says it got much worse after he came out.” Rachel paused. “Did you know he was gay? It's not a secret, exactly, but it's not publicly known, either. Mostly because Tyler hasn't been in a relationship since his last two movies started filming, and before Blood and Water no one really knew who the hell he was.”

  “I didn't know he was gay until tonight,” Josh said, “but you know I don't really pay attention to Hollywood stuff. Brad may have mentioned it at some point, but most of the time I only listen to him with half an ear. It came up in conversation with Tyler last night, though.”

  “Oh?” Rachel raised her eyebrows.

  “Tyler made an offhand remark about him running off with a hypothetical pool boy named Ramon. That was a pretty big clue.”

  “Okay,” she said, drawing out the word, “that must have been an interesting conversation. Anyway, Brad told me that when Tyler was thirteen, his dad found a bunch of gay porn on his computer. Tyler eventually admitted he was gay, and his dad put him into therapy.”

  “What kind of therapy are we talking about?” Josh asked, apprehensive and afraid to hear the answer.

  Rachel sighed. “Various types, including conversion therapy.”

  That's what Josh had been afraid of. “They sent him to one of those pray away the gay places?” He thought back. He remembered that the Chadwicks went to some church—he forgot which one, but he thought it was maybe in Lake Forest. In the summer, though, when it was just Mrs. Chadwick and the boys, they never went. Peter must have been the religious one, although he’d never seemed like the holy roller type to Josh. He’d thought Mr. Chadwick’s religion might have been less about God and more about social standing. “I didn’t realize the Chadwicks were like that. Shows what I know.”

  Rachel shrugged. “Brad said it's more that Tyler was defective and his dad was trying various things to fix him, including some places recommended by people at their church.”

  “Clearly it was super effective.”

  “Yeah, well, Tyler’s been in and out of therapy and treatment centers since he was a teen. Brad said that’s when Tyler started acting out. Instead of avoiding his dad, he started arguing with him. He dyed his hair everything from pitch black to bleached blonde, and tried out a variety of interesting hairstyles. He pierced his ears, then his eyebrow, and he started wearing makeup. Eyeliner, painting his nails, that sort of thing.”

  “I bet he made the prettiest little emo goth ever,” Josh said. He could just imagine teenaged Tyler, looking approximately the same, only maybe a little smaller; a pocket-sized Cure groupie with black hair instead of blue, kohl-rimmed eyes, and black nails. With that pale skin of his, he really would've made a great goth. That scary smile of his wouldn't have hurt, either.

  Josh also pictured Tyler with bleached blonde hair and that jogged a memory loose: a pale-haired Tyler with his finger on Josh’s chest. Oh, yeah, that had been at the last Chadwick picnic he'd gone to, and Tyler had been a teenager then. Josh, for the life of him, couldn't remember why Tyler was touching Josh’s chest in that memory.

  Rachel gave him a look with skeptical eyes and raised eyebrows that was so like their mother it gave Josh a nasty start. It was a look to inspire incipient guilt, even if you were sure you hadn't done anything wrong. “Anyway,” she continued, “Peter Chadwick’s answer to all that was to demand he join a sport, so Tyler became a cheerleader.”

  Josh snorted a laugh and Rachel gave him the look again. “Sorry,” he said. “I'm just picturing Mr. Chadwick telling his friends that his son was an emo goth cheerleader.”

  “Yes, Josh, I'm fairly certain that was the point.”

  “God, you’re no fun this morning.”

  Rachel frowned. “This isn't a joke.”

  No, it wasn't. The problem was that thinking of emo Tyler and cheerleading Tyler was both amusing and charming and made him want to smile, even knowing that whatever Rachel was going to tell him was bad enough to have destroyed her sense of humor for the time being. He thought of the marks on Tyler’s arms, and that was enough to kill his momentary levity. “I know it's not a joke. Go on, tell me what happened next.”

  Rachel looked uncomfortable. “Tyler was caught having sex on school grounds with two boys.”

  Josh sucked in air through his teeth. “Really? At the same time?”

  “Um. Actually, yes.”

  “Actually yes, what?”

  Rachel studied her coffee. “It was two boys at one time. Two of the football players, apparently.”

  “Wow. Just… damn. Give me a second. Two football players.” Josh started to picture it, then tried to stop. He was not going to imagine Ryan’s little brother in a three-way. No. Although it was a bit like trying not to think of a pink rhinoceros.

  “Are you done thinking about it?” Rachel asked. “I thought you were taking this seriously.”

  I am seriously trying not to think about a teenaged threesome with Tyler in it. I am seriously trying very hard. “I am. Go on.”

  “Okay, so all three boys were suspended from school. Tyler’s dad found this program here in Wisconsin to put him in called Bridges to Something-or-other. I forget now what Brad called it.”

  Josh stilled. “Was it Salvation? Bridges to Salvation?”

  “Yeah, I think that was the name,” said Rachel. “Have you heard of it?”

  “Unfortunately.” Bridges was infamous, at least among the gay community in the Midwest. They promised a cure to homosexuality, and it was rumored they used torture to get it. “They supposedly use aversion therapy,” he said. “Nasty shit.”

  “Brad said it was a bad place, a really bad place, but he didn't go into detail, which for him is unusual. I meant to google it when I got a chance.” She gave him a weak smile. “Just haven't had that chance yet.”

  “This is all second and third hand,” Josh said. “I've never met anyone who's been through there, except Tyler, I guess, but I've talked to people who’ve had friends and loved ones sent there, or know someone, or heard it from someone else. Hard to say how accurate any of the stories are, but the general theme is sort of Clockwork Orangey.”

  “Clockwork Orangey?” Rachel asked. “I don't think Orangey is a real word.”

  Josh gave his sister a look. “So, the story is that they take in homosexuals, mostly teens and some young adults. First, they give them all these lectures about how they're evil and corrupted and defective people, but there’s a cure. Then they show them homosexual pornogra
phy and torture them while they watch. You know, to erase the gay.”

  “Okay, that's pretty fucked-up.” Rachel had gone pale. “What do you mean by torture?”

  “I've heard the gamut: electrical shocks, beatings, immersion in ice-cold baths, giving them drugs to induce nausea, sleep deprivation. You name it. Supposedly rape, too.” Josh turned and looked out at the lake, which was still and pretty and peaceful. “All or none of which might be true. I don't know, but the stories are consistent enough to make me think it can't all be made up. There’ve been a few attempts that I know of to get the place shut down, but so far no one has managed it.” He shrugged. “I'm not sure if that means the allegations of illegal activity are false, or that they have really good lawyers. Do you know how long Tyler was there?”

  “A few weeks, I think. The first time.”

  Josh felt sick. “There was more than one time?”

  Rachel nodded. “Yeah, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself. Tyler came out and they said he was cured. And, for a time, his behavior seemed pretty normal, at least as normal as any teenager gets. He went back to school and concentrated on his classes. He got kicked out of cheerleading and the other boys got kicked off the football team, but Tyler tried out for the school play and got the male lead. He and the lead actress went out a lot, so the family, or his dad at least, thought they were dating. Brad said he was pretty sure the girl was Tyler’s beard, but he wasn't any more interested in setting his father straight than Tyler was. Brad figured that whatever it took for Tyler to be able to get through high school was fine by him. He had no idea how bad things were until he came home from college during Christmas.”

  “Wait, I think I remember this,” Josh said. “That was the year Tyler was in the hospital, right? I'm trying to remember. There was some sort of accident. I just remember that Brad wasn't around much that break.”

  “It wasn't exactly an accident. Brad came home to an empty house. His parents had gone out and Ryan was still at Stanford for a few more days. Tyler was supposed to be home, though. At first Brad thought he'd gone out, too, but his car was parked in the garage, so he checked around the house, thinking he'd find Tyler napping. Brad had this great plan of waking him up by dumping water on him.”

  “Your fiancé is an asshole,” Josh said, reminded of the water balloon incident.

  “Yeah, but he's my asshole. And it's a good thing he's an asshole, because he found Tyler, not sleeping, but bleeding out on the floor of his bedroom.”

  Even knowing where the story was inevitably headed, Josh winced.

  “He’d cut his leg, high up, and way too deep.”

  “Don't tell me he cut his femoral.”

  Rachel shrugged. “Brad didn’t say, and I haven't had anatomy since high school.” She smiled then. “But, speaking of anatomy, after Tyler and his mom moved out to San Francisco, you know, after the divorce, Brad made Tyler memorize the major arteries and veins to better avoid them. But don't tell Ryan, because he would kill Brad for enabling Tyler.”

  “Yeah, because Ryan and I talk so frequently,” Josh said. “Get back to your story. You've left poor Tyler bleeding to death in his bedroom.”

  “Well, Brad tied a tourniquet and called 911. Supposedly it was a suicide attempt, although Tyler to this day denies it and claims he just cut too deep, but regardless, he started seeing a psychiatrist. She prescribed some anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications and he got more therapy. Meanwhile Brad says his parents had, out of nowhere, started fighting a lot.”

  “I don't know if I'd say out of nowhere,” said Josh. “Granted, I was around a long time ago, but I thought their marriage was pretty much a cold war situation. I got the impression Mrs. Chadwick spent summers up here to get away from her husband. She always came up right after school ended and didn't return until a week before school let back in. He sometimes came up on the weekends, but rarely, and those were the worst. No one was happy then.”

  “Okay, maybe not out of nowhere, but the cold war definitely went hot. Then there was the incident with the guidance counselor. That was pretty much the beginning of the end.”

  “What incident?”

  “Tyler got caught again, this time giving a blow job to his guidance counselor. The one who was supposed to be helping him deal with the fallout from what had happened with the two football players.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Nope. His actual guidance counselor. Young guy, apparently. Not too long out of college, in his first job, according to Brad.” Rachel shrugged. “Doesn't make it any better. He was still a creep who took advantage of a teenaged boy.”

  “And there was no trial for statutory rape? Because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have missed that.”

  “It never went to trial. In the end, the guy lost his job and got a reduced sentence after pleading guilty. He got time served and put on the sex offender’s registry, and I'm sure that put the kibosh on his career. Tyler got sent back to Bridges. He was there all of one day and tried to kill himself. He was found by staff in time and was sent to the hospital. Then Mrs. Chadwick asked for a divorce and sole custody of Tyler. Things got ugly for a while, but you already know most of that. Eventually she got custody of Tyler, I think he was seventeen by that point, and they moved to San Francisco where she's from. Tyler finished out high school there, went to UCLA, started acting, and everything was presumably rosy. Well, except for Tyler’s little habit of slicing himself up, that is.”

  “Does Brad know what set him off this time?”

  “Yeah, about that. You remember that thing I told you about the football players?”

  “Trust me, that's not the kind of thing a person forgets,” Josh said.

  “Well, there’s a video of it, and it was sent to several tabloids and leaked to the internet. That's what I mean about the porn aspect. Tyler found out about it on Thursday and came out here to hide away from pretty much everybody.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Pretty much. And in answer to your next question, no, I don't know how it was leaked or why it even exists. I just know it does, and that Ryan is working with Tyler’s agent to fix the situation because it has the power to tank Tyler’s career, and Tyler’s brilliant idea to make things better was to come out here and carve himself up on a dock. Because things weren't bad enough already. Thank God you were here.”

  Josh frowned. “I think you're being too hard on him. If I hadn't been here, I wouldn't have scared him and he wouldn't have needed saving.”

  Rachel snorted. “Even without you startling him, Tyler still might have ended up dead.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Josh said. He wasn't sure why he felt the need to defend Tyler, other than it seemed wrong to attack him when he wasn't around to defend himself. “Some of us more than others, true, but no one’s perfect.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just find Tyler frustrating. He has this amazing opportunity that most people would do anything for, and he’s pissing it away through bad decisions and a weak will. It bothers me. I can't help it.”

  Josh remembered Tyler’s eyes, though. “Tyler isn’t weak,” he said. “He's got issues, no argument there, but weakness isn't one of them.”

  Rachel gave him a hard look.

  Josh squirmed under her gaze, feeling guilty but not sure why. “What?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “Sure, be that way. You ready to head back?”

  Rachel looked dubious. “You don't have to come back with me,” she said. “You’ve been officially absolved of any blame or responsibility. This is a family problem. I've been drafted because I'm almost a Chadwick, but you're a free agent. This is supposed to be your vacation. Have fun vacating.”

  “I could go out on the boat today, like I planned, and do some fishing. Or I can go back with you and throw myself into the big bag of crazy.”

  She wrinkled her brow. “Is there a third option that involves video games? My money’s on door number three.”

&nb
sp; “This is interesting, and I'm not in the mood to fish. I'm sticking my nose in whether it's needed or wanted. End of discussion.” That, and he'd promised Tyler he wouldn't abandon him.

  “All right, it's your funeral,” Rachel said. “For the record, I think you’re making a mistake, but whatever. Let's head back.”

  Chapter 7

  Tyler Ponders Fratricide

  Saturday, September 17th, 7:30 a.m.

  The Chadwicks’ lake house

  Blue Lake, WI

  Brad was almost done with the last of the stitches when the kitchen door opened and Tyler’s morning got a little more irritating.

  “Oh, great,” he said, “you, too.”

  Ryan flashed a sunny grin at Tyler. “I can feel the love from way over here.” He wore dress slacks and a button-down shirt, both sadly creased. He looked exhausted, despite the wattage he put into the smile.

  Tyler’s agent, Alicia, walked in right behind him. She also looked exhausted and creased, and she didn't smile at all. Not a good sign.

  “Fuck me,” Tyler grumbled. Now that Ryan was here he would be lovingly bullied in stereo. Add in his agent and suddenly it would be overwhelming concern and disapproval in surround sound. I am going to have to do so much counting today.

  Ryan came over to the table to inspect Brad’s work. “Excellent job on the stitches,” he said.

  “Naturally,” Brad replied.

  “I assume you’ve already read him the riot act?”

  “Yup,” said Brad as he tied the last stitch and snipped the nylon thread. “You're done,” he said. “Repeat back my instructions so you can't pretend later that you didn't know.”

  Tyler rolled his eyes and recited in a sing-song voice, “Use the waterproof thingies when I shower for the next two days, take the bandage off after three, no soaking it in water until after the stitches come out.” He turned to his agent. “I can't believe Ryan pried you out of LA, Alicia, but thanks for coming. What did he bribe you with?”

  “Jesus, I'm knackered. My flight got in late last night, your brother picked me up at the airport, and we drove straight here. As for my bribe, you probably don't want to know, but it was expensive. I can't believe I'm in Wisconsin. It's so… rural.”