by Cole McCade
Wally didn’t want to see any of these things. He couldn’t allow himself to, when nothing would come of it and this was sheer torment. The wanting. The what-ifs. Everyone he cared for left him, eventually. Miriam. Willow. Even Vincent, in those short-lived seconds when he had laced his fingers with Wally’s and whispered Goodbye, Walford. Goodbye in that accented voice of his; that voice that always spoke of other places, that said he sought something and Wally wasn’t it. Wally was never it. Not for anyone. And most certainly not for Joseph. It was safer to remember that. Joseph’s hatred had been more than a wall keeping Wally at a distance.
It had been a buffer, a safe zone that let Wally’s heart beat steady without remembering that trembling flutter in its depths whenever Joseph was near.
Strange how one could forget being in love with someone.
Stranger still how one could remember so easily, with a touch of skin to skin.
Absence makes the heart grow not fonder, my dears, but simply absent-minded.
He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror; his reflection stared back with haunted, wistful eyes and smiled. “When did you get old?” his doppelganger asked, then laughed. He brushed at his stinging eyes.
“When was I never not old? Always taking care of everyone, eh, old chap?”
“Aye. Something like that,” he answered himself. “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Bit too old and washed-up now to be turning any heads.”
When had this started to bother him? He’d been content with his life. Romance was a thing for grand stories, and if he lied to himself long enough he might convince himself he didn’t ache, for one bright breathless second, to be swept away. To be the one taken care of.
To be the one someone didn’t eventually leave behind, when life took them where they truly needed to be.
“Buck up,” he told his reflection firmly. “You’re always doling out advice like it’s Christmas cookies, so take a bite, swallow it down, and get your head out of the clouds.”
His mirror image parted his lips—but whatever conversation he’d fancied with some wiser, calmer shadow image of himself shattered as a crash shook through the house, ringing through the floorboards hard enough to vibrate up into the soles of his feet. He flung himself from the bathroom so quickly his reflection must still be standing back in the mirror, watching his exodus with wide, startled eyes as he tumbled out into the hall and back to Joseph’s bedroom.
Joseph sat on the bed, breathing hard, a pair of well-worn jeans hanging unbuttoned from his hips, chest bare. His crutch had fallen on the floor—next to the toppled nightstand. The books that had been piled atop the stand fanned across the floorboards, the alarm clock tumbled among them; the lamp had come apart, the shade rolled free but intact, the wooden base whole, but the bulb shattered in fragments of glass everywhere, some of them so tiny they glittered like granules of fresh snow in the faint moonlight drifting through the window into the darkened room.
Wally froze in the doorway. He didn’t know whether to go to Joseph or go to the nightstand or, from the way those deep brown eyes tore into him—challenged him—to go away. Go somewhere he was wanted.
As if he was wanted anywhere at all.
He swallowed back roughly and stepped forward, knotting his hands together, untangling them, knotting them again until the knuckles creaked in achy protest. “I—should I—do you need…?”
“No,” Joseph said through his teeth.
“Oh.” Wally stopped mid-stride, biting his lip, then turned toward the nightstand, bending to catch the edge. “Then I’ll—”
“I can do that, too.”
Wally closed his eyes. He didn’t know if Joseph was saying I don’t need you for this or I don’t need you for anything or will you get out of my life already, but no matter the message the arrow that bore it struck just as deep. He didn’t know why he wanted Joseph to need him, when the man was so fiercely independent and any admission of need seemed a banner of victory for his illness, a banner Joseph stubbornly and proudly refused to let take the battlefield of his body. And Wally wanted to fight that fight with him, but he didn’t know how when he didn’t want to…to…
Damn it, he didn’t know what he was doing.
He straightened, forced his hands to stop wafting about of their own fretful free will, and smoothed them down his rumpled shirt. “I’m sorry. I heard the crash and panicked.”
“Why? Thought I’d managed to kill myself?”
“No. Yes. I—Joseph, what’s the right answer here?” Wally flung his hands out. “You look at me as if you demand something from me, but I haven’t the foggiest what it is and unless you tell me, I cannot give it to you.”
“I want you to stop,” Joseph snarled. “Stop fussing. Stop fussing, stop fluttering, stop everything for five fucking seconds. I’m fine. I’m fine. And I want you to stop looking at me like I’m going to die every time I do something you think I shouldn’t be capable of.”
He stood, then—without his crutches, a hard jerk at first when his legs trembled before they locked and he rose with a powerful flex and ripple of the taut muscles corded across his chest. He spread his hands, glaring at Wally, a fire in his eyes that Wally hadn’t seen since Willow had disappeared.
“Yes, I have multiple sclerosis,” Joseph said. “Yes, some days it hurts. Some days it doesn’t. But it’s not all I am. It’s not all of who I am. It’s just a thing, a part of my daily routine as much as you needing six cups of coffee in the morning before you can string two words together, or someone getting nervous in old elevators or having one pinky toe that’s longer than the other or being lactose intolerant.”
Wally couldn’t help it. He looked down at Joseph’s bare feet, at his pinky toes, only to flush guiltily when Joseph smiled, a wry and bitter thing.
“Those are hypotheticals. My pinky toes are the same length and I can drink milk. But you don’t look at someone who’s lactose intolerant and think ‘That’s Sarah, she can’t have cheese’ like nothing else matters about her, like she doesn’t have two kids and a model plane hobby and a dead grandmother she misses every day. I’m just Joseph. Willow’s father Joseph, retired mechanical engineer Joseph, book nerd Joseph, Joseph with the sweet tooth, Joseph who hates summer. Not Joseph the cripple.”
Wally flinched; shame was a snake coiled in his belly, sinking its teeth deep and injecting its nauseating venom. Had he been so terrible to Joseph, so thoughtless, so cruel? He could claim ignorance, but ignorance was no excuse. It never was. Not when the hurt, the frustration, the weariness in those snapping, glaring brown eyes was all too real, and it didn’t matter if ignorance or intent had put it there.
It was still there, and right now it was Wally’s fault.
He dropped his gaze, struggling for words when I’m sorry couldn’t possibly be enough, useless and pathetic, and he didn’t know if Joseph would want to hear it. Finally he straggled out, “That’s…that’s an ugly word.”
“It’s my word.”
“I simply…hate hearing you speak of yourself that way.”
“Yeah?” Joseph made a horrid, brittle sound in the back of his throat. “The rest of the world does it all the fucking time.”
Wally dragged his gaze up, but Joseph wasn’t looking at him. He looked out the window, and in that frozen instant Wally slipped five years into the past. Another man, another window, but that same look that saw elsewheres and elsewhens Wally could never touch, worlds he could never enter, and he wondered if something was wrong with him: that he couldn’t see those far-off places of broken thoughts and dreams that others seemed to live in; that he feared living in those dreams, because it hurt more knowing he would never have them.
“Hurts less when I say it about myself,” Joseph murmured, and Wally knew without words:
Miriam had called him that.
Miriam in her wildness, Miriam in her cruelty, Miriam in her passion that burned her up from the inside out and torched everyone in her path. One way or another, she tur
ned everything she touched into ash—whether through desire or through viciousness, when sometimes they were one and the same.
He fought the lump in his throat, swallowing yet another I’m sorry when it wouldn’t mean a bloody thing, apologizing for his sister’s crimes when he had enough of his own to atone for. Finally he asked, “…Sarah?”
Joseph blinked. His expression cleared, and he looked back at Wally blankly before barking out a laugh. “I don’t know, I just made someone up.”
Wally remained silent. He was full of too many words and not enough, and so afraid they would be the wrong ones. Uncomfortable silence threaded between them, a chain made up of the weight of years and the promise that one day that silence would explode into something terrible and cataclysmic that would sever that chain forever.
Wally wasn’t ready for that. Wasn’t ready to say words that might once again banish him from Joseph’s life forever, a witch-curse that would ward him off with the mark of the evil eye.
And so he only turned away, because he couldn’t stand that look in Joseph’s eyes anymore.
That look that said he needed something, someone, but it wasn’t Wally.
“I’ll leave you to get dressed,” he said thickly, and fled out into the hall. “I think I need that first cup of coffee before I stick my foot in my mouth again.”
CHAPTER FOUR
JOSEPH FINISHED DRESSING—JUST A T-shirt and an open button-down—before lowering himself to one knee to pick up the mess he’d made, groaning as he braced his hand to the bed to keep his balance, carefully using the edge of a book to sweep the bits of broken glass together and tip them into the trash. God, he didn’t know what he’d expected when he’d blown up on Wally that way. Whatever it was, he hadn’t gotten it. Only silence, and those sheepish, guilty looks that said more than words ever could. The man confused the hell out of him. Always playing the sage of the goddamned woods, fucking Gandalf with a waxed and curled moustache, a word of advice and a little nudge for anyone who needed it…but call him on his own shit and he stood blank and blinking, lost as a child being taken to task.
He supposed it was easier to meddle in other people’s lives than to look head-on at your own.
Like you have room to talk, pining away like a damned Shakespearean hero. Next you’ll go full Bronte and die of the vapors.
He hadn’t needed Wally to point out his failings, though Maxi’s verbal slap upside the head might well have been deserved. Willow wouldn’t want him to live this way: caught in self-recrimination, wasting away with grief. She was alive, somewhere, finding her own way. Just as Miriam was alive somewhere, living her own life. Both his girls needed something he couldn’t give them, something far from him.
And when he thought about it, they weren’t really his girls anymore.
Maybe they never had been.
But she’s your daughter, whispered in the back of his mind as he picked up a book. Plath. God, he read depressing shit when he was wallowing. And that man took her. She probably called you under duress. He probably forced her to say those things.
He closed his eyes, fingers curling against the worn cloth binding of the book. No. He knew Willow. He knew her voice. When she was lying, when she was frightened. And even though everything in him wanted to damn his body’s limitations and go look for her, scour the country until he found her…
Please, she’d said. I need you to accept that. I need to know you aren’t hurting yourself looking for me. Promise.
He would honor that promise. He would trust her. And he would hope one day…
One day, she’d keep her promise that he’d see her again.
He stacked the books on the nightstand, then dragged himself back up. A wave of prickles shot through his legs, a warning to stop pushing it out of sheer stubborn pride. He didn’t have to prove himself. Especially not to that frustrating, bizarre man. He didn’t give two fucks if Wally thought he was perfectly capable or thought he was a helpless, broken pile of bones. He’d fought that battle in court already, and didn’t need to fight it again.
So why did it fucking sting so much, to think Wally might look at him as less than a man?
He was being a fucking idiot. And the scent of coffee was calling him, luring him from the bedroom and onto whatever adventure Wally wanted to take him on. That was the thing with Wally, as he’d learned from both Willow and Miriam. You never just went somewhere with Wally. He took you on adventures, and it was anyone’s guess what waited at the end of the road.
Welp. Moving was better than thinking, so on with it.
He laced himself into his boots, then ducked out into the hall with his crutch tucked under his arm. He didn’t need it right now, and wouldn’t use it until he did. If he had a choice he’d leave it at home; taking it in public was like wearing a neon sign directing people to stop and stare with that mixture of revulsion and pity they saved for the physically disabled. Their social moral codes told them they should feel compassion, empathy, some humanitarian impulse—but their uglier, baser sides were repelled.
He thought of that side as their inner child; children were born with underdeveloped brains incapable of empathy, and by the time their tiny twitchy cerebral cortices matured years later they were already chemically hardwired with the nasty little lessons they’d taught themselves through the cruelty of playground law. It was that playground law at work when people looked at him, at anyone disabled, and saw a thing to be reviled, avoided, a grotesque and limping caricature of Igor in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab instead of a person just like them. It was the higher brain functions, the human brain functions, that struggled to override that with learned social compassion and the expectation to be better, do better—but when the two came into conflict, the end result was a performance of syrupy, cloyingly fake “consideration” and excessive fussing that made him feel no better than a sideshow worthy of Wally’s circus. It made him never want to go out in public at all. Home alone, he was at least free of the weight of other people’s opinions.
But shutting himself away like he wasn’t fit for proper society wasn’t the answer, either. Because that let other people’s judgment dictate his life.
And he’d be fucked if he let that happen.
He’d rather have Maxi. Maxi never expected anything of him—not that he be better than he was, not that he be worse. Not that he be whole, and not that he be broken. She was just there, and let him be there; she helped when he asked, left him alone when he didn’t.
But he didn’t have Maxi. He had Wally, and he found Wally in the kitchen, leaning his back against the edge of the counter with both his ankles and his arms crossed. The coffee pot percolated behind him with that ticking hiss of building and releasing pressure, but Wally seemed to have forgotten it, his gaze trained out the window, his lips parted as if he’d meant to say something to the ghost of his thoughts but never found the words.
It was rare to see him in an unguarded moment; Joseph had learned early on that Wally’s glibness, his brightness, were a shield protecting Wally from the world and the world from Wally. Joseph knew about Wally, but he didn’t think he really knew him.
All Joseph knew was that in this instant, with Wally’s shirt rumpled and his feet bare and the kitchen light casting soft shadows that gathered and pooled in the hollow of his long, slender throat…he didn’t look human. A pale, fey glow shone through him, as if the moon lived under his skin and dwelled in his heart, and were he to open those pensive, lost eyes fully then moths would be drawn to the light in them, desperate to fling themselves into that dark, dreaming radiance.
Joseph leaned against the doorframe. He’d always thought Wally looked like Miriam, but he really didn’t; the resemblance was superficial, a passing thing now and then glimpsed in a certain fine cut to their cheekbones and the lushness of their lashes and the long taper of a high jaw down to a delicately pointed chin—but beyond that, they were entirely different beasts. Miriam was sharpness and fire, haunted by a vulpine hunger that hollowed out her
cheekbones and turned her eyes to acid and her mouth to a bloom of spilled blood.
While Walford…Walford was one of the crows who perched along the power lines: sleek and black and dapper-smooth on the surface, but when the light caught him he shone with the iridescent colors and textures of an oil slick. He held himself with a curious, listening stillness, alert and bright and ready at the slightest whim to spread his wings and fly away. Both brother and sister were beautiful, Joseph caught himself thinking, yet Miriam’s beauty was a thing she took and took into herself—while Wally’s gave and gave and gave, as if he would peel off his own lacquer and layer it over the world to give it color and shine and that taste of cotton candy melting on the tongue.
“You’re staring,” Wally murmured without looking up, and Joseph jolted.
“I didn’t know you knew I was here.”
Wally smiled faintly. “You were still staring.”
“Mn.” Joseph scowled at him and pushed away from the doorframe. “Coffee done?”
“Seems like.” Wally turned his head, studying him quietly; high spots of pink flushed his cheeks, like the blush makeup left behind after the circus paint had worn off, and Joseph wondered if he was taking sick after sleeping on the floor. Wally straightened, turning and opening one of the overhead cabinets to pull down two mugs. “How do you take yours?”
“On my own,” Joseph said, and took one of the mugs from Wally’s hand.
Wally remained quiet at first, then said, “I’m sorry. I was merely being polite.”
“I don’t like people to do for me.” Joseph dumped his crutch on the counter and picked up the coffee pot. “Not when I don’t need it. When I need it, I’ll tell you. When I don’t, let me do for myself. It’s that fucking simple, Walford.”
“I…” Wally bowed his head. “I understand.”