The Interview

by Alice Ward

  According to what he told me once we reached the city limits, Tate had purchased a house for his younger brother in Sacramento after his acting career started paying off, but prior to that, Artie had been living in one of those rundown Lodi homes while Tate tried to make it in New York.

  Artie’s residence was by no means awe-striking, but it was a massive step up from what he’d come from. I drank in the sight of the beige brick steps and inviting front porch as Tate pulled into the driveway, and I couldn’t help but admire the elegant flourish patterns on the white window frames. From the looks of it, the house was a shotgun-style bungalow because I could see straight through the screen door to the sliding patio door in the back. It felt homey, and after learning about what the two men had gone through as children, it was fitting they would prefer comfort and warmth over flamboyant flash.

  Tate opened my door for me and helped me climb out of the nondescript Hyundai before he turned toward the house and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Art!”

  Unintelligible shouting came from inside, and then a figure appeared behind the shadowy screen door. “I don’t want any, and I already found Jesus!”

  “Come on,” Tate said to me. He took my hand in his and led me along a charming stone path to the porch, where a man now stood with a broad grin. The moment the two were level, Tate released me to embrace his brother, who returned the hug with equal enthusiasm. They each gave each other a couple thumps on the back.

  I stood at the top of the stairs quietly, not wanting to interrupt a tender moment between family, but Tate turned around and motioned for me to come closer. “Sadie, this is my younger and better-looking brother, Artie. Art, this is Sadie.”

  “No wonder bro’s so hung up on you.” Artie stepped around Tate with an extended hand, which I took and shook politely. “You’re not too bad.”

  “Thanks.” I laughed lightly. If anyone else had said it, I probably would have felt sleazy, but coming from Artie, the remark was nothing short of charming. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  He beamed toothily at me, and I was struck by how incongruous the brilliant smile was to the face it was on. Artie had some similar features to Tate — the drool-worthy jawline and smoldering eyes, to name two — but deep shadows formed where his cheeks were disproportionately sunken, and clusters of creases lined his forehead and mouth. The color in his lips was more akin to a pale lilac than a traditional pink, and his skin lacked a glow completely.

  Taking his scrawny, bony form into consideration, I would have thought him a fifty-something-year-old on his deathbed, but the smile was enough to convince me that he was, indeed, a young man in his twenties.

  A young man who was, without a doubt, very sick.

  “Come on in. I got this killer zucchini bread from the bakery around the corner.” He waved us in with a gnarled hand, and Tate slipped an arm around my waist to guide me over the threshold. We weren’t together, and I should’ve put a stop to his affections, but I was comforted by his touch. The day had been so emotional thus far that it was a relief to feel those small gestures of companionship.

  The interior of the home was just as pleasant as the exterior. A foyer dressed in fashionable tile opened into an airy living room on one side and a sunshine-kissed dining room on the other, and the couch Artie led us to was squashy and soft. I was amused by the out of place recliner in the corner, which was upholstered in retro plaid and so well-used that there was a permanent divot in the seat. Somehow, it all seemed to fit perfectly with Artie’s brilliant smile.

  “How’re you feeling?” Tate asked before his rear even hit the couch.

  Artie sank back into the recliner and cocked his hands behind his head. “Not too bad today. Yesterday was a bitch. The doctor put me on something that made me throw up every twenty minutes, and everything I ate tasted like straw.” He pulled a revolted face, then turned his attention to me. “I don’t know if bro told you or not, but I’ve got AIDS. Makes life fun, never knowing how I’m gonna feel one day to the next, but you caught me on a good one.”

  I was at a loss for words. Seeing him, I knew he was ill, but I’d expected him to say he had cancer or something in that vein. My inclination was to apologize to him, both for what he had to deal with as a child and what he was dealing with now, but I didn’t want to offend him. So, instead, I resorted to nodding as I casually replied, “I’m glad to hear you’re feeling well today.”

  “She didn’t know about that yet.” Tate placed his hand gently on my thigh as if wordlessly reassuring me that my surprise wasn’t unwarranted. “I thought that was something you should tell her, if you wanted.”

  “How far did you get in our epic tale?”

  “The foster homes.” I opted to answer this one. In Artie’s welcoming home, the shock of witnessing the conditions Tate grew up in was wearing off, and my curiosity was starting to come back in tentative ripples. “He told me how he ran away from the last one and went to get you from yours.”

  Artie rolled his eyes back into his head, let out a long hum, and nodded jerkily. “Yep, that was the first night of the rest of our lives.”

  “Well, where’d you guys go?”

  “Abandoned houses. Alleys. Manufacturing plants that had been closed for a while.” Tate shrugged. “Wherever we needed to go. We never stayed in one place long because police always ended up raiding when people reported squatters, but we did a rotation around Lodi.”

  “What about food?”

  The men exchanged looks of blended amusement and revulsion. Even without words, their bond was tangible, and I felt a sense of honor just being allowed in the presence of it.

  “For a while, we were dumpster diving.” It was Tate who answered, and I heard a note of shame in his tone. “We used to hang out at the supermarket during sample days too. Eventually, we moved onto stealing whatever small things we could, but that didn’t last long. We didn’t want to risk getting picked up and put back into the system.”

  “So, you went back to dumpster diving after you decided it wasn’t smart to steal?” I wasn’t even going to allow myself to start digging into whether my conscience could handle the immorality of Tate’s thieving.

  Again, they shared a look, but it was Artie who picked up the answer this time around. “No. We started earning money.”

  “No, I started earning money.” Tate’s eyes had drifted down to his shoes, and he’d taken on his characteristic position of elbows on his knees with his fingers woven together.

  I wondered if this was some weird competitive thing, if maybe they had a long-standing argument about Tate having provided for Artie, because it seemed odd to me that he would have wanted it clear that he’d been the one to start earning an income for the pair of them. As subtly as I could, I leaned down a bit to see if I could capture a glimpse of Tate’s expression.

  It was dark.

  Alarmingly dark.

  His gaze was clouded and unmoving, and his cheekbones were so sharpened that they looked like they could’ve sliced right through a diamond. I would’ve been frightened to have someone look at me the way he was looking at his shoes.

  “Yeah, but I followed not long after,” Artie pointed out.

  “You shouldn’t have.” The way Tate snapped with so much venom in his voice made me withdraw from him by an entire couch cushion. It was so startling and unexpected, and I’d never heard him speak so viciously. To my surprise, Artie didn’t seem shaken in the least by the response.

  “I did what I thought I should’ve done.”

  Tate raised his head so slowly he looked pained. “But look where it got you. Look where I got you.”

  “We’ve been over this. It’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, it is. I allowed you to be put in that position.”

  Guilt was spreading through me with little knives attached, piercing and lacerating my insides. “I’m sorry.” Artie had already been in the middle of crafting a reply to Tate, but I cut him off. “I didn’t mean to cause an argument.”
>
  “Nothing to be sorry for, honey. We’ve been having this same argument for ten years.” Artie gave me a reassuring smile before turning his focus back to his brother. “You should probably explain to her what we’re talking about.”

  If Tate had looked ashamed before when he’d admitted to surviving off discarded food, he looked utterly humiliated and broken now. I wanted to reach out to him, lay my hand on his arm, and tell him he didn’t have to explain anything if he didn’t want to. But I needed to know. It was the whole reason I’d come to California with him in the first place. And I was getting the impression he needed to tell me regardless of whether he wanted to or not.

  “The money wasn’t legitimate.” He was quiet and emotionless without any expressive fluctuation in his voice. “I became a teenaged gigolo. I earned money for Artie and me to eat, and sometimes stay in a motel, by selling myself to older women.”

  Of everything I’d heard thus far today, this was the piece of information that floored me the most. I blinked, because nothing else would’ve been an appropriate response. I wasn’t even sure I believed him.

  My gut told me he wasn’t lying, but it just sounded so improbable, and I was completely unable to imagine reserved Tate doing such a thing. When I managed to locate my voice, it came out in a wavering crackle. “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen when I started.” He jerked his chin toward Artie. “I was fifteen when he took his first client.”

  I gaped at the younger man. “So, you were only…” Tears pricked my eyes, and I couldn’t continue. This had to be a nightmare. A bad movie. Something not close to reality.

  “Twelve? Yes, ma’am.” The left corner of his mouth perked, but I couldn’t return the smile. My stomach was threatening to regurgitate everything I’d eaten in the last twenty-four hours.

  “Okay, I’m not saying anything was wrong with you guys, but…” I shook my head, trying to process my tumbling thoughts. “What in the hell would a grown woman want with a teenaged kid? Or a preteen, for that matter?” I didn’t mean to use the italics in such abundance, but I was suddenly fired up on behalf of the children they had once been being used by sick adult women who absolutely knew better.

  Tate split his hands apart long enough to spread them in a gesture of ignorance before folding them together once more. “Some were unhappy at home. Some had fetishes, I guess you’d say. Some were really lonely and desperate for any human contact they could get.”

  “It’s sick.”

  “Yes. It’s also sad.”

  I curled my lip but didn’t reply. My sympathy for these lonely, unloved, misunderstood women ran about as deep as a puddle because the product of their abuse sat beside me. He was a wonderful man, and Artie appeared to be as well, but there was clearly trauma still affecting their lives today — Tate’s in the form of rigid secrecy, and Artie’s in the form of mortal illness.

  “Is that how you got sick?” I asked. “You contracted it from one of the women?”

  “Almost. I contracted it from a man.”

  Tate’s head dropped like he’d been shot from behind, and it dangled in front of his chest with the limpness of an unattended marionette. He was breathing heavily enough that his back and shoulders rose a clear inch with each inhale before falling back into place. “It was my fault.” He sounded on the verge of weeping.

  “It wasn’t.” Artie ripped a finger across his throat in a gesture commanding Tate to be quiet, then he looked back to me. “I was pulled off the street by a stranger, a man in a banged-up red sports car. He told me that he was taking me for food, so…” He shrugged, but I could see what the telling of this story was costing him. “He got rough. I fought. He got rougher and I blacked out. When I woke up, I was lying in the gutter right where he’d first picked me up.”

  “I shouldn’t have left you out there alone.” A tear was trickling along Tate’s downturned cheek. He didn’t bother to brush it away. “I shouldn’t have let you get into the game in the first place.”

  Artie straightened up. He was more somber than I’d seen him since we met. “If it hadn’t been me, it might’ve been you. I’m just glad it wasn’t you.”

  “It should’ve been me!” The pain in Tate’s exclamation tore through me with blades.

  The frailer man leaped up from the recliner, sending it rocking back and forth with aggressive squeaks. He pointed his forefinger directly at Tate, and there was enough fire in his eyes to make me wonder if this man was truly ill at all. “Stop it, Tyler. I mean it. Don’t you ever say that to me again.” He was practically shaking under his fury. “What happened to me is… not… your… fault. Do you understand me?”

  Tate didn’t answer, but Artie didn’t give him a chance. He rounded on me, and I pulled back slightly. “I’m sorry to act like this, but he needs to stop blaming himself, and I need you to understand that this man is the only reason I’m still alive today.” He reached for Tate’s shoulder and shook it with forceful camaraderie. “He made sure I had food to eat and a place to sleep. When he got the money, he spent it on my treatments. I live in this house because he bought it for me and pays all my bills since I can’t work. I’m getting the best healthcare we know about because of him. You need to know that.”

  “I do.” Adrenaline was thudding in my ears, but a sense of peaceful calm was blooming in my belly where horror and discomfort had been only moments before. The love between the two brothers was profound enough to tell me everything I needed to know about them.

  “Good. Now, come have some zucchini bread and tell me about yourself.” The rage cooled from Artie’s eyes, and I caught a flash of a grin before he turned away from me to head into the kitchen.

  Tate didn’t move right away, and I wasn’t sure if I should follow Artie without him. So, I waited. I didn’t speak, but Tate started nodding like I was offering him well-intentioned advice. After about a dozen nods, he puffed a loud sigh and sat upright. He looked over at me with an apologetic smile.

  “Sorry about that, but I guess that’ll give you a hell of a lot more insight than you had.” He lifted an it-is-what-it-is shoulder.

  “Can I just ask you one more thing for now?”

  He inclined his head. “Sure.”

  “Who’s Tyler?”

  He barked an unprecedented laugh, and I jumped. “I’m Tyler. Tyler Finnigan.” He held out his hand like we were meeting for the first time. I shook it, but I felt weird about it. “Tate McGrath is a stage name, partially because I wanted to separate myself from everything here as much as I could and partially because it sounds way cooler than my real name.”

  I was boggled. Stage names weren’t an uncommon practice amongst actors, but usually, the actors’ real names weren’t difficult to find if one looked. I’d looked, and all I’d ever found was Tate McGrath. He must’ve done an excellent job erasing his former self.

  “Come on.” He heaved himself to his feet and held out his hands to help me up. “Let’s go try this creepy vegetable bread. Maybe I’ll ask Art to dig out the few pictures from our childhood that exist. You wanted to see those, right?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Tate

  The scene unfolding before me was one I couldn’t have imagined even if I’d seen it in a movie, but it was one that left me feeling complete and whole in a way I never had before.

  Artie and Sadie were sitting side by side on stools lining the kitchen island, and they were talking so animatedly together that I could’ve left the room, and neither would have noticed. Spread out in front of them was a loaf of zucchini bread — which was delicious despite its nauseating name — with an uneven stick of butter and a dusty floral photo album. Every so often, their chatter was interrupted by the crackling of plastic picture protectors being flipped and a squeal of giddy laughter from Sadie as she discovered yet another snapshot featuring me with some embarrassing quality.

  “Oh my god, look at your hair!” She smacked the countertop and nearly fell off her stool with her guffaws.

&
nbsp; “Yeah, yeah. It was a cool look at the time.” I shook my head, crossed my arms over my chest, and bit back the smile threatening to show itself.

  I was leaning against the refrigerator looking on at the two new friends and trying to determine what exactly I was feeling. Each time Sadie’s eyes lit up, or she giggled, my stomach flipped. When I saw the way Artie’s posture relaxed in her presence, the back of my neck tingled.

  At one point, the little color my brother had in his face drained away without warning, and Sadie leaped up to retrieve him a glass of ice water before I even had a chance to ask him what was wrong. For that one, my eyes had started stinging, and I’d felt like I was going to cry. I was a rollercoaster of emotions, but none of them were unpleasant. In fact, they were downright wonderful, and I didn’t know what to make of it.

  Maybe I was in love with her. Not falling in love, but already floundering in the depths of it, wading through the rolling hopes and the heady desires. I had no idea if that was possible considering we’d only spent a month together and ten days apart, but love was notoriously unpredictable.

  All I knew for sure as I watched her was that I wanted to kiss her lips, hold her close, hear her laugh, see her smile, and make love to her all at the same time.

  “I can’t believe how different you look.” It took me a moment to realize she was addressing me. She’d extracted a photograph from the flimsy holder and was holding it out for my analysis. I plucked it from her fingertips.

  There I was in all my teenaged glory. A strategically torn baseball cap was perched on top of nearly black curls while those navy blue eyes peered out from beneath the bill. Ripped denim jeans matched the denim cap while a white tank top competed with white shoes for the dirtiest article of clothing on my body.