Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
brUNO
The estate appears at the end of the long drive, dark stone with deep-set windows and gloomy elms pressing close on either side; the spire with its one pale eye winks in the September light.
I’ve always dreaded coming back here. It used to be because of my father.
Today it’s about what I have to tell my brothers when I get inside.
I’ve kept it from them for so long. What was I thinking? Kelsey wasn’t wrong about me—I shut things down. I don’t let things get air and light. I try to regiment everything down to the smallest tick.
Just like my father.
Images of me as my father and my father as me keep playing in my head since the meeting with my mother. Me doing to Kelsey what he did to me and my mom and my brothers.
That will not happen to Kelsey. I will not do that to Kelsey, ever.
Now I’ve made sure of it.
He believed the world should run exactly to his specifications, and if he could just get it tight enough, quiet enough, orderly enough, then everything would be all right.
My mother got Russell and Adrian out before he finished making them. She didn’t get me in time. Standing there, listening to her, she may as well have been describing me.
I’ve turned out just like our father.
And it just got worse.
It got violent.
As it turns out, my brothers aren’t at the house. A staff member I don’t recognize directs me out to the vineyard. She offers to drive me, but I prefer to take the walk.
The path out back is beautifully cared for; that’s certainly a change. My brothers have replaced the pavers. I have this thought that I should spend more time here, support them in other ways. Do something more than just throwing money at them.
I had this thought that Kelsey would love it here, but I push it out of my mind.
It was good Sadie still had the PI report. She really does hate to throw files away.
I reached out to her on the plane flight home from Albuquerque while Kelsey was snoozing in the seat next to me. I’d never thought to look at the report until that day with Loretta.
I knew I might need it; Kelsey isn’t one to give up without a fight.
Well, it was some ammunition. The look of betrayal in her eyes flashes into my mind, nauseating me.
The grapevines are heavy with late-summer fruit.
The rows run long and thick, and I can hear voices before I see them—workers moving between rows.
A crate thuds down somewhere to the left.
I go to the corner and find Russell crouched at the base of a vine.
I hang back and watch him pull a grape off a cluster and pop it into his mouth, tilting his head, evaluating the ripeness, maybe.
Adrian is standing in the shade of a trailer, squinting at a printed sheet.
“Hey,” I say.
Russell looks up. “Bruno.” He straightens, handing off the cluster to the worker beside him. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks,” I say.
Adrian strolls over, looking wary. “What are you doing here?”
“We three need to talk.”
Adrian and Russell exchange glances. Adrian folds the sheet and tucks it under his arm. “What about?”
“Something important. A family thing.”
Adrian goes over and talks to one of the guys out there, and the three of us walk out of the rows of vines to a small picnic table off to the side of the trailer.
It’s just before dinner, but the September heat is still blazing.
You can see the back of the main house from here.
And beyond that, the ocean. To the other side is more vineyard area disappearing into the rolling hills.
I trace the grain on the top of it with my finger, then look up, meeting their eyes—Russell’s, then Adrian’s. “Mom is alive.”
Russell’s eyes widen. “What?”
Adrian scowls, suspicious.
“She didn’t die,” I say. “The drowning was staged. She’s been living in a dusty little village in New Mexico ever since. I don’t have every detail of how she managed it, but I do know why she did it.”
Russell blinks. “Staged. You’re telling us her death was staged.”
“Come on,” Adrian says.
“It was a scheme to get us away from our father. She was watching us become—well, you know how Dad is. She explained it. I saw her this week. You can hear it from her yourself.”
“So you saw her.” Adrian sounds angry. “You were with her.”
I tell them about our grandparents’ threats and her reasoning about military school.
“She let us think she was dead?” Russell says. “No. That is bullshit.”
Adrian scowls at him. “Have you met our father? We hated spending even a week here for Christmas and summer. Could you imagine living here full-time?”
“I don’t care. I would’ve liked to know my mother.”
“That’s because you don’t remember living with him full-time,” Adrian growls. “It sucked.”
“Russell, you’re going to have to make your own peace with her,” I say. “She did the best that she could.”
Russell looks at me, wild-eyed. “So you think it’s cool that she let us think she was dead?”
“I think a man like that is toxic and destructive to everyone around him. I think a man like that kills joy and life. And I know a man like that has no business having a family. He should’ve gone out and lived by himself in a hut somewhere so as not to inflict himself on the world.
I think our mother did the best she could. ”
My brothers look surprised by the vehemence of my words.
“Wait.” Adrian blinks at me. “Did she reach out to you?”
“No, I reached out to her.”
“How did you find out she was alive?”
“I knew for a while.”
“For a while?” Russell gusts out.
I explain about the school trip and seeing her through the window at the gas station. And how I set a PI on it a little while later.
“What the fuck?” Adrian says. “So all this time you knew.”
I trace a grain in the table. “The way I saw it all these years was that she didn’t want us.
She didn’t seem to think we were worth saving from him, and it really messed me up, thinking all that.
My reasoning was that I didn’t want that for you two.
I wanted you to have the memory of a mother who loved you and wanted you. ”
Russell just stares at the vines, a muscle in his neck tightening and releasing over and over again. “That wasn’t your call.”
“I know.”
“You could’ve told us,” Adrian says. “We could’ve figured it out.”
“That was the call that I made,” I say.
“Not much of an answer,” Adrian snaps.
“That’s the answer that I have. I’m still just figuring it all out myself.”
Russell rubs a callus on his palm. “So one day you just up and decide to pay her a visit?”
“It was Kelsey’s idea. She wanted me to get our mother’s side of the story. I wasn’t interested. I wanted to keep that box shut. I didn’t think anything could come of it, but Kelsey felt strongly that there was more to the story.”
“You told Kelsey and not us?”
“There’s something else that I should confess to you as long as I’m doing this. It was because of Mom that I didn’t want to do the documentary. I didn’t want her face plastered over national TV.”
“But you also had to go to Kelsey’s sister’s wedding,” Russell says.
“I didn’t have to go. It was bullshit, actually.”
“I don’t understand,” Adrian says.
“It was a farce. Just like the anniversary celebration.”
Adrian studies my face. “That was no farce. I had dinner with you two.”
“It was fake at first, then it was real for a little while, so I can see how you might think it was real, but we were just helping each other out.”
Russell hits Adrian in the arm. “I told you it was bullshit.”
“No, it was real,” Adrian says. “I know what I saw. You guys were good together—really good. You better not have dumped her.”
“I’m not relationship material. If you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty much just like our dear old dad.”
Russell looks at me like I sprouted another head. “What? You dumped her because you think you’re like Dad? You’re not like Dad.”
“You are so full of shit,” Adrian says.
“You don’t know,” I say.
“What the fuck do you mean I don’t know?” Adrian says. “Who the fuck else would know besides us? We know you. We sure know Dad.”
“Unfortunately,” Russell says. “God, you think you’re like him?”
Adrian says, “You’re a pain in the ass, but you’re nothing like him. For one thing, Dad didn’t care about us.”
“You don’t get it,” I say.
“Fuck right off with that,” Russell says.
“You’re not him,” Adrian says. “You stood between him and us. When he was in a mood, it went through you first. You took the heat, and you made it so we could hang back. You always stepped between us.”
“That’s not character,” I say. “That’s birth order.”
“You funded this vineyard,” Russell says, “and you never once tried to run it. Dad would’ve wanted to call the shots.”
“Agree to disagree,” I say. “I’ll email you Mom’s contact information. She knows you might be reaching out.”
Russell stands. “You’re not Dad.”
Adrian says, “Remember how it would feel just for him to look at us? I’d feel queasy. That is not you.”
I stare at the horizon, remembering his cold glare.
Russell says, “Do you remember the Christmas Dad sent all our Christmas presents home with the servants and made us go up to our rooms?”
Adrian exhales. “Father of the year.”
I point at Russell. “You knocked over your root beer, and he thought it was part of a diabolical plan.”
Russell holds up his hands. “Excuse me, I was six.”
Adrian turns to me. “And as soon as everybody went to sleep, you smuggled us out of our rooms, having somehow nabbed all the carrots from the kitchen without anybody noticing, and we went over to the Carringtons’ farm and fed them to the horses.”
“I think that’s still my favorite Christmas,” Russell says.
I roll my eyes. “You need some better Christmases.”
“No, it was my favorite Christmas too,” Adrian says.
“Out in the dark with you two feeding those horses. And it was that kind of snowy where it makes everything bright even in the middle of the night. And all the steam from the horses’ nostrils.
And you had our back, Bruno. You made a container so we could be free and safe. ”
I look down at my hands, feeling overwhelmed with the memory of that night. I’d gotten in so much trouble. “It doesn’t mean I’m not capable of the same damage,” I say after a while. “In different ways.”
“Please.” Adrian gives me his famous withering glance. “We’re all capable of a little damage. The point is, you’re not him. It’s idiotic to think you are.”
“Have you been to my yacht?” I say. “The strict severe silence? Everything running meticulously? The crew terrified of me? I run it like a prison camp, and that type of behavior only escalates.”
“That’s funny, it didn’t seem to me like you were running your yacht like a prison camp when I was there.”
“Well, I ran it like one before Kelsey came.”
“So you were a grumpy motherfucker, and then you got a girlfriend, and you got less grumpy and antisocial.”
“Your girlfriend helped you saw off some of your rough edges and helped you evolve a little.” Russell looks nearly disgusted. “Yeah, that really sounds like Dad. In FUCKING OPPOSITE WORLD.”
“And coming to us with this confession?” Adrian says. “Being open to the possibility that maybe it was a messed-up decision not to confide in us? Bro, do you know what Dad would do with it?”
We all know what Dad would do with it. Use it like a club with barbed wire wrapped around it.
“You seriously broke up with her to protect her from yourself?” Adrian says. “Is this actually what you’re telling us here?” I’ve never heard him sound so incredulous.
“Maybe,” I say.
Russell groans. “For fuck’s sake.”
Adrian gives me a hard look. “One question. Do you still have the yacht working like a prison camp? Now that she’s gone?”
I think about the conversation I had with Annie today about investing. And working with Phillip on a new menu for the week. Saying good night to Fernando when he’s on watch. The new paid-time-off plan. “I guess not.”
“You fucked up with that girl,” Russell says. “You need to undo that shit.”
The vineyard stretches out long in the late light. Workers move between rows. I think about the way I handed her the PI report.
I let her think I conducted that investigation in order to be sure about her, rather than an impulsive decision before I really knew her.
My pulse bangs in my ears. I let her think that I didn’t believe in her. I let her think that I didn’t know her beautiful heart.
“It might be too late.”
“Fuck off,” Adrian says. It’s a profound communication, and it hits deep.