CHAPTER THIRTEEN #4
Carver’s mouth was dry, and hot tears prickled his eyes. “That’s not fair,” he said, “to me.”
“No,” Nora agreed. “No, it was tremendously unfair. The shame compounded itself. And of course we didn’t know what to do with you. Send you to a therapist? You wouldn’t even be able to tell them what was wrong. You might get off track and spend years chasing your tail.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me,” Carver said, doing his best to keep his rage out of his voice.
Nora nodded. “The older you got, the more impossible it was,” she said. “We thought it would make things worse. You’ve always been more distant from us emotionally than your brother and sister. We worried we might lose you for good.”
“This is the most cowardly stuff I’ve ever heard you say. You would never in a million years let me excuse this type of behavior.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“I always felt like you were holding me to a higher standard. Not just higher than Chip and Conway, but everyone.”
“I can understand that,” Nora said. “But you have to understand, none of this was conscious. You were an innocent child, we knew that, we loved you so dearly. We’ve always loved you dearly.”
Carver’s breath caught. “Then what? What was the fucking problem?”
“In hindsight, it was just, you know, the fact that there was a secret.” She shrugged helplessly and blew her nose again.
“I tried to repress it, but I was afraid aspects would manifest in you that would make it obvious. And anything that was difficult about you felt like a referendum on me. As wonderful as your father is, I know he…” She lowered her voice.
“Whenever your behavior was an issue, he would give me this look. I don’t think he realizes he did that. He never did it with the other two.”
“Maybe that was just your guilty conscience acting up,” Carver said in a chilly voice. “Maybe you imagined it.”
“At times, perhaps,” she admitted.
“Does ‘anything difficult’ include my sexuality?”
“I suppose.”
“Did you suspect I was gay?”
“We discussed the possibility that you liked other boys, yes. Your father never wanted to believe it, but I could tell he saw an effeminacy in you. And we both thought you were vulnerable to it.”
“Vulnerable to what?”
“The idea. The culture.”
He absorbed this. “Do you think being gay is a bad thing?”
“No, no,” Nora said. “It just makes life more difficult, and other people think it’s a bad thing, and I didn’t want that for you.
It felt like piling on. I was worried you’d feel alienated, or have a hard time finding someone, or not be able to have children of your own.
And when you were a child, AIDS was absolutely terrifying, and NAMBLA, and all these things.
We worried about you being a victim or a tragedy.
I thought you did like girls too, and that we could sort of steer you in that direction.
I know this must sound like a lot of sophistry, but I mean it. ”
This was the most honest his mother had ever been with him. Carver wondered where Doug had gone, but hoped he would stay there for a little longer while he interrogated her.
“You have this fixation on gay people getting molested into it, though,” he said.
Nora exhaled, dabbing her eyes again. “Carver, I’m sorry. I grew up in the fifties and sixties, and back then that’s how everyone thought it happened. They taught us that in health class, for God’s sake. And I have known gay men who had their first experiences with older men when they were teens.”
“Well, my first experiences were with Scott, and vice versa,” Carver said, staring her down. “Some right here in this house.”
She rolled her eyes and shrugged this off. “Is that supposed to shock me?”
Carver leaned forward, his elbows on his thighs. “Does it?”
“This is what we did to you,” she said, pointing at him. “This is what I’ll never forgive myself for. I bet you don’t even realize it, but you are snarling at me.”
Carver closed his mouth, which he indeed had not realized was slightly open and baring his teeth. “I was terrified of you finding out,” he said. “Terrified.”
“You should have been, we would have been furious.”
“Because it would have confirmed something was wrong with me? That I was a bad seed?”
“No,” Nora exclaimed.
“Except, yes! You just said that!”
“I know you think we hate you, honey, but I really feel like it’s the other way around.”
“Why didn’t you get a fucking abortion, huh? Why the fuck did you drag me into this mess?”
“Don’t you dare speak that way to me,” Nora said, leaning forward with sudden fury in her eyes.
“No, the hell with that, I deserve to know. I deserved to be aborted, quite frankly.”
“I loved you!” Nora shouted at him. “I was certain you were your father’s, and I loved you!”
“But you didn’t love me enough to tell me the truth. You didn’t love me enough to put your hang-ups about your affair aside. You didn’t love me enough to not let your guilt contaminate my entire fucking life.”
“We tried! We thought we could! Do you know how lucky you are? Millions of people are born into this world with nothing! We gave you the best of everything, you have an incredible life!”
“I have someone else’s life!” He was so furious he couldn’t catch his breath; it came in choppy gasps like he was sobbing. “Because I knew deep down, always, that I was supposed to be someone else!”
“How many times and ways can I say I’m sorry?”
“Don’t bother! You can’t actually do anything about it!
” Carver got to his feet, still trying to breathe, so angry that his vision was growing dark around the edges.
“You can’t do anything! Jesus Christ, you can’t do anything!
” It was sheer agony to realize this. On some childish level, he’d been convinced that his parents were powerful enough to right what they’d wronged, like this was a misunderstanding that just needed to be cleared up, as if he could put all their missing homework scores in the computer and their grade would instantly change.
There was no going back. There was no undoing or redoing anything. He finally knew what was wrong with him, and it was a life sentence.
Carver staggered out into the hallway, his anger giving way to a physical grief which begged to be expressed.
He turned to the first wall he saw and put his fist through the drywall, something he’d never done before.
It felt good. It felt correct. He did it again, then again, littering that stretch of wall with holes until his knuckles were too inflamed to continue.
He stopped and stood there, swaying on his feet, catching his breath.
From behind him, Doug said, “I found the first aid kit, but I don’t think there are enough Band-Aids in here for everything you’ve got going on.”
Carver turned to him woozily and offered him his sore right hand. The knuckles were already swelling, but they weren’t bloody. “This doesn’t need a Band-Aid,” he muttered.
“No, it needs ice,” said Nora, appearing at Doug’s elbow. She sounded surprisingly calm. “But your palms are bloody, what happened?”
“He fell earlier, weren’t you listening?” Doug said.
“I thought that was just with regard to the knee.”
“It’s both,” Carver said. He felt drunk again, or like the weed was finally hitting him — maybe because of how much blood had just rushed to his head and then rushed back out.
“I’ll go get ice,” Doug said to them, and handed the first aid kit to Nora.
She took Carver’s right hand in hers, peeled back the fingers and started swabbing his scraped palm with an antibacterial wipe.
“Do you think I broke my hand?” he said.
“Punching drywall? Probably not. Does it feel like you broke your hand?”
“No, but it hurts.”
Nora manipulated his hand and fingers. “Yell if you get a bad pain.” He did not. “No, I think you’re fine. Your knuckles will swell up, that’s all.”
“Okay,” Carver said. He didn’t know why he was okay with her tending to him now, but he was. He was momentarily calm again. He could feel now that he’d aggravated his rotator cuff, too. “That was stupid.”
“Punching inanimate objects is pretty stupid, yes.”
This comment sounded like it came from experience. “Have you done that?”
Nora nodded. “You don’t realize it, because I learned to hide it early, but you get your temper from me,” she murmured as she continued to clean his bloody palm. “You’re more like me than you know. Much more like me than the other two.”
“I think I knew that, actually.”
Nora let out a soft snort. “What, all the things you don’t like about yourself?”
“No, just a lot of them,” he said, and she shook her head, smiling grimly. “What about him? Did he have a temper?”
“Him.” She met his eyes briefly. She was still beautiful, his mother — she was one of those classic, ageless beauties.
Carver was starting to realize how much bullshit this had allowed her to get away with in her life.
“He did have a temper, yes. More of one than your father does, certainly. I wouldn’t call him angry, though, just intense. And he would never punch a wall.”
Nora almost sounded relieved to be able to discuss this man with him. Carver was suddenly animated by a guilty sort of fascination.
“Why wouldn’t he punch a wall?” he said.
Nora lifted his other palm and began to clean it, very intentionally not looking at him. “Because he was a doctor who was training to be a surgeon. He was finishing a cardiothoracic surgery fellowship when he died.”
Carver was astonished by this for no particular reason. He wanted more and more. “How old was he when he died?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Did he know about me?”
Nora paused in the middle of pulling the plastic wings off a Band-Aid. She looked him in the eye with a great melancholy and said, “Yes.”
“Did he meet —” Carver began to say, but now Doug was coming back, and they both were quiet.
His father waited with the soft ice pack while Nora bandaged the most skinned parts of his palms, then Carver took the ice pack and pressed it against the back of his right hand. He felt instant relief.
“Let’s go sit back down,” Doug said.
He led them as a group to the couch. Carver’s parents sat down on either side of him, and his father began to clean out the wound on his knee.
“By the way,” Carver murmured as he watched him work, “pretty negligent to not tell me I have an immediate family history of fatal cancer —”
“I know, I know,” Nora exclaimed. “We’ve discussed this, over and over. But it’s not a particularly hereditary cancer, and it’s usually very treatable. Plus we do harp on all of you to do self exams and go to the doctor. And you know, you’re the only one of the three who actually goes?”
“You always have been very diligent about that,” Doug said, smoothing a large Band-Aid over his knee. “I don’t think this is going to stay on for long.”
Carver tucked his legs underneath him and looked between them. “Alright, tell me the whole story,” he said.