Chapter 35 Russell
Russell
Unfortunately, I can’t avoid the hospital forever, even though Jules isn’t answering me and I still feel like shit.
I finish up a routine surgery around eleven, wash up, and talk to the family.
When I get back to my office, I find a message from Alena, asking me to meet her in one of the conference rooms. It’s a weird request, but her life has been weird lately.
I grab a protein shake from the fridge and text her back that I’ll be there.
When the elevator door opens, I find her standing outside the room, looking twitchy.
“Everything okay? Has Matt tried to contact you again?”
“Oh—no,” she says, frowning, glancing at the door to the conference room. “Come on. Let’s talk in here.”
I nod and walk through the door, thinking she might be nervous that someone could overhear the conversation.
But the conference room isn’t empty. A single blond head is present at the end of the table, bent over a patient file, and raises up when I walk in.
“Russ?” Calvin asks, his brow knitting together. “What the—”
I turn to the door just as Alena shuts it, wedging a chair until the handle and crossing her arms defiantly. Her voice is muffled through the glass when she says, “You two are staying in there until you figure this shit out!”
“Alena!” Cal says, startling me with his sudden proximity. “I have a surgery this afternoon.”
“And this,” I say, gesturing to the chair under the door handle, “is a fire hazard.”
“Guess you’d better make up fast,” she says, and maybe it’s the stress of her life lately, but she looks completely and totally like she means it. And just deranged enough to pull a stunt like this off.
I turn to Calvin, remember how fucking pissed I am at him, then back to the door, “Let us out, Alena.”
But she’s already settled a pair of headphones over her ears and turned away from us.
“We’ll just have to wait until someone wanders up here and rescues us,” Cal mutters, letting his hands drop to his sides before he walks back over to where he was sitting before. “And hope they don’t commit Alena to the mental health center.”
“Don’t fucking talk about my sister,” I snap, turning to him just in time to catch his eyes rolling. He drops into the chair with an amused huff.
“What?” I prod, feeling some of my anger and frustration bubbling to the surface.
“What, what?”
“The eye rolling. The sigh.”
Cal slowly raises his eyes to mine, giving me a look, “You really want to talk about it?”
I glance at the door and only see my sister’s back through the glass. Letting out a low, quick growl, I scrub my hand over my face and say, “No, but doesn’t look like we have much of a choice, do we?”
Cal stares at me for a moment, then says, “You always do that. Act like you have more claim over things than I do.”
“…are we talking about Alena? My sister?”
“It’s not like sister is this be-all, end-all fucking label,” Cal says, snapping the patient file shut and pointing his hand at me.
“You want to talk about your sister? Then maybe consider this, Russ—which of us has been here, in Chicago, the entire time? Who watched her kids so she could go on an anniversary trip with Matt? And who hired the private detective to finally pin the fucking weasel for cheating on her?”
I can’t stop my mouth from falling open. “…you did? You knew about that?”
Once again, Cal rolls his eyes, “Yeah, in case you were unaware, the other people in your family actually like me.”
“I don’t—not like you, Cal. It’s never been like that.”
“Oh, it hasn’t? It hasn’t always been me against you, fighting for Frank to throw us a fucking bone?”
The way he spits out Frank is new to me and loosens something in my chest. Normally, I might take it as a chance to remind him that Frank is my dad, and that he’d better not talk ill of the dead, but there’s something different about this, now.
“Yeah,” I admit, pulling out a chair and sitting down, placing my palms flat against the surface of the table. “I guess it was, when we were kids. But I thought when I moved away that was pretty much over.”
Cal laughs, “Nah, man. Even when you were gone, Frank never let me forget that your grades were higher than mine. That you did that accelerated program. Even if it was subtle, it was there. Never mind the fact that I’m the one who stuck around, who went with him to chemo every week.”
I wince, the guilt I carry with me worming a little deeper into my chest. “I never said thanks for that, did I?”
“You don’t have to,” Cal mutters. “Frank was my family, too. Even if he clearly didn’t think so.”
“What does that mean?” Unlike other times, this doesn’t come out antagonistic.
Cal raises his eyebrows, “You don’t know? I thought you did. I thought that’s why you were rubbing the whole inheritance thing in my face, at that meeting.”
My brow knits together, “The hell do you mean?”
Letting out a breathy laugh, Cal stares down at the table and says, “Frank didn’t leave me shit, Russ.”
For a second, my brain struggles to catch up. All this time, I’d taken it as a fact that Dad left Cal something in the will, I just had no idea what, specifically, it was. Maybe a property in the city and some cash, a family heirloom or two.
“The hell are you saying?”
“Nothing,” Cal whispers, still staring at the table, his voice thick with emotion. “You know, I might have thought of Frank as a father, but he never thought of me as a son.”
It reverberates through the room, and I have to sit in the discomfort.
I’m used to being around other people, used to trying to figure them out.
It’s not like I’m able to drift through life without considering how the people around me might be suffering, but this is the first time I’ve really thought about Cal, other than as some sort of flattened caricature from my childhood.
He and I have never really talked about my dad.
Never really compared notes on how we were treated.
And in all the time that this weird, competitive space has existed between us, I never thought Cal might have been on the other side, lonely.
Nobody in his corner as he suffered through something pretty fucking similar to what I was going through.
“Well,” I say, all the breath leaving my lungs in a whoosh. “Fuck. I’m sorry. That was shitty of him.”
Cal laughs, and I look away as he swipes a hand under his eyes.
“Yeah. I guess. I mean, when you first left, I thought you were being selfish. That you had this great thing here, and you were just…squandering it. Then, eventually, I think I realized that things with you and Frank might not have been that great, either.”
I think of all the expectations. The lack of social life in high school so I could take a million AP classes.
The pressure to live up to the Burch family name.
At times, I’d assumed Dad was just doing his best. At others, Alena and I clung to one another, feeling completely and totally marooned without another parent there to balance things out.
In a two-parent household—I assume—the adults can balance one another. Maybe, if our mother hadn’t died, she would have been there to argue Alena’s case for attending a school dance, rather than staying home and studying. Perhaps our mother would have softened our dad up.
But I’ll never know.
Now, with my dad dead, the relationship is closed on the way it was. I’ve lost the chance to ever go back and mend it. To tell him how he affected me. To face him head-on.
He’s passed, and every soul in Chicago thinks of him as a saint.
One of the only other people who knows what Frank was really like is sitting across the table from me. And I do have the chance to fix my relationship with him.
Sighing like he’s having a lot of the same thoughts as me, Cal says, “I wasn’t being…
completely honest about my motivations around the clinic.
I mean, yeah, I really do think it’s a huge money suck—I mean, that’s just a fact—but I think there was also a part of me that just wanted, in a way, to scorch the earth for him.
He was always there, always raking in the adoration from people who saw him as this selfless, perfect man.
I never admitted to myself that was part of it. Kind of makes me the villain, I guess.”
I let out a bitter laugh, trying to hang on to the good feelings I had toward my cousin just a minute ago.
If anything, this is just re-enforcing how fucking complicated relationships can be. Especially with family.
“Yeah, well, you got your wish on that, I guess.”
Cal holds my gaze, apology clear there, and somehow, it actually makes me feel better. The knowledge that he and I are, in a way, both collateral damage left in the wake of Franklin Burch.
“You really hired the PI that found that shit on Matt?”
Cal lets out a surprised laugh, and the tension in the room eases. “Yeah. Fucking hated that guy since they got married, honestly.”
“Me too,” I agree, and for the next ten minutes, we make plans to get back at the fucker for messing with Alena.
When we’re leaning back in our chairs, laughing, I add, “Although, it’s not exactly like you know how to pick them…”
“Fuck,” Cal rolls his eyes, “Evony and I have been on and off for a while, but it’s done. I mean, not like I was thrilled to have you back, but I never would have gone to Grande like that. They could bring a suit against you for fraud, man.”
I bite my tongue and look away, knowing that’s true. Just another messy angle of this thing that I haven’t been looking at.
“Should be hard to prove it, though,” Cal adds, giving me a look. “Seeing as how you were giving her moon-eyes at the gala, and I know you’re not that good of an actor.”
I scrub a hand over the back of my neck, not really sure how I came around to talking to Cal about this. “Yeah. Well. I fucked it up big time.”
Cal is quiet, then he says, “Not to go all philosophical, but I think as long as she’s still here,” again, the weight of my father’s absence makes itself known, “I think you still have a chance. No matter how slim it is.”
Since having that talk with Orie, I’ve tried calling her, but I didn’t want to go too far. Didn’t want to show up at her place or force her to see me if she didn’t want to.
But maybe Cal is right. Maybe I still have a chance.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Maybe, in order to make this up to Jules, I have to do something pretty fucking drastic.
“Hey,” I say, glancing at Cal, “how long do you think it would take to get a rush order on a paternity test?”
“With our last name?” Cal asks, his eyebrows raising, “No fucking time at all.”