Chapter 25
LEGAL MAMBO [NO. FIVE]
Time passed differently after Papa died.
Weekends were no longer short; every hour of Oscar’s Saturday and Sunday stretched out for what felt like days, crawling into Mondays, the long-awaited hour that would tear him from that cold empty home where his mother’s yelling echoed off the walls with no fleecy warm blanket left to muffle it anymore.
So Oscar wasn’t so surprised when every minute began to feel like an hour the moment they stepped out of that hospital with nothing more to do but wait.
Aaron said that a diagnosis could take years for some people.
Dr. Andrews had told them they’d have answers soon, that he worked with patients like Gemma on a daily basis—they had come to the right place.
He’d told them not to worry, that the tests were going to be precautionary, but Oscar had been born anxious.
Two days had passed since they’d gone for Aaron’s last scan, but to Oscar, they had felt like two months, like every second he’d had to endure between being cleared for his top surgery and having it.
He hadn’t known back then how in love he would be straight after, how every follow-up with his surgeon in the months that followed would be a date, almost, with Aaron scheduling his at the same time so they’d go and have pancakes and coffee after.
Oscar wished he was still panicking about Aaron standing him up for their date, wished he was still picking on Aaron about his long-term commitment to the dark bitter drink he loved.
Instead, Oscar had spent hours trying to follow a YouTube video so he could repair the coffee machine, because someone had said in one comment on a sub of a sub of a thread that coffee could help with the kind of dementia Aaron’s mother had.
So now he poured him cups every other hour, the ones he spent at home, at least.
Aaron had insisted on working as much as he could, on paying the greater portion of the debt they now had with Lucas and Philip.
They’d argued about it, too, sometime in between dinner the night before Aaron’s tests and the hospital, their stomachs grumbling because Aaron had been instructed to fast.
“You’re not the only stubborn ass in this house, Spike,” Aaron had said.
“Clearly not,” Oscar had replied.
It hadn’t lasted long. Five minutes later, he’d been wrapped around him on the couch, kissing him on the temple and cheek, brushing his hair from his forehead, telling him how much he loved him.
Aaron was at work now, stocking shelves and cleaning fridges for Paulie, after Oscar had asked for a favor.
That had been another fight; there’d been so much of it lately, the thread that held them to one another taut as a guitar string.
And Oscar knew it needed tuning, that the notes were just a fraction off, and their music was discordant. But there would be time for that.
Fuck, Oscar hoped they had time.
He hadn’t believed in God since that day Papa had clutched his chest on the sidewalk, but Oscar prayed day and night, to every deity he’d ever heard of, to the universe.
Surely, the universe existed. Oscar lived in it, breathing proof, a speck of dust in a galaxy among many others, but if he was a planet, then Aaron was his sun, and if Aaron was a planet, then Oscar was a moon, and fuck did he believe in that.
The beta feedback would be shit. Oscar’s head was as far from the game as it could be.
He’d definitely passed a couple of NPCs without interacting, and he hadn’t even stopped at the market.
Maybe he’d start over, not even log the hours, because it was hardly fair that Joe slaved away at two jobs while he did…
this. Because he hadn’t even sat in on a single lecture since Aaron’s appointment.
And he hadn’t told him about it, either.
Oscar’s mind wasn’t in the game or on his degree. He wasn’t even sure what was going through his mind when he left his apartment and got on that bus. But he knew what he was thinking when he got off it.
The school gates were still open when Oscar passed. It had been years now since he’d come to this side of town, years since he’d walked through the winding not-quite-suburban streets lined with terraced houses that sat wall-to-wall on either side.
As a grown man, Oscar knew that their neighbors would have heard each and every one of his fights with his mother, each and every telling off he’d received, each and every ugly curse he’d hurled her way. But he didn’t bow his head as he made his way up the path to the front door of their house.
Oscar’s heart clicked in time with the key, slipping down to the pit of his stomach as the door gave way, cracking open and filling his lungs with the taste of many yesterdays before.
It smelled the same.
Oscar had changed in every way a person could, but his childhood home still smelled like citrus floor detergent and polished wood. The air still tasted like choking masked as home cooking.
He stood out on the doorstep, even though the door had swung halfway into the house. Oscar’s feet were frozen, stuck to the bristly Welcome carpet in front of a home that had made him feel anything but welcome for the last years he’d lived there.
Among the characteristics Oscar shared with his mother was an inclination to walk around barefoot. The balls of her feet clapped against the hardwood, and Oscar still couldn’t move.
“Who is it? Lina?”
Her voice echoed, and Oscar couldn’t move.
She appeared, and Oscar remained still.
A memory flashed across his mind, back to before the ugly things had started.
The occasion was a mystery to him now, packed away in the archives of forgotten things, but he remembered Papa’s hand wrapped around his shoulder and the scent of plasticine on his small fingers.
He remembered his mother’s face lighting up as he arrived from the birthday party Papa had picked him up from.
It was one of the last times Oscar remembered running in her direction.
His heartbreak didn’t echo in the chasm of his chest, caved in too deep from all the digging, all the carving out Oscar had done trying to eradicate the traces of this woman from a nervous system that stuttered every time he recalled her face.
She was standing in front of him now, and Oscar didn’t want to run to her. He barely even wanted to run away. He felt…nothing.
And maybe this was worse than all the bile and vitriol he’d held inside for so many years. Oscar swallowed hard, wishing he knew why his entire body had decided to mute and mask his feelings, when weeks before he’d cost Aaron a job on her account.
Right. Aaron.
Oscar stepped over the threshold, kicking off his shoes more out of habit than anything else, and pushed the door shut, sealing himself in with what he’d foolishly believed to be his worst nightmare.
He knew now what his worst nightmare would feel like.
His mother was a level two boss compared to this looming thing threatening his future with Aaron.
“I need something of Papa’s,” Oscar said. His voice sounded deeper to his own ears, new to this house, to these walls that had tried and failed to contain him.
“What are you doing here?” It wasn’t a scream. Maybe something had broken the last time they’d stood within spitting distance of each other. Maybe she’d used up her poison, and he’d used up his fuck-yous.
“I just said. Where are his things?” Oscar asked.
“Where they’ve always been.”
And for the first time in his life, Oscar pitied her.
In this moment, which would pass like a November wind, Oscar and his mother stood in a hallway together and didn’t scream.
In this moment, which would for a time sit outside the boxes of lost things, Oscar and his mother were two people in love with people who were better than them, people who had suffered far more than they ever deserved.
And in their own different ways, they both loved Papa, if not each other.
Oscar’s eyes skirted past her to the staircase, fixing on the same carpet he’d stepped on every single day of his childhood to go up to his room.
This time it was not there he went. As Oscar turned from the top step into the hallway, he headed to his parents’ room, where his mother had kept a shrine for the husband whose joy she’d slowly drained, the man they’d both consumed with all their screaming.
When Oscar came down, she was still standing in the hall, closer to the door, waiting. Her eyes traveled all over his body, searching for the big box it wouldn’t find.
“I only needed this,” Oscar said. Her breath caught in her throat when she finally looked down into the open palm of his hand. “I’m his son. It should be mine.”
Oscar braced himself for the screaming, for those slim typist’s fingers to come out and snatch it right out of his grip.
She could try. But Oscar knew that in every version of events, she would fail.
That was the thing about clawing one’s way through mud and tar and shit to scrape together a self that made sense—it grew the sharpest nails in the world, and Oscar was not afraid to use them.
“Your father would have liked that,” his mother said instead. It hit him worse than anything ill she could have spat his way, worse than the ugliness she’d spewed in his face about his body.
“He would have liked me,” Oscar replied. He imagined Christina nodding in the corner, his sister clapping, Grandma cheering on quietly, as he looked his mother in the eye. “He was always better than you.”
“Your father was better than both of us, and we didn’t deserve him. You certainly didn’t, for all the trouble you gave him.” There she was, the mother he remembered, the needles poking through the veneer of powdered sugar she wore in public. Maybe she’d remembered they were standing in her house.
“I did,” Oscar said, nodding. “And you made his life hell every minute he spent with you. I’m going to do better. I am. I am doing better.”