Chapter 3 #2
He’s significantly smaller than I am, both in height and weight.
I don’t understand how he made it out of that car alive when it looks like one wrong move could break his body in half.
But even with all the swelling, scratches, and bandages, he’s still the most perfect person I’ve ever seen.
I’ve never been anything less than awed by the sight of him.
By those first four words. “This is your brother.”
He gasps his next breath. It’s the inflow before a thunderstorm. His face crumples with pain as his hands rise to hide his eyes. His frail body is wracked with silent sobs. I’ve broken the levy.
Part of me wants to, but I don’t touch him. I can’t. Not allowed. I don’t speak. Shut your mouth. The next four words. “Stay away from him.”
I wait for what seems like forever for him to get himself together and stop crying until it starts to feel like that might never happen.
It looks so unbearably painful with all his injuries, but I’m helpless.
I’m at a loss. Out of my depth. No part of me can relate to his pain.
It exists inside a world I left behind without a backward glance, and I can’t go back there. I won’t survive it.
I was right before. I shouldn’t be here.
“Let me—I’m just—I’ll go get someone else.”
I leave him there. Alone. Again. Not only do I walk out of his room when he’s crying, but I also go to the nurse's station and announce that he’s in pain and emotional. I think I might even suggest a psychiatrist. I barely comprehend what I’m saying.
I can only imagine what they think of me, but it would pale in comparison to what I think about myself.
I don’t stop there, either. I leave. For the second day in a row, I leave my brother alone and terrified so I can have a panic attack in peace.
It passes after far too many minutes while I clutch my chest and fight for breath in the privacy of my car. Once it’s trickling out of my system, I drive back to the house, unable to get the image of him out of my mind. The way his features fell apart, his dark eyes, his pain. My utter uselessness.
There have to be other people he can call, right?
People who will sit there while he cries and tell him they love him—that they’ll be there for him no matter what?
People who can withstand the earth-shaking aftershocks of his grief?
I’m a complete stranger to him. I don’t belong in that room or at his side.
I tell myself he’ll be okay. That it’s going to be better this way. He doesn’t need me hanging around, wordless, clueless, reminding him of everything he’s lost.
There is a massive amount of paperwork when you become sole heir of something.
I spend half the next day in Phillip Haskell’s law office while he explains to me, in detail, everything I’ve inherited.
I voice record the meeting. I take notes.
I still can’t wrap my head around it. This is pretty far out of my wheelhouse.
I was not groomed to inherit on this scale. I was raised to be quiet and disappear.
But here we are.
Basically, I inherited the majority share of a software company my father founded when I was an infant. InVivion makes a thing that makes computers go fast. It makes a lot of other things, too, but with two degrees in art history, I have no context for understanding any of it.
The company ends up being around eighty percent of my inheritance.
The rest is the “estate,” which entails around two billion dollars’ worth of off-shore accounts, my childhood home, a handful of vacation houses, and an insane stock portfolio.
The good news is, I’m no one’s guardian.
Now that Connor’s awake, he can make his own medical decisions, but Haskell, in his non-helpful, roundabout way implies I have a moral obligation to make sure he’s taken care of.
His exact words in the recording are, “We don’t get to choose our relations, we do get to choose our relationships.
” Again—he’s full of helpful tips. It isn’t that I disagree with him, but I don’t know what I could possibly do. Technically, Connor’s an adult.
I’ll have to suck it up and reach out to Tristan when I get back to the house.
He should have some insider knowledge as to what Connor’s actual social resources are, and that’ll be a start as I try to figure out how to make sure he’s taken care of until he comes into his trust fund, which, for whatever reason, doesn’t happen until he turns nineteen in November.
Also, I plan to sell that fucking house as soon as humanly possible, moral obligations or not.
I don’t actually have to reach out to Tristan, though. To my complete surprise, he shows up at the house when I’m on hold with a realtor. I’m in the backyard, pacing around the pool when he comes through the back gate and startles at the sight of me.
I hang up the phone, both shocked and relieved to see him. “Hey.”
“You scared me. I didn’t know you’d be here,” he says with a hand on his throat.
“I wasn’t expecting you either.” I put my phone in the back pocket of my shorts.
It’s already vibrating again. The realtor calling me back.
I ignore it and open the patio door for Tristan.
I follow him into the house, doing my best to keep my eyes off his legs.
His shorts are very short and tight. White gym shorts.
They’re causing me to have the kinds of thoughts I usually only have in a gym full of similarly hot men.
“I came to pick up some things for Connor,” he says.
“How’s he doing?”
Tristan drops his keys and phone on the kitchen island like he’s done it a thousand times before. He takes a seat on one of the barstools. “Physically, a lot better. I think they’re gonna let him come home tomorrow.”
I can’t imagine any scarier words. Not even Tristan’s lean, bare legs can hold back the panic those words induce.
I was about to sit with him, but I can’t anymore.
I run both my hands through my hair and try to take a deep breath.
The last week of my life comes at me like a tidal wave.
The phone call during my lunch break in Seattle, the scraping together of money to buy a last minute plane ticket, the memory of Connor’s swollen eyes, the lawyer, the ICU, fucking eucalyptus—everything all at once overwhelms me.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I really do think this is it—I’m choking.
I pull the neck of my t-shirt so hard the fabric tears.
“I can’t be here,” I say without meaning to.
Tristan’s eyes go wide with alarm. “What do you mean?”
My mounting anxiety breaks through the wall I’ve tried to build around it. “I mean I don’t want to be here. I don’t belong here. I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t fucking be here.”
His head rears slightly back at the rising volume of my voice and the maddened gesture I make toward the floor, but he keeps his cool. He pats the seat next to him then reaches for my hand. “Sit down. Come talk to me.”
Taking his hand, I follow his instructions exactly.
I sit down and start talking, aiming all my words at his insanely perfect face.
No one should have to watch my guts spill, but he’s here, and he’s listening, and so they do.
My hands move like I’m painting a wall-sized landscape as, once again, I tell him things I’ve never told another soul.
“I totally fucked up with Connor. He’s never gonna want to see me again, and I have no idea how to help him, and I hate this house.
I have the worst memories imaginable here.
I still have nightmares about it. I can’t sleep here—” I shake my head.
I try to catch my breath and moderate my tone.
“And I have no idea how to plan a funeral or sell real estate. In terms of the funeral, what do I do? Send out invitations? How does it even work? I’ve never even been to one, and I’m not—Never mind.
I’m just saying, I don’t want to be here. ”
“I get it.”
Frustrated, I give him a look. “No—you don’t. Nobody ever actually gets it.”
“Sell the house, Archer. Just get rid of it.”
“I’m not sure I can—”
“Of course you can,” he says, all sincere earnestness and his hand on my knee.
It’s that—his hand—that snaps me back into sanity.
“And for the funeral,” he continues in that low, even voice.
“You go to a funeral home, give them way too much money, and they take care of everything. They’ll even try to get you to plan your own funeral while you’re there, so you know—two birds. ”
“What? How do you know that?”
“My grandfather died last year.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“Thanks.”
I blow out a huff of air, and he sits back, taking his hand with him.
“Also, just—fucking sorry in general,” I say.
“Hey, it’s all right. You’re not the only one melting down this week. Not by a long shot. But seriously. Just sell the house. Get rid of it if you don’t want it. A good realtor can handle that, too.”
I nod mindlessly, grateful for the green light he seems to be giving me. I’ll take what I can get. Anything that tells me something I’m doing or feeling is the right thing. “Do you know where Connor’s gonna stay?”
“Are you going back to Seattle?”
The lawyer asked me the same thing, and I didn’t have an answer, but now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I almost shout, “I live there! I have a life there. I have a job and friends and a girlfriend and an apartment—all my stuff is there.” I point in the general direction of the Pacific Northwest.
“You have a girlfriend?”
I frown, thrown off. Completely derailed, actually.
“I mean, I’d just think she’d be here with you given all that’s happened,” he adds quickly.
I start a few words without finishing them, but finally manage, “She’s not that kind of girlfriend.” I haven’t spoken to Carrie since that one call where I let her know where I was. I can’t even remember how many day ago that was. Three? Five?
Tristan’s eyes narrow, and he appears to study me a moment. I heat up a little under the scrutiny. He sits straighter, like he’s decided something about me. “What?” I finally ask.
“Nothing,” he says. “Connor can stay with me, but I’m leaving for school at the end of summer. He’ll need a place to go when I leave.”
“He can’t go with you?” I ask.
“He hasn’t graduated yet,” Tristan says, with a steady voice and gaze. “His mom held him back in third grade. Sorry. Your mom.”
I’m not even a little surprised.
“But you’re the same age?”
He shakes his head and says without blinking, “I’m older.”
This is news. “By how much?” I ask.
“I’m nineteen.”
My posture relaxes. Nineteen is still young, but I’m only twenty-three.
For a few more weeks anyway. Not that it matters.
Tristan is still my brother’s best friend, and no matter how well we click or whatever, nothing can happen, and my desperate brain needs to stop thinking about it.
If I want to hook up, I’m sure Austin has as many options for that as Seattle does.
“So…” He glances away. “He’ll need a place to stay in late August. Changing schools after everything that’s happened… I don’t think he should have to do that, and I want him to graduate.”
The proprietary way he says it—like Connor is his, and he’s the one who’s really going to take care of him pulls me up short. “Right.”
“So maybe you could stick around a while longer,” he says, in the form of a suggestion more than a question.
“Long enough for him to figure something out longer, or long enough for him to finish high school?” My words are smooth, but my thoughts are jagged.
I’m trying to get my head around any length of time—one more day even.
Suddenly I miss my bed—the futon in my downtown studio apartment in my favorite city in the world—with an ache in my chest. Girlfriend might be an over exaggeration of my relationship with Carrie, but I miss hanging out with her, too.
I have hundreds of dollars’ worth of art supplies I really like, friends who lighten me up, and a job I don’t completely hate.
“Well, I don’t know how long his rehab’s gonna take. At least until then, though.”
“Rehab?”
“For his leg,” Tristan says from what I’m guessing must be a well of infinite patience.
I have no idea what he’s talking about. I don’t really want to know. “Right,” I whisper, feeling stupid and underprepared.
“Why do you look like your world is ending?”
I meet Tristan’s color-saturated eyes again. They don’t hold so much sympathy or pity as they do understanding. I’m surprised to see it. It’s not what I expect. None of this is. “You’ll be around the rest of the summer?”
His eyebrows lift, and his cheeks get those spots of pink in them. “Yeah. At my parents’ house.”
“Where’s that?”
“Barton Hills.”
“And Connor can stay with you for now?”
He nods. “Of course. I’ll give you the address. Where will you be?”
Nervous at being put on the spot, I laugh. “Can I have a minute to think about it?”
“Can I give you one more thing to think about first?” he asks.
I sigh heavily. “Sure.”
“You should talk to your brother.”