Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Coming out of the bathroom from his turn in the shower, Myles found Jet and Shelly both asleep on his bed. On the TV tray, glowing blue aliens swung through floating islands on Jet’s computer screen.
It was easy enough to move the laptop and set it aside, but Myles was loath to wake either of the kids.
They looked too peaceful to disturb. The afternoon had been a good one.
Jet looked as close to happy as he’d seen him since he’d found out his mother was dying, so waking them now felt like asking for trouble.
He considered sleeping in Jet’s bed, but one glance behind the divider changed his mind. With clothes strewn across the end of the bed and papers and coloured pencils spread everywhere, he neither wanted to, nor felt the right, to move Jet’s things.
Curiosity got the better of him, though, and he glanced over the pages full of drawings. Some of them were clearly Shelly’s. Odd that Jet kept all his sister’s drawings, given how vocal he was about how unsettling he thought they were.
His own drawings held much more of Myles’s interest. He held one up to the lamplight to study it.
It was a human head, drawn from a tangle of coloured pencil lines, not unlike Shelly’s scribbles, but with intent.
After a moment, Myles recognized Natalie’s face in the depths of the myriad lines.
The more he looked at it, the easier it was to see his sister’s likeness.
Another picture was of Shelly bent over Emma, the cat who even looked calico in the jumble of colour on the page. There was one of Kreed, his bushy beard making his image easy to untangle, and another of Ozzy.
It was amazing enough to Myles that Jet had the talent to make any drawing of a face take on the distinct characteristics of one person or another. More interesting to him was this mimic of Shelly’s tangled, nonsensical style that managed to pull some kind of order from that chaos.
The image of Ozzy kept his attention the longest. There was nothing particularly distinctive about his face.
Not like Kreed’s beard or Tris’s pixie-like delicacy, or even Lucky’s wide, bright smile.
Ozzy was decidedly average, with short dark hair, brown eyes, and a stubbled jaw.
You had to know him well, spend time with him, to understand the depth in his eyes.
Most people never saw it at all. He was quiet, strong, and deadly deep.
Jet caught that undertow in his expression perfectly, and Myles couldn’t even pinpoint how, exactly.
Or maybe he was superimposing his own ideas onto a drawing.
With a sigh, he dropped the picture back to the bed, turned off the lamp, and left Jet’s space alone.
He was far too big for the child’s cot tucked under the dormer in Shelly’s tidy if modest corner of the room. He had no desire to sleep under the blue and purple pony comforter anyway—the one thing he’d found stuffed into her little pink suitcase when they had arrived.
Jet had sacrificed half of his shoe bins for her clothes and toys, Myles had later realized, when he noticed that Jet wore the same few pairs of shoes over and over, instead of showing off his vast array. That’s what big brothers did. They made sacrifices so their little sister could be happy.
Jet got that right. Myles had waited almost too long to be the big brother Natalie had deserved. But she had done an outstanding job raising Jet. Myles had a long way to go if he hoped to do half that job with Shelly.
He wasn’t going to do it tonight.
Carefully, he eased a pillow from Shelly’s side of his bed and settled on the couch in the center of the room, using a blanket from its back to cover his legs.
He supposed he could go down to the extra room off the kitchen, as he sometimes did when he didn’t want to do the stairs, but he was already up here, and the good day he’d had with the kids made him want to stick close.
He had half a thought to call Steven but decided against it. He’d been at the man’s house every day that week. While Steven hadn’t seemed to mind, it smacked a bit of that obsessive behavior Ozzy had always pushed back against.
Lucky still insisted he deserved to be happy, but at what cost? If he replaced his obsession with drink with one for Steven, was that being happy? Or was it giving himself a panacea for the void Nat had left in his life, just when he’d thought he was getting her back?
“Uncle Myles?” Jet’s sleepy voice almost startled him off the couch.
He grunted and sat up. “Hey.”
“Sorry. You want your bed?”
“Nah, you’re good.” He could see Jet’s head silhouetted in the window of the dormer where his own bed was shoved. Outside, the branches of one of the oaks in the yard tangled up the light from the streetlamps, turning the night sky into an abstract mirror of Jet’s drawings.
“Didn’t mean to take your spot,” Jet whispered.
“Yours is a mess anyway. I’m good here.”
“Bed downstairs,” Jet reminded him.
“I know. I’d rather stay here tonight.”
“Mmm.” Jet flopped back. “’Kay. Thanks.”
“Sure.”
“It was good. Today, I mean.”
“Yeah, Jet. It was.”
“Invite Steven next time.”
Myles sighed. “He won’t come.”
Jet’s yawn could be heard across the room. “He might. For you.”
Would he, though? Myles had his doubts.
“Y’should try, My-my. Y’never know.”
Myles snorted, almost told Jet not to call him that, but didn’t. “Maybe.”
“Never know if y’don’t try.”
“Go back to sleep.”
“Yeah. Night.”
“Night.”
For a while, Myles listened to the kids’ breath in the otherwise silent room. He watched the oak tree’s shadows move across the ceiling. He imagined a world where Steven’s face showed up in pictures like the ones he’d sent today.
He wondered, again, if he was reaching for Steven instead of a bottle, and still didn’t have an answer. Now he’d had the thought, he could practically watch sleep fade into oblivion.
He lay back down, fingers clenched around his blanket.
If he focused on breathing, one long breath in, one long breath out, he could keep his hands from shaking.
If he had a sponsor to call, he might have done that, but the sponsor he’d had in Calgary had suggested he find another the day she’d checked herself into a residential rehab center.
People were human, and Myles got it. Setbacks happened. He didn’t fault her for it, but her timing had sucked. He’d been too busy worrying about Natalie, the kids, hospice, her estate, lawyers, just trying not to drown every day, to go looking for someone else to listen to his problems.
Maybe he wished now that he’d taken the time. He couldn’t decide which he wanted more, a drink or Steven. The drink he knew wasn’t healthy. He had no idea if his relationship with Steven was.
“You used to know how to deal with this shit,” he whispered into the dark.
The room remained silent. Still. The lack of response was a bit ominous if he was honest. When had he come to expect some kind of response to his musings from the bricks and mortar and timbers?
“I did used to know,” he said again, a little louder.
The sounds the house made reminded him of wind in telephone wires, the sounds of distant traffic, an unquiet city street at night.
He had no idea how she made those noises.
Air in the plumbing? Crackling wiring in the walls?
Maybe it didn’t matter how, only the message behind them that said, had he known how to deal with his shit, he might not have spent so many years lost in drink and homeless.
He had done a lot of work, a long time ago, to get through his drinking and withdrawal and unhealthy habits. So why was it so hard now to know what was real and what was just a crutch?
“If you’re so smart,” he said to her, “what’s the right thing to do?”
Nothing.
He fell asleep to what could have been distant strains of music over a fuzzy radio, or just the static in his own head. It was hard to tell.
“Mail call!” Lucky grinned as he approached Myles’s lunch table a few days later. “Looks like your mail forwarding finally kicked in.” He dropped a slim envelope onto the table by Myles’s elbow.
“Only took them a month,” Myles grumbled.
“I’ll take a month of no bills, thanks very much,” Tiffany chipped in as she ambled by on her crutches, Jake following closely with a cup of coffee and a laptop bag.
“You and me both, Tiff,” Lucky said. “You got everything you need?”
“I do, thanks.” She smiled at Shelly as she passed, and to Myles’s relief, Shelly smiled back. She’d been a bundle of nerves and tantrums all morning. The simple exchange gave him hope that the storm might be passing.
Turning his attention back to his mail, Myles noted the letterhead from Natalie’s lawyer.
So did Jet. “What’s that?” He frowned at the letter.
“I’d have to open it to know, wouldn’t I?” Myles snapped, immediately feeling like a jerk for his biting tone.
Jet scowled. Shelly’s mood was apparently rubbing off on all of them.
Ignoring him, Myles slit open the envelope and pulled out the letter. It took him only an instant to find the name Bentley Priory in the sea of text. Jet’s father. Myles’s heart thudded to a hard stop as he skimmed.
True to most lawyerly communications, the letter contained very little actual information. Only that Priory wanted to meet his son. Not why, only that it was urgent.
After sixteen years of not caring enough to even contact him, and now he wanted to meet? Because Natalie was gone? Myles hadn’t known the man well when his sister had been involved with him, but what he had known hadn’t impressed him.
Priory was older than Myles by a decade at least, and hadn’t seemed interested in Natalie as anything other than a distraction from his boring suburban life.
When she’d turned up pregnant at eighteen, he’d been all too happy to sign away both parental rights and any obligation, financial or otherwise, for his child, or the very young woman carrying him.
So why was he reaching out now?
Myles managed not to crumple the page in a fit of rage while he schooled his breathing to as close to normal as he could manage.