Chapter Eleven #3
It was nearing sunset. The sky was low enough to touch. The last rays of the setting sun turned everything pink—the waves, the clouds, the pebbled beach that curled protectively along the fish-hook shape of the shoreline. The sailboat was still in bad shape, but at least she was clean.
Dean sat down beside Eric. Stretching out his legs, he leaned back against one of the wooden pilings.
“I still have some more work to do on her. Jeff Brein, down at the Crow’s Nest, is repairing the sail, and it should be done tomorrow.
Wendy Johnson is cleaning the cushions. I thought .
. . maybe if we could take her out . . .
” Dean let the sentence trail off. He didn’t know quite how to sculpt his amorphous hope into something as ordinary as words.
“We could remember how it used to be,” Eric said. “How we used to be.”
Of course Eric had understood. “Yeah.”
Eric drew the blanket tighter against his chin. “So, what’s it like, being the favored son?”
“Lonely.”
Eric sighed and leaned back into the pillows. “Remember when she loved me? When I was a star athlete with awesome grades and a promising future. I was her trophy boy.”
Dean remembered. Their mother had adored Eric, her dark-haired angel, she called him.
The only time Mom and Dad came to the island was football season.
Every homecoming game, Mom had dressed in her best “casual” clothes and gone to the game, where she cheered on her quarterback son.
When the season ended, they were gone again.
Eric had lived in the warm glow of his parents’ affection for so long, he’d mistaken pride for love, but when he’d told them about Charles, he’d learned the depth of his na?veté. Mother hadn’t spoken to him since.
So it had been Dean, the younger, less perfect son, who’d taken over the family business. It had never been something he wanted to do, but family expectations—especially in a wealthy family—were a sticky web. “I remember,” he said quietly.
“I heard the phone ring last night about eleven o’clock,” Eric said.
Dean looked away; eye contact was impossible. “Yeah. Some phone company rep who—”
“Don’t bother, bro. It was her, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Still in Athens?”
“Florence. Mother had the nerve to tell me that the shopping was great.” She’d also said, Come on over, Dean—we’ve got plenty of room at the villa. As if it didn’t matter at all that her elder son lay dying.
Eric’s gaze was pathetically hopeful as he turned to Dean. “Are they coming to see me?”
There was no point in lying. “No.”
“Did you tell them this is it? I’m not going to be around much longer?”
Dean reached out, touched his brother’s hand. It surprised both of them, that sudden bit of intimacy. “I’m sorry.”
Eric released a thready sigh. “What good is an agonizing death by cancer if your own family won’t weep by your bedside?”
“I’m here,” Dean said softly. “You’re not alone.”
Tears came to Eric’s eyes. “I know, baby brother. I know . . .”
Dean swallowed hard. “You can’t let her get to you.”
Eric closed his eyes. “Someday she’ll be sorry. It’ll be too late, though.” By the end of the sentence, his words were garbled and he was asleep.
Dean leaned closer. Carefully, he tugged up the blanket, tucked it beneath his brother’s chin.
Eric blinked awake and smiled sleepily. “Tell me about your life.”
“There’s not much to tell. I work.”
“Very funny. I get the San Francisco newspapers, you know—just to read about you and the folks. You seem to be quite the bachelor-about-town. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a man who had everything.”
Dean wanted to laugh and say, I do; I do have everything a man could want, but it was a lie, and he’d never been able to lie to his brother.
And more than that, Dean wanted to talk to Eric the way he once had.
Brother to brother, from the heart. “There’s something .
. . missing in my life. I don’t know what it is. ”
“Do you like your job?”
Dean was surprised by the question. No one had ever asked him that, and he’d never bothered to ask himself. Still, the answer came quickly. “No.”
“Are you in love with anyone?”
“No. It’s been a long time since I was in love.”
“And you can’t figure out what’s missing in your life?
Come on, Dino. The question isn’t, what’s missing?
The question is, what the hell is your life?
” Eric yawned and closed his eyes again.
Already he was tiring. “God, I wanted you to be happy all these years . . .” He fell asleep for a second, then blinked awake.
“Remember Camp Orkila?” he said suddenly.
“I was thinking about that yesterday, about the first time we went up there.”
“When we met Ruby.” Dean found an honest smile inside of him, drew it out. “She climbed up into that big tree by the beach, remember? She said arts and crafts were for babies and she was a big girl.”
“She wouldn’t come down until you asked her to.”
“Yeah. That was the beginning, wasn’t it? We’d never seen a real family before . . .” Dean let the words string out, find one another, and connect. Like threads, he wove them together, sewed a quilt from the strands of their life, and tucked it around his brother’s thin body.