Chapter 2 #2
Pushing the button to raise my bed a bit more, I turned my head left to right until I caught Thierry in my line of sight.
He looked like he always did—light brown hair, scowl on his face, a polo with a collar that was too stiff, and jeans that always needed a belt because he refused to wear one, always telling me that accessories were for men like me.
He was standing a few feet away from my bed, and I knew he wouldn’t come any closer.
“What are you doing here?”
“Is that any way to say hi to your favorite brother?” It was his favorite joke, but it wasn’t because he was my favorite brother. It was because Peter hated me more than Thierry did.
“Seriously, I’m tired and on a lot of pain meds.” I let my fatigue rest heavily in my tone. “Did Mom and Dad send you to check up on me?”
He hesitated, then walked over and pulled Tucker’s chair back against the wall and sat where he became a vaguely human-shaped blob. I didn’t mind it. I didn’t really want to look at his face.
“Everyone’s worried about you.”
I was too high to fight off a laugh. “Really? So they sent you? The family clown?”
“Tiago, do you really have to be such an asshole every time I see you?”
I waved my hand at him to go on. I was in no mood, and now all I wanted was a nap. “I’m being discharged soon. Get on with whatever you want.”
“Dad and Anne’s birthdays,” he said.
Oh my fucking god. I’d gotten the invitation. They always celebrated my sister-in-law and Dad’s birthdays on Banker Island, and five years ago, they had a vacation house built just for that.
But visiting with them came at a price. My family cared about one thing only: how they looked to everyone around them. Perfection was currency, and I was the broke outcast.
Each year that passed, I was becoming—according to them—more visibly blind.
And to add to that, I was an affair baby.
My mother’s secret shame. She used to tell everyone she got pregnant on their honeymoon, but while my entire family was pale with light hair and short and thin, I was nothing like them.
I had never fit in, sticking out like a sore thumb in every single family photo.
I was always the tallest, outgrowing Peter before I was eleven.
I was the bulkiest. I grew hair on my chest early, and it was as black as the hair on my head.
My mother once tried to blame it on Sicilian ancestry, but eventually, her story blew up because there wasn’t a drop of Mediterranean in our family history.
Of course, I didn’t find out the truth for years. It was a drunk confession one night when I was seventeen, and my father was furious at me for staying out too late.
“Nothing like me,” he’d slurred in my general direction. “You know that, right? Just a walking reminder that she couldn’t keep her damn legs shut before she said ‘I do.’”
I was a teenager, so I knew what those words meant, but it was easier to pretend like I didn’t. All it really did was give me the satisfaction of knowing I wasn’t really his. That this family—at least half of it—wasn’t really mine.
When I was in my twenties and I found the courage to tell them all that I knew the truth, I demanded to know where I’d come from, but my mother apparently decided to die on the hill that she didn’t remember that night.
Of course, that burrowed a hole deep inside me that would probably never be filled because I knew it didn’t matter how many times I asked her where I came from.
She was never going to spill that secret.
But at least I could cling to one thing: my dad hated me for an actual reason, and I was allowed to hate him right back.
“Why do they even want me there?” I asked, not bothering to look over.
“They want everyone there. It’s Dad’s sixtieth, and Anne has a surprise she wants to announce.”
It was probably that she was pregnant again. They had one teenage son, Oliver, whom I’d only met a handful of times. But they talked a lot about wanting more, and it wasn’t a far leap to assume that Anne’s big surprise was that my brother had knocked her up again.
It was sometimes hilarious how often they celebrated everyone else’s accomplishments. There was a party for everything…except for me. The cups I won weren’t important because it was disabled hockey. The awards and trophies I had didn’t matter because they were second-class.
They liked my money, of course. They all assumed they’d be getting some of it when I retired.
But that was a problem for future Tiago to deal with.
“Please don’t be a bitch about this,” Thierry said. “Just suck it up and come for a few days.”
“Sure.”
The silence was telling. A moment later, he coughed. “Really? Just like that?”
I couldn’t help a laugh. “I mean, why not. So long as Dad’s rules don’t apply this time.”
“What—”
“That I can’t use my cane,” I reminded him. That was what happened the last time I tried to show up to a function. It made me stand out, he’d said. People kept staring, and god forbid people stared.
Thierry said nothing.
“That I can’t use my voiceover on my phone,” I added. “Oh, and that I can’t get a braille menu at a restaurant when we eat out.”
He sighed. “They’re still adjusting.”
At that, I sat up in spite of the pain and searched for him. When his face filled up my field of vision, he covered it with both hands and sighed into his palms.
“They learned I was going blind when I was fourteen, Thierry. They can get over it, or I’m not going to bother showing up.
I’m not playing these bullshit games anymore.
I’m tired. I’m fucking injured. I have no idea if I just lost my career or not, and I’m not going to pretend that I’m not blind because anything else makes them uncomfortable. ”
“But you’re not blind,” he snapped, and there was a weird tension in his voice I couldn’t quite read. He didn’t like talking about my sight, but he’d never been fully on my parents’ side before today. “Not…not completely. You don’t really need all that stuff, do you?”
I blinked, leaning closer to him. “Yes, I do. I don’t care if you don’t understand it’s a spectrum. I don’t care if you don’t understand that the progression isn’t stopping or that I’m probably less than a year away from total blindness—”
“It wasn’t supposed to get that bad.” His voice was oddly quiet. “Mom and Dad said it was supposed to eventually, you know, stop.”
“Mom and Dad lied to you, then.” I dropped back against the bed and laughed.
“I’m not ashamed of myself anymore, Thierry.
I’m not ashamed to say disabled. I’m not scared to say blind.
I’m not going to sit quietly in a corner and become some kind of house hermit because I can’t see the world around me.
And I’m not going to deny my reality. It sucks, but it is what it is, and I’m not afraid to live as myself. ”
There was another pointed silence, and then I heard him stand, his knees popping. “I have to go. Anne and Oliver are waiting for me in the car.”
“They didn’t want to come say hi?” I asked, only because I knew he couldn’t give an honest answer without sounding like a total asshole.
“Just think about the trip, okay? You know Mom and Dad probably don’t have many more years with us.”
I laughed. My parents had been using that line for years to try and manipulate us all into doing what they wanted. It worked with my brothers every time. “Yeah. Go ahead and hold your breath until I decide.”
“You’re an asshole, Tiago,” he said. And without another word, he turned on his heel and stormed out of my room.
There was very little peace left behind, but there was just enough quiet that I could lie back, close my eyes, and doze until the hospital finally set me free.