56. Nathan
fifty-six
Claire knockson my office door at the beginning of the school day. I know it’s her because she has started using a specific pattern of taps that now always gets my heart racing. It doubles when she pokes her head inside.
“Hey, stranger,” she says, her warm smile lighting up the room.
“Hi,” I say, tension slipping from my shoulders as she closes and locks the door, and comes around to my side of the desk. When she places both hands on my shoulders and leans in for a soft, slow kiss, I exhale, but push her gently away before things can escalate.
“I really miss this, but we shouldn’t here anymore.”
She sighs, and while part of me wants to catch those words and swallow them back up, she nods in agreement.
“Well, I have good news then. I can come over tonight, if you’re free.”
“Does Penelope have plans tonight?”
“Not per say…”
She bites her bottom lip and looks away. She’s nervous about something.
When, “She kind of knows about us,” whispers from her lips, I can see why.
Emotions tidal wave over me, and I don’t know which to latch onto. Fear, anger, and anxiety crest at the top, while a small taste of freedom and hopecoasts below it. Claire is chewing on her thumbnail, clearly awaiting a response she’s afraid of. Above all of those other feelings, the innate desire to put her above it all is overwhelming.
Still. I don’t know what to say. First, Joe’s crude comments and our almost run-in, and now one of my employees flat out knows about us?
“Are you upset?”
I exhale, closing my eyes as I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“I don’t know. I’m feeling a lot of things, and I don’t want any one to overwhelm the others right now.”
She nods slowly, her cheeks that carnival pink.
“If it makes you feel any better, she did guess. I wasn’t having a heart to heart with her about it.”
She shrugs, and my chest constricts. Shouldn’t she be able to have heart to heart conversations with her girlfriends about her…
About her what, Nathan?
Therein lies the million dollar question.
What are we? And what will we become?
I sigh again, then reach out to cup Claire’s waist. My thumbs pass in errant strokes as a slow-moving tornado swirls around our feet, searching for momentum to latch onto.
“Can we maybe talk about it tonight? She has been sworn to secrecy. I promise,” Claire insists.
I tense.
Cal is in town. There’s a break with his residency program post-holiday, and he chose to come and visit. We’re having dinner, and I had planned to bring up the state of the house. I had honestly been banking on the secrecy with Claire’s roommate to cover for the fact that I am also keeping secrets.
“I have plans tonight. I’m sorry.”
“Oh. Right. No biggie.”
She tries to pull away, and I’m reminded of all of those times that a mere miscommunication had her doing the same. Just like that ride home from the shelter, when she’d thought that she had ruined the night. All it had taken to stop her from pulling away was to lay out my truth. I’ve always been good at reading between the lines when it comes to Claire, but I never want her to have to guess at my intentions.
Still, I can’t give her the full story. Not here in my office, when she deserves a platform for the whole truth and any questions she might have.
Besides, I’m still not quite ready for that.
I swallow around the lump in my throat that is part Penelope Barker knows your secret and Claire doesn’t know the whole truth.
“My brother is in town. We’re getting dinner, since he couldn’t come home for the holidays.”
Her eyes widen, and her body stiffens before it relaxes. I watch her expression tighten, her head tilting thoughtfully.
“Callahan?”
His name bounces off her tongue clunkily, like she’s testing it out for the first time. My chest loosens at the thought of my brother’s name being easy conversation between us one day.
“Yes. Since Cal had to work through Christmas, we’re having our holiday tonight.”
She nods, and my chest aches with the insistence that I just tell her.
Tell her about the way my life was upended when my parents died, and how I took care of my younger brother. Tell her about the financial situation we’re in, and how I’m struggling to put it all together.
Tell her about the guilt that has been slowly eating away at my soul, the insistence to give Cal the best life possible because I stole his family from him when I insisted that my parents put me first and drive out in that snowstorm.
Tell her that she is the first person who has shown me that I can and deserve to live the life that I still have left.
But the door buzzes with arrivals of staff coming in for the work day. This is not the time nor the place to have any of the harrowing conversations we’ve just dropped on one another.
I love my brother, and though it is wonderful to see him, I cannot shake the rocky feeling in the pit of my stomach.
It took Claire and I less than five minutes to realize that all of the nights I have free this week, she is working basketball games. They’re local, which means more people would recognize us leaving together if I just happened to show up.
Then again, if Penelope already knows…
It’s all such a mess. I know that she’s feeling as sick over all of this as I am.
And then, there’s the elephant in the room.
Cal is seated across from me at the dinner table that we grew up eating at, his personality as big as the earth itself, waxing poetic about his residency. And I have absorbed none of it.
I’m too tangled up in Claire.
Wanting to call her to clear the air. To hold her in my arms and reassure her that, despite the mount of issues we built before us just this morning, things will be okay.
Will they, though?
“Nate?”
“Hmm?”
Cal pulls me from my thoughts, and I realize he’s asked me a question.
“I’m sorry,” I say, shaking my head and fidgeting my fork around a barely eaten Chinese takeout meal. “What were you saying?”
Cal grins, and huffs a laugh.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you distracted like this. Is it work, or does she have a name?”
My cheeks instantly heat, and my little brother’s face is alight with joy.
“Nate!” he exclaims, slapping the table with both palms. “I leave home for five minutes and you’re finally getting out there and living?! Oh, come on, tell me the details!”
I clear my throat, and my brain is fogged by juxtaposed emotions.
On one side, I’ve always felt like living meant taking away from my brother, and sharing anything about my personal life with him wrings more guilt out of me.
On the other side?
I see the Cal that I knew before we wore matching hospital gowns and donned matching jackets to the Dead Parents Club. The little brother who only had to be the little brother, who I read books to and built Legos with.
That image is what pierces my heart into almost spilling the truth.
Claire told Penelope. You’ve got to tell someone important to you.
“Her name is Claire,” is all I give to him. I’m still too covetous of her to reveal more.
So then why does my heart suddenly feel a hundred pounds lighter?
Despite his brotherly poking and prodding—just like when he was only my brother and not my responsibility.
I stand and take our dishes to the kitchen, and am greeted by the dreaded monster of financial paperwork that I’ve been avoiding, stacked neatly on the kitchen island. I’m supposed to bring it up to him tonight. We’re supposed to formulate a plan.
But I don’t have a plan.
Because the moment Claire so much as mentioned that she would have to start working late at night, would possibly be picking up a second job once she was done at River Valley in order to start clinical hours for the future she never thought she’d have, I started looking at all of the things I could be doing differently with my money.
And that’s what chokes me.
The thought that I’ll touch my inheritance for her, but not for my little brother and our childhood home.
The thought of selling our home so that she can live out her dreams comfortably while he, what, has to lose the last tether to our parents? He deserves at least that, after I stole them from him.
Claire deserves the world too, Nathan.
My subconscious needs to have a hammer taken to it.
Instead of pulling out the paperwork, instead of trying to figure out what we’re going to do once the property taxes fully submerge me, I spend the night catching up with my brother—actually listening and paying attention this time. I get a glimpse of what we could have been, had cancer and a car crash not derailed our lives.
You can still have it, Nathan. Loosen the reins. Let him go.
“Oh, wow. That’s still there?”
In the middle of a conversation, Cal stands and walks past me to something he must have seen over my shoulder. When I turn, he’s rubbing his thumb over a dent in the wall beside the decorative table.
“You thought you were that Red Sox pitcher,” I chuckle.
“Pedro Martinez. But my chess-prodigy brother couldn’t catch for shit.”
I look to my brother. He’s smiling. Reminiscing. It’s a knife to my gut when he says, “Lotta good memories in this place.”
I’m saddened when my brother stands to leave. There’s an angry snowstorm rolling in, and he wants to make it back to his place so that he secures a good parking spot before it hits later in the week. After he leaves, I reflect on the mountain that now sits atop my chest.
The sheer joy it brings me to see him living out his dream is where my roads cross.
Cal is moving on from the demons of our past and living out the life he always deserved.
Shouldn’t Claire have that, too?