Chapter 15
The bar was called something I'd already forgotten.
I'd ended up here the way I ended up in a lot of places, which was by moving in a direction and not stopping until something stopped me.
What had stopped me tonight was a bar with low lighting and a door that required showing ID to someone who looked at mine and then looked at me and smiled in a way that meant she recognized me and was going to let me in regardless.
So.
Here.
It was a nice place. All dark wood and candles and a drinks menu that was four pages long and used words I wasn't going to look up. The kind of place you came when you wanted to feel like you were somewhere that mattered.
I was giving it everything I had.
There was a group around me, assembled from the various people who had realized who I was over the course of the evening.
Men and women and a couple of people I couldn't immediately categorize.
All of them were warm and interested and laughing at the right moments.
I was giving them the full Morrison experience because that was the deal, that was what I did, that was the transaction running smooth and clean and producing exactly the noise I needed.
I was telling the Jenkins story. The one with the wave at the away game, Jenkins counting three Wardens fans as a successful wave. It was a good story. I knew it was a good story because I'd told it before and it worked every time, hit the same beats, got the laugh in the same place.
I heard myself tell it.
That was the thing. I could hear myself from the outside, the timing and the pacing and the moment I leaned in, and it was correct, all of it was correct, and I was somewhere behind it watching it happen.
Someone refilled my glass.
I kept going.
The thing about the transaction was it ran best when you weren't thinking about it.
When the noise came in and you gave it back out and nobody examined the machinery.
Tonight I could see all the gears. Tonight every laugh had a half-second delay between the landing and the receiving, this small gap where I could see the audience deciding to respond, and the deciding was somehow worse than anything.
I was so fucking tired.
Not the physical kind. The other kind. I was tired because I had been performing for hours at a bar and could not stop, because stopping meant the quiet arriving, and the quiet had Nathan Cross in it.
Nathan Cross and my apartment and fuck it and his hands in my shirt and the wall and the sound he'd made, the sound that had gotten past everything he'd built to keep it from getting past.
Nathan Cross and I understand and a door clicking shut.
I killed my drink.
Someone new had materialized at my elbow, close in the way people got when they'd decided something. Good-looking, easy smile, the kind of person who knew exactly what they were doing and was comfortable with it.
"You look like you could use a better night," he said.
I looked at him.
In the past, before, in the version of myself that had existed before a corridor in a hockey facility and a shirt that smelled like clean soap, this would have been the moment.
This was the offer. This was the transaction completing itself, give them the moment and get something back, and I had done this version of it a hundred times and it had always worked fine.
"Yeah," I said. "Maybe."
He slid something across the bar.
Not a drink. The other thing, casual and quiet, just an option, completely my call.
I looked at it.
I thought about Nathan Cross's face when he handed me my laundered shirt.
I thought about the chair. Nathan sitting in the chair all night.
I pushed it back.
"I'm good," I said.
He looked at me for a second. Recalibrated. Smiled anyway, because these things happened, and moved on with the easy grace of someone who had other options, because he did, because everyone in this bar had other options.
I sat there.
The group was still going around me, the story finished, someone else talking now, the energy having found a new center the way energy always found a new center.
I was already peripheral. That was how it worked.
You were the thing and then you weren't the thing and the room moved on and you'd never really been the thing to begin with, you'd just been standing in the right spot.
I needed air.
I found the bathroom instead.
The bathroom was nice, because of course it was, same dark wood and low lighting, a mirror that showed me myself in the unflattering clarity of a person who has had too much to drink in a place that didn't know him.
I looked fine.
Messy blond hair, but the kind that looked messy on purpose, like I'd spent time making it look like I hadn't.
Brown eyes clear enough, bright enough, still doing the job.
Clothes that were stylish enough to pass in a place like this, even if they probably should've seen a dry cleaner at some point, though I had no idea how dry cleaners even worked.
Objectively, I looked good.
Like someone having a great night.
But inside? Inside I was completely hollow.
I had no idea when those two things had gotten so far apart.
I went back to the bar.
The next ten minutes were the longest ten minutes of my life. I was telling another story now, something I was inventing as I went because I'd run out of the prepared ones. The room was still laughing in the right places but I was somewhere else entirely.
Someone touched my arm.
I startled.
It was just the bartender. He wanted to know if I needed anything. I said no. He moved on. The group moved on. I sat at the bar and ordered water because some part of me was still functional enough to make that decision.
I was halfway through it when I felt someone sit down on the stool next to me.
I knew who it was before I turned my head.
I turned my head anyway.
Dylan was looking at the bar. Jacket on. Water already in front of him, which meant he'd been here for at least a few minutes. He didn't look at me. He just sat there.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," he said.
The bar kept doing its thing around us. The low music. The four-page menu nobody was reading.
I waited for it. The look. The catalogue.
Wesley, what are you doing? The thousand previous versions of this conversation, in a thousand previous bars, where Dylan would arrive and Dylan would assess and Dylan would deliver the verdict in his flat older brother voice and we would both pretend it was the first time we'd done this.
He didn't look at me.
He drank his water.
That was somehow worse.
"How did you know where I was? I didn't text you."
Dylan set the glass down.
"Wes."
"Yeah."
"Check your phone."
I looked at him.
"Just check it," he said.
I took out my phone. Unlocked it. Looked at the screen.
The most recent call in my history was outgoing.
Dad. Two minutes, fourteen seconds.
I stared at it.
I stared at it for a long time.
"Shit," I said.
"Yeah," Dylan said.
"I mean, fuck. Shit."
"Yeah."
"Shit. Shit. Shit."
"Yes."
I had pocket-dialed my father. My father, who I just knew was in his armchair right now, or was asleep, who had picked up his phone and gotten two minutes and fourteen seconds of bar noise and his son performing for strangers in a place neither of them had ever been.
"He didn't say anything," I said. "He just—"
"He hung up," Dylan said. "And called me."
I closed my eyes.
"How did he know to—"
"Wes." Dylan's voice was very flat. "He could hear you."
I opened my eyes.
I looked at the bar. At my water. At the four-page menu.
At the lighting that had been carefully designed to make this feel like the kind of place where things happened.
I thought about Rob Morrison in his armchair, listening to me do the Jenkins story for a bar full of strangers at midnight on a Tuesday.
"Fuck," I said.
"Yes," Dylan said.
We sat there for a while. Dylan finished his water.
Got another one. Didn't get anything else.
He had still not looked directly at me, which was new, which Dylan was doing on purpose, and I had been Dylan's brother for long enough to know exactly what it meant when he was doing something on purpose.
"You're mad," I said.
"I'm—I’m tired, Wes."
That landed differently than mad would have.
"Dylan—"
"Don't." He turned the water glass in his hand. "Just. Don't do the version of this where you apologize and we both pretend it's fine. I can't do that one tonight."
"Dylan—"
"You called Dad," he said. "On accident. From a bar in the middle of the night. And then he called me." He looked at the glass. "Because that's how it goes. That's how it always goes."
"Dylan, I didn't—"
"I know you didn't." He looked at me for the first time.
His face wasn't angry. It was just tired.
"That's the thing, Wes. You never mean to.
It's never on purpose. You just—you do something, and then someone gets called, and the someone is always the same someone, and we all just do this thing where we pretend that's normal. "
The bar kept going around us.
"I didn't ask Dad to call you," I said. It came out small.
"I know you didn't."
"I would have figured it out."
"Wes."
"I would have."
"Wes. How would you have figured it out?” Dylan asked. "You're three drinks past where you should have stopped. You're in a bar I've never heard of. How were you going to figure it out?"
I didn't have an answer.
He looked back at his water.
"I'm not mad at you," he said. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not mad. I'm just—" He stopped. Started again. "I'm twenty-seven, Wes. I've been doing this shit for you since I was twelve. And I love you. And I'm tired. And those things are all true at the same time."
Someone across the room laughed at something.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I know you are." He drank his water. "That's the other thing. You always are. Genuinely. Every time. And then the next time happens anyway."
I looked at the bar.
I thought about all the times. I thought about how many of them I'd actually counted versus how many of them had just blended into one ongoing thing.
I thought about Dylan at twelve, opening the door of the Morrison house to a kid who had been in eleven places.
I thought about Dylan at sixteen tying my skate when his knee was the one that hurt.
I thought about Dylan in juniors, the third year, his captain year, while Rob was four hours away in a snowstorm watching me play a regular season game.
"Dylan," I said.
"Yeah?"
"I don't know how to be different."
He looked at me.
It was a long look. Not the catalogue look. Not the assessment look. Something else, something I didn't have a word for yet, the thing under everything that I had been seeing flickers of for months and that was now sitting on the surface in a fancy bar at midnight.
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
He stood up.
"Come on," he said. "I'll drive you home."
"Dylan—"
"I know." He picked up his jacket. "Come on."
He walked toward the door without checking if I was following, which was Dylan, which had always been Dylan, and I followed him because what was the alternative, and the bar kept going behind us with its candles and its menu and its group that had already moved on to someone else.
It was cold outside. Dylan's car was around the corner. He'd parked and come in rather than texting from outside, which meant he'd been prepared to stay as long as it took, which meant Rob had told him to.
I got in the passenger seat.
We didn't talk for a while. The city did its thing outside the windows, late and sparse, everyone with somewhere to be or somewhere they were coming from. Dylan drove the way he did everything, correct and unhurried.
I looked at the window.
I thought about Nathan Cross, who I had not been able to stop thinking about for weeks, who I had not figured out what to do about, who was somewhere across the city right now probably asleep or pretending to be.
"Dylan," I said.
"Yeah."
"Thanks." I kept looking at the window. "For coming."
Dylan was quiet for a moment. His jaw moved.
"Wes."
"Yeah?"
"Don't thank me."
I looked at him.
"Just—don't,” he said. “We don't do that shit. That's not what this is."
"What is it then?"
He didn't answer for a second.
Then: "It's just what we do." He kept his eyes on the road. "It's what we've always done."
I sat there for a second.
"Dylan."
"Wes."
"I'm going to—" I stopped. Tried again. "I'm going to try to be different."
"Okay," he said.
It wasn't I believe you. It wasn't good. It was just okay, the way Dylan said okay about things he was holding open and not putting weight on yet.
He looked at the steering wheel.
"Then fucking do it for once," he said.
I got out.
I stood on the sidewalk and watched him pull away, the red taillights shrinking until they disappeared around the corner.
I went upstairs.
I didn't text Nathan.
I almost did, three times, and stopped myself all three times.
Instead I lay there thinking about Dylan.
Then fucking do it for once.
Lying there in the dark with nothing to distract me from myself, I was starting to understand that wanting to be better didn't mean anything.
Doing it did.