2
Oliver and I have this rule with phone calls where we never call more than twice unless it’s an emergency.
We (and by we, I mean I) established this rule when he moved to California nine years ago, and because of the time difference of me living in London, I’d wake up and have nine hundred missed calls from my brother when it would have been at about a.m. LA time.
He moved there when he was eighteen and fresh out of St. Benedict’s Military School. Our parents sent him there when he was sixteen to avoid facing what they had long suspected.
Los Angeles was in many ways both a wonderful and a terrible move for my brother.
It was the first place where Oliver ever really felt at home and accepted. It was the first place he was ever fully himself. It was the first place he was ever afforded the space to feel the weight of the life he left behind in Okatie and breathe in all the ways our family failed us.
It also swallowed him whole. The lights drew him in like a moth. It consumed him.
He fell in with not even the wrong crowd, but just a crowd without limits, and Oliver’s not so good with limits anyway. He has ADHD, and—I probably don’t even need to explain it more than that—obviously he has inherently lower levels of dopamine, and so he’s always mining for it. There are parts of life in LA that would feel like you’ve struck oil if you’re an emotionally dysregulated neurodivergent, which he is.
It didn’t take long for him to blow through the money I gave him and crash-land into a pile of sugar daddies and alcohol.
The alcohol wasn’t LA specific. He started drinking well before I left, and I was fifteen when all that happened, so I think he probably started drinking maybe when he was fourteen? God, fourteen. You’re just a baby when you’re fourteen.
He’s doing better now, I think? That’s what he tells me. He’s in AA again. Sober four months this time.
We went different ways, me and Oliver. Like, literally and metaphorically.
They sent us both away: him to Georgia, me to the UK. Around the same time, a few months apart. Me first, him after.
I will say this though: sending a gay teenage boy to an all-male military boarding school isn’t the punishment they thought it was. Sure, homophobia might run rampant there at times, but it surely wasn’t any worse than what Ol was getting at home, anyway. And at least he made friends there who kind of got it? Who were sent away for the same stupid reasons.
I think he was just glad to be away from the rest of Okatie.
And them sending me to England? That was like they were setting me free.
I think they thought I wouldn’t want to go, but I wanted to go so badly, even though I also didn’t.
Cawthorne Grammar School felt like a safe haven for me, and I knew that was true. I was safer in Bath than I was in Okatie… Happier too.
But there’s always that niggle, sometimes conscious but most often not—that the people who made you, the ones who created you, your own flesh and blood, the ones who are genetically wired to want you—they didn’t want me. They didn’t want Oliver either.
Not really, anyway—
Not the way they wanted Maryanne and Tenny.
And I knew that Oliver knew it too.
You can tell yourself you don’t even really want to be wanted by people like them anyway, but it isn’t true because the same way parents are supposed to want their kids, kids have a genetic predisposition to want to be wanted by them.
I mightn’t like my parents, I mightn’t like what they stand for or what they’ve done or how they’ve behaved, but they’re my parents and they sent us both away because we weren’t like them. That pulls a number on your psyche when you’re growing.
I don’t actually know whether they did it to punish us, hide us, reform us, or avoid us.
That was a hard thing at first, the not knowing why.
I mean, with me at least there was a catalyst they masked as the why, but it wasn’t the real why…
It took me a while to land the thought, but eventually I decided I’d never know why, and I’m mostly sure, most of the time, that even if I did know, it probably wouldn’t justify it much anyway.
Oliver struggled with the why. Struggles—present tense. Can’t blame him; it’s a really normal thing to struggle with. He looked for the answer at the bottom of bottles and in the beds of men old enough to be our father. That was probably our first and biggest divergence.
He tried to smother the memories of our childhood. I tried to pull them apart.
I know what he’s doing the second he answers the phone.
Sweaty and breathless, as though he’s answered midthroes.
“This better be an emergency,” he pants.
He did. Midthroes! For what? Who honestly answers the phone in the middle of sex? Just stop or call me back when you’re finished. “Fuck—Oliver—why did you answer?”
“This is your third call! That’s an emergency—”
“I think we should talk about maybe—in emergent situations—you just stop what you’re doing to take the call, not keep on keeping on until—”
“Is this the emergency?” he asks, impatient. “Because this doesn’t feel like an emergency.”
“Call—her—back—” Someone breathes heavily in the background.
“Gige, I’ll call you b—”
“Dad’s dead,” I tell him unceremoniously.
Oliver’s breathing stops, but the sound of him getting pumped does not—all the rustling of sheets, the strained breathing of his partner, that sort of skin-slapping-on-skin sound of sex… I’m guessing—hoping—that the guy he’s with can’t see his face, because if he can, the guy’s an asshole.
Oliver does like assholes sometimes though, so maybe he just is one.
I wait—don’t say anything—what else could I say, really?
I hear some movement and the sound of a door closing.
“What?” my brother asks me eventually.
He’s twenty-seven, but he sounds sixteen again.
“I’m sorry—” I press my hands into my forehead. My Social Psychology teacher would have had a stroke at the shit I just pulled. “I should have made you call me back—have I broken sex for you?”
My brother sniffs a laugh.
“We’ll see.” He blows air out of his mouth. “How?”
“He had a heart attack?” I offer. “I don’t know anything else. The funeral’s Friday.”
“Are you going to go?”
I feel my depressor supercilii muscles pull in toward one another at his question, which means I frowned. I frowned at his question. “Yeah—aren’t you?”
“I guess.” He sighs. “Fuck—”
“Okay, so you fly out of LAX tomorrow at p.m. Then you have a one-hour layover in Dallas—”
“What?”
“I bought your ticket. It should be in your inbox.”
He pauses. “You didn’t have to.”
I pause. “How else would you have gotten there?”
Pause.
“I would have figured it out,” he tells me, and I think I can hear a tiny bit of resentment in his voice.
I swallow uncomfortably because I hate this money shit. “I figured it out for you.”
He breathes in and out of his nose once. “When do you get in?”
“Monday morning. Couple hours after you.”
“If you were a better sister, you would have booked it so you got there before me.”
“If I were a better sister, I would have booked us two tickets to the Grenadines.”
He sniffs a laugh again. “I’ll see you Monday.”
“Okay.”
There’s a pause.
“Are you okay, Gige?” he asks.
“Are you?”
“I guess,” he says, and I need to see his face to know how true that is.
“I love you,” I tell him.
“Love you too.” Then he hangs up.