3
“Do you want me to come with you?” Hattie asks as we stand outside Heathrow the following night.
I shake my head.
“It’s not a hollow offer,” she tells me as she pulls me in for a hug. I knew it wasn’t because her eyebrows were raised in earnest, lips parted the slightest bit at the middle, a little hopeful I might say yes because Hattie’s love language is being needed.
I’m not always like this, by the way.
Well, I am—but I try not to be.
I do try to switch it off, try look at everything like a person who hasn’t taught herself to see the world stripped back to its sinew and bones, but sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard not to keep seeing things that are there in plain sight once you’ve taught yourself to see them.
“I know, but—” I shake my head as I squeeze her back. “My mom would spend the whole week convincing you to take your nose ring out and trying to convert you into a heterosexual Pentecostal.”
Hattie smiles, amused. “Will you be okay by yourself?”
I take a big breath and offer a smile that’s so transparent anyone could have seen through it.
She takes my hand and squeezes it. “I can fly out tomorrow, meet you there—”
“Oliver will be there.”
She pauses. “Are you sure he’ll turn up?”
I give her a look. “Yes.”
But no.
I’m not sure he’ll come, actually.
I’ve booked him two flights to London, and he’s not come either time.
He wasn’t sober though, so maybe things will be different now that he is?
I haven’t spoken to him since yesterday though, and I wonder if that’s negligent of me?
Telling my alcoholic-brother our dad’s dead and then not checking in on him?
There’s arguably a duty of care there, and I arguably have dropped the ball. Not even because of any complicated parentification relationship that may have developed between us because we didn’t have anyone else so we had to be everything to each other, but just like, you know, basic human duty of care that I’ve failed here, and I hate failing Oliver because too many people have already.
I can’t even text him now because he’d be in the air. And if he’s not in the air, then I can’t know that now because the idea of being in that place without him is enough to convince me not to get on that plane myself.
Fuck.
I breathe in through my noise, give Hattie a brave smile and a nod.
“I’ll be fine. I promise.”
“If you’re not—” she starts.
“I’ll tell you.”
She gives me one last squeeze and nods, resolute.
***
British Airways flies Heathrow to Charleston, direct. Nine hours.
I took an Ambien on the flight so I slept all the way, but as soon as I landed, I was tired.
Okatie tired, not regular tired.
Have you ever dated someone you fought with a lot?
A couple of years back I sort of dated this guy, and he was super hot and nice and smart and well-read, but we fought like mad.
And I liked him, I actually liked him a lot.
I liked the buzzy electricity around us, the surge of adrenaline I’d get every time we’d start to argue, but after about a month, before I’d see him, I’d feel tired.
Like, I knew what I was getting into before we got into it.
And we’d get into it, fall into it like a dance.
We’d have peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs and peaks.
We always ended on a peak; it’s why we’d keep coming back to each other.
The peaks were the sex. Everything else was a trough. Everything else made me tired.
That’s how I feel as I rent the charcoal-gray Land Rover Defender 110 at the car place by the airport… Tired already.
Tired like I’m saddling up to go knock around with JT Riley again, but at the end of it all, I don’t even get to bang it out. I’ll just leave more tired and more empty than I arrived.
I could have had someone pick me up, but the thought of sitting in a car alone with my oldest brother or my mother or my sister’s husband or worse—my sister herself—makes me want to cry on the spot, so I just drive. It’ll be good to have an escape route anyway. I like the safety net of being able to drive away if I need to. And I suspect I will need to.
The last day and a half have been a tremendous mind fuck, I’ll give you that.
I slept on the plane because I drugged myself, but I didn’t sleep much the night before because my mind couldn’t switch off.
I play the loudest songs in the National’s catalogue the whole drive there, so my brain never has the chance to lull into silence and feel the full nervousness I refuse to acknowledge.
God, it’s like my stomach’s swallowed rocks.
And I know why I’m nervous; it’s normal, completely normal—my coping mechanism was to never come back, and I never did except for one time when I was nearly nineteen, and that was nearly seven years ago.
But now I have to.
You would have thought I’d processed it…
Parts of it, I have. There are other parts though… I don’t know—I think I’ve done a fairly good job with grappling with what was mine to grapple with. Those first few years after they sent me away, I got real good at staring what happened in the eye. And then the rest of it I knew I was avoiding, but the farther away from it I was, the easier it was to ignore.
But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.
I pull into our long driveway and park.
There’s one other car out front. A rental too.
A little Ascent.
Neither of the Nouns would be caught dead driving that car, so I know it has to be Oli’s.
I sit in the car a second longer, wondering whether maybe, hopefully, no one’s home except for Oliver, and maybe I’ll have a minute to hug him and catch my breath before Hurricane Maryanne.
I walk into the foyer that’s more a part of a big open living space.
Vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, light pouring in from the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the whole back of the house. Not a lot of art, actually. I’ve never noticed that before. There’s a mirror above the fireplace, and this big painting of a plane, but now that I’m thinking about it, I think that’s all? A lot of flowers, though. Not just “sorry for your loss” flowers; there’s always been flowers here. I think that’s maybe why I’m not a massive flower girl? It’s strange how you can long for a place to be your own and hate it so much in one breath.
My eyes fall around my childhood home, trailing from the right of it to the left, and it’s over there, in the far left, that I see a person I’ve never seen before.
Very tall—spends a lot of time in the sun with that tan of his, and brown hair—that’s what I can see from this far away. That, and he’s leaning against the wall by the fireplace, watching me, saying nothing.
I walk toward him. I take it back: his hair’s not brown. It’s not quite blond either. Maybe it’s brown but it goes golden in the sun?
He’s wearing light washed blue jeans with the knees all ripped, a white T-shirt, and no shoes. He’s got rings on his fingers and a few necklaces tucked away, and he is—without a doubt—the most attractive man I’ve ever seen in my entire life, so much so that I am immediately sure he is gay. That’s just the way the world works.
He’s Oli’s latest, obviously. Good for Oliver—what a pull!—and good on this little (big) guy, coming to his fuck-buddy’s dad’s funeral. I like that in a fuck-buddy. (For my brother. I don’t like that in a fuck-buddy for me; that’s way too involved.)
The beautiful gay man tilts his head to the side when I approach him, and he peers down at me.
Blue eyes. Very blue. Like, should-have-spotted-them-from-the-other-side-of-the-room blue.
For a second I think I see his pupils dilate, which is often associated with attraction, but if he’s dating Oliver, that could mean literally nothing because maybe he’s just high.
“Hi.” I smile up at him warmly.
I’m warm for two reasons. One, this poor man probably has no idea of the dumpster fire Oliver’s just dragged him into, and two, my social inhibitions melt away quickly around gay people because I trust them more than straight ones.
He cocks a half smile as he peers down at me. “Hey.”
There’s an accent, but it’s hard to tell what from just a single word.
God, he is tall though.
I offer him my hand. “Georgia.”
“Thought you might be.” He nods coolly—Australian accent—then he takes my hand in his. And he has to be high because his pupils are definitely dilated.
“Sam,” he says. “Penny.”
I nod once, looking him up and down.
His feet are squared toward me, but I wonder whether he’s just trying to prove something.
“Sam Penny.” I frown a little bit as I stare up at him. “God, you’re so attractive,” I tell him.
His face twitches with a smile. “Thank you.”
With my other hand—the one that isn’t still in his—I tap the top of my head and reach up to his, trying to measure him.
“What are you—? Six-three?”
He squashes a smile. “Four.”
I look down at my hand that he’s still holding, noticing the sporadic tattoos on his arms.
I flip his wrist over. “And what do these mean?” He stares at me while I ask that, stares at me a few seconds longer than he needs to—maybe he’s bi?—then glances down at his arm.
“Ah, well, this one”—he taps on the heart with a dagger through it with the words death before dishonor wrapped around it—“I got at the original Sailor Jerry’s parlor in Honolulu. This one”—he points to a flower—“is a magnolia, because there’s a song that changed my life. This one”—he points to a ship—“is a ship.” He grins up at me. “Doesn’t mean anything, really. I just like it.”
His talking voice is stupid sexy. Deep but so personable. Maybe he’s not Oliver’s plaything. Maybe they’re in love, and Oliver is going to tell me about it on this trip. I hope they are in love; there’s something about him. I don’t know what. A warmth, maybe?
“This one”—he keeps going as he taps the one that says a place where you found you were human —“is a line from my mum’s favorite poet.”
“Who’s Catherine?” I tap the name scrawled near his elbow.
He sniffs a laugh, but it’s genuine. It reaches his eyes. “A girl I slept with a long time ago when I was really drunk.”
So, definitely bi then…
I push his sleeve up farther, because this feels a bit like an Easter egg hunt through my brother’s boyfriend’s psyche.
I feel his bicep through his T-shirt and flick my eyes up at him. “Whoa—” I squeeze his arm again. “You’re like—this is—wow—!”
His head’s still tilted, pupils dilated, brows up, and mouth a little parted, and I think perhaps, objectively speaking, I should have been becoming less and less confident in my diagnosis of his sexuality by the second, but I’m a sucker for the benign flirting that happens between a gay guy and a straight girl, so I don’t want to notice what I should be noticing.
“Well, hi,” Oliver says, stage left.
“Hi!” I grin over at him and squeeze his boyfriend’s other arm just for show. “I’m just feeling up your boyfriend—” I grin up at the boyfriend before I give my brother a look. “God, Oliver, he is so handsome—”
Oliver bats his eyes at him. “Isn’t he?”
“Tell me about it!” I squeeze both his arms up toward his shoulders, so broad and taut, and Sam Penny is just standing still, smile maybe a bit apparent on that exquisite mouth of his.
“He is gorgeous, isn’t he?” My brother smiles, nodding. “He’s also not my boyfriend.”
I freeze.
“He’s my sponsor,” Oliver keeps going—shit. “And he is, unfortunately for me—and possibly you, considering…this”—he waves his hand in my general direction—“very straight.”
The best way I can describe my recoil from Sam Penny is, it’s like he’s a hot element that my hand is touching.
I yelp as I yank it away.
Sam Penny tries to squash a smile, but it’s unsuccessful because it hits his eyes, which crinkle at the edges.
Oliver bullrushes me—thank God—and picks me up and swirls me around in his arms before placing me back down on the ground.
He looks okay, I think? Maybe even good—? Handsome as ever. His hair’s shorter now though; it’s tousled. Eyes are big and brown, but they’re not sunken—neither are his cheeks. I breathe out a small sigh that I didn’t know I’d been holding in, waiting to see if he really was okay.
“I love this—” he tells me, as he tugs my hair. “So cute.” He fluffs out my fringe the way he thinks it should look. “Yes. Love it. So adorable. This length, I’m dead—wait, is your hair virgin?” He feels it between his fingers. “Virgin hair, who are you!”
He stands back so I can look at him.
He hasn’t changed much. It’s funny how people freeze in your mind.
His hair is pushed back and styled to disheveled perfection.
A little bit of facial hair that’s trimmed down neat and tight. I touch his face.
“You lost the beard.” I smile at him, my heart swelling with fondness.
“You like?” He grins at me proudly.
I nod. My brother has always had an immaculate jawline but it’s really on display at the minute.
He rubs his hand over his chin mindlessly. “So you’ve already met my poor sponsor, who you’ve probably set back several years of sobriety with your vulgar display, Georgia—my God, have you no self-respect?”
“I thought he was gay!” I cover my face with my hands. “It’s a tacit agreement straight women have with gay men—I know you know about it”—I point to my brother—“Don’t pretend you don’t. I know you do—”
Oliver rolls his eyes and I glare over at Sam Penny, the straight sponsor, that traitor.
“You know, you could have told me…”
“What?” Sam scoffs, taking a step closer to me. “And ruin all that fun you were having objectifying me?”
I scoff.
“I wasn’t objectifying you, I was…” I trail.
“Objectifying me?” he offers.
I hang my head. “Yeah.”
He smiles at me. Duchenne smiles at me. Eye crinkles, cheeks up, no bottom teeth showing.
Pupils still dilated.
Interesting.
“Where is everybody?” I glance around, my cheeks feeling a tiny bit pink.
“Mom’s at brunch with her church friends and Maryanne. They’ll be home in a minute, and Tenny is—I don’t know.”
“Tenny is here,” my oldest brother says, walking in the back door. Shirt slung over his shoulder, hair pushed back like he walked right off the page of an Abercrombie catalogue in 2008.
He opens his arms wide for me and I hug him.
I don’t know why I do it.
We’ve never really hugged before.
We’re not close.
He and Maryanne are close; me and Oliver are close. Or were. Are? I don’t know.
It’s been that way since forever, them and us. Even before anything happened. Nouns versus Adjectives.
The hug is forced and uncomfortable, and my brain throws a rapid-fire pop quiz to understand why he initiated a hug in the first place. I land on this:
Dad is dead. Tennyson is the man of the house now. Men of houses comfort their house in times of distress. Physical touch is an outward symbol of emotional intimacy, which Tennyson and I share none of, but baser people believe intimacy can be fostered through touch. Sometimes it can, but only for a second. It’s pseudo-intimacy. He wouldn’t realize that’s why he’s doing it, but I think that’s why he’s hugging me. A hollow attempt at a relational closeness we’ve never had.
“How are you doing? You okay?” He grips my shoulder, his eyebrows slanted upwards in concern, and I think his mouth pulls down, which would be a sign of genuine concern for me, but since fucking when? It doesn’t compute.
“I’m fine.” I give him a weary smile, because my smile would be weary if it was authentic (which it isn’t, and I don’t even really believe in a weary smile anyway; it’d be more aptly called a “controlled grimace”).
Fine is a dead giveaway word for not being fine, we all know that—but it’s enough to placate Tennyson, and even if it isn’t, that’s the moment my mother swans in.
“My baby!” she coos.
I glance over my shoulder, confused. Who’s she talking to? Did they get a dog, or something? And then her hands are on my face.
“How are you, my baby girl?” She pulls me in tight for a hug. “Are you okay?”
What the fuck? I mouth at Oliver.
Oliver discretely nods in Sam’s direction, and I roll my eyes, getting it—and honestly a bit put to shame that Oliver understood it before I did.
Margaret Carter is nothing if not a showwoman. I’ve never been her baby girl a day in my life, even when I was quite literally her actual baby girl.
There’s a series of family photos that definitely aren’t on display; they’re just tucked away in an album somewhere—they were taken right after I was born. It’s our whole family, the six of us, and the series starts out with my mom holding me, and Maryanne’s right next to our mom, staring at me. A photo later, she’s having a blue fit—completely scream-crying. The next photo, Maryanne’s run out of the frame. The next photo, my mom dumps me in the arms of my father, and half her body’s in the shot as the rest of her darts after Maryanne.
I don’t know who was taking the photos—maybe it was self-timer—I always thought it was so strange that they kept taking them. I guess back then you didn’t know what photos were being taken. You couldn’t delete them how you can now, not print the shit ones. They were all shit ones, is the point. Maryanne made sure of that. And sure, she was four, so it probably wasn’t on purpose. Except I’m pretty sure it was on purpose.
My mother pulls back. “How are you doing, my sweetheart—look at you! You’re just skin and bone. Rita!” she yells out into the abyss of our family home. And you can be sure of that, it is an abyss. “Georgia’s home and she’s thin as a rake, would you mind fixin’ her a plate?”
“Oh—” I shake my head. “I’m not hungr—”
“You’ll eat,” my mother tells me, pointed, as her eyes drop down my frame.
I flick my eyes over to Oliver.
There she is.