10
I’m not even really sure where it came from or when we started doing it, but sometime very early on in our adolescence, whenever things got shitty at home, whenever tensions rose or Mom or Maryanne came out to play, Oliver or I would yell “THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” and then we’d run out of the house and down to the dock, to this white wooden rowboat that we assume our dad must have won in a raffle or something.
One day it was just there. We never saw him on it, though a few times I went out to use it myself early in the mornings and I’d see him sitting in it by himself, a big old book in his lap. I’m not religious how my parents are but I thought it was sort of sweet. Him out there alone with his Bible.
On the side of the boat, it reads Saint-émilion. I saw him paint that on himself—I’m not sure why. Maybe he liked the legend of him, or something.
He and Mom had a fight over it because he wasn’t all that handy around the house, I guess? Mom asked why he was painting our stupid boat when the garage door needed to be painted for like a year and a half, and then dad told her she could hire someone for that, and then she told him he could hire someone for the boat painting, and he gave her a strangely stern look and said, “No, I couldn’t.”
Then she told him to get rid of the boat and Dad said no.
She said he had to because Oliver and I used it to avoid our problems, and he said he thought we used it to avoid her. She was so angry she made him sleep on the couch that night and sulked all the morning through, but even still, he wouldn’t cave.
Like I said, I don’t have a lot of great memories of my dad (and I don’t even know if that can count as a great one? Him not letting our psycho mom throw away our boat like she wanted to?), but the bar was low, so it’s at least in the wheelhouse of positive.
Anyway, Oliver and I coined it the SS Avoidance .
“I hate it here,” I tell my brother as we lie on the floor of the boat, staring up at the sky.
He sniffs a laugh. “Do you? I love it.”
I give him a look, then prop myself up on my elbows and watch him. “Are you okay?”
He props himself up too. “About Dad?”
I nod and Oliver shrugs.
“I guess,” he lies. “Are you?”
And I hate this. So much, I hate this… It never used to feel hard to talk to him. It was the only thing in the world that made sense once upon a time, and I want it to feel the same; I want to be able to step through this magical doorway back in time to the place where we didn’t have distance and mistakes and drugs and shit between us, but that place doesn’t exist anymore. All we have is this. The bones of a close relationship and the smoky memory of how we used to be and might not ever be again.
I put my hands on my cheeks and stare back up at the sky. “It’s so hard to explain to people how bad they were.”
He looks over at me. “Do you think they were bad parents?”
I frown a bit. “Do you not?”
“Bad is the wrong word,” he tells me, and I’m not surprised he does, because he’s always defended them in one way or another, even though they’ve never deserved it. Even though they’ve been worse to him than they have been to me. Oliver can’t look the fullness of how bad they were square in the eye, at least not yet. And that’s fine—well, it’s not really fine, it’s incredibly invalidating of his life experience, but I understand that acknowledging the fullness of something then requires you to feel the consequences of it with a fullness too, and I don’t think he has the bandwidth.
I purse my lips.
Oliver shrugs. “They should have just stopped at Maryanne.”
“Oliver—” I prop myself up again and sigh. “God—you thinking that makes them bad parents.”
He shakes his head, which—of course he would. “They just didn’t know what to do with us.” He shrugs, like that’s a legitimate excuse.
I sigh to the clouds. “That sponsor of yours has turned you soft.”
Oliver sits up in the boat. “So, what’s up with you and Sam anyway?”
I mirror him because I want to fast-track us to an emotional connection, which we already technically have, but he seems prickly, so I want to remind him of it.
“Nothing.” I keep my face straight, because I think if I attach any emotion to the words, even surprise, it’ll give me away. “He’s kind of a know-it-all.”
Oliver sniffs a laugh. “I was surprised you guys seemed to get along so well.” He shrugs airily as he lies back down. “I thought you’d drive each other stupid mad.”
“Why?” I ask super casually, like I’m not a little disappointed that my brother didn’t bring Sam here thinking maybe we’d be soulmates.
Oliver takes off his shirt and uses it as a pillow to rest his head on. “Because he’s so calm and balanced, he already knows who he is—he’s so self-aware already, and you like to read people, not be read. There’s just nothing you could bring to the relationship—he already knows all the ways he’s fucked up.”
I frown. “That’s not all that I bring to a relationship…”
“Listen, Gige—” He swats his hand dismissively. “Sam is like, this reformed bad boy turned easy, breezy yoga queen, who loves transparency and balance and wholeness, and you like pushing people’s buttons to make their heads pop off so you can see how their brains work.”
That isn’t true. I don’t like pushing buttons; that’s such a cheap explanation. More than anything, I just like knowing why people are the way people are, and I see a high value in being able to predict what comes next. Now, sometimes to do that, do I have to push buttons? Maybe, but I’d like to think I’m not unnecessarily antagonistic. I just want the truth at all costs. That’s not very breezy though. I’d like to be breezy, I think. But I’m too clever to be breezy. Breezy doesn’t get you into Cambridge. Breezy doesn’t get you a job at the EIA.
“Anyway.” I clear my throat. Breezy. “Are you okay? Sober-wise?” I pause. “Sobriety-wise? Sober-wi—are you sober?”
“Yeah.” He props himself up as he eyes me playfully. “Are you?”
I roll my eyes at him. “Why did you bring your sponsor home for a week if you’re okay?”
He leans away and points at me. “Don’t do that to me.” The point is a gestural emblem. He means it. He wants me to stop.
“Then don’t lie to me,” I tell him, my eyes flickering from his eyes to his mouth, watching for muscle twitches, but there’s nothing. Literally nothing, not a thing—neither a twinge nor twitch of emotion.
I lie back down in the boat and look up at the sky again.
We lie there quietly for about twenty seconds, long enough for him to subconsciously let out a sigh of relief, which is when I ask—
“So when did you start using Valium?”
He laughs and groans all at once. “When my little sister started turning into Nancy fucking Drew.”
“Does Sam know?”
I don’t see it, but I can hear it in his voice, the eye roll. “Yes, Sam knows.”
He drums his hands rhythmically on his chest.
“How much are you taking?”
He pauses. “More than I should.”
I sigh and sit up, hugging my knees to my chest. “Why?”
He mirrors me and shakes his head. “You wouldn’t get it. You don’t have an addictive personality.”
“Yeah, well, neither do you. It’s bullshit,” I tell him.
He gives me a dubious look. “What?”
“There’s no such thing as an addictive personality; it’s a psychological myth and a nice way of saying you struggle with neuroticism and that you have poor impulse control.”
He looks at me straight in the eye. “I hate you.”
I sniff a laugh and rub my face, tired. “Sorry.”
My older brother holds my eyes for a second and a crack of a smile shows itself. “I’ve missed you.”
I nod. “Me too.”
He lies back down. “Play the song.”
I smile and find it on my phone.
The same song we always played on this old thing, the song that we felt a deep kinship to and many years ago, divvied up the parts to:
“Teenage Dirtbag.”