Far from All Else

by Tom Lally

“Trying isn’t sitting in the basement. You’re twenty and you still haven’t gotten your fucking license,” he said.

  I looked over at him.

  My dad rolled his eyes at me and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘What the fuck?’

  “I always think I’m gonna kill somebody,” I said. “And it’s not like you’re home all day. You and Grace go to the country club or to the city to see a show or you’re on the boat. Riley and Pierce don’t come home that often so it’s not like I have someone to practice with.”

  “Hey, I worked hard to get where I am. I deserve time to myself. You could’ve learned in Drivers Ed in high school and gotten it done then like your siblings, but no, you were too busy smoking pot and writing in those silly notebooks. You wasted time and now look at where you are,” he paused taking a deep breath. “I think we need some major changes, Drew.”

  “Like what?” I asked nervously.

  “I gotta figure that out,” he said.

  The rest of the ride was silent. I didn’t know what he meant by ‘changes’. The only thing it did was scare me. I knew he already was sick of me. I was an embarrassment to him while my brother and sister were practically golden. I rested my arm on the windowsill of the passenger door and glared out as the car followed the roads of Barrington. The houses were not massive, but large. It reminded me of the town I lived in, but the aroma of wealth and snobbishness wasn’t as potent. The winding roads meandered up and down hills and a few poor ten-year-olds tried to ride their bicycles on the sidewalk. We traveled past the town limits and onto Long Island’s main roads passing shopping centers and fast food joints. It was only a twenty-minute ride, but I wished it lasted forever. I knew my family, along with their respective partners, was over for dinner that night.

  We passed through several other neighborhoods that possessed striking similarities to each other. The houses all tended to be split-level structures where the garage rested underneath the bay window of the living room. After a few blocks, the tenant houses would make an appearance until reaching the nearby apartment complex that had two floors, but extended a full avenue. It seemed strange how the boundaries of each town worked. Houses would resemble the model for middle-class living and then over a single crosswalk, the working class homes that were classified as the lower middle-class would overtake the street. This carried on until we passed over the Long Island Railroad tracks that separated Goldencrest from Hayley’s Cove.

  My house belonged to the incorporated village of Goldencrest which was a part of the larger town, Hayley’s Cove, though we made it abundantly clear that we were the wealthier area. Our local playground used to have one basketball court and one tennis court side by side. The town forced a law to be passed that removed the basketball court and replaced it with a second tennis court after residents filed a noise complaint. I found out later on that the complaint came from the mayor and his wife, both avid tennis players who hosted the annual Goldencrest tournament every year in May. The playground had a good set up for children. Monkey bars, four slides, a firefighter’s pole, and the steel microphones to shout into, yet somehow, it was the only playground in the county without a swing set. I always wondered if this was the townspeople’s feeble attempt at being different.

  The feeling hit me immediately that the ride was coming to an end. The trees, although massive in height and beautiful in the way they gently rained down October leaves, overwhelmed me. The road felt narrower and narrower. It seemed like the trunks were growing closer together forcing themselves to divert the road into one single path which led straight to my front door. I had no problem with this when I knew my house was going to be empty or when it was only my sister, but when my brother and sister came back together, it meant I had to talk to the former.

  I loved talking to my sister. She was the only one who seemed to like me. Riley was twenty-four and a fashion model. My brother, Pierce, was twenty-seven and a trader for Goldman Sachs. He was a former football star at Boston College.

  Both made good money. Both had partners; Pierce’s was soon to be his wife. Both had determination. Both had confidence. Both were functioning humans in a typical sense. It seemed as if they didn’t fail. I was a twenty-year-old sophomore in college. I had worked as a waiter at a local restaurant and couldn’t handle the stress. I wore ripped jeans and old sneakers every day. I lacked any thread of self-esteem, and needed to be counterbalanced by the maximum dosage of Zoloft allowable.

  The only light at the end of my day was a cigarette just before I went to bed, reminding me that tomorrow was another thing to worry about, but for those two minutes, the only thing I was focused on was a single Marlboro Menthol.

  We reached the gate to our house shortly. Each property on the street had an entrance gate since each house lined the water and the town didn’t want people sneaking onto the beach who weren’t apart of the Goldencrest Beach Club. The gate opened and my dad slowly eased the car up the driveway. The driveway had a parking space wide enough for two cars near the walkway to the front door while the rest of the path led to the garage in the backyard. I saw two cars, a Mercedes and a Jeep sitting there and immediately knew my brother and sister were at the house waiting for me.

  I knew they knew where I was coming from, but I hated the hesitance on our respective parts to act as if everything was completely fine, except with Riley. I was off, possibly had always been, but it had become public information. With the exception of my sister, no one in my family understood mental illness. Instead, they feared it. They didn’t know how to react because the term, ‘mentally ill’, suggested the idea that a noose was somewhere nearby.

  As we walked up the stone steps to the front door of the house, my father grabbed me by the arm.

  “Hey. That conversation stays between us. Don’t go crying to Riley about this. That’ll only make things worse and I’ll still make those changes I mentioned,” he said sternly.

  I remained quiet, slowly walking forward so my father would have to release my arm, but his grasp hung firm. I felt him jerk my arm and the force pulled me back in front of him.

  “Do you understand me?” he asked.

  I nodded without looking at him.

  “Look at me,” he said, slapping my chin with his fingers.

  I tilted my head towards his and nodded.

  “I understand,” I said before passively pulling my arm free.

  The double doors were unlocked and I walked in first. The wood floors had been freshly cleaned. The staircase lined the wall to the right of where I stood. It led up to the balcony where I saw Grace. Her butt sat on the wood railing as she talked on her cell phone. The large bracelet on her wrist glistened against the chandelier’s light hanging above the main floor entrance. Her heels were tall and her white dress pants were tight. She was a beautiful forty-five-year-old. Grace had married my father when I was fourteen, roughly a year and a half after my mother died. She’d worked as a secretary at my dad’s Wall Street company in Manhattan. She didn’t know much about economics, but her looks made up for what her brain lacked.

  That’s not to say she was dumb, but it is to say that she was merely average, and that held for everything except her appearance.

  “Hey, Grace,” I said.

  “Hey, Drew,” she said, smiling. “How was your appointment?”

  “Great,” I said unenthusiastically.

  “Oh, that’s great, sweetie,” she said before turning her head back against the phone.

  She talked to me like I was ten years old. I knew she didn’t fully understand my dilemma. Loneliness and depression were not something she was used to and my situation made her uneasy.

  “Hey, babe,” my dad said.

  “Weston,” she said. “Come up here.”

  I avoided this part. The idea that my dad was with someone so supremely opposite to my mother, someone whom in my opinion, didn’t hold a candle to her. Her intelligence, her diligence, her temper that could occasionally flare, her presence that was evident the s
econd she entered a room. She never cared about money or material things. My father had always made a lot of money, but my mother still wrote at the kitchen table for hours on end.

  Five books, no commercial value, still, five books, all with emotional relevance.

  It was an empire of wisdom that we lost when she passed, and so to watch the man I knew who had only ‘loved’ a single woman in his life then grope a woman my mother wouldn’t have been able to stand was bruising.

  I looked at the large oval entrance to the left of the front doors. The dining room was set. The black mahogany table could seat ten comfortably. Each placemat was set with silverware, a napkin, and a small bread plate. The napkins were neatly folded as they did in the restaurant I’d worked at. It looked fancy. I knew Grace did it. She tried to be fancy, but without the wedding ring on her finger, she would be sitting behind a desk answering someone’s telephones and making dinner reservations for people like my father. The set places also showed that my brother and sister, along with their respective partners, would be staying for dinner.

  The kitchen was a short walk directly in front of the entrance. I walked under the balcony where I could hear chatter coming from inside. I stopped short of the kitchen, just before the wood on the floor turned into ceramic tiles and I listened to the voices of my siblings and then their partners who were accompanying them.

  Riley had been with Brock for three years and Pierce with Emma since middle school. I was no longer a mystery. They were aware of my problems. I used to be the friendly and cute little sibling.

  Now I was the scarred and pained youth who still hadn’t experienced the hardships of being an adult.

  My sneakers crunched against the kitchen floor. It smelt like chicken and noodles. I could feel everyone’s eyes turn. Riley was the first to speak.

  “Hey, Drew,” she said and ran over to give me a hug.

  Pierce and Emma followed seconds after.

  “What’s up, Drew?” he asked and gave me a limp handshake.

  “Hi, Drew,” Emma said while giving me a light, hesitant hug.

  Brock came last.

  “How’s it going, Drew?” he asked and gave me a firm handshake.

  “Hello,” I replied to everybody.

  I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a soda can, cracking it as I turned back to the room.

  “Where were you?” Pierce asked.

  “Physical therapy. My knee is killing me,” I said.

  I’d torn ligaments in my knee playing basketball during my sophomore year of high school. Though I acted like it was something bothersome, it hadn’t affected me since the surgery corrected it that winter break four years prior. It became a paper-thin shield that everyone could see through, but I just didn’t want to tell them where I’d really been.

  “Yeah. I heard. What are they doing for it?” Brock asked.

  “Same old exercises,” I said.

  “That should help,” Pierce said.

  “Yeah, I hope, but if you guys don’t mind, I’m gonna head outside for a smoke,” I said.

  “That’s definitely not helping you. You gotta stop that shit,” Pierce said.

  “Well, you know what they say, life is short, I might as well smoke up then,” I said.

  I could hear Pierce scoff.

  I walked through the kitchen, passed the living room on the left where the fireplace and two reading chairs were. Old family photos of us when we were younger stood on the mantle next to photos of our updated family. Pierce’s college football jersey and game balls were enshrined in a glass frame as were various magazine covers depicting Riley striking beautiful poses. The mirror on the wall reflected nothing but the ceiling lights above, something my mother and I used to laugh about when she was alive.

  “Why did your father hang a mirror from there? What the hell are you going to see?” she used to joke with me.

  The solarium was glistening with the late afternoon sun. The room, complete with two chairs, a couch, and a large television led out to the patio in the backyard. Opening the sliding door, I was immediately hit with a fresh gust of wind. The breeze came off the Long Island Sound just one hundred feet past the edge of our backyard lawn. I loved this part of the house. Summer months allowed me the pleasure of reading a book in the warm air while listening to the soft, haunting melodies of Elliott Smith and Townes Van Zandt. Fall brought a different mood, but just as serene a feel. Though slightly colder, it tended to agree with my Irish skin. The sun didn’t beat down the way it did during the summer; instead, it seemed to hover distantly above the clouds. It was close enough for me to feel and see, but far enough to avoid sunburn.

  I lit a cigarette and sat on one of the reclining chairs that faced the water. The silence didn’t last long; however, as I heard the back door slide open.

  “You okay?” Riley asked as she slid the door closed.

  She ran her fingers through her long, brown hair. She truly was beautiful. Her elegance was primed ever since she was a baby.

  The modeling world was known to be cruel, but Riley had escaped without a scar. She had a perfect life. Soon to be married, wealthy, beautiful, and intelligent. People who knew her were always shocked when they met me, at least in my opinion. I knew that the rest of my family was slightly embarrassed by me, but to Riley, I was simply myself, and I forever loved her for that.

  “I’m getting there,” I said, holding up the cigarette.

  “No, Drew, how are you doing? Actually?” she asked.

  “I’m okay,” I said, taking a drag.

  “Sorry about Pierce and Dad. I know they’re not your favorites,” she said as she took a seat next to me.

  “Why? It’s not your fault,” I said.

  “I know they can be assholes on occasion,” she said.

  “They do have their moments,” I agreed.

  “How was your appointment?” she asked.

  “Same old. Two hundred milligrams of Zoloft still. If it doesn’t get better, then we’ll try something different,” I said while taking another pull from my cigarette.

  “I’m sorry, Drew. I really am. I’m not gonna pretend to understand what you’re going through, but I have to know something. Are you gonna call me if things get worse?” She asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I just mean if you start to feel lonely and distant. I know Dad and Grace are no help, but I’m always around no matter what,” she said.

  I turned to her and gave her a cheap grin.

  “I will,” I said.

  Riley leaned over and hugged me. Her gold earrings dangled against my cheek and shoulder.

  “God, I wish you didn’t have to deal with this,” she said.

  “Me too, but it’s getting better,” I lied.

  “I hope it is, Drew,” she said as she pulled her face from my shoulder.

  She wiped a stray tear from the corner of her eye.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m good,” she said, sniffling.

  I gently grabbed her forearm.

  “I’m gonna be fine,” I said.

  She grabbed my hand this time.

  “I know, Drew. Are you writing?” she asked.

  “Not recently, no,” I said. “I thought about buying a typewriter. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I think it might help me write. I love the sound the keys make.”

  “Are you gonna get one?” Riley asked.

  “I don’t know. It might be a waste,” I said.

  “Get one,” Riley said. “It won’t be a waste. Not if you use it.”

  The back door slid open again. It was Pierce this time.

  “You guys coming in? Dinner is ready,” he said, but didn’t wait for an answer and closed the door.

  “C’mon, let’s go, Drew. I’m starving,” she said.

  I snubbed the nose of my cigarette in the ashtray and followed her inside.

  Chapter 3

  I went to the kitchen sink while everyone filed into the d
ining room. As I washed the cigarette smell off of my fingers, footsteps crept along the kitchen floor behind me. The refrigerator door opened and I looked behind me only to find Pierce grabbing the Britta from the shelf.

  He snagged a glass from the cabinet next to the sink.

  “You gonna change before we eat?” he asked.

  “No, why?” I asked.

  “C’mon, Drew. Look at yourself,” he said, while he poured himself a glass of water.

  I looked down at my clothes. My jeans were tattered and my sneakers were dirty. My messy, brown hair was uncombed and subjected to the wind. I didn’t understand his problem with me wearing what I wanted within the limits of my own house.

  “I think I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  “Just trying to look out for you,” Pierce said, shaking his head, “but obviously it’s a waste of time.”

  Pierce liked to believe that his ambitions were always for the greater good of someone else, but in reality, it was what he felt was better for him. The only reason he would deride me about the way I looked was because he was embarrassed by how I dressed.

  Last month, I went to the country club with him and my father for a round of golf. Pierce was so angry over how ‘shitty’ my polo was that he bought me six new ones from the pro shop. My father made no attempt to defend me. Instead, he simply chimed in with, “He’s got a point, Drew.” I guess he just hadn’t noticed beforehand even though I was next to him in the passenger seat for the entire drive over. Those shirts were now rotting in the back of my closet.

  “You done?” I asked.

  We made brief, but solid eye contact before I left the room. I could feel his eyes following me through the walls all the way to the dining room.

  Grace and my father sat at opposite ends of the table. Brock sat next to my dad, as would Pierce when he returned. Their respective partners sat next to them. I was happy to see my sister subtly wave me over to her side of the table where an open seat remained.

  I sat and looked across at an empty chair. Grace had just finished making sure the table was set perfectly before returning to the kitchen to check the food. We sat around the table making small talk until Grace and Pierce returned with a platter of chicken breast bathed in some sauce I didn’t know how to spell or even say. There was a bowl of peas as well as a bowl of noodles. A plate of string beans slathered in butter was placed in the center of the table. The presentation was well put together though, everything about the meal seemed very normal, despite the added ingredients Grace put in to distinguish herself as a woman with a palate.