Thinking of You

by Rachel Kane

  “But what it does to the people around you, is it leaves them in a constant state of shock. You try so hard to hide everything, and then whenever anything comes out, it’s a surprise. Over and over. I felt like I couldn’t trust you at all, Jake. I felt like you were lying to me.”

  I wanted another beer, but this would’ve been a bad time to stand up and leave the room. Instead I held the empty bottle in my hands, feeling the cool condensation on the glass, the way it wrinkled the label.

  “I was lying to you,” I said. “I was lying to everybody. Hell, I’m still lying to Pop. You know he asks about you all the time? He really thinks eventually we’re going to get back together.”

  She nodded. “Believe me, I got an earful of it while you were gone. You’re going to have to tell him.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, you have to, Jake. Especially if you’re going to be seeing this Eli, going out of town every night, going to gay bars or—”

  That made me laugh. “Gay bars? Really? Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  “Jesus, Jake, I don’t know! I don’t know anything about you!”

  “I’m still me. That’s the weird thing about all this. I’m the same guy I always was. Just…with this one difference. This one discovery. I thought I could hide it. But I think about Eli. He’s not afraid. His whole family is getting busted up over him coming out, and as much as it hurts him, there’s not one fiber of him that says go back into hiding. He’s a hell of a lot braver than me.”

  “Do you talk to him?”

  “What? Of course I talk.”

  “No, Jake. I mean, do you talk to him. Do you open up, the way you never opened up with me? Because let me tell you something, if you’re playing the strong silent type with him, you’re going to hurt him, the same way you did me.”

  I really wanted another beer. Or maybe just to escape the discomfort of the conversation.

  “I don’t think—”

  She didn’t let me finish. “It’s one thing, what all this is doing to me. I don’t want you to care about that. I don’t want you to make choices based on whether I get hurt, not anymore. When I see you rushing in to something with him, it makes me sick inside, because I know you mean well, I know you think you’re doing the right thing. But you never have dealt with what your lies did to me, did to us, you just moved out and moved on. You left me all alone, wondering if I could ever trust another man. And, surprise, I don’t. I haven’t been on a single fucking date since we broke up. Because what if everybody’s got a secret they’re not telling?”

  It came out all in a rush. I wanted to go over to her, comfort her, but I knew it wasn’t the time for that. Knew it wouldn’t be welcome, not now, not anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This shit doesn’t come with an instruction manual. I didn’t know what to do. It felt like the only time in my life where I didn’t know how anything worked, didn’t know what to say, how to act.”

  “I know! That’s why I can’t hate you, as much as I tried. As much as it hurt me, I knew it was hurting you more. But Jake, what are you doing? Who is this Eli? Why are you in so deep with a man you’ve only known a few days? And don’t tell me it’s not deep, don’t you dare tell me you’re just casually dating him, because I know you. I know how you act when things get intense.”

  That made me sit back. It’s true. I was about to say something about how Eli and I were just feeling things out, hadn’t made any firm decisions or anything.

  But that was a lie, wasn’t it? I was about to lie to her.

  I loved Eli. There was no getting around that. He was the first man I had ever loved, and the depth of my feeling for him scared me.

  I rolled the beer bottle between my fingers, then returned it to its coaster. “I’m not going to hurt Eli.”

  “Really? Then who are you going to hurt, Jake? Pop? You going to keep this a secret from him, so that when it comes out a year later, he’ll feel like you were lying to him all this time?”

  “Is that what all this is about?” I asked her. “You want me to tell Pop?”

  “I want you to stop lying. I’m tired of watching you hide things from us. You’re my best friend, Jake! Would you just get all this shit out in the open so that I can move on? I need some damn closure, but with all your secrets hanging over my head…”

  She was the one who stood first. I realized a moment later she was signaling me to go. She was kicking me out.

  I gave her a final look at the door. “I’ll tell him,” I said. “I’ll explain it to Pop. I don’t look forward to it, because he’s going to flip his fucking wig. But I’ll do it. For you.”

  “Not for me, Jake. Tell him for you. Tell him, because you’re a different man when you’re open and honest. Your secrets are like fucking knives, they just keep hurting everyone around you.”

  I sank into the truck seat, a long sigh emptying my lungs.

  Holy christ, that had been painful. I’d thought I was just going to tell her about Eli, thought I’d confirm what we talked about earlier. I hadn’t realized my soul was going to be sliced open for examination in her living room.

  I pulled out my phone to listen to the message that had come in while I was in there.

  It wasn’t Eli’s number.

  It was his sister’s. Amanda.

  We met halfway, at a rest stop on the interstate that led into Corinth. By now it was late, and the parking lot was empty except for the moths wheeling around the sodium lights.

  “I thought you might be with him tonight,” she said.

  I shook my head. I felt bruised after my conversation with Marcia. Torn open. If anyone else in the world had asked to meet me, I would’ve refused. But the strangeness of Amanda’s request had drawn me out here.

  “What is it that we couldn’t talk about on the phone?” I asked her.

  “I wanted to see you face to face when I asked you this,” she said, “because I need you to know I’m serious.”

  “Okay?”

  She looked around the parking lot, looked up at the lights. “Do you know how fucking weird it is to be out here with you? You’re a stranger, and here I am in a deserted spot in the middle of the night.”

  I leaned against the side of the truck. “If you were my sister, I wouldn’t have let you come alone.”

  “Yeah, well, Eli doesn’t know I’m here. Obviously. Just…don’t turn out to be a serial killer or anything, please.”

  “Promise,” I said.

  “Fuck! I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t come here to make damn jokes. I practiced all the way over here, figuring out how to say it—”

  A sense of foreboding was like a fog creeping around me. My worry was almost palpable. “Just say it,” I said.

  “This was a mistake. Shit. Just let me get back in my car and drive—”

  “Amanda. What is it?”

  She turned to me. “I want you to break it off with Eli.”

  24

  Eli

  “When did you start that again?”

  My dad looked guiltily down at his cigarette. He shook his head. “Don’t tell your mother.”

  We were down by the pond in the backyard. I’d helped dig out the pond, a thousand years ago when life was normal. Helped put in the liner, picked out the lilies.

  Was life ever normal? Was it normal to have kept myself hidden all this time?

  I watched him exhale a long plume of smoke. “I guess we all have our secrets,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Don’t compare the two situations. My smoking is not the same thing.”

  “Right. Your secret will give you lung cancer. Mine just makes you uncomfortable.”

  “When you called, you said you wanted to talk. Did you mean you wanted to trade barbs in the middle of the night? Because if that’s the case, I’m going back in.”

  I sat on the concrete bench next to the pond. “I thought maybe if Mom and Amanda weren’t involved, we could talk more calmly. Because I don’t unders
tand what’s going on, and I need to understand.”

  He flicked an ash into the water. “I think I’ve made my position clear.”

  “That’s just it. You haven’t. You’ve yelled a lot—don’t worry, I’m not accusing you, I’ve done a lot of yelling too—and you’ve made big pronouncements, but you haven’t explained anything.”

  The silence between us seemed full of sharp edges. He clearly didn’t want to talk to me. He’d said as much over the phone. But I had insisted on coming over. Had threatened to wake everyone up. That had gotten him to agree to meet me out here, in the quiet loneliness of the yard, but I guess it couldn’t force him to talk.

  Uncle Ron, what would you have done?

  Of course I knew the answer to that already. Ron had gone to the mountains. He’d left everything behind, rather than face my father’s belligerent lack of acceptance.

  It made me feel very foolish for having flown up there. What had I been expecting, all the answers for my family? If Ron couldn’t face my dad, why did I think his book would help me to do it?

  Yet I still had that unshakable belief that Ron wouldn’t have mentioned the book in his letter, had it not been important. Had it not been the key, in some way, to unlock the mystery of my father’s hatred.

  What was it the letter had said? I’ve been writing a little something, too. You know what it is. Hard to write when I’m surrounded by your judgment, but I hope the silence of the mountains will help me finish. I’ll be able to hear my own words, instead of yours.

  You know what it is. What an ominous phrase.

  “My brother destroyed his life,” my father said after his long, thoughtful silence. He tossed his cigarette butt into the pond, and pulled another out of his pack. “I know you admire him. Ever since you were little, your mother and I were terrified, the way your face would light up during his visits. You thought he was exactly what he said he was. Thoughtful, kind, generous.”

  I scowled. “You’re saying he was something else.”

  “You didn’t see Ron for who he really was. There was a loathsome sickness at the heart of the man, an evil. The way he would flaunt his…his lifestyle. His choices.”

  “Dad, this is the twenty-first century. We know a lot more about being gay now. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s not a choice. Who would choose this?”

  He lit the new cigarette, then stared down at the burning ember at the tip. “You know why I keep my smoking secret?”

  “Because Mom will yell at you?”

  “Because it would hurt her to know. I love your mother, and I don’t want to cause her pain. She doesn’t need to know that ever since you brought this stress into our lives, that I’ve started up again.”

  “I feel like you’re about to make an analogy.”

  He cut his eyes at me. “Yes, Eli, I’m about to make an analogy, thank you. Maybe your…your gayness isn’t a choice, but telling anyone about it certainly is. Ron understood that. He knew how much it would hurt everyone if he talked about it, yet he wouldn’t stop. Your grandmother was heartbroken. I felt like I lost her. She would sit in her rocker, clutching that picture of him from when he was a boy, crying over her lost son. Ron did that to her, because he wouldn’t keep things to himself.”

  “You have got to be kidding me. Grandma not being able to handle the truth was her own problem, not Uncle Ron’s.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand. You’re still young, you don’t know what you’re doing. The choices you make right now are going to affect not just your future, but all our lives. I see you headed down the exact same road as Ron. You don’t care about the pain you’re causing. All you care about is whatever momentary, disgusting pleasure you get in your perversion.”

  Now I understand why you had to leave to write your book, Uncle Ron. How did you ever talk to Dad? How did you hope to get through to him?

  “Let me tell you what I do understand,” I said. “I nearly died in a plane crash. I might have starved out in the woods, if someone hadn’t come to save me. But rather than welcoming me back, rather than being happy that your own child is safe, all you can think about is how grossed-out you are by me. Do you know how much that sucks? Do you have any idea what it’s like to come home knowing nothing has changed, that my survival doesn’t mean a single fucking thing to you, because all you care about is whether or not I tell anybody I’m gay?”

  I was pretty sure this was going to turn into a fight. Regret for coming out here tonight ate away at me. I should’ve stayed home, should’ve had those last two beers in the fridge. Drunk and moping on the couch all alone would’ve been better than living through this conversation.

  But instead of yelling at me, my dad took a long, contemplative drag on his cigarette. Maybe he should never have quit smoking. It certainly gave him something to do, a little time where he could calm down and consider his next reply.

  Not that his next reply made me feel any better.

  “You nearly died, in the name of following in your uncle’s footsteps. When Amanda told us where you were going, I felt like you had already died. My innocent little boy with his spaceships and robots, lost under the influence of my brother. What the hell drove you up there, anyway? What made you chase after his ghost?”

  “I think you know why,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I honestly cannot imagine.”

  “Before he died, he told you he was writing a book.”

  The cigarette fell from his hand. Sparks bounced from where it fell on the grass. He quickly covered it with his shoe, twisting it into the ground.

  “A book,” he said, his voice still and dead.

  “A book that would explain things. A book that would help me understand why this family is so stuck.”

  He wouldn’t look at me. He stared into the pond. “And did you find it?”

  “No, that’s the hell of it. Whatever he was trying to tell us, it’s gone forever. Maybe I’m stupid, maybe I’d built it up too much in my head, but all I could think was that if I read the book, if I understood it, I’d know what to say to you, to make this all okay. To make you stop hating me.”

  “I think I’d better go in now,” he said.

  “What? No, stay out here.”

  “No. I don’t hate you, son. Not you, not the person I know is inside you. All this other stuff, the men and the…the perversion, it’s not you. Not the real you. I just wish you’d come to your senses and stop killing us with it.”

  If I had hoped for a big confrontation that would make everything clear, then that hope had been bitterly disappointed. I chastised myself for being foolish. It had been stupid to talk to him. Stupid to think I could convince him to drop this fight.

  It was so easy in books, in movies. If we had been giant robots battling over the fate of a planet, everything would have been clear. Guns in the open, rockets firing. Maybe that’s why I liked science fiction so much, a particular kind of science fiction, one that lacked subtlety. I was tired of subtlety. I wanted good guys and bad guys, duking it out until the good guys won.

  But this is real life, I reminded myself.

  In real life, there weren’t always clear winners and losers. In real life, you weren’t sure what kind of weapons your opponent really had. His secrets. His motives.

  There were things my dad wasn’t telling me about him and Ron. Things he couldn’t say, but I couldn’t imagine what they would be. Why couldn’t he come out with it? Why couldn’t he tell me why this was such a big deal he was ready to rip the family apart over it?

  Why couldn’t he just accept me?

  I’m a grown-up. I knew the proper response to this, it was the same thing every friend would tell me. Forget your family. If they can’t accept you, they don’t deserve you. Anyone with a spine would dump them. Your friends can be your family instead. Jake can be your family.

  Jake. God, I missed him. I wished, not for the first time, that he could have stayed the night with me. I needed someone to hold onto, someone strong enoug
h to help me through this, because I don’t care what my friends would say, it hurt that my family was throwing me away. It hurt, and I didn’t know what to do.

  I thought about calling Jake. I wondered if he would mind that. But I couldn’t. The last thing I wanted was to look like I was running to him with every little problem. I wanted to be the kind of boyfriend who would make him happy, not the kind that would worry him with constant family drama and a need to be protected all the time.

  Back at home, I looked at my toys with a baleful eye. Who the hell was I, anyway? An innocent little boy, according to my father, one who had been misled. What kind of man keeps all these toys around, though? What kind of man burns with this wretched self-hatred, lets someone else’s words ignite in him a disgust of himself that threatens to burn him alive?

  You’re just mad. Your father has that effect. Calm down. It’s going to be okay.

  But it wouldn’t be okay, would it?

  I have never had a successful relationship. I probably forgot to mention that to Jake when all this started. Never once have I managed to simply love someone, and be loved back. It always goes horribly wrong. I end up wrecking it, because of this thing in my family, this need to keep secrets, and all the fucking drama and pain it causes.

  Guys know better than stick with a man like me. They can see the danger a mile away.

  Jake didn’t know. If he were here, he’d wrap his strong arms around me and tell me that he could protect me from the world.

  It wasn’t true. He couldn’t protect me from my family, because I was my family. I carried their guilt and judgment with me wherever I might go.

  I sank onto the couch again, my head pounding. I hadn’t felt this full of doom since the plane went down.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  25