by Rachel Kane
“He knew? How?”
I shook my head. “I misunderstood. We were talking about two different things. I thought he was talking about knowing I was gay, but no, he was talking about this book.”
“Ugh, so you still have it hanging over your head, that you have to come out at some point.”
“At some point,” I agreed. “Later. I promise you I will, but not in his condition.”
“No, I know.” He looked at the pages. “This…this is all of it? It’s smaller than I thought it would be.”
“That’s what I thought too. But hey, you gotta stay awake tonight anyway,” I said. “You might as well read it.”
“Have you…”
I nodded. “Not all of it. But I know what it’s about. I think… I think you need to read it. I better not say anything.”
He picked up the pages with interest.
Meantime, I had a book to read too, didn’t I?
Pieced Together: A Novel By Eli R. Groom.
I began to read a story about…not robots, not exactly, but small machines that somehow came together to make an intelligence.
It made me think of all the different sides of people, some sides you’d never actually see, but all of them working side by side to create the person you come to know.
I knew I had limited time to read his book. Knew that before long, he would come to the part I had read.
It took about half an hour.
“Holy shit,” he said. He looked at me over the pages. “Jake. Holy shit.”
“I know. Keep reading.”
“But my family—”
“Keep reading.”
“Well, it’s better than the ICU,” I said, looking around the hospital room.
Pop looked a thousand times healthier. Still on oxygen for now, still with breathing treatments, the IV bag delivering heavy-duty antibiotics, but the color had come back to his face, and he was sitting up, his breakfast tray nearly empty.
“Told that doctor to let me go home,” Pop said. “He turned around and told the nurse to tie me to the bed if I got up.”
“Damn right,” I said. “You sit there and get well. I don’t want to have to save your ass yet again, old man.”
He gave me one of his rare smiles, turning up the corners of his white mustache, lifting his thick white beard. “Don’t you get too uppity, you still owe me a plane.”
Then he looked over at Eli, who had taken one of the chairs in the room.
Eli looked as exhausted as I felt. But he’d made it through the night with no more headaches, no seizures or any of the other symptoms the doctor had told us to watch out for. Maybe if he didn’t over-exert himself, he’d be okay.
Or maybe he wouldn’t. He’d finished reading the book last night.
Pop said to him, “You Ron’s nephew, right?”
“Yessir. We met during the rescue.”
“Hm.” He looked over at me. “You give him the book?”
I nodded.
“So now you know,” he said to Eli.
Eli opened his mouth and inhaled, as though he were about to say something, but then had second thoughts. Instead, he just nodded.
“Hard thing to learn about your family,” Pop said.
“You get some rest,” I said. “I need to get Eli back home. I’ll come back by for lunch. You’ll be okay till then?”
But Pop wasn’t ready to stop talking yet.
“Your uncle was a good man,” he said. “Cared about you. Cared about his whole family. He deserved better than he got.”
Eli nodded. “He did. He was the only one in my family who ever made sense.”
Pop pointed at him. “Family doesn’t desert family. Not for nothing. When he died, nobody came for him. Not even you.”
“Pop, I don’t think—”
“No, Jake, it’s okay,” said Eli. He turned to Pop. “Every day, I regret that I didn’t keep in touch with Uncle Ron. By the time he died, I was so deep in hiding, I wouldn’t have even known how to reach out to him. My dad was so pissed off at him, all the time. Hated him. Well…you know.”
An unspoken agreement filled the room. We all knew about Eli’s dad, and the reasons for that hatred.
“It felt like it would split the family apart, if I tried to keep in touch with him,” Eli continued. “Stupid, isn’t it? Because the family managed to split apart anyway.”
Pop didn’t know about Eli’s coming out story. And I didn’t want to go down that path, because for all that Pop looked better, he was still weak. I could tell him later. When he was back on his feet, when he wouldn’t be shocked.
“That’s a poison,” said Pop, “that kind of hate. Turning brother against brother like that. All for what?”
I hope you remember that when I come out to you, I thought. I hope you don’t turn against me.
“I never understood it,” said Pop. He watched Eli rise from his chair to leave with me. “Never understood why that would make somebody hate you. When Jake’s mama died, it was the hardest thing in the world for me. Hurt like hell. But that was nature. Why would somebody do it to themselves? Why would they hurt their own family like that, on purpose?”
Eli came to stand next to me. “I’m going to talk to my dad about it. Soon. I’m going to show him the book.”
Pop nodded. He looked tired. Too much talking. He settled back onto his pillows.
“You boys take care of one another,” he said.
Almost as if he already knew.
32
Eli
There were a thousand things I needed to say. I needed to confront my dad over what I’d read in Uncle Ron’s book. I needed to talk to Amanda, and tell her that I was going to ignore her advice, and was going to work hard to keep my connection with Jake.
I really needed to talk to Jake, because those red flags were still flapping in the breeze, and the only way we were going to take them down was by talking it through.
One of the reviews of Pieced Together said that the end was clumsy, one shocking revelation after another. That it felt rushed, like I had gotten three-quarters of the way through writing and just wanted to speed through to the end, to get finished, to have it over with.
Honestly, that’s how I felt right now, like I needed to do everything at once. All these conversations. I should just get everybody on a big conference call. Wouldn’t that be fun? A big, melodramatic scene where I gave lofty speeches about love, and family, and how important it was to save those connections and not let them go?
You know what I did instead? I went to fucking sleep.
I’d stayed up for many, many hours according to the doctor’s instructions, so that we could be sure this was just the concussion and not any extra brain injury, but now I was fucking tired.
How’s that for drama? I was in my own bed, with my own pillow, my own blanket draped over me. Jake had kissed me on the forehead—the side without the stitches—and promised to see me soon.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, as he left the room.
“I’ll believe it when it happens,” he said with a smile, and pulled my door closed.
My dad was always angry. That’s the main thing I remember about my childhood. It was so rare to see him happy, ever. I could never figure out why he was mad. Sure, sometimes the cause was obvious. Maybe I broke something of his, or said a swear word in his hearing, something like that. There was the time Amanda and I were playing in the sprinkler in the front yard…while his car was in the driveway, the window down, so every time the sprinkler sprayed in its direction, the water would go right into the driver’s seat.
Yeah, he was mad about that.
The thing about living with someone in a permanent state of anger is, you don’t learn how to calm things down. Everything is always out of your control. Strategies that are supposed to work—apologizing, being docile—end up blowing up in the face of their eternal rage.
It leaves you feeling like you’re going to get in trouble. A lot. All the time. Like you
’re always on the verge of being discovered having done something wrong.
What a way to grow up. What a fucked-up way to live.
Maybe that’s why I was so attached to robots, growing up. Machines made sense. They didn’t get mad, they didn’t blow up at you. They did what they were supposed to.
Maybe that’s why the only way I could solve problems during emotional times, was to dissociate myself from all the feelings. Like I couldn’t both feel and think at the same time.
I was going to have to work on that. Eventually.
This was all stuff going through my head in my half-asleep, half-awake state. Things felt like they were clicking together…and then I slipped away into dreams.
In the end, there was no big confrontation. I could have confronted my dad with the whole family there. Could’ve had Jake by my side. But we were going to be on painful territory, and I couldn’t risk my dad lashing out at Jake. He’d been through enough lately, without the Wrath of Dad coming down on him.
Amanda had taken Mom to the mall for the afternoon, leaving Dad at home.
I found him smoking by the pond.
“Back again?” he said. “I wouldn’t think you’d have much to say to me at this point.”
“I tried really hard to think of a way to ease into this subject,” I told him. “I thought of prefaces and preambles…but, y’know what, fuck it. I found Uncle Ron’s book. I read it.”
Dad paled, and took a long, long drag on his cigarette.
“You fucking hypocrite,” I said quietly. “You goddamn lying hypocrite.”
He nodded, and threw his cigarette into the pond, where it died with a tiny hiss. “I am. I absolutely am. You’ll learn one day that sometimes you have to lie, to keep things going.”
“All this time, you hated Ron for being gay, you hated me for being gay—”
“I’m assuming his book talks about the time he caught me with my friend Joe. It was college, we were drunk.”
“That wasn’t the only time,” I said. “There’s no point in lying.”
It had been the most uncomfortable story I’d ever read in my life. Nobody likes to think about their parents that way…but Ron had laid it out in bitter detail.
He had walked in on my father three times, with three different men.
The last one had been when my mom and dad were married. After Amanda was born, but while my mom was pregnant with me.
“What do you want me to say, Eli? You want a tearful confession? You want me to tell your mother? It’ll kill her. She won’t know how to take it.”
He shook another cigarette out of the pack. His hand was shaking as he brought his lighter up.
“I don’t know what to do about telling Mom,” I said. “In a way, I feel like it’s not my place to tell her. Because it will break her heart. Not because you slept with those guys, but because you lied. You tore the fucking family apart.”
“You’re still a kid,” he said. “You don’t understand a damn thing. Ron was so fucking happy when he caught me. Fucking delighted, like now he had something to hold over my damn head. But I’d seen how people treated him, his whole life. I’d seen the sneers, heard the insults. For what? So he could be open about doing something that most reasonable people try to hide. So he could flaunt it.”
I thought back to the dignified man who had brought books for Amanda and me. There was nothing about Ron that suggested he was flaunting anything. He was just himself.
“It’s one thing to stay in hiding,” I said. “That’s your personal decision. Whatever. But you forced him out of the family. And you made our lives fucking miserable. Is that why you’re so mad all the time, because Ron got to live his life, I’m living mine…and you don’t get to?”
“I love your mother, son.”
“You cheated on her.”
He shook his head. “I’ve spent my whole life feeling like there’s a time bomb in my chest, waiting to go off. Knowing that eventually, no matter how well I hid it, it was going to destroy everything. When Ron died, I was fucking miserable, knowing I’d driven him out of the family…but at the same time I breathed a sigh of relief, because there was nobody else who knew my secret.”
“You punished us every day of our lives, because of your secret. Even after Ron was gone, you didn’t let up. You were still just as rigid and judgmental as ever. Then, when you found out about me—”
“Found out about you? Eli, your mother and I have known about you for years. Probably before you knew about you. I still remember when we caught you with that boy from your drama class. What was it you said, you were practicing for a play? I would’ve laughed if it weren’t so damn sad, knowing you were going to turn out like me and Ron. Knowing the same curse was draped over your shoulders. All I knew how to do was beat it out of you. Not physically, of course. You know I never laid a violent hand on you. But to let you know it was unacceptable. To teach you by my example how to live, to put those urges aside.”
“Yeah, you did a great job,” I muttered.
“Then when that novel of yours came out, we were horrified. There you were, telling the entire damn world that you were gay. No shame, no embarrassment.”
“That’s because being gay is nothing to be ashamed of!” I said, loud enough that my voice carried over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
That made him stiffen up. His fingers playing with his cigarette reminded me of an insect busily cleaning itself.
“You’re wrong,” he said. His voice had grown quiet and cold. “It’s an ugly thing, having these urges. It’s like an addiction to the nastiest drug possible. It turns a normal man into a sweating, grunting mess.”
It was like the world had been out of focus before, but a well-made lens had slipped between the world and my eyes, snapping everything into sharpness and clarity.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s the difference between us. I see being gay as being about who you love, who you feel the deepest connections on earth with. You just see it as physical.”
He grimaced. All this time, I had seen him as angry, but I’d never seen that anger fall away and reveal the pain underneath. The aching caused by a lifetime of self-hatred.
What must it be like to find love in your heart, and be so afraid of it, that you twist it into hate?
What must it be like to have that kind of secret, that erases some part of you, that disconnects you from the rest of the world, even the people who love you most?
I had come here today to demand justice, to call out his hypocrisy and force him to accept me.
Instead, I’d discovered a man who was going to go to his grave unable to accept himself.
Sometimes stories don’t have happy endings. Sometimes they just end. I wasn’t going to be loved by my father. He had made himself incapable of it.
I was never going to have my whole family back.
I pulled the rolled-up pages from my jacket, and lay them on the bench by the pond. “There’s the book, if you want to read it. Or throw it away. Burn it. I don’t care. It’s between you and Uncle Ron now.”
He didn’t look back at me as I left. Just stared into the darkness of the pond, that cigarette jammed between his fingers, lost in a maze of his own self-hate.
I don’t know if it was sympathy I was feeling. It felt too angry to be sympathy. But I recognized that I had never understood my father before, and now I did…
…and I wished I didn’t.
Oh, to go back to simpler days.
Everything had changed.
Everything in my life had turned into a crash.
33
Jacob
For some reason I thought Eli had come back to the hospital. I guess I had dozed off in the chair, listening to Pop’s oxygen quietly hiss. When the door opened, I snapped awake, realizing how deeply asleep I had been.
“How’s he doing?” said Marcia. She had two cups of coffee in a paper tray, and handed me one.
Of course it couldn’t have been Eli. How would he get here?
I couldn’t help but feel a little sting of disappointment that he wasn’t here, though. And couldn’t help feeling apprehensive about the tension between me and Marcia.
“I didn’t expect to see you here. You didn’t need to come out.”
She shrugged. “I worry about the two of you.”
“He’s doing a lot better.”
“He looks like it. I guess he’ll be going home soon, and things can get back to normal.”
That made me laugh. “Normal. That’s one word for it.”
“Look, I’m sorry if I stressed you out about…” She looked over at Pop, and lowered her voice. “About things. All the things going on.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it really isn’t. You’ve had big things happening in your life, and I’ve been sitting here like the aggrieved party, nursing my grudges.”
I shook my head. “Apology accepted, but you have to accept mine too. Look, there was no way for me to be up-front with you about…about my identity. God, it’s hard to talk about this with him right there. But still. In a perfect world, I would have told you as soon as I realized. Instead, I was scared. Scared you’d hate me, scared everyone would. I’ve never felt a fear like that before. Hell, even crashing the plane wasn’t as scary as the idea of the world finding out about me.”
Her thumb traveled over the rim of her paper cup. “I should have known from the start. Guys like you are never straight. Good, kind, compassionate, hot…I should’ve known there was something wrong there. You were too perfect.”
“That’s the most confusing compliment I’ve gotten all day. But seriously, you’re not psychic…and neither am I. When we knew, we knew. No sense in beating ourselves up for not knowing before that. No sense in punishing each other. It has been painful enough.”
“What’s painful?” asked Pop, opening his eyes.
Marcia shot me a knowing smile; I must have looked startled.
