The Art of Breathing

by T. J. Klune

  It’s not a matter of breathing.

  It’s who we are.

  He pulls away, but barely. His eyes fix on mine. “I’ve been waiting,” he says almost angrily in that beautiful broken voice, “for the look you just gave me. Is this clear enough for you, Tyson? Do you understand now?”

  Well, no, I don’t understand anything at all because I’m pretty sure I’m brain-dead and have an erection in the middle of a gay bar fifteen hundred miles from home after having the first kiss to end all first kisses. “Flarg,” I say rather eloquently. “Gah.”

  “Good,” he says. “Just so we’re clear.”

  He lets go of my face and turns on his heel, disappearing into the crowd.

  “Gah,” I say again. No one seems to notice.

  THE FINAL Sage:

  It’s hours later and I still haven’t quite recovered from what I’ve determined to be a life-altering event of a magnitude that I can’t even begin to understand.

  Dom and I haven’t said much to each other since we left the bar. To be honest, I haven’t said much to anyone as my speaking ability appears to have been temporarily destroyed, and I can do no more than make grunting noises to questions that I’m not quite hearing. It probably doesn’t help that whenever I look at Dom, he arches an eyebrow at me, asking me a question I cannot remotely comprehend.

  Funny thing, though. I can breathe. It’s not even an issue.

  And now everyone’s gone to bed and Dom is in our room, and I’m putting off following him in there because I’m convinced that either I’ve constructed what happened in the bar as some sort of elaborate fantasy and it didn’t happen, or it did happen and Dom is waiting for me in the bedroom so we can talk and kiss and maybe (probably!) get down to business, and all I can picture is that huge fucking dildo in the drawer and what if he wants to use that? On me? Or on him? Do I have to put a condom on it? Is it even clean? Can you get STDs from rubber dongs?

  Yeah, I know. I sound ridiculous. But I can’t help it.

  So instead of taking charge and getting what I’ve been waiting for all this time, I’m sitting in the dark in the living room on Sandy’s couch replaying that kiss in my head over and over and over again. Stupid, stupid, stupid—

  The light switches on overhead.

  “Gah,” I say. “Gah flarg!”

  “Because that makes sense,” Sandy says with a yawn. “I thought I heard some noise out here. What are you still doing up? Can’t sleep? Me either. Takes me a while to calm down after a show.”

  “He! Did stuff! To my face!”

  “Uh, come again?” he asks. He sits down next to me on the couch. “Who did stuff to your face? Did someone hurt you at the bar?” I can hear the steel in his voice. Helena’s never too far away.

  I shake my head and clear my throat. “No. Kissed me!”

  “Who kissed you?” Then a smile splits his face. “Well, I’ll be fucked. Did someone perchance find out what a certain officer of the law tastes like?”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Holy shit, indeed,” he says. He reaches over and wraps his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close. Holy crap, do I need this. I curl up against him, and he laughs quietly to himself.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask, because I’m failing to find any humor in this situation whatsoever.

  “That didn’t take long,” he says. “I expected you to last at least another week or so.”

  “It wasn’t me! He did it!”

  “Even better, then. It means he got tired of waiting for you to open your eyes. Gotta love a man who takes the initiative.”

  “I’m so confused,” I mutter.

  “Why, baby doll? You’ve got what you wanted. Dom is, at the very least, interested in your cute little ass. And at most, it’s what you’ve been waiting for.”

  “I don’t even know what that means!”

  “No one does. That’s the beauty of it. You’ll find out together. The big thing that you need to do is just go with the flow and not overthink it.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly a ‘go with the flow’ kind of guy,” I remind him.

  He laughs again. “Yeah, I kind of figured that. You’re lucky I already have plenty of experience with Paul. You two are peas in pod. Maybe you’re a little less neurotic and a little more of a smartass, but you remind me of him. And that’s a good thing.”

  “He and my brother can never meet,” I warn him. “It really would be the end of the world.” And then it hits me what I’ve forgotten. “Oh shit,” I moan.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “My brother!”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s going to kill me.” And he really will. There’s going to be no end when he finds out that Dom and me are doing… well, whatever it is that we’re doing.

  “Why?”

  “He’s… overprotective.” Understatement, that.

  “I thought you all have known Dom a long time.”

  “We have.”

  Sandy cocks his head at me. “I don’t understand, then. You’re twenty years old. You’re an adult and capable of making your own decisions. Who you love and choose to spend your time with shouldn’t be dictated by your brother.” I can hear the frown in his voice, and it’s my fault, really. He doesn’t know about Bear and me.

  “It’s not like that,” I tell him. “It’s hard for people to understand who haven’t been through what we’ve been through.”

  “And what’s that? If you don’t mind me asking. And if you do, please tell me to shut the hell up and mind my own business. I won’t be offended.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We’ve got all night.”

  I think I’ll balk at it. Sandy’s nice and he’s becoming my friend, but I’ve known him all of two days, and there are things I haven’t told people I’ve known for years. I open my mouth to tell him thanks, but no thanks, but instead I say, “One morning when I was five years old, I woke up on the couch. I looked down, and Bear and Otter were sleeping on the floor. Otter was curled around Bear protectively, and I remember thinking how happy I was about that, how Bear needed someone to look out for him. I thought I couldn’t do it on my own because I was just a little guy.

  “Bear woke up and we had Lucky Charms. And it was his birthday. I remember that. It was his birthday, and I hoped he would like the present I’d made for him. And then Anna and Creed were there, and somehow, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t want to say anything out loud because I didn’t want to ruin Bear’s day, but I knew. I just knew. And then he told me I had to be brave. That I had to be big and brave. I thought she’d died. But it was worse than that. I ended up in the bathtub that day. Because of the earthquakes.”

  She had left. As the story spills from me, as I confess to a man I barely know, I remember how Bear’s words had hit me. I was smart, smarter than I had any right to be, but I was still only five years old, and I didn’t understand how a mother, my mother, could make a decision to leave her sons behind, like we were nothing to her. Like we didn’t matter to her. I didn’t understand the selfishness that could exist in a person then. Sure, I knew she wasn’t the best mother, but she was still my mom, and I loved her. I loved her with my whole heart because that was what a son should do.

  So, no. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how she could leave and never look back.

  But, of course, she did look back. She looked back and tried to hurt us even more. She almost won too. That’s the funny thing about family, though. When you do stupid shit you think is for the best in the most self-sacrificing way possible, they’re there to knock you upside the head and tell you to stop being such an idiot.

  I was fifteen years old when I found out. Bear took me for a drive one day. Up the coast. Just me and him. It was a pretty summer day, and there was the sun and the waves and our windows were rolled down, and we let the wind run through our fingers.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said to me
. We’d stopped at a lookout and we were the only ones there. “Something I should have told you a while ago. I just couldn’t work up the courage.”

  My skin felt cold. “Are you okay?” I asked quickly. “Are you sick?” In my head, a million doomsday scenarios ran through my head. Bear had cancer. Bear had AIDS. Bear had a brain tumor. Bear was going to die and he was going to leave me behind. The car shook a little. A precursor to an earthquake, I thought.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not sick. I’m not going anywhere. Neither is Otter or anyone else.”

  That should have made me feel better, but it didn’t. “What’s wrong?” I asked nervously. “Whatever it is, we’ll fight it, okay? If it’s the courts again, if they’re trying to take me away from you because you and Otter got married, we’ll fight it. I don’t care what it takes.” By the end of my misguided little speech, I was growling and spitting, suddenly sure it’s a custody thing. Who do they think they’re fucking with? I thought to myself. Bring it. Bring it and you will see what it means to have the fight of your life.

  He groaned and covered his face with his hands. “I’m going about this all wrong,” he muttered. “No, Kid. It’s not custody. Nothing bad will happen.” He reached over and took my hand in his and squeezed it. “You’re mine, okay? You belong to me. Nothing can ever change that. I promise you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Then what is it!”

  “Mom.”

  “Oh.” And it was like I was five years old again. “She’s dead?”

  He shook his head. “No. At least, I don’t think so. I haven’t checked up on her in a while.”

  “Then what?”

  “The hospital,” he says. “When everything happened at once.”

  I closed my eyes. Everything at once.

  Mrs. Paquinn.

  Otter.

  Anna.

  “I remember,” I said. “That wasn’t a good day.”

  “We’ve had better,” he agreed. “But we picked ourselves up.”

  “That’s what we do.”

  “There’s… something that happened there that I didn’t tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I only wanted to protect you,” he said sadly. “All I’ve ever wanted was to keep you safe.”

  “And you’ve done that, Papa Bear,” I said gently, trying to make sure he knew I was serious. “Who knows what would have happened if she’d taken me with her when she threatened to?”

  “That’s just it, Kid. She was never going to take you away.”

  A buzzing enveloped my ears. “What?”

  “She came to the hospital. When you were in school.”

  Anger, sleek and oily. “What did she want?”

  Bear looked older than I’d ever seen him. More tired. “She came to bring the adoption papers. Renouncing her custody of you.”

  “You said she sent those in the mail. That they just showed up one day.”

  “I know. But she came. And I asked her. For the both of us. I asked her why.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “Said she wasn’t meant to be a mother. That we were better off without her.”

  “What about when she came back? That day to the apartment. She wanted me then! She told me!” It didn’t matter that I never wanted to leave with her. It didn’t matter that it did nothing to offer her redemption in my eyes. But it had mattered, at least a little bit, to my nine-year-old heart, that my mother wanted me. That she wanted me enough to try and fight my brother for custody. That she cared about me enough to make petty demands.

  That she loved me.

  “It was for money,” Bear said. “Otter dated a man before he came back to Seafare. They broke up. He knew Otter had feelings for me. He wanted us to break up. He tracked her down. Offered her money. She took it. And did what she did.”

  “Money,” I said stupidly. “It was about money.”

  “Yeah, Kid. Money.”

  “Did she get it? Did she get her money?”

  Bear looked stricken. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Why tell me the truth now?”

  “Because,” he said, “you’re old enough now to understand such things. And there might come a day when you feel the need to track her down yourself. I hope that never happens, but that’s me being selfish and I can’t do that to you. If it does happen, I wanted you to know everything about her. It’s only fair.”

  “Fair,” I spat at him. “How is any of this fair? What the fuck do you know about fair?”

  “It’s not,” he said, his voice growing hard. “It never was and it never will be. But I have done my damnedest to make sure you’ve had a home, that you’ve known every single day that you were loved like no one else on this earth. Yes, I’ve made mistakes. Yes, I’ve fucked up and made decisions based upon what I thought was right, but if it meant keeping you healthy and sane and alive, then I’d do the same thing. Again. And again. And again.”

  I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Sane? Think we kind of lapsed on that one, Papa Bear.”

  “Don’t you dare talk like that,” he growled at me. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “I think the medical community would disagree with you.”

  “Fuck them!” he cried at me, slamming his hands on the steering wheel. “Fuck them! Fuck a goddamn diagnosis! Fuck her! And fuck you too, if you think I’m going to stand aside and let you think that about yourself. You are going to make this world a better place, and you are going to prove everyone wrong who thinks you needed a mother and father to grow up good. There’s never been a moment when I haven’t looked at you and thought, This is why I’m doing this. He’s the reason I’m doing all that I do.”

  “Earthquake,” I whispered at him, barely able to breathe. The slamming of his hands was like shutting the door on my lungs. “B-breathe. H-hard t-t-to—”

  He was out the door and around the car before I could even blink. In the panic that was my mind, the red waves and shifting ground, I felt anger at myself for being so weak. I have to fix this, I thought. I have to find a way to fix this somehow.

  But then the ground broke up beneath my feet and I started falling, falling, falling and I couldn’t breathe and—

  My brother was there. As he always was. And as always, he talked me through it. It took a while, but eventually, the earthquakes stopped. My throat and lungs opened up.

  We sat there, for a time. Bear and me.

  “And that’s why,” I tell Sandy now, my voice hoarse from talking so long, “it matters what my brother thinks. For the longest time, it was just Bear and me. That’s all we knew about how to survive. Eventually, it got better, but no matter where life takes us, no matter where our stories go, it always will come down to Bear and me. There might come a time when we’ll be apart, but everything I’ll do will be because of him, and everything I’ll do will be for him. He’s not just my brother, Sandy. Bear is the reason I’m alive.”

  “Oh, baby doll,” Sandy says, wiping his eyes. “I do believe that’s possibly the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard. Forgive my ignorance earlier. Of course you should care about what your brother says. But you shouldn’t let it define you. You are your own man, and while the path might have been started by Bear, it’s your own now.”

  “He’s still going to flip out.”

  “Doesn’t he do that normally?”

  I laugh. I feel better. A little bit. “Yeah. I guess he does.”

  “Well, then. It’ll be par for the course.” Sandy hesitates. Then, “Was he right?”

  “About what?”

  “Your mom.”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you want to find her? Ask her the questions yourself?”

  “No,” I tell him honestly. “But I’ve been thinking about her more and more lately. I even dream about her. Sometimes, they’re good dreams. But most of the time they’re not. And I’m not wher
e I want to be. If anything, I’m worse.”

  “And you think she has something to do with that.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. So, no. I don’t want to find her. I don’t want to ask her questions myself.” I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But I think I’m going to. Not for Bear. Not for Dom. For me.”

  “You might not get the answers you want,” he tells me. “You’re more likely not to get anything at all. If she’ll even talk to you.”

  “I have a sister,” I tell him. “That’s the last thing Bear told me that day. After my mom left, she got pregnant again. She’d be eleven now, I think. Maybe twelve. Her name’s Isabelle.” I sniffle. “Izzie, for short.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Sandy says, pulling me close again. “I wish I could take away all this hurt from you. You don’t deserve it.”

  “I lied to you,” I admit. “Just now.”

  “About?”

  “Doing it just for me. It would be for Bear too. And for Dom.”

  “I know, baby doll. But they love you just the way you are.”

  “I know.” And I do. “But in order for me to be who I want to be for them, I’ve got to clear this blockage. In my head.”

  “When will you do it?” he asks me quietly. Outside, the sky is beginning to lighten.

  “I’ll take Dom home,” I say, making the first firm decision in a long time. “Then I’ll leave again.” It’s best to do it now and get it over with.

  “You need to tell him.”

  I shake my head. “He’ll just worry.”

  Sandy laughs. “If you two are headed where I think you’re headed, he’s going to do that regardless. I think he does it already. Probably has for a very long while.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gives me a small smile. “You’ll find out, I’m sure.”

  “This is my fight,” I say.

  “But you just admitted it was for him too.”

  “Shit.”

  “Indeed.”

  He holds me close.