Across the Pond

by R. J. Scott

  My grandmother came to my defense, as she always had. Soon the room was alive with Spanish that flowed out the open windows. I wiggled free after being fussed over and pulled Sebastian out of the corner.

  “This is Sebastian,” I called, and about twenty pairs of judgmental brown eyes zeroed in on us. “He’s my good friend.”

  The silence was deafening. The happy chatter of Spanish women died off. My mother whispered something that I couldn’t quite catch.

  “Pleasure to meet you all,” Seb said as the uneasy feeling intensified.

  Not knowing exactly what had set them off, I nudged Sebastian out of the back door. We fell out of estrogen land right into testosterone world. The looks that my father, uncles, and cousins tossed at us made me wonder if the ugly silence in the kitchen wasn’t better. The guys were seated under the shade trees, watching a baseball game. I made the introductions. Seb was never going to be able to recall all the names, poor guy.

  “Alejandro, come have a beer,” my cousin Héctor called from the picnic table where the TV had been placed. “The women chased us out.” He slapped my back, then gave Seb a funny, drunken look. I fished a cold beer out of the cooler, handed one to Seb, and dropped down in the shade, my legs straddling the wooden bench, Sebastian seated right beside me.

  The cloud of uncertainty began to envelop us as we spent thirty minutes or so watching the game.

  “So, Alejandro, I thought perhaps you’d come home with a pretty girl, not some white foreigner,” Héctor slurred, his gaze lingering on Sebastian as he flung out that rather pointed comment. “Surely there are enough women for you to pick from that you don’t have to haul this Anglo asshole around? Unless your time playing with that Madsen fag has rubbed off?”

  This was all said in Spanish. Sebastian glanced at me as I stewed on how to reply. My father began chiding Héctor, but he was the only one speaking up. Damn it. I’d not even gotten to see my older brother and sister, as they were still working.

  “Alex…” Sebastian whispered as the tension thickened.

  “No, actually, playing with Ryker didn’t rub off. I was a fag long before I ever skated with him.”

  “Oh fuck no! This asshole turned you?” Héctor roared, his face mottled with an insane and instant fury.

  Things kind of went from bad to motherfucking horrible in the blink of an eye. For some reason, Héctor took a swing at Sebastian, who had no idea what was going on as the only language being spoken was Spanish. The shot caught Seb in the eye, and I went over the picnic table, jumped on my aunt’s son, and began beating on him. Chairs and drinks went flying as men joined the melee.

  When my father finally had me subdued and pinned to the high wooden fence around our yard, Héctor was being helped inside, his face a bloody mess. Sebastian had been given some ice in a bag and was sitting in a lawn chair, ice on the right side of his face, his head down nearly between his knees. So many people were yelling at me all at once that I couldn’t understand anything being said. The few things I did understand was my baby sister was crying over by the table that had held the boxes of yellow custom printed T-shirts for the party tomorrow, all of which had been knocked to the ground and trampled, my mother was ashen and shaken, and my abuela was fingering her rosary while patting Sebastian on the back.

  I jerked free of my father, no easy task, and hurried over to kneel in the grass beside Sebastian. My knee landed in some spilled beer. He lifted his head. I was stunned to see a wobbly sort of smile on his handsome face.

  “Your family certainly knows how to throw a bash.” He chuckled, then moaned. I rested my brow on his thigh. Somewhere in the foggy distance, I could hear my father herding people out of the house. Seb ran his fingers through my hair. “My hero,” he whispered as the extended family vacated the premises. When it was just my grandmother, my mother, my father, and my sister, I stood, my fingers resting on Seb’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry this happened this way,” I said shakily, my knuckles weeping blood. They all stared at me in obvious shock, well, except for Abuela, who nodded as if this were something she’d been expecting. “I’d meant to tell you over dinner when it was just us, but fucking Héctor—”

  “Alejandro, watch your mouth,” Papá snapped. I murmured an apology. “We’re quite upset at you for doing this!”

  “Yes, why did you have to ruin your sister’s big day?” Mamá asked, and I had no real answer for her. “What did you do to make this happen? How did this happen? Did I not raise you right?”

  “Mamá, stop it!” Elizabeth snarled, using her long sleeves to swipe at her eyes. “You’re making it sound like Alejandro being gay is dirty and wrong! It’s not.”

  “In the eyes of God—”

  “No, Mamá, God loves all his children,” Elizabeth argued. I loved my feisty little sister so much. “This kind of shit is insane and why our world is so full of hate! Anyone who’s a little different is wrong and sinful. That’s bullshit! You don’t like Dwayne because he’s black, and now you don’t like your own son because he’s gay? That’s stupid, and you’re stupid!”

  “Elizabeth!” Papá shouted, but she would not be quieted, not until my father threatened to cut off her allowance. Then and only then did she sit down. Not by them, but next to Sebastian.

  “Can we all please stop yelling and talk to poor Alejandro?” Abuela enquired, tottering around to find a soft seat in the shade. “Such a big shout about such a small thing.”

  “The boy being a gay is not a small thing!” my mother barked, then lowered her voice in case the neighbors were eavesdropping. I suspected it was far too late to worry about the Santos-Garcia disgrace leaking out. The whole block knew I’d announced I was gay and had beaten up my cousin. I’d do it again. No one took a swing at my boyfriend. Not as long as I was still sucking air.

  “Yes, it is. He’s been so for a long time, and there is no wrong in it. How can love be wrong?” Abuela asked, then picked up someone’s beer and took a long pull from the bottle. “Such going on about who kisses whom. Your aunt Celeste was gay too, but you do not see me yelling at her.”

  “Tía Celeste has been dead for twenty years,” I explained to Seb, who nodded, then grimaced. “Look, I know this has been bad. We can go. I think we should go.”

  “Yes, I think you should,” my mother whispered, her eyes wet with tears.

  Elizabeth began shouting again, my grandmother did as well, but in the end, I took Sebastian by the hand and led him back to my Jeep. My baby sister followed us.

  “Stay please, stay,” she begged, her smooth cheeks damp. I pulled her into my chest and hugged her hard, long strands of her dark hair blowing into my face. “Please, don’t let them drive you off. Stay. We’ll talk it out. Please, please, I want you there. It’s my fucking party, not theirs! Please, stay? Don’t let assholes like Héctor ruin things for you. Please, please, stay.”

  I threw a look at Seb, who was standing by my Jeep, his eye swollen and already turning a nice shade of black. I was going to kill Héctor.

  “Should we stay? It’s up to you, Sebastian.”

  Sixteen

  Seb

  Alex’s abuela bustled toward us, looking as if she was on a mission, and I even took a step back to avoid her walking into me.

  “We talk,” she said.

  Next to me, Alex shook his head. “I don’t want you in the middle of this, Abuela.”

  I thought maybe it would be good to have a mediator, but it seemed as if she had certain ideas about me and Alex.

  “Come, come, sit down. I have sage advice to pass you.” She tugged my arm to separate me from Alex, and I sent him a worried glance. He closed his eyes briefly and then shook his head, so I followed her to the bench.

  “Now, first I say this for you to hear. Mi nieto, my grandson, for many years thinks he is clever in his fooling.” She tapped her chest. “But me, I see all with Alejandro. I know for long times he is gay. My sister Celeste was lesbiana, ever since she was old enough to know boy from gi
rl. Back in my youth days, people did not come out with big prides like they do now. Being a lesbian would be the ultimate insult to any man, being an ‘inferior being who doesn’t give me what she should’.” Pain stabbed my chest, and she looked devastated as she spoke. I was being included in some great truth here and the weight of it was suffocating. “Celeste’s sweetheart, she suffered so, from every kind of corrective rape, she was forced to marry to avoid scandal, only when her husband died was she released and found Celeste. Homosexuales and the lesbianas, they hide. Always hiding for fear of bad feelings from family and church.” She shook her head and paused.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured.

  She patted my knee. I wasn’t sure if it was to reassure me or to ground herself. “Celeste, she never say any words about her true self to our parents. She hid herself from them, but she tell me. She tell me out of eight other sisters. And I tell her to be honest, always. Tell Mamá and Papá, but she would not do it. She died, never telling her truth. She died alone, with no love for too many years.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “This breaks my heart. God does not say anyone is bad for loving who they love; only the people say this.” She spoke passionately.

  “I agree,” I said. “So the advice you’re giving me is what? To help Alex see that—”

  “No, not just that. You are older man than Alejandro, more settled in life. Living more, you see more. You must go talk to my daughter. Make her see that they may lose their son if they do not try to make a come together, un compromiso. Si? Do you understand, Sebastian?”

  I did understand. But the thought of finding Alex’s parents and talking to them was terrifying. I was already the bad guy, the one whom Héctor had accused of turning their son. Or was that Elonso? I couldn’t recall properly, because my head hurt, and my thoughts were spinning so fast I felt sick. When I’d first gone to Cambridge, the odd one out in the group of rich kids I’d been lumped in with, I decided there and then I would become something different, a brand-new person who spoke without an accent, who was clever and funny and could carry a conversation.

  All I’d needed to do then was channel my inner bravery, and that was what I needed to find again. For Alex.

  “I will,” I said and stood, brushing the seat of my shorts and heading to the house.

  “What are you doing?” Alex called.

  “Give me some time,” I said and watched Alex being blocked from following me by his abuela and a very determined Elizabeth. I hesitated by the side door, and then, shoulders back, I knocked sharply. I heard movement inside, and then Papa Garcia opened the door and peered out, probably checking for Alex. I could see the concern in his expression when he located his son out by the road.

  “Now is not a good time,” he said and went to close the door in my face, but I stopped the door shutting with my hand, and he didn’t use any force to make me remove the block. If anything, there was a glint of respect in his eyes, and he sighed. “You’d better come in.”

  The door took me into a hallway, and he led me into the kitchen, where only a short while before Alex had been pinched and hugged and loved on by everyone, and where everyone had judged my being there. Now it was empty and silent, all apart from the soft breaths of Alex’s mama, but it still smelled of tomato and herbs, and food was piled to one side. Everything had gone so wrong today, and with hindsight, maybe Alex should have spoken to his parents one-on-one well before entering a full house where anything could, and did, happen.

  “Sir, ma’am, could we talk?” I didn’t sit until I was asked, didn’t move fully into the kitchen until his mama looked up at me and nodded. That was a good sign, right? All I knew was that the Catholic Church's position on homosexuality was based on a distinction between being lesbian or gay and acting on it, accepting the first part but clinging to the fact that acting on it was a sin and was wrong.

  I stood by the table, and my chest was tight with nerves and pain. What would happen if I made things worse? What if I fucked things up for Alex and he lost his family and didn’t want me. What would he do?

  His mama was mumbling under her breath, her rosary in her hand, and her eyes were bloodshot. She’d been crying; that much was clear.

  “Sit down,” Papa Garcia ordered, and I did what he’d asked immediately. This was like going to the principal’s office for a punishment, but that didn’t mean I had to act as if I was scared and unable to talk.

  “Why?” Mama Garcia said in an anguished tone.

  Why what? Why had he told them? Or why was he even gay in the first place. He was born that way, and he wanted his family to know. That would answer everything but seemed so dismissive.

  “I don’t understand the question,” I said finally.

  “Why now, why here?” she asked.

  “Why at all?” Papa Garcia said in an ominously dark tone.

  I was not going down that tunnel of science versus God, so I chose my language carefully.

  “He is embracing the way that God made him,” I said, and that much was true. Alex believed in God, he had faith, and being gay wasn’t throwing away all of that, and I knew firsthand the challenge to be true to oneself.

  Mama Garcia inhaled and let out a stream of Spanish, which I had no chance of keeping up with.

  “No hablo español. I’m sorry.”

  This set off another tirade, but this time in perfectly clear English. “He says he is with a man, that he is gay, and the man he says he loves cannot even speak our language.”

  “I’ll learn.” In fact, I’d already begun with a few words, but this wasn’t where I wanted this to go. I needed to talk of a compromise for Alex, not make promises to his parents about what kind of man I could be for Alex if only they’d let me. I took a couple of calming breaths. Papa Garcia had taken the other seat, opposite me, and was staring at me so hard I was surprised I wasn’t combusting under the glare.

  “I understand you need to process things because the news Alex gave you has devastated you, but surely that isn't a weight to put on Alex’s shoulders? Can you try to accept that he is being truthful with you and that him coming out isn’t about you. It’s about Alex himself and the fact that we are in love.”

  Papa Garcia tensed even more. “Who are you to come into my house and tell us how to think!” he snapped.

  Fuck, I guessed that is what I had been doing, and I reconsidered my direction again. Why Alex’s abuela thought I had a hope in hell’s chance of garnering any kind of compromise here I didn’t know.

  “Alex thinks he has done something wrong, and he doesn’t want to feel that way—”

  “Is he sure?” Mama Garcia interrupted my sincere sentence, and for a moment I couldn’t process the words.

  “Is he sure he’s gay? Yes, he is.”

  Silent tears tracked down her face. “He will die of AIDS. Marie Alonso’s son is SIDA ! HIV, you call it. Worse, he will burn in hell, and I will not be able to save him. My Alejandro will burn for eternity, and you sit and tell me that he knows he is gay? How can a boy who loves his God, and is a good Catholic”—she made the sign of the cross—“even begin to have this hate for himself inside him.”

  Well, shit, that was some heavy paragraph to throw at me. “He won’t get HIV any more than you would,” I finally settled on saying. “Focusing on telling someone how they could die doesn’t celebrate them being alive. I mean, I could get run over by a bus tomorrow and—”

  “Show some respect,” Papa Garcia interrupted.

  “Can I bring him in? Can we talk, the four of us? Because he is out there brokenhearted. He’s lost everything, and right now is the easiest time to make him feel like the loneliest person in the world. I can’t speak for Alex, but I know that he has been lost in all of this, scared of what he felt. Scared of you.”

  Mama Garcia stared at me, and her eyes widened. “Scared?”

  “Scared, lonely, lost, and he’s a grown man, but he needs his family, and the thought of not having your love will destroy him.”

  “I do
n’t want to hurt him,” Mama Garcia murmured and reached for her husband’s hand. “But his soul, how can I begin to…” She began to cry again, and Papa Garcia scooted closer so he could stroke her hair. It was such an intimate moment, seeing their thirty years or more of marriage and love in one touch. I wanted that with Alex, and he wanted that with me. I racked my brains to think of what I could do here. Without his family, Alex really would be lost. I could tell them I’d walk away, but that wouldn’t make Alex not gay.

  “Can I tell you something that happened last week?” They turned to look at me. “I watched four men approach him after a game, fans in jerseys, all of them full of beer, who wanted to ask him about hockey. From the beginning, I didn’t like it. They seemed almost menacing, but by the time I’d carefully moved closer, they had him pinned in a corner. Not so you’d notice, but he couldn’t move them out of the way without making a fuss. He was very polite, but they were goading him, and not once did he lose his temper or focus. That’s on you as parents. He might hate what is happening to him, but he has a backbone of steel, and the pride he has? Overwhelms me sometimes.”

  “He can be stubborn,” Mama Garcia admitted and lifted her chin. “And he’s always been a good son.”

  There was a glimmer of light from behind dark clouds in her words, and I ran with it. “He’ll always be a good son—” I stopped when Papa Garcia cursed loudly and left the room. It seemed as though, even as Alex’s mama began to listen, that his papa had dismissed everything out of hand. If I could just get one of his parents to compromise, I had hope for him.

  “He’s a wonderful man, and I love him more than life itself. He will always have me, whatever happens, but he would be a broken man if he loses his family.”

  Her hand went to her chest, and she pressed it over her heart. “You truly love him? As a man loves a woman…” She was abruptly flustered. “I don’t know how to say it.”