Return to Sender

by Ashlyn Kane

  §

  BEFORE

  THE batter swung the bat hard and connected with the ball, sending it into deep left center. Jonah cursed under his breath, watching the advancement of the runners helplessly. The ball went well over the fielder’s head, landing somewhere behind him and to his left. If he hurried, he might make the throw in time to beat the runner, who had been on second, home. Then Jonah would have a chance to make a play.

  But the fielder looked between the ball and Jonah dubiously and threw it in to the second baseman, where the batter was already waiting, and a few seconds later the runner crossed the plate with a triumphant grin to cheers from the stands, just like the three before him. It was near the end of the second game of a double-header, and there was only Emerson to pitch—it was obvious he was getting tired, and Jonah didn’t blame him.

  Behind Jonah, he heard one of the away team’s older fans—probably someone’s grandmother—lean over and say, in a voice that may have been intended to be soft but which carried across the flat, dusty diamond as easily as if she’d used a megaphone, “They won’t throw him the ball because they know he won’t catch it.”

  Flinching, Jonah ducked his head in shame and kicked at the dirt, feeling sick. It had been two years since he’d played on a team, and it was true that he was rusty, but he always played well in practices. But he was short and scrawny and awkward, and people took it for granted that he wasn’t good at sports. It was difficult to have confidence when nobody wanted to give him a chance to prove himself.

  The next batter stepped up to the plate, and Jonah raised his head again to meet Emerson’s eyes where he was standing on the pitcher’s mound. They were narrowed into slits behind his lenses, and he looked like he’d swallowed a mouthful of vinegar. “Time out,” he said loudly, and Jonah’s heart hammered in his chest as Emerson waved the other players in from the outfield.

  The boy who’d fielded the ball, Tim, glared defiantly, and Emerson hadn’t even said anything yet. “Tim, do you want to win this game or not?”

  Tim scoffed. “We’re down four runs in the bottom of the seventh, Emerson. I’d like not to be an embarrassment.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Emerson said acidly. Jonah stared determinedly at the dirt. “Is your arm bothering you?”

  “What?” Tim answered. “No.”

  “So there’s no reason you couldn’t throw the ball where it would do some good? Home plate, for example, where it would have prevented another run?”

  The second baseman spoke up. “He was trying to make the easier out, Emerson.”

  “Does he need glasses?” Emerson asked rhetorically. “Because he can borrow mine. The batter was already on the base.”

  Jonah kind of wanted the ground to open and swallow him up, preferably erasing any evidence that he had ever lived, or at least this conversation, from history.

  Tim and Eric, the second baseman, gave Jonah guilty sideways looks. “Look, Sarah Waters and Allie Sparks are in the bleachers, okay? We look stupid when he doesn’t catch it.”

  Jonah flinched again, but he couldn’t stop himself from looking at Emerson, and he saw that his friend’s face had gone hard. “You’ll look a lot stupider when I bench you and put Jonah’s sister in instead! At least she knows how to play on a team, and she’s not going to let some girl”—here Emerson’s lip curled up—“distract her from the game! Jonah is perfectly capable of catching the ball. I see him do it every time one of the batters misses. Maybe you just need to work on your aim.”

  Jonah felt his ears heat at the praise, but he took care to make sure the other boys didn’t notice his pleasure. The last thing he needed was for Emerson to be accused of favoritism.

  “Now,” Emerson said, while Tim and Eric were still busy staring furiously at a spot over his shoulder, “can we play some baseball here, people?”

  §

  THEN

  EMERSON looked better, Jonah decided as they walked back to his house. They’d been at the diamond most of the day watching the kids play, eating hotdogs, and just generally existing in the same small pocket of space. Emerson’s face had got a bit of color back, and he’d eaten some lunch, and if there was a red slash of sunburn spreading over the tips of his ears and nose, for once, Jonah wasn’t going to complain about it. Apparently neither one of them could be trusted to remember sunscreen at a time like this, and that was fine.

  They had just come into view of Emerson’s house when Emerson pulled up short, presumably at the sight of the black Trans Am hugging the curb at the end of the driveway. Emerson said, “Oh, no.”

  Jonah looked from him to the car and back again. “Friend of yours?” he asked warily.

  “It’s Zack,” Emerson explained, looking pained. “Hayley must have told him when he got back from seeing his parents.”

  “Well, it’s good that he wanted to check that you were okay?” Jonah hazarded.

  “Yes, no, Zack is great, absolutely, it’s just.” Emerson finally met his gaze. “He kind of hates you.”

  Oh, well. That wasn’t so bad. Jonah was mostly just glad it wasn’t an ex-boyfriend—or current one. Wait a second—“Wait, why does he hate me? What did I do?” Everyone liked Jonah, and aside from the attempted ass-grabbing, he was mostly okay with that. He was just gregarious. People couldn’t help it.

  “He’s just.” Emerson looked a little panicky now. “He’s kind of protective. Um. A lot.” He scratched the back of his neck, then winced, and Jonah realized that that was burnt too. Damn it, he was going to have to be more careful. Next time they would sit in the shade. Too bad he hadn’t brought that 100 SPF. “And when I first met him, you were, you know….”

  Gone, Jonah realized, and not speaking to Emerson at the time. Well, he could see how that would color Zack’s opinion. But hating him for it seemed kind of extreme. Unless…. “Exactly how badly did you take that?”

  Emerson flushed under about forty new freckles and looked away, so, pretty badly, then. Jonah didn’t know whether to feel guilty about it or pleased that Emerson cared about him so much. He didn’t have any time to decide, however, because at that moment the door to the house opened and a guy Jonah decided must be Zack jogged out of it, making a beeline for Emerson.

  “Hey, Emma.” They—well, hugged wasn’t exactly the word; it was a lot manlier than the hugging Emerson usually did. “Hayley told me what happened. I came as soon as I could. I’m sorry, man.”

  Emerson nodded, pulling back, and wiped at his eyes once, and then Zack took a step back and looked over at Jonah.

  This was probably going to be ridiculous, but Jonah stuck out his hand anyway. “Hi, I’m Jonah. You must be Zack.”

  Zack gave him a flinty-eyed stare and let his hand hang there in the air for a moment, but eventually he reached out and attempted to crush Jonah’s fingers. He was just lucky his hand was proportional to the rest of him, or he might have had to go to the hospital. “Pleasure,” Zack said, tone indicating clearly that it was anything but.

  “Um, while this macho display is good for my ego, I am choking on the testosterone,” Emerson broke in.

  Zack let go of Jonah’s hand, looking thoroughly unchastened. Jonah pointedly did not shake his hand out in spite of the throbbing.

  A rumble sounded in the distance, and Jonah looked up to see the blue sky rapidly clouding over. “I should get home,” Jonah said regretfully. With Natalie at work, he’d have to walk, and it was definitely going to rain. He didn’t exactly want to leave, but it wasn’t like Emerson was going to be alone. “Call you tomorrow? I should probably spend some time with my parents after the bombshell I dropped on them yesterday.”

  Emerson blanched under his sunburn, and Zack gave him a narrow-eyed look that told Jonah his opinion was being rapidly re-evaluated. “You told them…?”

  Jonah shrugged, trying to be nonchalant. “No time like the present. See you tomorrow?” he asked, meaning, “Will you be okay if I leave you with this guy?”

  “Yeah,” Emerson said fin
ally. He’d been doing so well all day, but all of a sudden it seemed like you could have knocked him over with a feather. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Alright then. It was nice to meet you, Zack,” he said as sincerely as possible. He waved goodbye just as the gathering clouds blocked out the sun.

  “Zack could drive you,” Emerson offered as he was walking away.

  Jonah smirked a little as he turned around. Emerson looked embarrassed, Zack thoroughly unimpressed. “No, he couldn’t,” he said, watching Zack shrug at Emerson unconcernedly. “See you tomorrow.”

  §

  THEY hadn’t even made it to the church yet, and already Emerson wanted to fall apart. Aunt Brenda had volunteered to drive the family out to the church, and so he was sitting in an uncomfortable suit in the back seat of her car. Kierstyn, by reason of being the smallest, had been elected to take the middle seat. She was pressed firmly against his side, and Emerson tried not to think about anything else but the comforting warmth of her body. If he didn’t, he might recall what it was that they were doing today.

  They rode in a silence that was broken only when Aunt Brenda announced, “Here we are.” It was a long moment before Emerson reached for the door handle. By the time he and Kierstyn pulled themselves from the car, his mother and Harper were already standing at its bumper, staring at the church.

  They walked in together as a family, and Emerson wished he could take more comfort from that fact. They were not a whole anymore, not without Dad.

  Emerson blinked hard and shied away from those thoughts.

  He followed his mother and Harper down the aisle to the front pew, and when Kierstyn snaked her hand into his own, he didn’t argue. He simply squeezed her hand back.

  Back stiff, and heart aching, Emerson kept his mind carefully blank and held Kierstyn’s hand tight. He didn’t notice the other attendees arriving. In fact he hardly noticed when the pastor began the ceremony.

  Emerson didn’t take notice of the proceedings until Kierstyn untangled their fingers and went to the altar. There, looking sweet and pretty in her black dress, she carefully and deliberately recited the words to Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Hearing his little sister recite his father’s favorite poem made Emerson want to cry again.

  He zoned out again when the pastor started up once more and didn’t come back to himself until it was Harper talking.

  “I wish I knew all the right words to say to encompass the man that our father was. Unfortunately, I don’t, and I probably won’t do the man justice, but I’m here to try.”

  Emerson sat and listened, his chest aching to hear Harper try to give a eulogy for their father.

  “My father was a man who loved his children more than anything else. My whole life, his love for me was never in question. No matter what we did or what we told him, he never stopped loving us. And we tested that. I tested it when I moved across the country for college and forgot to phone regularly. Kierstyn’s not old enough to have given Dad a proper test—I think that takes teenage hormones—but all the little everyday tests didn’t pass Dad by. He even forgave her when she quit ballet and cut off her pigtails.” There was tittering in the pews at that, and Harper gave a small smile.

  “Emerson… Emerson perhaps gave it the biggest test when he came out, but Dad… Dad took that the same way he took everything. In fact, the day he passed he had breakfast with Emerson, and Em says Dad was just as nosy about his love life as always.”

  There were more titters about that, but not as loud as the ones before. Not everyone at the funeral had been entirely accepting when they had heard that Emerson was gay, and the awkward laughter was proof of that. Emerson suddenly felt a pang of great love for Harper, who didn’t flinch away from telling the truth.

  “We’ll miss you, Dad,” were Harper’s final words before he folded his paper and stepped away from the altar.

  Then his Uncle Ed who lived in Tulsa got up and commemorated his baby brother. Ed’s eulogy was for a boy who hadn’t existed for forty years and a man who hadn’t in twenty. Emerson felt awkward listening to an uncle he barely knew talk about a man that he didn’t.

  His awkwardness increased when it was Uncle Ed who said, “In order to commemorate his father, John’s middle child elected to say good-bye in the way he does best. Emerson created this slide show of his father’s memory. The music is, I believe, an original composition by some friends of his, created for today.”

  They played the slide show. The song had been written by Greg and Zack. Zack had been working the melody out on his piano for weeks, and after John’s death had enrolled Greg into helping him create the lyrics. The song was for Emerson, and he found he couldn’t both listen to his father’s elegy and watch the photos of his life. He looked away.

  Then the service was done, and they were moving outside and watching the casket being lowered. His mother was pushing him forward, and Emerson was scooping up earth and tossing it in the grave.

  The priest ended with an invitation to the wake at the Blackburn home, and Emerson walked back to his aunt’s car. Just as suddenly, they were back in the driveway, and then Emerson was standing in his house, waiting for people to arrive with food and more condolences. He stood by the kitchen counter, staring into a glass of water.

  “Hey.”

  Emerson looked up, and there was Jonah, tall and handsome as ever. He was beautiful in his black suit.

  “Hi,” Emerson said back. It was apparently all the permission Jonah needed to walk right up and wrap his long arms around Emerson. Emerson was engulfed, but it didn’t feel stifling. He just felt precious and cherished, safe. Jonah was good at that. Emerson allowed himself the luxury of placing his head down on Jonah’s shoulder and soaking up all the love and attention that he could.

  They stayed in the kitchen with Jonah holding him close and Emerson’s fingers curled in the fabric of his coat until Brenda came walking in carrying a casserole, with guests carrying more food on her heels.

  Jonah released him then, and if Emerson hadn’t been so tired, he might have blushed at being caught in such an intimate pose.

  “Oh.” Brenda didn’t look that surprised to have found them alone together. “Boys, why don’t you find someplace else to hide—this kitchen is about to get busy.” She gave them a soft smile, which they both attempted to return, before she went back to organizing food.

  Jonah followed Emerson through the living room and into the den, then to a far corner where they could sit on a love seat that was out of the way and far from popular traffic.

  “You need anything, Em?” Jonah asked softly. Emerson shook his head. No. He didn’t need anything that Jonah could give him.

  Emerson shifted on his seat. He felt stiff and uncomfortable. He didn’t even know how to just sit anymore, it seemed.

  “Hey, settle down,” Jonah murmured. He wrapped an arm around Emerson’s shoulders and pulled him in close. Emerson didn’t argue as he was settled against the back rest, leaning into Jonah’s comforting presence.

  His mind was still moving, but at least his limbs weren’t. “Jonah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Emerson?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t thank me again.”

  “Oh. I just wanted you to know….”

  “Yeah. I know. Just so long as you do too.”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence reigned. Emerson let it consume him.

  Kierstyn found them first. She crept into the room as though she was sneaking away from or to something. Kierstyn didn’t hesitate to climb onto the couch next to Emerson, and Emerson never thought to deny her. She was so somber; he had never seen her like this before.

  Unfortunately, she wasn’t the last person to find them.

  Sedate guests in dark colors kept wandering into the den and spotting Emerson and Kierstyn, insisting on offering condolences. They kept coming and coming, even after Kierstyn had fallen asleep curled against the armrest. Emerson hated them f
or their pity and their I’m sorrys. Mostly he hated them for making Jonah so uncomfortable that, upon arrival of the first guest, he had coughed, embarrassed, before lifting his arm up and away. Emerson’s shoulder felt cold without Jonah’s warm weight. He kept shifting his back and rolling his shoulders uncomfortably, anxiously, until Jonah grabbed his hand and laced their fingers together.

  “Hey, quit twitching.”

  “I’m sorry. I just….”

  “Hey, I know. It’s just… you’re starting to look like you’ve got a rash or something.”

  Emerson turned to look at his best friend and found that Jonah was giving him an attempt at his usual mocking smirk.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want all these lovely people to get any ideas.” Jonah arched a brow.

  The smile was genuine if small. “You’re always so thoughtful.”

  “Yup.”

  Emerson opened his mouth to respond but was interrupted by a call of “Emerson! There you are. I’ve been looking for you. I just wanted to say….” He turned to the newcomer, nodding to her in all the appropriate places, acting as if he actually cared what she said.

  Jonah stayed all afternoon and into the evening. He didn’t move from his spot except to head to the bathroom. He didn’t even leave to find food, though that might have been possible only because food was brought to them. Jonah just stayed with him, their hands locked together, all day long. Emerson wasn’t sure he had ever loved him more.

  §

  “IF YOU try to do up my seatbelt for me, I’m changing seats,” Emerson threatened as Jonah finished putting his carryon in the overhead compartment.

  “Oh.” Jonah thought about wheeling Emerson’s suitcase through the airport, and bringing him his sugared-up coffee, and keeping track of his boarding pass and ID, and never letting him out of sight for longer than it took to take a leak in privacy, and decided he might’ve been a bit of a mother hen. “Sorry?”