Finding Refuge

by J. P. Oliver

  Beth threw back the fridge door. “Want something to drink? Maybe a juice box, since y’all are children?”

  “Oh, yeah, that sounds good,” I said.

  “Got apple juice?” Victor added.

  “No.” Beth turned from the fridge, flipping us off. “But we’ve got plenty of this.”

  I smirked.

  “Does it come with a straw, Bethie?” Victor asked.

  “Fuck you, Victor.”

  We laughed and chatted easily as she passed around the milk carton, ushering us to hurry if we were going to take a sip; drinking straight from the carton still pissed Mom off like crazy, so we passed it around quickly, trying to look innocent as Beth shoved it back into the fridge.

  Beth talked a bit about the wedding. Victor told me about how things were going at the family business: the Savage Distillery. There was light gossip (we were, after all, a true Southern family, so it came natural thanks to our mother’s love for it).

  Relief soaked into me slowly, warm as lying out in the sun. I didn’t know what I was so worried about. Being home was never something I regretted, even if North Creek was full of painful memories. Home was home; being around family was everything. It felt like when we were all in high school, goofing off with each other.

  And then I saw the chair.

  There was nothing inherently wrong with it—it was, after all, just a wheelchair—but it was just seeing my dad in it. He was a powerful guy, always had been. That’s how I remembered him from my youth: dark-haired and strapping, tall as the rest of us, average-sized. Healthy; healthy. That’s how I remembered him.

  Of course, I was around for the graying hair. I was there to see him get older the same as I was there to see the change in my mom. And we never minded that, but this was so wildly different.

  “Hey,” I said, rounding the island, feeling really young again.

  I don’t know why I felt that way; maybe it was humbling in a mortal sort of way to see him sick. Maybe I just wanted desperately to be that for a second—young—because then maybe he could be young again, too, and we wouldn’t be here facing this together.

  “Hey, Zach,” he laughed with the same gusto. He reached up as I wrapped my arms around him to give him a hug. “Hey, bud.”

  I huffed a laugh. “Looking good.”

  He patted my back as we drew apart. “I’ve looked better.”

  “Please, Dad,” Victor said, grinning. “You’re a silver fox.”

  “That’s what your mother tells me.”

  “Hey,” our mother said, cuttingly. “Have y’all been drinking from the milk carton again?”

  “What?” Beth asked laughingly, obviously lying.

  “Never, Mom, c’mon, we aren’t twelve—”

  “So help me God—”

  I turned to my father, smirking. He was in a wheelchair and he was a little skinnier than when I’d last seen him, but so much about him was still the same. He had the same short gray hair and the same smile, the same small brown eyes that crinkled in the corners when he smiled. Like he was doing now, watching his family bicker and be loudmouths like we always were.

  “I’m glad you’re back, son,” he said, turning to me.

  “Me, too, Dad.”

  “It’ll be nice to have the family all together for this.”

  “Yeah.” I huffed, crossing my arms. “The banner was a nice touch.”

  “You liked that?”

  I paused. We looked at each other; I couldn’t lie to him.

  He let out a wheezing laugh. “Mostly I got it ‘cause I thought you’d hate it.”

  “Job well done, Dad.”

  He slapped lightly at my arm. “Come on. Help me get this thing into the living room, son—no use standing around the kitchen when we got plenty of nice furniture to put our asses on, right?”

  The party moved to the living room, and, honestly, I thought we’d be safe there.

  Of course, of course, the universe had to prove me wrong.

  We hung around the couches, and for a few minutes, everything really did seem like it would be smooth sailing, at least for the evening. It was most of the main Savage family, and the rest of them—the aunts and uncles and cousins and Dominic, our other brother—would be showing up soon enough. It was going to be a party; it didn’t matter if it was for me. It was never for me, it was for the family, and I liked that just fine.

  “Markus,” a separate voice called leisurely from the hallway.

  I froze mid-sentence while talking to Beth. I saw her tense just the same as she watched me. It was like watching someone react to a scary video, just waiting to see their reaction to something horrible.

  This was something horrible.

  Curtis Walker stepped through the door, pausing at the threshold, eyes trained on me.

  I knew the chances of running into him were astronomically high in a town as small and intertwined as North Creek. There were reasons I’d spent the past three years avoiding this place, and he was one of them—one of many. Let’s just say, I had a sordid history of being an ass and had a lot to feel bad about.

  North Creek was haunted by the ghosts of my many mistakes, and now one was standing in my living room.

  “Dr. Walker,” my father greeted.

  Dr. Walker. My dad had always called him Curtis, until he got his doctorate. Then it was a sign of pride and respect, I guess, referring to him like that. Dr. Walker.

  Curtis’s gaze lingered on me for far too long, before he turned back to my father.

  He was two years older than me, and we’d known each other forever. Since elementary school. We’d been in love just as long—well, we were in love. Now we just… weren’t speaking. Actively not interested. Mostly. He still looked unfairly good though, which wasn’t allowed. I didn’t want to have to know he still looked good: tall and broad-shouldered, all lean muscle. The brown hair that curled down to his shoulders, and his matching chocolate eyes. Technically, he was making a house call, but since it was with people he knew—since it was with my family—he opted to leave behind the doctor’s coat. So it was just the flattering business casual jeans and dress shirt.

  “I just wanted to let you know everything’s been set up with your medications. Just the base things. I’ll have you come see me at the clinic this week if you’re feeling up to it….”

  The tension in the room was palpable, but God bless my dad, he really tried to pretend it wasn’t.

  “Sounds good to me,” Dad said, smiling.

  “Good.”

  Curtis was trying, too, vaguely. His voice was losing that pleasant edge, eyes swinging back to me. Old feelings were boiling inside me, threatening to spill over: guilt and anger and hurt.

  I could see the same feeling mirrored in Curtis’s eyes.

  2

  Curtis

  Zach Savage was the last man on Earth I wanted to see.

  Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. I knew it would be inevitable—North Creek was notoriously small and tight-knit, after all, so there were only so many places for us to hide away from each other. I was given notice ahead of time that Zach would be coming home again, thanks to Beth. I just thought I’d maybe be able to stop in to see to Markus’s medical care and then dip out without running into Zach.

  Zach was two years younger than me, but thanks to his Savage genes, he was built like a brick house: tall and muscular and sturdy. He was the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome—annoyingly: black hair cropped short but not unattractively so with the same devastating blue eyes that I’d tripped over myself to get a glimpse of all through high school. In a rather beautiful family, though, Zach was always the stand-out—or maybe that was just my biased opinion. Probably, it had something to do with those dimples of his.

  Not that I cared about his dimples anymore.

  But, you know. The universe is cruel and likes to play games. What can you do except grin and bear it, right?

  Like I said: Zach Savage was inevitable.

  In all my
days of dreading running into him, though, I’d had a flicker of hope that maybe things could be…cordial. Not normal, because they’d never be normal between the two of us, but at the very least pleasant. We would both be able to keep our emotions in check and our tempers even long enough to exist momentarily in the same space.

  The look on Zach’s face—just short of annoyed—told me that wouldn’t be happening. My own anger flared in my chest as my gaze swung back to him, pendulously, inevitably.

  The room was tense. This needed to end; we were making everyone uncomfortable, and my issue was only with Zach, not the rest of the Savages.

  “Nice to see you, too,” I said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Okay. Maybe not the best way to keep the peace.

  Zach turned his head away, occupying his attention with something he deemed far more important: a piece of lint on the couch arm. Great.

  “Ashley,” I said, clearing my throat.

  She perked up, happy to lend a hand in diffusing the tension. “Yeah, hon?”

  “I’ll be back to check in on Markus in a day or two, if that’s all right with you both?”

  “Of course,” she said, pulling herself off the couch to show me out; sweet old Southern hospitality. “Any time’s fine.”

  “Great. I’ll be able to stay a little longer.” I offered her a smile. “I don’t want to intrude on the festivities or anything—”

  “Oh, hush,” Ashley tutted. “You wouldn’t be intruding. You know that.”

  I hummed as she opened the door for me. “Well, it’s clear that Zach doesn’t want me here, so.”

  We looked at one another. I felt the tension kick back up to its highest setting, thick and irritating. His mother twitched into a deeper frown.

  All right, I told myself. That’s enough public pettiness for one afternoon.

  “Thanks, Ashley,” I said, touching her shoulder.

  She shot me a gentle smile; it could only otherwise be described as motherly. Ashley Savage had known me almost all my life. For a long time, I felt like I was part of this family, and even now, when I was just the doctor who had a problem with her son, she never treated me any different. If this wasn’t a welcome home party for Zach, I had a feeling she might have even tried to convince me to stay a while and have a burger or two.

  But this was a party for Zach.

  “Thank you, Curtis,” she said, waving as I stepped onto the porch. “Drive safe, now, all right?”

  “I always do.”

  My car was parked behind everyone else’s, one of several in the long driveway. I was stupid to hope I’d be so lucky as to avoid him, but when I saw all the same cars in the parking lot, I thought maybe I could slip in and out before the party started. I traipsed down the steps, eager to make an escape, but as soon as I touched my car—

  “Hey. Curtis.”

  I froze, hand on the driver’s side door. There was only one voice in all of North Creek that could pin me down, make me wait so easily. I tensed, turning to follow the voice.

  Zach lingered on the porch before wordlessly coming down the steps. My fight-or-flight activated, all of my natural instincts screaming for me to just get in my car and drive away, but Zach was—unfortunately for me—compelling.

  I leaned back against the car as he lingered, keeping a safe distance between the two of us. God, he looked uncomfortable. It stung, even now after so many years had passed.

  Arms crossing, I asked, “So you’re home.”

  “Yeah.” He huffed, looking me in the eye. It shouldn’t have felt intimate at all, but somehow it did, which only pissed me off more. “I’m not staying long. I’m just here to see—”

  “Your dad.”

  Zach nodded.

  It was a fucked-up situation all-around. These weren’t the circumstances he wanted to return to, and these sure as hell weren’t the circumstances I wanted to talk to him under; tense and irritated.

  “I’m sure they’re glad to see you again,” I said, because it was the truth and because it was at least civil. “Your mom especially. I’m sure she’s happy you’re around.”

  “Yeah, well… I’m not here for long.”

  My brows dug together. “Okay….” Why did it feel like he was telling me that, specifically? “How long are you in town for?”

  He shrugged. “My leave is for a couple weeks. Then I’m going back to Virginia Beach, re-enlisting for another five years.”

  Warmth coiled in my chest, hurt and irritated. It was like ripping a bandage off of a cut before it was properly healed; you thought you’d maybe be okay, but the wound was still there and the glue was stuck just enough to tug at your skin. It wasn’t supposed to hurt anymore, but, fuck, it did.

  “Sounds great,” I huffed. “Should I congratulate you on wasting another five years?”

  Zach’s expression turned from slightly uncomfortable to angry. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Did you just come out here to tell me that, or?”

  “I don’t—God, I don’t fucking know.”

  “Right.” My lips twitched into a mean smile. “Well, if that’s everything you wanted to say—”

  I grabbed the door handle, ready for this conversation to be over.

  “What do you fucking want from me, Curtis?” Zach asked, voice getting louder.

  “You want to know?” I snapped back. When I turned back to Zach, his eyes were a little bit wider, like he was surprised I’d lost my cool. “There was a time when we had plans, Zach. Together. And now, you’re making plans on your own. So I wanna know—what’s changed? What’s so different that those plans just had to disappear?”

  When I looked at Zach again, I expected an earnest answer. I deserved an earnest answer, after the years of hurt and waiting.

  But Zach said nothing. His lips parted like he was thinking of something, some explanation, but then they pressed closed again. We weren’t going to have this discussion tonight, or maybe ever.

  Our past felt like an ocean between us. I felt like I was drowning in it.

  “Of course,” I huffed, tugging open the door. “Radio silence. I don’t know why I’d expect anything less from the great Zach Savage.”

  “Curtis,” Zach said, like it was unfair.

  It was unfair. All of this was so unfair.

  “Save it,” I said, slipping into my car, shutting the door before he could get one more word in. As I backed down the driveway, Zach watched, standing dumbly in the driveway. It was only once I turned onto the road that he moved again, shaking his head and climbing the front porch. I could hear his voice still, curling around in my head; it had been so long since I’d heard him say my name.

  I took the familiar backroads from the Savage household into downtown. It was early enough that the clinic wasn’t closed, but I wasn’t in any kind of hurry to return. Not after the argument I’d just had with Zach—if you could call it that. It felt so one-sided, like yelling at a brick wall and expecting it to tell you why your chest felt so heavy.

  All these roads, all these memories….

  That was inevitable, too, I guess; the remembering. Memories and fragments I’d found so precious when I was younger were resurfacing. I could remember riding along these backroads in twilight, in the summertime. Riding them with friends, with others, with Zach. Always with Zach.

  I glanced at an innocuous field and remembered when he parked the family car on the edge of it. It was warm enough that the fireflies were out, little blips of uncatchable light that wove between the long strands of wheatgrass. That night, I sat on the hood of his car, watching as he leapt like a wild person to grab one, before giving up and joining me. He’d touched my cheek that night, smoothing his thumb under my eye. I looked at his mouth, wanting so badly to lean in and close the gap….

  I cleared my throat, snapping myself back to the present. To reality. Things weren’t like that anymore. We weren’t kids, and we’d done so much since then, good things and terrible things.

&nbs
p; The car turned into town, slipping past the old haunts: the bar he’d tried too many times to sneak into and the thrift store; the music shop and the barber’s and the tattoo parlor. The grocery store and the gas station. The sidewalks and the trees and the little park with its gurgling fountain and the outline of Savage Distillery far down the road—all these places were infected with memories, viral. Remembering Zach Savage was a sickness I didn’t know how to cure.

  I felt a pang in my chest as I pulled into the clinic’s parking lot.

  I put the car in park, touched the key in its ignition….

  And just sat there, letting my head rest against the wheel. The engine trembled softly under my feet and I let myself get used to the idea of melting into the vibrations of it. Just… losing myself to it for a second, like I was losing myself to all these conflicting thoughts.

  This is shit, I thought. Bittersweet shit.

  All of these memories—I never wanted them to surface. I really thought, at thirty years old, I’d be able to handle them, but I was quickly finding out that Zach had a power over me I’d underestimated after all this time.

  I sat there for what felt like three minutes, but when I glanced up at the little digital clock on the dashboard, it told me I’d been idling in front of my workplace for a good fifteen. Great; that’s not weird. Probably didn’t freak any patients out.

  With a sigh, I shut off the car.

  Pulled my weight out and made my way into the clinic.

  The clinic was on the western side of North Creek Medical Center, a much larger facility and the only hospital in the area. There were others, but you had to drive—an hour one way for the larger metropolitan hospital and then there was another over the North Carolina border, depending on your pleasure. I had my own practice out of this side, and we were attached mostly for convenience's sake; it was easier to refer my clients, if I ever had to, to the emergency room or urgent care when it was literally right down the hall. It was a neatly kept, somewhat old building nestled comfortably downtown between the sheriff’s office and town hall.

  The clinic was just about empty this afternoon. Usually, we were busier in the morning anyway, so it wasn’t unusual. The practice was famous for making house calls and keeping things within the family, so to speak, too, so vacancy was something we were used to.