Bombora (42 page)

“Nate called this morning to say he arrived safely in Ohio,” he says, staring off in the direction of the horizon. He slicks his hair back away from his face. “Thought you might want to know.”

Solemnly, I nod and fight off the sudden thickness in my throat. “Thanks. I’m… glad. I’m glad he’s safe. I was wondering about that. That damn bike of his—it was a long way to travel alone at this time of year.”

My response makes Hugh sigh angrily, and I recoil slightly. Before I can ask, though, he says, “You still don’t have anything else to say about it? After
everything
?”

“I don’t know what else there is
to
say,” I admit. “Nate was right in that much; sometimes it’s better to not say anything.”

Hugh grunts, and I can’t tell whether it’s a noise of agreement or denial. “Well, I figure since I was going to ask you to come live with me, we should probably talk about it at some point.”

I jerk in surprise. “You were going to—what?” Surely that offer got snatched off the table ages ago.

He meets my eyes steadily. “You heard me, Phel. I know you’ve probably been thinking about where the hell you’re going to go after this, and, well… Nate was also right about what he said: you should stick around California. It’s good for you to be out here, and… it’s good for me for you to be out here too.” He pauses, and I have a hard time deciphering the look that flickers across his face. “Assuming, of course, you want to be.”

There is so much wrapped up in these few sentences that I scarcely know where to start. Of course, I’ve been hoping against hope for Hugh to accept my apology and plea for forgiveness; I’m not so stupid as to think I don’t have work left to do in earning his trust back, but this is both such a significant step forward and a point of such confusion that for a moment I’m speechless. I don’t understand how Hugh still wants to be my friend after I betrayed his confidence and, ultimately, broke his brother’s heart. There’s no question that’s what I’ve done, on either count. I destroyed Hugh’s trust and inflicted upon Nate as bad a turn as I felt had been done to me. What stalls me is the suggestion that I could want anything other than to stay here.

Enough time passes that Hugh seems to read my silence, for he gives a heavy sigh and splashes idly at the water near his knee. “Look,” he begins, “I’m not gonna deny I’m hurt by how you and Nate carried on behind my back, but this whole situation has been a fucking kaleidoscope of messed up. I don’t know if I’d have acted much differently if the roles were reversed.”

I’m unable to resist the urge to fidget, even though the movement sends me listing a little to either side on my board. “That’s nice of you to say,” I answer. “But I don’t think you’re the kind of person who’d get yourself into that kind of mess to begin with.”

There’s a low laugh that’s full of irony, and Hugh is back to pinning me with his stare. “That’s where you’re wrong, Phel. Maybe I don’t have many gay love affairs in my past, but I’m not exactly what you’d call squeaky clean. I’ve had my share of fuckups no one else knows about besides Nate and the counselors at Palermo.”

“The counselors at—” I stop dead, hesitating for a moment even to let go of my breath, while Hugh, on the other hand, seems to have trouble finding enough air for a breath of his own.

“Listen, Phel,” he says, and starts pulling at the neoprene on his thigh, “there’s obviously a lot of stuff you didn’t tell me when we became friends, and—well. As it so happens, there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t tell you either.” Catching the terrified expression on my face—
what now?
—he quickly holds a hand up. “It’s nothing, like…
personal
,” he explains in a rush. “Personal to me, okay, but not personal to you. I didn’t tell you because it was a while ago, and you didn’t have any real reason to know. But I think I should come clean now since we’re in a sharing mode.”

His face is so serious and pained that my mind immediately leaps to the worst possible scenario. “Did you kill someone?” I ask, half-joking but mostly not, and to my great relief Hugh blanches and barks out a laugh so relieved that it almost circles right back around to anxious.

“Jesus, no,” he exclaims. “Is that what you think?”

Feeling awkward, I try to shrug. “No, but when you give me an introduction like that… and your books are
awfully
violent….”

“Okay, okay.”

He still looks so nervous. I can’t not try to help him out in some way, though I still have no idea what he’s about to say. “You can tell me, Hugh,” I encourage. “By now there’s probably not a whole lot you can say that will shock or otherwise scandalize me.”

“I know.” He sighs again. “It’s not that. I just… don’t talk to people about this. Ever.” Our eyes meet again before his gaze flickers away like a skittish bird’s. “After Nell died, I sort of went crazy.” Off my expression, he butts in, “Not crazy like
that
, but… I definitely got messed up in some stuff as I was trying to shut it all out.”

“Stuff, as in….”

“Drugs.” The word plunks between us like a dropped anvil; all that’s missing is the splash. “It wasn’t, like, super dramatic or anything, but it definitely would have gotten a whole lot worse if Nate hadn’t intervened. I was pissing away a lot of money on coke, and I guess the effects were pretty obvious to my family. I was a huge dick to everyone and impossible to be around. Nate flew out here to try and get me sorted out. That’s how I wound up in Cardiff, to get clean.” In a purely restless gesture, he lifts his hand to scrub through his hair again. “Mostly I’m pretty good; I have to pay attention, obviously, which is why I don’t drink all that much beyond a couple beers here and there, but sometimes… it’s hard.” Hugh bites his lip. “The last few days have been hard.”

Unconsciously, I flinch. “Hugh—I’m so sorry,” I splutter, unable to come up with anything better or more adequate. “I had no—”

“I know.” He attempts a smile. “That’s not your fault, and not really the point I’m trying to make. The thing is, Phel, it’s not my place to judge what people will do in a time of grief or when they hit rock bottom, because I know all about it.”

The next breath I try to take comes out sounding more like a sob. “But you never hurt anyone,” I cry out, even though I don’t know for sure if this is true. In my gut, I feel it is, because Hugh’s more the type to hurt himself first before putting someone else in harm’s way. “I let my grief drive me to hurt Nate as well as myself, and there’s no excusing that.” Struggling to explain something I still don’t fully understand myself, I go on. “It’s like I’d lost a part of myself when I came here, the Phel who was confident and proud and
alive
. And then that Phel was gone, and I felt fucking afraid all the time, like my own shadow could jump out at any second and take away everything I had left to lose.”

Aware my outburst isn’t close to being done, Hugh stays silent and continues to watch me, the atmosphere oddly calm with the gentle lapping of the waves around us and the calling of sea birds in the sky. “When Nate showed up, I felt this thing inside me that wanted to break away and be free again. And hurting Nate—subjecting him to every kind of cruelty and humiliation I could think of—was the only thing that made me feel like a shadow of my old self again. I wanted it so bad, Hugh, and I let myself be carried away with it. In trying to get back to the middle, I let myself get lost all over again. And hurt Nate in the process even worse than he hurt me, because I did it with my eyes open.”

“Nate’s an adult, Phel,” Hugh reminds me gently. His hand comes out and covers my knee across the water. “If you’d really done anything so bad that he couldn’t take it, he would have just walked away.”

“He
did
walk away,” I remind him. “He’s gone.”

Hugh nods his acknowledgement. “And that’s why I’m trying to help you out, man,” he says. “I don’t want to judge you for that stuff you did or might have done—quite frankly, I don’t wanna know—because it won’t solve anything. Obviously it doesn’t sit right with you, so what’d be the point of me telling you what you already know? You fucked up; so did Nate. It happens, ’cause no one’s perfect. It’s more important for us to help each other get back up again. I sure as hell would be nothing and nowhere if Nate hadn’t done the same thing, helped me find another chance.”

“I don’t think I’ve got any chances left.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s not true.” Hugh sounds so much more certain than I feel; I could almost ask him for his secret. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be a bigger help to you throughout this whole thing, just like I’m sorry you and Nate couldn’t work things out between you. But don’t say there’re no chances left, because if there’s anything I don’t doubt, it’s the fact that Nate loves you, dude. I’ve known that much from the start, even before I knew you were the one he was so crazy about; he told me himself.”

Far beyond the point of tears threatening to spill, I hug my arms around myself and just let them fall to blend with the salt spray on my face, their taste indistinguishable from the sea. “He left,” I say again.

For a moment Hugh looks like he wants to slap me. I almost welcome it. “Don’t be such a goddamned idiot, Phel,” he snaps. “Nate wanted to find some kind of happiness out here as he tried to figure his life out, no different than you. Do you honestly think he would have just walked away and gone back to Ohio if he wasn’t willing to give anything for you to be happy instead?” He lets that sink in for a while, though my brain seems to have a hard time absorbing the words, before giving my knee another gentle squeeze to draw me back.

“You really need to stop living in such deep denial about Nate’s feelings, or your own. I know you love him too, and quite frankly it’s sort of retarded for both of you to go on being miserable on principle alone. At some point you’re going to have to give up on thinking there’s nothing else out there, because that’s a fucking choice, not a reality.” Unspoken is the reminder that Hugh spends a fair time of his own being miserable about Nell, and that’s certainly not by choice. “I mean… look. You’re a surfer, even if it took you a while to know it, and anyone who looks at you can see how naturally you come to the water. Half the waves you spot look like nothing but unbroken water to me, but somehow you always know when it’s gonna be good, and you go for it. Any true surfer knows when they’ve found the perfect wave. So why trust your intuition in the water, but not out of it? What makes you think you can be right about a wave, and not how you feel about Nate?”

“Because I’ve been wrong too many times before.” Pathetic, I know, but Hugh’s faith in me makes me so stupidly hopeful that I don’t know how to trust it.

Sharing my disbelief, Hugh scoffs. “And I was wrong about how awesome the waves were going to be out here today,” he deadpans. “Does that mean I’m not going to come back out surfing again tomorrow?”

No, of course not. Hugh says the words, and I can’t imagine not getting back up on my board after a miscalculated drop leads to a spill, or better yet, not coming back day after day until the tide is just right and the waves, however broken, carry you right on up like you’re a part of the water. That faith is what makes it okay to admit defeat one day and keep on trying the next, anticipating the moment when things are just right and you trust yourself enough to do things properly. The water doesn’t care if you aren’t ready; it’ll wait until you are. Is it the same with Nate and me? Can I admit to still needing him in my life, to wanting to try again, without feeling like I’ve betrayed myself or anyone else? Could I be anything but unhappy if I continued to stay angry and alone?

These questions unanswered, Hugh and I remain a while longer in the ocean until it becomes obvious we should call it a day. The other surfers have all but deserted the beach, and it’s a long paddle back to the shore in becalmed waters. In silence, we walk back to Hugh’s house, where he moves my meager collection of things into the spare bedroom. Like it’s a choice I can accept, or not. There’s no one forcing me to stay or go but myself.

After dinner, I’m alone in my room doing what amounts to staring into space when Hugh knocks on my door and enters with an envelope in his hand, Callie a shadow that trails close behind. He comes over to where I’m sitting cross-legged on the freshly made bed—Callie, forever lacking in propriety, leaps on top of the mattress to settle herself at my feet—and passes it over with a small, crooked smile that’s indecipherable in the dim lighting.

“I got this the other day, after Nate left,” he tells me and with a nod indicates I should open the envelope and see what’s inside. “Dunno whether it was out of hopefulness or frustration, but there’s no date on it. So you can just… do whatever you think is best. Whatever your gut tells you.”

Hugh is gone again when I look up. The only company left in the room, aside from my misery—if I’m allowed to be really maudlin—is Callie and the plane ticket she’s curiously trying to sniff in my hands. I stare disbelievingly. There’s no departure date specified, as Hugh said, and no doubt it cost him a small fortune to arrange it that way, but what’s clear as day is the destination: Columbus International Airport. My breath catches audibly in the quiet room, and the tumble in my gut is precisely the same feeling I get when crashing over the edge of a monster wave, the perfect ride sweeping up out of nothing but hope and a prayer.

It’s there for me to take it, if I’m strong enough.
If I have faith
, I think. If I could walk up to the man I love with forgiveness in my heart and certainty in our future, and say,
Hello, Nate. Remember me?
The yearning is so strong that I can feel it vibrating through the core of me like a tuning fork struck to the perfect pitch, can feel it the way I felt something click into place as I looked across a crowded bar and saw him standing there, looking back at me like he already knew my name and where’d I’d been. It feels like holding the whole ocean in my hands, all its terrifying danger and fathomlessness and possibility; it feels like looking over the edge of a cliff of water. I can go forward, or I can remain as I am. I know this.