Halfway Home (18 page)

I laughed to see him so awkward, the laughter startling him. "Gray, listen—my brother's alive." A waver of doubt clouded his eyes, like maybe I just got religion. "He's
here.
They're all here." He stared over my shoulder at the beach house, still wary, an old frontier stubbornness that demanded proof. "It was this family that worked for them who died. They weren't even there."

Slowly the disbelief ebbed from his eyes, and he turned them again on me. He smiled his crinkled smile, followed up after a beat by a tiny snort of laughter. Then he glanced at the basket on my arm. "May I quote you?" he said, mocking me ever so gently. "'I hate roses.'"

"No, I don't. I just don't like them dying on me."

"Oh."

He was grinning at me now, but then I may have started it. There was really no one else who could fully appreciate the craziness of the last day, all the way to death and back. Well, Mona could of course, but she wasn't here. I don't know what other people do with the aura of good luck that follows a false alarm. But for me, standing there like the rose queen, it was like waking up from a nightmare to a world of second chances—Scrooge after the ghosts. I thought nothing and weighed nothing, because there was nothing to lose. I picked up a yellow rose and held it out like a specimen.

"Lord Graham, I hope you won't think me out of line, me just a poor tenant and all. But before that funeral started yesterday, I could swear I was falling in love with you."

He took it between two fingers, careful of the thorns. Sniffed it, but not floridly. "Oh really? I thought that's what I was doing. According to Merle and Foo and Mona."

"Yes, well, they got it backwards." I think I was waiting to see him blanch, or shuffle from one foot to the next. Those Jimmy Stewart moves of his, so earnest you wanted to put him in your pocket. I was amazed how cool he took it, frankly, and so I breezed right on. "Don't worry, you don't have to do anything about it. I mean,
we
don't have to. I just decided to tell you." I shrugged. "I'm terrible with secrets."

He gave me the most remarkable look, blazingly frank, beyond anything he'd ever allowed himself with me. I did the blanching. "They didn't get it backwards," he said, savoring the repetition. "I've been in it for months now. I just happen to be great at keeping a secret."

There was a dangerous merriment there. "I warn you, my lord, some people say I'm a dead man."

"Yeah, so I hear. Same ones who say I'm a hundred years old." His turn to shrug. "You get what you get. Besides, death's very overreported around here, don't you think?"

He opened his arms wide, taking in all the island. Seeing my chance I moved to embrace him, still holding the shears and the basket. It was a hug of relief more than anything, not especially sexual, more like survivors meeting in the aftermath of a wreck. I was looking over his shoulder toward the house and saw Daniel in the kitchen window, watching. Oh shit,
now
he puts down his book. Who would he tell, I wondered, his mother or his father? And I knew the answer because he was me. He wouldn't tell anyone.

"I won't come in," said Gray, easing away.

"Of course you will," I protested. "You'll meet them. You're my—" Mouth went dry. No word yet.

"Tomorrow's soon enough."

He waved the rose like a little flag. I saw that he needed his shyness to curl up in for a while and catch his breath. He was right, of course—I still had to get my refugees squared away. So I let him go without a second thought. Waved him down the driveway after our sixty seconds' swap of declarations. We seemed to have found our own way to smash a clock. He tooted once before he gunned across the coast road and into the Trancas hills. And for once, turning back to the beach house and my blood, tomorrow seemed like a good idea. Because now there would be enough time.

C
URIOUSLY IT FELT ALMOST ORDINARY, THE FOUR OF
us together in the house. Not the same thing as
normal,
mind you, but they had their rooms, and I had mine. At least we weren't on top of each other, the way it had been on West Hill Road the last time I did the family bit. Susan stayed upstairs for the first day and a half, so I didn't see her at all. This I chalked up to female mysteries, recalling Brian's remark about her period. In any case, the connecting bathroom between our rooms required an extra alertness in the locking of doors. Once I went in to brush my teeth and caught a faint whiff of bitter musk—a woman's blood. Instantly I thought of my mother, the only woman whose smell I'd ever known. Yet it didn't faze me at all, this coming full circle. It only served to reinforce the sense of natural history that clung about the beach house. The arrival of my brother's clan seemed inevitable as the cycle of seasons.

Almost ordinary, especially when Brian and Daniel and I gathered for meals in the dining room. For supper that first night, Campbell's soup and peanut butter sandwiches, the three of us hunched at the table without a word. But I mean, it didn't seem awkward in the least. It was as if we'd been having supper like this for years, no need to speak. And the next morning at breakfast, coming down to find my brother in the kitchen making french toast. It moved me in a very uncomplicated way, to find myself part of the ritual of Brian and his son.

Only I knew where the maple syrup was, a tin at the back of a cupboard with black molasses rust around the cap. Sitting there scarfing it down—four slices, six slices, trying to keep up with the kid—I almost forgot the upheaval of my brother's plight. Till Daniel drained his milk, set his glass on the table, and addressed his father gravely: "Where will I go to school?"

"Don't worry, we'll work all that out," said Brian, with a slight burr of annoyance. "You're still on your Easter break."

The boy nodded sadly. My cheeks were bulging with toast, ridiculously piggish, but I wanted to reach out with my napkin and gently wipe the milk mustache from his upper lip. I didn't. "May I be excused?" asked Daniel, and his father nodded, and he slipped away from the table. I watched him pick up his book off the sideboard and head outside. The book was like ballast, the last thing holding him down from flying away.

"I'm seeing that lawyer tomorrow," said my brother, no lingering look after the figure of his fleeing son. "Not here," he hastened to add. "At his office. I'm not giving anyone this address."

I smiled at him. "I guess the idea must be to find you one of those witness protection things. Change your name. Whole new life." Even as I said it I couldn't prevent the creep of envy in my voice. It sounded marvelous.

Brian laughed harshly, his upper lip pulling back in a sneer. "Yeah, those programs are total bullshit. You know what the rate of survival is? 'Bout fifty percent make it two years before somebody catches up with 'em. Great odds, huh? Just like they swore I'd be testifying in secret." He scoffed in disgust, leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head. The swell of his biceps was taut against the sleeves of his T-shirt.

By midafternoon a cover of clouds was starting to seep across the sky. Soon the sun was pale, dilute as lemonade. It wasn't clear that a storm was coming, the ambiguity of March leaving it up in the air. But they'd started to argue again in Cora's room, or Susan at least was harping, harping. Once again I couldn't hear the words distinctly. As it happened I was lying on my bed, jeans to my knees and playing with myself. Idly enough, only half-hard, but truly it had been months since I'd fiddled with it at all. I suppose I was testing the waters, for Gray's sake as much as my own. But as soon as I heard that nattering drone I buttoned right up and went downstairs, determined to avoid all domestic incidents.

Daniel was in the parlor, perched on the sofa and huddled over the coffee table. He looked as if he was studying a map with an X for buried treasure. Tentatively I moved to the doorway, reluctant to intrude. He didn't look up. Now I could see that he had the million pieces of a jigsaw spread out on the surface of the table. He'd already pieced together three or four ragged islands and a foot of border.

"Hi," he said, then scooted over on the sofa, making room for me. This gesture of accommodation made me flush with unexpected pleasure. I sat beside him, careful not to touch his knee with mine. I bent over the puzzle, which seemed like nothing but a fractured mass of gray. "Are you seven or eight?"

"Seven and three-quarters," he said, laying in a corner piece.

"Birthday's in June?" He nodded. "Maybe we'll have a party." He shrugged, not impolitely, but as if to say who knew where they'd be three months from now. He tapped in another piece, bridging two of his islands, all of it gray to me. "What's this supposed to be?" I asked, feeling stupid and aphasic.

"A statue," Daniel replied, and reached beneath the table for the box. He handed it to me.

I gaped at the picture on the cover: Michelangelo's
David
, in three-quarter profile, standing in the rotunda at the Accademia. But all I could see at the moment was his dick. I glanced again at the coffee table, the shrapnel pieces coming together. Now in dismay I could see that one of the islands was David's thigh, another his shoulder and left pec. My eye darted frantically among the jumble of unassembled pieces, trying to find the crotch shot. I excruciated, in a daze of embarrassment, wanting to cover the boy's eyes or drag him bodily away. This stupid bohemian house! Why didn't it have a
normal
puzzle, a nice barn in Vermont? Inexorably Daniel filled the picture in, piece by methodical piece.

I realized I was terrified that Brian and Susan might walk in and think this was my idea. And that shocked me back to sanity, because what, after all, was wrong with Michelangelo? Instantly I knew, sitting like a giant beside this little boy, what I was really afraid of. That Daniel would turn out gay, and they would blame me and curse my infected ghost. That's why I shrank from touching him, even my knee.

Once I saw my own fear of being implicated—of tainting him—I realized how the old self-hatred still had its hooks in me. Because what I really meant was that I didn't
want
him to be gay, to run that gauntlet of misery and solitude. Where the hell was all my pride that had marched in a hundred parades?

"Uncle Tom, are you on television?"

I winced at the family name, feeling at the moment all too worthy of the scathing contempt with which the phrase was freighted. For I had just sold my people down the river, all for the sake of what the Aryan masters call "family values."

"No," I retorted guiltily. "Who told you that?"

"Mom said you were an actor."

"Oh. Well, I'm not really that kind of actor." As if he knew there was any other kind. I was startled to find myself ashamed not to be on a hit series. Me and the Cos, so the kid would have something to brag about in school. Some dim, unsettled place in me wanted to race to my apartment in West Hollywood and grab my box of clippings—show him all my raves in
Drama-Logue.

Yet he didn't seem remotely disappointed, or curious to know what other sort of actor I might be. He accepted me all on my own, a given, because I was his uncle Tom. As I watched him, aching with tenderness now, he fitted two pieces of the puzzle together. Now we could see David's hooded brow and his piercing eyes. I understood that I couldn't keep Daniel from learning the world, of men with men or anything else. Suddenly he looked up at me, the giant towering over him, and smiled wanly. "I like my room," he said, clearly wanting to please me.

"I'm sorry about your dogs."

He frowned, and his shoulders moved in a barely perceptible shrug. "Yeah, they were great," he said, shifting his gaze to the puzzle again. So stoic. Such a fatalist. Me.

I stayed a while longer, even attempting to lay in a couple of pieces myself. But I've always been lousy at close work, and found myself trying to jam together shapes that were not cut out to be. I scanned the field of shards a final time, still hoping I could palm the piece with David's dick, so the assembled whole would sport a fig-leaf of negative space. But the fucker eluded me.

I stood up to leave and didn't touch Daniel, who for his part seemed philosophical as to whether I stayed or went. No words required about seeing each other later, since we just would. And I walked away with such an overwhelming sense of him, his concentration and his cool, I couldn't any longer distance him by calling him a mere shadow-image of me. For once in my life I'd met a kid as real as the one I left behind in Chester. If anything, I was the shadow of him now, not the other way around. Was this how parents put away their childhood, the vaporous image evaporating in such bright light?

I napped that day like a stone at the bottom of a well. When I woke, the breeze had blown the balcony door open. Still the air and the milky sky had the tease of rain. The prestorm in California sometimes goes on for days, leaden skies with mackerel swirls, swelling till you think they'll burst, and then they clear off without so much as a drop. A sort of stratospheric coitus interruptus. Now I longed for another five-day Alaska blow, like the one that turned things upside down last week, leaving me half in love with Gray. I wanted it for Brian and his family, to cabin us together safe and sound, the eye of the storm. I wanted to show Daniel pelicans on the lawn.