More Than This (11 page)

“No, you weren’t. Not to have that kind of responsibility.”

“It’s just me, Gudmund,” Seth said, catching his eye. “You don’t have to pretend to be all wise. I’m not a teacher.”

Gudmund took the rebuke with grace and kissed Seth lightly on the shoulder. “I’m just saying, though. You were probably as weirdly self-contained back then as you are now, right?”

Seth nudged him playfully with his elbow, but didn’t disagree.

“And so your parents were probably happy they had this strange little kid who acted like an adult,” Gudmund continued. “And your mom thought – against her better judgment, we’ll give her that – she thought it’s only a few minutes and it’s an emergency, so our little Sethy can watch our little Owen for just a second while I run back to the whatever –”

“The bank.”

“Doesn’t matter. It was her mistake. Not yours. But it’s too big and awful to blame herself, so she blames you. She probably hates herself for it, but still. It’s a bullshit bad deal, Sethy. Don’t buy into it.”

Seth said nothing, remembering that morning more clearly than he wanted to or ever usually tried to. His mother had delivered a curse word so loudly when they got back to the house that Owen had grabbed Seth’s hand in alarm. It turned out she’d managed to walk all the way home without realizing she’d left a thousand pounds sitting on the counter at the bank.

Seth wondered now, for really the first time, what that money could have been for. Everything was done electronically, even then, cards and PINs and debits from your bank account. What was she going to do with all that cash?

“I’ll be right back,” she’d stressed. The bank wasn’t the one on the High Street, it was off of it and up, a lesser bank his mother had never taken them to before on any other errand. “I’ll be ten minutes tops. Don’t touch anything and don’t open the door to anyone.”

She’d practically sprinted back down the hall to their front door, leaving Seth holding Owen’s hand.

Ten minutes came and went, and Seth and Owen had only moved from their spot to sit down on the floor beside the dining-room table.

Which is when the man in the strange blue jumpsuit knocked on the kitchen window.

“I let him in,” Seth said now. “She specifically said not to open the door to anyone, and I did.”

“You were eight.”

“I knew better.”

“You were
eight.”

Seth said nothing. There was more to the story than just the opening of the door, but he couldn’t tell even Gudmund that part. He could feel his throat straining, felt the pain rising up from his chest. He turned away and lay there on his side, shuddering a little at the effort of crying and trying not to.

Behind him, Gudmund didn’t move. “I gotta tell ya, Sethy,” he finally said. “You’re crying and I don’t really know how to handle that.” He stroked Seth’s arm a few times. “I really don’t know what to do here.”

“It’s okay,” Seth coughed. “It’s okay. It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. It’s just . . . I’m an idiot about these things. Wish I wasn’t.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Seth said. “Just the beer talking.”

“Yeah,” Gudmund said, agreeing even though they’d hardly had four bottles between them. “The beer.”

They were quiet for a second, before Gudmund said, “I can think of a few things that might make you feel better.” He pressed his body against Seth’s, his stomach against Seth’s back, reaching around to grab parts of Seth that responded with energy.

“That’ll do,” Gudmund said happily into Seth’s ear. “But seriously, though, why does there even have to be a problem? He survived and they caught the guy and Owen’s a nice kid.”

“He’s not the same, though,” Seth said. “There are neurological problems. He’s all1 . . . scattered now.”

“Can you really tell that about a four-year-old? That he was one way before and a different way after?”

“Yeah,” Seth said. “Yeah, you can.”

“Are you sure, because –?”

“It’s all right, Gudmund. You don’t have to fix it. I’m just telling you, okay? That’s all. I’m just saying it.”

There was a long silence as he felt Gudmund’s breath in his ear. He could tell Gudmund was thinking, working something out.

“You’ve never told anybody else, have you?” Gudmund asked.

“No,” Seth said. “Who could I tell?”

He felt Gudmund hold him tighter in acknowledgment of the importance of the moment.

“It’s nothing I can change, right?” Seth said. “But imagine there’s this thing that always sits there in the room with you. And everyone knows it’s there and no one will ever say a single goddamn word about it until it becomes like an extra person living in your house that you have to make room for. And if you bring it up, they pretend they don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“My parents found the wrong gender of porn on my touchpad last year,” Gudmund said. “Guess how many times they’ve talked about it with me since?”

Seth turned to look at him. “I never knew that. I’ll bet they went ballistic.”

“You’d have thought so, but it was just a phase, wasn’t it? Nothing that churchgoing and pretending it never happened wouldn’t make go away.”

“Aren’t they suspicious about me coming over all the time?”

“Nah,” Gudmund said, grinning. “They think you’re a good influence. I tend to play up your athletic abilities.”

Seth laughed.

“So we’ve both got messed-up parents who just don’t want to know,” Gudmund said. “Though, I admit, yours are a bit worse.”

“It’s not anything, really, good or bad. It just is.”

“It’s enough of an anything to make you cry, Sethy,” Gudmund said softly. “And that’s not something that can be any good.” He squeezed Seth again. “Not something I like to see anyway.”

Seth didn’t say anything, didn’t feel like he could without his voice cracking just that second.

Gudmund let the silence linger for a moment, then he said, brightly, “At the very least, it made you guys move out here from England. And if you hadn’t, I’d never have learned about
this.”

“Quit tugging on it,” Seth said, laughing. “You know what a foreskin is.”

“In theory,” Gudmund said. “But to think that I used to have one of these and someone had the nerve to chop it off without even asking –”

“Stop that,” Seth said, smacking Gudmund’s hand away again, still laughing.

“You sure?” Gudmund moved an arm underneath Seth and pulled him back into a full embrace, nuzzling his neck.

“Hold on,” Seth whispered suddenly.

Gudmund froze. “What?”

“Just that.”

“Just what?” Gudmund asked, still frozen.

But how could Seth explain it? Just what?

Just Gudmund’s arms around him, holding him there, holding him tightly and not letting him go. Holding him like it was the only place that could ever have existed.

Just that. Yes, just that.

“You’re a mystery, you are,” Gudmund whispered.

Seth felt Gudmund reach for something off the bed and turned to find Gudmund holding his phone up above them.

“I told you,” Seth said, “I’m not taking any pictures of my –”

“Not what I want,” Gudmund said, and he snapped a picture of the two of them from the shoulders up, just together, there on the bed.

“For me,” Gudmund said. “Just for me.”

He brought his face around to Seth’s and kissed him on the mouth, taking another picture.

Then he put down the phone, pulled Seth even closer, and kissed him again.

Seth opens his eyes on the settee and can barely breathe from the weight on his chest.

Oh, Jesus,
he thinks.
Oh, no, please.

Once more, it was so much bigger than a dream that he puts his hands to his face to see if the scent of Gudmund’s body is still there. That it isn’t – but that he can
remember
the smell, of salt and wood and flesh and something intensely private – makes the weight feel so much heavier.

“Shit,” he says, his voice cracking as he sits up. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” He leans forward into himself and rocks slowly back and forth, trying to bear how bad it feels.

The
ache
of it. The ache of missing Gudmund is so great he can barely stand it. Of missing how safe being with him felt, how easy it was, how funny and relaxed. Of missing the physical stuff, of course, but more than that, the intimacy, the closeness. Of missing just being held like that, cared for.

Maybe loved.

But also the ache of missing something that was his own. His own private, secret thing that belonged to no one else, that was no part of the world of his parents or his brother or even his other friends.

Gone.

Isn’t dying once enough?
he thinks.
Am I going to have to keep doing it?

But then he thinks,
No. Because you can die before you’re dead, too.

Oh, yes, you can.

So why not after?

He had been with Gudmund again. And waking feels like death, like a death worse than drowning.

I can’t take this,
he thinks.
I can’t take this.

He’s slept through the night again, it seems. The light around the blinds has the bluish tint of early dawn. He doesn’t want to get up, feels like he can’t, but the pressure on his bladder finally forces him up the stairs to the bathroom. Yesterday, after the episode of housebreaking and trying to avoid just exactly this kind of dream-filled sleep for as long as he could, he’d gotten the creaking pipes to work in the sink and shower. He’d then refilled the long dried-out toilet with glasses of water, and it had worked on the first flush, a victory that made him almost embarrassingly happy.

He goes to it now and does his morning business. Then he washes himself in the cold water of the shower, using the hardened block of dishwashing liquid from downstairs as a sticky bar of soap. He gasps as he sticks his face again and again into the brutal coldness of the water, trying to snap himself into wakefulness.

Snap him hopefully from the weight still pressing down on him, ready to crush him if he lets it.

He dries himself off with one of the new T-shirts and heads back down to the main room to put on a clean set of clothes. He’ll need to get more of these, too, ones more suited to warm weather, and maybe some lanterns for nighttime. He needs more food as well. He’ll unload the cart from outside and then refill it, taking more time to get better things.

Yes. That’s what he’ll do.

Keep moving,
he tells himself again.
Don’t stop. Don’t stop to think.

But he stands there for a minute, over the backpack of clothes, feeling the empty house around him, feeling the doorway to the kitchen and the farther door that leads outside onto the deck.

The same door that he’d opened for the man in the jumpsuit.

And the attic upstairs where he’d waited, by himself, on all those terrible, terrible evenings while the hunt for the man and Owen was on, all those evenings when his parents could barely bring themselves to look at him or each other, when his dad started taking the go-away pills he never quite gave up.

Seth hadn’t told Gudmund everything, even when he could have, even when the chance was there for –

For what? Forgiveness? Absolution?

If he could have taken forgiveness from anyone, he could have taken it from Gudmund. He could have done it right then, and even now he isn’t sure why he didn’t.

He remembers being there, lying in bed with Gudmund, being held as close as it was possible to be, having shared a story he’d never told anyone besides his parents and the police.

His chest begins to ache again, dangerously so, and he says, “Right.
Right.
”

He heads outside to start bringing food in from the cart, trying as hard as he can not to cry again.

He makes three trips to the supermarket before the morning is through. It’s mostly cans and the few bottles of water that look tolerable, but he’s also found some sugar that’s not too hard to chip chunks out of and some dried meats vacuum-packed in plastic that may not be too petrified to eat. He’s found a couple bags of flour, too, though he doesn’t really know what he might do with them.

He gathers a few camping lanterns from the outdoor store and finds some more clothes at a small Marks & Spencer around the corner from it. The shirts and shorts are boring enough to make him look like his father, but at least he’s not having to wear snow gear in midsummer, which makes him wonder what will happen if he’s still here for whatever passes for winter in hell.

When the sun’s in the middle of the sky, he uses the camp stove to heat up more spaghetti. He does it at the same spot in the park where he ate yesterday, looking down the hill again at the grass and the crystal clear pond beyond.