More Than This (14 page)

“Candace –” his father said, trying to stop her as she rose from her chair.

“You can’t possibly think you’re going to see him again.”

“Just try and stop me,” Seth said, his eyes burning.

“Enough!” his father shouted. “Both of you!”

There was a moment of stand-off as Seth and his mother locked eyes, but she eventually sat back down.

“Seth,” his father said, “I’d like you to think about maybe taking some antidepressants, or even something stronger –”

His mother let out a cry of exasperation. “That’s your answer to this? Disappear into oblivion like you do? Maybe you can both do silent DIY projects for the rest of your lives.”

“I’m just saying,” his father tried again, “Seth is obviously struggling with something –”

“He’s not struggling with
anything.
He’s crying for attention. Can’t bear that his little brother needs more care than he does, so he goes and does something like this.” She shook her head. “Well, you’re only hurting yourself, Seth. You’re the one who’s going to have to go to school next week, not us.”

Seth felt a twisting in his gut. She’d nailed exactly what had been worrying him.

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” his father said. “Not until this blows over. Or we can change schools –”

His mother gave another exasperated gasp.

“I don’t want to change schools,” Seth said. “And I’m not going to stop seeing Gudmund.”

“I don’t even want to hear his name,” his mother said.

His father looked pained. “Seth, don’t you think you might be a little young to be taking decisions this enormous? To be doing these . . . things with . . .” He trailed off again, not quite able to say “another boy.”

“And all this when you know how much we’ve got to deal with for Owen right now,” his mother said.

Seth rolled his eyes. “You always have to deal with Owen. That’s what your whole stupid life is. Dealing With Owen.”

His mother’s face hardened. “You have the gall to say that? You, of all people?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Seth spat back at her. “‘Of all people’?”

“All we’re saying,” his father said, talking loudly over them both, “is that you could have come to us. You can come to us with anything.”

And there was another long silence that none of them bothered to fill, as perhaps they all wondered if that was true.

Seth looked down at his feet again. “What’s wrong with Owen
now?”
he asked, unable to stop himself from putting all his anger into the last word.

His mother’s answer was to rise quickly to her feet and leave the kitchen. They heard her stomping upstairs, heading straight for Owen’s room, heard him start an excited explanation about the new video game he’d gotten at Christmas last week.

Seth looked at his father in confusion. “What’s she so mad about? How does any of this hurt her?”

His father frowned, but not at Seth. “It’s not entirely you. Your brother’s scans came back.”

“The ones because of his eyes?”

Owen’s eyes had started a strange twitching a few weeks back. He could see something when it was directly in front of him, like his computer games or his clarinet, but walking anywhere had become a wild hazard of knocking things over or simply falling all the way down to the ground. He’d given himself four bloody noses in the past ten days.

“The neurological damage,” his father said. “From . . . from before.”

Seth looked away, almost automatically.

“It was either going to get worse or better as he grew,” his father said.

“And it’s got worse.”

His father nodded. “And will continue to do so.”

“So what happens now?”

“Surgery,” his father said. “And cognitive therapy. Almost every day.”

Seth looked back up. “I thought you said we couldn’t afford that.”

“We can’t. Insurance only covers so much. Your mum’s going to have to go back to work to help with the costs and it’s going to eat badly into our savings. We’ve got rough times ahead, Seth.”

Seth’s mind was reeling, for his brother, for their money troubles, for the fact, he was ashamed to think, that he had college tuition payments starting in the fall that were going to need some of those very savings and if they weren’t there –

“So, this whole thing with you and your friend?” his father said. “Not the best timing in the world.”

Laughter rang down the staircase. They turned to look, even though there was nothing to see. Seth’s mother and Owen, sharing something between the two of them, just like they always did.

“When is it ever good timing?” Seth asked.

His father patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry, son,” he said. “I really am.”

But when Seth turned back around, his father had broken eye contact.

It’s raining again the next morning when Seth wakes, though it takes him a few minutes to notice because of how the dream is still ringing through him.

He lies motionless on the settee. He still hasn’t slept in any of the beds upstairs; his own in the attic is far too small for him now, even if he wanted to use it, which he doesn’t, and sleeping in his parents’ bed just feels too weird, so he’s stayed on this dusty couch, under the terrified eye of the horse above the mantelpiece.

Dreaming.

The weight in his chest has grown heavier, almost too heavy to move.

The greatest thing with Gudmund had been the secrecy of it all. When they were together like that, they had been their own private universe, bounded just by themselves, a population of two. They were the world, and the world was them. And no one deserved to know, not his mum and dad, not his friends, no one, not then, not yet.

Not because it was wrong – because it definitely wasn’t that – but because it was
his.
The one thing that was entirely his.

And then the world found out, his
parents
found out. Those two photos Gudmund took, painfully innocent compared to what some of the boys at school sent their girlfriends, but so private, so something that no one else should have seen, that Seth burns even now with anger and humiliation.

His mother had been right. Going back to school had been a nightmare. The whole world changed in an instant, collapsed to a place where Seth almost didn’t even live. After Christmas vacation was over and he’d stepped back onto school grounds, there had been only him and everyone else. Far away. Beyond reach. The school tried to clamp down on the worst of the abuse, but they couldn’t catch it all. And the whispers were everywhere; his phone vibrated constantly, even throughout the night, with jeering texts. Nor did he dare look on any social networking, where the picture – and accompanying comments – seemed to be everywhere. His private universe exposed to the egged-on scorn of all.

But he couldn’t leave. Gudmund was still out of school while his parents decided what to do about him. And Seth had to be there, for whenever he came back. He had to bear it, alone.

“Self-contained,” Gudmund had described him, but what that really meant was that it felt like he’d had a private burden to shoulder for as long as he could remember, and maybe not all of it even to do with what happened to Owen. Worse, it had been accompanied by an equally hard lifelong yearning, a feeling that there had to be more, more than just all this weight.

Because if there wasn’t, what was the point?

That had been the other great thing about Gudmund since that surprising spring night at the end of junior year when they had become more than just friends. It was suddenly as if, for the briefest of moments, the burden had been lifted, like there was no gravity at all, like he had finally set down the heavy load he’d been carrying –

He knows he should stop this thinking, knows he should get moving, keep himself occupied with simply surviving this place, but he feels like he’s at the bottom of a well, with sunshine and life and escape all miles away, no one to hear him, even if he could call for help.

He’s felt like this before.

He lies there, listening to the rain, for a long, long time.

Eventually, biology again forces him to get up. He has a pee, then stands at his front door. The rain pours, rivulets coursing everywhere through the mud. He wonders for a moment why it doesn’t just wash away, but he sees that the street is slowly becoming a stagnant flood, great ponds forming at blocked drains, everything swirling together in a muddy mess.

It’s nearly as warm as it was yesterday, so he gets the block of dishwashing liquid, leaves his clothes in a heap, and uses the rain as a shower right there on the front path.

He lathers himself up, making a soapy mop of his buzzed-off hair, then closes his eyes and lifts his face to the rain to let it all rinse off. Almost idly, he tries to see if playing with himself will have any results, but the weight on his chest is too heavy, the memories of everything too much. He gives up and just crosses his arms, letting the soap slowly wash off him, the suds slopping down to the brown water gathering on the footpath.

Have I done this?
he thinks, pulling his arms tighter around himself.
Have I brought this rain? Have I made this place even more miserable?

He stands there, motionless, until he begins to shiver.

The rain isn’t that warm after all.

It rains all through the day, the flooding on the street getting bad down at one end, but most of it near his house draining slowly into the sinkhole before it gets too deep. He hopes the fox and her kits are all right.

He heats up a can of potato soup. While it cooks, he looks out to the back garden, watching the rain come down on the deck and the now-soaking pile of bandages. The sky is a uniform gray, impossible to separate out any individual cloud, just solid rain from horizon to horizon, however far away those horizons might be. When the soup is hot, he takes two mouthfuls before losing his appetite and leaving the rest by the switched-off camp stove.

There’s no television, of course. No computer. No electronic games. For lack of anything better, he takes a book from the bookcase. It’s one of his father’s, one Seth has already read part of years ago, sneaking it from the shelf in America when his father wasn’t looking. It was far too old for him at the time and, he smiles wryly, is probably too old for him
now.
There’s large quantities of good-spirited sex, metaphors that run on just for the hell of it, and plenty of philosophical musing about immortality. There’s also a satyr who features heavily, which Seth remembers was the thing that got him caught. He’d asked his father about “satire,” having heard
that
word said out loud and assuming it was the one he was reading. After a lengthy, baffled explanation, his father had said, “Why on earth are you asking?” and that had been the end of that reading adventure. He remembers now that he’d never actually been able to sneak it off the shelf again to find out what happened in the end.

So he reads on the settee, letting the rain continue and the day pass outside. At some point in the afternoon, he grows too hungry not to notice and heats up a can of hot dogs, eating half and leaving the rest beside the cold can of potato soup. When dusk comes, he lights one of the lanterns he took from the outdoor store, sending stark shadows around the room but illuminating enough to see the pages.

He forgets about dinner.

A book,
he thinks at one point, rubbing his eyes, tired from so much focused reading.
It’s a world all on its own, too.
He looks at the cover again. A satyr playing pan pipes, far more innocent-looking than what it got up to in the story.
A world made of words,
Seth thinks,
where you live for a while.

“And then it’s over,” he says. He’s only got about fifty pages left; he can finally find out what happens in the end.

And then he’ll leave that world forever.

He folds down a corner to mark his place and sets the book on the coffee table.

It’s fully dark now, and he realizes he’s never seen this place at night. He picks up the lantern and stands in the front doorway again, keeping out of the rain, which seems lighter now but still steady.

He’s amazed at the unyielding blackness. Not a single other light is shining back at him, not a streetlight or porchlight or even that glow that’s always on the horizon from the gathered lights of a city.

Here, there’s nothing. Nothing but darkness.

He flicks off the lantern, and for a moment, the world disappears completely. He stands there, breathing into it, listening to the rain. Slowly, slowly, his eyes begin to adjust to a dim light, which can only be the moon behind the clouds. The neighborhood starts to resolve itself into house fronts and gardens, the mud now swirled in rivers and deltas on the sidewalk and street.

Nothing stirring, nothing moving.