Something Of A Kind (27 page)

I’m not going to beat the sorry drunk to the ground like he’d do
to me, but I don’t want to be Owen. I don’t want to sit there and take
it like encouragement. This doesn’t have to be me. The cycles stop
here.

Instead, the old man leaned against the door.
“You cannot pretend you don’t know,.” Lee said, getting louder,
demanding. “You haven’t called me Father since you were a boy. I
heard Tony today, his words. I didn’t want you to be like your
father’s family, yet you gravitate to his people instead of ours. You
stay on his couch, you do your car with him. You will not speak to
us, only disrespecting. You wish to be like the outsider boy who
killed her… his loins do not make that child your father. You must
see you are not like him. You have no piece of him, you and Sarahgirl both. You’re like her, a fighting spirit. You cannot fall as she
did…”

“This stops right now – whatever this is.” Noah demanded, his
voice low and dangerous.

“You still play your games, but I know you know.” Lee
continued, sounding confused and staring at the floors. His brow
was wrinkled, his voice distant. He didn’t make eye contact. “You
must know.”

“Get out!” Noah shouted, pointing at the door.

 

“What did you say to me, boy?” Lee grumbled, alarmed and
aghast. He squinted, as though he was trying to read Noah.

 

He’s never seen these pieces of me.

 

“Get. Out,” Noah warned, his hand balling into a fist as he
stepped forward.

 

Rustled, Lee
offered a
look of
death through his shock,
disappearing between the door.

Feeling
nauseated, confusing
complexities of
betrayal and
incredulity rushed through his veins. A headache was rousing, too
intense for anger. He covered his face, leaning against the wall. With
muffled murmurs from beyond the door piercing his skull, a steady
throb bleeding from his head to his arm, he wished he claimed a full
dose of painkillers, rather than the hesitant half accepted from an
addict’s maybe-son.

Glancing up as the voices raised, he looked into Aly’s eyes, the
blue rimmed with tears. Her lips parted, the lower trembling. Coffee
ran down her knuckles, dripping to the ground.

What is this?

 

Something was incredibly wrong.

 

Nothing is okay. Nothing’s right at all.

 

CHAPTER 21 | ALYSON

 

Mom would know what to do.

It was a realization that had been haunting Aly all night. Noah
was something she never experienced before. She’d never known
anyone or anything like him. It was so easy, so natural. He always
made sense without thinking about it, not that she could stop. He
knocked down her walls before she erected them.

Her mother had only dated once, and it was more of a hinted
backstory than anything Aly could remember. When Aly was in her
toddler years, some guy named Aaron swept Vanessa off her feet.

Apparently, he flew out to Los Angeles for a work conference,
and never came back. Word of a horrific bus accident floated into
town two weeks later.

Broken hearted, Vanessa always told Aly that he was the man
she should have been with from the beginning, that he was the father
she should have had growing up. Between the devastation of the loss
Aly couldn’t recall, having Greg down her throat, and the first
diagnoses, as far as Aly knew, her mother never tried again. She had
already worked too hard for it, and the pain never proved worth it.

Her mother always teased that someday Aly would stumble into
that stage, what she called the ‘ridiculous head over heels fantasy
every little one dreams of, every old person dreads remember, and a
piece of happiness that every girl deserves’.

Her mother expressed some of
the most
grief over never
attending Aly’s wedding or seeing her children. She made Aly
promised that she wouldn’t make her mistake, pregnant and alone as
a teen. The week before Vanessa stopped talking; she whispered that
she was going to miss the story of a first love, and they both
mourned.

Just for a moment, Alyson w
as thankful for no one’s eyes or
arms. Flat on her back as she lay in bed, her lip trembled. Tears
flooded down her face, hot and silent. Stomach relaxed to a concave
between her hipbones, Aly balled her fists around the frame propped
below her rips.

She would lift her head or pull it close, eyes scathing the
wounded moment. A memory edging into her head, she flipped it on
its back, sliding the metal clasps away from the cardboard backing.
A second picture had been turned around, her packing revealing she
was a frame too short to display it.

When moving to Lauren’s, Aly had found it in a paperback of
The Tempest. It was wrapped for her seventeenth birthday, due at the
end of the early spring Vanessa intended to see. It wasn’t wine-
stained, in a mass collection, or an easy-reading version like the beat
up renditions peppering the rest of her mother’s shelves. In her
mother’s closet, it was hidden in a box covered in black lace. Inside,
along with an unsigned card, it was brand new, the cover filled with
artistic edgy illustrations, perfect-bound.

As if an afterthought, like a stray piece of paper, the picture was
tucked beneath the cover. On the back, in her perfect, old-fashioned
cursive printed with her calligraphy pens, she wrote, I love you, my
Aly
Sun, and below, “What is past is prologue” –
William
Shakespeare.

The photograph was taken the second time she got sick, before
radiation affected her thick head of hair. It was always a shame
when it pieced out, clumps in the sink or on top of a filled trashcan.
Post full premature
hysterectomy,
it
kept coming
back –
in
surrounding areas, in new places, finally weaseling into her blood
and bones, traveling to her head.

Standing against the vibrant yellow panels of a hot dog stand,
her bright blue pea-coat was a contrast as stark as her dark brown
curls. Pupils reduced to specks from the camera’s bright flash, her
green irises looked alien. Light freckles covered her ashen skin, only
noticeable after her complexion paled with dangerous levels of
anemia. Her young mother shared a genuine smile, both warm and
pained, her lips pale and dimples slack.

She always was beautiful.

At her side, Lauren had her fast twisted into a mock-gape,
leaning forward with both arms crossed. In a gray sweater, black
skinny jeans, and a blue beanie that caused the bottom of her hair to
spray out passed her shoulders, they were both dressed too chilled
for that summer. Aly remembered the blistering heat, a rare feat to
be prolonged over so many months, as distinctly as she remembered
her mother’s frigid fingers.

Aly wished either were here to offer advice, but the longing for
her mother was overwhelming. It took a while to confess how
viciously the grief was, as though labeling it was an understatement.
It tasted like pain and fear, a constant haunting over her shoulder,
fighting its way forward through every thought. It had been half a
year, those unspeakable days after Christmas, before New Year’s,
since the doctors offered false hope that she’d be able to fight it until
an early spring.

At the time, it never felt like her mother was the only one
carrying the disease, always a dozen bricks too many on her own
chest. Like glass, and ashes, it filled her lungs. Always crying,
praying, pleading with God and fate, trying to open sympathy cards
or pick at flower-esque fruit bouquets like they were a final promise,
a sweetness with a reassurance to faith it would pass, and go away.

The devastation crept up with constant nausea. Spending day
after day sitting crisscross-applesauce, laptop or textbook or Austen
classic in hand, she stayed loyally beside her mother’s bed –
enduring the howling of an IV when her arm bent, her mother’s tears
and breakdowns followed by senseless apologies, the plans for a
possible post-mortem that killed Aly but comforted Vanessa.

Even snow-blind with the blackness of
an impending
end,
constantly coming to terms and falling to pieces again, Aly never
fathomed missing anyone so much. It never came close to the
clenching desire for a father when she was a child, or even the
terrible ache she had when her day with Noah no longer made her
smile, but instead only want him more, unable to wait for the sun to
rise.

Vanessa wouldn’t see her dreams and she wouldn’t see Aly’s.
Her mother wouldn’t be there when Noah eventually either broke
Aly’s heart or offered vows, and she wasn’t there to offer advice or
suggest the perfect words to fix everything and make her laugh
again.

Mom’s gone. She always will be.

A wave of agony clenching in her chest, Aly put it back, propped
on her bedside table. After a moment, she pushed the face down.
Glancing at the boxy alarm clock she always hated, the angry red
blinking of 2:35 AM felt like scorn.

Exhaustion heavy in her limbs, she rolled onto her side, in fetal
position. The exposed window bathed the room in blue moonlight.
Stars, however untouchable, glistened with distinction: the sun
thieves, and the thousand souls around them, dancing in place,
breathed across the sky.

They were magnified, almost beneath a lens, compared to nights
in the middle of Kingsley’s city. Sleeping in Ashland, lying in bed
every night felt like a camping trip, like the sunroof after late night
car trips, like the window from that one summer in a cabin on Long
Lake. Aly didn’t know which star was brightest, but she knew who it
belonged to.

She didn’t want to fall asleep. Time was too precious, life too
short. She found the most comfort in the stories, a hope of heaven,
of rebirth, of the new life she always swore she wanted. Like a
lightning strike from divinity, Noah sowed a rift in the relentless
burden of six unendurable months. Noah gave her the sun thieves.

She wanted to get up and run to him then, falling into his
embrace so seamlessly. Maybe fate would put him outside, standing
beneath the stars in Ashland, the town without streetlights.

But as much as she wanted to break down his door and offer a
thousand apologies, she knew everything was too fast, too little time
to be so engrossed. As much as she wanted to bother him, pull him
away from the demands of his family, she knew that it was possible
Lee was right. It was possible she belonged on the outside– outside
of Noah, outside of Ashland, and outside of Alaska.

Greg Glass, in his predictable narcissism, was dishonest, a liar,
not a father. As always, Aly couldn’t deal with it, and refused to
accept it. Noah was hurt because she demanded he help her prove
the impossible, some unfathomable something of a kind, to Greg, a
heart to hardened to hear anyone but himself. She begged him to
humor her. She pushed something too new and too good way too far.
It shouldn’t be such a shock that Lee’s outburst was so viciously
honest.

Did he mean it? Could she not see Noah? If she ignored it,
would Noah even want to see her?

Guilty and feeling selfish, Aly swallowed, squeezing her eyes
shut. Fear flooded her veins, like blackness and grief, that someone
was talking sense somewhere and Noah would see it first. He was
worth more than a temporary placement court-ordered into his little
town, diving into his life with an
uproar, changing his world
unapologetically. Aly feared he would leave to make peace with his
father, or she would have to.

I’d do it for him.

 

Maybe Noah never broke the frame. Maybe he just freed the
picture.

 

CHAPTER 22 | NOAH

Sarah came in before dawn with a neon bottle covered with
directions, explaining that she’d promised to return the favor. After
they bickered about her being out of her neck brace, she reminded
him he’d be out of work and for three weeks. Brief explanations and
apologies were offered, along with a mutual covenant of, “Let’s not
talk about it.”

He didn’t mention Lee’s possibly made
-up revelation, especially
when puzzle pieces
infuriatingly
pressed
together
in the
few
moments before he passed out the night before, dead until dawn.
Sarah left her runaway attempt at a forced shrug and, “a momentary
breakdown that will not be repeated or again attempted.” He knew
they’d both end up prying the wounds open later.

He’d managed a half
-in-half-out shower with an awkward shave.
Dressed in a uniform button-up, half ripped and makeshift muscleshirt and shorts, the morning started with an edge of bad coffee
batch and more confusion than when he’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t
until he realized he would barely be able to pull his acoustic from
the case that it occurred to him he wouldn’t be playing anytime
soon. With the testiness of the old ladder, the widow’s walk would
be an off-limits retreat for a while.

Sitting at the booth with his head in his free hand, Noah
wondered how he managed to get out of bed, or why he bothered.
Feeling part handicapped and part inhuman, all he really wanted at
the moment was to drive to Aly’s.

Although the thought had slammed through his head for the
fourth or fifth time, it still felt like a perfectly timed movie scene
when Greg Glass’s SUV pulled into the spot beside his window. She
shuffled to fill her arms with the random possessions she carried.
Glancing up, she dropped some in her lap to smile and wave. He
laughed as she scrambled to re-gather, eventually collecting herself
and sliding out the door with her usual grace.