Bombora (29 page)

“You can’t fuck me all of a sudden?”

Brow furrowed, he shakes his head. “No—hide. ’Cause when it comes down to it, that’s what this is about. Hiding. I’m finally ready to come out of the closet to my brother, tell him the whole reason I left Emilia and Liam in the first place, and here you wanna drag me back in there with you because it’s safe. You’re fucking scared, Phel, but I don’t have that problem. I’m not afraid of who the hell I am, not like you are. Not anymore.”

“Hugh knows who I am,” I answer, pulling back. Miraculously, I keep my voice steady despite feeling like my insides are crumbling. “He’s known all along. What you and I do in private has nothing to do with him.”

“Nah, he doesn’t have the first clue.” Nate skims his knuckles across my cheekbone in a gesture that’s far gentler than his words, even though I can’t find any malice in his voice. “But I don’t think you do either, baby.”

At this, I snap, “I told you not to call me that.”

“Yeah, okay, Phel.” A brief touch to my lips and then the hand is curling around the back of my neck like Nate wants to pull me up for a kiss. I can’t deal with him when he’s being tender like this, because I know it takes infinitely more certainty on Nate’s part to show affection over anger. “I—I guess I get it. Believe me. It’s not my place to drag you into this when you obviously aren’t ready to admit it, which is why this ain’t about you. I’d like your support, but I know I pretty much squandered it the first time I had my chance.”

With a snort, I bat his hand away. “You don’t think Hugh’s going to put two and two together if you come out to him, Nate?” Finding my legs again is easier now, and I stand up so I can look him in the face, press in close and warm so he is sure to feel me, sure to meet my eyes when I turn his head toward me with my hands against his cheeks. “Everything you said about wanting me back? Well, don’t expect there to be much chance of that if everything’s out in the open. Look what happened the last time.”

He smiles and leans in to kiss me, so soft I almost lean away from it in confusion, the way Nate sometimes doesn’t know how to respond to my smiles. “There wasn’t much chance even now, man. I knew that going in. But if you were always gonna walk away again, doing things exactly the same way as last time wouldn’t change that.”

With that, Nate retrieves the bag of half-melted ice from the floor and hands it back to me, pressing it into my hands like I might still sit here babying my bruises. The room feels much quieter once he leaves, even the sounds from the television going mute as I try and fail to herd my thoughts into something resembling coherence. Tomorrow—or whenever Nate decides to talk to Hugh—everything will be completely changed, and I suppose I ought to feel relief I’ve already begun to think about where I’ll go after I leave Cardiff. Impossible to stay here now, with everything poised to shatter at a mere touch. We might as well have broken it ourselves.

The classical music from Hugh’s study continues to waft toward my ears as he writes on, oblivious for now, but not much longer.

Hugh

N
ATE
dropped out of high school the year I started ninth grade. Not right away, mind you, but a couple of months before he was all set to graduate, he up and quit without any warning and no explanation except to say he had no intention of ever going back.

His GED arrived in the mail not long afterward, something else he did without telling me or our dad, and after that Nate kind of changed. Maybe not in so fundamental a way that I no longer recognized him after—he was still as cocky and carefree as ever—but little things were different.

He was more protective in some ways, more guarded in others, and it was around this time the womanizing and the drinking started in earnest. Nate was a little wild, but our dad was a cop and ran a strict household; anything major would have gotten Nate kicked out, and he once said that if that happened, there’d be no one left to look after me the way I needed. So he always watched himself and never did anything so crazy that it would land him in serious hot water. Even I was old enough to recognize that the stuff he started doing after that point wasn’t a danger to anyone but himself. Though he didn’t know it then, it’s absolutely what led to Emilia getting pregnant. Maybe everything would have gone differently if he’d never left school—it might have been a miracle that things eventually worked out, but it sure as hell wasn’t chance that made things fall apart. To this day, I never understood why he left when he was so close to the finish line.

When I say “to this day,” I literally mean until today. Because I think I get it now. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

About a month after Nate turned eighteen, I witnessed something that made so little sense at the time that the only logical explanation was I’d confused it for something else. Now, I know I wasn’t mistaken, but I also know I wasn’t meant to see what I did. I never spoke a word of it to anyone, not even Nate, which in retrospect was the smartest thing I could have done. Kids are easily confused at that age, or so I always thought, though as it turns out they’re a lot more perceptive than they’re given credit for—not by others, and certainly not by themselves.

There was this teacher at the school, Jay Garrett, who started teaching English at Sidney Lanier High in Montgomery, Alabama, the same year I started there. I never had him because he taught mostly the upper-year students, but I know Nate was in a couple of his classes and complained about them far less than he did some others. Mr. Garrett was young: barely twenty-five and newly certified as a teacher, with shaggy dark hair and exotic eyes Nate said came from Japanese blood on his mother’s side. In retrospect, his inexperience and good looks probably should have gotten him eaten alive, but he was so easygoing and cool that he hardly got any trouble, not even from the kids like my brother who prided themselves on causing it on a regular basis. Word was, Garrett was funny and smart and had a knack for making his classes fun. Apart from the requisite number of crushes that developed almost immediately, he was well liked by everyone, faculty and student body alike. More importantly, he was well liked by Nate.

That day, I was waiting around after school for Nate to show up and drive us home. Over thirty minutes had passed without any sign of my brother. Usually he was pretty good about being punctual, or would let me know ahead of time if he had to stay behind in class for detention or to speak with a teacher. But he hadn’t said anything to me that morning other than “Meet you after school.” All my other friends had already gone home, picked up by their parents or the bus, and suffice to say I was getting a little impatient and cranky with hunger, the way only a fourteen-year-old can.

Nate’s last class of the day was English, so I got it into my head that maybe he’d stayed behind to talk to Mr. Garrett about something. He once introduced us on a similar occasion, calling me his “brat kid brother,” and the teacher seemed to like me enough; it didn’t seem like a big deal to stop by the classroom to see whether Nate was there. The only other thing I could think of was maybe he was off smoking behind the auditorium or something, but in the event I was wrong, I didn’t want to risk getting harassed by the older kids who also frequented the spot. Garrett’s class, it was.

By then all the hallways were deserted, and all the classrooms I passed on the way were dark and had their doors closed, teachers having packed up and gone home for the day. As I rounded the corner to Mr. Garrett’s room, the first thing I saw was that the light inside was on, even though the door was closed. I barely made it up onto my tiptoes—I hadn’t hit puberty yet—to peer through the door’s single porthole before I stopped dead, my throat closing up so abruptly I made a choked noise.

There inside the class was Nate and someone who looked a great deal like Mr. Garrett, judging by the trademark suede patches on his tweed jacket. Except instead of deep in conversation like I expected, they were pressed up against the chalkboard, my brother’s shoulders, familiar in his football jacket, bent toward Mr. Garrett, who was a few inches shorter than Nate’s six-foot-three-inch frame. The teacher’s hands were in Nate’s hair, clutching at those dark-blond strands, and even though their faces were mostly turned away from me, they were either having some kind of quiet argument or making out, or else Nate had turned into a vampire. I could see the pale strip of skin on Mr. Garrett’s side where Nate’s hands had bunched up his jacket and shirt, the shiny flash of tongue between their mouths, an image I later did a damn good job of forgetting.

After that, I didn’t stick around; I ran home, although I paused for a while in the park to talk myself out of whatever I thought I saw. Due to my tarrying, I turned up late for dinner, to furious reprimands from both my father and Nate, who had arrived not long before me. Apologizing for a quickly invented homework study session at a friend’s house, I begged off from the rest of dinner with the excuse that I had a project to finish. Smartly, or so I thought, I tried to put that afternoon as far from my mind as possible. Even though I desperately wanted to figure out why the hell someone like my brother would be kissing another dude—Nate was popular with the senior girls and never without a Saturday-night date—it seemed easier and ultimately wiser to forget I was ever there.

For a while, I managed okay, even when Nate started having to stay behind after his English class most afternoons, during which time I did my homework in the empty cafeteria until he was done. I successfully ignored the few whispered phone conversations I heard late at night, convinced Nate was talking to one of his girlfriends even in the absence of his typical endearments of “baby” and “sweetheart” to whoever was on the other end of the line. I pretended the gray sedan that sometimes dropped him off after midnight—always when our dad was on duty, of course—belonged to a buddy from school. Much as I was able, I forgot anything out of the ordinary had ever happened. I even started to believe I had truly misunderstood what I’d seen that day.

That is, until a few weeks later, when a special news story came on while I was eating dinner with Nate and my father. We always left the TV tuned to the news during meals, which my dad said was the one time of the day he actually had a chance to catch up with the outside world. In a place like Montgomery, most of the news was comprised of human-interest stories or reports from Birmingham, but that night they interrupted the regular broadcast to update us on a scandal that had broken out right here in town.

Two men had been arrested for sodomy and acts of public indecency in Hayneville Road Park, one of them a local high school teacher. The news anchor made it seem like this one occurrence made Hayneville Road Park a “hotbed of homosexual activity” in Montgomery, and explained that, while men elsewhere were regularly arrested for engaging in sex or soliciting undercover cops, the involvement of a local teacher made this breaking news. The accused was none other than Mr. Garrett, who was described as “young, likeable, and popular with many of the local students, and assistant coach of the boys’ basketball team,” as though these things had any bearing upon what he was currently being held for at the local jail.

“Oh my God, Nate, that’s Mr. Garrett!” I said stupidly, but neither my father nor my brother responded. Back then, I was still too young to fully understand what the big deal was, but I’d heard about Proust and knew what sodomy was. Even though the law’s interpretation of the crime was fairly broad in those days, I also knew that, in God-fearing Alabama, it meant nothing good. For the first time in weeks, my stomach sank as I realized what I’d seen that day between Nate and Mr. Garrett implied Nate had a pretty clear understanding of the word as well. Thankfully he’d been home last night.

Casting a glance at Nate from the corner of my eye, I saw he’d gone white as a sheet, knife and fork gripped so tightly in his hands that his knuckles were completely bloodless. All three of us watched the broadcast in silence until the anchor moved on to the next story, and for a few minutes, no one said anything until my dad got up and turned off the TV. It was obvious he hadn’t heard the news until now, the arrest most likely having taken place while he was off duty. Our dad was a big man, gruff and stern on a good day, but as he glanced over and his hazel eyes met mine, it was the first time he actually made me nervous.

Although he returned to the table, he didn’t pick up his utensils right away, staring hard at Nate while my brother refused to look at him. Then Dad asked, “He’s one of your teachers, isn’t he? Garrett? I recognize him from parent-teacher interviews.”

“He teaches English,” I supplied, only realizing my mistake when Nate jerked up from the table with his plate in his hands and went to dump it in the sink.

“I’d like to be excused,” he said gruffly. “I got homework.”

“Nathaniel.” The sharp bark of his name from Dad’s mouth made both of us go still as statues, Nate already on his way out of the kitchen, me with my fork halfway to my mouth. “Sit your ass back down, boy.”

Because our dad wasn’t the kind of person you disobeyed when he spoke in a tone like that, not without a death wish, Nate’s expression darkened, but he did as he was told. I noticed he was sitting on the edge of his chair like he needed to be ready to bolt again at any second. It was weird, seeing Nate so discomfited and nervous, but a part of me was obscenely curious to find out how things were going to unfold. To be honest, I had no idea.