Starting Over (Treading Water Trilogy) (14 page)

She said nothing as he walked away.

The bickering began just south of Boston. Declan didn’t like the smell of the salt-and-vinegar potato chips Colin bought at the gas station, so he forbade his brother to eat them in his new car. Colin opened them anyway, and when Declan made a grab for them, Brandon had to lunge from the backseat to rescue the chips before they went flying all over the car.

“For Christ’s sake, you two. Knock it off.” Brandon thrust the chips at Colin. “Open a window. They stink.”

“That’s why I don’t want them in my car,” Declan said.

“You’re being such a
girl
about this car,” Colin said.

“Screw you.”

“Just because your girlfriend’s pissed at you doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk to us all weekend,” Colin said.

“Quit busting his balls, Col.” A headache had started behind Brandon’s left eye that promised to only get worse in the next three hours if the two of them were going to keep up the uncharacteristic bitching. Brandon was nervous enough about how he would be received by Aidan without listening to the
Bickersons
go at it in the front seat.

He yearned for some peace and quiet so he could think about why Daphne made him want to drool and why the thought of them moving filled him with such sadness. He’d known them only a couple of days, but Mike was already working her way under his skin. He remembered something he’d heard at one of his meetings about the many blessings that came from living a sober life and wondered if Mike might turn out to be a blessing in his life.

Her prickly mother, on the other hand, had the potential to be more of a curse. He chuckled as he imagined her reaction to him drooling at the sight of her. It probably wouldn’t be the first time a man made a fool of himself over her.

Colin and Declan had fallen into merciful silence.

“How pissed is Jessica, Dec?” Brandon asked.

“Royally.”

“We could’ve gone without you,” Brandon said. “Mum wouldn’t have known.”

Declan snorted. “As if. She’d find out, and I’d be even more screwed than I am with Jess.”

Colin laughed. “Why do we still care so much about our mother being pissed with us? We probably need counseling or something.”

They shared a laugh, and the fight over the chips was forgotten.

“Do you think if we ever have kids they’ll fear us the way we fear her?” Colin asked.

“Hardly,” Brandon said. “We’ll be lucky if they don’t end up in jail.”

“How pissed do you think Aidan’s gonna be that we’re showing up there unannounced?” Dec asked.

“Depends on what’s going on with him,” Colin said.

“How was he when you saw him last weekend?” Brandon asked.

“On top of the world,” Colin replied. “He said he was going to marry Clare.”

“He did?” Dec turned to look at Colin. “When?”

“Friday night when the rest of you were dancing.”

“Wow,” Dec said. “That was fast. Didn’t he just meet her?”

“A couple of months ago, but he said he loved her from the very beginning. She seems really good for him, and he loves her kids, too.”

“She has kids?” Brandon asked.

“Three girls,” Colin said. “Nineteen, eighteen, and thirteen. The oldest and youngest were there last weekend. They’re nice kids.”

“How do you guys think he’ll feel about seeing me?” Brandon asked, expressing the worry that’d been on his mind since their mother issued her edict two nights earlier.

Colin turned in his seat to look at Brandon. “The two of you have to sort things out eventually.”

“I have things I need to say to him,” Brandon said. “To all of you, really.”

“Like what?” Colin asked.

“Some of it I need to talk to Aidan about. Maybe not this weekend, if he’s got other stuff going on, but sometime. It’s crap that goes way back, but they helped me see in rehab what a big effect it’s had on my life.”

“You gotta give us something, Brand,” Declan pleaded, glancing at his brother in the rear-view mirror.

Brandon stared out the window, watching the Boston city lights zip past as they crossed the
Zakim
Bridge on Interstate 93 North. He was going to have to do this at some point. Why not now? “Do you guys remember when Aidan got into medical school?”

“Sure,” Colin said. “Before he and Sarah graduated from Yale, just before their wedding, right?”

“That’s right. Well, I jumped to a huge conclusion at that time that I’ve only recently found out was wrong. Way wrong.” When he took a deep breath to steady his nerves, he realized Dec had turned off the radio, and he had his brothers’ full attention. “I assumed Da would expect the rest of us to come into the business.”

“I think we all assumed that,” Colin said.

“But I didn’t want to,” Brandon said so softly it was almost a whisper.

“What did you want to do?” Dec asked, making eye contact with Brandon in the mirror.

“I wanted to be a Navy SEAL. I wanted to go places. See things. I wanted out of the Cape.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” Colin asked, incredulous.

“I figured Aidan had gotten the get-out-of-jail-free card, and there wouldn’t be one for the rest of us.”

“Why would you just assume that?” Colin asked.

Brandon shrugged. “When I talked to Da about it the other day, he made it clear I’d read the whole thing totally wrong. He was devastated, in fact. Made me feel like shit to upset him that way.”

“So all these years, you’ve just been, like, hating life?” Declan asked.

“Not every minute, but a lot of it. Yeah.”

Brandon gave his brothers a minute to process what he’d told them. “What about you guys? Wasn’t there other stuff you wanted to do?”

“Not me,” Colin said. “That’s why Da couldn’t get me to go to college. I was exactly where I wanted to be.”

“Me either,” Declan said. “I couldn’t wait to get through school so I could come home and go to work.”

“I guess it was just me.” Brandon sighed. “And I blamed Aidan for the whole thing because he got to leave, and then when he gave up medicine—
even then
—he didn’t come back home to work with us. I was really furious about that.”

“Why?” Colin asked. “It wasn’t his fault you hadn’t gotten to do what you wanted to.”

“I know that now. I know a lot of things now, but at the time, that’s how I saw it. For many reasons, I blamed him.”

“Is this tied into the, uh, other thing?” Declan asked.

“You can say the word alcoholism, Dec. It’s not forbidden. And yes, it’s all part of it. I’ve kept huge secrets and nursed even bigger resentments, both of which are very destructive to someone who has a natural inclination to drink too much. Together they’re like gas and fire. I got so I couldn’t deal with anything or anyone without alcohol to numb me first.”

“So there’s more?” Colin asked. “You said there were secrets, plural.”

“Yeah, but the rest is stuff I need to work out with Aidan. Eventually.” Brandon’s stomach twisted. He couldn’t imagine any scenario that would be conducive to saying to his older brother,
Your wife, the love of your life who died? Oh, by the way, I loved her, too.
A shudder rippled through him.
And I hated you because you had her and I didn’t
. Yeah, this was going to be one hell of a weekend.

When they arrived just after ten at the A-frame house Aidan had built outside of Stowe, Vermont, they found him passed out on the sofa with a dozen empty beer bottles scattered around him.

“Shit,” Colin said. “He’s smashed.”

“Aid.” Declan poked at his brother. “Aidan.”

“What?” Aidan grumbled. “What do you want?”

“Wake up,” Dec said with a glance at Colin. They hadn’t seen Aidan like this since Sarah died.

Brandon hung back at the door to Aidan’s den, staying as far out of the way as he could.

“Aidan!” Declan said.

“
What?
I’m awake.” His speech was slurred, and days had passed since his last shave. “What the hell are you guys doing here?”

“Your mother sent us,” Colin said. “She wants to know what’s wrong with you, and since you wouldn’t tell her, here we are.”

“There’s nothing wrong, so go home.” Aidan buried his face in his arm and appeared to be on his way back to sleep.

“Oh, no, you don’t. We just drove four hours to get here, so you’re gonna talk to us.” Colin pulled his brother into an upright position.

That was when Aidan saw Brandon in the doorway.

“What the
fuck
is
he
doing here?” Aidan roared. “
Get him out of here!
”

“Mum made him come with us, so give him a break,” Declan said. “Where’s Clare?”

Aidan kept his eyes closed. “Gone,” he muttered. “She’s gone.”

“Gone where?” Colin exchanged glances again with Declan.

“What does it matter?” he slurred. “She’s not here, and she’s not coming back.”

“A week ago, you were going to marry her,” Colin said. “What the hell happened?”

“She turned me down,” Aidan said, his eyes filling.

“
No
,” Colin exhaled. “No way. She’s wild about you.”

“Yeah, well, apparently not as much as I thought.”

“She loves you, Aidan,” Declan said. “That was obvious to all of us last weekend. Tell us exactly what happened.”

Aidan ran a weary hand over his face. “I asked her to marry me, and she said she wants to, but there’s something else she wants, too.”

“What?” Colin asked.

“She wants to adopt a kid.”

“So what’s the problem?” Declan asked.

Aidan shook his head. “I don’t want a kid. Not now or ever. Her kids are fine, but I don’t want one of my own.”

They were all thinking in that moment of the son Sarah wanted so desperately she refused cancer treatment to give the baby a chance at life. His stillbirth had been almost as devastating to Aidan as Sarah’s death two days later.

“So Clare didn’t exactly say no, then, did she?” Colin asked.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s over, and she’s gone.”

The horrible pain etched into Aidan’s face made Brandon ache for the brother he’d once wanted dead.

Colin and Declan managed to get Aidan up three winding flights of stairs to his bedroom on the top floor.

“What am I going to do now, Collie?” Aidan moaned as he dissolved into tears. “How am I supposed to live without her? Without her girls? I love them, too.”

“I know you do.” Colin tugged the blankets up over his brother. “You’re going to get some sleep, and we’ll figure this out tomorrow.”

Declan came into the room with a glass of water and two
Advils
, which they got Aidan to take.

“I’ll crash up here with him,” Declan said when Aidan began to snore softly between sobs. “In case he pukes or something.”

Colin rubbed the tension from the back of his neck. “Why couldn’t things have worked out for him this time? Hasn’t he had enough?”

“I know. Seeing him in tears is just so screwed up. That’s not him.”

“Really. I’m going to go check on the
other
one,” Colin said with a dramatic roll of his eyes.

Declan chuckled. “When did we become the
older
brothers?”

“No shit. Give me a yell if the bear comes out of hibernation and you need a hand,” Colin said as he left Declan with Aidan and went downstairs to find Brandon dropping the empty beer bottles into a grocery bag. “Why don’t you let me do that, Brand?”

“I can do it.” Brandon bent to retrieve two bottles from the floor. “So this is what it looks like, huh?”

“What?”

“A big ugly drunk. This was me. How many times have you seen me like this?”

Colin shrugged. “A few.”

“A lot,” Brandon insisted. “Don’t sugarcoat it, Col. It was ugly, and it went on for years. You even bailed me out of jail. Twice.”

“It’s in the past now. We don’t need to dwell on it.” Colin added a couple of logs to the woodstove in Aidan’s cozy den, Colin’s favorite room in the extraordinary house.

Brandon put the bag of bottles on the floor and sat on the sofa. “I had no memory of it, you know. Until I got your letter in rehab, I didn’t even know. Everyone said some really tough shit to me in those letters, but yours was the one that finally got me to say the words.”

Colin turned to look at Brandon. “What words?”

“The all-important words: my name is Brandon, and I’m an alcoholic—a very big moment in rehab. Your letter made me realize I could no longer deny what I was.”

“I felt like an asshole for days after I wrote that letter,” Colin confessed.

“You said things I needed to hear, stuff I didn’t know. I honestly had no idea how out of control I had gotten.”

“Well, we did a lot to make it easy for you. We were your quote-unquote enablers. As long as we were cleaning up after you, there was no need for you to take any responsibility.”