Bombora Page 16

  Instead I asked, “Did something happen?” the way my dad always used to do if I went too long without calling, immediately assuming something was wrong. I pulled him into the kitchen, where Nate was drinking a coffee and reading the paper. “I was worried.”

  “No, nothing happened,” sighed Phel. My attention was momentarily distracted when Nate clattered his dishes down in the sink and stalked out of the room. Phel made an unimpressed face and settled his hands on his hips before his gaze flicked back to me. “I had a lot on my mind. Sorry I didn’t call you.”

  I lifted my eyebrows at him like he could volunteer more information at any time, but he just continued looking at me like, No, this conversation is done, Hugh. Drop it.

  I think I made the face Nate tells me not to make, the one that makes me look like I’m constipated. “I thought you were dead or something, man!” I exclaimed. We both knew how much of an exaggeration that was, and for a second Phel let that sink in before he gave a tiny eye roll.

  “Had something serious happened, you would have received a phone call,” he said. “You’re my emergency contact.” While I was busy trying to process that information and the weird sense of warmth it gave me, Phel gestured vaguely. “Okay, well, if that’s settled, I’m going to hit the restroom and then we’ll go surf.” I nodded dumbly.

  Phel wandered off down the hall just as Nate walked back into the kitchen. “You sound like a needy girlfriend, man,” he informed me, voice more sour than usual. “I’m sure Phel wasn’t half as concerned about what you were up to while he was off doing his own thing.”

  There seemed to be no justifiable reason for this sudden peevishness on my brother’s part, except that these waspy comments would become par for the course when Phel was around, and Nate’s mood swings all the more frequent. At the time I didn’t think much of it, because Nate has always been a moody guy, and slow to trust; I was too glad Phel was back to think much of it. His reappearance made me relieved and happy, and gave me something to look forward to again each day, like when you meet a cool girl and can’t help but wonder when you’ll hang out again.

  So we’re back to spending time together, Phel and I, acting for all intents and purposes like nothing has changed. We talk, we surf, we hang out and argue about Battlestar Galactica or Doctor Who until Nate looks ready to pull his hair out. Aside from my quiet fear Phel will up and disappear on me again, the sudden addition of my brother’s presence is the biggest change. Nate refers to himself as an intruder in the clubhouse whenever he feels he’s interrupting something or doesn’t know how to join my conversations with Phel.

  Surprisingly, this happens way more often than I would have expected from him, because Nate doesn’t do socially awkward. Socially boorish, maybe, but never awkward—he’s been charming crowds since the age of five. Nate should be able to manage one gay ex-socialite, especially with those dimples, but if I’m honest, Phel doesn’t seem all that receptive, nor interested in changing that fact.

  As if he’s aware of this hostile climate, Nate makes a habit of steering clear, taking timely walks with Callie or runs around the neighborhood, anything to get out of the house and whatever line of fire he seems to think exists. He jokes about how he doesn’t want to walk in on Phel and me playing Dungeons & Dragons in full costume—an absurd thought, because Nate is and always has been the biggest geek in the family, especially if his obsession with Star Trek is anything to go by—but to an observer it seems to run much deeper than that. For reasons I can’t begin to figure out, Nate and Phel don’t like each other.

  So why does it feel like the two of them have this private conversation going on all the time?

  I don’t have anything to qualify why I feel this way, except for the weird atmosphere that seems to fill a room when they’re both in it, the drawn-out looks that sometimes pass between them like I’m not even there. There’s no animosity to it, though, nothing abrasive to reinforce the pervasive sense of underlying hostility; rather, it’s how different they become around each other, Phel sharper somehow, coolly confident, Nate withdrawn until he’s sullen and silent and unsure like I’ve never before seen him. If there’s an explanation for that, I can’t find one, and Nate isn’t talking. Maybe I’m just imagining it all, though, and they’re not really spiteful of one another, but best buds when I’m not around.

  If it’s not obvious, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. With Phel AWOL, I couldn’t help but dwell on how empty my life started to feel without him. What is it about me that makes me place such weight on friendships and family relationships, however few? I think back to the time I spent at Palermo myself, weeks of struggling to understand my weaknesses and how to get strong again, how to make choices that would lead me down a different path than the one I was currently travelling.

  When I first enrolled at Palermo as a patient, I remember thinking it didn’t quite hold up to my idea of what rehabilitation facilities were supposed to be, the kind referenced in gritty cop dramas or stories about down-and-out folk overcoming their personal demons. Sure, you hear about celebrities entering rehab all the time, but that’s not real life, right? Since Nate was the one who staged the intervention and set everything up, I hadn’t exactly researched the digs that would become my home for twenty-eight days. I was surprised by how much like a luxury resort it was, and how the majority of people there were average folks with above-average incomes: housewives addicted to prescription meds and stockbrokers with drinking problems, teenagers with eating disorders and trust-fund kids who partied a bit too hard in college. There were a few people there who struggled with the harder stuff, like me, but I think I only ever saw one person with a heroin problem, an aging rock star who in my mind automatically resembled Keith Richards. No crack, no crystal, nothing like that. I guess I had it easy—I doubt I would have been able to handle the horror stories you get wind of from state-run facilities or jails, tales that haunt you forever. Call me selfish, but I’m not cut out for that.

  There was one girl in particular, Eleanor, who struggled to control her own coke addition. Maybe I took a shine to her because of the similarity of our experiences, but what touched me from the beginning was her determination and the fact that she was there on her own steam. She was an artist who’d had numerous shows in LA and New York, whose work was once so in demand you stood a better chance of landing one of Picasso’s sketches. In fact, I attended one of her shows when I lived in Los Angeles, though of course I refrained from sharing this fact with the rest of the group. Anonymity and all that. But I remembered her face—even the violence and vibrancy of her art—and couldn’t help but feel betrayed to know how much she depended on drugs to create, to help her withstand the pressure of her own success. No doubt people would have felt the same way about me if they knew. Perhaps it was for the best, but Eleanor’s name had all but faded into obscurity ever since that slip of control started to take its toll on her ability to satisfy clients and wow critics.

  What saddened me was how all those people, the ones who crowded around her when she was famous, were nowhere to be seen. With no living family, Eleanor often talked about feeling totally cut off from her life before—so-called friends who wouldn’t return her calls, a manager who dropped her as soon as the cracks started to show in the veneer of success. I knew the story well: everyone loves to watch a train wreck, but no one wants to stick around to clean up the damage.

  “I tried to get clean a few times before,” she told us one day in Group, with her kind of soft-spoken sincerity that made everyone lean in to listen. “Figured I might be able to do it on my own and without anyone knowing. But with no one to help, it was practically impossible. I would have had to seal myself up in a basement for two months and cut off all contact with the outside world. I couldn’t think about anything but how much coke defined my life. The people around me, the lifestyle in Hollywood, it’s like there was this gate that locked down in front of me and kept me from getting through to the other side. To being my own person again
.” She glanced at me with a small smile, then at a couple of the other group members with whom she’d become close over the last couple of weeks. “When people found out what a mess I was, it wasn’t any better. They basically ran as fast as they could in the opposite direction, which just made me feel even more alone and less capable of sorting myself out.”

  “Everyone?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Pretty much. I had one close friend from high school, someone who stuck with me even when I was a nobody, but when I really started struggling, I think he gave up. It was too much for him to handle on his own, and I don’t blame him. This is the first time I’ve actually felt like I have a shot at getting clean, because I know there’s a support system behind me here, and I don’t have to dump all of it onto one person.”

  I thought about Nate and how utterly lost I would have been without him behind me, without the well-wishing and support of Emilia and Liam behind him. “Are you worried about what will happen after you leave?” While this might sound like a douchey thing to ask, the one thing I learned in Group was to ask the hard questions people were sometimes afraid to admit to themselves. Our fears get a lot smaller once they’re out in the open.

  “I’m terrified,” answered Eleanor, blue eyes fixed on me. “I don’t want to walk out of here and realize I’m still alone.” She was a beautiful girl with long strawberry-blonde hair and a heart-shaped face, huge eyes the color of seawater. I didn’t spend all my time thinking about that stuff, to be clear, but there was something so striking and unusual about her features, her whole expression echoing whatever sadness or uncertainty she might be harboring on the inside. Without looking like a wreck, Eleanor appeared exactly as broken as the rest of us felt, and it wrenched my heart a little to look at her.

  “You aren’t alone,” said Patricia, another woman in the group. “We’ll still be here for each other after we finish the program, whenever we need the support.”

  Eleanor gave a brittle laugh and immediately looked abashed. “That’s what we all say now,” she responded. “But who knows what will happen once we go back to our lives?” She gave a gentle shake of her head. “No, it’s better to build lasting relationships you know you can count on. I wish I’d taken the time to do that in my old life instead of just breezing through surface friendships that collapsed at the first sign of trouble. I wish I hadn’t killed the friendships I had. Because now I have no one, and even I wouldn’t want to be friends with me.”

  This statement stuck with me for a long time, all through the rest of the session and into that night, into the following days and eventually months past my own recovery. It’s a pretty obvious concept even now, one I’ve stopped to consider a lot over the last little while—I know a thing or two about isolation, which is why meeting Phel was such a big deal. As for Eleanor, I heard she was clean for a little while, but got back on the powder when she couldn’t keep working the steps. She OD’d at a party and had a well-attended funeral of people she probably hadn’t spoken to in years. Her artwork is now prohibitively expensive to come by. And shit, when I heard that, all I could think about was how much I didn’t want to be her. How I needed to stay close to people who wouldn’t ever let that happen. Now, with Phel, I have faith that if something bad happened, if some ugly truth came out down the line, we’d still be there for each other. Plus I still have Nate, and he’ll always be there too.

  But can Nate and Phel say the same thing for themselves? Obviously I’ll never turn my back on either of them, but I have to stop and wonder—who else, besides me, have they got in their lives that will have their backs in good times and bad? Eleanor is totally right—one person isn’t enough to keep an entire life from collapsing.

  I wish we could be each other’s support systems without me having to worry about this unspoken animosity between my brother and my best friend. How great would that be? Aside from the obvious reasons, I mean. I’ve been back at work on a new book and slightly less available than I was before, and I like the idea of Nate and Phel hanging out together in my stead, maybe forming the kind of bond I share with both of them. It would be awesome to feel like we all belong in this place together, three people that are kind of mismatched, each of us outcasts in our own way, proving that a family needn’t be a big or elaborate unit to work or care about each other. Nate is blood, obviously, and I’ve come to think of Phel as a brother as well, but the whole thing will fall apart if they can’t stand each other or can’t find a way to communicate except through weird glances. Call me selfish, but I don’t want it to fall apart.

  I try to run the idea by Nate, a quiet suggestion to patch up his issues with Phel and become friends, and I admit his response isn’t quite as I imagined it. That the conversation happened at all was because he wandered into my office one day with questions about my new book, his loneliness or boredom—or both—thinly disguised as curiosity about my work.

  I know Nate has read all the previous books in the series and is a fan of the Manderfeld twins; why shouldn’t he be? He’s the one who made up the original bedtime stories that inspired me. When I was six or seven and terrified of our house being broken into or robbed in the night, probably around the same time I first learned about the kinds of people my dad locked away, Nate was the one who deliberately checked all the locks on our doors and windows with me before tucking me into bed. He even invented a safe word I could use in the night if I ever got scared: “Benny,” after the stuffed rabbit I carried around everywhere.

  “So I’ll always know to come when you call,” he’d said solemnly, and promised he would keep me safe even when we grew up and Dad wasn’t always around to look after us. I blush to think about it now, what a needy kid I was, but it’s something Nate never teased me for, even when he made fun of me for plenty else, the way big brothers do.

  So naturally, this was a detail I included in my books, the Manderfeld twins’ childhood safe word one could always use to let the other know he was in real trouble. Like characters in any good suspense novel, they seemed to get into trouble a lot. Nate did tease me about bringing this sliver of our childhood to life in the series, especially whenever Nell cooed about how adorable we were, but I could see how secretly touched he was by it, by the fact that I remembered.

  But for years I’ve been stuck in what I now see as a rut, writing books about a self-enclosed family of two that had a hard time letting other people in. The Manderfeld twins remind me of Nate and myself, of course, and all the years we spent fending for ourselves as kids, cut off from other family besides our dad, who wasn’t around much. But that changed when Nate and Emilia started a family and I met Nell. We learned that life, just like a story, needs the introduction of new characters to develop and grow. Just because Nell died doesn’t mean I want to remain alone for the rest of my life, which is largely why meeting Phel was such a big deal for me. I don’t want that for the Manderfeld brothers either, and so in my recent work, I decided to expand their little family unit by one: I gave them an ally.

  “His name’s Jacob,” I tell Nate, who sits on the sofa holding my manuscript draft in one hand, a beer in the other. From the perplexed look on his face, I can tell he’s either confused or not keen on a new character, so I decide to explain and sell him on the idea in one fell swoop. “Ever since the last book, it’s been obvious to me how badly the guys need someone else to have their backs, someone on the inside.” The last book had seen Chris and Alex, my two main characters, wanted by the FBI after being falsely accused of murder.

  “So I thought it’d be neat if at first Jacob was trying to stop them, or maybe manipulating them toward turning themselves in or something, but instead ends up becoming a friend, even working with them against other cops when he sees how corrupt his superiors have become, how much the FBI wants to close the case and be done with it, even if they put two innocent people away.” Nate continues to look at me blankly, so I add, “And he’s the one who got Alex off the meth, right?”

  That was another story in and of
itself, certainly one of the more ambitious and drug-influenced plot twists I’d attempted. Surprisingly enough, I pulled it off to decent critical response, and not too many comments about the book being semiautobiographical. Still no idea how that happened, but apparently readers loved the plot twist of Alex getting caught up in drugs to infiltrate the cartel they were trying to investigate, and saving his brother’s life in the process. Not semiautobiographical at all. “So they have this, I don’t know… this special bond between them as a result.”

  Shifting in visible discomfort, Nate chews the inside of his lip and then takes a swig of beer. “So what about Chris?” he asks. “He’s just a reject, now that Alex has a super special FBI agent buddy?”

  His question, or rather its vehemence, throws me off. “What? No!” I struggle to recall if I included anything resembling this dynamic in the text, but nothing comes to me. Still, Nate seems wary of the development. He’s far more protective of Chris and Alex’s brotherhood than I expected. “Jacob is supposed to be a friend to them both; there’s no third wheel in this arrangement. Don’t you think things were becoming a bit… claustrophobic? With just the two of them?”

  With a shrug, Nate sets my manuscript down in front of him on the coffee table and presses his palm flat against the paper in contemplative silence. I can’t begin to guess what he’s thinking. Eventually he says, “Chris has given up everything for Alex, man. His childhood, his shot at a happy life and a family, his whole future. Even almost his life a few times, just so Alex could be normal and not follow in his footsteps. No wonder he was so pissed Alex tried to throw away his life to save him. Yeah, it’s a big deal Alex got mixed up on drugs to take the heat off his brother, but… Christ. Throw the guy a fucking bone, would you? He’s totally alone, and now it’s like he doesn’t even have his brother anymore.”