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  “I said I know, Hugh, okay?” he grates out. “I tried to do what I thought was best for everyone involved, but I didn’t think it through—obviously. What I thought was the right thing to do turned out to be totally wrong, and I see that now. If I could do it all again, I’d—” He makes a hurt sound. “Maybe I would have never married Emilia in the first place, who knows? Maybe I would have tried to be a good father by keeping the hell away from them both.”

  “That’s bullshit.” I don’t know where this sudden anger is coming from. I probably should feel bad about yelling at Nate when he’s obviously in a rough place himself, but I just can’t fight it. It all seems so… so wasteful, so callous in its carelessness. Sure, I don’t know the whole story, but what I see in front of me makes a hard knot of nausea form in my stomach. “The only person you tried to do right by was yourself. I mean—Jesus Christ. Do you have any idea what I’d do for a family like yours, for a chance to have that kind of happiness? You’ve had your whole life just handed to you, and you don’t even appreciate it!”

  “Fuck you, man.” Lurching out of his chair, Nate whips his half-empty bottle at the sink, where it clatters against the stainless steel with an awful noise but doesn’t break.

  Though the sound makes me want to flinch, I remain seated, remain still, staring Nate down even as I will my anger to get itself under control. Nate and I don’t do this: we don’t turn on each other. But there’s a lot of stuff I’ve heard about this morning that I sure as hell never expected either. What hurts most of all is the tremor I notice in Nate’s hands a second before he balls them into fists, trying to get a hold of himself. But I don’t know how to respond to that any more than I knew what to say when our dad got drunk late at night and started to cry over our mom while I did my homework in the kitchen. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly strong person, and it’s a pretty big deal for the one person I look up to—Nate—to keep it together for both of us.

  It seems I’ve fallen short of his expectations of me too, which I know without him saying anything. Still, it wouldn’t be Nate if he let me off the hook easily—he’s been lecturing me since he was six years old. “You know,” he begins, “of everyone who’s bothered to remind me what a piece of shit I am throughout all this, the one person I didn’t expect to hear it from is you. My own fucking brother. We’ve both made mistakes in our lives, but apparently the door don’t swing both ways like I thought it did.” He goes quiet for a second and I can see his rage dying in front of me; he looks exhausted again. “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t have time to unpack,” he says grimly. “I’ll grab my crap and be out of your hair if you don’t want me here ruining your chance to play house with Phel.”

  This last part is too much to keep me from rolling my eyes—honestly, my brother is such a drama queen sometimes—but Nate stalks out of the kitchen before he can see, then clomps up the stairs like he’s forgotten how to be the elder sibling and not some melodramatic little bitch. I don’t belittle his angst, but where I’m concerned he’ll have calmed down by the time I count to ten and make my way upstairs after him. The cool-down is as much for his benefit as my own, and as the seconds tick by, I can feel the anger slowly start to recede, replaced by what I know is sadness for Nate’s situation and, if I’m honest, bitterness over my own. I don’t have a right to start comparing his position to what I might have had with Nell, because they’re very different, same as Nell and Emilia were very different women, and Nate and I are different men.

  Upstairs, there’s some shuffling around and the sound of various objects being slammed, hopefully nothing of mine, but then everything goes quiet and I recognize my cue. Tail thumping, Callie keeps one eye on the ceiling like it could start up again any minute, but I know it won’t. Nate knows the two things he can always expect from me are tough love and someone to have his back, which might seem contradictory but really aren’t. Right now he’s railing against the fact that staying in my house means having to put up with my honest assessment of his idiocy. But he’ll get over it, and together we’ll figure out what’s next.

  Sure enough, Nate is sitting on the edge of his bed when I pause in the doorway of his bedroom—so named because he has a standing invitation here—and while his bag is indeed packed, it isn’t zippered. Having arrived with just his bike, he packed light. Nate glances up at me without saying anything, waiting, and eventually I approach and take a seat next to him on the mattress. Busybody that she is, Callie leaps onto the bed and settles herself precisely in the middle, head nestled on her paws so she can watch us both by only twitching her eyes back and forth. I guess for her this is better than reality television.

  “You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want,” I say grimly. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” It’s not an apology, but I’m not going to say sorry for speaking the truth when Nate probably needs it most.

  “That’s totally what you intended,” Nate says with a snort. He’s right. Or at least I didn’t try not to upset him. “It’s, like, your God-given right to try and piss me off.” He falls silent for a few seconds before adding, “I know you think I took my marriage for granted, Hugh, but it wasn’t like what you had with Nell. You two chose each other, legitimately wanted to spend the rest of your lives together in a way I never got to think about with Emilia. Yeah, I love her, and God knows I love Liam more than I can say, but jumpin’ into that marriage was just the first in a long line of shit I didn’t really think through.” He huffs, and I know he’s ready to try to inject humor into the situation—Nate’s special way of trying to regroup, not so much from me as the issue at hand. It’s how he deals. “Well, that and not using a rubber. Woulda served me right if I’d gotten the syph or somethin’.”

  With a sigh, I reach out and pat his knee, registering that Nate is a bit thinner than when I saw him last, the tiredness coming through in the quiet slump of his shoulders and the way his flesh seems to cling to his bones with only purpose and no joy. Nate, when he’s content, is the kind of person to let things slide and embrace a little happy weight; it occurs to me that, by those standards at least, he probably looked happier in the last year than I’ve seen him in a long time. Not that he’ll ever be fat, because Nate works too hard for that to happen, but he certainly had the look of a man at ease in his life. I don’t know whether to thank this other woman for that, whoever she is, or blame her.

  “The fact that you asked for a divorce is a start,” I tell Nate. “At least you’re not leading Emilia on by pretending it’s what you still want. A bit late, but better than never. I guess.”

  To my surprise, rather than accepting the olive branch for what it is, Nate grimaces. “Ironically, I think that’s what pissed her off the most of anything,” he admits. “Emilia was ready to sweep the whole thing under the rug—forget about my ‘phase’, as she called it—and couldn’t believe I wasn’t willing to do the same. But by that point it couldn’t have gone any other way, man. You’re right in that much.”

  I hesitate for a second, pitying Emilia and fretting about Liam, but also painfully sad for my brother, who is obviously shouldering a whole lot more than a pending divorce. “Are you going to try and find her?” I ask. “This woman? If you love her, maybe there’s still a chance.”

  “I don’t know.” Nate rubs his hands against his thighs and stands up. He wanders over to the window to peer out at the ocean for a few minutes, brow furrowed. “Even if I bumped into her today, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t want to talk to me. Same as Emilia and Liam, she put a lot of trust in me, and I betrayed it. I didn’t mean to, and I sure as fuck didn’t want to, but there you have it. No changin’ that fact now.”

  We are both quiet for a little while, there being not much else to say on the subject, but then Nate turns back around to face me with an inscrutable expression.

  “How come you never mentioned Phel before this?” he asks.

  The question stumps me for a few moments. There’s no good answer to that. “I don’t�
�� I guess it just never occurred to me. He’s pretty low-key, for one thing, and in a way… I didn’t feel right burdening you with my problems. It’s like Phel and I are each other’s therapists sometimes, and it felt best to keep it private. In case I accidentally wound up talking about his issues as well as my own.” I shrug at the ineffectiveness of this response, but Nate nods in a way that seems to indicate he gets it. That’s one thing about Nate; it doesn’t take a whole lot of explaining to get him on the same page.

  “That’s okay, dude,” he says. “In all fairness, I kept a hell of a lot from you for a whole year.” I snort, because Nate is the king of the motherfucking understatement, but in actual fact I wouldn’t have it any other way. Especially when I tend toward overstating things a little myself. There are so many questions I have about that time, where Nate met this woman, how he knew she was different from Emilia, what about her could have changed his life so fundamentally, but there will be time for all that later on.

  “Just… no more secrets, okay?” I plead. Nate looks down at his hands, which maybe isn’t the response I want, but we’ve had enough awkwardness today to last us a lifetime. I can stand to let him off the hook just this once. “I can’t be an awesome brother to you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Fair enough.” I think that’s the end of it, until he blurts out, “So does he still love the guy?” Nate’s also the king of the non sequitur, apparently. Sometimes his train of thought is more like one of those insane Shinkansen from Japan than your average locomotive.

  “Who?”

  Still not looking at me, though. Fuck, at the rate we’re going, I’m going to need to brush up on my psych textbooks just to decipher my own brother. “Phel,” he clarifies and, wow, that’s pretty random, even for Nate. “Does he still love the guy who broke his heart?”

  Since I can’t think of a good way to hide my surprise, I don’t. That Nate knows how wrecked Phel is feeling after one meeting might say something, but that doesn’t mean I’m at liberty to start divulging secrets behind Phelan’s back. I wouldn’t do that to Nate if the shoe were on the other foot. “Why do you care about that?”

  Nate shrugs and finally meets my eyes with a steadiness I don’t expect. “I don’t know, Hugh. I guess I just want to know if there’s still hope for someone like me.”

  Because there’s no better way to respond to someone who is hurting and lost and kind of alone except for the dubious comfort of your presence, sometimes the only thing you can offer is a hug. So I rise from the bed and go to put my arms around Nate, my broken, well-meaning brother who has nevertheless managed to make significant disasters of a bunch of people’s lives. Try putting that on a Hallmark card. Instead Nate accepts the embrace for what it is, sort of awkwardly since we haven’t done this in a while, and doesn’t try so hard to hide the fact that he’s leaning most of his weight into me.

  “Phel’s situation isn’t the same,” I tell him gently, “but it’s not for you to worry about. You and Emilia and Liam… I’m sure everything will all work out. There’s hope for you yet, you idiot.”

  Nate is wearing a brave smile when he pulls away, but it doesn’t reach his eyes and he’s gone back to not looking at me. I sigh and say nothing, because even though I’m just his brother, it’s painfully clear how badly he wants to believe me, but doesn’t.

  4

  Phel

  THERE’S a moment, just before you’re about to catch a wave, where the only sensation you’re aware of is of pure force—not the burn in your arms of paddling out, the salt spray in your face, the anxiety of not popping up in time, not anything else in your life—just water and power and sheer exhilaration. It’s like flying, hurtling along on your stomach at an incredible speed until that last second when you push yourself up, surfboard hopefully angled in the direction of the swell before it breaks. Suddenly you’re on it, balanced between riding the wave and racing it, fighting every impulse of mind and nature to hurl yourself against that wall of water again and again, carving into it like your whole body’s the knife.

  It’s probably stupid that I came out here alone, but as long as no one cuts into someone else’s priority, aloha spirit dictates we all look out for each other while we’re here. Though it’s getting late in the afternoon and the tide is almost out, there are plenty of surfers doing the exact same thing as me, trying to squeeze in a few more waves before they call it a day. I’ll stay out until the end, I think, surfing to make up for lost time. The past few days without it have felt… empty.

  True to my word, I didn’t go back to the beach that day after running into Nate, hopped up on Xanax to the point where I’m lucky I made it home in once piece. It started to rain on the way there, but I was so loopy and numb from the drugs I barely registered the wetness, or how cold it got with my clothes soaked through. Doesn’t mean I didn’t miss the waves, though.

  When I first came to Palermo Springs and got set up in my little apartment here, Willa gave me a contact card listing what’s considered to be the three most important pieces of information in the patient’s arsenal: the number for emergency medical services (overdoses or self-injury), the number for client services (housekeeping, security, or not enough food in the fridge), and, finally, the assigned counselor’s direct line for emergency therapy sessions. I know one of those things is not like the other, but if there’s anything they take seriously here at Palermo, it’s health, comfort, and mental well-being.

  Before the front door was even closed, I started tearing through the drawers in my tiny kitchen, unmindful of the water I was tracking everywhere, looking for that damned card because I went ahead and listened when Willa asked that I not program her number into my phone. She wanted to discourage me from calling her direct every time crisis struck, a dubious luxury reserved for higher-maintenance patients. At the time, I kind of liked that there was a level of trust between us; she didn’t think I needed her on speed dial, and counted on me not to abuse the system. I know Willa isn’t a friend, but this is something that keeps me feeling like there is an element of reciprocity to our professional relationship. As she probably intended, it gave me a much-needed sense of control over my actions, confidence that I could rise above losing my shit over every little thing.

  Yeah, right.

  I couldn’t find the damn card anywhere and got so frustrated that I contemplated calling emergency medical services and faking a suicide attempt or something; naturally, that was the number I’d memorized. Except that with Xanax, the feeling of frustration becomes abstract, conceptual, more like you’re aware that you should feel upset about something, but don’t. So while I likely couldn’t have scratched my own ass right then, much less faked a convincing suicide attempt, dialing out to emergency services was an idea that came and went like a slow-moving tide.

  Instead I flopped onto the couch and melted into the cushions for a few minutes—hours, maybe—coasting along on that feeling of nothingness unique to benzodiazepines. I felt like part of the air, completely insubstantial and weightless. For a while I considered going to sleep, which of course was when I spotted Willa’s card in its usual spot in the middle of the coffee table. Independent living patients are given a “private” cell phone for the duration of their stay, reachable only by switchboard, and I fumbled it out of the pocket of my jeans, amazed it hadn’t suffered water damage. My first few attempts to dial out were unsuccessful. On the fourth or fifth try, I managed to get Willa on the line.

  “Phelan?” Since I never called her like this, she picked up right away. “Phel, is everything okay?”

  Some people think drugs like Xanax and Valium turn you into a complete mess, and I’m sure in large enough doses they do, but I was perfectly coherent, if numb, capable of stating the facts without hyperbole. “I need to see you,” I told her. “Can we set something up before our scheduled time this afternoon? Right now, maybe? I’d really appreciate it.”

  The thing about Willa is she makes each word sound like she’s paused to think a
bout it, a trait that usually gets on my nerves if I’m in a heightened state of anxiety. Right then, however, it was instrumental to my being able to follow along. “I’m sure we can,” she answered, “but first, can you tell me why you feel this urgency?” A second later she added, “Phelan, have you taken anything?” She must have recognized something different in the cadence of my speech to indicate I was under the influence.

  “I took Xanax for my panic attacks, just like you told me to do in an emergency,” I explained.

  “How many?”

  That, I had to think about for a moment. “Just two. No more than that. Like you said. I read the label. But the Paxil wasn’t cutting it.”

  She sighed a little with relief. “That’s okay, Phel.” Another pause. “Did you have alcohol with those?”

  “No.” When this seemed to meet with her approval, I said, “Remember that guy I told you about? Nate? The married man?” This seemed a pointless question, since I spoke of little else during our sessions. By her silence, I took it she found the clarification unnecessary as well. “Well, he’s here.”

  “Here, as in… your house? He’s with you now?”

  “No, of course not. He’s in Cardiff, staying with Hugh.” It was time to prove my sarcastic streak could still function even when medicated. “He’s Hugh’s brother. Isn’t that fantastic? This whole time, another mystery just waiting to be discovered. Are you surprised? I was surprised.”