“OKAY, SO SINCE YOU two have been together the longest and, besides that, you’re having a rough patch, I’ve decided you get Lance for the first two nights,” Elias said.
Dylan was driving, but Elias was typing on his laptop.
“So that’s Sunday night when he gets home. You might be too tired to even do anything then. And then on Tuesday I get him, and then from that point on we’ll just have normal rotation. You Wednesday, me Thursday and so forth. Unless there are mitigating circumstances—”
“Eli, do we really have to talk about this now?” Dylan turned to him.
“Well, we’re not really talking so much as I’m doing the chart for the whole time Lance is here. He graduates at the end of this year, and then we’re really going to have to revise the chart.”
“Jeee-ssus!” Dylan muttered and pounded the steering wheel.
“You know what, Dylan?” Elias told him, “the reason you can say Jesus and drive on unbothered is because yours truly goes through the effort of making the chart and making the house rules. Rules like, even though Lance stays in your bed for two nights, what you all do is your business, and that doesn’t mean that during the day we can’t be with whomever of us we choose. Or—and this is my favorite: even if you all are having a fight, you must stick to the chart and sleep in your assigned bed. Except in cases of gas or sickness in which the sick person can or ought to sleep alone.”
Dylan only turned up the radio, and planted his hands firmly on the wheel.
“You can’t deny that it works,” Elias said.
“No,” Dylan agreed. “But you just go on and the fuck on about it. You’re such a tyrant about the whole thing.” Dylan jabbed the computer and Elias made a noise.
“My work isn’t saved—”
“It’s just… Why can’t we be more spontaneous?”
“Because there are three of us,” Elias said.
“If you were any good in chemistry you would know the more neutrons, the more unstable an atom. We’re like an isotope or something, and that means we need rules. The only reason one of us hasn’t left, or isn’t crying or feeling suicidal is because we keep these rules.”
“I guess,” Dylan said, bored.
“You know it,” Elias said, passionately.
Elias had lost his virginity to Dylan one Christmas years back, something Dylan had been embarrassed and ashamed over. He’d wanted them to go back to being friends, and Elias had complied, but not before Lance had stumbled into him in a similar way. The two exes, Lance and Dylan, had come back together, neither one of them knowing they’d both had a passionate indiscretion with Elias, and then they had both begun to fall in love with each other again, and with Elias. The truth was Elias had a way of stabilizing anything. Either of them would have been happy with Elias, but he was passionately in love with both of them. Dylan and Lance were perpetually in a passion with each other. Only the addition of Elias would make their relationship something close to sane. Only Elias saw this as the natural conclusion. Since the night they had first come together, with his very logical mind, Elias had set to building the rules by which a three way relationship could survive. When something did not work, he made a mental note of it. Lance and Dylan tended to feel moody, guilty and taciturn after three ways, so that was out. If the two of them had spent the night together, during the day both of them usually approached him for sex, so that was in. Apparently their relationship, before he had joined it, was so out of control neither one of them liked to discuss its details. So that was out too.
The phone rang, and Dylan reached for it, but before he could open it, Elias said, “No talking while driving,” and answered himself.
“Hello?”
“Eli!”
“Bennett?”
“Yeah, Twin. Where are you?”
“I’m in a car with Dylan on my way to South Bend.”
“Oh,” Bennett sounded deflated.
“What’s wrong?”
“I was hoping to see you.”
“We’ll be back soon.”
“I won’t. I’m going to Chicago.”
“What the—?”
“I’m going for Maia.”
“But she doesn’t want to see you.”
“She will, and then we’re gonna take a little trip.”
“It’s Bennett,” Elias mouthed to Dylan.
“She doesn’t even want to talk to you, and you’re talking about taking Maia on a trip, and you sound really nuts and—”
“Well, when I say trip, I mean kidnap,” Bennett explained.
“Bennett—!”
“Love you, brudda. Gotta go.”
And then Bennett hung up while Elias sat there with his mouth open.
“What was all that about?” Dylan said.
Instead of answering, Elias made another phone call.
“Fenn? Yes. Bennett’s on his way to Chicago, and I think he’s lost his mind. Yeah. That’s it. Alright. Good bye.”
As they came off the toll road, Dylan said, “That was the strangest conversation I’ve ever heard.”
He paid the toll and they drove into South Bend, or more correctly, Notre Dame, Indiana. He had been here a few times and he went down the state road. To his left was the university and across Elias was the green of Saint Mary’s College. They sped toward the city proper.
“So this is South Bend?” Elias said.
“Um hum,” Dylan muttered.
Effecting a Bette Davis impersonation, Elias murmured:
“What…a…. dump!”
The hospital was large. Being a place he didn’t particularly enjoy, Dylan walked with a laser focus. Had he been Theseus, he could have easily made it out of the labyrinth with no girl and no ball of yarn. Elias’s analytical mind helped as well, and it was not long before they found their way to the room of Eileen Wehlan.
“Are you Dylan?” a boy sitting outside said.
The hall was comfortable, carpeted, a little dim. There was a lounge.
“Yes,” Dylan said.
“Oh, good,” said the boy. “She’s been waiting for you. She’s right there.”
He pointed to the room across the hall where Dylan could hear some voices.
“Thanks,” Dylan nodded.
“Helpful kid,” Elias muttered. “I wonder if he’s a cousin? You all look alike.”
Dylan said, “I got more cousins than I can shake a stick at,” as he entered the room.
“Dylan!”
His aunt—he had gotten used to Meg Callan being Aunt Meg, stood up. His cousin Theresa was with her, feeding ice cubes to a woman Dylan hadn’t seen in a decade.
“Dylan!” her voice was dry.
“Eileen,” he said. He didn’t refrain from calling her Mother to prove a point. He simply didn’t think of her that way.
He came to the bed, amazed. There were no tears in his eyes, but he surveyed the ravishment of the woman who had brought him into this world, curly hair grayed now, face lined, eyes incredibly grateful to see him.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
Instead of answering this, Dylan said, “This is Elias.”
Elias nodded.
“Hello, Elias,” Eileen said.
She lay back and sighed with a smile on her pained face.
“You’ve turned out so good looking,” she said.
“You know I couldn’t have done it. Fenn and Tom did it. I never could have.”
Dylan said nothing.
“A long time ago a man came to me. He knew I wanted a child. He said he could help. He brought you to me,” Eileen continued. “In a cup. I wasn’t able to be the mother I wanted to be, so I gave him back to you.”
She began coughing. The fit lasted so long they feared she would never stop. Liz held her up, placing her hands on Eileen’s back. The dark haired boy from the hall came into the room, anxious faced, but Dylan said, “Don’t worry about it, Kid. Elias, walk him out.”
Elias nodded and escorted the boy out of the room.
At last, with ice chips in her mouth, Eileen continued, “You may have thought I was in the wrong for giving you up again. And I was, but you were always in the right place. Fenn and Tom are where you came from. That’s where you should have stayed.”
She sighed. It was such a long sigh Dylan nearly passed out in the middle of it.
“And now…” Eileen said, looking suddenly very dignified, more dignified that he had ever seen that crazy woman, “For why you are here.”
“I’m here to say good bye,” Dylan said, bluntly.
“Well, yes,” Eileen said, “And I appreciate that. But… I would never ask you to come here for that alone. Not after the mother I failed to be.
“I am going into hospice, darling,” she said, “and then I am going to die. And very quickly. But when you go back to Rossford, you have to take something else back with you.”
Now Dylan’s eyebrow came up and he said, “Uh… take what?”
“Oh, God,” Liz murmured.
“That boy.” Eileen said, “out in the hall. His name is Thackeray. Take Thackeray.”
Ignoring the fact that this woman was dying, Dylan Mesda threw back his head and laughed.
“Eileen! What the nut? I’m sorry you’re dying. I’m sorry you were a shitty, shitty mom. But I am not responsible for raising one of my cousins.”
“He’s not your cousin,” Eileen rasped, sinking back into the bed, wearily.
And then just like that, her heart monitor stopped beating. Her eyes closed, but not fully, and the tension left her face. As the inexorable beeeeeeep proclaimed Eileen Wehlan’s death, Thackeray ran in, face white, followed by Elias.
Theresa let out a shudder and Liz touched her sister’s head.
“Oh, my God,” Liz whispered.
“Liz,” Dylan said, his voice far from his empty body.
“I’m so sorry, Dylan,” Liz said.
“Liz,” Dylan continued while the noise went on over Eileen Wehlan’s dead body,
“What did she mean…?” He looked at the little boy, no more than twelve, “by Thackeray’s not my cousin.”
“Oh, Dylan,” Liz said, shaking her head over her sister’s corpse. “Thackeray isn’t your cousin. He’s your brother.
“In fact. He’s your twin.”
AND SO WE CONCLUDE CHAPTER FIVE
