ELEVEN
DEATH IN THE MORNING
Though later they were to claim that he had all the choice, in those early days, Elias often experienced his lack of choice. Dylan had been his friend his whole life, and when he was fifteen, for the first time, in the same bed, sharing a blanket had turned into sex. The day afterward Dylan said nothing about it. It happened two other times, and each time was more intense. By the time Dylan sat him down and gave him a lecture, there was no virginity left in Elias.
“What we’re doing isn’t right,” Dylan had told him. “I mean, what I’m doing to you.”
“Fucking me?”
“That only happened once,” Dylan held up a lame finger, and Elias turned his head, looking at him like he was the biggest fool in the world.
“We’re supposed to be friends. I’m supposed to look after you. Like a brother.”
“That is the silliest crap I’ve ever heard,” Elias shook his head. “You’re nothing like a brother.”
Dudes on the way to fucking each other always had that idea in their head, “We’re like brothers,” Laying under the covers with Dylan, playing footsie, gently removing his clothes, was nothing like being brothers. The idea of doing that with Bennett made him wretch.
“I just feel like I’m misleading you,” Dylan said, simply.
“I like having sex with you,” said Elias with equal simplicity.
Dylan frowned about this and crossed his arms over his chest.
“I’m no good. Not for a boyfriend or anything. I’ve always had someone, and I don’t know how to be alone. I don’t really even know how to sleep alone. I’ve been with a lot of guys.”
“You’re safe though, right? You don’t have anything.”
“Of course I don’t have anything!”
“Well, you just said—”
“Look, I haven’t been with that many guys. And not that way all the time,” Dylan said.
Elias didn’t know what the hell that meant.
“It’s not fair,” he said. “I’ve heard other guys talking about sleeping with you. About how good it was. And here you are, my friend, this close. And you know how I am. And fifteen. It would have been stupid if I hadn’t lost my virginity to you.”
“You make it sound so calculated,” Dylan began, and then there was the surprised look on his face. His face went red.
“I thought it just happened,” he said.
“It did just happen,” Elias told him.
“But you… You intended it all the time.”
“I intended it when I asked if I could sleep in your bed.”
“Oh, fuck this,” Dylan got up. “Fuck this. Elias, you’re making my head hurt. You have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because of what you just said,” Dylan told him. “Jesus Christ, what part of that sounds right?”
“It all sounds right. And it’s not like I used you! You clearly wanted it.”
“I didn’t want to start sleeping with one of my only friends,” Dylan sounded a little wretched now.
“That’s not what I wanted. I wanted to have a friend who was a friend. I wanted—I wanted to know I have some control over myself. That I’m good for people, not bad for them.”
“Dylan—”
“What could be worse than having your parents let you stay in my room, having my parents let it happen, them being sure that nothing will ever happen between Dylan—who is seventeen—and his fifteen year old friend that he’s always looked after. And then it turns out it is happening? What could be worse than that? It’s like… if I started sleeping with Chay. Or Sheridan.”
“What would be so wrong with that? And besides, they both ended up with guys who had the same relationship you have to me, only there’s a hell of a lot more years between them.”
“And you sit here, looking at me,” Dylan went on, “so logical like, ‘Yeah, of course, I wanted you to fuck me when we met! I instigated the whole thing!’”
“Aren’t we friends?”
For the first time in all the years Elias had known him, Dylan looked distinctly panicked.
“I’ll just,” he touched Dylan’s arm. And then he went to hug him. Dylan was so rigid Elias didn’t dare try to hold him close or stroke him. He was beginning to think he’d done something terrible. He let him go.
“I’ll go,” Elias told him.
Dylan didn’t say anything, and so Elias left.
It was days before they talked again, days before Elias came over. He didn’t stay very long. Things were so awkward between them.
“That’s a… good book,” Dylan said, one afternoon, pointing to what Elias was reading.
For Dylan that was a very lame line, but he knew Dylan was trying.
“It’s hard for me to read.”
“I’ll… You might want to read Aristotle first. I have him up in my room.”
Elias nodded and followed him.
This time around, looking for books in Dylan’s room strictly meant looking for books in Dylan’s room. Dylan pulled the book down and gave it to him.
“I’ll read it and give it back to you soon.”
“Don’t worry about it. Keep it.”
Dylan hugged him on the way out. Elias wanted to surrender to the hug, to fall into the warmth of Dylan’s body, to hold onto him, but he knew that wasn’t allowed. This sort of rigid love with almost visible boundaries would stand between the two of them until the day when they finally kissed in Rossford High School library, and then it would not turn into the passion of those nights in Dylan’s room until the afternoon where they rented a hotel room and made love.
“IT’S SO STRANGE TO be here when she isn’t,” Nell said. She stood over the sofa, not sitting, as if even that was a sacrilege.
“I keep waiting for her to show up.”
The Affren house seemed strangely dark, no matter how many lights they turned on. The furniture and the curtains, the art on the walls, were all inexcusably old. The excuse had been Barb, and now she was gone.
Awkwardly standing around the house were Bill, and Maisy. Milo’s mother Tina and his father John were on the sofa, and in a chair, beside Dena and Milo, sat Maggie.
“So, you’re my grandmother,” she said to Tina.
Tina, still blond, and barely in her sixties, seemed a little insulted by the idea of a grown woman calling her grandma.
“Yes,” Meredith told her, coming out of the kitchen with a platter. “That’s your grandmother.”
There was a knock on the door, but only out of courtesy, and then it opened and Fenn and Todd entered, followed by Adele, Layla, Thackeray and Liam.
“We’ve got food, and we’ve got booze,” Adele said, “so now everyone just relax while I put this place in some order.”
“I’ve been trying to put it together,” Maisy began.
Adele hugged her old friend, and then, when they parted, said, “She had a good run.”
“Mom did so much,” Maisy looked from Adele to Bill. “I always thought when the time came I would be sober and ready and have lots of good jokes on hand. Right now I can’t think of anything. Except how numb I am.”
“I think we need music,” Maggie murmured. “Dena, help me find something. Nobody really wants to be talking right now.”
Maisy went around the house, lighting candles.
“Now I do remember,” she said, as a candle flame lit up behind an image of the Sacred Heart. “That broken old Saint Jude. Mom and Dad used to put a lottery ticket under it every Saturday and there was one year when Dad told me that he thought they needed a new Saint Jude, because it had been dropped so many times, and it was so cracked the transmission wasn’t getting up to heaven. That’s why he said they never won the lottery.”
“And that’s why Mom got the new Saint Jude,” Bill realized.
“Yes,” said Maisy, “but Dad died a week later.”
“Look,” Roger lifted up the Jude on the dusty mantle, “here’s an old… this must be a twenty year old lottery ticket.”
The Affren children gathered around, and the three of them held it in the tips of their fingers, laughing at the faded pink print on the browned paper. Behind them, from the stereo, Sarah Vaughan sang:
When you must do without him
But your dreams are still about him
You’ll begin the lonely hours
When your romance is ending
And your heart has stopped pretending
You are in the lonely hours
Oh, how slow the moments go
When your love disappears
Oh, how slow the moments go
Every minute is a thousand years
There was a knock on the door, but they were so used to people walking right in that no one answered. When it came again, Fenn looked at Meredith, and said, “I’ll get it?”
She nodded.
Fenn answered the door, and held in his breath.
“Hey, Fenn. We came as soon as we could.”
A little rougher for wear, a little older than they had been when he’d seen them last, in black coats and caps which made them look a little priestly, a little like they had once been, stood Keith McDonald, and Daniel Malloy.
“You haven’t changed.”
“Well, you just saw me four months ago,” Fenn told Dan. “Not frequent, but more frequent than the entire year before where you disappeared.”
Dan nodded.
“I accept that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
They were sitting in the bay window of Barb’s house, looking out onto Leeper Street.
“That I’ve been a very bad boy. Me and Keith are pretty solitary these days. We don’t get out much.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t ever call.”
“Point taken.
“As soon as Dena called Keith and told him about Barb, we packed a bag.”
“Then the point isn’t taken,” Fenn said mildly.
“I loved Barb, but she’s gone. The point is why rush in your car and drive as far as you can for someone who’s dead, but wait and wait and wait to see the living?”
Dan didn’t say anything to this. He’d learned that sometimes not answering Fenn was best.
“Life is so much shorter than we thought it was,” Fenn continued. “It feels so long. It feels very tedious, and then you look back and there go sixty years. Dylan is twenty one now.”
“Is it true Dylan has a brother?”
“Yes. Apparently Eileen had him hidden away.”
“And then?”
“Well, Eileen is dead,” Fenn said succinctly. “Before her death she got the boy out of foster care and made him known to Dylan, and Dylan made him known to Tom and me. And the rest…” Fenn shrugged.
The door opened, and looking sober, side by side, Brendan entered the house with Sheridan, who wore a blue pea coat and was dandling Raphael.
“Oh, God, remember when Brendan was just a little boy?” Dan whispered as Brendan approached them.
“I even remember when you were a little boy,” Fenn reminded Dan. “Bren always had that serious look, though.”
“What serious look?” Brendan said with a grin, sitting down in the old chair across from them, his knees wide apart.
Fenn ignored this and said, “Dena’s in the kitchen, if you’re looking for her.”
“I was. But I also figured it was good not to crowd her.”
“The way Charlie’s crowding Meredith,” Fenn gestured across the room.
“Um?” Brendan looked over there and said, “That is what one might call cloying.
“Is it just me,” Brendan gripped the edges of the chair, “or does this house suddenly have no excuse to look so old now that Barb is gone?”
“You are not the first person to say that,” Dan told him. “It reminds me of the rectory. Has that changed?”
Brendan shrugged and Fenn said, “I haven’t been in the rectory since you left.”
“He hasn’t been to church since you left,” Brendan said, wryly.
“Well, no,” Dan allowed, “we knew that was a temporary thing.”
“I am a Christian in my own way,” Fenn said. “Do the two of you insist on talking as if I’m not in the room?”
“Not at all,” Brendan said, “I want to show you my book later.”
“A new one?” Dan said.
“Well, yes,” Brendan told him. “I don’t want to be that guy who once wrote a book.”
“What’s it about?”
“I hate that question,” Brendan said.
“Sorry.”
“I didn’t mean to make it sound like that,” Brendan clarified. “I mean, I hate that I don’t really have much of an answer to it. It’s about… I guess it’s just about a guy. Like me. Sort of like me. Actually, not at all like me. And I’ve hardly started it, so…” Brendan shrugged. “I do think it’s going to be the best thing I’ve ever written, though.”
Brendan clapped his thigh in that brisk way that meant he was about to change the subject.
“So,” he said, “When do I get to meet your new son?”
“Thackeray is with Tom. He’s quite the musician. The two of them are like best friends. The boy may be the best thing to happen to him.”
Dan nodded.
“Father Dan, you’re getting grey,” Brendan said.
Dan Malloy wrinkled his nose at Brendan. After Dan had left the priesthood, Brendan had made a serious effort to stop calling him Father. In the end, it hadn’t succeeded, and this was just as well because eventually Dan had surrendered to inevitability and been ordained an Anglican priest. So it was not at the title Father, but the mention of grey that Dan wrinkled his nose.
As Keith came to sit on the side of the chair with Dan, Fenn continued,
“At this very moment, Thackeray is with Tom and Bryant, and of course Bryant is over the moon because he’s the conductor of the regional symphony.”
“Seriously!” Keith said. “Well, now I’ve got to go over and congratulate him.”
“Yes you do,” Fenn said. “You’ve been sort of neglectful of your friends in Rossford.”
Dan was looking at Fenn who asked: “What?”
“It’s just I’m surprised it doesn’t bother you a little. Thackeray with Tom and Bryant.”
“Thackeray is Tom’s son. Bryant is a great musician, and the rest is not worth remembering.”
The little circle of men had become very quiet now, and Fenn said, “A lifetime has passed.”
“It is the province of friends to remember,” Dan said. “I can’t help it.”
“You always lived more in the past than I did,” Fenn told him.
“I think somewhere underneath it all I’ve always been angrier than you,” Dan said.
Brendan grinned at the aging priest and said, “You’ve always been the mellowest person I’ve known and Fenn… But no,” Brendan reflected, “that isn’t true.”
Keith, who was Bryant’s good friend, said, “Surely we can find something else to discuss at a time like this.”
Dan Malloy did not want to finish discussing their current something, but Fenn looked away from his old friend and said to Keith, “Yes. Surely we can.”
