That night Todd found Fenn sitting quietly in the kitchen.
“Did you know?” he said, “what someone did?”
“Hum?”
“Someone found a porno Paul did, and made a sex tape… or DVD of himself and Paul, and mailed it to Kirk.”
“Paul’s Kirk?”
Fenn nodded.
“And…” Fenn continued, “mailed it to his mother and his sister.”
“Oh, God!”
“Claire got it. She saw it, unfortunately. But she kept it from Marilee. Which I think would have been a lot more unfortunate.”
“What kind of person…?” Todd began. “Who… would do that?”
“Brian Babcock would do it.”
“No,” Todd said. “No, Fenn. He wouldn’t.”
“He would,” Fenn continued. “Number One: because he did; and Number Two, I know he did because he filmed himself and Paul fucking, and got Paul to talk about Kirk. I think… Because this is the way I would do it, if Kirk heard his name then he would know this wasn’t like the movie, something in the past, something in the way back when. He’d know that Paul is the same old Paul. That’s what Brian was getting at.”
“Oh, Brian!” Todd murmured. “Oh, how could you? And… to his family? Why’d he send the second CD to the family?”
“To be an asshole,” said Fenn. He shook his head. “I’ve given up trying to understand him.”
“He’s gone,” Todd said.
“I know.”
“No, I mean gone for good. He left. He said he… always went overboard and he didn’t ever think about the things he’d done until after he’d done them. And… he was so torn apart.”
“Well, he should try being a little more torn apart a little quicker,” Fenn said.
Then, “You felt sorry for him?”
Todd turned away.
Fenn sighed.
“You felt sorry for him.”
The next day was a pretty gloomy one. Fenn knew that Todd’s mind was on the absent Brian.
The truth was that no one else seemed to be terribly upset about his absence and Fenn didn’t know how to feel because while there was no reason he should miss the man that destroyed his relationship with Tom, he could not be completely happy about anything that distressed Todd.
But he didn’t destroy my relationship. My marriage, Fenn said to himself. No, it’s giving him too much credit. We could have come back together. If I’d wanted it. If I’d trusted Tom.
If Tom was who he was now. The Tom who was his best friend, who was with Lee now. He was almost but not the same Tom he’d found being fucked against a wall by Brian Babcock so many years ago. This Tom had been made by that experience. Fenn had, in fact, loved another Tom, and in many ways he had been another Fenn. Probably, the Fenn who lived now could never have been with the Tom who existed then. That was the reason things had ended. The day Tom had been caught in the act, that awful moment, two different people, maybe three, had been born.
Closer to forty than thirty, Fenn could not begrudge Brian Todd’s pity. It was all that he had right now. Wherever he was. It seemed resentful and tiresome to be eternally vengeful for what had happened so long ago and had, in the end, resulted in the life he had now. Far on the other side of betrayal, when the man he had fallen in love with, who had once been his best friend became his best friend and close confidante again, Fenn could look with pity on what had happened.
Tom had sincerely believed that because what he and Brian had had was just sex, just some strange curious itch that had needed to be scratched, it could not possibly touch what he and Fenn had. The affair would go on, like a flu, until it had run its course and Fenn would never have to know. Perhaps, even, Fenn being wild and worldly, would laugh about it, shrug about it like Europeans are supposed to do. Never mind that Fenn was Black, under thirty, easily angered and American.
Whatever illusions Tom had must have ended when time stopped and his legs were wrapped around Brian, his back against the wall, naked, sweating, Brian inside of him, Fenn looking on him as he came out of the frenzy of mindless sex. Tom had never been ashamed before, not really. In some way it must have been as shattering for him as it was for Fenn. Not that it wasn’t his fault. No, Fenn knew better. Only, after a while fault mattered less and less and there was only pain and shame. Tom had lived with both a long time. Add to this regret.
But Brian got none of that pity. Fenn never thought about what the event had done to him. He didn’t want to know. Brian was a broken man. Brian had also been the only one to be physically injured that night. Fenn had injured him. There had been no tears. There had been a supernatural strength and a show of rage. He had made Brian dress “Just so I can pull you by your collar.” And midway through his dressing, Fenn dragged him through the old apartment. He had given him two black eyes while Tom held back, not wanting to see Brian hurt, but knowing he had no right to interfere. Brian left the house limping and injured, and Fenn threw the rest of his clothes out of the window. That was something they never talked about. The door had been shut on Brian, and Fenn had turned to Tom with so much rage in his face Tom had flinched. He’d wanted to run away. He wanted to go away. Instead, Fenn had left him.
In the early time, and almost for a year, Fenn couldn’t get out of thinking about his pain, his tears that no one saw, his intense, intense hurt. The loss of everything. Only later was he able to think about Tom, alone and shaken, humiliated, full of regret in the aftermath of it all.
“You’re my only friend. You’re the only person I share things with,” he’d told Fenn once, and this never really stopped being true. Bereft of his only friend, as cold and frightened and alone as Fenn had been that night, only without the comfort of being right, or the comfort of family for that matter. No wonder in the end Tom had spent that couple of years somewhere between bouts of overwork followed by promiscuous, risky affairs with strangers in strange places and, at last, come back to Brian, who was as miserable as him.
Brian.
When Fenn had slammed the door on him that was it.
Go back to that night.
Brian was as physically hurt as he had been embarrassed. For a long time, almost until a month ago when Brian had come to the house in tears, Fenn had imagined that he was too tall and too beautiful to care about what he had done. He had imagined him smug that night when he had walked into the room. But if he remembered rightly, they had both looked so frightened and so exhausted and so if-only-we-could-hide. And Brian was physically stronger than Fenn, no doubt. Even with Fenn’s rage there was no reason he couldn’t have fought. Brian had hidden his face behind his hands and crawled away. But he hadn’t fought back. It was like he knew he deserved it. The whole thing sickened Fenn now. It had sickened him a few times remembering it, how Brian had been more like a child being beaten by a parent than anything else.
So when Todd came down the steps that morning, face woebegone, Fenn was prepared.
“I don’t want you to be angry at me,” Todd said. “I love you.”
“Of course you do.”
“You’re my husband. You’re my spouse. You’re my partner. You’re my best friend. You’re my—”
“Heart.”
“You’re my heart,” Todd said.
“But…” Fenn continued, “you’re going to find Brian?”
Todd blinked, gathered himself and then said: “Not if you don’t want me to.”
Fenn got up from the table and circled it.
He stood looking at Todd, and then reached up and took his hands in his face.
He pulled Todd’s face down and kissed him.
“Go,” he told him.
Todd bent down and pulled Fenn to him.
“Go find him,” Fenn whispered in his ear.
And then he kissed it.
“How are ya, kid?” she said.
“Kid?”
Claire smiled and shrugged, coming into his room.
“I need a long shower and a good cry,” Paul told her, turning over in bed and yawning.
“I’m glad you were here last night,” he said.
“Yesterday was the worst day of my life. I mean, hands down. And I’ve had some bad ones.”
“Yeah,” Claire said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I’ll bet.
“Paul,” she said touching his shoulder, “You need to go to Kirk.”
“How can I?”
“Or I will.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Someone has to. He doesn’t understand, but maybe he could.”
She shook her head. “You left home when you were my age, Paul. When I think of you out there on the streets, scared... Doing the stuff you did… The things that must have happened…”
“Claire. Please.”
She shook her head.
“I’m just saying, Paul, you can’t go through stuff like that and not be affected. And ten years of it. And far from home. You didn’t have us.”
“Dad was gone and you were a little girl, Claire.”
“And you were a little boy. Almost. God, it hurts just thinking about it.”
“Well, then stop,” Paul climbed out of bed and sat beside his sister.
“Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about that kid. About the things he did. The last thing I want is for you to be hurt over anything I did.”
“But don’t you see? You can’t feel sorry for yourself. Or who you were. You can’t have compassion for that kid. But someone should. I do.”
“I wasn’t the only one. Or the youngest. There were boys out there.”
Claire winced.
“There were kids. Boys and girls who died.”
“You could have been one of them,” said Claire.
“But I wasn’t.”
And then Paul said.
“But… something did die. Something went numb. And for a while now it’s been coming back. That’s why I was so terrified. That’s why… Can I talk to you? I wanted to shield you from everything, but it’s too late now, and you and Fenn are the ones who know me.”
“I’m your sister,” Claire said.
“You’re my baby—”
“Don’t go there again.”
Paul nodded.
Claire stirred.
“It’s just someone downstairs knocking at the door,” Paul told her.
She nodded, and continued listening to her brother.
“I think… I knew I wanted to get out when I left. I mean the guy I was working for, whose name was Guy by the way,” Paul chuckled. “He got shut down and that was the night Fenn and Paul found me and… it’s a long story. But we ended up here and I realized I liked being here, and I kind of wanted to start over. But… it’s been bumpy. The old me keeps coming back. And the me me… Gets so afraid. I remember one night just breaking into sweats for no reason. Coming down the street afraid that… someone would come out and grab me. Rape me. Whatever. And then the only way to fight that fear was to do what I had done before. Make an amateur porn, have sex with someone. It… I’ve been in a bad way. And the more I feelthings,and I want to feel things, Claire, I do… The more I feel afraid, too. And then I go and do something stupid.”
“Paul,” Claire turned to him. “You remember after Grandad died, and I couldn’t sleep because I was so afraid? So afraid of everyone dying and… what death was? Being alone and… everything.”
Paul nodded his head and smiled, painfully, at her.
“And I didn’t want to sleep alone, and Mom said I needed to be a big girl?
“Everynight. Every single night, you came to me and you crawled into that itty bitty bed, and you stayed with me till I was asleep and said you would never leave me.”
He nodded, and she chuckled.
“I’m the same height you were then, and I tried that bed out last year. To remember. I got cramped up like an accordion just getting in there by myself.
“Paul. I love you. I love you.”
Paul lowered his face and turned from her, but just then Fenn stuck his head in the doorway.
“Can I join the lovefest?”
“It’s not a lovefest without you,” Claire said, archly, though she was wiping her face with the back of her hand.
“Well, actually,” Fenn began, “I’m just the escort. It’s an old friend here for you.”
Paul wrinkled his brow and said, “Who?”
But just then, Noah Riley stuck his head in the door.
When we return, the final part ofThe Houses in Rossford
