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In the weak, bloody 2002 mornings, the car was practically new. It was a ‘96 Beretta, discontinuation year, red in a way that went orange in the light, and it drove like it knew all the roads already. He took it around the yard once, twice, windows down to let smoke out and pine in, getting his feet settled into the pedals, digging his hands into the sound of the engine; he hadn't driven in over a year, but the Beretta came easy.
“You're tearing up the grass,” Oscar had said. He was on the porch steps, knees to his chest. He didn't believe in smoking before breakfast, so his hands were as empty as the look on his face.
Nick made a show of looking around the yard. There wasn't really grass so much as weeds and stubborn moss, tracked through with donut circles all around the little house. There was rain pooled in the grooves where he'd taken the Monaco into a tree and folded the hood up like origami. It was still sitting next to the house, right under the kitchen window, fixing a peculiar empty-headlight stare onto the drive.
Habit turns to instinct the longer it grows. Most crashes veer left or right with the yank of the wheel. The Monaco is a study in symmetry, crumpling clear down the center.
Nick looked around the yard, then looked back at Oscar. Oscar said, "I'm working on it,” and Nick wondered if he meant the grass or the dirt or the logistics of drifting in a car with standard tires. He didn't get a chance to ask before Oscar unfolded himself and said, “I'll make coffee.” On the serrated side of twenty, and he still hadn't learned how to let the screen door slam instead of closing it silent behind him.
It wasn't an official visit. Nick had only officially visited once, his one and only flight out of Germany during his first year there; he took to the tarmac on the third of November, the closest thing he could stomach to the day that really mattered, and hadn't even called until he was standing in Concourse E with one bag over his shoulder (leather bag, long slid over the line from broken in to butter soft, stolen out from under Oscar's bed twenty seconds or ten thousand years ago). He'd kept Oscar's number scrawled on his wrist for the trip, and when he shoved it into the payphone, he'd almost expected it not to work at all. “Jesus. Go get some coffee,” Oscar had said over the line. “There were closer airports,” and Nick had said, “I'll pay you back gas money,” and Oscar had hung up the phone. He didn't make him pay, but he did glare at the bag.
The world had turned since then. There was a bloody smear sinking teeth into the South Carolina freeway, shattered bone and glass soaked in leaking gasoline. The funeral will roll in with the brewing storm on Saturday. If Nick were twenty five, he would have flown into Columbia on Friday night, but he's only nineteen, so he left Tuesday for Hartsfield-Jackson instead. Oscar had been waiting for him this time, slumped in the Beretta with a Greenville Drive cap pulled low over his face. Nick had said, “New car?” and Oscar had said, “There are always casualties,” and they’d fought over the radio the entire two hours back up to Blue Ridge.
The sun was coming up over the mountain to turn the red paint orange. Nick turned off the ignition and went inside for coffee.
It was a complicated thing; it still is, but even thorns will dull, so it tugs on softer edges now. 2002 was a razor blade. He took the Beretta when his coffee was gone, 85 on 85, driving East back into hell. He pulled into his parents’ driveway with one bag over his shoulder (black canvas, speckled with stray paint, stolen from the back of Adriana’s closet the night they got home from Portugal).
His father had said, “Who's car is that?” but he'd said to Mama, not to Nick. Mama had said, “We could have picked you up from the airport,” and neatly answered the question which had been excised from between.
Why didn't you fly into Columbia?
Nick said, “I'm not here to see you,” but he'd said to his dad, not to Mama, and he spent the night in something they could call a guest room now that they'd taken his posters off the walls.
He didn't remember the funeral even as it was happening. He wasn't watching the dirt turn. He was standing next to Aaron, watching as the gathering clouds filtered his hair from gold into gray. He looked spiderweb thin, wearing a face the color of sun bleached bone, dragonfly tremors in his fingers. For a moment, for an hour, the anger under his veins had bled dry. He stood there frozen like a deer in the road, and Nick just stood there watching him like headlights. Two eyed stare with grief between them like a bullet. A man built like the Monaco, a car crumpled clear down the center.
They rot like roadkill, side by side, and don't speak the rest of the day. Nick should have forced something out, anything to balance out the rusted scales between them, but there was guilt like blood between his teeth. Tuesday died off slow and silent.
Guilty, morbid, and useless, he sat in the guest room and thought, God, it used to be easy.
He thought, Maybe I'm getting better, sitting in the wake of something worse, because he was thinking, it used to be easy, but it was never supposed to be. Guilty, morbid, and useless, he sat in the guest room wearing Erik’s favorite Ocún shirt, twisting years between his fingers like yarn.
It used to be easy, because he used to be young. Back when he liked racing and firefly jars and sticky summer heat and scraping up his knees on the gravel of Micky's backyard, they met for the first time. His parents had called him Nicholas, his aunt had called him Michael, and Aaron had called him Nicky because he was tiny, the size of a kitten with eyes still blue. Nick liked spiderwebs, so he took Aaron out the backdoor where they stretched between the porch posts. He didn't let him touch them, but he pointed out all of them one by one. Aaron pointed with him, because he was copycat young, and maybe also because he didn't know what to do with the attention. Nick hadn't thought to ask at the time. He was barely five.
Aaron was from sunset lands, far out in California, so he was more of a luxury than anything real. Nick kind of liked that, because every time Aaron came to visit, Nick was a little bit taller and Aaron looked a little more impressed by him. In the dying daylight of 1992, the day before Christmas, the house was strangling itself; Tilda and Luther were fighting, so Mama hid Nick and Aaron from the storm by sending them outside. Nick stared at his baby cousin, almost fragile at six years old, nodded to himself, and then drug him to the garage. “Here, I'll show you how it works,” he said. He had to lower the seat on his bike all the way so that Aaron could reach the pedals. It looked ridiculous. The handlebars were too high for him to balance. He crashed a total of twenty six times that day—they were both bleeding by the time he got it right.
Nick wiped the blood off their faces with the sleeve of his shirt and grinned at Aaron until he got a smile back. “Told you! I knew you'd get it!” And for a minute and half, he'd been convinced he was the best cousin in the world.
It used to be easy. He showed him how to skip rocks, and how to use a slingshot, and how to fall from a tree without getting hurt. One time Micky said, “Here, show him how to punch,” and promptly hit Nick in the face so hard his cheek almost split open. Aaron had flinched back so hard he hit his head on the porch steps, ten years old, still the size of a blue eyed kitten.
“Ow,” Nick complained, but he was already crouching down to reach for his cousin. “Don't worry,” he said, trying to sound comforting, but his lip was bleeding into his mouth, so he had to pause and turn away to spit it out. “You don't have to learn that. Micky’s just mean.”
“I'm not mean,” Micky said, but his voice had turned odd. A tangle was in his throat. “Hey, kid…” but he didn't finish. He just stared at Aaron with his eyes squinted, and then he said, “Um, my mom wants me home,” even though it was barely three. He was gone before Nick could say goodbye.
Aaron sat next to him when he iced his cheek that night, watching Nick instead of the TV screen. “Um. Nicky.” His fingers pulled at the threads of the couch. “Does it hurt?”
“No,” Nick said, because he’d had ice on it for twenty minutes, so it was actually pretty numb. Aaron didn't look satisfied, but he tucked his head against Nick’s arm and let it go.
Scraping up against fourteen washed him into rocky bays. He'd been rocketing through the years, born racer without a taste for stopping, but things got choked as he tripped over the beginning of summer. He outgrew his bike. He outgrew his shoes. His eyes started getting stuck on faces they weren't supposed to, and he started coughing of the taste of denial. It was different, suddenly, being with Micky, and it was harder to look his dad in the eyes, and when Aunt Tilda fucked up his name again, he snapped at her to “shut up!” so sharply that Aaron avoided him the whole visit. Something was wrong, either with Nick or with who he was going to be, and he couldn't stomach the thought either way. He tried to kill the feeling. He tried to kill the feeling. He tried—
He hit fifteen with a growth spurt and a taste for iron. He got in all of one fight, breaking Micky’s nose in the hallway at school, and then his dad made damn well sure he'd never get in another. He picked up a routine of running: racing himself until he threw up or got dizzy or rolled an ankle and then spending days sulking in stagnancy until he could do it again. He got stupid. He got angry. He twisted himself up into knots, biting at his own loose threads, turning himself to static, static, and then—
He tried to give it up. It didn't work quite right.
He woke up in the hospital on the day Aaron and Tilda should have gotten to town, but they weren't visiting this year. It was just Nick and his dad in the room, because his mother couldn't stomach seeing him like this and because nobody else knew yet. Hopefully, they wouldn't know at all—it wasn't a good look. He wasn't a good look, in his entirety, just a stain that his parents hadn't managed to scrub their blood out of yet.
“Why isn't Aaron coming?” he asked. “I kind of wanted to see him,” if only because Aaron had avoided him the whole visit last year and the heaven-white of the overhead lights was a breeding ground for regret.
His father just said, “Go back to sleep, Nicholas,” perfectly disappointed. His head was hurting too much for him to do anything but obey.
It used to be easy, because he used to be stupid and blind and useless and young. It used to be easy, because he gave up as soon as it got hard.
The beginning to the middle, five to fifteen, and he is unrecognizable at either side of the string. He has become something else entirely. There is something wrong with who he is going to be.
He confessed to his father in the hospital chapel, head bent down between bony knees, trying to breathe through the ache of himself. His father let him say it. The chapel stayed silent for one, three, five minutes, and then Luther took him home.
There is something wrong with him. There is something wrong with the way he was born to be.
He gave up in October—he wasted away November, half of December—he came home to find his mother crying. His new year broke over the horizon with the news of North Carolina, and he was so empty of himself that all he said was, “Thank you.” It didn't even taste like a lie.
He turned sixteen with his stomach inside out on the floor. There was a hand on his back, rubbing at him, only soothing because he knew it wasn't supposed to be. “This is progress, Nicholas,” she said, encouraging in a way that was perfectly sincere and proud in a way that was a perfect lie. Her hand came away after six seconds, maybe six and half if he was lucky; she couldn’t stand to touch him. That was as much as he'd ever get.
Still, he said, “I'm getting better,” and it came out as a nothing sound. His throat was ripped to shreds.
Nelly said, “You're getting better,” and he tucked it behind his ribs as his only birthday present of the year.
(The next day, he said, “I'm sixteen,” and Oscar said, “No, you're not.” And when Nick started to explain, he just said, “No, you're not,” again. Nick might have thought about laughing if Oscar hadn't been wearing his empty eyes.)
And he got better.
It wasn't until he was home, sitting on the repainted back porch with Micky's old flannel on, that he realised he hadn't thought about Aaron since the hospital. He stared at the empty gaps between the porch posts, idly wondering how guilty he should feel, except he didn't feel guilty. He didn't feel anything about it at all. He had started killing spiders when they kept getting into the corners of him and Oscar’s room. He didn't need anything else crawling over him there.
When his cousin came to visit, bruise eye tired and headsick pale, he didn't even scrape Nick’s chin. He was smaller at fourteen than Nick was at nine, which was kind of sad except Nick didn’t care at all. They watched TV together until Jenny came over. She said, “Who's this?”
Nick said, “He's my cousin,” but he was already standing to leave. “Aaron, you can go through my room if you want. Use whatever, I don't care. I'll be back later,” and then left without waiting for Aaron to say goodbye.
“Cute kid,” Jenny said.
Nicky turned the key on his father's car. “Sure. He's fine, I guess. Where do you want to go?”
By the time he got back, emptied of himself again, Tilda and Luther were fighting. Aaron was stirring a bowl of cereal on the kitchen floor. Nick stopped in the doorway for a minute to watch his hand move in circles. There was a rhythm to it. He did it like he couldn't be doing anything else.
He looked tiny there against the cabinets, so Nick said, “Jesus, you're small.”
Aaron said, “Fuck off.”
Nick said, “Do you want dinner?” Aaron just held up the bowl. It was close enough, so he didn't bother arguing.
2002 was a balance on a razor blade. Nick sat in the guest room as Tuesday died, thinking, maybe I'm getting better, but it still sounded like Nelly, so it wasn't true at all.
On Wednesday, Luther went back to the grave to pay respects again, a private moment with his sister. The neighbor drove Mama to the store, just to get her out of the grieving house. Nick wandered downstairs to make breakfast by himself. He was deciding between cereal and eggs when a bleach bone hand tugged at his sleeve. “Nicky.”
“Aaron,” he replied. “Do you want breakfast?”
Aaron said, “Um,” and then stared at the cereal box for a very long time. Nicky waited, watching him blink, watching him breathe, wondering what he would have done if Aaron was the one in the ground. If Tilda were here, and Aaron weren't, what would he have done? Would he have come back at all?
It is an awful thing to look at someone and think, I would not have come to your funeral. I would not have survived the trip to say goodbye.
The decision had already halfway been made, but it snaps into sincerity right there in the Wednesday light. The anchor sinks down into Nicky’s chest and lodges in solid between his lungs.
Aaron finally said, “No.” He looked like he was going to be sick.
Nicky swallowed the hollowness behind his ribs back down and said, “Okay,” and then, “In that case, can you do something for me?” Aaron looked up at him, perfectly hollow, so he continued. “Get my computer from upstairs. I need to look at something with you.”
Aaron didn't necessarily give him an approval on the house, but he gave as close to it as he was able. “This can be your room,” Nicky said, pointing at one of the pictures. “I can repaint it if you want.”
“You don't have to do that.”
(He'd done it anyway, although he hadn't found the time until summer settled in. He turned it light blue, the same color as the bike he taught Aaron to ride. He's pretty sure he's the only one who could possibly know what the color means. It's just light blue. He likes knowing it, though, even if Aaron doesn't remember at all.)
The next week happened in flashes of movement: he flew back to Germany for two more bags, and Erik said, “Don't worry, the rest will be waiting for you,” and he didn't cry about leaving because he didn't have time. He got back to his parents' house in a cab at a quarter to three in the morning, so he didn't wake anyone up, just dumped the bags in the garage and threw the Beretta back onto the empty hours of I-85, racing himself at 110 through the budding light. Oscar was awake when he pulled up the long gravel driveway, sitting on the porch with his arms crossed loosely over his knees. Nicky lit him up in the headlights before he shut the engine off and got out.
“You know I don't park it there,” Oscar said.
Nicky said, “You didn't believe me when I told you it was my birthday.” All he got was an empty stare, so he said, “When I turned sixteen. You didn't believe me.”
Oscar stared a moment longer before he said, “Oh,” and ran his tongue over his teeth. “I still don't. Time didn't pass there.”
Oscar doesn't stand as Nicky gets close, so Nicky just leans down to tuck the keys into his flannel’s breast pocket. He said, “Okay,” because that seemed like it was true, maybe, even though it wasn't at all. “Time is passing now.”
“Sure is,” Oscar agreed, empty because they emptied him of himself. “You can make coffee if you want.”
Nicky drank it in the kitchen with the window open. He would never quite understand how Oscar lived like this, singular and silent at the end of a gravel mile, but it was beautiful before the sun came up like a stain. He left the mug in the sink. Oscar drove him down to Hartsfield-Jackson, and this time, he flew into Columbia. His father picked him up outside.
Luther’s face is a perfect blank. “I heard about the house.”
“It wasn't a secret,” Nicky said. He felt like a kid driving home from school.
“You,” Luther said, “Are not what those boys need.”
And that is the truth of it, really. There is something wrong with who he has become. There is something wrong with who he was born to be. There is something morbid and guilty and useless that keeps him alive. He is no better than before, still stupid and blind, and he is not what the boys need. He knows this will not be enough.
This will not make it any better, is what his father really means, and Nicky’s pretty sure he's right. But he already gave up once, fifteen and foolish and rotting into static. He will not give up again. This is what he can do. This is all he can do.
The beginning stretches to the middle, unrecognizable on either side, and then continues blindly. Nicky has wasted all the years of his life, and the world has kept turning all the while. He has spent a year convincing himself that it would never be worth it to come home.
Maybe it's not. Maybe it's never getting better. But the anchor between his lungs keeps him breathing anyway.
The only truth of it: he comes home. He finds Aaron again. Life goes on from there.