The Love Story (The Things We Can't Change Book 4) (26 page)

A failure.

“I know that,” I finally say quietly, and Dad gives me a curt nod.

“That’s right. Now, Alex told me some of what you’ve done for Evie Parker. It seems to me she’d be too grateful to let you go. And you say she broke up with you?”

“Not exactly.” I sigh. “And her being too grateful is what sparked the problem. See, it all started at the club one night, the very first time I saw Anthony Stull hitting her…” Somehow, I don’t even understand it or consciously decide to do it, but the whole story comes out. Virtually everything, the entire saga of my and Evie’s story. The rescue in the bathroom, the months after Cindy’s death of trying to escape the truth and the nightmares, the summer Evie and I spent helping each other recover. Even the explanation of our trip to Florida before school started.

At some point, we get up and make dinner together. I’m not even sure who makes the first move or why we do it. If our stomachs growl or we just remember that we’re men and need to keep our hands busy as we talk of such things that are usually kept silent and taboo. But we cook, moving around in the kitchen together with familiar ease, though we’ve never done it before.

A meal takes shape under our hands as I talk and talk and talk. I talk more than I have in weeks, more than I have since Evie and I spent every moment of the summer together. Dad stays silent through it all, just listening, not judging. It’s a completely foreign experience but not an unpleasant one, both of us behaving in a way we never have in the past.

“So she really let me have it tonight at the art show,” I finally conclude, pushing back my empty plate and sitting back in my chair. “She… she’s always been able to see right through me. She’s knows exactly why I’m holding back.”

“And why’s that?” Dad asks, scooping up the last of the meat and gravy on his plate.

I swallow and look down, drumming my fingers against the table. I finally find words for the real reason I’ve been pushing Evie away, voice the reason that I’ve been running from and refusing to name all this time. “Because it seems like everything good that comes into your life gets taken away. Or leaves, eventually.” I look up at him carefully, questioningly. “Don’t you feel that way about Mom? That it would have been easier and less painful if you hadn’t met her or not gotten into it with her in the first place? Just avoided everything.”

He looks up at me, plainly startled. “Zeke,” he says slowly, setting down his fork. “I don’t regret… having
met
your mother. Having loved her. Even though she left, I don’t regret the time we did have together.”

“How could you not?” I burst out, not understanding. “She left us like… like we were nothing. Her idea of love was a joke. It seems to me that it’s better to just avoid attachments and relationships from the start. Because people always end up disappointing you.”

Dad is quiet for a long, long time, fingers latched together and resting over his middle as he thinks. “Loving your mother made me a better man, Zeke,” he says eventually, his voice calm and quiet. “I’m not… I’m not perfect now but I was worse then. Her love may have been selfish, not strong enough, but loving her, caring for her and sacrificing for her made
me
better. We’re usually better for loving someone. Much better. We need to still be that person after the one we’ve loved has left us. To keep the good things we learned by loving them. To realize that just because we lost
a
love doesn’t mean we’ve lost the ability to love entirely.”

He pauses, then admits quietly, “That’s where I failed. For a long time. Where I failed you and Cindy. I forgot everything I learned, the selflessness that loving another person so strongly gave me. I didn’t keep that lesson and I became just as selfish as your mother. And I’ll spend a lifetime regretting that. Regretting not spending all that time, every minute of it, with you and especially your sister.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I mutter. “I spent a ton of time with her and still don’t think it was enough.”

“That’s the regret we always face when someone dies. But not every good thing goes with a person after they’re gone or leave. You keep all the memories, don’t you? The lessons they taught you, the way they made you a better person, even if it was brief. The way they changed the way you looked at the world, even if it was in small ways. From everything you’ve told me… aren’t you a better person for this summer spent with Evie? I know I am for the time with your mom, maybe even for her leaving me. Would you rather have not met Evie at all? Never loved her, never keep on loving her for as long as you’re both able?”

I’m quiet as he stands and clears the plates, trying to think if there is truth in his words. But I already know that there is and I’m just trying to avoid thinking about what it means. He’s right. Evie is steady, consistent. I can try and rationalize it away as much as I want, hide behind both our fears and insecurities, but the fact of the matter is that Evie and I have a connection that neither of us can explain. Something that goes deeper and is much more intense than anything else I’ve ever heard of or felt before.

I don’t push her away because I’m afraid she’ll stop loving me, just as I know I could never stop loving her. I just worry that I’ll never be enough for her, that our worlds will never fit peaceably together. That it will breed resentment and turn something beautiful into something ugly. But my dad is right. I don’t believe Evie will do that. Her dad raised her not to care about such things. She’s faced down everyone at school and their scorn of the idea of her and me being together.

And regardless of all else… I am so much better a person for having loved her. Even if I lost her, somehow, someway, someday, I am better for the time spent with her, and her with me. We healed each other, and we will take that with us for the rest of our lives, wherever we go and whomever we’re with.

“I just don’t like how deep the feelings for her go,” I say quietly, staring at the table. “I don’t like feeling so vulnerable.”

To my surprise, my dad laughs and I look up at him, frowning.

He can’t seem to hold back his smile. “No one likes feeling that vulnerable,” he tells me, not unkindly. “That’s part of life, son. You just have to make the decision if the reward for being vulnerable is worth the risk. Most times, I’d say that it is.”

“If I’d known you were this wise about relationships, I’d have come to you a long time ago,” I mutter sourly, because I know he’s right.

Dad finds that hilarious, so funny he actually cracks up and tears leak out of his eyes. I watch him for a long moment and then, resigned, I laugh along with him.

We don’t hug. We don’t tell each other that we love the other or have any more meaningful words. There’s just an understanding that is eerily similar to what I share with Evie, that we know everything is all right between us as it never has been before, not even when my mom was around. Inexplicable but understood.

Dad just claps a hand on my shoulder and asks if I want to drive over to Alex’s place and get my stuff. It’s an invitation to come back home without being said in so many words. I tell him that of course I do.

We head over to Alex’s and he’s so surprised by the sight of my dad and me on his doorstep, smiling and getting along, that he’s struck speechless. Then he finally invites us inside. He makes fun of me in my dress clothes, asking when I’ll kick him out of his office at the club and then my dad cracks a joke about whether anyone will realize it’s a different man. It is weird how eerily the three of us look alike.

This line of questioning leads to questions about the art show and when they hear that I took first place and will be continuing on in the competition, they declare it’s time to celebrate. We settle around the kitchen table, each with a beer, and my dad doesn’t even complain as he would have in the past. We just toast Ezekiel Quain and his art career and take well needed drinks.

I’m reminded of all the times Alex and my dad sat on the porch, beers in hand and shooting the shit, staying out just long enough to watch me come rolling in, escorted by the cops or looking guilty with paint smears on my hands. It always ended in a lecture and argument. Now, I’m finally on the other side, one of them, no guilt on my conscience or secrets or messy emotions kept inside.

It feels good.

I look around the small table and am reminded of something that I often forget; that Alex and my dad are brothers. Family. That my mom came and went, that Cindy died, that their parents are dead too, but they still have each other.

Maybe there are some constants in life. Maybe my dad’s constant isn’t a woman, a love, but his brother. Alexander and Nathaniel Quain.

And maybe mine is Evie. In that instant I miss her with a painful, ferocious intensity that steals my breath away for a moment. I wish she was here. At a glance, she would appear wildly out of place, a small girl hanging out with three big men, two of them old bachelors.

But I know she would enjoy herself. Enjoy just watching, being able to participate. She would enjoy the easy rapport between the two brothers, as I do now. She would like the cozy feeling of Alex’s apartment, a place that only has one person living there but is still a home. She would enjoy just being with me, as I would enjoy just being with her.

And in that moment, I know I’m willing to take a risk.

Ezekiel

110

Dad and I get home late, very late. It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow is Saturday and neither of us has to work since I took the weekend off for the art show. We might even cook breakfast together or we might not. It doesn’t really matter. I won’t be pushing out the door first thing to avoid him, just as he won’t spend the weekend at work trying not to come home. That’s good enough.

My dad settles down on the couch in the living room, flipping on the television as I head up to my room. I pause, however, when I walk past Cindy’s door. Without thinking, I push on the flower drawing bearing her name and step inside. I move to sit on her bed, carefully remade after the night Evie spent in it.

I hadn’t been able to wash the sheets. Evie’s scent was there, flowery and intoxicating, but beneath it I could still smell the vanilla-sugarness of Cindy’s innocent scent. I’d been clinging to it. Clinging to this room, as though by walking into it, I could walk up to my sister and see her.

Sitting on the bed, I think over everything my dad told me. Only I don’t think about Evie when I do it. I think about Cindy. I think about whether she made me a better person by being in my life or whether it would have just been easier and less painful to avoid it all in the first place.

It’s a stupid question because the answer is so painfully obvious. Of course my life is better for Cindy being there, even if the time was far too brief. My sister taught me love—love for her. The selfless kind of love that is so opposite of what my mom displayed. She taught me sacrifice, what it really means to give up everything for another person. To not hold anything back when helping someone else.

She taught me drive and ambition, relentlessly pursuing her own dream day after day. Hours of grueling practice even though she was just a child, only eleven years old. She taught me to go after my dreams and not let anything—money, class, people around me, even a disappointing mother—get in the way or discourage me.

Dad is right; my life is better for having Cindy in it, even with all the pain and grief I went through after she died. But as I look around the room, I realize that keeping a bedroom immaculate doesn’t ease the pain. I don’t need to cling to
Cindy
anymore, as a small part of me is still doing. I need to cling to the lessons she taught me, the way she made my life better for being in it. Cling to just those things and let the rest of me move on.

I stand up and go down the stairs again, heading for the small, cramped basement. I find empty boxes down there and cart them up to Cindy’s room. I start with her closet, emptying all the clothes and the dancing outfits into boxes to be donated. They’re quickly filled up with the neat piles and then I make a second trip downstairs for more boxes.

Dad follows me this time to see what I’m doing. He watches from the doorway for a little while and I pretend not to notice the war that is plain on his face. The one I fought just a few moments ago as I sat on Cindy’s bed. Then he disappears from the doorway and returns a few minutes later with his own load of boxes.

We pack up everything. Her clothes and toys, her dance things and her books, even the bed linens. We pack up everything except for the shattered frame that has the sketch of my mom in it. Just the glass is broken and I carefully clean it out before handing it to my dad. Right now, I think he needs it much more than I do. We pack everything up until just the skeleton of the room remains; an empty bed and furniture, a polished, well-worn barre before a mirror.

It doesn’t feel good at all, to say goodbye again. To have a voice screaming that I’m erasing Cindy, severing my only connections to her, even though I know the voice is wrong. It’s not supposed to feel good.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good for me.