Bombora (10 page)

I shrug and play with the label of my beer. Beneath the table I can feel Callie breathing wetly on my bare toes, her quiet mood seeming to feed off the maudlin energy in the room. “We met at the beach a few months back,” I explain. “I know he comes across as kind of intense, but he’s a really good guy. He has his own shit to deal with as much as anyone else. Cardiff seems to be the place to be for emotional crises.” Though I smile at the joke, Nate doesn’t.

“He’s having an emotional crisis?” he asks instead.

For a second I debate how much to tell him. I don’t think it’s kosher to let slip that Phel is being rehabilitated for his nervous breakdown, but the basics probably won’t pose an issue. “Some guy back East really fucked him over—Phelan fell for him, hard, except the jerk turned out to be married with kids the whole time. The wife found out and the whole thing turned into a colossal mess, so Phel pretty much came out here to recoup and hide. The dude sounds like a classic douchebag, but Phel is still torn up.” Maybe I said too much; Nate flinches. The tic reminds me to stay on topic. “What’s going on with you and Em?”

The way Nate stares down at his beer makes it look like he really wants the beverage to up and speak for him. It doesn’t, of course, so Nate gives a miserable grunt that curls his lip at the corner. “Hugh, I—” His voice breaks, which I don’t think I’ve heard since Dad died. His hands come up to push through his hair roughly. “Fuck. I’m the classic douchebag, man. Emilia, she… she caught me messin’ around with someone else.”

The force of my jolt rocks my stool against the counter. “
What the fuck?
”

Nate grunts in response. My guess is he doesn’t want to have to repeat himself. Nevertheless, he sighs and chooses to elaborate, which I suppose is one of the perks of being a brother—if I were anyone else, I’m sure he would have told me to eat a dick. I can tell he’s not happy about it, though. “Yes, it was only one person, and no, I didn’t mean for it to happen.” He looks so damn tired when he says it and, if I can be honest, sad. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen Nate look that worn-down.

This information is somewhat reassuring, though only moderately so. Nate’s never been one for thinking ahead, and the spontaneity of his decision to cheat isn’t totally surprising to me; that he cheated at all is what’s shocking. My mind can’t decide what it wants to know most, however, so it seems best to stick to the basics. “And Emilia filed for divorce once she found out?”

Unexpectedly, Nate laughs, a quiet snort through his nose. “Actually, no. Despite what happened, we tried to work it out—did couples therapy for a while, separate bedrooms, ‘I feel’ statements, the whole bit. But it wasn’t helping, and eventually I just told her I’d gone as far as I could go, had the papers drawn up.
Then
she threw me out and announced she was applying for full custody of Liam.”

“Wait, you’re divorcing
her
?” I don’t mean to suggest Nate could only ever be the one to get dumped, not at all, but he’s always been first to admit Emilia is a perfect ten, not only gorgeous, but intelligent, sane, awesome, and a great mother to boot. Divorcing her is the equivalent of a homeless dude turning down a $50 million windfall. “Are you out of your mind? Why?” A horrible thought occurs to me: “Oh God, you aren’t in love with this other woman, are you?”

That defeated sigh again. “Yeah, Hugh, I am.” Our eyes meet, and he looks troubled, but not unsure; when I asked him the same thing about Emilia almost a decade ago, just after he found out about Liam, his answer wasn’t half as confident. “It was totally unplanned. We just met and….” He hesitates. “She changed my whole life, man. Changed the way I think about myself, who I want to be. I couldn’t stay with Emilia after that, not even for Liam. It’d be just as unhealthy for him to live in the same house as two parents who don’t love each other and fight all the time, a father who regrets everything he never became. Hell, we grew up with a dad who hated himself, and look how much fun that was.”

“So you would have left Emilia eventually, if she hadn’t found you out first?” I have my doubts about that, but leave them unsaid. Nate, for all his bluster, isn’t much of a risk-taker, especially when it comes to falling short of other people’s expectations of him. It’s for that reason I try not to ask too much of him, because I know he’ll bend over backwards every time to try and come through, even if he kills himself in the process.

“I was thinking pretty seriously about it,” Nate admits. “It never seemed like a real option, but after a year, it began to feel like the
only
one. I couldn’t keep living a lie, and it wasn’t fair to anyone.”

It feels like my mind is running at half speed; much of what I should be extrapolating from this conversation is losing out to the bombshells Nate probably doesn’t even realize are bombshells. “A year?!” Jesus, my voice is starting to screech worse than Gilbert Gottfried’s. I knock it down a few decibels until I’m almost at a whisper, even though we’re inside my own house. “You screwed around on your wife and kid for a whole
year
, Nate? Seriously? What the fuck?”

“It wasn’t that simple, dude.” The flush high in his cheeks hints that Nate is starting to get angry, defensive. “Both of us had something to lose by the relationship coming out.” He gets flustered for no reason and adds, uselessly, “In the open, I mean. Out in the open. Trust me, the last thing she wanted was for it to become public knowledge she was dating some loser contractor from the middle of nowhere. Her family is super conservative and high-profile, and it just… trust me when I say the fallout was bad.”

God, what is it with these people?
I think. Like it wasn’t bad enough Phel’s parents kicked him to the curb and forgot his name when they found out he was gay; apparently there are still families out there pulling
Gone With the Wind
Scarlett O’Hara shit. “Where is she now?” I ask awkwardly. “Are you two still together at least?”

Nate clenches his jaw. “No. She pretty much told me to get herpes and die painfully when she found out I was married. I’d told her about Liam before that, but Emilia… I tried to play it off like we were no longer together.” He must catch my look, because he adds, “I know, Hugh, I fucked up big time. You don’t need to say it.”

“Holy shit, Nate. You didn’t just fuck up, you ruined three people’s lives, not including your own!” The force of my own outburst surprises me, but goddamn—I’ve never known Nate to be so careless with other people. He’s never been anything but overprotective of the people he loves, me and Emilia and Liam. If the shoe were on the other foot, he’d have killed someone for pulling a stunt like this. I feel like I don’t know the person sitting in front of me, and I think maybe that comes out in the way I look at my brother across the countertop, because Nate bristles and visibly restrains himself from throwing something, either a fist or his beer bottle.

“I said I know, Hugh, okay?” he grates out. “I tried to do what I thought was best for everyone involved, but I didn’t think it through—obviously. What I thought was the right thing to do turned out to be totally wrong, and I see that now. If I could do it all again, I’d—” He makes a hurt sound. “Maybe I would have never married Emilia in the first place, who knows? Maybe I would have tried to be a good father by keeping the hell away from them both.”

“That’s bullshit.” I don’t know where this sudden anger is coming from. I probably should feel bad about yelling at Nate when he’s obviously in a rough place himself, but I just can’t fight it. It all seems so… so
wasteful
, so callous in its carelessness. Sure, I don’t know the whole story, but what I see in front of me makes a hard knot of nausea form in my stomach. “The only person you tried to do right by was yourself. I mean—Jesus Christ. Do you have any idea what I’d
do
for a family like yours, for a chance to have that kind of happiness? You’ve had your whole life just handed to you, and you don’t even appreciate it!”

“Fuck you, man.” Lurching out of his chair, Nate whips his half-empty bottle at the sink, where it clatters against the stainless steel with an awful noise but doesn’t break.

Though the sound makes me want to flinch, I remain seated, remain still, staring Nate down even as I will my anger to get itself under control. Nate and I don’t do this: we don’t turn on each other. But there’s a lot of stuff I’ve heard about this morning that I sure as hell never expected either. What hurts most of all is the tremor I notice in Nate’s hands a second before he balls them into fists, trying to get a hold of himself. But I don’t know how to respond to that any more than I knew what to say when our dad got drunk late at night and started to cry over our mom while I did my homework in the kitchen. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly strong person, and it’s a pretty big deal for the one person I look up to—Nate—to keep it together for both of us.

It seems I’ve fallen short of his expectations of me too, which I know without him saying anything. Still, it wouldn’t be Nate if he let me off the hook easily—he’s been lecturing me since he was six years old. “You know,” he begins, “of everyone who’s bothered to remind me what a piece of shit I am throughout all this, the one person I didn’t expect to hear it from is you. My own fucking brother. We’ve both made mistakes in our lives, but apparently the door don’t swing both ways like I thought it did.” He goes quiet for a second and I can see his rage dying in front of me; he looks exhausted again. “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t have time to unpack,” he says grimly. “I’ll grab my crap and be out of your hair if you don’t want me here ruining your chance to play house with Phel.”

This last part is too much to keep me from rolling my eyes—honestly, my brother is such a drama queen sometimes—but Nate stalks out of the kitchen before he can see, then clomps up the stairs like he’s forgotten how to be the elder sibling and not some melodramatic little bitch. I don’t belittle his angst, but where I’m concerned he’ll have calmed down by the time I count to ten and make my way upstairs after him. The cool-down is as much for his benefit as my own, and as the seconds tick by, I can feel the anger slowly start to recede, replaced by what I know is sadness for Nate’s situation and, if I’m honest, bitterness over my own. I don’t have a right to start comparing his position to what I might have had with Nell, because they’re very different, same as Nell and Emilia were very different women, and Nate and I are different men.

Upstairs, there’s some shuffling around and the sound of various objects being slammed, hopefully nothing of mine, but then everything goes quiet and I recognize my cue. Tail thumping, Callie keeps one eye on the ceiling like it could start up again any minute, but I know it won’t. Nate knows the two things he can always expect from me are tough love and someone to have his back, which might seem contradictory but really aren’t. Right now he’s railing against the fact that staying in my house means having to put up with my honest assessment of his idiocy. But he’ll get over it, and together we’ll figure out what’s next.

Sure enough, Nate is sitting on the edge of his bed when I pause in the doorway of his bedroom—so named because he has a standing invitation here—and while his bag is indeed packed, it isn’t zippered. Having arrived with just his bike, he packed light. Nate glances up at me without saying anything, waiting, and eventually I approach and take a seat next to him on the mattress. Busybody that she is, Callie leaps onto the bed and settles herself precisely in the middle, head nestled on her paws so she can watch us both by only twitching her eyes back and forth. I guess for her this is better than reality television.

“You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want,” I say grimly. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” It’s not an apology, but I’m not going to say sorry for speaking the truth when Nate probably needs it most.

“That’s totally what you intended,” Nate says with a snort. He’s right. Or at least I didn’t try
not
to upset him. “It’s, like, your God-given right to try and piss me off.” He falls silent for a few seconds before adding, “I know you think I took my marriage for granted, Hugh, but it wasn’t like what you had with Nell. You two chose each other, legitimately wanted to spend the rest of your lives together in a way I never got to think about with Emilia. Yeah, I love her, and God knows I love Liam more than I can say, but jumpin’ into that marriage was just the first in a long line of shit I didn’t really think through.” He huffs, and I know he’s ready to try to inject humor into the situation—Nate’s special way of trying to regroup, not so much from me as the issue at hand. It’s how he deals. “Well, that and not using a rubber. Woulda served me right if I’d gotten the syph or somethin’.”

With a sigh, I reach out and pat his knee, registering that Nate is a bit thinner than when I saw him last, the tiredness coming through in the quiet slump of his shoulders and the way his flesh seems to cling to his bones with only purpose and no joy. Nate, when he’s content, is the kind of person to let things slide and embrace a little happy weight; it occurs to me that, by those standards at least, he probably looked happier in the last year than I’ve seen him in a long time. Not that he’ll ever be fat, because Nate works too hard for that to happen, but he certainly had the look of a man at ease in his life. I don’t know whether to thank this other woman for that, whoever she is, or blame her.

“The fact that you asked for a divorce is a start,” I tell Nate. “At least you’re not leading Emilia on by pretending it’s what you still want. A bit late, but better than never. I guess.”

To my surprise, rather than accepting the olive branch for what it is, Nate grimaces. “Ironically, I think that’s what pissed her off the most of anything,” he admits. “Emilia was ready to sweep the whole thing under the rug—forget about my ‘phase’, as she called it—and couldn’t believe I wasn’t willing to do the same. But by that point it couldn’t have gone any other way, man. You’re right in that much.”

I hesitate for a second, pitying Emilia and fretting about Liam, but also painfully sad for my brother, who is obviously shouldering a whole lot more than a pending divorce. “Are you going to try and find her?” I ask. “This woman? If you love her, maybe there’s still a chance.”