For Brad (3)

Michael stands with his hands on his hips, his brow twisted into a frown over his blue eyes.  His fists ball up against his ribcage, and his pale nostrils flare.  Next to him, Badham gets quiet and shadowy, slipping off to the corner to watch Michael’s tantrum. 

“I don’t go to the baby school,” he growls at me, and plants his two feet, in their small sneakers, onto the floor.  “I read better than the big kids.”

Badham picks around the attic of the school, looking at toys and picture books and cribs and twin beds.  Their belongings from the house are organized into a corner, spilling over a bunk-bed that is covered in sheets printed with a jungle pattern.  He slides into the bottom bunk, and picks his nose.

“There’s our walkie-talkies,” Badham observes, and Michael ignores him. 

Both of the boys are wearing white tank tops with blue piping along the sleeves and collar.  The front is printed with Transformers that match the print of their papery swimming trunks.  Michael is blonder and taller and thinner than Badham, who is chubby and has darker skin, but their resemblance is obvious.  Badham has a shorter nose, more often smeared with dirt.  Michael has longer legs with more scabs on the knees. 

“Me and Dig are not babies,” he insists, his cheeks reddening and his volume increasing.  Badham watches him, his head low.

“Michael,” I start to tell him, my voice quiet, and he yells over me, his voice high and almost squealing.

“This room is stupid!”

His face breaks into angry tears as he sits down on the floor and looses his rage onto a plastic dump truck.  He bashes it into the floor of the attic, and then beats the floor with his fists, his high voice wailing.  I watch him with my arms crossed, and stand still and amazed when Badham crosses the room and turns Michael over onto his back.

Badham sits on Michael’s thighs, and puts his arms around his chest.  Michael calms down, a little at a time, into whimpers, while Badham bear-hugs him into submission.  Michael fumes up to the ceiling, his brow still knit and his breath heavy, pushing up Badham’s head on his chest, until 10 minutes has gone by, and they are both asleep. 

When I turn around to leave, Brad is standing in the doorway, his baseball hat pushed back on his head, arms crossed and leaning on the door jamb.

“Isn’t that the most convenient shit you’ve ever seen?” he asks me, and I slip by him, and down the stairs of the new school, passing wide wood-paneled hallways with his hand in mine. 

“Some temper,” he remarks with pride, like Michael’s tantrum is something passed directly from father to son. 

*

“You think I’m fuckin’ stupid, Evie, you do!” Brad yells at me, his face the same red as Michael’s, tears welling up in his eyes.  “I see it when you fuckin’ look at me like I don’t know anything!”

“I don’t think that!” I protest at him.  “I never thought that!”

“Yes you fucking did.  You said the map I made was fuckin’ wrong and I’m a whiny pussy because of Donny,” he rants, pulling the sleeve of his shirt down over his knuckles by instinct.  The ground around us is muddy, but freezing cold, the sucking swamp eating the front tire of the van I was driving that I guess must’ve been Joshua’s.  The snow comes down in little flecks that melt and soak my hair quickly.  His breath puffs out of his mouth while he cries.

“I made that for you - for us,” he corrects himself.  He shivers without his jacket, left somewhere in the back, and I think I should offer him mine, or at least the chance to get back in the car, but I just stand there, getting wet in the snow. 

The thing about hell is that I never felt like I could ever leave for anyone or anything.  Not with any real permanence.  And I might’ve been able to make my inhabiting it romantic in some way, tragic even, if I had tried hard enough to do it.  I could have decided to embrace that as who I really was and maybe this would have all ended another way, with me standing next to Matthew and declaring everyone else to be fragments of distorted glass in a window, but it was always Brad that gave me the longest and most dire of pauses. 

At the end of the day…

At the end of the day, Evie, what is it you really want? 

And the answer to that was always something Brad gave me, something I wanted that he had, somewhere there was a chance to keep the idea of us alive.  To be close to him or even witnessed by him.  To fucking understand him. 

And it was always Brad because I had a responsibility built into me a long time ago, to see him through whatever I could.  Maybe it just comes down to blood being thicker than water, I don’t know.  I came home because of him, and it has always been him that was the reason I really stayed, at the very end of the longest days. 

But what would Brad do without me?

Oh fuck you, Evie.  I’ll move the fuck on is what I’ll do.  I’ll move on and cut you right out of my virgin.  Fucking.  Heart.

But what will I do without you?

Who would I even be?