Summer Sons(22)
it isn’t for fun. I’m not cutting you out. you have your own life up there to deal with and I’m sorting out his business here
A response came back almost as soon as he finished:
Okay, fine. Sorry, I didn’t think Eddie was the sole reason we talked, but I guess I was wrong.
you’re being unfair
And you’re being a complete fuck
Andrew ground his teeth. Now that they’d come home, the eight years he and Eddie had spent in Columbus felt like the dream. He was already picking up Eddie’s shit habits, acting as if here was where he belonged instead of there—or anywhere else. Home was where Eddie was; home was nowhere, now. Except the heat and the smells and the cicada-filled nights pulled him straight to his childhood, the summer before Eddie’s parents died, the summer after the cavern. The imaginary fist he kept clenched around the haunted, haunting presence in his chest loosened bit by bit the longer he stuck around Nashville, and those cracks let out something other than light. He pictured a cold darkness seeping out, dripping free of the confines where it belonged, almost as tangible as the blood pulsing in his veins. He couldn’t stand to let Eddie’s research pry that fist any further open.
The phone lit up with another message. Del had continued: Just because he was the only thing you ever gave a shit about doesn’t mean that other people don’t care about you.
As his thumb hovered over the keyboard, weighing a diplomatic response against the lit fuse of irritation that pushed him to say something he couldn’t take back, the unsaved number buzzed in twice more. Text me back and Sun’s down have some fun?
“Who the fuck,” he muttered.
He had one good guess and he didn’t care to pursue that in the middle of the endless argument with Del. To fortify himself, he stole the near-finished bottle of bourbon from the kitchen counter and mounted the stairs, tapping the CALL button before he second-guessed himself.
She answered immediately. “Yeah?”
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself,” she replied, the opposite of lighthearted. Andrew sat on the edge of Eddie’s bed and took a swig from the bottle that burned his sinuses. “Did you call for a reason?”
“Yeah, because you’re upset.”
“Bullshit.”
The sound of her breath on the other end of the line filled the silence. Which of us did you love best, he almost asked, but he knew the answer: no one who’d met them both could prefer him over Eddie. Even he didn’t. Del should’ve given up on them both. So instead he murmured, “Because I’m upset.”
“Bingo,” Del said. He resented, childishly, the exhaustion he heard. “I figured you needed someone to talk to, whether or not I felt like talking to you right now. Why come back to me? That crew he found getting to you or something?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” he said.
She paused, then started in. “Or is it the fantasy where you find a culprit, someone else you can blame for all this? Do you think someone else cut his wrists, Andrew, really? Is it starting to sink in that Eddie was just selfish, that he abandoned—”
Andrew hung up on her. Do you think someone else cut his wrists, said with such utter contempt, as if by chasing that possibility he was lying to himself about the person Eddie had been. But how was it any more implausible than offing himself out of the blue? The screen accused him with another incoming call, but he ignored it.
Their other friends hadn’t tried to contact him. Del was the last straggler. He wondered if she hated him, and if he deserved it; she’d have been better off without their dead weight dragging at her heels, long after their frosty breakup as freshmen at OSU. He knew that the person he’d been with Eddie wasn’t the person he would be without him, and neither version ultimately had much to offer Del. He tipped the bottle back, bitter and burning, for two short swallows. As he leaned to set the bourbon on the nightstand, he noticed it: the notebook lay open at the mouth of the closet, papers on top of it, like his hidden stack had been pettily upended.
Teeth bared, he thumped the bottle onto the floor. One more time, he scooped the papers and the notebook up, open to a page that began mid-sentence: haunts are mediocre til you feed them & then you’ve got a fucking problem, moral of the story. Disturbingly direct. He flipped it shut one-handed. The phone buzzed behind him again. He burst out, “Fuck, leave me alone!” With Eddie’s notes in his other hand, he grabbed the phone from the bed and scrolled through his texts—a handful of apologies from Del, as he expected, but more from the unknown number.
I thought Riley said you were treating him fine
Don’t make me fuck you up
Poor you sure but you’re walking a fine line here
Riley says it’s his fault but maybe you just need to get out of that fucking house for a night
The phone creaked in his fist, plastic protesting his grip. Not so unknown, after all, Halse taking up for his cousin and getting in where he didn’t need to be. Another message flicked into the inbox, saying, I’ll ask you again: come out with us.
Andrew dropped the phone on the end table, nerves skittering. Don’t make me fuck you up was a hell of a thing to say to him, a total stranger. The sawed-through slashes on Eddie’s wrists had bisected his tattoo; even if Andrew swallowed the suggestion that he’d been abandoned, Eddie wouldn’t disrespect him so completely. Do you think someone else cut his wrists? Another man might, though, maybe someone like Sam Halse—for reasons Andrew couldn’t begin to guess. All he knew of him was his brash reputation and the contained fury in his texts.