Release(10)

“Don’t suppose you’ve got anything big you want to tell them first?”

“What?”

“I figure if it’s both of us, then the heat gets split in two. Less for each.”

“Anything big to tell them like what?” Adam held his brother’s stare, daring Marty to say it out loud. Marty didn’t, so Adam went on. “No matter how mad they’re going to be at you for this – and they will be – at the end of it, they get a grandchild. You weather the storm, there’s a happy ending for you.” He couldn’t stop himself from adding, “Like there always is.”

“Not always,” Marty said.

“More often than me.”

Marty shook his head again. “You’re still just a kid. You wouldn’t even know what it is to fall in love yet. You will, though, one day. I hope.”

“You’re twenty-two, Marty. What do you think you know about love?”

“Bro–”

“If Felice isn’t the first girl you’ve slept with, then she’s the second, right?”

“I don’t see what that has to do–”

“Well, one, my sex life is already more vibrant than yours–”

“I don’t want to hear about that–”

“And two, I know what it is to be in love, Marty.”

“No, you don’t. Teenage love isn’t love. Especially if it’s…” He stopped.

“Especially if it’s what?” Adam leaned into the truck, raised his voice. “Especially if it’s what?”

Marty looked genuinely distressed. “You think they don’t know? You think they don’t talk to me about you all the time?”

“They never talk to me about me, so I just imagined they did their best not to think about it at all.”

“Look, I’m not…” Marty threw his hands in the air, failed to grab the word he wanted, rested them again on the steering wheel. “I love you, bro, but you have to know that this life you’ve chosen–”

“Tread carefully, Marty. I mean it. The world has completely changed around you while you weren’t looking.”

Marty looked Adam square in the eye. “It’s not real love. Everybody’s convinced themselves that it is, but it isn’t. And it never will be.”

Adam was so angry he felt winded, his airways struggling to get enough oxygen against the upswell of rage and hurt rising from his stomach. He wanted a line, a well-worded sentence he could hurl at Marty and wipe that maddening pity off his face, one that would incidentally destroy the truck somehow while annihilating his brother’s empty-headed arrogance, one that would win this stupid, soul-sucking argument once and for all.

But all he got out was “Asshole.”

He took off running again, turning his music back up. The horse and the companion goat watched him go.

He was stiff, had cooled off painfully, and it felt like he was running in leg splints, but he didn’t care. He ran anyway, leaving the truck behind.

I love you but…

It was always, always, “I love you but…”

He ran faster. And faster. And faster again.

This anger, he thought. This tedious, endless anger. Was that all there was ever going to be? Would it just twist him and twist him, obliterating everything else so he lost the ability to know when he should be angry because that was all there ever was?

He pushed, his strides growing longer, his hands opening and swinging higher into the sprint.

I don’t want this, he thought. I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want to always fight.

I want to love.

I want to love.

I want to love Enzo.

His legs were at their physical limit. They felt disconnected from him, almost their own creatures, filled with a wobbly sting, like an injury in cold weather. If he stopped to think, he would lose his balance. Running was the only thing that kept him upright.

I want to love Linus, he thought.

I want to want to love Linus.

He approached his house from the opposite direction he’d driven away earlier this morning, down a small gully, his speed peaking, the fire hydrant as his finish line, the fire hydrant, the fire hydrant–

He passed it and let up, slowing to walk in a circle. His heart was pumping so hard he could see it pulse in his wrists, his chest gulping air like a goldfish flipped from its bowl.

The music still blasted in his earbuds. He saw his mom looking at him from under the brim of her very corny gardening hat. She had a degree in linguistics, was only forty-three years old, but for some reason insisted on dressing like a grandmother from a commercial for fancy cookies. Folksiness, he supposed. Though she’d have the grandmother thing sooner than she thought.

He continued his circle, huffing air, letting the pounding in his temples and ears recede. He’d twice pushed himself hard enough to vomit, and though it was awful, there felt something heroic in it, too, something powerful about going beyond what you could safely do, into oblivion, to the point where you could erase yourself, be erased.

For that reason, he didn’t know now if his hands were shaking because of the run or because he was still raging.

He stopped, bending at the waist, trying to breathe through his nose. Without looking up, he turned off his music because his mom was clearly talking to him now. “What’s that?”