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Chapter Four
Nala
It’s been five years since Malcolm and I had anything resembling a relationship. Recently, we’ve been forced back together because neither of us, for all our bravado, will give up the family we’ve created with Jordan and Brooks, and Hunter and Isa. As a result, we’ve spent some moments together in the last year, but mostly with other people.
Today, it’s just us, and no matter how much I promised Brooks I could do this, I’m starting to wonder. All of that time between our separation and now has left us with more silence than words—both of us lost in thoughts and memories that neither of us quite know how to deal with.
On the drive home, we speak exactly twice after getting onto the interstate: when I ask him if he needs me to stop by a pharmacy to pick up any kind of prescription—to which he responds, “I don’t need medicine”—and when I ask him how long he’s going to be home.
“Eager to get rid of me already?”
“You guessed it,” I fire back, irritated that he can’t see, or just won’t acknowledge, that I’m making an effort, and try to do the same. “Although, I can’t imagine why I’d be happy to see you go, what, with how enjoyable spending time with you is.”
From the corner of my eye, I see him turn his head so he can study me. I keep my own eyes stubbornly forward, mad because he’s doing what Malcolm always does, which is only thinking of himself, and I’m responding to it. I know better.
“As long as it takes to get back into shape,” he says. And then he must see the steam about to come out of my ears, because he adds. “At least twelve weeks, according to the doctors. Maybe sixteen, but I usually heal faster than most.”
I don’t respond to that, because I can say that with absolute certainty about him. He learned to take a hit from an early age, learned to nurse a bruise, a cut, a broken bone, and a broken heart before most of us learned to walk. Which is why when Malcolm walks away from something, a fall, a loss, a friend, he does it without looking back.
I kind of hate his ability to do that. Just like I hate how my heart leaps at the prospect of twelve to sixteen weeks of Malcolm.
Possibly four months.
I try to think back to the last time Mal was home for more than an extended vacation, and I can’t. Since he left at the beginning of his sophomore year in high school to become a professional skater, he’s never been back for longer than a month. When I needed to avoid him, the fact that he was never here made that a whole lot easier.
I’m silent until I pull into his driveway, where I turn off the ignition and jump out so I can round the front and help him.
“I’ve got it,” he growls when I reach for his bag and crutches. Swinging his long frame around, he jumps down from the seat, the pain obvious in his eyes, but he doesn’t acknowledge it. He just reaches over and into the backseat, yanking out his backpack and swinging it on before grabbing his crutches.
Then, he turns and heads up the small walk without a word to me, crutches making his trek slower than normal. Swallowing back another scream, I follow, irritated that even when he’s being a dick, I have a compulsive need to make sure he doesn’t fall and break his other leg.
I don’t know why it surprises me. Malcolm has always been quick to react, and quick to demand. Just like he’s always been careful to show no sign of weakness; Malcolm has been, and will always try to be, the strongest person, for himself, and everyone around him.
It’s one of the reasons I loved him so hard for so long.
+ + +
Seven Years Ago
The wind whips up against the shoreline, biting through my long-sleeved rash guard. I ignore it, and the rapidly falling sun, paddling harder to make one more ride before the sky is fully dark.
This isn’t my first run of the day. I’ve come and gone once, heading home to be with Mom for dinner the way she likes, but one foot inside the door and I knew I would be back here. Luke’s still gone—which means Mom is still crying. It’s been like this for a week; every day since the man who was not my father, but the closest thing I’ve had for the last five years, up and decided that he was bored living in a small beach shack near the ocean in a normal city.
“This isn’t the extraordinary life I want, Reece.”
According to Mom, that’s what he said. I came home from school Monday, and he was gone. She was crying, and has been since. It hurts me to listen to her, and makes it impossible to shed my own tears when we are together.
My mom…she’s not opposed to crying. “Tears are real,” she always tells me. “If your body wants to shed them, do it, because it means something, even if you don’t know what.”
I know why she’s crying; I just don’t know how to help. And these tears, they aren’t like the ones she cries when she’s sad about war, or illness, or the angry tears she cries when she cuts herself on a piece of metal. These are like the tears she used to cry after she talked to Nana and Pop, her parents who don’t come visit anymore. They are painful tears, like the ones I shed when I fall off my board and hit my head on a rock, or the kind that my best friend Ashton cries when I sleep over at her house and she doesn’t think I can hear her.
So, instead of staying all night, I stayed long enough to search out last night’s pasta noodles and put them into a lidded container with some pine nuts and strawberries. Then I grabbed my board, and walked back down to the water. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but maybe, like Ashton when she curls into a ball in her closet, maybe Mom wants to be alone. I don’t know, but I do know I can’t stay and feel my heart break over and over.
He wasn’t my dad, but he was my friend, and Luke left me, too.
I find a wave, not a good one, but good enough, and I paddle until my lungs burn and my arms are jelly, pushing to my feet and finally—finally—reaching that familiar rush of calm, the same one that always comes when I’m at the water.
I find more like it, and I keep paddling, over and over, liking the burning lungs and straining arms more than the pain in my chest.
