Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

She was as secure in her conclusion that he needed to cut his losses and accept Eddie’s death as all the other people orbiting his life, watching and judging from the outside.

The sepulchral vibe ached in his molars, wreckage all around resting silent and still.

The building carried a weight of age and respectability, something timeless that made him think of Eddie—bounded in his wildness, hunger that had never known privation. Old money, come home to roost.

Crouching in the hidden hollow of the closet, scruffed by the revenant that dogged his heels, he felt terribly and paradoxically alive.

The events of the past week left him feeling like tilled-up dirt: the earth’s viscera showing, full of worms and rocks.

The sun set like a tether snapping. He felt the change, night coming in like a stinging slap on the soles of his feet.

If Eddie had been Riley’s friend, he wasn’t that for Andrew. That friendship was a muted fraction of the real thing, the marrow-thing, that tied them together.

“For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”

Of course Eddie, monstrous as he’d been, had left behind a revenant that broke all the rules to cling to him, demolishing him one haunting at a time.

Nothing remotely close to this extravagant personal haunting had ever happened to him before, not even in the weeks after the cavern when the curse was fresh and awful. He was in uncharted territory.

The soil drank his sacrament and shot an echo into the world, an arrow that struck Andrew through the heart as he tore himself free of the mist with a shout, kicking leaf litter, mindless with the struggle to escape the married memories.

He drank in the gloaming-dimmed forest around him for signs, for some necromantic twinge, and scuffed his feet through the leaf litter in pursuit of more tangible evidence.

The land had known Eddie, had given him its rites, drunk the dregs of him down. He was one and the same as that earth.

The interstate spread in front and behind them. Night descended in degrees. Andrew watched shadows grow in the divots of Sam’s wrists, his exposed collarbones. His belt buckle peeked from underneath the hem of his shirt.

Andrew felt as if he’d fallen out of his body, as if his roommate could see straight through him.

He wasn’t some whiskey-gentry scion playing historian for kicks, digging into his long-nursed wounds to find the festering bottom. He didn’t belong at Vanderbilt, and he didn’t belong in Troth’s world either. He hadn’t been groomed to inherit the Fulton name and legacy. He was just Andrew Blur. All he wanted to unearth was the truth of Eddie’s last hours, to set things as right as he was able.

It was a leeching, corpse-cold thing; he wasn’t going to think of it as a real part of himself. It spread from its home in his belly through his veins, his teeth, his fingernails.

As borrowed life colored in the revenant’s edges, its tattered wrists began to ooze fresh red. Andrew saw that his, too, were shorn open to the bone, gushing with slow, determined pulses—matched and matching, in death as in life.

Night loitered in the shaded basement stairs and the silhouette of the house on the grass, waiting to descend. He didn’t want to be outside when that happened.

The version of Eddie lingering under the rattling of the windowpanes, the hush of the air conditioner, offered no succor and kept no promises to him. The bandages on his itching arms proved that.

The ancestral home creaked at the seams with the weight of contained histories, a constant pressure that ached in his nail-beds and molars.

Riley pinched his leg savagely and hissed, “Do fucking not. Whatever you just almost did, do not.” “Sorry,” he muttered, cramming the messy tendrils of the curse-gift back into their metaphorical lockbox. He felt like some kind of idiot, trying to explore his magic. “Christ almighty,” Riley said.

Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness.

He glanced for the blacked-out prowl of the Challenger, from habit and a different hunger, one that would remain unsated for as long as it lingered. He was about to turn twenty-three, and Eddie wasn’t going to see it happen.

The endless throb of missing Eddie kept on pulsing, but as he paced Sam in a pavement-eating game of tag, the pain banked a fraction.

Sam pulled him apart one notch at a time to release the horror he held under his skin.

The fact that he was continuing on—that he was changing, as the night before proved, growing past the static moment in time the revenant would always be trapped inside.

The stillness of Eddie’s paused life decomposed with each passing week, eaten away as the reality settled in. No one was coming home. The basket of clothes would remain unwashed, the guitar silent, the beer cans moldering. That immensity was the force that drove dogs to waste to death on their masters’ graves.

He’d spent his whole life repressing the inheritance Eddie had inflicted on him out of careless adoration; using it on purpose was like learning another set of limbs.

Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?

He had become a passenger in his flesh, one half of a whole, as he’d thought of himself for so long.

He’d known Eddie to the bone, or so he thought. But having Eddie’s memories inside of him was different. The tender awfulness of remembering himself through Eddie’s eyes, beautiful and cherished and wanted with raw confused intensity, with ownership, a sublimated tangled connection that Eddie had never spoken or unpacked, though it loomed so large—that understanding was an answer to the things about himself Del had made him confront, that he’d started figuring out with Halse, but it didn’t help. Having been loved wasn’t the same as being loved.

As boys they’d been happy here, together, and he felt scraps of the lifelong yearning Eddie had dragged to his grave with him.

The inheritance he’d taken up was nothing but poisoned ashes. It held only a fraction, a splinter, of Eddie’s adoration and anger and need.

Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.

The land seethed with death and need under his hands.

Knowing it was the right thing to do, to preserve the memory of Eddie as he’d really been, rather than what he’d become, didn’t fix how bad it hurt to be well and truly alone.

Each crunch of forest debris under his shoes put another foot of distance between the person he had been and the person he thought he might become. Eddie had left him this, also: a future to see through.