Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

He was coming back to Tennessee, but there wasn’t going to be a homecoming. He’d buried home two weeks past.

No mistaking the ruined flesh and its bleak message, unless the obvious narrative wasn’t the whole story. Maybe instead it was a palimpsest, scrawled in haste over the original draft to cover—something else. He wasn’t sure what.

He’d left in a box, a handful of weeks before Andrew was due to join him, without so much as a warning—leaving him a car, and a house, and a graduate program, and a fortune, but nothing that mattered as much as himself. Without Eddie, there was no point.

Weighed down by the shittiness of the interminable drive, the conflict-riddled afternoon, and the impending rest of his life, he allowed exhaustion to drag his eyelids shut for a brief rest.

There would be half-finished drinks on the shelves, a guitar and a battered amp in the closet that used to be Andrew’s and were once again.

Eddie had put together a perfect room, a room that held all of him without the slightest effort. He’d done it without question, knowing Andrew’s needs inside and out. The shelf yawned for his own books to be added to it, the closet gaped for clothes, the space waited to become home. No part of Andrew could conceive of the room as a goodbye offering. It was too much a welcome to the life in Nashville that Eddie had talked up on his calls, the impending reunion after their brief, uncomfortable separation.

Pretended that he hadn’t spent most of his life ignoring desperate whispers at the limits of his hearing, and that his bones kept quiet under his skin instead of flaring to life with a terrible itch of potential during the blackest depths of night.

He shouldn’t have been in Nashville in the first place, considering the force with which Andrew had protested their application to Vanderbilt, far too close to the teenage past they’d skinned loose. But Eddie was a convincing liar with a long list of fake reasons; his decision had withstood Andrew’s meager arguments.

Every moment of his life that followed would take him further from Eddie, no matter his efforts to scrounge for the remains, but what else was there for him to do except draw what was left as close as he could?

“Sam, be chill for once in your goddamn life,” Riley said.

He couldn’t marshal his thoughts past his raised-hackles resistance to their being more at home than Andrew was in the middle of his own living room.

He’d cared about music, once, though he no longer had access to the emotion, which felt like it had happened inside a different person a long time ago.

If Eddie’s lark of attending Vanderbilt and his burgeoning research posed no real threat, poisonous and horrible as it was for him to pursue without telling Andrew, then it had to be something else. Maybe something like the kind of trouble that tagged along after boys with fast cars and bad habits, who might protect themselves first and their new friend second if trouble arose.

His better judgment shut off, leaving him standing in a kitchen that wasn’t really his, in the heart of a place he’d tried to leave behind forever, thinking is it your fault he’s dead? at a stranger who wanted to be his friend.

The question of who to blame, himself or the world or their lifetime of ghosts or the other boys Eddie had given his time, bared endless rows of teeth.

Home was where Eddie was; home was nowhere, now.

An icy burning gripped the back of his neck in the rough outline of fingers, their shape more familiar than his face in the mirror. Against good judgment and survival instinct he leaned into the too-solid hold. It hurt, but he missed that touch so much, even this noxious remnant.

In the course of hours he’d learned that Sam Halse had cocaine and a fast car and apparently a goddamn death wish—inviting scabs on his knuckles, plus a mouth that could peel paint off a wall. The appeal was obvious. Eddie might have been fond of Riley, talked gothic bullshit with him and got drunk on cheap beer, but now Andrew understood where the hook had sunk in because it pierced straight through the meat of his cheek, too. He wanted to race Halse again, and that was a strange sensation: want. He also wanted to break his knuckles on Halse’s jaw.

Good-natured, that was the phrase that kept popping into his head about Riley. Hard to square that nature with the conflict between him and West, his nonchalant acceptance of Eddie’s eldritch obsessions, his uncritical kinship to his firebrand cousin.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Andrew said, though the truth was, I needed to see for myself what kind of trouble you make.

“Don’t be. I wouldn’t let someone talk shit about him either. And he was your—you know, he was yours, you were together.” “No,” Andrew said. “It wasn’t like that. We weren’t like that.” “What,” Riley said, twisting in his seat and glancing away from the road. Andrew met his eyes for a split second before closing his own against the accusation he saw there, the hurt wedged like a splinter under a fingernail. “I’m not gay.” “Oh my god,” Riley murmured. His laugh was forced and, Andrew thought, incredulous. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re serious?”

Andrew subsided. The night whipped past in silence. His knuckles hurt. And he kept hearing Riley say he was your—on loop. What word should he put after? On paper, a sibling; in practice, something else. 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. Through the cavern and their hauntings since, through a life spent with Eddie keeping him leashed but cared for at the same time, he couldn’t find a label that fit where he needed it to go. Maybe instead, just a hard stop: he was yours.

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

The tomb of the bedroom above him filled him with a miserable, childish yearning: his head hurt, his hands hurt, his soul hurt, his hangover was monumental, and he missed Eddie. Face in his hands, Andrew shuddered through a few hard breaths. He didn’t miss his parents, he didn’t miss Del, he didn’t miss his old apartment. Those gaps were all distant aches that didn’t require filling, only an awareness of loss. Eddie’s absence, though, cut a trough of tired need that no one else had the potential to fill up—

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.

The sight of himself in the mirror that morning, despite as liberal an application of ice as his body could handle, hadn’t been pretty: not for him the aesthetic, fashionable black eye; instead, a visual reminder of the kind of uncontrolled violence that folks on Vandy’s campus didn’t see much.

The wolf-grin made a reappearance as Sam, knees spread in his kingly position on the couch, dragged his eyes up the length of Andrew, as hot and stinging as the four faint lines his fingers had left behind.

No one had touched him so much in—weeks, months. Eddie had visited him at the end of the spring term and spent the whole five days manhandling him: scratching his scalp, digging thumbs into the knots of his trapezius muscles, rolling on top of him during naps, once gnawing absently on the knob of his wrist for a full five seconds during a movie. Eddie’s touch was a careless claim that meant home, home, home. These knockoffs hadn’t earned the right to handle him.

A shudder ripped across the bones of Andrew’s forearms, terror and delight and the promise of risk bringing him to life.

The revenant made its accusation implicit: at the bitter end, Eddie hadn’t wanted to die—Eddie tried to save himself, Eddie reached for Andrew. If Andrew had come home sooner—if he’d been there, to stop the whole thing—

Eddie had reached for him in those last moments, after violence was done to him, and Andrew hadn’t been there—not to stop it from happening, not to rescue him as he begged for help. That was all the haunt really had to show him. He didn’t blame it for rubbing that salt into his wounds.

Halse laid his palm over the trunk of a broad, craggy white oak with its bottom branches curved almost to the ground. The tree was as broad as Sam’s wingspan, Andrew guessed, a monster planted in the middle of a ring of skinnier growth. It had a certain poetic weight. He hated it with a fierce, scouring depth.

In all his dreams, he’d never seen the tree, this broad spreading creature standing guard over a forest he wasn’t sure the name of.

How to put to words that he’d seen a stranger’s hands arranging Eddie’s corpse in a cruel parody of care, that knowing the truth recast his haunt-dreams from covetous punishments for his absence to stark evidence of his failing loyalties? The revenant had shown him in its crooked, horrible way, and he’d ignored its efforts.

After a night spent driving, crawling, fighting, and spilling confessions, he was a different version of himself than he had been that morning. It was rare to feel a shift so clearly. He wasn’t sure he welcomed the defamiliarization.

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.

“I’m sorry he died before you figured it out. For what it’s worth, I think you might’ve eventually, without me there to displace your bullshit onto. He was head over heels for you, and everyone knew but you, and maybe him. No, I think he knew. I think he hated seeing you with me, so he got himself involved.”

Country woods weren’t his favorite place to be, but Sam’s offer meant something; depending on how the conversation went with West, he’d need to have a breather outside of the rooms Eddie had left behind, and Sam was giving him somewhere to be. No one would fuck with him out at Sam’s, and there would be room to think through whatever he learned. He hated that it sounded so good.

Sam is so into Andrew lmao

He felt scoured from the intimate conversation, occupied by the picture of a miserable teenage Sam Halse tumbling through a single-pane glass door ass-first, bleeding on the upholstery of some cheap sedan on a long ride to a hospital. Mundane, personal, and monumental at the same time.

Andrew collapsed into the chair to stare at the clippings Eddie had assembled to chart the public narrative of their shared trauma. Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness.

They’d survived, but not unscathed. The unruly, ghoulish power that streaked through his veins marked him as an heir to the Fulton lineage, more than he ever wanted to be.

A bare handful of weeks ago he’d run into them here, at this same gas station, knowing nothing but that he might punch Halse across his smug mouth at the first wrong step. Now he knew their faces, their habits, and in the case of the cousins, had begun to form something that felt like ease. His wrapped Supra fit in perfectly between their cars, right at home, oozing red to mauve to purple in the washed-out light.

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.

Andrew sat on the end of Eddie’s bed, working his fingers against one another, thumbs digging into the meat of his palms. His phone stuck out from the folds of the comforter. Curtains billowed in the breeze from the open window. The faint crispness of oncoming fall lingered in the gust of cool air. Summer’s end. Nights that felt open with possibility, weather for a hoodie with the sleeves rolled up, cigarettes and bourbon to fight off the hint of winter rolling in from the north. It came earlier in Columbus.

His hands floundered for a place to rest. The cushion skidded with a leather squeak under his palm; the other hand twisted in the hem of Sam’s shirt for a lifeline. He’d held on like this before, but he’d never been so aware of the reason. Now he was starting to understand where the instinct to grab for Sam came from, and the resulting vertiginous swoop in his belly.

Nothing from the past, here, no steps to retread—the fresh lightness of that almost made him laugh, but instead he gripped Sam’s outside leg and slotted their bodies together.

The release that cracked his sternum was a consummation of a long-held urge, but not a replacement for anything. He hadn’t known how bad he’d wanted this, before, but—he guessed he had.

He expected to feel ashamed, or frightened, or like he didn’t know himself. Instead he floundered in a curious free-falling simplicity, almost pleasant.