Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

Though he glanced over, he let Andrew take a quiet minute to catalogue him without interruption, from shorn buzz cut to the dense swell of his biceps to the faint roll of flesh at the band of his underwear. He had unexpectedly bony, large feet.

“Good,” he said, packing the word with expectation and vulnerability, far from on-brand for his provocative kingship.

Sam cackled with childish glee. Andrew ignored the reflexive burn of dampness that sprang to his eyes at the domesticity of the morning in favor of the fresh wonder of smooth skin under his cheek, magnetic and allowed. Life coursed through him with each thud of his pulse. He had no idea what he was doing, except that it fit. 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.

Once he regained the feeling in his hand, he picked up the ring from the desk, playing it along his palm. Eddie might fade from the world, but he had a handful of things left to hold close. Platinum meant forever; he wasn’t sure if he intended his gesture as an apology to the friend he’d loved or a reminder of his responsibility to him. The band slid snug onto his left ring finger, as if made to match the hand Eddie had held on the dorm balcony years before, when he’d been marked a second time.

Once in the car, Andrew asked, “You sure about doing this with me?” “Don’t say dumb shit. You’re one of mine, Blur, and we’re going to get you sorted out fine, okay?” Sam said as the engine growled to life. 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?

The work he’d done, that the cousins had helped him with despite their misgivings and his intractability, crumbled like dry soil through his fingers when he tried to mold it into a logical whole. Looming at the center of a set of jagged spokes sat the curse, connected to the hollers and to the university alike, thanks to Eddie—to study carrels and double-wide trailers and interstates at night. The curse was his and Eddie’s bond; maybe it was an answer too, if he found the right question and put it to the right person.

“He’s dead, Sam.” “I know that. He’s not gone, though. Look at us right this minute. Half the conversations we have, he’s in them. I was going to fuck you wearing his ring on your wedding finger.”

He’d come full circle, back to the kid trapped in a cavern with a broken ankle, waiting to die, best friend in his arms.

Eddie had left him a mess of clues to follow, but he’d stepped straight into the trap with the same blind confidence that had gotten them to the caverns the first time. Except he’d been the one to drag Sam along with him, unwilling but dedicated, repeating the cycle of his inheritance.

He gave silent, hysterical thanks to Eddie’s bad habits and his own lack of survival instinct.

The sorcerers in stories all fed ghosts blood to bring them life, and in this version, he was summoner and sacrifice at the same time.

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

A concentric ripple washed from the site of his unmaking, his possession, through the earth and dust and bones the plantation was built on. The thing that had been Eddie was him, and he had become it as well. The crush of their beings slid home together, filling the gaps and crannies he had left, coursing through his blood and occupying his wounds. The pain lessened in his arms.

Compared to the darkness of Troth’s void, Halse burned bright as an ember in their unearthly sight. His life was precious; on that, he and the remnant agreed.

Scattered memories cluttered his brain, his own and Eddie’s, twinned: giving himself the tattoo with broader hands and a frantically pumping heart, while at the same time holding his breath and riding the stinging pain out for the sake of the marker. The vulnerable beat of his pulse and the bumps of his vertebra, held within the cup of Eddie’s palm, silken skin under a sweeping thumb; his own soothed lull at the grounding weight, the squeeze, the welcome reminder of his belonging.

He tumbled through a blur of memories doubled at the seams, the dew-spangled lawn and the silk of Andrew’s hair knotted in his fist, the gross patch of drool spreading on his chest, watching the sun come up and thinking fierce as devotion this is mine forever until sleep sucked him under again watching Eddie snore with a leaf stuck to the side of his neck and the cold damp grass soaking him as he fought to sit still, not shiver, not disturb the perfect moment of being that the pair of them occupied in sleep, in innocence, in dumb happiness beer and foam spilled in an erotic embarrassing stream across the plane of Andrew’s chest into the band of his swim trunks, Eddie’s urge to put his mouth there and taste Eddie stretching on the floating dock, the midday sun turning him into a bronze god of a boy with muscle from neck to ass to calves, untouchable and unbreakable, savage and timeless the night before junior prom both of them dressed in their suits sharing stolen wine coolers alone and pretending, pretending without speaking, that they could be there together

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.

One time. He and Sam had managed one night together. His whole being remembered the stretch of his jaw and the grip of broad fingers on the base of his skull, thighs solid under his palms, sheets tangled around his knees. An abyssal gulf opened in him at the thought that he had wrecked the potential for that to happen again. The endless taunting text messages and the raw late nights, fistfights and firelight, the one bright savage thing he’d gained from all the loss since the turn of summer—nothing else kindled him to human, eager life. Sam Halse wasn’t going to be another almost. He’d made that mistake over and over in total ignorance for almost a decade, and he wasn’t going to do it again.

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. Sometimes he imagined an alternate future, him and Eddie in Nashville without Troth, growing freer under the influence of the pack. Maybe one night, Eddie would’ve seen him right at sunset all doused in gold and grabbed him with both hands, and put their mouths together. Maybe he wouldn’t have. And even if he had, maybe he’d have been a fucked-up, controlling, monstrous disaster of a partner. Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.

Fire wouldn’t cleanse the history from that earth, but maybe it could put the bones to rest.

Come on. I love you, but this is no life.

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.