Home for the Holidays

LaVieEnRose

Here's a thought, Brian said, sitting on the kitchen counter with his laptop. Make one cookie that isn't two-thirds frosting.

Justin looked thoughtfully down at the pan we were decorating. “No.”

I like them with a lot of frosting, I said, putting little candy balls on a very-frosted Christmas tree. That's the best part.

Justin said, Brian's not going to eat them anyway, so I don't see why he gets a vote.

I don't want to look at them, Brian said.

Justin licked a smudge of green frosting off his hand. Luckily they'll be going to Derek's office party tomorrow and you'll never have to see them again.

I looked at Brian. How come we're not having a party this year?

Because I didn't have time to organize one given my delicate waif of a partner.

Justin rolled his eyes and said, Because he hates them and this year he had a good excuse not to do it given his delicate waif of a partner.

That too, Brian said, typing something with his other hand.

Sick Justin is really the gift that keeps on giving, Justin said. Now that I can have sex again there aren't even any downsides.

Besides the not breathing thing, I said, and he waved his hand dismissively.

It has been convenient, Brian said. I've gotten out of like four meetings because I said I needed to get home to you. I didn't even come home.

Incredible, Justin said.

Brian ticked things off on his fingers. I didn't have to go to that shitty play with a client, your mom send us care packages every week for a month...and, most importantly, it got us out of Pittsburgh Christmas. Thank you, sick Justin.

Hey, it got me a house, Justin said. They were moving into this beautiful house in Queens in a few months, as soon as some renovations were finished. It was really exciting, even if there was kind of this gnawing feeling in my stomach about it because I lived up in Washington Heights, so it meant it was going to take me about two hours to get to them in the new place versus forty minutes on the A train now, and I was scared I was never going to see them.

I cleared my throat. Wait, you're not going home for Christmas?

He’s barely out of the hospital, Brian said. He’s not up for that yet.

Gus is going to come up next week for a late Christmas, Justin said. Going home is just a lot of kids and a lot of germs, that’s all. Otherwise I could do it, I’m ready.

Brian caught my eye and said exactly what he thought of that in a glance, and I got to say, I was with Brian on this one. I knew how hard Justin was working to get better, but I also knew he was running himself ragged trying to get back to where he was and a lot of times it backfired in the end. Last weekend he’d come with me and Jane to the park and played with her for a few hours, and the whole next day he was sacked out in bed in pain and barely able to move while Brian and I puttered around the apartment and snapped at each other because we were so worried.

So what’s the plan for actual Christmas? I asked. Are you going to Emily’s?

Justin said, They’re doing Christmas morning at Emily's parents' house, then they're coming over here in the afternoon. You can come over then or sleep over, whichever. He piped way too much icing along the edge of a cookie.

I said, Oh, I actually... Ugh. It was going to come out sooner or later. I can't make it.

You're not going to be alone on Christmas, Justin said.

I won't be, I have plans.

Brain raised an eyebrow.

Plans with who? Justin said, which, you know, fair question. I'd lost most of my close friends before I even met Brian and Justin, and the others had either moved away or we'd grown apart. I had a few I'd still try to see, but there was just so much baggage there now, so much we were all trying not to think about, and it was impossible not to think about it when we were together and it was so obvious who was missing.

I have to try not to think about that stuff.

I took a deep breath. I've been talking a little to my mom. And she invited me home for Christmas. So I'm going to go.

To LA? Justin said.

I nodded. I'm leaving the day after tomorrow.

I didn't know you were in touch with your mom, Justin said.

I shrugged. It's early, we haven't really talked about...anything substantial. I don't know if anything's going to come of it.

Justin said, I think it's great.

You do?

I do. At the very least you'll have closure, and hopefully she's had some time to think about things and she wants to change. He lifted my chin and kissed me. You're amazing. Brian, are you seeing this?

Yep, Brian fingerspelled, his face flat. Our boyfriend's all grown up and making nice with his abusive parents.

They didn't abuse me, I said.

They threw you out of your house.

So did Justin's dad.

Brian made this face like, and? and I guess fair enough.

Don't listen to him, Justin said to me. What you're doing is really brave.

That's one word for it, Brian said.

Justin gave him a look. Maybe they've changed.

People don't change.

Oh really, Justin said, and he waved his wedding ring in Brian's face. Brian rolled his eyes.

People don't change without the introduction of major life-altering illness, Brian amended.

You were fucked for me long before that.

Ah, yes, but I didn't realize it until that whole, you know... he gestured to Justin's head. Situation.

'You know, situation,' are you referring to me taking a bat to the skull?

He winced. Are you fine with this just to bother me?

I'm fine with this? That's fun. Tell Lauren, she'll be so proud. He pointed to me. And, I mean, if we're saying that change requires life-altering illness—

They don't know I'm positive, I said.

Justin stared at me. Seriously?

Yeah. And they're not going to find out.

Oh, this is good, I like this, Brian said. This is a great plan.

I'm trying to just be functional with them, I said. I'm walking around with their last name, I might as well know how to talk to them.

Sure, Brian said. And all it costs is putting yourself in danger and being a completely different person.

We’re a phone call away if anything goes wrong, Justin said to him.

A phone call and four thousand miles.

Justin gave me a rueful smile. The dark side of being one of Brian’s ducklings.

I don’t have ducklings, he said. I have admirers.

You are so full of shit, Justin said, and then he stopped and rested his hand on the table and took a shaky breath. Brian and I looked at each other and he nodded to me, since I was in Justin's field of vision and Brian wasn't.

Go lie down, I said to him.

Justin shook his head and coughed into his elbow. I want to finish this.

Sounds bad, Brian said with a sigh, and he put his laptop aside and stood up.

We’ll finish, I said to Justin.

He gave me a look. You’re spending too much time with Brian.

We’re all spending too much time with Brian. Lie down.

Brian took the piping bag away from Justin and nudged him towards the living room. I finished up the cookies while Brian got him settled, and he came back in while I was packing them away. I've gotten way too complacent with that fucking wheeze, he said. I barely hear it anymore.

Me neither.

Hilarious. He felt kind of warm too.

“He okay?”

Yeah, I made him check, he doesn’t have a fever. I think it’s just from hanging out around the oven. He sighed and stretched. Please tell me I don't have to decorate cookies. I don't love him that much.

I laughed. I’m all done here. Just help me clean up.

He packed cookies for a while, then said, You know this is a bad fucking idea.

What, eating Justin's baking?

Haha, he fingerspelled flatly.

I sighed. “I'm trying to be a grown up or whatever.”

Grown ups or whatever know when to say 'fuck no' to shitty people trying to get back into their lives.

“They're my family,” he said. “I owe them a second chance.”

You don't know owe anybody shit, he said.

“Can't you just be supportive?”

Like a nice bra?

“Yeah.”

Fine. But don't come crying to me when it sucks.

**

Like the prophet Miley Cyrus foretold, I hopped off the plane at LAX, though without the dream or the cardigan, at noon Pacific time on Christmas Eve. It was my first time back here in over ten years. Back then I'd hitchhiked with a hundred and forty dollars in my pocket. Now I had a ticket I paid for with my salaried job, clothes that fit me, a backpack full of protease inhibitors, and someone I had to call and tell I'd landed safely. What a difference a decade makes.

I called Justin while I walked to baggage claim, and he picked up from his studio. He had a paintbrush in his mouth and he hadn't shaved and he looked hot as hell. You made it! he said.

This was a bad idea. Now I'm going to have ASL-brain. I need to think English.

I could talk to you. It's funny; I know Justin talks out loud to Brian pretty often—I do too—but I never picture him doing it, because, for someone who grew up hearing, Justin is so non-oral. It's easy to forget he hasn't been signing his whole life, and it's totally weird to me that he and Brian used to just...be two hearing guys together. It feels so fake.

I said, No, I don't read lips well over video. And you don't read them well at all.

He scrunched his nose up and glared at me.

How are you? I said. You're not supposed to be working yet.

I'm just dabbling. And fuck me, I'm fine, how are you? Are you scared?

I think I'm past scared and my system got overwhelmed and now I'm emotionless.

So you're a robot.

It seems so, yeah.

He tilted his head to the side. You're going to be great. They've had ten years. They're ready to deal. People don't...the world isn't like it was ten years ago. His eyes were so fucking beautiful. Imagine not being proud of you.

They don't even know me.

That's what this trip is for, right?

I had no idea how to answer that one, because I guess I was still hoping it would be that but I knew, even at that point, that it wouldn't, and luckily—or something—I was saved—or something—because I got to baggage claim and there was my mom. Holding a sign with my name on it like she thought I wouldn't recognize her. Or maybe just to be cute? I didn't...I couldn't remember enough about her personality to know if she'd do that, and I don't think that was really something I'd realized, that I'd forgotten her that much, and I was all of a sudden so, so sad.

She put one hand to her mouth and waved a little with the sign, and I said goodbye and I love you to Justin and went over and dropped my backpack and hugged her. The smell of her hit me like a wave. Lilac and baby powder. I'd forgotten that too and here it was.

I heard her say something in my good ear, so I pulled away from her so I could see her lips. “How was your flight?” she said.

“It was fine. Um...thank you for coming to get me. I could have taken a cab.”

“No, I wanted to see you.”

“Is Dad here?”

“He's back at the house. Getting the house ready for the party.”

Oh, God, the party. Every year they throw these huge Christmas parties, everyone on the block. I always hated them because my mom freaked out about the house not being perfect and cried every time and it was too many people and I couldn't follow the conversations. I'd wondered if maybe they stopped doing them after I left. I guess not.

“Is that tonight?”

She nodded. “Everyone's so excited to see you.” She looked me up and down. “Look at you. All grown up.”

I put on a smile and followed her out into the heat.

**

Really, my whole life in New York started around Christmas, a few months after I came to the city. I don't remember when it was exactly, but I know it was snowing through the windows of this seedy apartment where I'd come with Danny and Amir, two of the guys I was living with. I was standing around with my little red cup of something that tasted awful and there he was across the room, half-naked with hands all over him and a smile that could light up the world, and it was like every single thing in the world, in the universe, was pointing at him, and that was the night I met Adam.

He asked me where I was from. He always looked right at me and spoke so clearly.

“Nowhere,” I said.

“Then you came to the right place.”

It didn't feel like Christmas here in LA, with the heat and everything, but God, it felt like Christmas with him. For three years, it felt like Christmas.

**

The Christmas party at my parents' house was like looking through one of the fun house mirrors. The same house. The same people, plus or minus a few, ten years older. Everything seemed small, and I don't mean that in some kind of figurative way, I mean the place literally felt too small. When I'd walked into my old bedroom to drop my stuff off and change, all my stuff was still there, the posters and the books I'd had when I was sixteen and didn't bring with me after my parents caught me with this boy from algebra class, and it all seemed tiny, like the bed was made for a doll, or something. I don't know.

I played the good son at the party, circulating, offering to grab drinks for people, nodding and smiling at things I couldn't quite lipread. The room was busy and loud and my hearing aids were picking up all the ambient shit and driving me crazy, but my parents would notice if I took them out and think that meant I wasn't trying. They'd worry people would notice they were gone and think that meant I wasn't trying to communicate with them.

It's funny the things you don't forget.

My father had still barely looked at me. He averted his eyes and shook my hand and told me it was good to see me when I got to the house, and since then he'd just found other things to do. It really wasn't hard to tell which of them had invited me home for Christmas, not that there was ever any doubt in the first place. She wasn't the one who kicked me out.

I told people about work and was vague about when I started and let people believe I'd gone to new York for the job and hoped they hadn't remembered I left before I finished high school. I let people think I'd graduated and made vague allusions to fake plans to go back to school, because everyone always likes hearing that, and it gives them an in to babble at me about their college experience, which people apparently never grow out of looking for any excuse to do.

Before I knew it I'd constructed this whole narrative about my life in New York. Ambitious, successful, and sexless. Everything these people wanted from me. None of them knew I signed every day at home, or that I was gay, or that I was sick.

I was talking to Mrs. Avrams from the house in the corner when my phone buzzed. I apologized and checked it quickly. It was a text from Justin asking how things were going, so I left it to answer later, but when I looked back up at Mrs. Avrams she had that face hearing people get when you don't understand them. Embarrassed and annoyed all at once.

I said, “I'm sorry, what did you say?”

She gave me a patronizing smile and said, “Who's that?”

I thought she meant Justin at first, and I was trying to figure out how she'd seen his name in the quick flash of my phone. And then I realized that she obviously meant the picture on my lock screen: Jane when she was a few months old, wrapped up in her sheep blanket.

“Oh, that's my...” I never know what to call Jane. When people ask when I'm out with her I just say I'm babysitting. “My friend's baby.”

“She's beautiful.”

I imagine telling them that she's Deaf. That she's signing already. That she calls me Dad, because she calls every man she meets Dad, and she knows the sign for sheep so now we can ask her if she wants her sheep blanket, and she'll say yes. What kind of hearing baby could do that?

“Thank you,” I said. I didn't sign it.

**

Adam was maybe the worst signer I'd ever seen. I would teach him something, sign it for him over and over, and it would fall out of his head a minute later.

“I don't have a brain for learning,” he told me once.

“Oh yeah, what's your brain for?”

“Thieving and general debauchey,” he said.

And God, he was good for it. The world lay down for Adam like a lover. One flick of that smile and people would do anything for more. He was...well.

He was a drug.

My friends worried, lectured, said they never saw me anymore, or they got sucked in right along with me. But Adam chose me. For some godforsaken fucking reason, he chose me.

He was a terrible signer, but God, he was so encouraging of me learning. He shoplifted sign language dictionaries and syntax books. He sat with me in the library for hours while I watched videos. He gave me money to take classes. He told me I was doing well when I wanted to give up.

He always knew how to cheer me up. Not that it was complicated. After a while I loved two things and two things only: Adam and drugs.

**

I sat on my bed in my childhood room and watched the clock tick from 11:59 to midnight. From Not-Christmas to Christmas.

Maybe I should have picked a different time of year to come back. I thought being out of the city would be easier, that there would be fewer things to remind me, but I just felt guilty and shitty for not being there. And I missed Justin. He knew I had a hard time with Christmas, and that was another reason I left. I didn't want to rain on Jane's first Christmas morning with all my depressing shit, and I didn't want him worrying about me, and I didn't...know how to share what I was feeling with him. It wasn't fair. How do you fucking talk to your boyfriend about missing your old boyfriend?

But I called anyway, and the phone had rung twice before I remembered the time difference. I cursed and was about to hang up, but Brian picked up before I could. He was in bed, but the lights were on and he didn't look like I'd woken him.

You okay? he said.

Yeah. I'm sorry. I messed up the math.

We were up.

Yeah, I called Justin's phone, right?

Brian angled my phone so I could see Justin propped up on his chest. He was awake, but a lot sleepier than Brian, and Brian had one arm around him and his fingers massaging the back of Justin's neck.

Seizure? I asked.

Brian shook his head. Nightmare. He moved the phone back to himself. Drugs are starting to kick in now.

“Bad one?” I said, and Brian nodded a little. Justin gets these brutal nightmares from when he was attacked as a teenager, and they'd been worse since he got sick a couple months before. The bashing left him with this overwhelming fear of dying, so something like this...it really fucked him up. Justin does a good job of hiding it most of the time, but he lives his life assuming the worst possible thing that could possibly happen is going to happen, and yeah, that can be sort of annoying, but how do you fault someone for that when they go to their fucking prom and almost get murdered?

He's fine, Brian said, and I could tell from the way he was angling his signing that he meant for Justin to see it too. He got the good drugs, he's safe. Everything's okay now. Could use a neb while we're up, though, you want to stay with him?

I nodded and waited while Brian got up and switched the phone to Justin's hand. Justin sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes. Hey.

You okay?

He nodded and coughed a little. Bad dream.

So I hear. Can you breathe?

Sort of. You don't have to worry, he said sleepily. Brian has me.

I know, I just... I shrugged.

How was the party? he said.

It was fine. Weird.

You look tired, he said.

You look tired. I rubbed my forehead. I am, I'm just like...this is so draining. I was this fucking perfect little caricature of myself all night, and I”m so used to smiling and being sweet.

I know you are.

So I thought it would be easy, I said. Because I'm used to it. I don't know why it's not easy this time.

Because it's your mom, Justin said, taking the nebulizer mouthpiece from Brian somewhere off-camera and sucking on it with a little more desperation than he probably wanted me to see.

I'll be fine, I said. I'm just tired, it's not...a thing. Are you okay?

Didn't you ask me that already? Meds really were kicking in.

I know, I just...

He tilted his head to the side. Not like you to be nervous like this.

I know, it's just the...everything.

Justin looked above the camera, then back to me. Brian wants to know if you've taken your meds.

Not yet. I will.

He says you were supposed to take them five hours ago.

I'll do it as soon as I'm off here. I watched Justin look above the camera again. What's he saying now?

He's bitching about you so we won't catch him giving a shit. He took the mouthpiece out and coughed for a while, and Brian's hands appeared to hold his shoulders in place.

And I'm a fucking idiot because I didn't even think about the fact that my sound was up really loud on my phone because I'd had earbuds in listening to music on the plane, and here Justin was coughing like he was goddamn dying, until my bedroom door starting opening. I signed Shit, I have to go, to Justin and hung up quickly as my mom came in.

“Hi,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said. “I thought I heard something.”

“Just watching something on my phone, sorry,” I said. “Do you need help cleaning up or anything?”

She shook her head and looked around my room. I couldn't look away, in case she started talking, so I had to just sit there and watch her take in all my old belongings and get sadder and sadder.

She said something I couldn't make out because she was walking and half-turned away from me as she crossed over to my bookshelf, then she took something off the very bottom shelf and held it up to me. It was this old beat-up book of fairy tales. I think it was hers when she was a kid.

“I loved reading these to you,” she said. She came over and sat on the foot of the bed and opened the book into her lap. “We'd sit here and you'd squish into my side...”

I twisted my hands.

“We were so close,” she said.

I didn't say anything, and after a minute she patted the book cover and set it on the bed and got up to leave, and I knew I should just let her go, I knew this was manipulative bullshit, but I just...couldn't write her off completely. She's my mom.

And she's not the one who kicked me out.

“Why did you keep everything?” I said.

She turned around.

“All of this...” I gestured around. “It's like a memorial. It's like I died.”

“We love you,” she said.

“You threw me out of the house.”

“That's not what happened.”

“I was there,” I said. “I know what Dad said. I know what happened.”

“He didn't throw you out. Maybe you...misunderstood him.”

I stared at her.

She watched me.

“He told me if I wasn't his son I couldn't live in his house,” I said.

She didn't say anything.

“Isn't that what he said?”

“It was ten years ago, Evan,” she said. “I don't remember anymore.”

“I do,” I said.

**

It got dark eventually. Adam and I ran out of money so we ran out of drugs. We turned into monsters, but not to each other. Mostly not to each other.

Our friends faded out, one by one. Lily wouldn't watch us destroy ourselves. Danny went back to St. Louis. Amir killed himself when he found out he was positive. We lost Adele and Leo to infections. Rob went to prison. I still don't know what happened to Angie. I've tried to find her. The police didn't care.

But I had Adam, at the end of every day, at the beginning of every morning. Those hands and that smile, as we got thinner and sicker and meaner and still he loved me. God, he loved me.

**

I spent Christmas Day out of the house as much as I could, wandering around the places I grew up and trying to feel anything for them. I was half-convinced all day I was going to run into someone I knew, but I never did. I took a bus out to where Justin's mural was and felt something there right away, so I took a selfie with it and he replied back with about a million hearts.

I was going back to New York the next morning, and that was keeping me going like a heartbeat, but first I had to go back to the house for a Christmas dinner with my family and...well. That's where everything kind of went to shit.

It started with my dad asking me about my job in New York, which he hadn't heard about even though I'd talked about it the whole party because he'd been steadfastly avoiding me, and even now I could barely read his lips with the way he kept his head down and his eyes away from me, but okay. I talked about the job at Kinnetik and alluded to my salary because I knew it would impress him.

He said, “Good. This is why it was so important you do all that speech therapy, learn to talk. There's this guy I see at the grocery store, you can't talk to him at all. All he can do is push carts.”

I cut a slice of ham very slowly and then said, “I actually sign some at work.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Like, sign language,” I said. “I learned it when I moved to the city and a few people at work know it, so I use it there.”

“What do you need to know sign language for?” he said. “You talk.”

“Not all of my friends do,” I said. “I have Deaf friends in the city, I use it to talk to them.”

“I just don't understand that,” he said. “Why learn a language that hardly anyone knows?”

“Because lipreading and speaking is really, really hard,” I said. “And why should we have to do oit when there's a language for us?”

“To participate in society,” he said. “Instead of further isolating yourself into...whatever you want to call it.”

“Communities? Families?”

He rolled his eyes and said something at his plate that I couldn't make out, and I sat there feeling stupid and shitty.

And angry.

“I have people,” I said. “In New York. I have people.”

“So that's what your mother and I tell our friends?” he said. “Our son, who we raised, cared for, poured thousands of dollars and hours of time into making sure he could participate in the real world, he's isolating himself and throwing away everything we gave him, but he has people?”

My mother said something to him, but I wasn't looking at her to catch it.

“What is it exactly that you think that I owe you?” I said.

“It's not about what you owe me, damn it, it's what you owe yourself. Not making yourself any more fucking isolated than...”

“Which of these exactly did I choose to be?” I said. “Deaf or gay?”

I got up from the table and went into the living room without waiting for an answer, I swear just to clear my head for a minute, I was going to go back in and put on a smile and apologize for losing my temper, but I was walking in little circles trying to calm myself down, my mom came in.

“Don't,” I said. “Don't apologize for him.”

She always did that. You don't forget.

“You don't understand how hard this is, Evan,” she said. She looked like she was about to cry.

“I don't understand?”

“You don't understand how much this hurts,” she said. “To know that your baby won't ever have a family. To look at someone you love and know that they're going to die alone.”

I froze.

**

Ten minutes later I was sobbing on the floor of my fucking childhood bathroom.

They don't know, I said. They don't fucking understand anything.

Justin was watching me, eyes big. I'm so sorry. I'm so fucking sorry.

I can't do this, I need to get out of this fucking house, I don't know what I thought...

You thought maybe they'd changed, he said. You gave them the benefit of the doubt and you wanted them to be good people because that's who you are.

They're telling me I can't have a family but I did. I had one. It was there, it happened, it was real. I had it.

Evan, he said, pain on his face.

I miss Adam, I said, before I could stop myself. I miss him so much.

Baby, I know. I know you do.

It''s like I'm missing a fucking part of my body and they have no idea he even existed, it's like he was never here, but he was here, he was here and I was there and I know it was real, I said, and I cried until I couldn't move.

**

It was some sketchy shit we got from some sketchy guy but when you don't really worry about that at the time because your whole life feels fake once you get in that deep. When I told Justin big stories don't happen to me, that wasn't a lie, because the whole thing with Adam still feels fake. One reason I don't talk about it—not the biggest one, but a reason—is part of me feels like I'm making it up when I do. That's how fucking frenetic the whole thing was. That's how high we were. Consequences and risks aren't real because this cannot be real. You go from a nice house in LA to squatting in New York and shooting herion? I mean, who fucking does that? That's not you. That was never going to be your life. You fell in love with a pretty boy and this is where you ended up? That can't happen. That's not your life. That's a character in a movie.

Which I guess means we really should have seen it coming, because how do those movies end? With one of them blue-lipped on the floor with a needle in his arm.

I did CPR for twenty-five minutes before the paramedics got there.

Adam was in a coma for two days and he died on December 26th, seven years ago.

Three weeks after that I collapsed in that supermarket and found out I was positive, which wasn't much of a surprise but still felt like one, somehow.

Turns out, you get news like that and all you really want is some more of the shit that got you there in the first place.

So I fucked around for a while and my friends screamed and cried and told me they wouldn't watch me kill myself and I guess I just walked past a rehab place at the right time one night. I don't know how else to explain it. There wasn't any big breaking point because how many of those did I really have left? What else could even fucking happen to me?

I don't know how to explain how I survived getting clean except that I already wanted to die from losing him and somehow that made it easier. I already felt as bad as I was ever going to feel.

Andrea Gibson said it, in a poem Justin loves that I don't fully understand, but I get this line: when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back.

Maybe that's supposed to be inspirational, but it just makes me think...God, you get so, so sick of being hit. You pull yourself together just to make it stop.

It's not that it's easier to forget. It's just that you don't have any other way to get up every morning.

I can still see his smile, oh God. Oh God.

**

My mom offered to drive me to the airport in the morning, but I got an Uber.

“Are you going to come back?” she said. She was crying. I dont' know where dad was.

“I don't know,” I said.

“We made a mistake,” she said. “Ten years ago, we shoudn't have...”

I didn't say anything.

“We made a mistake,” she said.

My phone buzzed that my Uber was here. I hitched my backpack up my shoulder.

“You made a mistake twenty-five years ago when I lost my hearing,” I said.

When I got into the car, I signed, Hi, I'm Deaf, to my driver, settled back, and really, really fucking felt the silence.

**

I used to squish under her arm and watch her read fairy tales. I couldn't look at the pictures. I had to watch her mouth.

She used to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and I loved them so much.

She used to hold me when the kids at school were mean to me.

She called me little bear.

She didn't throw me out. But she didn't stop him.

**

I got off the plane in New York and walked to to arrivals to get a cab and there was Brian, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. He tilted his head when I stopped in front of him and dropped my backpack on the floor.

Justin wanted to be here, he said. But, you know.

You were right, I said. It was a mistake.

And just like fucking that I was crying in the middle of the airport, and Brian knit his eyebrows together.

“Everyone who's ever fucking loved me is gone,” I said. “Adam and my parents and my friends and....they're all fucking dead, everyone who's ever loved me is gone, and I—”

I felt his hands grab my shoulders and pull me into him, and I pushed my face into his neck and held on for dear fucking life.

**

Brian was stony-faced and quiet in the cab back to his place. He nudged me to the kitchen sink to wash up once we got inside and I watched him through the cut out over the counter as he went to the living room and pulled Justin off the couch and into his arms, and when he finally let go of him he pushed Justin's hair back and cupped his cheek and there was something almost frantic about it.

What's wrong? Justin said.

Evan was crying.

Is he okay?

Yeah, I just...

Justin watched him.

The last time I was fucking hit with this you were godamn dying on a garage floor, can I just—

Yeah, okay, Justin said, and he let Brian pore over him, checking his temperature, kissing his cheek, putting a hand on his chest to feel his breathing or his heartbeat.

Brian closed his eyes and rested his forehead against Justin's. I dried my hands on a towel.

“I'm okay,” I saw Justin say. “We're okay.”

**

I fell asleep on the couch for a while and woke up with Justin's hand in my hair.

How do you do it? I said. How do you fucking live with the shit that happened to you? I can't think about it. And now I'm thinking about it, and I can't think about it.

I think about it every single second of every day, he said.

I balled myself up small and squished into him. Are we fucked up for life?

Yeah, he said. But at least we don't have to fucking apologize to anyone about it.

Brian came over after a little while and put on a movie, and I sat between them and watched Brian drink and Justin cough and held each of their hands in one of mine. Brian got up abruptly at one point and got a big roll of paper, and Justin helped him uncurl it over our laps. Blueprints for the new house.

See here? Brian said, pointing.

Yeah.

That's your room.

Justin rested his cheek against my shoulder, and Brian pointed out some more stuff in the house, and I still felt very, very sad.

But I also felt like I was home.