Heartbeat Repeating - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,17
keep it up forever. His kids are growing up, and Alejandro doesn’t want the man to live in the past or force his children to live in the shadows of a ghost. But he wants to cling to the remnants of their tiny family while he still has bits and pieces left.
“I’ll be down for dinner,” he says. He kisses the top of his dad’s head then escapes up the stairs before his mother can insist she walk with him. He’s halfway up, and he puts his hand into his pocket, touching the orca again. It brings him a strange, unexpected comfort, having a tie to Avery inside these walls. He thinks about what it might be like if things were different, if he could bring Avery home, and the thought surrounds him with something like warmth as he reaches the top of the stairs.
He can see the room from where he stands, a long corridor in the south wing. It once looked like a reflection of him—the child he’d been, the teenager he’d become. There were posters on the walls of David Bowie and Boney M. He had polaroids of him and his friends bashing around Paris on weekend trips and several of them lounging on the pebbled beach in Brighton.
All of those things got pulled down and packed away in stages. Little fits and bursts of his mother and father accepting that he was moving on with his life. The posters disappeared when he started University, the photos after he proposed to Connor. His books made their way into boxes after Gabrielle was born, and eventually it took on the neat and tidy look of a guest room he and Connor could stay in whenever they came for a visit.
A little farther down and across the corridor, his parents set up a guest suite for the children. He’s never around, but he knows Louis and Yvette’s families stay a lot during the year. Gabrielle had been there first, though—the family’s first born grandchild. The last time he’d been brave enough to look through those doors, he saw her fingerprint everywhere—in familiar toys, stuffed animals, a few pieces of finger-painted paper framed and hung on either side of the window. There was even a single bit of wall with crayon scribbles that had been preserved as a tribute to the one lasting mark she made on their small world.
He pauses near that door, his hand out, but he knows he’s not going in. He never does.
Instead, he pushes his bedroom door open and takes a deep breath. The room has been aired out recently—even without a call, his parents know he’s coming. The duvet is freshly laundered, and he can smell something floral as he lays down on his back and stares up the ceiling. He’s tired, but he can’t stop thinking, can’t stop wondering if there’s something wrong with him, because everyone else has managed to find a way to get on with life.
And he knows what this therapist would say. Letting go is harder for him. His brain doesn’t work that way naturally. It clings, and it gets stuck in patterns and repetitions and obsessions. It consumes him until he can’t breathe or think or move, and he has to crack himself in half just to take a single step forward.
He thinks it was particularly cruel of God, or whoever designed the mess that is humanity, to lay that burden on him. The burden of loss in so many forms shouldered by a man who can’t ever let go? It sounds like the start to a bad joke, except eight years later and he’s still waiting for the punchline.
Rolling onto his side, he pulls the orca out of his pocket, and he stares at it. It’s easy to think about Avery now because in spite of that being just as messy, it’s a little softer. He knows where the beginning is and where it has to end. And although it hurts knowing he’s going to have to let him go, being able to love him quietly on his own is peaceful in a way.
And at least he has this—something he can touch. The gift is perfect—and so very Avery. It’s simple and inexpensive and so very personal. Avery didn’t tell him why he picked it out, but he doesn’t have to. He knows the younger man was walking somewhere, saw it, and it made him think of Alejandro for whatever reason. It means he has real estate