Page 52 of Margins

“So, we just keep reading.”

“We just keep reading.”

The written birthday and holiday greetings seem to stop after that, though it becomes clear that James never fully let go, visiting them each year on his birthday. Alex looks down at the paper he holds.

Edgar, my love, I know we put up such a fight about these visits from James each year, but I’m so glad he uses his birthday as a reason to force our hand, asking for something from us on the one day we can’t help but agree to give it. These days are always a chance to remember what we had and what could someday be again, if only the world dares to turn upside down. He still doesn’t understand why we had to leave, but he continues to respect our wishes. He has always and will forever.

Laura hasn’t asked about us in a while, and Annie no longer cries. But James. Oh, James. I hope he never stops spending his birthday at our side, and I know how selfish I am for taking it away from anyone else, but it’s all we have. It might be all we ever have.

Peter

Elijah just nods, and they move on, even though there’s not much more to see. Newspaper clippings about progress made by, and plenty of harm done to, the gay community. A couple of pictures. Small notes. Collected bits of what seems to have been an increasingly lonely life, even the new friends they’d made seemingly kept at a safe distance, whatever risk Peter and Edgar had thought they were willing to take when they moved to San Diego quieting over the years and leaving them at home with only each other more often than not.

Always in each other’s arms because they had nowhere else to go.

Alex hadn’t expected them to find wedding bands in the box, but they’re in there too, identically simple, and saved in an envelope with vows written to each other for a wedding nobody else would attend. One that wasn’t yet legal but must have served as a secret act of resistance, as though their whole lives hadn’t already been so much of that. Maybe it was pointless, or maybe nothing like that ever could be, and Alex just wants to cry.

But the first decade passes, then another, and it’s clear from the handwriting alone that Peter is so much older now, each shaky word on the page leaving something raw to rattle in Alex’s chest. Elijah had said Edgar was a lot younger, and maybe that’s obvious too, a little more energy in everything he has to say. And just a little bit of the fight he’d left behind a while ago. They breeze past the births of Elijah’s brother and sister, then through the year Alex was born, and then they pass Elijah’s birthday too, one celebrated in a note from Edgar, and maybe just enough to finally change his mind.

Peter, we should go see them. All of them.

I know I’m the one who did this, the one who took you away from your family, and I will carry all the blame for that for the rest of my life, and likely for so many years after you’re gone. But there are three of them now, three great grandchildren you should be able to hold, and while I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that James and Annie don’t want us anywhere near, James has never stopped inviting you home. Inviting us home, really, though why he continues to love me, I will never understand.

So, please, let’s go see them, so your youngest great grandchild can rest in your arms. If only for an afternoon, let’s be a family again. Let’s remember something good. We deserve something good.

Edgar

“He held me when I was a baby?” Elijah whispers, tears clinging to his jaw until their stubbornness loses out to gravity and they fall into his lap.

“Here,” Alex rasps, holding up a picture they must have missed on their first quick run through the box.

An elderly man, maybe around 80, with Elijah’s same curls, even if they’re thin and gray, and Elijah’s same broad shoulders, even if they’re curved forward now, both age and the innate desire to protect a baby curling his entire body around a much smaller one. The baby is looking up at him with blue eyes, a gummy smile, and the kind of peace little ones can offer better than anyone else on the planet.

“Oh my god.”

Alex leaves him with the picture for a few minutes, breaking his earlier promise just long enough for Elijah to have this moment alone, and taking their mugs back into the kitchen to wash them far more thoroughly than is probably necessary. But then he returns to sit close to Elijah again, and he holds his hand while he sorts through the last handful of things left in the box, and Elijah clings to the picture.

“There’s not much after that.”

Elijah’s voice is barely there. “Don’t need anything else right now. I want—can we go to bed? We don’t—it doesn’t have to be anything else, just—I want to sleep. I’m so tired and I just want to sleep.”

“Of course,” Alex says, careful when he lets Elijah go, and maybe even more so when he picks up the piles and puts everything back in order, the lid back on the box when he’s done.

After that, he locks up and turns off the lights while Elijah grabs his duffel bag, and then they head upstairs together, most of the comfortable desire between them replaced by emotional exhaustion tonight. Alex lets Elijah duck into the bathroom first and he uses the time to get changed, Elijah doing the same when they trade places. And once they’re in bed together, Alex only leans in for a single kiss, almost too innocently, before Elijah closes his eyes.

Anything else Alex might have said will have to wait, pushed aside by years and years of grief.

Chapter Thirteen

“You better not try to make me a morning person,” Elijah grumbles, Alex failing when he attempts to sneak out of the bedroom for the second day in a row.

He laughs and walks over to the bed to give Elijah a kiss on the forehead. “Wouldn’t dream of it. And you won’t be spending the night here tonight anyway. You have to work.”

“Ugh, the night before Thanksgiving. When everyone wants to get drunk off their ass before they have to deal with family all day tomorrow.”

“Well, I understand the temptation,” Alex says. “This will be my first holiday without Cass and Elena by my side.”

“Mmmm, then you should come see me tonight.”

---