Page 59 of Margins

“And your grandpa?”

“My mom definitely doesn’t remember anything about his reaction at the time. And she was just a kid, so once my great grandfather and Uncle Edgar moved, she kind of didn’t worry about them one way or the other. Asked about them a few times, maybe, but then it was just a new reality—they weren’t around anymore, and she had other grandparents on my grandma’s side to still see often enough,” Elijah shrugs. “It wasn’t until she was older, in college, that she eventually started asking about them again, and my grandpa told her about everything that had happened. And she never knew whether he’d ever been mad at them for the arrest, or for the fact that she could’ve been caught up in that mess, because by the time she was hearing about everything, he was just incredibly sad about it, missed them terribly, and certainly wasn’t mad at them at all.”

“And he told her the truth about their relationship?” Alex asks.

“Yeah, he told her, and asked her to keep the family secret out of respect for a decision he hated, but that they had made. My great grandfather and Uncle Edgar refused to risk any more harm to my grandpa, my grandma, or my mom, even once any significant danger was long gone.”

Alex nods, his head heavy. “How did you end up at a birthday party in San Diego?”

“Well, we read about my grandpa’s annual trips to visit them and Uncle Edgar's change of heart,” Elijah says. “As my great grandfather got older, and he couldn’t really argue a reason to keep everyone apart, even if they weren’t going to introduce Uncle Edgar as anything other than that, my grandpa pushed for a few family visits. Apparently, the time my great grandfather held me as a baby and the memory I have of the San Diego trip weren't the only two times my whole family was with them, but more often, it was just my mom and grandparents who went down there.”

Elijah gets up then, and heads into the kitchen to make them a couple of drinks, and while Alex thinks he’s still full from dinner with his family, he takes the glass when it’s handed to him, Elijah taking a long sip of his and ending with some kind of sigh.

“Okay, so there was a little bit of a reunion, some wounds at least slightly patched, and then your great grandfather died,” Alex says. “So, what happened then?”

“I remember hearing about it, but my brother, sister, and I were in school, so my mom and my grandparents went to San Diego for the funeral without us. And I don’t know—I’m not sure they would’ve taken us anyway.”

“Small service, with just the friends they’d made in the community?”

“Basically, yeah,” Elijah confirms.

“And then Uncle Edgar?”

“He stayed in their house alone for a long, long time—probably part sanctuary, part solitary confinement,” Elijah says. “My mom and my grandparents continued to visit, maybe even more than they had visited when my great grandfather was still alive, and then eventually my mom and grandpa helped Uncle Edgar move into an assisted living facility about seven years ago.”

“In San Diego?”

Elijah snorts. “Yeah. They tried to move him closer again, but he refused and getting him to agree to leave the house at all was damn near impossible, so that was the compromise. They continued to visit there, then my grandpa died, and now it’s just my mom.”

Alex’s eyes go wide. “Wait, what? She still goes?”

“On my grandpa’s birthday, my great grandfather’s birthday, and on Uncle Edgar’s.”

“Wow.”

“Yep.”

They both pause to drink, and Alex gives Elijah a few extra seconds before he goes ahead and pokes at what he assumes is the most tender of all of Elijah’s wounds, raw now in a way that it hadn’t quite been throughout the rest of his life. It’s the obvious question, and Alex thinks he could probably come pretty close to guessing the answer, but he takes a deep breath and keeps his voice as soft as possible.

“So, why didn’t she tell you? You said before that your parents didn’t say much of anything one way or the other about Peter and Edgar, and that they seemed to outwardly approve more when you liked girls, but if your mom knew everything about them, and she knew about you—that’s quite a choice she made.”

Elijah’s jawline tightens before he seems to become conscious of it, working it free of whatever hold the past, however understandably, has on him. Then he looks skyward, his lip caught between his teeth, and Alex waits him out. He hadn’t wanted to be left alone the other night, and Alex won’t leave him alone now either, but he can’t push too hard when there’s a chance of breaking things they’ve barely built. A minute passes, then another, and maybe even more, but then Elijah leans forward to set his glass on the coffee table and Alex does the same, welcoming Elijah into his arms when they both fall back against the cushions again.

“She said she—it was a mistake—she was—” Elijah’s voice cracks fiercely and while he could probably go on, Alex won’t make him explain if he doesn’t want to.

“Want me to give it a try?” he offers.

“Please.”

“She was scared,” Alex starts. And honestly, he probably doesn’t need to finish when that’s the beginning and end of it all, but his arms are around Elijah and neither one of them seems eager to be anywhere else, so he goes on. “For years, she’d kept Peter and Edgar’s secret because your grandpa asked her to—because years before that, your grandpa had sworn he was going to treat his father with nothing but the love and respect that had been shown to him—but that’s a hell of confusing thing to do when the secret itself is a whole lot of love tied up in guilt and fear and shame. Then when you were little, she was making trips to see Peter and Edgar in San Diego after they’d basically exiled themselves there on her account, which gave her a chance to witness the love and guilt and fear and shame, and a lonely life she would have never wished on her own kid. And maybe she always knew you weren’t straight, or maybe your grandpa said something to her, but you were just a little kid when Matthew Shepard was murdered, and that’s just one story that had to have hit her hard. It would’ve been so nice to believe that the world had changed from when Edgar was nearly beaten to death, but what was she going to think, watching the news, and then looking at you? So, she was scared, maybe sometimes selfishly so, and she let your grandpa keep you close because she didn’t know how to, and he’d already devoted his entire damn life to loving two men the world wanted to hate.”

“Alex,” Elijah breathes.

“Mmmm, I’m still right here. Not going anywhere.”

He means for it to reassure Elijah, but Alex thinks maybe he needs to remember it too. That while their time together has been driven, and occasionally even halted, by somebody else’s love story, they aren’t inextricably tied to faded ink and tear-stained pages.

“Things have changed, though,” Elijah argues. “And she’s had so much time to tell me, but instead I got loved under unspoken conditions that I only occasionally met. Even in the last two years, after my grandpa died, she could’ve told me.”

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