Page 39 of Summer Lessons
Mason shuddered. “Ugh. I’d rather kiss Bobby Cannavale—”
“I wouldn’t mind that, actually.”
Mason glared at him. “It’s like you’re not even my brother. I’m going upstairs to talk like a human being.”
“Fine—but don’t knock Bobby until you’ve crushed on him.”
“Dane, just no.”
Mason took his phone upstairs to his room. By the time he got there, Terry had left a string of texts that he had a hard time deciphering.
So he hit Call, because fuck it, texting was a young man’s game.
“What’re you asking?” He threw himself back on his bed and kicked off his slippers.
Terry sounded disgruntled. “I’m just… you know. How does your brother seem so normal?”
Mason grunted and tried to recall his conversation with Skip. “Have you ever pulled an all-nighter?” he asked. One of Dane’s triggers was a stressful week of finals.
“Yeah, when I was in tech school. I’d get off work and go to school and stay up all night to do my homework—”
“Exactly. How long did you go without meaningful sleep?”
Laugh. “About two days.”
Mason couldn’t laugh. “Dane went about three weeks. He started ripping out walls in his dorm, painting them.” Mason closed his eyes, remembering his mother calling him up, panicked, and how he’d had to clock Dane in the jaw, stun him, to get him in the car to take to the psych ward. How the place was awful, even with health insurance, and how Mason and his parents had taken shifts so Mason’s sweet baby brother wouldn’t be alone in that place, and the painful reconstruction of Dane’s life after that. This had been before Ira, and Mason had been so desperate afterward for calm, for “normal.” Thinking about it now, he realized he’d equatedboringwithnormal.
“What’s the crash like afterwards?” Terry asked perceptively.
Mason’s throat swelled. Suicide watch. Dane lying unwashed in bed like a dying fish. Hearing the words “I want to die” coming from his baby brother.
“Bad,” he whispered hoarsely. “It’s… for full-blown bipolar, it’s bad. So there’s medication and talking and more medication and more talking. He has to keep a journal every day. He has to talk to a doctor every week. And the thing is, when everything is level, he’s Dane. And….” Mason smiled. “You’ve met him. It’s worth it. It’s worth it to find normal, you know?”
“What’s normal?” Terry asked, sounding raw.
Mason let out a sigh and wriggled under the covers. He was wearing sweats—he might as well settle in for a convo. “I like to think it’s something that doesn’t hurt.” He remembered Ira. “But that doesn’t bore the shit out of you either.”
“Doesn’t hurt?”
Mason thought about it. Thought about all the times he’d opened his mouth and fucked up a relationship—and how badly he wanted someone to see past the dumb things he said and look at the things he actually did. “Yeah. Something that makes you feel good when it’s working. That doesn’t make you afraid it’s going to get yanked away because you say or do the wrong thing once or even twice. It’s a relationship with a do-over clause.”
“Huh,” Terry said.
Mason resisted throwing the phone across the room. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“I just… I know you’re thinking you want to hear what I’ve got in mind for a relationship, but, uh, I’ve neverhadone, really. I mean, queer guys don’t get a relationship, do they?”
“Well they donow,” Mason said, trying not to cross his eyes or sound like a condescending shit. “Thirty years ago, not so much. Nobody expected us to have a family. I mean mymotherexpected me to, and that’s what mattered, but I get it.” And suddenly he remembered his gay history, riots at Stonewall, AIDS activism—all of it. “For a while, close encounters in bathrooms were all we got. But not anymore.”
“Not according tomymom,” Terry said glumly. Then he let out a sigh—and it turned out to be one of the best sounds ever. “She’s… I mean, I want to say she’s, like, mentally ill, but I don’t think that’s right. Dane can’t help himself. Or, I mean, hecanhelp himself, and, you know, that’s what he does. But she… it’s like her heart died when I was a kid. And the only thing that makes her happy is now it’s my turn to take care ofher.”
“But that’s not fair,” Mason said, so relieved—so damned relieved—to actually say it out loud.
“But she didn’t have to have me, you know,” Terry told him matter-of-factly. “She could have gotten an abortion. I’m lucky to be alive.”
Mason’s heart stopped. Literally. In the silence that it left behind, he could hear the big whoosh of its last beat roaring through his ears.
“Your mother told you that?” he asked, not sure where the breath had come from.
