Page 88 of We Fell Apart
I stand under the hot water until my skin turns red. I cry until I am fully cried out. Then I scrub my hair with shampoo and my skin with vanilla-scented soap until I’ve removed as much of theSharpie as I can. Finally, the stink of Kingsley’s unwashed body and the smell of paint thinner rinse down the drain.
I put on the clothes Holland has left on the bathroom counter—some underwear with the tags still on, a tank top, a pair of loose cotton pants, slides that I think have like a seven-hundred-dollar price tag, and a green cashmere sweater so fine it’s almost see-through.
Dressed, I check my phone.
There are no messages from Tatum. I ignore everything else.
In the kitchen, Holland makes coffee using the kind of fancy machine that takes pods. She heats up a frozen streusel cake in the oven and offers me a bowl of raspberries, but I only want the hot, crumbly cake.
“You wanna tell me what’s going on now?” she says as we settle on stools at the kitchen counter. “You don’t have to. You could just crash here or we can watch a movie. Talk about sex and college and, I don’t know,Portlandiaor whatever.”
“It’s about my dad,” I say, finally.
“You know I’m here for all the Kingsley Cello content.”
I tell her everything. The whole story of how I learned that I was Kingsley’s daughter, how I came to Hidden Beach, how I loved my brother instantly and totally. I try to explain how I’ve adapted to many parts of June and Kingsley’s way of life, and how beautiful it seems sometimes, and how rigid and restrictive it seems at others. I tell her that June sedated me. And that Tatum wanted me to leave, but we found each other, and now I think I’ve lost him. And that I thought Meer was faking Kingsley’s paintings, but it turned out that Cello is locked in the castle. He painted me and begged me to rescue him, demented and desperate and frightening.
Am I going to take action to get Kingsley medical help that heactually doesn’t want? Does he really need it, or is there nothing doctors can do anyhow?
I half expect Holland to want to run over and see Kingsley right away, get access to the paintings and the great man, but she is calm and rational. She asks questions and makes sure she understands the whole situation. Am I going to call social services and report that he is locked in the tower? Or do I want to let June handle her own very messed-up situation as if it’s none of my business? Do I want to salvage things with Tatum, or do I want nothing to do with him? And what about my brother?
I don’t have any answers, but she encourages me to talk until the sun starts brightening the sky.
When I’m finally talked out and wondering if she has somewhere for me to sleep, she brews two more cups of coffee. “I have some intel for you,” Holland says. “I didn’t tell you before, because Meer was all tangled up in his own problems, and I was all tangled up in mine, frankly. I felt like he should be the one to say it all, but obviously he hasn’t.”
“Meer? You’ve met him once.”
“Yeah, that’s not true.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“I should start at the beginning. Okay?”
Okay.
57
“Back in themiddle of the twentieth century,” says Holland, “a man named Jonathan Sinclair married a woman, Marybeth Bridger. This would be my great-grandparents on my mom’s side. Jonathan Sinclair came from money, went to Harvard Law, and became an expert in copyright. Marybeth’s family was equally well set up, and she invested in real estate.”
In time, Holland tells me, Marybeth gave birth to three sons.
Harris was the eldest.
Dean the middle.
And the youngest, Kincaid.
The three boys were strong and healthy. When they were young, they were close. But Jonathan set his children against one another.They were in competition for his approval, for his resources, for his fortune. “It was a bunch of elite New England notions of excellence that basically made Kincaid’s life a living hell,” says Holland. “And I understand it, because even though I conform in a lot of the ways my family cares about, being queer is a huge way I don’t conform, and so—whatever. Sometimes I think these people are completely terrible and sometimes I totally love them.”
“Kingsley tells this Grimm story on this podcast I listened to,” I say. “It was his favorite as a kid. It’s about three brothers who are pitted against each other by their father.”
Holland grips my wrist. “That’s totally him and his brothers.”
“Yeah,” I say, “except that even though one of the three brotherswins the contest, he doesn’t act like the winner. Instead, they all three share the fortune he inherits. They live together until the end of their days and are buried in the same grave.”
“That’s the opposite of what really happened to them,” says Holland.
When the Sinclair brothers grew to be young men, they were brilliantly educated and entitled. They had straight teeth and strong shoulders. They rowed crew and had pretty women on their arms. They worked hard in school and in sports.
