Bombora (33 page)

I can’t help but bristle at the undertone of condescension in his voice. “Nate, I
know
. I feel like shit, okay?”

As if anticipating my lip, Nate’s already glaring at me with all the force he can muster. “So what the hell came over you, man?” he demands. “A couple weeks ago you were going on about how important it was that Phel and I stay in California—far as I can tell, we were both seriously considering it too. And now… I don’t even know what Phel is gonna do, but this morning he didn’t seem too keen on sticking around. Not that I blame the guy.”

“I wouldn’t blame him either. But I don’t want him to leave.”

Nate snorts. “Then don’t you think you should do something about it?”

We let the conversation go there; there’s not much else left to say, and we both know it.

Giving my arm a squeeze that suggests he knows it’s time to let me start doing my soul-searching thing, Nate says, “I’m going to bed. Night, Hugh,” and leaves to do just that.

It’s hard for me to sleep that night. Almost like a kid on Christmas morning, I toss and turn all night long, continuously checking the clock like it’ll make morning come faster. Maybe not in anticipation of anything good, but it’s anticipation nonetheless, and I know that the sooner the sun comes up, the sooner I can haul ass down to Palermo and try to make things right with Phel. The not knowing is killing me.

Having taken Nate’s words to heart, I feel guilty and stupid and ashamed that I wasted a whole day not apologizing to Phel, so even sleeping feels like a reckless, selfish waste compared to what I could be doing. I’d knock on his door right now if I didn’t think that would hurt my cause. Although I can’t shake the feeling that a face-to-face conversation would be best, Nate also has a point when he says Phel might feel crowded if I show up at his house and bang down his door. He’s probably right, but I want to be able to see Phel’s eyes and know for sure he’s forgiven me. Phel’s face can be doing a million contradictory things at once, each one a red herring as to what’s really on his mind, but I can always tell what he’s thinking from his eyes.

When morning comes and I’m all but bounding down the stairs with Callie at my side, I barely catch Nate on his way out. “Going for a run,” he tells me, holding the door open with his shoulder. “Might be a couple hours.”

“You want Callie?” I ask, and sure enough she’s wagging her tail and panting at Nate in eager anticipation, knowing exactly what his running shoes and old gym shorts mean.

He doesn’t really stop to consider. “Nah. I got some stuff to think about, so I’d rather fly solo today.” To Callie, he says, “Maybe tomorrow, girl,” and with that, he’s off.

Left to wonder how my brother has suddenly started to make me feel like the unmotivated slugabed in the family, I shrug and lead Callie to the kitchen so I can fix us some breakfast. It actually isn’t that early at all—nearly nine thirty, since I think I fell back asleep somewhere before dawn and caught up on the rest I’d missed while worrying about Phel. I know he’ll be up and about himself right about now, since ten or ten thirty is usually when we head down to the beach to get a head start on the crowd. With that in mind, I decide it’s probably safe to call him and put myself out of my misery. Hopefully he’ll look at the clock and know I couldn’t wait to call him.

Once I’ve filled Callie’s food bowls with water and kibble, I pop a couple of slices of bread into the toaster for myself and grab a mug of the still hot coffee Nate must have made before taking off. As I’m waiting for the bread to toast, I grab my phone off the kitchen counter and dial Phel’s number, then go through the rigmarole of requesting his mobile line after some polite chat with the switchboard operator at Palermo.

At first the phone rings long enough to make me worry he won’t pick up, but after maybe seven or so seconds of no answer, the phone switches over and I hear Phelan’s voice on the other end, gruff from a night of disuse. “Hello?”

“Phel,” I answer, and then throw in a bright “How’s it going?” before he can think better of it and hang up. “Glad I caught you still at home.”

From the silence on the other end, I can tell Phel isn’t necessarily in agreement. Eventually he says, “Hugh. What can I do for you?” in a tone that sounds more tired than antagonistic, but whose staid politeness still cuts like a knife.

“Look, man,” I say, “there’s no point pretending like yesterday didn’t happen, so I’ll just cut to the chase. I’m sorry. I was a dick, and I said some really unfair stuff to you and Nate. I won’t even try to justify why I said what I did, because there’s no excuse for how I treated you.”

There’s another pause. “I appreciate your calling, Hugh, but it isn’t that simple. You really….” Phel makes a waffling sound I can hear on my end. “You really betrayed my trust.”

“I know.”

Phel keeps going like I haven’t spoken. “I realize there’s a lot about my past life I haven’t been forthcoming about, but I always thought our friendship was about something other than knowing the trivialities of our individual situations. I don’t know everything about you, and I kind of prefer it that way; I was happy with you not knowing everything about me too.”

At first, I don’t know what to say to that. I know what he means, and obviously we’ve both kept up our ends of the bargain by not sharing everything or demanding anything, but… I didn’t realize it was an actual
pact
we’d entered into by unspoken agreement. “I would have told you everything if you’d asked,” I say tentatively. “And I would never have objected to knowing everything about you either.” I just never felt welcome to ask, exactly.

Sure enough, Phel says, “I didn’t want you to.” More gently, he adds, “There seemed to be greater trust required to satisfy ourselves with
not
knowing everything than there was sharing all our secrets.” He hesitates. “That’s what I always liked best about our friendship, Hugh. The trust.”

“Which I broke,” I supply for him. Even though I realize I’m not totally happy with how he’s defined our friendship, it hits me that I’ve probably known this for a while and never spoke up. I assumed things would change, maybe? Who knows? I was wrong, anyway. Pretty damn wrong.

“Yes, which you broke,” he agrees. Pause. “But you had just undergone a significant shock from your brother that made you begin to question what you knew about everything else. I know a thing or two about losing your worldview. It’s challenging for even the most patient of people.”

Surprised by how reasonable this sounds, I blurt out, “I’m not using that as an excuse.”

Phel chuckles. “I know. And I’m not giving you one. For what it’s worth, though… I think I would have explained everything to you at one point. Things just… changed. I got confused and started to wonder how much I could even trust myself. That wasn’t your fault.”

Another silence stretches out so long I begin to wonder if he’s still there. I ask, “Phel?” and his grunt is, I guess, a form of acknowledgement. “So where does that leave us?”

Phel’s hesitation is so profound that I can practically hear it. Then: “Would it really have been so terrible? If Nate and I had been lovers?”

Whoa. What a mental picture. I think if circumstances were totally different—if Nate wasn’t married, for one—and had introduced Phel as his boyfriend, after getting over the sudden fact of my brother’s gayness, I would have had no issue with the relationship. Of course not; Phel is a good man. Beyond thinking they have nothing in common, which even I know to be untrue, I would have been happy for them both. Probably even if they’d hooked up while in Cardiff, provided I’d known about it, I’d have eventually gotten over the initial weirdness of seeing my brother and best friend together. But I don’t really want to say any of those things to Phel. Phrased like it was, though, there’s no real way for me to dodge the question, which I suppose is Phel’s point.

“It wouldn’t have been terrible,” I answer slowly. “Not that in and of itself. But if you
lied
about it the whole time….” I let that hang there, but something about Phel’s answering pause seems to change.

“Yes. That is about what I expected you to say. The lies are always so much more damaging than the reality, aren’t they?” Before I can think I have no idea what the hell to say to that either, Phel moves on. “I suppose, after what happened back East, I let myself believe that refusing to know everything about a person, and refusing to let them know everything about me, would prevent lies from ever becoming necessary.” He pauses. The sound of his throat clicking in a swallow reaches me from down the line. “I was wrong.”

What the hell does that even mean? Hoping to prevent further confusion, I just come out with it. “What does that mean?”

Phel sighs. “It means, Hugh, that I’m still angry at you, but I’m trying not to be.”

“Okay….”

“It was wrong of me to leave you in the dark too. Were the circumstances reversed, suffice it to say, I’d have reacted the same.” That little pause again, and it occurs to me that Phel is picking his words really, really carefully. “It would… bother me to think that the important people in my life were in collusion against me.”

“But you’re not, right?” Fuck. The second the words are out of my mouth—even before I hear Phel’s sharp intake of breath—I feel impossibly guilty and start trying to backpedal like crazy. “Jesus. I’m sorry, Phel. I said the same thing to Nate and he almost flipped at me again. I didn’t mean that.”

Luckily for me, he ignores the comment altogether. “I’m sorry I told you to go fuck yourself,” he says.

Even in the emptiness of my kitchen, I shrug. “I deserved it.”

Chuckling, Phel replies, “In retrospect, I don’t think you did. But it was too late to take it back, and I felt like being sore at you a while longer.”

Sounds like Phel, all right. Whoever he
really
had that affair with, I can picture them running into each other ten years from now and Phel still wanting to punch him out, eyes narrowed and jaw set in that way of his I secretly think is more endearing than scary. Still, I’d rather someone else be on the receiving end of it. “Was it too soon for me to call?” I ask tentatively.

“No, it wasn’t,” he tells me. I think I can hear exhausted honesty in his voice. “I’m glad you called.”

“So… are we good?”

I picture Phel nodding on the other end. He’s probably sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee, or curled up on his sofa. The normalcy of the image is almost as reassuring as the knowledge he’s not still furious at me. “Yes, if you accept my apology too. For going behind your back. But I hope you understand I couldn’t out Nate to you without also betraying his confidence.” His voice is gentle but firm. “Despite my reservations towards your brother, that wasn’t something I would ever feel justified in doing. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, of course,” I answer, surprised in spite of myself to be hearing such an overt demonstration of loyalty to Nate. If possible, it makes me respect Phel even more. “I probably would have been pissed if you had. So I guess we’re good.”

“I’m glad,” sighs Phel.

Letting slip another self-conscious laugh, I ask, “Do you want to come surfing, then? Looks like it’s gonna rain later; you know the waves are always the best before a storm.”

But instead of him answering with an enthusiastic—if relieved—yes, there’s more hesitation, unexpected this time despite being hot on the tail of one very uncertain conversation. “I wish I could, Hugh,” Phel says with genuine reluctance. “But I’m afraid… I’m not feeling well. I planned to stay close to home this afternoon and… rest.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing serious,” he assures me. “Probably just a bug. I’ll be fine.”

“Do you want me to stop by?”

“No!” He tries to recover quickly, I can tell. “No. I’d prefer if you didn’t—no sense getting you sick too if I really am coming down with something. It’s a bad time of year for colds.”

“I guess….” In the interest of being completely honest, I deny myself the impulse to let it go when I’m not really confident of what I’m being told. “You’re sure you’re not still pissed off at me?”

“I’m truly not angry at you, Hugh,” he says. “Just unwell. We can go surfing tomorrow, if I’m feeling better. Or perhaps just spend some time together.”

“Okay. As long as you aren’t avoiding me.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I promise.”

Because there’s little else to say, we end the conversation there. I thank Phel again for being awesome, which makes him chuckle awkwardly, and when I hang up the phone, I realize my toast has long gone cold and charred in the toaster, since Nate is forever turning it up to the highest setting. It takes the wind out of my sails for some reason, and this thought occurs to me out of the blue, like it’d be even worse if I were cooped up at home after a near-fatal fight with my best friend, too unwell even to go and surf my troubles away. And I decide, right then, it’s unacceptable to let the conversation go there. Knowing Phel, he probably won’t feel good about it until we see each other face to face either. For someone raised in such a strict Catholic family, he doesn’t have much by way of faith in people.

Mind made up, I grab a few things from the pantry: an unopened carton of orange juice and a couple of boxes of this gourmet soup they sell at the local market. It’s not as good as the kind made from scratch, but it’s close enough that Phel probably won’t turn his nose up at it. Soup is a pretty clichéd remedy for someone who’s feeling unwell, but I know it always made me feel better as a kid, or when Nell made it for me, and that should suffice. The point isn’t even to cure Phel of whatever ails him—it’s just to be
there
, remind him he’s still got friends who care about him.

Considering it’s such a short drive to Palermo from my house, I arrive at the compound less than thirty minutes after I hang up with Phel. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a former patient or because I’m there all the damn time, but the security guard at the gate rarely makes me sign in anymore, since he recognizes me on sight. Steph was there even when I was enrolled in their twenty-eight-day program, a huge Greek man with a shining pate and one of the most carefully groomed beards I’ve ever seen.