Summer Son (11 page)

Though I was gentle with my son, inside my blood was boiling. Oliver often had that effect on me, but today more than ever. Just who did he think he was, trying to take Harrison? He couldn’t even hold on to our son for a whole weekend.

When Zane held his arms out for Harrison so I could pay, I hesitated before handing him over and then hated myself for it. Zane knew too, I could tell. He pulled Rory out of the cart and tucked both baby and dinosaur up on his shoulder.

He was quiet when we got back to the car, and I offered to take him back to his own apartment rather than coming home with me and Harrison.

He shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”

“No,” I said softly. “I want you to stay with us.”

“Okay. I need some clean clothes.”

When I smiled at him, he gave me a tentative smile back. I pulled up outside his apartment building and put my hazards on while I waited for him. After Zane jogged up the steps and disappeared inside, I watched the closed door for longer than was necessary, then looked over my shoulder to where Harrison was—miracle of miracles—napping in his car seat.

That meant I had no one to talk to.

I considered calling Leo, telling him about what had gone down in the supermarket, but he’d just get mad, and we’d end up shouting at each other down the phone. It was a love thing: I got mad, he got mad.

Zane didn’t take long, but I still had plenty of time to sit and think, staring out of the front window. We hadn’t found the time or need to sit and discuss all aspects of our past yet. We’d shared little things, but not much. He probably deserved full disclosure.

He put a duffel on the backseat, since the trunk was full of groceries, then slid back into the passenger seat.

“Do you have school tomorrow?” I asked as we pulled away.

“Yeah,” he said and made a face. “I have a watercolors class at eleven.”

“Cool.” Then awkward silence. “I’m sorry about Oliver,” I said eventually. “I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”

“It’s not your fault. You couldn’t know he was there, or that he’d react that way, or what he’d say to me.”

“What did he say?”

Zane stretched his neck from side to side, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

“Something about my being a terrorist who was trying to kidnap his child.”

The white-hot rage stabbed through me again. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“He disgusts me.”

Zane reached for my hand and held it as I steamed. “I’ve heard a lot worse, Ellis. I really don’t want this to mean you don’t let me take care of Harrison anymore. I love getting to hang out with him.”

“I don’t give a fuck what Oliver thinks. He lost that privilege when he decided that Harrison wasn’t his son anymore.”

“Is that what happened?”

I hummed and explained, briefly, what had gone down after the divorce.

“Bastard,” Zane said emphatically as we unloaded the car. “How could he just turn his back on his child?”

“The judge at the court agrees with you,” I said drily. “That’s why Oliver has to pay child support. They ruled that Harrison wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Oliver, so he has to take equal responsibility. It was a landmark case, apparently.”

“I guess New York hadn’t dealt with the fallout from many gay divorces.”

“Another landmark,” I said. “We were the first for that as well.”

It wasn’t exactly a badge of honor. One of the first gay couples to get married in New York got divorced less than three years later.

I left Harrison in his car seat when we went inside, hoping he’d nap a while longer so we’d have a chance to unpack all the groceries. Zane was quiet, but I didn’t want to push. He’d already been through enough today without me asking him to talk about his feelings.

We ended up on the couch with a tall glass of iced tea each, watching Harrison sleep.

“Do you think Oliver will do anything?” Zane asked me after a while.

“What can he do? He doesn’t get a say about who gets to watch Harrison. You could have been a babysitter for all he knew.”

“True,” he conceded.

“I’m not worried,” I said, sliding a hand around the back of his neck and squeezing gently. “I’m just surprised you think we’re worth it. It’s not like I come without baggage.”

He laughed. “I don’t mind that. I love children. And… Ellis? I think I’m falling hopelessly in love with your son.”

“He loves you too.”

I didn’t know what that meant, for me, or for Zane, or for Harrison.

“There’s some stuff I need for you to know,” Zane said. “And I’m really not sure what you’re going to think of me when I’m done. I don’t want to lie to you.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “I’ll listen.”

“My childhood wasn’t easy,” he started.

But whose was?

The youngest of five sons, Zane was the baby and the one his brothers always vowed to protect, especially after his father died when he was twelve, right on the cusp of adulthood. That was when his oldest brother, Sabri, took over as head of the family.

Sab was nineteen. Zane had known he was involved in something he didn’t want their mother to find out about, but the depth of that deceit only became known when the position of power fell on Sab’s shoulders. When Sab was in his teens, the streets of New York were littered with gangs. Sab had found one that would accept a kid from a Muslim background, even if his family wasn’t religious.

“We weren’t black, not Hispanic, definitely not white,” Zane said with a laugh. “He did what he thought was right, found a group of people who would offer him protection, and all of the rest of us by extension.”

In the two years that followed his father’s death, Sab got more and more involved with the gang. He’d disappear, sometimes for days on end, coming home with hundreds of dollars in cash, which was handed straight to their mother. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what was going on. But with her husband and the main source of the family’s income gone, they had to take whatever they could.

When Zane was fourteen, Sab agreed to take him out on the streets. A reedy kid, with artistic rather than athletic talent, he was already taking shit from his peers about his sexuality. There was no way he could reveal it to his brother, who had brushed aside his Muslim roots in order to better fit in with the mostly black, mostly Christian gang.

It was supposed to be about protecting himself, Zane explained. To be able to fight back when the kids at school called him a fag, to demand respect and have the power to back that up.

Then twenty-one, Sab was heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the gang, which mostly meant dealing drugs and guns, as well as stolen meat and illegally bred dogs. He’d risen quickly through the ranks, meaning he brought home more money but also put a target on his back. The other gangs knew of him. Knew that position of authority.

It was a weekend night when Sab let Zane ride with him in a Mercedes that was most likely stolen. There was no other way Sab would have been able to afford it. Zane’s youth and naïveté meant he didn’t truly understand what was going on, and his hero worship of his older brother meant he didn’t question it when Sab ordered him to watch the entrance of the alleys he disappeared into to exchange something from his pocket for a wedge of cash.

“This isn’t ours,” Sab warned him as they pulled away, back into the night, and he handed the cash to Zane. “Stick it in the glove compartment until we can go hand it in.”

Sab’s death—a drive-by shooting—went unreported in the local press. Why would anyone care about another gang member dying? Not when the gang member in question had more than two grand worth of cocaine in the car and in his pockets, and nearly five grand in cash.

No one would care that his youngest brother watched the whole thing happen and screamed his voice raw as the life seeped out of Sab’s body. Police reports said they were on the scene within minutes, having been close enough to hear the shots.

Zane was taken into protective custody until his mother could be informed that she’d lost a son. As the only witness to the shooting, he was questioned by the police until they could determine that he wasn’t the one who had killed his own brother.

Within days of the funeral, their mother declared they were going to visit family in Vermont. Zane had heard they had family there, only in the loosest definition of family. His mom’s cousin’s wife’s family. What he didn’t know was that his mom had packed up everything they owned and was moving them all out of the city, out of the only life Zane had ever known, to live in a sleepy little town of less than five thousand people.

A town where there was absolutely no one who looked like him. Or Cass, or Hyder, or Faris. Without Sab’s leadership, it was supposed to be Faris’s turn to head the family, but he immediately rejected any type of responsibility, and Hyder and Cass were too young.

“The first few months were hell,” Zane said. “My mom managed to get me grief and trauma counseling, which really fucking helped. Missing New York sucked, though. I hated Woodstock. I hated the quiet and the fact that nothing ever seemed to happen. I didn’t want to go to a new school. I missed my dad and Sab and my friends. I used to scream at my mom that I hated her and I was going to run away.”

He seemed ready for comfort, so I reached out and gently ran my fingertips through his silky dark hair. Zane kissed my thumb.

“It took about a year for me to settle there, and that was only when my art teacher saw something in me and started to encourage me to paint and draw. We were dirt-poor without the money Sab was earning from drugs, and my teacher gave me a sketch pad from the school’s stock, and a handful of pencils.”

“Look at you now.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I owe him a lot.”

“Where are your family now?” I asked.

“Hyder got a scholarship into med school, and Faris works in a bank. They’re still in Vermont with my mom.”

“And Cass is here, right?”

“Yeah, he moved back to the city with me. We were the youngest when we moved, but I think the most desperate to get back.”

“I can’t imagine wanting to be back in the city,” I said, shaking my head. “Not after everything that happened.”

“It’s different now. So different. I would never have come to this area when we were kids. It was too dangerous. Then the artists moved in and turned it around…. So, yeah. Now you know.” He seemed to shrug off everything he’d just told me.

“This doesn’t change anything between us,” I said, frowning as I forced him to look at me. “You know that, right? I mean, obviously I’ll tell you about my family at some point….”

“It doesn’t matter to you?”

“Of course it matters, Zane, it’s your past. But no, it doesn’t have any bearing on you spending time with Harrison.”

He stood, returned the two glasses to the kitchen, then came back to hover in front of me. “I could still be a target,” he said. “I stood as the sole witness in a murder trial. They never showed my face, but it was pretty fucking obvious who was giving testimony.”

“Okay….”

“They could come after me.”

“Who’s they?”

“I don’t even know!” he exclaimed. “I’ve changed my name—both Cass and I did, to my mom’s family name. And it was years ago. I was just a kid then. But… but….”

“The police know you’re back in New York?”

“Yeah,” he said mournfully. “My mom got in contact with the detective who looked after Sab’s case.”

“Then that’s all you can do,” I said.

I was pretty good at maintaining a calm exterior when I was secretly going crazy inside, but for some strange reason I didn’t feel crazy. I was worried, mostly for him, because he lived in a crack-house apartment building with shitty security and wandered the streets at all hours of the day and night. He’d never taken Harrison out on his own, though, and if that ever happened, I’d reassess my concerns.

I reached out for Zane’s hand, and he let me tug him down onto my lap. Holding him tight, I kissed his neck and waited for him to start to relax.

“What do you want for dinner tonight?” I asked.

“I don’t care.”

“Are you staying for dinner tonight?”

“Yes, please,” he said in a small voice.

“Hey,” I said. “We’re good. I promise. Let me cook for you.”

“I can make a really cool vegan pizza.”

I groaned and dropped my forehead to Zane’s shoulder, making him laugh.

Chapter 8

T
HE
PIZZA
was surprisingly good, even if Zane did bitch about my adding chicken on top of mine. I even let him cut tiny strips off for Harrison to try. It wasn’t quite the same resounding success as the breakfast banana yogurt, and most of it was smeared on his face rather than put into his mouth, but he did eat some of it. Which was something.

I let Zane give Harrison his bath and get him ready for bed while I got the kitchen cleaned up, then fixed Harrison’s bottle and got my computer fired up ready to do some work.

“Can I read to him again?” Zane asked as he emerged from the bedroom with a squeaky-clean, pajama-clad baby.

“Sure,” I said. “Do you want to try giving him his bottle at the same time? He might spit it out, but it’s worth a try….”