The Space Between (7 page)

That Sam wasn’t gay was beside the point. He liked women. A
lot
of women. But when Angus hit him with that, he leveled Sam. The proof was sitting right in front of me.

“Shan…” I murmured, glancing at her fingers as they traveled over the edges of the envelope. “Could you read through the legal bullshit? Just tell us what it says?”

She nodded, and slipped her finger under the flap of the envelope. Holding the folded pages in her hands, she paused and looked around the table.

“I think we should agree, before this goes any further, that we’re putting Angus behind us. He’s gone. No matter what we find in here, he’s gone, and we’re not reliving any of it.”

“Agreed,” Matt said.

Shannon turned her attention to the legal documents, and I studied my siblings in the thick silence that ensued. Sam was still locked in his angry sneer, busy mounting arguments against whatever Angus left in the will.

I tried to look away from the wordless communication passing between Matt and Lauren, but I wanted to learn the private language of people in love. It felt voyeuristic to watch them, yet it occurred to me that I understood nothing about the inner workings of a serious relationship.

Matt’s head rested on Lauren’s shoulder while her hands stroked his fingers. I thought of Andy’s fingers and their silken texture as my fingertips coasted over her skin.

Why the fuck was I still thinking about that?

From the corner of my eye, I saw Shannon lean back in her chair and drop her hands to her lap. “Holy shit,” she sighed.

“I called it. Rusty nails for the win,” I said.

“Don’t tell me,” Sam said. “He’s leaving us a hoard of milk crates and bottle caps from the past twenty years that he expects us to transform into a monument in his honor, and he’s leaving the house to a group of doomsday survivalists.”

“No, I got it,” Matt said. “He’s left fifty grand buried in coffee cans all over the yard, and we have to find them. He left the rest of his money in a Cayman account and lost the number, and the house is going to self-destruct after we sign these papers.”

“Wrong and wrong,” Riley disagreed. “He’s in debt at the dog track, and we have to cover his gambling losses unless we want some goodfellas to take out our kneecaps. And he burned all of our baby pictures and childhood mementos, and we each get a plastic baggie with the ashes. But they’re all unmarked because fuck us.”

“That one’s good,” I said.

“You’re all wrong,” she murmured. Pushing away from the table, Shannon grabbed the whiskey and glasses, quickly distributing them and uncapping the bottle with quivering hands. “Aunt Mae used to say ‘There’s a fine line between being an alcoholic and being an Irishman. Drunks are always assholes.’”

“That bad?” I asked when she poured three fingers into my glass.

“She also said ‘What whiskey won’t cure cannot be cured,’ so bottoms up, boys.”

“I never knew Aunt Mae was such a drunk, or a philosopher,” Riley said. “I guess we have something to be thankful for after all.”

“Oh yeah,” I replied. “She took a drink upstairs with her every night. An alligator could have been spooning with her in bed, and she never would have noticed.”

When the glasses were empty, Shannon nodded and passed the bottle around again. “Let me get this out.” She glanced at the document, the liquid in her glass lapping against the rim as her hand shook.

I placed my hand on Shannon’s shoulder and squeezed, and she responded with a patient smile. A Jack Russell terrier was definitely involved.

“Okay. Here goes. Assets were distributed in rather standard terms. Angus left two hundred and fifty thousand to Cornell.”

“Figures,” Riley said.

Cornell was the only family tradition that survived to my generation. Matt, Sam, and I studied at Cornell’s architecture school, and Sam and I picked up our Masters of Architecture there while Matt went to MIT’s grad program in structural engineering.

Riley attended Rhode Island School of Design’s architecture program. On top of Riley’s decision to stray from the herd, he frequently revealed shocking gaps in knowledge, forcing us to keep an eagle eye on his work. We suspected those gaps were more about Riley than RISD.

“His stake in Walsh Associates is to be divided between the six of us, and that stake can be cashed out or reinvested.”

She took a deep breath, and I braced myself for the ax to fall.

“He invested five hundred thousand in Walsh Associates, with the earmark that it pays off the loan on the office.”

“What?” I slapped both hands on the table in shock. My siblings wore the same stunned expressions.

“He decides to invest in us now?” Sam yelled. “Are you fucking kidding me? After we drained everything to start the goddamn business and mortgaged our asses off to buy that place?”

“And,” Shannon continued, “he left the house in Wellesley, and all its contents, to us. We are free to sell it, although the will states he wants it restored first. He left money for that purpose.”

“Which may still contain twenty years of milk crates and bottle caps,” Matt said.

“And the ashes of my baby pictures,” Riley added.

“Dude, you’re the fifth kid. There were never pictures of you,” Sam said.

“There’s more.”

We gazed at Shannon, all slightly terrified to hear anything else.

It shouldn’t have surprised me. Everything Angus left would have fallen into reasonable territory if he had been a reasonable father. He wasn’t. He was a demonic jackass who got off on abandoning us to raise ourselves while getting in regular jabs about us letting Mom die on our watch. We would have been more receptive to his final requests if they didn’t sting like one last slap in the face, a reminder that he hated us.

“This is where the ass raping starts,” Sam muttered. A sure sign of Sam’s intoxication was the slip in his vocabulary. He loved sounding erudite, yet never managed to pull it off drunk.

“He left two million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It’s only for research and treatment for preeclampsia. Anything left after the disposal of the estate goes into a trust for equal division among…his future grandchildren. It will be made available on their twenty-fifth birthdays, in addition to one hundred thousand already in the trust.”

Holding the memories of Mom’s death alongside a future generation was uncomfortable at best, unfathomable at worst. It didn’t take much to relive the horrible moments of her death or the long road that followed, but imagining the possibility of our own children in the same thought felt wrong.

Even with five siblings, we were always somewhat incomplete. Angus’s death didn’t orphan us. We were orphaned the day my mother died. For us, family was far more fragile than it seemed at first glance.

One by one, we drained our glasses and darted glances at each other in bewildered silence.

“I was expecting something more demented,” Matt said. “Why spend twenty-two years since Mom’s death being the biggest cocksucker in the world, only to do this? It’s not like he couldn’t have funded that research a long time ago.”

“He did,” Shannon said. “According to this, he’s been a major donor for about thirteen years now. Always anonymous.”

“And he’s suddenly concerned about grandkids?” Sam sneered. “We’re talking about the person who referred to you as ‘cunt,’ Shannon, and routinely suggested that Mom was a whore and Erin wasn’t his, so yeah, I’d say this is more than demented.” He filled his glass again. “He knew what he was doing the entire time, and this is just another manipulation. I don’t want a fucking dime of it.”

“When was it written?” I asked.

“Two years ago,” Shannon said.

“Two years ago?” Sam yelled. “Two years ago! Two. Fucking. Years. Two years ago, he creates trust funds for our nonexistent kids because he’s such a caring guy, and two months ago he rips me a new asshole because he’s decided I’m a disgusting queer. Unbelievable. No, actually quite believable, and we’re the fools for expecting something different.”

“We agreed,” Shannon said. “It’s the past. We’re letting him go. We’re not letting this screw us up anymore. We can’t do that to ourselves. And we have to look at this as a window into his fucked up mind. Think about it—this tells us with great clarity that something mattered to him. He tried to explain it with this because all he had when he was alive was anger.”

“Shannon, it is one big ‘fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’ I’m not going along with any revisionist history tonight. He was a demented son of a bitch, and I’m not remembering him fondly because he wants to pay off our debt and send his fictitious grandchildren to college.”

“Refusing the money would let him win,” I said.

“I don’t think so, Patrick,” Sam scoffed. He pushed to his feet and circled the table. “Taking the money would mean we think of him every time we look at our office space, or the children that we’re all too fucked up to have.” He stopped pacing and gestured to Lauren and Matt. “I don’t mean you two. You’ll have awesome, well-adjusted kids, largely due to Lauren, and we’ll be the fucked up aunts and uncles who take your kids to Red Sox games. The rest of us are a little too damaged for anything normal or healthy.”

“He loved Cornell, Sam. He loved the work, even though he had unusual ways of showing it in recent years. He loved that house. And he loved Mom—”

“Then he should have killed himself a long time ago, Shannon! It woulda been better,” Sam roared. “And how can you even say that? If he loved her so much, how could he talk about her the way he did? How could he disown you, and me, and Erin? At least these guys look like him.” Sam waved his hand at Riley and Matt. “It wasn’t like he could pretend they weren’t his.”

“He loved her more than anything, and he couldn’t live without her. I wish you could remember what it was like before she died, and the way they were together. But after Mom?” Shannon held out her hands and let them fall to her lap. “He existed. Just barely. He did everything in his power to drown it all out, and it made him a monster. In the end, he tried to make a few things right in the only way he could.”

“He called you a cunt!” Sam ran his hands through his hair and bent at the waist, as if winded from the exertion. “How can you overlook that? How can you ever forgive that? How can you forgive everything he did, everything he said?”

“I’m not,” she replied. “I’m letting it go. There’s plenty to be angry about, Sammy. But it’s his shit, not yours, and you have to let it go.”

“I like how you think you’re letting it go. I like that you think you won’t wake up some day and realize he gutted you. He completely fucking gutted you. You don’t even have a clue how much he ruined you but someday you’ll figure it out.”

Sam shook his head and shuffled down the hallway. The table descended into quiet again, the only sounds coming from the slosh of whiskey into glasses.

I thought about Sam’s tirade, wondering if he was right—were we too damaged? Taking over the business meant my time was devoted there, and not on dating. Marriage never figured into my thoughts. My interests centered on open relationships without the responsibility of keeping track of birthdays or holidays. Kids only crossed my mind when they screamed their demands from the middle of the grocery store aisle.

Lauren’s engagement ring caught my eye when her fingers ran through Matt’s hair. His eyes drooped shut and he whispered something into her ear that elicited a smile. That voyeuristic feeling returned and I wished away the unbidden thoughts of Andy that appeared every time I noticed Lauren’s loving touch.

“We need to sell that house. Hire a crew to clear it out. Be done with it,” Matt said. “But someone needs to make sure he doesn’t have a pack of wolves roving the grounds first.”

“I’m not going out there.” Riley shook his head and reached for a bowl of paella. I watched as he picked through the dish with his fingers, selecting chunks of chorizo to nibble. We failed him on the table manners front.

Before I realized what I was offering, I said, “I’ll go. It’s my problem.”

Four pairs of eyes snapped toward me in surprise. “We can do it together,” Shannon said.

“No. You’ve got enough on your hands with the estate, and I really don’t want to be involved in all the legal bullshit. I’ll do this. You do that.”

“Yes, boss,” she replied with a salute. I grimaced at the title. “This officially makes you the CEO, you know.”

“No,” I said. “It means business as usual.”

“What we need,” Matt slurred, his hand sweeping over the table and narrowly missing a few wine glasses before Lauren steadied him. He was five minutes from falling face first into bed. I wasn’t far behind him. “Is a party. Like the one they had in Oz when the witch died. The first witch, not the one chasing Dorothy.”

“Not the direction I was expecting you to go, my friend. I was thinking something along the lines of engagement party, but please, proceed,” Riley said.

“Yeah, that too,” Matt said.

Lauren started clearing the table, and he smacked her rear end as she walked away. Their easy affection was unexpected and so arrestingly intriguing I struggled to tear my eyes away. Was that how couples interacted? Whispered words and ass slapping?

“We need to do that. We didn’t do anything for the holidays, or our birthdays.” Matt drew a triangle between himself, Shannon, and me. “We should. We deserve something good.”

Shannon and I were born the same year, me in January, and her in December. Matt came along the following December. We usually picked one day as a communal celebration, but that ritual fell away this year. Taking Angus off life support and burying him the week before Christmas didn’t leave much room for anything special or festive.

“You’re right,” I murmured, sipping my whiskey. Crawling would be an accomplishment tomorrow; running would be out of the question. “This all feels like a kick in the ass, but we’ll own the Derne Street office outright. All the Bunker Hill properties will be off the books by the end of February. We get to do what we love and hang out with each other every day. We need to celebrate that shit.”

“Good,” Matt shouted as he stumbled into the kitchen. “But don’t think I’m forgetting that you’re thirty-three, and Black Widow is thirty-two now.” He pressed Lauren up against the refrigerator and kissed her. I looked away when he hooked her leg over his hip and his hand slipped under her shirt.