Chapter Forty-Eight

Travis was scared. The understatement of everything seemed to sink into his clothes, his dreams at night. There was a soft tickle of something he’d forget about, wincing through the pain of Roman farting in his sleep or as he felt the bristles of his toothbrush excavate his teeth. But then it would come to him, two fingers snapping sharply at his ear: he’d never get out of this place.

When the guard told him he had a visitor, Travis barely knew what to do with that information. He was tired and couldn’t take his grandmother’s worry or that lawyer’s exhaustion and heavy perfume or even his grandfather who had lived a lifetime of disappointment, and here was his grandson, adding to the pile. So, Travis walked heavily from the room he shared with countless other boy humans who were treated to feel far less than such to the room where Douglas was waiting for him.

Douglas.

But Douglas wasn’t alone. Travis’s Uncle Edwin was there, too, but slumped in a metal chair against the wall, nodding a man-to-man nod at Travis who had never felt more like a child. 

“Twenty minutes,” the guard said, a generous number, but Travis figured it was due to there being no other parties present.

Douglas studied him as he sunk slowly into the chair across from him. His cousin looked like a nightmare. Douglas was always intimidating with his bulky build and all that weightlifting. But his demeanor, for the most part, was like his father’s—cool and laid-back, his eyes catching on to the joke before you ever did. But now, he looked plain terrified.

“You okay?” Douglas asked although Travis felt like he should be the one asking it.

“Yeah, fine.” It wasn’t the truth, but Travis had given up on the truth for weeks now. He was existing. He made do like Marge would say.

“Good, good.” Douglas studied the hands in his lap, losing track of his thoughts. Edwin cleared his throat and nodded his head at his son who looked up and took Travis by the eyes even though Travis hated the feeling.

“I’m sorry,” Douglas said.

“For what?” Travis asked. It was an honest enough reply. Travis truly didn’t know why Douglas was here or what Douglas could be sorry for because Douglas had never been sorry for anything in his life. He just did things, and the people around him endured, no worse the wear, usually.

“You know for what.”

“No, I don’t. You got nothing to apologize for. Things are fine. I got a new lawyer. She says I’ll be out in no time.”

“I do. It was my fault, Travis. We both know what I did.” Douglas whispered this, and his eyes looked like he wanted to reel it all back. The image came full force—the small, old man in the back of the LeSabre. A scared bird in the wrong cage. Travis wanted him to reel it all back too.

Travis tried to assess the broken bits of feeling poking everywhere inside of him. He couldn’t hold onto anything but anger. How dare Douglas come in here and say “sorry” for something that was done, over with, finished. There was no going back. There was no bringing that man back to life. For an instant, Travis thought of Lazarus back from the dead, and oh how Travis prayed for a moment like that. He didn’t want to be in this place because of something so vile. He didn’t want his cousin looking at him.

“Then why? Why did you do something like that?” The question was unnecessary. Travis knew why. Even at fourteen, he could smell it on his cousin. The boy had no sense of who he really was.

Douglas looked for the answer in the cinderblock room, but he didn’t seem to find it. It painfully reminded Travis of the time he found his cousin crying in the bathroom. He made no noise, just shoulders slumped and heaving up and down, and it was an out of place experience. Nothing had happened to warrant it, so Travis shoved it away into a drawer of things he wasn’t sure he’d ever really seen.

“What else do I do? I mean...you’re good, Travis. You’ve always been good. You have a good family. You got Franklin. People like you.” Douglas no longer looked scared, which was even worse because he looked determined. And Travis wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what he had to say.

“But me? What do I got?” Douglas deflated, all the words spent, his breath traveling after them. Travis tried to avoid the hurt in Edwin’s eyes. Douglas’s father pretended to be enamored with the broken chips in the thin tile floor. Travis knew all about him because he had watched his Uncle Edwin from when he was a boy, his comings and goings as harsh and creaky as the screen door he was always walking out of. He wasn’t like Franklin. In fact, Travis had never known two brothers to be less alike. But there was a soft spot for Edwin just as much as there was a soft spot for Douglas within Travis’s heart. Because Franklin had taught him about the curse the generations suffered, and his uncle and his cousin were like watching that pain in real time, and they had never even known it. Until now.

“Me,” Travis said. He reached across to touch Douglas’s hand, the guard now poking his head out into the hallway to talk to someone wrapped in shadow. Douglas tried to hide his wounded animal look, sucking in his cheeks and biting them hard on the inside, but there was no control there, just the simple act of receiving his cousin’s love. So, he cried, much worse than that time in the bathroom because this time, he knew he was being watched.