My Better Life

6

Gavin

The wind smacksmy face and needles of cold air hit me. I drag in a breath and brace myself against the sheer edge of the cliff. What the heck is wrong with me?

The wind whips past, tugging at my limbs, and I wonder for a minute if I should turn around. This route, a deer trail really, is more technically difficult than I realized. It’s not a marked trail, just a path down the mountain, near my cabin. The ledge along the cliff-face is only six inches wide and littered with loose gravel from past rockslides. It’s a warning I’d usually take by turning back. But I don’t want to turn around yet. If I do, I’ll have to confront that nasty-tempered red-haired woman, and then I’ll have to apologize.

I was an ass. But I felt raw, exposed, undone by what Lacey said, and then when I thought I was alone, safe to lick my wounds, I opened my eyes and there she was.

That half-feral, boney, frizzy-haired, smelly, awful woman. She was on her knees looking at me like I was someone to be pitied. Me.

Lacey saw that I couldn’t measure up, and then this woman, who smells like chicken poop, has feathers in her hair, and has never left this mountain top, looks at me as if she feels sorry for me.

I’m okay being envied, desired, or hated, but never, ever pitied.

When she told me I owed her for the artwork she delivered, my wedding present for Lacey, I lost control. I don’t have an excuse. To be honest, I barely glanced at the glass wave. It hurt to look at it. I didn’t want it anywhere near me. The light hitting the glass and sparking off it was a potent reminder of everything Lacey said, and everything I’d just lost.

Lacey claimed I don’t know how to love. I don’t know how to stay still. I don’t have direction or purpose. That I’ll make a terrible father and a terrible husband. That piece of glass, the blue shining wave, was a monument to my delusions. I thought I’d changed. But I haven’t.

Because even now, my chest is twisting, my hands are itching, and I’m preparing to run.

I’ll hike the Andes. I’ll dive the Maldives. I’ll go and I’ll do what I always do, and I’ll prove Lacey right.

My brother Will is going to be disappointed. He’s finally shucked off all our dad did to screw him up. Because he’s a better person than I am, he thinks I can do it too. He thinks Lacey is the best thing that ever happened to me and that I’d be an idiot to screw this up. Well, I’m an idiot.

That’s what our dad always said. Will was the smart one, I was the dumb one. Will was the serious one, I was the fun one. Will was the success, I was the failure. Will was…he was my twin and my best friend.

When he was nine, our dad realized he was a mathematical genius. He decided that he’d mold Will into the perfect financial, business machine. There were hours of tutors, books, lectures. Will wasn’t allowed outside to play, wasn’t allowed friends, our dad even put down his dog. I knew what was happening, I hated it. So I did my best to disturb the lessons, sneak Will out of the house, play pranks on the tutors. I did everything a nine-year-old could to make sure my best friend and brother could come outside and play.

A month into my strategic assault on tutors and lectures, my dad decided he’d had enough. Nothing would prevent Will’s talent from blooming, especially not his less useful, less intelligent, less obedient brother. So in the mornings, and in the evenings, really, every minute we weren’t in school, Will was sent to the office to study with his tutors, and I was sent…

At first, my dad locked me in my bedroom, but I just climbed out the window, down the tree, and then went to find Will to see if I could make a distraction big enough to let him run off. But then, my dad caught on, and instead of locking me in my room, he locked me in a closet in the basement. There were no windows, no lights, there was just darkness, and me, hitting my shoulder against the door and yelling and yelling.

The first day, when my dad let me out, I ran upstairs to find Will, to tell him everything that’d happened. But Will was crying because Dad had put down Riley, his Jack Russell. Will thought it was dad sending him a message, that his studies were more important than anything else. But I knew it wasn’t a message to Will. It was a message to me.

“Where were you?” Will asked.

I shook my head, shrugged, and said in a cocky voice, “Outside playing. I’m sick of hanging around, waiting for you to come and play.”

After a week of sitting in the dark basement closet for hours and hours while Will studied with his tutors, Will stopped asking where I was, why I wasn’t there trying to distract his tutors anymore. After a month, Will stopped trying to get away to play and just started studying all the time.

When he asked what I did while he was learning, I told him that I hiked in the woods, climbed trees, swam in the pond nearby. I told him dozens of stories about all the wonders of outside. The scratchy bark on the trees that I climbed looking for bird nests, the tadpoles I chased in the pond, the deer tracks I followed deep into the woods. I told him about all my adventures. It wasn’t a lie, because while the tight, concrete walls of the two by three closet pressed on me like a stone coffin, I closed my eyes and imagined I was in the bright woods, under the open sky, breathing in the leafy air, listening to the robins, feeling the wind on my skin and the cool, damp earth on my bare feet.

Three years later, I was twelve, taller, and stronger, and my dad stopped locking me in the basement closet. When Will’s economic tutor pulled in the driveway and my dad didn’t come, I sat in my room, shocked, confused, and then, with slow realization, I knew I was free. He wasn’t coming. I was free. That first day I sprinted into the office, barging in on Will and his tutor. I still remember the flushed heat of my skin, the wild beating of my heart, I was free, and Will and I were going to go outside. A trace of sweat lined my brow, my dad was there too. All of them looked up at me.

“Will,” I said, my voice breaking, my heart pounding.

He lifted his head from the large book he was tracing his finger down.

I swallowed down the fear at seeing my dad. What would he do? Would he take me back downstairs? I didn’t care. I felt wild and free.

“Will. Let’s go outside. Let’s…”

My dad’s lips curled into a cruel, amused smile. He knew something I didn’t, and I realized, too late, that I’d walked into whatever he’d planned.

“Let’s go outside?” I stuttered, gesturing at the window and the beautiful, blue sky.

Will stared at me blankly.