Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

We went downstairs to the kitchen, where he took the cocoa tin and dumped the last bit of its cocoa into the trash. So we could bury our secrets in it, he said.

“But that’s not really tellin’ a secret,” I insisted.

“Sure it is. And one day when we’re both feelin’ brave, we’ll dig up the secrets and promise each other, right now, that no matter what they are, we won’t turn on each other. We won’t get angry. We will accept the secrets and still … I don’t know … любовь each other.”

“What’s любовь mean, Grand?” I did my best pronunciation of the Russian word. It came out jarred and mumbled, but I already knew what it meant. It was the first Russian word I had learned. Still I wanted to hear him translate it.

“‘Love.’ It means ‘love,’ little man.”

This love echoed in my ears as I got closer to the tree house, where we had buried the secrets. I shushed Sal as we moved low through the brush. We heard the moans before we saw them. It was the first time I’d ever seen sex. It took me a moment to realize that’s what I was seeing.

At first I just saw Grand standing back into the man’s chest. Clothes in piles on the ground around them. Two naked bodies strong and close. The movement was gentle and familiar, like the time I was in Juniper’s with Dad. He was going up to the register with a tube of toothpaste in his hand. There was another man already at the register. Along the way, Dad tripped and fell into the backside of this man. They didn’t fall down, they just nudged forward, bending in a curve of bodies while that tube of white toothpaste shot out in front.

That’s what their sex looked like to me, just two men falling into each other and catching each other at the same time.

I wanted it to be a girl he was with. Grand with a girl wouldn’t have frightened me. We had been brought up not religiously but Bible aware. I knew the Bible said thou shall not lie with another man if you are one. I was not wise enough to know that God was more than the Bible. I had yet to know this at thirteen years old for not just Grand’s sake but for my own as well.

I was sure Grand was going to the fire in the ground, and even though the devil wasn’t so bad when he was Sal, maybe he was terrible when he wasn’t. Thinking of Grand being tormented for eternity not only broke my heart, it broke all the surrounding area too. My lungs. My ribs. My everything.

I wasn’t ready to lose the fantasy that was my brother, because like his name, he was grand. The grandest damn thing I’d ever known. And yet, I didn’t know him at all. I had always thought he was just this traditional American male, and here he was so foreign to me. It was then I realized he’d been telling us he was gay all along, every time he spoke Russian. Not because of the Russian itself. It could’ve been any language because being gay was what was foreign. It seemed not to speak English and he didn’t understand it. He knew no one else who fluently spoke that language. He tried to speak it, learn it, understand it, but being gay didn’t feel like home, where all the boys wrapped their arms around girls and kissed them and made love to them because they wanted to.

Grand tilted his nose up. He was breathing something in. I smelled it too. His cologne on my shirt. Oh, God. Was that his face turning toward me? I pulled back into the shadows. No, he wouldn’t see me. I wouldn’t let him. But still he would know. He would smell my shadow and know I had seen who he truly was.

The heat was making it worse. It felt centered on my face. I wished I could just go home like it didn’t matter. But of course, it mattered. It was the thing to matter the most.

I was going to scream. I had to get away. I made a mad dash to the river, where I jumped into the water and stayed under. Nothing but the fish hear you screaming underwater, nothing but the fish and yourself.

I think Sal thought I was trying to drown myself, because he swam down after me and pulled me up. I suppose I was under there for a rather long time. I let him swim me out of the water and to the bank, where he laid me down. He lay beside me and in silence, we looked up at the stars.

I saw each small glitter as another Earth. A billion planet Earths. A billion Grands fucking a billion men. And would I be lying at the side of the river a billion times? Frightened. Confused. Lost. Or was I up there somewhere getting it right?

“Sal?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it a sin? What Grand’s doin’ with that man?”

“Are you asking me as a boy? Or as the devil?”

“As a boy, Sal. I’m askin’ you as a boy.”

“Then, yes. It is a sin. Isn’t that what all boys are taught? To like girls? To fall in love with one and make a life out of it? That’s what they say. I don’t know, Fielding, it’s just what they say.”

I shut my eyes. The stars were blurry anyways. “And what if I ask you as the devil?”

“I’d say no. It isn’t a sin. And shouldn’t the devil know more than a boy? Shouldn’t a devil know all the things hell exists for?”

* * *

When we got home, Sal went to bed while I dusted off the family Bible. I carried it up to Grand’s room and, using his yellow highlighter, followed the lines,

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

I left the page open on top of his pillow so he’d see it when he got home. I thought I was saving him.

When he did finally come in an hour later, I stayed in the shadows. I remember how he was whistling. So happy as he turned on his light. I could hear him walking toward his bed. Then silence. Was he reading the Bible?

Yes, he had read it. Yes, he had thrown it into the wall and slammed his door shut. When he started to cry, it sounded like hail on a roof and I had to leave. I returned to the tree house and dug up the cocoa tin, and under the light of a billion mes, I read his secret:

I’m afraid.

A billion times the stars flinched and screamed, I’m afraid.

I’VE STOOD ON top of more churches than I’ve gone into. The last time I was in a church, I was forty-four, and it was my father’s funeral. Him and Mom had been living in Pennsylvania, and I came in to stay with them while she was sick.

She died in June. He died in August. Another summer of death. I knew he wouldn’t last long, the way he sat at her bedside, eyes squinted, arms folded, legs crossed. For all the sunscreen Grand had asked me to put on, no one ever once asked Mom, not even when she left the house and went to all those places in the sun. Her chocolate chips had melted. I wasn’t there to pull her away from the oven.

I remember how Dad would lay his hand on her head as white and as slight as powder on the pillow. She’d tilt her ending eyes toward him and the window. Her breathing raspy and rutted, like a fingernail scratching across a cotton sheet.

All she wanted to do was to go outside, even in the rain. Especially in the rain.

“Let me go.” She’d reach for her feet like that was the first step.

We’d pull her bones back to the bed. It was no longer her keeping her inside. It was us, and that turning of the tables clotted our hearts with an inescapable sorrow until we almost wished she were still afraid of the rain.

“You need your rest,” we’d say, and feel her pulse, sounding like closing.

One time as she slept, I held my nose to her cold skin. I thought she would smell like the morphine they pumped into her. I don’t know if morphine has a smell, but I thought it would be something metallic, something acidic, most definitely something cold. I was relieved when she still smelled like Breathed River. Did she really? I think I just needed her to.