Tyed

chapter sixty five

Have you ever been in a place where everything is just wrong?

Everything that exists in that physical space has nothing to do with it; it's just a couch or a wall or a person. There's nothing wrong with you, either; you're as alive as you are outside of that room, and you're not sick. You can just hear your heartbeat in your ears. The smell of rot isn't actually in your nose; it's more in your mind's eye, this unsettling feeling, like the place is haunted or the world is about to end.

It's palpable, it really is. The eggshells you walk on, you can hear them crack, not in your ears but in your heart. It's like waiting for a bass to drop, waiting for a jumpscare you know is coming; but that moment lasts forever, for every day of your life until you manage to leave.

But your house is not haunted, because it is not a ghost that put his hand on your shoulder. A hand heavier than the weight of the world, resting so lightly on you. A hand that is dirty and rotten and disgusting and sickening, and yet you are still because you are a deer and every instinct to fight back has disappeared. He froze them.

Tyler's father uses him as a crutch to lean on, and Tyler can't move. He doesn't know how. He doesn't know what he would do. Every action he could possibly take is the wrong action. He wasn't ready because this moment never should have existed. He can't even be angry, because to be angry is to take an action and he can't. He can't do anything. There's nothing to do.

"Could you all keep your voices down?" His voice is... weak. Weaker than normal. He got sick once, had the three of them running back and forth all the time to get him the things he asked for; Tyler remembers whispering to Kali during church with hope that maybe he was going to die. His voice is worse now than it was then. "Leave an old man to die in comfort."

The silence chokes everything. Tyler can't move. These are two worlds, two lives, that cannot exist at the same time, and the same place. He tries to find Colby, tries to hold onto him, but his gaze is frozen in place where he stands. If he acts, that might make the situation real.

It's Scarlett who opens her mouth. "I'm sorry," she says, possibly just to pierce the silence; but it's empty, empty words into an empty room.

"Go back to bed," Carol says, and Tyler finds his gaze flitting without his permission to his mother; her hands are balling into fists. Something cracks, and Tyler falls forward, like he just got put back into a limp body that didn't have the ability to stand. Colby catches him by the arm, and Tyler grips him like a lifeline. He resituates himself at Colby's side, and Colby puts a protective arm around him. Tyler wishes he wouldn't- not because it doesn't help, but because he wishes Colby wasn't here to see this.

Tyler's father steadies himself on the wall again, casting Tyler a glance that Tyler doesn't mean to meet. His skin is droopy, sagging. His pale blue eyes are Tyler's; the long nose, strong lip that wavers in the uncertainty of the moment, his brows, all of it Tyler sees and curses in the mirror every day. The way his skin hangs off his face, pale and blue, mottled and sick, that's new. He's mostly bald, although what remains is long and unkempt, a stark grey, and he's hunched over and heavier set in the way old men get, tired of life. He looks like an image of Tyler's sad future.

He coughs. It's not just a sickly cough; it's long, racking, his body shakes, it's got a haunting echo like it's bouncing off the walls of a concrete tunnel that's getting ever thinner. Cancer, did they ever say where? Or did they just say he was going to die? Because he's pale. His blood doesn't look like it's moving anywhere fast. And in that cough, Tyler can see life leaving him, piece by piece. He looks at Trey, whose gaze is frozen on their father. I want to see him die.

Nobody says a fucking word. Not even Scarlett or Colby. Colby's grip tightens on Tyler's shoulder, and a whole different terror strikes him- terror that feels so small in comparison to the hush that Tyler's father puts on this room; because this is what Tyler was afraid of. The four of them, standing in one room, under Colby's eyes.