Senior Stories: Gillian Lombart

11. Uncle Billy

Billy was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of green tea. He had been there for hours thinking and trying to wrestle with the feelings his brother’s trip to rehab had stirred up. Only now a week after being back did he have time to let what being back meant for him. It had been a long time since he was back in the Bay Area and it seemed at every corner his past haunted him. In Los Angeles he had spent years and thousands of dollars dealing with the trauma of growing up on the house on 8th Street. There were only a few people in his life that he had trusted with the family secret that he and his brother kept. Leslie was one of them and now she was living through her own trauma, with his brother being he one who caused it for her.

She deserved better, but she also knew that this was always lying underneath – alcoholism: the sleeping giant. She knew that Billy and Jeff’s father drunk himself to death, she knew that their mother secretly popped pills at night and had slept with half the doctors in the San Francisco Bay Area just to get her fix. Leslie was the only one who knew.

Growing up their family was the perfect family. Their mother an assistant professor at the college, their father the owner of a famous book store where beat poets and novelists debuted their work. It wasn’t until their father was taken to the hospital with sudden liver failure that Billy told Leslie about the hell that he had been living in. The drunken fights that left him and his brother bruised and bloodied, the heavy responsibilities of a house hold left upon children because the parents couldn’t take care of their basic needs, and the times where his parents would leave for days never to call or even inform their children of where they had gone.

“What do you mean they haven’t been home in a few days?” Leslie asked the first time he broke his silence. They were in 9th grade and whispering in the library.

“They do that some times. They just leave.”

“I don’t get it, do they leave you money for groceries? How do you get to school?”

“We have credit at the local market so food isn’t an issue and we just walk.”

“What parent would do that? You sure your dad isn’t just at the store and you have missed him?”

“No one has seen him for three days. My mom has been gone for two.” Billy said trying to make it sound casual and that he wasn’t worried.

“You should tell the police. What if they’re hurt?”

“Don’t worry about it Leslie, they will turn up. They always do.”

Billy felt guilty, that maybe because he had described his fears of leaving his brother behind, the fear that he would not be taken care, that he lead Leslie into a trap. A life trapped of caretaking for someone who had never given the opportunity to learn how to take care of his or her self. He wanted to rescue her out of this life, to swoop in and save everyone who had been hurt by his brother’s behavior, but he knew deep down in his heart that wasn’t the right thing to do. He didn’t really have the money to fly Leslie back and forth from Colorado and the Bay Area. There was only one thing that he could do without loosing himself and all the issues he had worked on these past 10 years; he could help Gillian and Andie gain something that he was denied, the chance to be a kid and not worry.

Dragging out his computer from his kitchen bag he set about researching how to gift his nieces back their childhood. First he would start with Gillian. Leslie was worried about her and told him that she had recently broken up with her boyfriend, for the life of him he couldn’t even picture Gillian dating, let alone having a boyfriend, but he made a note to try to talk to her about. Maybe she would tell her charming uncle from L.A. what was going on in her head since her parents were no longer safe.