Untouchable (boyxboy)

Chapter 24

When I'd told my dad of Isaac's proposal, he'd responded immediately with two, firmly spoken words that left little room for argument.

"Let's go."

Now, the day before we're scheduled to depart for Hawaii and join Isaac on Maui, we're paying one final visit to my mother's grave.

As I help him straighten from where he'd just set a dozen yellow roses in a sturdy vase beside the memorial stone, my dad lets out a long sigh.

It's not a sad sound, though, and as he looks down at the marker, he smiles.

"Do you want to be alone?" I ask. This could be the last time he ever stands in this spot, after all.

He shakes his head, looping his arm around my shoulders in a half-hug. "No. She's not really here, anyway, you know, and I don't need a stone with her name on it to remember your mom."

We stand there for a while longer anyway. It's midmorning, the day is warm, the leaves of the nearby maples burst with fiery color, and the sky overhead is a dark, autumnal blue.

"She'd have preferred cremation, anyway," he says quietly, staring at the headstone with a slight frown, "but after what happened, her parents insisted on a church burial, and I was in no condition to have an opinion until well after the fact."

He doesn't often talk about my mom's death—how, after years of struggle, she'd lost the fight against the crippling depression that had plagued her after my birth.

I can't imagine what he felt.

He'd lost the love of his life, and he could've dealt with that pain in any number of unhealthy ways; and yet, besides his unfortunate smoking habit, he'd remained a kind, caring father; a hard worker and a loving man. In his place, I don't know if I could have survived it, and yet my dad had stayed strong and been there for his kids.

Which makes Dylan's failings all the more egregious.

He's another thing we haven't spoken of very much.

My dad kept up with the trial though, staying in touch with Dylan's lawyer throughout. Now, Neil is in prison and Dylan has vanished, disappeared within the Witness Protection Program to start a new life, although I suspect he'll be looking over his shoulder for the rest of it.

"I think he blamed me," I say, speaking the thought that's come to nest in my mind over the last several months. "I think he came to hate me because he thought that, if only I'd never been born, he'd still have a mom."

My dad's hand tightens where he grips my upper arm, and he pulls me against him a little tighter for a moment in a one-armed hug.

We both know who I'm talking about.

Dylan would have been too young to fully understand what had happened to our mom when she died, but by the time I was ten and he was entering high school, he'd have understood well enough. And it wasn't that much of a leap to make, after all.

No baby, no postpartum depression...no bottle of pills.

"If he did think that, he's wrong," my dad says now. "Your mother was a beautiful, intelligent, kind woman, but she struggled for a long time—well before either you or Dylan were even a thought. I'm not saying what happened was inevitable, but I am saying that it's absolutely not your fault. I wouldn't trade you for anything, Felix—remember that, okay?"

I nod, and have to look up and blink to keep back the threat of tears.

"As for your brother," he goes on, releasing another, less contented-sounding sigh, "he's chosen his path. I still love him, and he'll always be my son—my little boy—but the man he's become..."