“Finally, a deputy drove up from the direction I guessed the accident was and asked if I was okay. He saw me holding my babies. I told him what happened and he started to change the tire for me and we started talking. He confirmed it was an accident causing the traffic jam, but didn’t say anything else. His tone told me it was a bad accident, and I didn’t want to know the details. I sort of joked that I was going to have to chew my ‘friend’ Parker out for not taking a different route when he obviously must have gotten caught in the traffic, and it would serve him right for me not being there and him having to look for me.
“He went quiet, and I’ll never forget he had green eyes. He had taken his hat and sunglasses off to change the tire. He asked me what I said my friend’s name was again, and I had this horrible feeling wash over me and couldn’t answer him for a moment. I said Parker Tophin, and he’d be driving a little red Ford Festiva.”
She stared at her hands, which lay clasped in her lap. Tears fell on them and she made no move to wipe them away. Melanie got up and grabbed a box of tissues off her counter and brought them over for her.
“Thank you,” Alana whispered as she took them. After a moment, she spoke again. “I’ll never forget that man. Captain Gene Smith from the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office. I remember his name tag, staring at it. He didn’t finish changing the tire. He stood and told me he’d be right back and he walked back to his cruiser and spoke to someone on the radio.
“When he came back a moment later, I knew. I tried to joke with him but he asked me questions like if Parker had a wife or family, and I said no, he lived with my husband and I and we were his best friends and his only family. That we even were his next of kin. Then the next thing I know, there’s an ambulance there and I was screaming and screaming that Parker couldn’t be dead. I must have given them Jonas’ work number at some point because then he was there, too, and then a couple of hours later me and the babies are in the hospital, in a room, with Jonas. They’d had to sedate me because I was hysterical, so they just brought all of us together.”
She had to blow her nose again. “That’s where they’d taken Parker. Jonas talked to the ER doctors. Parker had died on the way there and they couldn’t save him. The paramedics told the ER staff that Parker kept saying while they were cutting him out of the wreckage that he had to get to the babies and they didn’t know what that meant. A guy in a pickup truck wasn’t paying attention and blew through a stop sign and hit him in the driver’s door. Obviously, Parker didn’t have any carseats in the car, I had them, so they didn’t know what he meant.”
“He was talking about you and the boys,” Mel softly said.
“Right. That’s what we figure. I insisted on seeing him even though Jonas had already ID’d his body. I wanted to say good-bye to him or I knew I’d never be able to believe he was gone.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “My heart shattered that day. Jonas’, too. I mean, he loved him like a brother. More than, even.”
“Were they…involved with each other?”
Alana slowly shook her head. “No. But it broke his heart just the same. And we had two sons to raise. We’d originally planned for me to go back to work when the boys were about a year old, but then we realized Davis had some developmental delays and I had to give him extra attention and occupational therapy. When I finally did go back to teaching, at first it was at the same school the boys went to so I could be right there. They were in the same classes except when Davis had his therapy.”
“When did you realize how smart he was?”
“Early on. They were both above-average, but Davis especially so. And in the process of fighting so hard for Davis to have a normal life, we just…never told them.”
That all still didn’t really answer another question Mel had. “So why did you want to tell me first?”
“Because when we do tell them, they’re probably going to be very angry with us, and they’ll need you.”
“I can’t say I’ll blame them for being angry.”
“Neither will we. And I wanted you to know the answers to questions they might not want to even ask us. I felt that I owed you that. We decided once they were adults that we’d wait to tell them unless they…” She sighed. “Unless it was obvious one of them was in a serious long-term relationship. We figured that’d mean Kirby, to be honest. We never dreamed they would…” Slowly nodding, she dabbed at her eyes again. “Parker would have thought this was amusing, I’m sure. Ironic.”
“How so?”
“That our boys unwittingly followed in our footsteps, so to speak.”
An involuntary shiver rippled through Mel. “Hopefully without the tragedy.”
“Yes.”
By the time Alana left a little while later, Mel’s mind swirled with the new knowledge. Alana had said her plan was to return home and then talk with the men and tell them the news.
And tell them that she’d already told Mel.
Mel hoped that didn’t piss them off at her for learning first.
No, they’re not like that.
It did, however, bring up an interesting wrinkle. If she had kids with the guys…
She headed for her bathroom to take a shower.
If I have children with them, it means the three of us are committed to spending our lives together anyway.
And frankly, understanding Davis as well as she now did, Mel knew she’d be stupid to let what-ifs scare her away from happiness. Davis would be the first to admit he was happy. Most people who weren’t neurotypical lived perfectly excellent, fulfilling lives. Understanding there might possibly be challenges was the primary key to helping any hypothetical child of theirs overcome anything they might encounter.
She froze.
Am I really jumping that far ahead?
In the past, that’d been the fastest way for her to sink a relationship.
Oh, gawd, please don’t let me have just jinxed what we have!
She knew that was a stupid way to think, but now that she had, she couldn’t help the shadowy worries swirling through her gut.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kirby wasn’t sure why Mel left as quickly as she had. If he didn’t know any better, he’d swear that something had happened. But his parents and Davis weren’t acting as if anything had.
Then again, Davis wasn’t the best bellwether of that, either.
It was still early. Their mom left a little while later to go to the store, leaving Kirby and Davis in the garage with their father and trying to diagnose the electrical system problem in their dad’s old Jeep restoration project.
When their dad had to go inside for a moment, Kirby tapped Davis’ shoulder. “Did Mel seem okay to you when she left?”
“What do you mean?”
Just as he’d thought, no help there. “Did she seem upset?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. She didn’t mention to me that she was upset. I don’t believe anyone said or did anything to upset her. Would you like me to call her and ask her?”
“No. Never mind.” There was no universe in which Kirby could imagine that phone call ending well, no matter how well it started.
Then again, maybe he wasn’t giving Mel enough credit. Somehow, she’d managed to slip into both of their lives and make herself at home there. She loved Davis for all his batshit quirky ways and had a soothing, positive influence on him. For his own part, she’d shown him love and trust the likes of which he’d never dreamed possible, a selfless way about her, patience and gentle compassion, the perfect woman for both of them.
While he’d expected his parents to accept her as “their” girlfriend, their reaction had stunned him in the good way. As if people being poly was no big deal to them.
Maybe they have friends we don’t know about.
Their mom returned home a while later, only carrying two shopping bags, which Kirby thought was unusual based on how long she’d been gone. Their father followed her ins
ide.
A moment later, he was calling them to come in, too.
Kirby exchanged a glance with Davis, who looked puzzled.
Good. It’s not just me.
* * * *
“Boys, wash up and sit down and join us,” their mom said.
Davis knew that tone of voice, no matter how pleasantly it might sound to others.
She wanted to talk to them about something.
Maybe this is where she has the proverbial freak-out about us being involved with Mel.
If she did, it’d be unfortunate, but it wouldn’t change Davis’ feelings about Mel.
Their mom had brought a cheesecake home, Davis’ favorite. She cut them all slices and as she sat down, she reached over to where their dad’s hand lay on the table and laced fingers with him.
It immediately brought Mel to mind for Davis, how he held hands with her. Something just a couple of months ago he would have sworn was impossible to enjoy, he now looked forward to.
A simple gesture he’d long envied in others, including his parents, and now he got it.
“For starters,” their father said, “we wanted to tell you Melanie seems to be a wonderful girl, and we’re very happy for you both.”
“But?” Davis asked, apparently startling both their parents and Kirby, who shot him a look.
Their father appeared confused. “But?”
“Isn’t a comment like that usually followed by a ‘but’ and a litany of reasons why you wish we’d reconsider what we’re doing?”
“No. That’s not what we were going to say at all.”
Shit. And here Davis had thought he’d deciphered an inherently complex statement. “My apologies. Please continue.”
Their mother was the one who spoke next. “We know it’s an unconventional arrangement, but it’s not shocking to us. Your father and I have a confession to make, and we hope you’ll hear us out before you make any judgments.”
Kirby groaned and covered his face with his hands. “Mom, please don’t drop some sort of bomb on us tonight that you guys are swingers or something. Just stop at accepting this and we’re good. Seriously.”
Their dad cleared his throat. “No. That’s not what we were going to say, and there’s no good way to say it but to say it. We never told you the truth about Parker.”
Kirby peeked through his fingers at his father, then to Davis, who shrugged but didn’t interrupt.
“Parker?” Kirby asked, lowering his hands. “Your friend who died?”
Their mother appeared to now have a desperate grip on their father’s hand and looked close to crying. “He wasn’t just our friend, sweetheart. It’s true that he and your father were very close and I met the two of them in college. But what we never told you was that Parker was our third.”
“Third what?” Davis asked.
Kirby actually reached over and smacked his shoulder. “Ass. They were poly with him.” Kirby focused on their mother. “Okay. I can understand why you might keep that back. We were, what, not even a year old when he died?”
Davis didn’t understand why their mother was now crying. He got up to get her tissues. When he returned to his seat, their father had also removed his glasses and was rubbing at his eyes with his free hand.
The other was still tightly gripped by their mother.
“We were a family,” their father said. “Parker wanted me to marry your mom and we told people that he and I were good friends and college roommates. Anyone who knew Parker would believe that we’d have him live with us for all of the reasons.”
“Why?” Davis asked. Something wasn’t making sense to him.
“Because he was much like you, Davis,” their father said. “More acute in many ways, actually.”
“Fuuuck,” Kirby whispered, sitting back, his eyes wide as he stared at Davis.
“What?” Davis asked.
Their mother cried. Their father pried his hand free from hers and slid his chair closer to her to drape his arm around her shoulders, comforting her.
“What?” Davis asked again, now staring at Kirby.
Their father told them about the day Parker died, the full details they’d never heard before, as their mother softly sobbed into the tissues.
“They told us that he kept saying he had to get to the babies,” he softly said. “Because he considered both of you his sons. Kirby, you were named after Parker’s middle name, and Davis after mine. He loved you both the way I love you, and he loved your mother the way I love her. He died loving you boys and worried about you.”
Kirby’s hands were covering his mouth again and he still bore a look of wide-eyed shock, the same shade of blue eyes their father had.
“I’m sorry,” Davis said. “I wish you’d told us how much he meant to you. We didn’t mean for our revelation to dredge up painful memories. We would have planned this a—”
Kirby slapped the table, making all three of them jump. “Dude! Seriously?”
Kirby jumped up and stormed out of the room, returning seconds later with the old picture of the three of them together, one he and Kirby had grown up seeing sit on the shelf next to Parker’s urn, their mother and father smiling at the camera while Parker stood next to them, one corner of his mouth slightly curved and not looking directly at the camera.
Kirby pointed at it. “One of these things is not like the other, isn’t it?” He set it on the table in front of their father. “Just fucking say it!”
“Why are you yelling at them?” Davis asked. “You’re not helping.”
“Davis.” He pointed at their parents. “They’ve spent our entire fucking lives lying to us!”
Confused, Davis looked from Kirby to their parents, and finally at the picture.
That’s when, for the first time, he really saw the picture.
Not just the way the man stood there, nearly identically to the way a picture of the three of them, taken by Kim for them at dinner at Sigalo’s one night, had turned out.
But that when he looked into a mirror every morning, he saw that man’s face. A man he’d never remember meeting because the man had died when Davis was a baby.
Died worrying about him, and Kirby.
His gaze swiveled from the picture to Kirby’s eyes. Slowly, Davis stood and made his way out to the living room to look at the pictures.
To see the pictures.
All of them now appeared to him in their correct context, lovingly arranged around the urn. A memorial to a well-loved man, not just a lost friend. The picture of the two men on either side of their mother in the hospital right after their birth, of them in college at their graduation, more of the three of them at the beach, at a concert.
One of Parker and their mother, where he stared down at her with a loving smile Davis knew all too well while she smiled into the camera.
“I’m sorry, son,” their father said from behind him. “We suspected, but we didn’t care. Parker and I called you both our sons. He’s the one who wanted me to marry your mom. He thought it would be better that way. We didn’t care which of us was your father, and when she had twins, even though the doctor said you were fraternal twins, we hoped it would be one from each of us. It wasn’t until…later that we knew for sure.”
Davis had a hard time catching his breath. “How…long…have…you…known?”
“Since you were a baby and we noticed your symptoms. We had a DNA test run to confirm it. You weren’t my biological son, meaning you were his.”
Now that he knew, he felt like a total idiot. He could see it, right there, all this time.
“Parker had no early intervention like you did,” his father said. “He had some of the repetition patterns, would get overwhelmed socially, and many other issues. But when he met your mother it was like magic. She immediately soothed and focused him in a way no one else had. I was going to back away when both of them told me no, that’s not what they wanted.”
“I…inherited this from him? He was on the autism spectrum?”
“
He was never formally diagnosed, but from what I know now, yes. Definitely Asperger’s.”
Davis couldn’t pull his gaze from the pictures. From one to another to the next, it was there. Had been there the whole time.
He’d never seen it before.
Kirby spoke from behind Davis. “That’s pretty shitty, Dad. Not telling us.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” their dad said. “He’s still your brother, and he’s still my son, and unfortunately, Parker’s still dead. Our hearts are still crushed. We didn’t plan to keep it from you, but you have to understand what we were going through.”
Davis turned at the raw, choked emotion in their father’s voice.
“We were gutted,” he said. “I considered Parker my brother. He wasn’t just my best friend. Your mother had to be sedated and taken to the hospital when she found out he died. She could barely cope with losing him and then raising twins and I had to work to support us, too. Then when Davis started to show some symptoms we were desperate to make sure he got every chance, every intervention he could, so that he would hopefully not face some of the challenges Parker did.
“I knew that man like I knew my own mind, and he was frustrated at himself and at life that he couldn’t just be ‘normal.’ That it cost him a childhood in the foster care system. Then your mother came along and he was really, truly happy for the first time in his life. He was finally okay with who he was, because she was okay with who he was. Just like Mel is okay with who you are.”
Tears rolled down their dad’s cheeks and he quickly brushed them away. “We knew that the only thing Parker loved more in this universe than your mother was you two boys. He cried the night you were born. He was in the delivery room with us and held your mother’s hand and helped me cut the umbilical cords. He sobbed as he held you two for the first time. He would get up to help feed you and change diapers and the first thing he did every day when he woke up and when he got home, before even kissing your mother, was to kiss you both and make sure you were okay. You were his miracles, that in his life he could have been a part of making something so beautiful and perfect.”