Page 187 of Two Marlboros

I took a deep breath.Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out...

I didn’t want to sneak out of that house like I had been a criminal. Okay, I had entered without the explicit permission of the landlords, and that wasn’t good, but surely, they wouldn’t have called the police for such nonsense, would they? Maybe my father would have yelled at me, maybe he would have orderedme to leave, but either way it was a situation I could handle. I owed it to Jimmy, and I owed it a little to myself as well.

I threw myself back on my back and crinkled my eyes, after which I sighed. It was strange to wake up to someone’s voice. For years now I had found only silence when I opened my eyes in the morning, and to tell the truth I found only silence throughout the rest of the day as well. The TV kept me more company than an octogenarian, so it was not uncommon to find myself on the couch wrapped in blankets like a butterfly cocoon, since the heater was broken once in a while. That’s why waking up in the morning with another human being next to me and voices from downstairs seemed the strangest thing in the universe. Strange, but also beautiful.

My stomach barely twisted when I thought about how much I had longed to return to that house and how, after all, it had been easy. It had been enough to put pride aside and make Jimmy a priority for everything to go smoothly. I smiled as I thought about that solution that I had struggled so hard to find, but which seemed so obvious in that moment.

I listened to my brother’s placid breathing, and the subdued murmur he exuded was shortly confused with the sound of...

...footsteps. Again. In front of the door.

Footsteps that stopped just in front of the room where we were and soon gave way to the squeak of a doorknob dropping and the hinges of a door opening.

My father jerked and stifled a scream.

I sprang to my feet at lightning speed.

“I can explain, I swear.”

My father’s mouth was wide open, his hand still on the doorknob. It only took a moment for his surprise to give way to a more wrinkled expression.

“... Nathan.”

I pulled a smile in the hope of not looking like the one caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His gaze remained unchanged, for a change.

“Jimmy called me last night in tears and-”

“Enough,” and he nodded toward the hallway. “Get out.”

I let out a sigh expressing all my disappointment at that explanation I had failed to give, but the only result I got was my father standing by the door with an impatient expression on his face, close to homicidal if I didn’t obey shortly thereafter.

I did as he ordered, leaving Jimmy buried in the blankets and my Converse untied under the bed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him following my every move and he seemed to be back to the same father he always was. An asshole. I wondered where that alter ego of his that had spoken to me in the hospital had gone and, even more curious, what had caused him to manifest himself. But as a new Nathan, I promised myself to remain indifferent to him and everything that orbited around him; so, I followed him downstairs and, for all seventeen steps, tried to ignore that sense of anxiety he was still capable of instilling in me.

In the kitchen I found my mother. As soon as she saw me, she dropped the glasses she was drying and rushed toward me. I hugged her, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed my father sit down at the table and grab the newspaper that was on it. I had the feeling that he had been in the same way as a courier - I was the delivery for my mother and he had unglued me there like a package, then gone back to minding his own business.

My mother loosened the embrace and ran a hand through my hair.

“Honey, what are you doing here?”

I tried to disguise my embarrassment at the situation. “Jimmy called me last night and-”

My mother frowned. “Jimmy? Your brother?”

I shrugged and nodded.

“Why did he call you?” she asked again.

I cast a glance at my mother and soon after at my father, who was still reading the newspaper. Or at least that was what it looked like.

“He couldn’t sleep.”

My mother stared at me for a moment, and her thoughtful expression turned first to embarrassment and shame, then to displeasure. Likely, she understood. She turned back to my father, who returned the look -interesting, I thought. He was well aware of what was going on around him, giving it weight or not was a personal choice.

A voice from upstairs interrupted both my thoughts and the look between my parents. Apparently, Jimmy wanted Mom. She still gave me a sympathetic look, because going to Jimmy would have meant leaving me alone with my father. I motioned for her to go, and as I heard her walk away, I felt the chill approach and enter me, although I tried to deny it.

The paper must have been very interesting indeed. The whole time my mother had been walking away and up the stairs, he had not looked away for even half a second. I couldn’t be sure, but I knew there was something weird about his attitude. In fact, it was not that often that I was able to have a civilized relationship with him, without yelling and insults.

If he couldn’t look away from his paper, however, I couldn’t ignore my discomfort, which had made me stand upright for what I could now describe as an embarrassing amount of time. My legs were as if frozen, firmly planted on the floor, and no matter how hard I tried I could not move even half a muscle. This was not how I had imagined indifference toward my father, this was not how I wanted the new Nathan to be. I stood waiting for a sour comment from him any moment, a comment thatdid not come, however, and that added to the oddities he had decided to reserve for me in that last period.

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