The Widow and the Watcher

I.
Father, I remember your eyes upon my face
and the way I was acutely aware
how little I was to you.
I'm sorry it must be this way,
but you have left me no choice.
I cannot forgive you now.

He sits the pen down and closes the book and tries not to think too much. He likes this pen, with its fountain nib and the way its lines form brilliant dark trails of ink across his page. And he likes the notebook, a handmade leather-bound volume, embossed with the notes of a song long lost or never brought to conception. He'd tried playing it on his violin once, but the notes were too closely packed, too complicated to make any sense of. He wonders if the artist even knew what they meant.

In the kitchen, his mother is preparing a casserole, slaving over the hot stove like she rarely does nowadays. His brother is at the kitchen counter, coat thrown over his chair. It is the only indication of his sudden arrival, and that was around the time that Blaine left for the room which he now calls his own, picking up his pen and scrawling the world that swirled about his head onto the paper. He doesn't want to wonder what Cooper is doing here, why he found it suddenly necessary to talk to their mother, to share with her in hushed voices. He doesn't talk to Blaine much. He hasn't in a long time. Blaine wonders, momentarily, if he'll ever find out what's on Cooper's mind tonight, if their mother will tell him, or keep the whispered secrets to herself.

Their voices grow louder, echo slightly around the small hotel apartment, and Blaine moves across to his bed, burying his head under the pillow. It feels immature, even to his seventeen year old self, but he can't help it, to want to block out the world.

He only wishes he could block out his own spiralling thoughts the same way.

Blaine Anderson was fifteen years old when his father died, of acute heart disease. It was quick and painless, like ripping off a band-aid that had grown old and brown with age, and at the funeral, he didn't cry. He had nothing to cry about.

His father had never been good to him, never treated him how he should have. There was always too much to be done, houses to be sold, businessmen to meet with, and Blaine was pushed to the sidelines. Even their Sunday hours in front of the TV, where his father would pull his ten year old son onto his lap and point out all the best plays on the football, faded from memory as soon as Blaine became aware that he was gay.

And then it became worse. The extended silences, the sideways glance during dinner as if to ask why are you here, eating our food? And slowly Blaine stopped expecting things to change. He stopped expecting his father to love him.

At the funeral, he dropped his rose onto the top of the coffin, already turning away. He slipped his hands into his pockets, turned his back on his father like he'd always turned his back on Blaine, and returned to the car, head held high.

He didn't like to say that he was glad. He wasn't. But he couldn't deny that it released that little part in him that had become wound and twisted and malignant within his gut. It made him feel suddenly free again, like the world wasn't as horrible as perhaps he'd once thought it was.

Because his mother wasn't so bad.

II.
Mother, dearest,
I told you not to say those things
you said to him,
made him think you were enough for him
without me.

He grabs his toothbrush from his toiletry bag beside his bed, dashes down the corridor and into the bathroom, avoiding the kitchen at all costs. He doesn't want to look at Cooper, see his knowing smirk and feel that it is meant for him. So he stares at the mirror, grabs a towel from the rack and methodically clears his hair of the gel and gunk he'd pushed into it at the start of the day. Then he brushes his teeth, rinses his face, and returns the same dash down the corridor.

Sometimes it's a different corridor, but he makes the same dash every day.

This room is cold to him, different than it should be, than the last one, and he pulls back the carefully pressed linens, trying not to worry about the creases he might be putting into it. This bed isn't home, not to Blaine.

His pajamas are on the back of his desk chair, right where he left them that morning, and he tugs them on, humming under his breath. He can hear raised voices in the kitchen, still too muffled to quite make out, but loud enough that he knows someone is getting angry, and then a sudden, 'It's not your brother's fault!' and he's learnt to recognise those words better than his own name. He climbs between the pressed linens, presses one ear into the mattress and covers the other with the pillow.

He hopes tonight Cooper will leave before his mother is in tears, so he doesn't have to feel guilty for not going out and comforting her, making her feel as if this isn't all her fault.

Because if it's not Blaine's, then whose is it?

His mother took his father's death better than anyone expected. She, from the big family home in the Philippines, he the only son of a Cold War veteran; she had adopted his life completely when they married. Everyone had expected that after his death, she would return to her childhood home, take the boys with her, and make a new start for herself, but instead, she took over the family business completely, buying property, building houses and selling them at top market pricing. Her training as an architect which had previously only aided the enterprise, now held it up by cold and tired feet, yet she did not rest. Where she used to stay at home, looking after the boys and designing properties on her laptop at the kitchen table, she now packed up the house, put their things into storage except for the necessities and took them on the road, living out of hotel apartments and traversing the country as property and clients dictated.

Blaine hadn't felt at home since.

She was a strong woman, Blaine's mother.

The morning dawns early for Blaine, his eyes blinking open as light filters through the gaps in the curtain he forgot to ensure was shut last night. He can hear his mother in the kitchen, cleaning up dishes and cooking a pot of oatmeal on the stove. There's no other voices, no muted discussion, so Cooper must have gone home late last night.

Blaine slides out of bed, finds clothes to wear and doesn't care that they may smell bad and desperately need a wash. He pulls them on blindly and slips out into the corridor, into the kitchen where his mother is scooping breakfast into bowls.

'You're up early, honey,' she says with a brief echo of a smile. He doesn't correct her, tell with a joking remark but you're earlier. He just sits at the counter on the same stool that Cooper occupied last night, and lets her hand him a bowl. 'You didn't eat last night,' she tells him, and it is most definitely not a question.

'I wasn't hungry.'

'And you were asleep when I came in to check on you. What teenage boy goes to bed at eight?' He doesn't tell her that he was faking it, purposefully loosening his grip on the pillow as he heard her open the door, evening his breaths until she went away.

'Boys that have a lot of work to do the next day?' he returns.

'Just don't do it again, Blaine,' she says evenly and sits down next to him, scooping up a spoonful of oatmeal to swallow down quickly before she has to finish getting ready and head off to another long day of work, before returning home, frustrated and angry and wishing the world wasn't as sexist and cruel to her as she should know it is.

Blaine swallows his own breakfast reluctantly, steps to the other side of the counter to wash his bowl, and places it in the drying rack for the cleaners to deal with.

'Is it a packing day?' he asks her with a sideways glance, and when she shakes her head, he pretends not to be relieved.

III.
You are the widow,
the strongest of the strong
yet you cannot survive your own home
now that you are without him.
You cannot look at me
and consider me a son,
and I cannot look at you.

Blaine's schooling is more than a little off-key. Since they started the whole moving around thing, he's considered himself officially homeschooled. He's technically part of the Ohio school district, where the family home was before his father died, but his mother long ago filed the relevant forms for homeschooling. On his sixteenth birthday, shortly after the funeral, she handed him his textbook, pointed out a chapter, and motioned for him to read and complete the questions.

Since then, his schooldays have been oddly organised, and mostly self-ran. In the morning, after his mother leaves, he reads through the requirements for the day, the chapters, and then answers the questions. He's usually done by eleven.

The rest of the morning is spent sending his washing down to the cleaning floor of the current hotel, reading his novel of the day, or making something complex for lunch.

The afternoon is spent perhaps getting ahead on his schoolwork - although what's the point when there's hardly any work in the first place - and then playing around with his guitar or violin, and maybe writing poetry.

Actually, he thinks, he always writes poetry.

His days run like clockwork, and sometimes he wonders if he should be out meeting people, but his mother always told him he wasn't old enough to walk the streets by himself, and now that he is, he isn't exactly sure what he'd do.

He grips his violin in his hands, plucks out a simple rhythm, and then puts bow to string, plays out a tune of melancholy and woe. All his tunes seem to be of melancholy and woe nowadays.

And slowly the words start flowing through him, making twisted sounds of verb and noun and melding with the sound of the violin. This is always how the poetry starts, in the music, and then just as quickly his hands are stilling and he moves to his desk, draws out the leather bound volume and writes down the words as quickly as they come.

He always writes poetry in the afternoons.

IV.
I am not all right.
Perhaps I hide it better than my brother
and for that you do not comfort me.
Yet since you chose him over me,
the harsh man over your youngest son,
I have not been alright.

He stands at the kitchen sink, rinsing his plate with vacant eyes. This hotel apartment has its window just here, looking out over the city street, and maybe New York isn't as bad as he'd made it out to be for himself. There's people moving busily, happily, and he imagines himself like one of them, another piece of the puzzle, and maybe he could be normal. He could ride his bike to school, grab a bagel from a street stall for breakfast and say hi to his friends as he slides into the school grounds.

He hasn't had friends in a long time.

He places his plate in the drying rack, turns away from the window. There's nothing he can do about it now, he thinks. He's made this life for himself, let his father isolate him, and let his mother take him away from everything he actually loved. It doesn't matter now anyway.

But some part of him, the part that plays violin and writes poetry filled with agonising metaphors and imagery, tells him he should go out. He should make a life for himself. His mother keeps mentioning getting his diploma early, filling out college applications. She doesn't say getting his life back. She doesn't have to. He tells her maybe, if he can get round to it, if he can pass his SATs, but she knows he can, and he knows he can, and maybe he just doesn't want to anymore.

He won't tell her that he's scared. He won't tell her that he's forgotten what the real world is like, what makes people tick when they don't live a life of seclusion in a hotel apartment being homeschooled while their mother runs her own business and their brother goes about life as if nothing ever changed and nothing ever will.

So he takes the forms she hands him, and when she's at work, tips them down the disposal, sheet by sheet.

V.
How do I show you the many ways in which I'm scared,
sitting in your little dream of white-washed destiny
and trying not to cry myself to sleep?
Perhaps I will never be able to face the day.