By MG Allan
Click here to see content warnings
death of a loved one
Brevard stepped out onto the deck and looked over the backyard. He hadn’t really been back here in years. Even when visiting his father, he never came out back, so it was like he was seeing it for the first time.
The landscape of his childhood.
Surprisingly, not much had changed, and what had changed was a result of the passage of time. The metal-framed swing set was still there, off to the left, but rusted and neglected, the chain of one swing broken so that the seat drug the ground. The basketball goal was still there, but toppled over like a fallen tree. The rope that had once held the tire swing hung like a pendulum from the branch of an oak, but the tire was long since gone. Grass and weeds had grown up around everything, though since it was late fall it had all turned brown and brittle.
As Brevard went down the steps into the yard, he looked at all the trappings of his youth, trying to remember the last time he’d enjoyed any of it. When was the last time he sat on one of the swings, the last time he’d had his father spin him around in the tire, the last time he’d shot hoops? He couldn’t remember, and a part of him felt saddened that the younger version of himself had done all those things without consciously realizing he would never do them again. If he’d had that insight, maybe he would have worked harder to cement those moments in his memory.
A buzzing from his pocket got his attention, and he pulled out his phone to see Nicolas’s name on the screen. Answering, he said, “Hey babe.”
“How you holding up?”
“You know, as well as can be expected.”
“I just want you to know I’m at the airport right now. My flight has been delayed, but I should be there sometime late this evening.”
“I still think I should come pick you up.”
“It’ll be too late, and you have enough to deal with right now. I’ve already reserved a rental.”
“I miss you,” Brevard said, walking underneath the oak and grabbing hold of the old rope, contemplating lifting his feet and swinging from it like Tarzan.
“You shouldn’t be going through all this alone. I should have blown off the Trask meeting like I originally wanted to.”
“No, that account is too important for the business. I would have never let you skip the meeting. You’ll be with me tonight, and that’s soon enough. You’ll be here for the funeral tomorrow.”
“If I have to grow wings and fly there myself.”
Brevard let out a shaky sigh. “I love you, Nic.”
“Love you, Bre. What’s it like being in the house?”
“Weird. I mean, it shouldn’t be. I grew up in this house, after all. But being here without my father, it feels like a foreign landscape. Totally alien. I just wish … ”
“Wish what?” Nicolas prompted.
“I wish I had spent more time with him. I think we only saw each other twice in the past three years.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about that. You live on the other side of the country now. You visited as much as you could.”
“Did I? I mean, I could have made more time. If I had only known – ”
“But you didn’t.”
“Sure I did. I mean, not the exact when, but I knew it would happen eventually. Dad wasn’t a young man. I just can’t believe I’m never going to see him again, talk to him again, play basketball with him again.”
“You played basketball?” Nicolas asked with a slight laugh. “I didn’t know I was married to a secret jock.”
Brevard laughed as well, short-lived but appreciated. “It’s not like I was on a team, but sometimes my dad and I would come out to the backyard and play a little. We mostly used that as an excuse to talk. It felt like we could be more real with each other if we were playing a game as opposed to just sitting staring at one another. In fact, when I first came out to my dad, we were playing basketball.”
“You never told me that.”
“Yeah, I had just missed a pretty easy shot. He squeezed my shoulder and told me not to worry about it, and I said, ‘Dad, I think I’m gay.’ I thought adding the ‘I think’ would somehow soften the blow.”
“How did he react?”
“He squeezed my shoulder again, nodded, then told me to try popping my wrist more when releasing the ball. In fairness, I suspect he had long suspected.”
“He was an amazing man.”
“That he was,” Brevard agreed, realizing that Nicolas had barely known the man. And vice versa. Whenever Nicolas had been able to join him for a visit, Nic and his father had gotten along well but there had never been the time for them to truly get to know one another. Now they never would.
“Have you decided what you want to do?”
Brevard knew his husband meant, “What do you want to do about the house?” Once probate cleared, which he understood might take a while, the place would be his. A slightly rundown house in an even more slightly rundown neighborhood on the opposite side of the country from where he lived.
“I suppose I’ll find a reputable real estate agent and put it up for sale as soon as I’m able.”
A hesitation then, “You sure? I know there are a lot of memories in that house for you.”
“The memories are inside me, not inside the house. They’ll travel with me. I’ll keep some mementos, but it makes no sense to have this house.”
“I’ll be there tonight,” Nicolas said again, and Brevard appreciated the repetition. This was harder on him than he had admitted, and he suspected his husband knew that.
“I’ll wait up for you,” Brevard said with a soft chuckle.
“I would say don’t bother, but I am definitely hoping you’re up when I get there.”
Anytime Brevard and Nicholas had visited, they always stayed in Brevard’s childhood bedroom, and the first time he’d gotten a blowjob in the bed where he’d spent his youth lonely and fearing he’d never find love had been a revelation. Healing a past wound he hadn’t known still needed to be healed.
“I gotta jet,” Nicolas said. “I’ll be there very soon.”
After they exchanged I-love-you’s one more time, Brevard hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. He stood there in the middle of the backyard, marveling at how quiet the world sounded. When he’d grown up on this street, you always heard children laughing and shouting and cat-calling. But all those children had grown up like he did and flew the coop, leaving their parents to grow old all alone on Chestnut Avenue.
Maybe a young couple with a family would buy this house, starting a rebirth that would return Chestnut to its former glory. Then again, with kids today permanently attached to their devices, did they still go outside, ride bikes, play tag? Brevard had never felt so old. Losing a parent could bring one’s mortality rushing up to them like someone playing Red Rover.
He wandered further into the backyard, like a landowner surveying his property. Which, he supposed, was somewhat accurate. Back in Seattle, he and Nicolas had a gorgeous apartment, but they had never owned property before. Brevard found the experience overrated, and he wanted to offload the house and land as soon as possible. Of course, that may have only been because the place felt haunted, the ghost of his father constantly judging him for neglect and abandonment.
In life, his father had never made Brevard feel that way at all, so perhaps these were ghosts of his own creation. However, that didn’t make him feel any better. Imagined ghosts could be just as substantial.
He made his way to the back board fence, once painted white but now a dull gray with warped boards and protruding nails. A tangle of dead bushes ran most of the length. If he had any hope of selling the property, he was going to have to seriously invest in cleaning the place up. Right now there was nothing that would be appealing to potential buyers, not unless they wanted to purchase a graveyard of his childhood memories. And even he didn’t want that.
He could remember when this bush used to be thriving, covered in fragrant honeysuckle in the summer. As a child, he loved to pick the little blossoms, pull out the steam, and let the drop of sweet nectar fall on his tongue. Neglect had killed the bush and now it just a mess of woven dried branches. Through it, he spotted a bit of faded color up against the fence.
Curious, he hunkered down and pushed away some of the branches, one of them snapping off completely. Recognizing the object, he crawled under the dead bush, ignoring the pricking and poking his back took as well as the tiny tear to his shirt. When he shimmied his way back out, he held in his hands an old and half-deflated basketball.
The very basketball he had used when shooting hoops with his father all those years ago, the very basketball that facilitated all those important heart-to-heart talks. At some point, after Brevard had started losing interest in the game, the ball had disappeared. He hadn’t given it much thought at the time, but it effectively ended those games with his father because they never bothered to buy a replacement ball.
Somehow the ball must have rolled down the slight slope of the backyard and into the bushes, and it had remained there all these years. Unnoticed, forgotten, abandoned.
Did my father feel that way?
Brevard clutched the ball to his chest, hugging it close, and thought this was the closest he’d ever get to holding his father again. If only he’d made more time to visit, if only he’d called more often, if only he had played at least one more game of basketball with him.
“Hey son, you gonna sit in the dirt all day or are we gonna play?”
The voice startled Brevard so badly that he fell out of his crouch and right onto his butt. He spun around on his behind and looked up the slope. The grass was no longer withered and brown, but a bright green and neatly trimmed. The deck looked freshly painted. The basketball goal had been resurrected to its upright position.
Yet Brevard noticed all of these things only peripherally. The majority of his attention was focused on his father standing under the goal.
Not his father as he’d last seen him, hunched over with a bald head and a wrinkled face. This was his father as a younger man, head full of salt-and-pepper hair, posture erect, face smooth except for some laugh lines around the corners of his eyes and mouth. The way his father had looked when Brevard was a teenager.
Funny, back then he’d thought his father ancient, but in reality he’d only been in his forties. Around the same age that Brevard was now.
Only this wasn’t now. Brevard only had to look down at himself to see that. Dressed in a sleeveless shirt and basketball shorts, he could see his body was thinner, with more muscles, less hair. The body of a teenager who knew nothing as of yet about spare tires and aching backs and creaking knees.
And the ball in his hands was now bright orange and fully inflated.
“You wanna play?” his father asked.
Brevard wondered if he might be dreaming? Had he somehow fallen asleep out here in the backyard and slipped into some fantasy world where his father was still alive and they were both still young? Yet everything seemed so real, all of his senses working to cement the reality of the moment. He could feel the heat of the sun on his skin, smell the perfume of honeysuckle behind him, taste the sweat that dribbled down his face and onto his lips, hear the sound of the Crocker children down the street playing tag.
And he could clearly see his father standing there with a smile on his face.
“What’s happening?” Brevard said in a tremulous voice.
His father placed a hand over his eyes like a shield, looking up at the sky. “The sun will be setting soon, but I think I have enough time for one more game. What do you say, son? Want to play one last game with your old man before I have to call it a day?”
Brevard got slowly to his feet, still hugging the now pristine ball to his chest. As he made his way up the slope on shaky legs, he thought he was beginning to understand.
“Sure, dad. I’d love one last game.”
MG Allan spent his childhood making up stories in his head, and now he spends his adult life writing them down.
The Q&A Queerzine 