Gabriel didn’t even know Mary wasn’t his mother until he was seven years old, when his father had gotten upset with him for wanting to buy a pink shirt instead of a blue one. In the middle of a department store in the thick of back-to-school shopping season, his father had berated him, calling him a faggot and a pussy bitch. He’d picked Gabriel up by the collar of his shirt and said words that even back then, Gabriel would never forget, “You better not turn into a pansy ass little cock kisser, boy. You murdered my wife and your brother’s mom isn’t going to want anything to do with raising someone else's faggot kid.” His father had dropped him and stormed off, leaving Gabriel and Thomas in silent shock.
The next picture was one of Gabriel and Thomas, arms looped around each other's shoulders, nearly the same height, and probably ten and nine years old. They looked happy, but Gabriel remembered the struggles of his childhood as clear as day. It was as if after the department store incident, the floodgates had opened for Gabriel’s father to abuse him at every possible opportunity. If Gabriel didn’t close his closet, a smack across the face. If his socks were too dirty when he took his shoes off, a shove into the wall. If he didn’t drop his head low enough in prayer on Sundays, a swift shake against the trunk of the car when they got home. Thankfully, Paul Russell had never laid a hand on Thomas, as far as Gabriel knew, and that had been all Gabriel had needed to take the discipline on his own shoulders willingly.
As Gabriel had reached puberty, he’d realized he was, as his father said, a faggot kid, a pansy ass little cock kisser. Gabriel had buried it as deep as he could, fearing not only the retribution of his father, but also a promised eternity in hell. Then, when he was fifteen years old, he’d noticed Thomas had started picking up the same slurs their father used and was freely distributing them around the house and their school.
One day in their mixed homeroom class, Gabriel had drawn a flower as part of a doodle on the margin of his paper and his brother had leaned over and scoffed at him in disgust, “Flowers, Gabe? Are you a little fucking pansy too?” Gabriel had slammed the notebook closed, shooting a glare over at his brother, before hanging his head in silence, offering no reply and reminding himself again the importance of denying the reality that he was gay.
The next picture Gabriel clicked was from his high school graduation. He stood alone, with no friends or family around him, and he wasn't smiling. It was a candid photo Thomas had taken, blurry with movement as Gabriel had leaned back against a brick wall in the school to remove his cap and unzip the polyester gown. Gabriel hadn’t even known Thomas had been there when he’d taken it. Even though his face wasn’t visible in the picture, anyone could tell Gabriel had carried himself with the weight of someone who had never known what it was like to feel good enough, to feel welcome as he was. He’d slumped with the weight of knowing his parents were not lingering out of frame waiting to congratulate him on his achievement. His mother was dead and his father had long given up the ruse of caring for him.
During his high school years, the only person Gabriel could even remotely count on to be around was Patrick Scott, an acquaintance from his math classes who had gotten in the habit of sucking him off in the library during study hall their junior year. His relationship with Patrick was a tense one, with Patrick pretending the stolen touches in the janitor's closet meant nothing, and Gabriel trying to convince himself they didn’t either.
And that moment, with him leaning against a wall, his life poised on the edge between leaving childhood and becoming an adult, was when his life had changed.
Thinking about it now was like watching a car accident play out in slow motion. After Thomas snapped the picture, Gabriel looked up to see him drop the camera to his side and raise a hand in greeting. They both saw movement from the side and simultaneously turned their attention toward it. Gabriel watched Patrick come around the corner, looking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t followed. Thomas was standing an easy six feet from Gabriel, near a tree, and had a clear line of sight as Patrick stepped up to Gabriel, grabbed his face between his hands and pressed a quick kiss to his lips.
Thomas dropped the camera, and the sound pulled Gabriel and Patrick’s attention away from each other. Gabriel watched Patrick's eyes widen in shock, then fear, and he watched Thomas open his mouth in a sneer, grinding out the words, “Fucking faggot. Dad was right? You’re a fag?” before turning on his heel and running toward the campus exit.
Patrick looked like a deer caught in headlights as his face blanched. “You’ll be fine, Patty. It’s all me, now,” Gabriel told him. He ran a regretful finger down the delicate slope of Patrick's nose before pushing off the wall to grab Thomas’s fallen camera, then walked home.
By the time Gabriel got there, two garbage bags and a half-zipped suitcase, clothes forcing their way out of the seams, were sitting on the porch. His father had opened the door when Gabriel was halfway up the sidewalk and said, “No disgusting cock suckers are gonna live under my roof,” and slammed the door shut in his face. Those were the last words he’d ever said to Gabriel.
Blinking away the memory, Gabriel clicked the next picture. It was a little house in Whittier, California on a street lined with shedding Jacaranda trees, and houses built in the 1950s. On the porch stood a beautiful woman with strawberry-blonde hair and a smile Gabriel assumed could light up the entire city on its own. She held a baby in her arms, draped in a blue blanket with a tuft of strawberry-red hair sticking out the top. Gabriel smiled at the picture, even though the memory wasn’t his, and clicked the next image. It was a birth certificate for Joel Nicholas Reading, born 1999 in Whittier, California to parents Mark and Madeline Reading. The next click showed a death certificate for Mark Reading, citing an automobile accident on New Year's Eve in 2006. And then one last click brought up the document that had started him on his quest for Joel: a marriage license from 2008 for Madeline Reading and Thomas Russell.
Gabriel had not set out tofindJoel. When he’d started his search, he didn’t even know Joel existed. When he was thirty-four, he had seen the obituaries in the paper and learned his father and stepmother had both died in an accident, and the loss had hit him harder than he’d anticipated it would.
He’d spent his entire adult life on his own, and he was fine with that. He was a self-made success, if a lonely one. The night of his thirty-fifth birthday, three years ago, he’d been out drinking, alone of course, when he’d met a flighty little twink, surprisingly named Thomas. He’d kept drinking, and Thomas had kept rubbing up against him, groping his ass, his thighs, and fondling his cock through his jeans. Thomas had laid sloppy kisses along the hemline of the sleeve of Gabriel's shirt and whispered filthy promises he’d never keep.
Thomas had said he wanted to play, that he liked it rough, so rough was what Gabriel set out to deliver. Against his better judgment, Gabriel had taken Thomas home and unleashed years of pent-up aggression, more appropriately suited for his namesake. Somewhere between when he’d lashed Thomas’s fine wrists to the headboard and when he’d seen the slightest streak of blood coat the condom as he’d pulled his sated dick from Thomas's swollen ass, Gabriel had emotionally snapped.
He was surprised that after he loosened the belt holding Thomas to the headboard, the man didn’t run screaming from the room. Thomas’s eyes shone bright with sympathy. And then Gabriel raged, calling him a cock-sucking faggot through the tears that clogged his throat, and Thomas simply wrapped his delicate, lithe arms around Gabriel's heaving shoulders and held him while he sobbed. Gabriel was easily twice the other man’s size, but Thomas wrapped him up as best he could. He cooed to Gabriel and soothed his fingers through his hair, like he was calming a skittish horse, and for the first time in his life, Gabriel cried over everything he’d lost, and everything he’d never had.
“Would you like to talk about it?” Thomas asked him quietly, sometime around five in the morning. Gabriel shook his head, trying to burrow himself into Thomas’s side, needing this time of reprieve from his life. Thomas stroked his hand down Gabriel's ribs and urged, “You should, though.”
“I’m sorry for the things I said to you,” Gabriel whispered into Thomas's skin. “It was wrong, and I didn’t mean them. My… My brother…” Gabriel stopped, and Thomas continued his delicate caresses. “My brother is named Thomas. I haven't seen him in seventeen years. He doesn’t...he...he doesn’t want me, doesn’t want to see me.”
“Because you’re gay,” Thomas concluded so Gabriel wouldn’t need to say the words.
Gabriel nodded his head into Thomas’s armpit, and it was the last thing said for a long time. Thomas continued to hold and stroke him, until Gabriel fell into a restless sleep.
Hours later, he’d woken up to find Thomas still there, still holding him as tightly as he could, and then Gabriel had told him everything. About Margaret dying, about Mary and Paul, about the department store, about all the instances of abuse, about the way he’d loved Patrick and the way Thomas and his parents abandoned him when he needed them most.
Later, as he was leaving, Thomas had smoothed his hand over Gabriel's face and offered him some parting advice: to look for his brother, that maybe he had changed, times were different now, after all. Then he’d kissed Gabriel on the cheek and left. Gabriel had never seen him again, and while he strongly doubted that his brother had changed his mind about anything, Gabriel had started the search anyway. He owed that to both of his Thomases.
It wasn’t hard to find Thomas Russell. Emmitsburg was a small town, so it was an easy enough starting place. He found Thomas had moved to California and attended Whittier College, which was where he met Madeline and Mark. After Mark had passed away, leaving Madeline a single mother, Thomas married her.
It was ironic both brothers ended up in California. Gabriel was living in Hollywood at the time, and when he learned Thomas was only down the freeway, he took the forty-five minute drive east. He parked on Thomas's street and sat in the car with his windows down and eyes closed, smelling the scent of jasmine drifting by from a nearby bush. The peaceful silence was shattered with the slam of a door across the street.
“Go on then, you worthless fucking homo!” Gabriel listened to someone yell in a different, yet somehow familiar voice, and Gabriel swiveled his head to see his brother standing on the porch of his house, angry and pointing at a kid with bright purple hair who was halfway down the sidewalk. Gabriel didn't even have time to take in all the ways his brother had changed, and all the ways he hadn't, before the kid spoke up.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Fuck me, Thomas. I get it. Thanks a lot.” The kid, who Gabriel assumed must be Thomas's stepson, Joel, flipped him the bird before sliding the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and walking down the street.
The door opened again, and the strawberry-blonde wife, Madeline, came to join Thomas. Gabriel couldn't help but notice she looked much older than in their wedding announcement picture. “Thomas, stop this, please. Not where the neighbors can hear,” she begged him softly with an edge of exhaustion in her voice.
“You'll thank me, Maddy. The kid’s a faggot and is gonna cause us problems. He needs to go.” Thomas's gestures were conciliatory as he stroked her hair, which contrasted starkly with his harsh words.
“I know, Thomas, but the neighbors don't need to know too. If you made more money, we could afford to send him out of state to one of those camps...” Thomas put his hand over Madeline's mouth, silencing her.
“Well, we don't have the money, so we can't. We aren't going to have this talk again. I'm tired of it.” Thomas patted his wife's head like she was a child and went back inside the house.
