Playing God

Michael’s ten years old.
His family has taught him to be a full Catholic and, even if he is so young, he can already study the Bible and properly believe in it. And he does, especially since his family started to change. Michael remembers the day when he first heard about it; his grandmother saved him from being caught in the middle of a true fight. He had previously heard the screams and the smashes, but he had never wondered about their source; he was too young.

That day, though, his grandmother isn’t there, and neither is his mother. He’s alone with Gerard, and they’re supposed to be with their father, but he’s gone somewhere as soon as their mother left for work, hours ago, and he hasn’t come back yet. Gerard doesn’t seem worried about that situation; in fact, even if he’s not enjoying it thoroughly, Gerard’s doing homework because he just had to, and the father finally opens the front door and comes home. Michael’s happy with it because they’re safe now since there’s an adult there, but he doesn’t remember the one time he saw his father like that. He seems to Michael what people call ‘drunk’ and he smells bad too, and he’s angry at something and yelling for Gerard, who comes to the living room not too quickly and looking too scared. And so is Michael; he’s not showing it unless you look closer into his eyes, but it’s all very clear when he jumps five feet in the air as his father tells him sternly to not watch what’s gonna happen or to simply get out of the room. Michael sees perfectly that his brother flinches and almost whimpers, but he still obeys his father and leaves the room.

Michael is half way up the stairs and something breaks behind his back, and there are whimpers, so he has to look back to make sure everything is or will be okay. He turns around with his eyes closed, afraid of the impact of whatever images are being aired in the living room he just left, and when he opens them, there’s Gerard not too distanced from the bottom of the stairs, and he’s trying to escape their father, shielding his face and body, whimpering for him to stop, but Dad only yells back. Michael recognizes some words as being things around an order for Gerard to be someone good and not a gay, stubborn little bastard.

Michael goes away to his bedroom, not exactly understanding what’s going on, but certainly knowing that there’s something wrong happening in the living room. The only thing he can think about is the way his older brother, somewhat an example of creation in Michael’s life, seemed so fragile downstairs; how it is possible, Michael doesn’t know, but he does pray as soon as he gets closer to his bed. He kneels by it, elbows on the mattress and hands folded in each other, the perfect way his grandmother once taught him how to pray to God and ask for good things. For a while, he listens to the screams and whines coming from downstairs, but then he closes his eyes and starts whispering the words, elevating his voice as time passes by.

Some Our Fathers and Hail Marys later, because those were the only long prayers Michael knew without reading them directly from his catechism, he decides to use his bed to sleep. So, after dressing up properly, he says his night prayer, something very simple his grandmother has also taught him a few years before about his soul being ready to rest and hoping for God’s protection until the next morning, and puts the duvet over his pajama-covered body, only to talk some more to God.

The sounds from downstairs are long gone, but Michael’s soul is still restless to know and understand what they meant before. That is only until new sounds come from the other side of his closed door; Michael curls himself in a tight ball, the heavy and warm duvet weighting over him and protecting him from all evil, he thinks, and listens to the hushed echoes that creep in to his bedroom through the crack at the bottom of his door.

He thinks that it’s his mother’s voice, but he can’t be sure because it’s so hushed, so low and muffled by the door itself, and he whimpers softly to his bedroom walls when high-heels clack on the corridor carpet and stop sounding before a door bangs somewhere in his house. Michael can’t sleep for some hours, vigilant and very cautious about all kinds of noises, but soon enough his early years in life take over him. He falls asleep.

--

The morning comes and Michael wakes up to the same hushing sounds coming from the crack on his protective door. It’s his mother’s voice again, and she seems to hiss too, and cuss, so Michael asks for forgiveness for her because she surely doesn’t mean that; she’s just careless about her mouth, Michael thinks. His father is talking too, but in a much lower tone; actually, he seems to be moaning and Michael can almost picture his father rubbing his not-quite-bald-but-missing-hair head and nodding it in agreement with Michael’s mother; it’s always like that when their voices are that low. Michael knows their parents, and they never disagree beneath such quiet words.

He gets up and goes to the bedroom to take care of morning matters, mumbling to himself, others will say if they hear him, but Michael knows who he’s talking to. It’s the weekend, so no one has to worry about school or work. And hopefully it will be a Saturday in family and peace. That’s what Michael dreamt about that night; living in the perfect family where no one disagrees until it’s really necessary to discuss things; a family where all members stand together and pray in one voice; a family where one protects the others. In fact, that’s the main purpose of that morning’s prayer; Michael always prays when he is alone.

Later, but not too much, breakfast finally comes and the mother, the father and the two brothers are silently sitting at the kitchen table. As usual, there’s coffee, milk and bread, a simple breakfast for a Catholic family, as though all of them believe in God. Gerard says he doesn’t, though, but Mikey doesn’t really care; he knows God will save his brother too, as long as Michael asks for it enough. Michael is a deep believer, and he loves God; he loves his family too, and Gerard’s in it.

The meal passes by in silence because they all heard the hushed sounds from last night and this morning, but Michael has to watch everyone sitting at the table from behind his brown and thin glasses. He sees his brother’s dark-red spots around his eyes and also on his neck, he sees his father’s head low, seriously focused on his coffee mug and slice of bread, and he sees his mother’s eyes bugging out towards her husband, trying to tell him something Mikey can’t identify.

Then, his father speaks. “Gerard?” Gerard looks up, eyes wide in surprise and bread hanging in front of his open mouth. He drops it before their father talks again, Michael’s eyes focused on his face, and Michael’s ears almost sticking out in attention.

“I should apologize to you,” he says and the corners of Michael’s mouth smile just a little, even though his brother’s don’t even move. “I shouldn’t have done those horrible things to your face and God knows what else that we can’t see, but I was drunk,” he continues and, ah!, Michael was right about that after all; “It doesn’t explain anything, and it’s not an excuse either, but I want you to know that it won’t happen again. I’ll try to contain my anger problems when it comes to you,” he pauses.

Gerard’s eyes narrow to a minimum line on his face and Michael doesn’t like what he sees. He doesn’t know if his older brother is angry at their father, but if he is, Michael thinks, he really shouldn’t be because that is a terrible sin, and Michael doesn’t know what will happen next, but watching that reaction from Gerard certainly doesn’t calm him down. Something bad will be said, Michael just knows that.

“Wrong choices,” Michael hears and sees his mother raise one finger towards his father, who gulps and nods to say, “Sorry, it’s your choice.”

The whole family is in silence for some moments and Michael doesn’t know what will happen next, so he drops his mouth corners to their relaxed position and just watches, waiting for any kind of movement or words. He blinks once and eats some more, and blinks again as his right hand moves the mug to his mouth again, and when he puts it down and blinks for the third time, Gerard mumbles a stifled “Okay,” and gets up.

Gerard leaves the table in a hurry and their mother calls, “Gerard!” as though no one else knew who had just left the room. The rest of that breakfast is dead silent and the family isn’t together for the rest of the day; Michael’s dream remains a dream and, for Michael’s mind, only his prayers will save their family. Michael shakes his head.

**

Michael’s fifteen years old.
He’s at home, alone with Gerard, for the umpteenth time in their life. They can’t say they don’t like it, because they do. Michael is on summer vacation, heavenly away from school, teachers and bullying colleagues for two months and closer to God, so he’s happy. Gerard’s at home on vacation too, but from his job. Their parents are still at work.

The two brothers are watching a movie together and talking through it, over the subtle but annoying voices of the too-European actors in a too-American movie, and they love to do it because they’re best brothers and best friends, and they just trust each other and like to hang out. They mostly talk about comics and official books, and girls and boys, and friends and ads they saw on TV last week; they talk about everything as the movies goes on.

They’re still watching it, though, even if some details are left behind inside their brains, but they’re officially watching it, for their own way of watching movies, some sort of a Way-brothers-secret for watching-a-movie-and-having-a-serious-conversation-at-the-same-time. And they’re eating popcorn, frantically indeed, to keep the movie tradition, and drinking orange juice to keep their throats fresh for the talk. They’re comfortable, sitting on the couch.

At some point, obviously, and because the movie seems too long, they run out of popcorn and only Michael’s glass has orange juice, because Gerard is a drinking human machine. However, the older brother is comfortable enough to get up from where they’re sitting, announcing, “Bathroom and kitchen.”

Mikey knows what he means. “You want me to pause this?” he suggests, but Gerard says “It doesn’t matter, I won’t be long,” from above his shoulder, but Michael still presses the button. Gerard’s practically running to the stairs, but the other couch is on his way and Gerard bangs loudly against it.

Michael looks over when he hears Gerard’s cussing sound, “You alright?”

“No! I banged my fucking toes on the damn couch! Ouch, damn ouch!” Gerard answers, and rhymes. Yes, he cusses a lot when he’s angry, or hurting. Michael just laughs, his overreacting feminine giggle and then his loud hahaha, contagious in its best, so much that even Gerard is laughing with him. “You’ll fucking die for that,” Gerard threatens, “slowly.”

Michael’s already close to tears with laughing when his older brother gets to the top of the stairs with no more accidents, but still limping. When Gerard disappears on the second floor, Michael’s laughs diminish and he drinks the rest of his orange juice, a tiny rest, that is, which doesn’t even relieve him of his sore throat from laughing. Now that he’s calm, there’s only silence; no TV, no popcorn, no Michael’s laugh, no Gerard’s pointy cusses; nothing.

Gerard said he wouldn’t be long, but it seems to Michael that an eternity has passed by, so he decides to make a move before his distracted brother kills himself for running into the wall because he missed the door he wanted to open. Michael goes upstairs.

“Gerard?” he calls, mischievously. “Geraaard!” Silence is the answer, so Michael approaches the nearly-closed bathroom door, saying a hushed and hurried prayer to himself, not wanting to find the broken and drunken brother from the few lastweeks months. It can’t be exactly happening, because Gerard was only drinking orange juice, but it still wasn’t pretty for Michael to recall those occasions when he found his brother like that. It wasn’t pretty at all.

He finishes the prayer, sighs and enters the room, and Gerard’s there, washing his mouth and hands, looking flushed and disgusted. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gerard answers, “I didn’t mean to scare you, but I think the popcorn wasn’t too good to my stomach, since I didn’t eat much at lunch. Sugar can cause wicked nausea in empty stomachs, that’s for sure,” he smiles. Michael nods.

“I know that,” comes the not-so-worried-anymore answer, “I was just worried you had hurt yourself more, after your little toe-accident downstairs,” he sniggers.

“Very funny, Mikey, but accidents do happen.” Gerard sticks his tongue through his two thin lips and, after, smiles at Michael. He dries himself up, face and hands at the same time, and so vaguely Michael knows he’ll still be dripping when he gets out of the room. “Let’s go watch the movie.”

Drop. Yeah, Michael was right about the drop, and he smiles. “Yeah,” he replies and follows his older brother, as usual.

**

Michael’s still nineteen years old.
The February rain falls outside, but no one in the house can see it. It’s perfectly hearable, though, because it swings in the air in its way down the clouds, and it swirls against the window and doorframes, and it hits the brown wood with a shushing monotone that bothers you. That’s the rain, and you don’t wanna know about the wind.

It’s almost dinner time that day, and Michael is in Gerard’s basement room. He thinks he shouldn’t be there, not because it’s dangerous or forbidden, but because Frank’s also there. And Gerard. You can guess the rest. Well, they’re all just hanging out, talking and laughing sometimes, and Michael likes that, unless the lovebirds decide it’s time for a make-out-and-embarrass-Mikey session. Michael just huffs. And they stop. Giggling, like only Frank and Gerard can do.

“Relax, Mikey,” Frank says when he sees Michael’s known face for a very bad mood, and annoyance. And to that Gerard adds a tipsy,

“C’mon, Mikes, two guys making out is the dream of your life.” Michael doesn’t laugh, but he gets the irony and smiles a little. He likes his brother, and maybe that’s Gerard and Frank’s luck.

Michael looks around in the next moment of silence and, despite the one or two bottles and the four or five pills, only for Gerard, the basement bedroom looks okay. A pleasant atmosphere, if you want, and the three young men like to enjoy it together. They’re having fun; they’re laughing.

A door bangs. The laughs stop. Michael, Frank and Gerard look up at the basement door and they hear the raw “Michael! Gerard!” from their mother. They just look at each other, not knowing what to think.

“Someone did something wrooong,” Frank chants in a joke and they laugh at it, because Frank’s always like that.

“Let’s see what she wants,” Michael says, too serious for the present mood, and they all get up from the floor where they’re sitting and go upstairs.

The mother is in the living room, sat on the couch with her face on her hands and her elbows on her knees; she doesn’t look okay. “Mom?” Michael calls, and she lifts her head up.

She’s crying. It looks bad.

“Mom!” Michael repeats and runs closer, sitting on the couch by her side and placing one hand over hers. “What’s wrong? What happened? Was it us, what did we do?” he asks frantically until Gerard appears on the other side of the couch, on the other side of their mother, and looks at him weirdly, one eyebrow too high up on his forehead.

“It’s Nan,” she sniffs and, at first, the brothers think they didn’t hear her right, because Nan refers to their grandmother, their mother’s mother, and she’s a spectacular woman, present in all the needed times, so beautiful and wise, and healthy at the present time. They do remember that, only three months ago, she went to the hospital and stayed there for some days, due to a heart attack. It can’t be the same now, their minds tell them, but the mother looks so down and her sniffs are so frequent that soon the information kicks their brain dead-on, freezes Gerard and shudders Michael from head to toes.

“What happened?” Michael finally asks, interrupting the silence that even Frank was respecting. He’s also very fond of the old lady and he smiles and blushes every time she mentions her name and how proud she is of that young man. Nan is, in fact, a very caring woman and everyone should love her in Michael’s opinion.

“She’s in the hospital,” the mother answers and Gerard gasps. Michael knows he’s the one who loves Nan the most because he always shared her love for art, and he was always taught by her magnificent patience since he had no mood to deal with teachers, and Nan always made him feel more relaxed about existing. At least, that’s the image Michael sees of the relationship between his brother and their grandmother. “Heart attack. Again.”

It could be Michael’s heart stopping. The news leave him uncomfortable within his own body, as if he’s suddenly trapped in it, and there are only empty spots where he always had his body organs, so Michael can’t exactly understand what he’s feeling. He looks at Gerard for something more, let’s say, definite, and he finds pain. Gerard’s eyes are huge and profound, lakes of a dark hazel he hasn’t had before, or Michael has never seen; they’re watering too and his hands shake from the discomfort of what the mother said.

A door clicks in the background and two of the three heads in the living room turn around to see what the noise is; the mother doesn’t seem to know what happened, but Michael knows it was Frank leaving. He probably didn’t feel comfortable with heartbreaking news or with that low ambiance that’s now creating around the couch.

Gerard emits a fathom sound and it makes Michael shudder, before he squeezes his mother’s hand and leaves the room towards the basement door. He wants to be alone and Michael understands that; he could do the same, but his mother would be left without any kind of support. They should be together now because God will help them and save Nan.

Soon enough, the mother is crying and Michael hugs her and comforts her, not with sweet little nothings, but with murmured prayers on her ear. Her face is buried in Michael’s neck and the hair ruffles against Michael’s chin in a tingle that could bother him, but not now; he’s too uncomfortable and too focused on his prayers to even notice that.

There are new murmurs sounding along with Michael’s and he looks down to see that his mother is praying with him, before she says, “Say it louder.”

And they do. Together, they’re praying for Nan because she will always be needed in the family; she’s a master in her art of being lovely and neither of them can think of losing her at any moment. The family needs her, more than anything, because Nan brings light to every soul in the Way clan, and she always brightens people’s moods, and she always surprises them with a new peak of energy every day. She’s Nan and she’s special.

“Oh, Mom, God,” she whimpers and Michael cradles her closer and stronger in his embrace. There weren’t any occasions in his life where he comforted his mother like that and now it feels like a new bond is forming between them. In Michael’s mind, there’s a hyperbole about the umbilical cord being re-established between them in this moment of staying and praying together, and he wants to snort at it, but no; there are prayers taking place and those moments are sacred, holy, even for a teenager in his last year of the concept.

“Please, save her,” she says clearly before they start a new Hail Mary together, in the middle of their mentally organized praying session. The mother turned Michael into a believer and he’s very proud of that.

“We’ll save Nan,” he says. His voice is almost cracking from the new-found lumps making their way up Michael’s throat and the new-found tears finding a new home in Michael’s eyelashes, rather than the inside of his eyes. He’s crying and his mother notices, so much that she kisses his cheek lovingly, once, twice. Michael interprets that kiss as a thankful message, for the sudden support, when Gerard just left and he could have done the same, and for the shared prayers in that moment of affliction.

“We’ll save her,” he repeats and re-begins their prayers in one voice. In his mind, there’s a clear image of his grandmother, the lively one, not the sick one his mother just told him about; he imagines her smiling at him and bowing her head, a permissive and perhaps thankful gesture. Then, he thinks he just has to play his magic and see through God to save Nan, so he says,

“I promise, Mom.”