Once Magnificent

“I’m gay.”

In the absence of an audience, the words came easy, unleashed like a restless beast with lungs breathing and heart beating. I was crouched in the grass, my mother’s headstone before me. I had long maintained that there was no grave deep enough that could keep her from me, but there was something distinctly easier about not having to look her in the eye that allowed me to get the words out. Instead, staring back at me was a small figure of Moroni above my mother’s name, her date of birth, date of death, and the titles of wife, mother and grandmother that she had managed to amass in the sixty-four years we’d been blessed with her.

In the last few years of my mother’s life, through all her suffering, I willed her not to die. Selfishly, for years my prayers followed the simple narrative of need—I needed my mother, and I wasn’t ready to let her go. With hands clasped around her own, I begged her not to leave me. Only me. Forever the momma’s boy, I reminded her while she slept of the hours we’d spent together when I was small, too delicate and young to be wanted in the presence of my older siblings. We would cook together, watch television and listen to Elvis as we danced in the kitchen.

Whilst my father and brother kept their cards firmly to their chests, my sentiments weren’t shared among my sisters. More than once I’d arrived to find Catherine, the eldest of my sisters, stroking her fingers through my mother’s hair, telling her that everything was alright, that she could go now if she wanted to. I never said anything, not to her, but Joshua was hit with the full force of my distress despite his disinterest.

In the end, my mother died peacefully in a hospital bed. I was twenty-nine at the time, a father of two with another one on the way. Despite my prayers, there was something almost relieving as I stepped through those heavy swing doors only to be bowled over by Catherine, her tears slowly leaking through my shirt. I had missed her passing by twenty minutes. Catherine and my father had been with her. Irene, Claire and Sophia followed soon after, but Joshua never came—just like he hadn’t shown up for Grandma Patty’s funeral nineteen years prior, earning himself a whack over the head from my mother in the front room.

It was universally decided in our silence that it would be me that offered the next blow of retribution. Twelve years my senior, Joshua was the picture of who I would be. More than anyone else, I looked up to him, taking his word—and David Bowie’s by default—as gospel. As a teenager I was handed down his cassettes as CDs became popular, immersing myself in the lavish and synthetic sound of 80s British pop music. I didn’t walk the quiet streets of Nephi when my Walkman blared the Pet Shop Boys in my ears; I walked the streets of Manchester, London and Liverpool, sick with the knowledge that I’d been born on the wrong side of the Atlantic, some twenty years too late.

I went to see Joshua the next day. He’d been drinking. I frowned, pouring the last remains of a bottle of beer down the sink. As Mormons, we weren’t supposed to drink, but I wasn’t one to lecture; I’d only given it up when my wife had been pregnant with our first son, desperate for some direction, the lingering fear of my very early childhood causing me more than an inch of distress. When I was little, my mother and I would wander around dark carparks, sometimes with me in the front of a rattily shopping cart. It was a little game we played. It was only as a I grew older that I realized we were looking for my father, who, in the height of his alcoholism, had a penchant for falling asleep in 7-11 car parks, too embarrassed to come home.

Nothing could prepare you for the loss of a parent. I was the youngest of six by seven years—a ‘surprise’, mom often said—and a complete and utter momma’s boy. I took it hard, but Joshua took it the worst. Bitter breath in my face, he twisted his fists into the front of my shirt, cried, “I couldn’t say goodbye, B. I just couldn’t.”

I cried in Maria’s arms that night. Again, there was a relief to my anguish, this last bout of sorrow lasting almost two years. Maria petted my hair down. It must have looked bizarre, me trying to hide myself in her tiny body like an overgrown child. She said she’d tell the kids, and I hadn’t even thought about that; not only had I lost my mother, but the boys had lost a grandmother. The child growing within Maria would never get to meet her.

It had been six years since then. Six long years. Like a kingdom besieged, without my mother, my family was torn apart; my father retreated into himself while Joshua fell to the sins of the three generations that had proceeded us. My sisters, who remembered the actions of my father much more clearly than I ever did, wanted nothing to do with Joshua. With three young children, I found my own patience worn with him—that, and I’d come to the startling realization that I was gay.

Until my mother died, I’d had no issue repressing the inkling that lingered at the very base of my subconsciousness. Without her, though—without the tangible weight of the memory of her pulling me away from those two women in the park, the thought consumed me. It overtook me. The contents of my prayers changed to something much more confusing, much more frightening. I sat in church, Aaron squirming in my lap, and stared into a void, waiting for something to make sense, to save me from my torment.

I told Maria in the dead of the night. For the longest time, she said nothing and slipped from our bed, stumbling like a ghost through our home until she reached the kitchen. I watched her shaky hand pour herself a glass of water, and felt my soul leave my body with the fright of the glass shattering against the floor. I went to her, hands as equally as unsteady, and held my forearm against her, keeping her from the shards of glass. She slinked back, little body curling tight against the foot of the fridge. She cried into her wrists as I picked up the glass, fingers bleeding.

“It’s all been a lie,” Maria said, voice hollow.

“No,” I said, because if there was one thing I was sure of, despite all my uncertainty, it was that I loved her. That hadn’t been a lie, that feeling. I hadn’t known the truth, but none of it had been a lie.

Elijah, Joseph and Aaron were harder to tell, so I took them up to the mountains.

Aaron was a cautious little thing; every bike ride he’d be padded out from head to foot, his lips pursed in a concentrated pout as he moved slowly along the path. Elijah grew frustrated and Joseph copied, even managing to force out a scowl that made him look frighteningly like his grandmother. We soldiered on until they whined of hunger and set out our little picnic. As I tore off the crusts of Aaron’s sandwiches, mind too much of a mess to cut them off before we’d left, I thought about how they would grow up thinking about me, if they would take their mother’s side even though she had fallen into a state of numbness and not the quiet rage I’d expected. Out of everything—my faith, my wife, my family and my reputation, it was the love and respect of my sons that I feared losing the most.

“You know, they got some real big mountains down in Vegas,” I told them, bringing my knees up to protect myself. It was hot out, sweat sitting on my skin. I had to squint to see Joseph spill a spoonful of yogurt down his front. “I’m going to be going there for a little while.”

“Why?” Elijah asked with his signature bluntness. He’d gotten that from his mother.

“Me and your momma, we—well, sometimes adults gotta take a break from each other.” My knees came even closer to my chest. “Sometimes for a real long time.”

Aaron continued eating, oblivious. Elijah stared back at me blankly. Joseph immediately shot up, angry, shouting, “No!” like he hadn’t done since he was a toddler. “You can’t leave! I won’t let you!”

“Joseph, sit down, please,” I said, voice jumpy. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Aaron getting a little upset from Joseph’s shouting. I lowered my legs and pulled him up onto my lap. “Joseph, please, you need to be a big boy about this.”

“You’re the one that’s running away!”

My stomach dropped at that. I had to wrap my arms around Aaron, my baby, for something to hold on to, to keep me grounded and from floating off somewhere else. It didn’t feel like I was running away—I knew I couldn’t stay, not in the home I had built with Maria. That wouldn’t be fair on either of us. It wasn’t like I was abandoning the kids either; I had plans in my mind already about how I was going to make this work, but Joseph didn’t know that.

While Elijah was the spit of his mother, Joseph and Aaron displayed a startling resemblance to me in my own youth. I looked up at where Joseph stood, silhouetted by the sun, and tried to remember if I’d ever spoke to my own father in this way. Probably not. He wasn’t as much as a pushover as I was, never gave an inch. Joseph could see right through me and I’d never been so terrified.

Mercifully, Aaron fell asleep on the drive back, giving me an excuse to stay silent. I hadn’t told them about being gay, the words all clogged up in my chest. That I would be leaving, heading back to my native Vegas, was enough to drop on them for one day. Maria said I should have told them, stalking around behind me as I washed out a few plastic lunch containers. She hadn’t said much to me until then, but I wasn’t foolish enough to not understand why.

“I need some time,” I told her.

“Why couldn’t you have taken the time before we got married?”

I turned to her scathing gaze. She was a short, pixie-like woman, hair chopped close and blonde. When I’d first met her, I was twenty and stuttered when I spoke to girls. I’d only had my first kiss the year before. I remember she told me to stop cracking my knuckles on our first date, but it was to be a nervous habit that never did die.

“You think I wanted things to turn out like this?” I asked. I threw a dishcloth over my shoulder, braced palms-flat back against the counter. “You think I would’ve put you through all this if I’d have known?”

Her chin pointed up, blue eyes blazing. She wasn’t numb anymore. “If you were scared enough,” she said. “God dammit, Brandon, how could you not have known?”

“I don’t know!” It was the truth. “And anyways, I had you. I didn’t need nobody else, didn’t need to be thinkin’ ‘bout anybody else.” This, too, was the truth. She had been my whole world, the first girl to really like me back, and I’d done the good Mormon thing and married her and started a family. I didn’t regret that, but I was starting to think she might be. “Come on, darlin’, you know I’m no liar.”

Then she came at me in a lurch, fists beating weak against my chest. She was crying. I held her as she struggled, still beating at me, lips dropped into her hair and smelling roses. She gave up after a little while, hands bunching in my t-shirt at my waist. Her tears were hot against my chest, burning like fire through to my heart. I never wanted to hurt her, but I couldn’t help the way that I felt. It had laid dormant for too long, and God knew the eruption would kill me.

I just never thought about it destroying everything else.