june 3rd, 2022.
The sun beat down on Washington Square park, on a day that was both sufficiently ordinary and satifactory for Louis Denver. Stretched out with his arm behind his head and the sun on his face, he held a paperback aloft to block out the overhead glare. His morning had been spent in lazy contentment, heading down to his favorite breakfast nook long after the rise of the sun. The waitress there had smiled her sweetest smile and fetched him his coffee, an assortment of sugary syrups Louis had found he actually liked after years of drinking black coffee. Sure, it wasn't very tortured artist of him, but for the sake of coffee that didn't taste like dirt, he was willing to leave a little pretension behind.
Now, all he was looking forward to for the rest of the day was scribbling in the margins of his copy of Young Mungo and having his heart ripped out of his chest in a controlled environment. Maybe he'd swing by his local bar at the end of his night and get a drink, chat amicably with a handsome stranger in the smoking area. The world was his fucking oyster. He'd always wanted to live in California.
Uncapping his biro between his teeth, Louis clumsily underlined a particularly poignant sentence in his novel. He tucked the pen back behind his ear after doing so, absently thinking that perhaps his hair was getting a little too long. Last time he'd facetimed his Maman she'd despaired at the way it was curling just under his chin, tutting with a small smile on her face.
As Louis found himself thinking fondly of his family, he was suddenly ripped out of his reverie by the sound of his phone ringing. Planting the paperback face down atop his chest, uncaring about the already-cracking spine, Louis fished his phone from the pocket of his jeans, squinting at the string of unknown numbers suddenly lighting up his phone.
As a rule, Louis generally didn’t answer unknown numbers. He did, however, recognise the area code. Lowell, Massachusetts.
A lump as hard as a rock gathered uncomfortably in his throat as he merely stared at the phone, waiting for the number to ring through. Whoever was on the other line, he didn’t want them to know he’d hung up on them. There were only two people in his hometown that knew his number, and they’d both been sworn to secrecy. And Louis had his number blocked.
When the phone mercifully stopped ringing, Louis navigated with shaky hands to his list of contacts, scrolling for only a second or two before he reached the C’s. After Louis had left home, he’d quickly dumped his phone and replaced it with the oldest, still-working model of iPhone. There were few people whose numbers it was important for him to save, now.
Pressing his phone to his ear, it rang for mere moments before the woman on the other end picked up.
“Caro? Did you give Ger my number?” Louis launched into the conversation, not pausing to wait for the chirpy, ‘Lou!’ his big sister usually picked up the phone with. Instead of a response, however, he only heard ragged, shallow breaths on the other end of the phone, the unmistakeable sound of his only sister sniffing.
“Carolina? Qu'est-ce qui ne va pas?” Louis asked, his voice wobbling with concern in his rusty French. He white-knuckled his phone as Carolina’s sobs increased in volume.
“I - I, oh, Lou. I didn’t want you to hear it like this.” she sniffed.
Louis sat up, his book tumbling into the grass.
“What’s so important that you needed Gerard to call me? That you or Mom couldn’t?” he asked, his fingers anxiously tugging at the loose threads in his jeans. It wasn’t often in his phone calls with his big sister or his Mom that they brought up his older brother. After the first few attempts, they’d noticed the visible change in Louis’ tone and simply stopped trying.
“It’s Dad, Lou. He’s - oh God, he’s gone.”
Whatever Carolina said next dulled to static sound. It was so goddamn cliche, but everything - the kids running circles around each other, the bible basher he could hear faintly across the way, the busker playing Fix You by Coldplay - was muted as Louis contemplated that his Father was gone.
It was a hard fact to reckon with. Leonard Denver, the man who cheered at his football games, the man he was named for, was lying dead somewhere, in a hospital morgue or a funeral home, Louis wasn't sure. At the same time, Leonard Denver, the man who told him he'd rather Louis never marry at all if he was going to marry a man, who spent most of his childhood calling him a 'priss' as well as some of the more creative slurs, was dead.
Vaguely, Louis was aware of the fact Carolina was still talking. Between choked sobs and muffled words, he thought he made out the word 'home'.
"What's that, Caro? I can't understand you."
"You've got to come home. To Lowell. We have to plan the funeral, we have to - we're gonna have to get you on a flight, hon. Are you working right now? Hold on, Ger's texting me now, he says he'll pay for your flight."
Louis' blood ran cold.
"I ain't coming home. I'm not coming back to Lowell ever again." Louis said, so quietly it was possible Carolina might miss it. When she didn't respond, he thought for a second she had. A tinny scoff could be heard through the speakers of Louis' phone.
"For Chrissakes, he's our Dad. Of course you have to come home. We should all be together right now. All Denvers together. Maman is sick over this, and she's always liked you best, anyway."
Running a hand through his too-long dark locks, Louis winced. Of course Louis loved his sister, but if there was anyone Louis loved irrevocably, without conditions, it was his Maman. Aurelie Denver has always shielded and protected him to the best of her ability, smuggled him tawdry paperbacks and put his poetry up on the refrigerator with pride. It killed him to think of her suffering alone, lamenting the death of the husband she'd loved for over forty years. And yet, if she knew, Louis knew without a doubt she'd tell him to run and ever look back.
"I can't, sis. I'll call Mom, I'll explain everything - but I'm not going to that man's funeral."
Carolina's tears had made way for exasperation.
"He can't hurt you. Didn't you hear, he's dead! He's gone! My Dad is dead, Louis!"
"Yeah, Caro. My Dad is dead, too. My Dad, who hated his strange, queer kid and never came to a single one of my open mics. He never wanted to meet my boyfriend but loved Edie, and Stella, and Joan. Never the one fuckin' person I was serious about. I'm not going. I'm not standing in a room with that man, dead or alive, and I sure as hell don't want to see my dear big brother."
Louis held the phone away from his ear for a mere moment, gathering his courage back up after his little outburst. He realised in that moment he'd been shouting, and that multiple people were now staring at him, screaming down the phone at his grieving sister.
"Jesus, what is it with you and Gerard? What the fuck kind of argument did you guys have that you won't even be in the same room as him? He loves you. He talks about how much he wishes you'd call, all the time. Why are you doing this?"
Louis' pinched the bridge of his nose, his sunny day suddenly turned sour. Times like this he found it hard to reckon with the sneaking suspicion that he was the fuck up, he was the one tearing his family apart because of his inability to stand in the same room as Gerard Denver. No, not Gerard Denver. His abuser. It had taken him so long and years of therapy to even think of the man as such. Louis had tried anything and everything to cope. Drinking, leaving his whole life in New York behind. Just last year, Louis had been on a date with an older man and ended the night in a full-fledged panic attack. He would not undo years of progress just to placate his sister, even if it stopped his Mom's heart from breaking.
"Ask him." Louis spat down the phone, the words bitter-tasting in his mouth. "I'm sorry, I love you and I love Mom, but I fuckin' can't. I'm sorry he's gone, but I'm not gonna stand around and cry and pretend he was a good Dad. Goodbye, Carolina."