The Mercy of Birds

CHAPTER 25: THE YEARS BURN

CHAPTER 25
THE YEARS BURN

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His meaning of life could be broken down only into a couple of tasks today: take the seven hundred miles flight to see his brother. Then drove a couple dozen more just to delude him and pretend everything was all right when it was even so far removed from being bearable.

He recalled the conversations that he had with Nicholas the day after he practically absconded from South Dakota. He had been so nervous as to being unable to pick up his call the first two times, and could only return to him after a couple of hours of trying to vainfully distract himself from the inexorable. When he could no longer escape, he thought that by then, Cameron had already divulged in all the details, turned himself in, but imagine his surprise, when he found out Nicholas was still as clueless as the day he was born.

Victor didn't take the liberty to expose him. In part because he knew it was Cameron's responsibility to bear alone and also because he feared if he were to be the one to disclose it, he wouldn't be able to quell his panic this time, but withholding the information also came with its cost and it would only inflate the longer they waited.

"Did you hear from Cam recently? He just called me asking if I sent my people after him, but then he said it was nothing, he sounded paranoid, I worried about him but he wouldn't talk to me and we both knew the second I'd try to intrude he would give me hell. That bastard. Vic, you're the only one who can get a hold of him. Go and talk some sense into his head," Nicholas demanded him that day through the phone after Victor just flew back to his studio in Austin, Texas. It made him so unimaginably torn, all the confession was just at the tip of his tongue. He was afraid his heart would just separate and it might just very well be once he saw Nicholas face to face today.

Nico, if only you knew.

How did Cameron do that though? How did he reenact such a perfect play and contrive so devious of a scheme that neither of them had even the slightest clue of it after all these years? Or had it always been there since the very beginning? Victor could recall that he had been involved with several altercations with their mother regarding their sister, but they believed as their mother believed that he was just confused—as all of them were, and she had straightened it out of him. It was true that the older he got, he ceased to speak about it, but it turned out that no one really knew his mind. He harbored it within him, enshrined the dream, until one day he had the feasible means to make it real.

Victor sighed as he pounded his hand at the steering wheel, gazing out into the view of the city. The paved road was a man-made chasm that halved the path to the mountains in two. The evening was tranquil, with residents preferring to stay inside their homes for warmth or within the effervescent establishments of pubs in the row of buildings with square façade and arched windows that lined the streets. The streetlights and illuminations from the shops passed him like some sort of exiled star from the constellation. His heart seared. Their mother had hand picked this place from the map as their safe haven after everything that happened and it felt so much as though he was tainting her hope for a better life, jimmying and wrecking the walls for security that she constructed around them just for harboring this knowledge.

What of Cameron? Did the act kill him or did it bring him back to life?

He turned right at the intersection and the house with the sycamore tree that dangled over from the weight of the snow, appeared halfway on the road that stretched before him. The other houses were alight, wreaths adorned their doors as they opened it to family and children that came home after a long separation. He tried to quell his yearning, but lying about how he missed his adolescent years up until the tragedy wrecked them only overburdened him.