Page 31 of Thin Ice

"If."

"If we can come to an understanding."

"You're asking me to confirm the plan."

"I'm asking you to come home."

"To Kingswell. To your family."

I held his eyes. I thought about what he'd told me on Tuesday. Chase the boat. Genuinely good advice but it was from a man who was leveraging four hundred scholarship students to keep his son in line.

Both things. Same man.

I looked at my mother.

She was looking at her plate. Her hands were still. She had heard every word. She understood what was being asked and what was being threatened.

She did not look up.

Three days ago she had told me about a heron. He comes back because he wants to. And tonight she sat six feet away while the cage closed and studied her plate.

I turned back to my father.

"I need to think about it," I said.

"Alexander." A flicker of impatience, the first real one all night. "I've just told you the scope of what's at stake."

"I heard you. I need to think."

He studied me. This was what he'd trained me for: the stare, the silence, the willingness to sit inside discomfort. I was using it against him, and we both knew it.

"I expect an answer before Christmas," he said.

"You'll have one."

I set my napkin on the table. Stood. The chair made no sound.

"Goodnight, Mom." I touched her shoulder as I passed. She put her hand over mine, briefly, and the grip was tight, and she didn't look up.

"Goodnight, Alexander," my father said behind me.

I went up the stairs. Closed my bedroom door.

The door was shut, and I was alone, and the whole thing came up at once.

I sat on the floor. Back against the door. And the crying hit me like something breaking loose inside my chest, tearing through muscle and bone on its way out. I folded in half. My forehead on my knees, my hands gripping the back of my neck, and the sound that came out of me wasn't a sound I'd ever made before. It was raw and gutteral.

I punched the carpet. Once. Hard enough to feel it in my shoulder. Then again. Then I was up, pacing, three steps to the window and three steps back, my hands in my hair, pulling, trying to hold my skull together because it felt like it was coming apart.

Choose your family or be yourself.

That's what he was asking. That's what it had always been. Not the plan, not the folder, not the money. My father was asking me to stop being gay. To sign it away like a bad investment.

So fucked up.

My hands were shaking and my face was wet and the anger was everywhere now, in my teeth, in my fists, in the back of my throat.

James was twenty-two. Abandoned by his family because he brought his boyfriend to Thanksgiving. That was coming for me. I could see it.