Belonging (3 page)

“I don’t fear the damn thing, I just
don’t want it in my kitchen!”

“Tough. I’m not taking it
away.”

He knit his thick brows at me as he
crossed the room and plucked the orange sphere off the counter. He
then strode to the back door, flung it open, and chucked the
tangelo outside. Zan looked pleased with himself when he turned
back to me, until he realized the tangelo had been immediately
replaced with another. That fruit met the same airborne
fate.

“You’re totally acting like a child
right now,” I pointed out as he turned toward me again and found
yet another tangelo in the spot previously occupied by the other
two.

“Bloody hell. Are you shitting those
things out?”

“Now there’s an attractive visual.” He
grabbed the latest fruit and I did, too, leaning over the kitchen
island to get in his face. We were the same height, about six-two,
and I held his gaze as I said, “Stop throwing these! You’re not
six. Actually, that’s beneath even my six-year-old
nephew.”

“I’ll stop throwing them if you
promise to stop improvising! There’s a list. Just stick with
it!”

“It’s not good to be so rigid. You
need to open yourself up to new experiences, or else what are you
going to be like five or ten years down the road?”

He let go of the fruit and
straightened up, his green eyes flashing. “I don’t recall asking
your opinion.”

“I don’t recall needing to wait until
I’m asked.” He’d had enough of me by that point and started to
return to the den. I called after him, “I’m going to be doing yard
work for a couple hours, just so you know. If you decide you
actually want to have a conversation with someone, you know where
to find me.” The door clicked shut behind him and I frowned at
it.

I gathered up the grocery sacks and
went back down the long hallway leading to the side door. The walls
were lined with a couple dozen gold and platinum records. Zan
Tillane had been a famous pop star, one of the biggest in the
world. But that was a long time ago.

He hadn’t left his house in more than
a decade. His son and I’d had long conversations about how much of
this isolation was voluntary, and how much might stem from some
kind of mental illness. Zan was definitely bipolar, there was no
doubt about that. But was he also agoraphobic, paranoid, or any of
the other diagnoses that doctors had tried to assign to him over
the years? I really didn’t know.

When Zan first disappeared from the
public eye, it had set off a firestorm of publicity, far more than
he’d probably ever anticipated. All kinds of stories sprang up, in
the form of urban legends, movies, documentaries and countless
rumors. Whatever his goal had been when he tried to walk away from
it all, the end result was this. He lived his life totally cut off
from the world and if he ever tried to go back, the paparazzi would
pretty much swallow him whole. Given that, it might be a good thing
that he seemed to have no interest in ever leaving his
home.

But how could he stand so much
isolation? The only person he spoke to regularly was his son, and
he kept a lawyer on retainer to deal with anything that cropped up.
That was the sum total of his social interaction, not counting me.
And I really didn’t count, since he had very little interest in
speaking to me.

After stopping off in the tool shed, I
started working around the perimeter of the house. The sprawling
ranch-style behemoth was partially built into the side of a hill.
It appeared to be one story when you drove up to it, but around
back, two lower stories were revealed. The house sat by itself amid
rolling, tree-dotted grassy hills, as far as the eye could
see.

It was early spring, and the grass had
been growing like crazy. Every other week I was out with the riding
lawnmower, trying to keep it down. There was a significant
firebreak around the property, a wide, dry creek bed separating the
grassy hills from the minimalistic landscaping that ringed the
house. It still made me nervous, though. If a wildfire broke out,
what exactly would this man do? This wasn’t just a house, it was
his whole world.

No one else seemed terribly concerned
about this, but I was, so I spent a lot of extra time on the
landscaping. I’d recently begun trimming dead branches from the
trees closest to the house. I wasn’t much of a gardener though, and
wondered how Tillane would react if I asked to bring along my
brother Vincent, who had a natural affinity for that kind of
thing.

From my vantage point up in an oak
tree, I could see Zan in his den. His back was to me and a movie
was playing on the big TV mounted to the wall. He was facing away
from the screen though, sitting on his brown leather couch and
staring at the closed double doors leading to the kitchen. He was
probably waiting until he knew I was gone before he came out and
made himself some lunch.

I felt sorry for him, except for the
part where he was choosing to be completely obstinate. Deciding I
was the enemy didn’t make a lick of sense. It wasn’t as though I
was purposefully trying to replace Christian.

Still though, my heart broke a little
as I watched him sitting there all by himself. It was always like
that for him, day after day of that sameness and loneliness. I had
absolutely no idea how he could stand it.

*****

Progress on the trees was slow. By
late afternoon, I was exhausted and decided that was all I could do
for one day. I went to the toolshed and put the handsaw away, then
washed up in a utility sink in the garage. The structure was built
for three cars, but held only one: a dusty, long-forgotten vintage
Jaguar convertible with four flat tires. The car was a thing of
beauty. What a waste.

When I went inside the house and
knocked on the door to the den, Zan swung it open and stared at me.
“Do you care if I bring my brother to help me with the
landscaping?” I asked him.

“Why are you doing all of
that?”

“To keep your ass from burning down if
there’s a wildfire.”

“There’s never been a wildfire here,”
he said.

“Well, in case Mother Nature didn’t
get the ‘no wildfires here’ memo, I thought I’d go ahead and take
care of some of that shit.”

He stared at me for a long moment, a
muscle working in his jaw as he ground his teeth. Finally he said,
“Tell me about your brother.”

“Tell you what?”

“Anything.”

“Well, let’s see. Vincent’s a
newlywed, he’s married to a sweet guy named Trevor and they have an
adopted son named Josh. Christian was at their wedding, you can ask
him about my brother if you want. Vinnie’s been studying landscape
architecture and wants to start a business, but for now, he just
does work for our family. He’s really smart, too, and good at
fixing things. If you have any projects around here that you’ve
been wanting to get done, he could take care of them for
you.”

Zan mulled that over, then said,
“Bring him,” before closing the door in my face.

I sighed and muttered, “Good talk,”
before turning and leaving him to his solitude.

Chapter
Two

“What’d you bring us, Uncle
Johnnie?”

I’d gone home to shower before heading
to my brother Mikey’s house and had put on a clean t-shirt and
jeans. As I hung a garment bag with a change of clothes for later
inside the hall closet, away from sticky little fingers, I asked,
“Who says I brought you anything?” I turned to my nephew Markie and
ruffled his dark hair.

The six-year-old knit his brows. “You
always bring us something, and you always pretend you didn’t,” he
told me flatly.

“Sounds like I’ve become predictable,
I’d better change things up a bit,” I said and he sighed
dramatically. His older brother appeared on the stairs to my left
and I called, “Hey Mikey Junior. What’s shaking?”

Now it was the nine-year-old’s turn to
frown at me. “Remember how we talked about this, Uncle Johnnie? I
don’t want to be called Mikey Junior anymore, I want to be called
MJ. Is that so much to ask?”

I grinned and told him, “Sorry, I
forgot.”

“Everyone
keeps forgetting. It’s just like the whole family
calling you Johnnie when it’s not even your name,” he said. “Don’t
you want people to stop doing that?”

“I’m used to it.”

“Why does everyone call you Johnnie,
anyway?”

“It’s his fault.” I pointed at my
brother Mikey, who was coming down the stairs carrying Mitchell,
his seven-year-old. “When your dad was little he couldn’t say
Gianni, so he called me Johnnie. Somehow, it stuck.”

“Could be worse,” my brother said,
depositing his son in the hall. “I’ve totally given up on getting
the family to call me Mike instead of Mikey.” He began fidgeting
with his dull, dark blue tie.

“You’re right to give up, it’s a lost
cause.”

My brother really wasn’t a ‘Mikey’ by
any stretch of the imagination. He was eleven months younger than
me, but you’d never know it. At six-four he had almost two inches
and probably forty pounds of muscle on me. That big build was an
interesting contrast to the tidy hair and the Clark Kent glasses
that made him look like an accountant (which he was).

Between his size and the fact that he
had the same dark coloring as most of my Sicilian family (which had
skipped me for some reason), we looked nothing alike. That didn’t
stop our family from calling us the twins, though. It wasn’t just
because we were close in age. Mikey and I had been inseparable
growing up. Our parents died when we were just three and four, and
we’d totally latched on to each other when that happened. He’d been
incredibly important to me throughout my childhood. Even though he
was younger than me, he’d brought a sense of security to my life at
a time when I desperately needed that.

But then, soon after high school,
Mikey decided to get married and start a family of his own. That
shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. Sure, I’d been happy for him. But
at the same time, I missed my brother when he moved out and started
a new life.

He’d married Jenny, his high school
sweetheart, and they had three beautiful boys. Then Jenny was
killed by a drunk driver and Mikey, who’d already been a great
father, evolved into Superdad. His whole life was about his kids. I
admired the man he’d become, even if a pathetic little part of me
still missed him sometimes.

Mitchell came up to me and I scooped
him up and gave him a squeeze as I said, “Hey, big guy. What’s
new?”

“I have a loose tooth. MJ keeps
threatening to tie a string around it and yank it out. Don’t let
him,” he said gravely.

I grinned at Mitchell. He was my
favorite, partly because he was quiet and studious and took
everything way too seriously. “Your tooth is safe with me. Which
one is it?” He curled back his lips and pointed to a tiny little
Tic Tac of a tooth in the center of the bottom row.

Someone knocked on the door and I told
my brother, “That’s probably Yoshi, he was finding a parking spot.
We’re going out later, so he’s going to hang out while I
babysit.”

“Awesome! He can give us all tattoos!”
MJ exclaimed. His father rolled his eyes almost imperceptibly.
During our last visit, Yosh had brought a set of nontoxic markers
and drawn temporary tattoos for the kids. Even though they washed
out with the next bath, they’d still made my straight-laced brother
a bit twitchy.

Mikey answered the door, and he and my
friend greeted each other with backslapping hugs. Yosh hadn’t
thought to dress down and was wearing head-to-toe black, topped
with a slick motorcycle jacket. That was going to go
well.

“I ordered pizza,” my brother told us,
“it’ll be here soon. Boys, please go set the table.” I put Mitchell
down and the kids headed for the dining room. My brother turned to
Yosh and me and said, “Can I ask your opinion on
something?”

“No to everything you’re wearing,” I
said.

“How did you know what I was going to
ask?”

“Are you going to a funeral?” I asked
him.

“No.”

“Then what’s with the dark suit and
boring tie?”

Mikey said, “I wanted to make a good
impression.”

“Who are you going out with?” Yosh
asked.

“A woman named Bonnie. We met at the
grocery store,” he said embarrassedly.

“First date?” I asked, and when he
nodded I said, “Where are you taking her?”

“I made reservations at
Fonte.”

“My God why?” I asked him.

“Well, because it’s popular and I
heard it’s nice.”

I said, “Come on, let’s go upstairs
and find you something else to wear while I text Dante.” As we
followed him up the staircase I shot our oldest brother a message.
He replied just moments later and I told Mikey, “You’re all set,
Dante’s saving the best table in the house for you.” Dante and his
husband Charlie owned a wonderful restaurant in the Marina
District.

“What was wrong with Fonte?” Mikey
asked.