I breathe out and try to get my shit together.
But Milo is home after two years and Janus called and told me the condition they fucking found him in.
Meanwhile, I was stuck at that premiere with the most vapid of Hollywood’s elite. All of them praising me for a movie I wasn’t in, telling me how my acting was better than ever. How I had a fresh edge they’d never seen in me before.
Understandably, because it was actually my brother who’d been on screen while I was out of commission with a broken leg.
Years ago, I would’ve felt their words like a spear through my abdomen—a mixture of jealousy and anxiety eating away at me as our adoptive mother’s voice rang in my head all over again.
She never stopped comparing us. She’d endlessly rewatch tapes of our weekly sitcom with each of us as children. Janus is getting an edge over you again. Remember only one of you will be able to actually make it in the industry. Don’t you want it to be you?
I crept up to the door one day when she was in with him watching his tape. She said exactly the same thing to him. So I never knew which of us she really thought was more talented. I didn’t realize until decades later it didn’t matter. She’d never cared. She was just pitting us against each other so that her odds of winning fame and fortune would be doubled.
It’s why she was happy to throw me to the wolves when I was just fourteen. There were rumors about that producer and her penchant for fresh-faced young actors. But hey, anything if it meant I’d get an edge in the business.
Now, it all just seemed so… frivolous. Certainly nothing worth almost destroying three young boys’ lives over.
And tonight with all these shellacked, tucked, and Spanxed people with their empty accolades. All so terrified of anything real. Tomorrow they’d forget my shiny star and go fawn over someone else. Or, if I flew too high, they’d delight in tearing me to shreds and dining on the pieces.
All that’s actually real in my life is currently back at my house. I glare at the GPS on my phone. Four miles away might as well be four million with this goddamned fucking traffic.
My car moves about two inches and then I’m forced to stop again.
It’s nine o’clock on a fucking Thursday. What the hell are all these cars doing parked on the 101 right now? Oh right, it’s LA.
I’m about to lay on the horn again when the cars in front of me finally move forwards. I jam my foot on the pedal—
Only for the asshole from the lane left to shoot into the tiny opening that opens between me and the car ahead of me.
“Son of a fuckface!” I shout. A useless echo in my empty car. I slam my steering wheel again.
Then pound my head back against my headrest as I glare at the again-unmoving traffic.
The last two years have been hell without Milo there.
Especially since it was all my fault.
If I’d made Milo tell Hope earlier, I could’ve managed the situation. He’s my brother. I knew him. I knew he couldn’t take rejection well, not when he felt he was being ejected from the one place he considered home. After wanting it his whole life.
Was he a little fucked in the head? Sure. We all were.
But for him to think that we’d ever just cast him out like that…
My gut churns. I should have followed him immediately. I should have known he’d do something reckless.
He’s back now, I try to reassure myself.
But Janus and I know better than anyone that bad things… leave scars, if not open festering wounds.
I was a nightmare to live with for a large portion of the last couple years. All of us were suffering but I was the one who couldn’t handle my shit. Hope eventually made me go back to therapy. Kicking and screaming, but I went because I could see I was hurting her and Janus. And there were the kids to think of. Did I want them growing up only knowing this angry husk of a man for a father?
My therapist, an old hippie guy with patience that would drive even a nun to madness, would not be impressed with my current road rage.
I slam the wheel again just because no one’s watching and I can.
My therapist likes to say I need to practice not having control of every single thing in my life. I like to remind him I have control of his paycheck. To which he just smiles and says I’m free to go to any other therapist, and that the power of money is an illusion. To which I said his fancy office in this tall downtown building was quite corporeal.