Work Text:
“all my life
i’ve never known where you've been
there were holes in you
the kind that i could not mend
and i heard you say
right when you left that day
does everything go away?
yeah, everything goes away.”
—“always gold," radical face
❅
Tommy’s bus gets in sometime past two in the afternoon. When he makes his way out of the bus terminal, backpack thumping against his heavy winter coat, he’s almost blinded by the afternoon sunlight, flashing dazzlingly off a jungle of steel and glass rising in every direction. New York City is a behemoth, a hulking giant creature coiling all around, and Tommy, tugging his knit cap down lower over his ears, feels utterly tiny in the face of it. He wonders, just for a moment, if that’s why people come to New York—to be reminded there are bigger things out there than whatever is troubling them.
The ride from Chicago was uneventful, and the city bus he had taken to get to the one to New York even more so. Whenever a stranger or a driver gave him—a teen traveling unaccompanied—a suspicious look, Tommy had handed out a story about going to see family for the holidays as easily as a department store Santa gives away candy canes. Everyone was all too happy to accept it and go back to more important things, more pressing personal matters.
And anyway, it’s the truth. He is going to see family. (Tommy hopes so, at least.)
He spent all summer mowing lawns, and all fall raking leaves, spending every afternoon after school tramping around in neighbors’ yards, doing homework late at night and between classes in the hall, working out algebra problems with his notebook pressed against his locker door. All for this—to be here, in New York City, now, two days before Christmas.
All for his brother.
All for Wilbur.
❅
Here’s the thing—Wilbur and Tommy aren’t really brothers, not in the conventional sense. Not by blood, and not even by law. They meet when Tommy is nine and Wilbur is seventeen, and for three years, they live in the same house with the same foster father. His name is Phil. He has smile lines around his eyes and a nice laugh, and Tommy likes him, even if his best attempts at cooking consist of soup and pancakes.
Tommy still likes him, even now, after everything. He’s hard not to like.
After six months, Phil officially adopts Wilbur before he ages out of the system. The night before Wilbur goes off to college, he lets Tommy sleep on his bedroom floor without a word of teasing. He calls home every Wednesday and always listens to whatever nonsense Tommy wants to babble on about. He’s the best friend Tommy’s ever had. For those three years spent in Phil’s small house with the yellow walls and sagging front porch, Tommy is the happiest he’s ever been.
Which is to say that it doesn’t last.
Over the years, Tommy has learned good things rarely do. Life sucks and then you die, Wilbur used to joke, and no matter how hard Tommy tries to be a good son and a good student, to hold on to his happiness, it always seems to slip through his grasp. Phil doesn’t adopt him like he did Wilbur, and a week after he turns twelve, Tommy goes back into the system. Phil never tells him why, and though Tommy resents him for it for years, some part of him is relieved not to know.
Wilbur makes a point to keep in touch with Tommy afterwards, though neither of them like to talk about Phil. Tommy doesn’t really mind; at the end of the day, he’s just glad that he hasn’t lost everything of what he spent three years coming to regard as home. When he has nothing else but the clothes on his back, Tommy has Wilbur.
They were never truly brothers, not in a way that’s at all simple to explain or to understand. But for a while, they were close.
It’s closer than Tommy’s ever gotten with anyone else.
❅
Sam, Tommy’s foster father of two years, doesn’t know that Tommy’s here. Or rather, he probably knows now that he’s had time to get home from the graveyard security shift, sleep for eight hours and wake up to realize that Tommy is gone and has left him a note explaining everything folded up and taped to the fridge, but Tommy’s not really worried about it. Sam is one of the nicest people he knows, if a little stern. He knows how important Wilbur is to Tommy—he’ll come around, surely.
He has to.
❅
(The winter after he graduates, Wilbur moves to New York City. He comes to pick Tommy up from his latest foster home three days before Christmas to break the news. They spend hours driving slowly through darkened neighborhoods, gazing at the houses decked out in warm haloes of Christmas lights, normal families gathered around lit trees in living rooms that seem a million miles away from the quiet darkness of Wilbur’s car.
I’m leaving, Wilbur says after an hour, though Tommy could already tell by the look in his eyes, the whiteness of his knuckles around the steering wheel. The guilt in every line of his body.
When? Tommy asks. He wonders why he didn’t think to expect this.
Tomorrow, admits Wilbur. Part of Tommy wants to ask how long he’s sat on this, how many phone calls and afternoon trips to the mall he’s spent with the knowledge sitting heavy as a stone in his stomach, worrying at him like a pebble in his shoe, but a bigger part of him doesn’t want to know.
Okay, he says, and he’s proud of himself for not doing something ridiculous like yelling or getting out of the car—or worse, bursting into tears. Where are you going?
New York City, Wilbur says after a moment of hesitation, like he’s worried about what Tommy’s going to say, but there’s something in his eyes, his face—something sparkling and hopeful, something a little like wonder. I’m going to be a musician, Tommy. Just like I told you. Just like I said.
Wilbur has always loved music. The first weekend he and Tommy spent together, when Phil had given Wilbur an allowance and turned them loose, he and Tommy took the bus to a thrift store where Wilbur rummaged through dusty cassette tapes for hours and hours, until Tommy became so bored he plopped down beside Wilbur on the dirty tile and demanded he talk to him. Wilbur told him all about music and his favorite bands and what albums he was looking for. He introduces Tommy to The Cars and David Bowie and more.
Whenever Wilbur finds a new song he loves, he shares it with Tommy. Whenever he’s trying to write a song, he plays it for Tommy. Tommy has had a front row seat to Wilbur’s love of music for years now, so in a sense—this makes sense. None of this is surprising. Wilbur always wanted to go places. To be someone. To play music. Of course New York is where he would go, a moth drawn to the lights of the big city. It’s only natural for someone like him. For a dreamer.
And so that is that. Wilbur moves to New York to pursue his music dreams, and Tommy is alone on Christmas like he always was before Wilbur, with his foster parents gone barhopping and Tommy by himself in the darkened house. It’s funny, Tommy sometimes thinks, how his life can be divided up so neatly into Before Wilbur and After Wilbur, with so little of just Wilbur tucked between.
Funny, he thinks, because surely the universe must be laughing, somewhere. Tommy isn’t, though.
They don’t quite fall out of touch, though sometimes Tommy wonders if that wouldn’t have been easier. In the beginning, Wilbur calls him every week, just like he used to, but it gets difficult when Tommy moves homes and then moves again. But still, they try. They figure out what works. They don’t want to say goodbye, and so they don’t.
Tommy gets exactly two phone calls from Wilbur per year: one on Christmas, one on his birthday. Sometimes, Wilbur will surprise him and call three times, or four, but those calls are few and far between, especially as the years wear on. One year he comes down for Christmas, bringing stories of New York City’s endless bustle and noise and a snow globe of the city skyline for Tommy—the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, even a tiny Statue of Liberty all surrounded by swirling plastic glitter. It’s cheap and Tommy breaks it six months later, but he loves it all the same, even after he slices his palm open on the broken dome.
Wilbur doesn’t come visit again after that, never seems to be able to get enough time off from work or to afford a bus ticket to come visit, and Tommy tries not to mind. The truth of the matter is that Tommy still misses him, and there’s nothing to be done about that.
Not, that is, until now.)
❅
Once Tommy finds a stable home, one he’s been at for nearly two years now, Wilbur sends him a few postcards. Tommy keeps them in his desk drawer most of the time, but he has the most recent tucked into his pocket now as he stands on a crowded New York sidewalk in the winter of 1992. It’s from ten months ago, before Wilbur’s correspondence became snappish and strained, before he forgot to call Tommy on his birthday for the first time in six years.
Wishing You Were Here, it says on the front, over a picture of the city at sunset. It’s a little crumpled when Tommy pulls it out, corners bent and battered, but it’s mostly intact. Wilbur’s message on the back—something about his friend opening a bakery, various auditions, and playing his guitar in Central Park—is in pencil, which is to say it’s been smudged to hell and back from ten months of handling, but Tommy knows every word by heart, including the return address. (He spent half an hour painstakingly tracing over the letters with a pen, committing the cramped loops of Wilbur’s handwriting to permanence as best he could, like a child copying cursive from a handbook over and over until the letters were a perfect copy.)
He has approximately zero idea how to get to the address, but that’s what taxis are for, right?
❅
At the end of a slow-crawling taxi ride, the silence filled only by crackly Christmas music on the radio, Tommy forks over more of his hard-earned yardwork cash and clambers out to face a dubious-looking apartment complex. The bricks are crumbling, the fire escape rusty, and the cracked front steps covered in weeds, but it matches the address on the postcard, so it must be the place.
Tommy takes the front steps two at a time and examines the rows of buttons on the buzzer by the door. They’re all labeled in various styles of handwriting, but try as Tommy might, he can’t find a W. Soot anywhere. The button for apartment 6A, the one from the return address, has a peeling piece of blue tape stuck under it but nothing else. Tommy tries pushing it anyway. Predictably, there’s no answer.
He pulls the postcard out of his pocket and peers down at the smudged handwriting on the back, though he knows it by heart and has for months. The address is right. The apartment number is right. The only thing that’s wrong is there’s no Wilbur to speak of, and Tommy doesn’t quite know what to do about that.
Just then, the door bangs open and a man wearing a crumpled business suit slouches down the steps, clearly hungover and very unhappy about it. He catches sight of Tommy hovering awkwardly by the buzzers and his eyes narrow.
“Who,” he drawls, “the fuck are you? You don’t live here.”
“How do you know?” Tommy asks, only partly because he’s curious. The man’s demeanor sets him on edge, the way he radiates hostility, practically drips with self-importance.
The man snorts. “I’m the fuckin’ landlord, that’s how. You someone’s bastard kid turned up for the holidays? A girl scout out selling cookies?”
“I’m looking for my brother,” Tommy says, and then he holds up the postcard like it explains everything before realizing it clears up approximately nothing. “Wilbur Soot, 6A. I thought this was his address.”
“Oh,” the man says sourly, attempting to smooth his rumpled tie in vain. His tie clasp, shaped like a tiny silver revolver, is crooked. “That deadbeat. He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Do you…know where he moved?” Tommy asks, trying to ignore the deadbeat comment, the derogatory tone.
“Moved!” the landlord lets out a loud bleat of laughter, bending nearly double with the force of it and slapping his thigh. When he straightens up, he wipes his eyes of apparently mirthful tears. “Moved, my ass. That’s rich. I evicted him, kid, because he couldn’t pay his fucking rent, and when you don’t pay rent, you end up on the streets. He’s probably sleeping on a bench somewhere, if he’s not dead in a ditch already.” He leans in, placing one hand on Tommy’s shoulder. He smells of cigarettes and sweat. His breath is sour. “You know what I say? I say good fuckin’ riddance!”
And then he’s off before Tommy can even think to flinch away, staggering down the sidewalk, muttering about bleeding hearts and wannabe musicians, leaving Tommy standing on the weedy steps with a postcard in his hands and more unanswered questions than he can count piling up behind his teeth.
❅
There’s a subway station nearby, and Tommy makes his way there almost on autopilot. He doesn’t know what to do, where to go. The postcard was his one solid link to Wilbur, a fact Tommy never realized before, and now it’s useless. Wilbur could be anywhere. He might not even be in New York anymore. He might be dead. And Tommy has no way of knowing whatever state Wilbur might be in.
Eventually, he finds himself in Central Park, where the crowds of people thin out enough that he feels like he can breathe again. Tommy finds a bench near a pond with a stone bridge and pulls his knees to his chest, burying his face in them and drawing in a rattling breath. His nose is numb and his cheeks sting from the cold and his eyes are stinging too, for reasons unrelated to the temperature.
(Thankfully, there’s only one other person around—a man sitting some ways away, his back to Tommy, bundled in what looks like at least two coats. He has a truly terrifying amount of pigeons milling around his feet, pecking at whatever he seems to be throwing them. He pays Tommy no mind—maybe isn’t even aware of his presence—and Tommy is intensely grateful for that.)
Pressing his forehead against his knees, bone on denim on bone, Tommy takes in deep gulps of freezing air and tries to steady himself, to stay his tears, but the truth is this: though he knows exactly where he is, Tommy has never felt more lost in his life. He’s always measured himself against a scale of here to Wilbur, always calculated time in increments of how long until he hears from Wilbur next, marked out bus and plane and train routes in terms of how far, how long, how much to see his best friend, his nearly-brother. Since meeting Wilbur, Tommy has never not known, at least in a general sense, where Wilbur is.
Until today.
He feels as though he’s been blindfolded and spun around and around and around until he couldn’t tell which way is north or east or west anymore.
Tommy is alone in New York City with no idea where to find Wilbur, and he has never felt so small in all his life. Never has a place felt so big, so impenetrable, so impossible. Deep down, some part of Tommy wonders: is he lost, or is Wilbur? Does it matter, if the results are the same?
The next breath Tommy takes in comes right back out as a strangled sob, and he bites down on the inside of his cheek to contain the next one that tries to escape. His breathing is ragged and the cold air stings the back of his throat and Tommy finds himself torn between wanting Wilbur and wanting to be home.
He’s not quite sure when those two diverged into separate things, but he thinks he’d take either right about now.
And then—
“Hey,” comes an impossibly familiar voice, if a little rough around the edges. “Kid, you okay?”
There is a hand on his shoulder, then, and Tommy looks up into a familiar face behind familiar streaky glasses lenses, and he wonders if perhaps Christmas miracles might be real. If, somewhere out there, someone wasn’t listening for his prayer.
“Hi, Wil,” Tommy croaks, not bothering to hide his tears. He grins shakily. “Fancy meeting you here.”
❅
(There’s a kind of heady delight that comes with Wilbur’s perfectly timed arrival. How absurd, how miraculous, Tommy can’t help but think, to find the one person he’s looking for amongst seven million others? The odds must be astronomically slim, and yet here he is, here they are, in Central Park, just two people among millions, somehow reunited two days before Christmas.)
❅
The first thing Tommy does, before even standing up, is pull Wilbur into a hug. He leans forward, forehead knocking against Wilbur’s sternum, and wraps his arms around Wilbur’s frighteningly skinny frame. Wilbur’s always been lanky, just like Tommy, but Tommy can feel every one of his ribs through the three layers of jackets and sweaters he has on.
There’s a guitar case slung over Wilbur’s shoulder. His nose is red from the cold, and he smells like bird shit and cigarettes, but Tommy could not care less because he’s here and he’s breathing and he’s very much not dead in a ditch somewhere Tommy will never find him. It hardly takes a second for Wilbur to hug him back, arms wrapping fiercely around Tommy’s shoulders, and for a long minute, they stay there, perfectly still, Wilbur standing and Tommy sitting and everything momentarily, miraculously okay.
And of course, the moment has to end. Wilbur pulls back, allowing Tommy a good view of how tired he looks, how utterly unkempt he is with dirty glasses and tangled hair escaping his old knit beanie he’s had since before Tommy met him.
“Tommy,” says Wilbur, hands on Tommy’s shoulders, studying him far too closely, “you’re not supposed to be— I mean, I thought— Tommy, what the hell are you doing here?”
And—okay, admittedly, he sounds a lot less thrilled than Tommy was thinking he would, which puts somewhat of a damper on things, but Tommy still manages a grin.
“I came to see you,” he says, “fucking obviously. For Christmas.”
“Why?” Wilbur asks, and to his credit he sounds genuinely baffled.
“Because I missed you,” Tommy says. To him, that’s the long and short of it. The neatest summary he can manage, though it can’t quite encapsulate the quiet aching of months, no, years of missing someone you regard as family. Still, it’s the best he can offer. Apparently, it’s not good enough for Wilbur.
“Does your guardian know?” Wilbur questions, eyes narrowing. “God, you didn’t run away again, did you?”
“No,” Tommy insists. He’s a little offended by that, actually.
For a stretch of time after Phil…well, after things didn’t work out, Tommy used to run away from his foster homes, hopping buses with nothing but a backpack and a worn-out jacket to his name. Wilbur would let him crash in his dorm room every time Tommy showed up on his doorstep, hiding him under the bed or in the closet as necessary to dodge the RA who came by at midnight. Tommy never got to stay—Wilbur always called someone by the third day, if they hadn’t turned up already, and Tommy always left when his social worker came to pick him up—but he kept coming, and Wilbur kept letting him in. Since Sam, though, Tommy hasn’t run away once. Not that Wilbur’s been a very viable option for running away to, not since he moved, but still. Tommy’s grown. He’s got a place to stay now, and stay he does.
He folds his arms, jutting his chin out. Wilbur just raises an eyebrow, and Tommy slumps a little.
“I didn’t,” he insists. “Not really, anyway. I left him a note.”
Wilbur groans. “I could get in so much trouble for this, Tommy. You can’t just run off to New York by yourself two days before Christmas and only leave a note! What if, I dunno, someone mugged you? What if you got murdered in a back alley and nobody knew?”
Is he serious?
“Yeah? What about you?” Tommy challenges, pushing himself up off the bench, because really, this is pretty rich coming from Wilbur right now.
“What do you mean what about me?” Wilbur asks, but there’s something like fear in his eyes. Fear of what? Tommy wonders. Of being known?
Tommy pulls out the postcard, and something in Wilbur’s face crumples just like the cardstock.
“I went to your address,” Tommy says.
“You didn’t,” Wilbur almost pleads.
“Met the landlord,” Tommy continues. “Real asshole, that guy. Could use a shower. Told me he evicted you. Said you were—you were probably dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“Tommy.”
“I didn’t know where you were, Wilbur,” he says.
“Tommy—”
“You didn’t call.” Tommy doesn’t mean for his voice to break, didn’t mean for things to go like this, but he can’t help it. The simple truth of the matter is that Tommy missed Wilbur, and that for the last hour, he has never been so scared in his life that he will be missing him for the rest of his life. Now that fear has nowhere to go, nowhere but out.
Wilbur closes his eyes, dragging his hands down his face, taking Tommy’s words like a blow. He looks fragile, Tommy realizes, like the slightest tap could send him shattering to pieces. Wilbur has never seemed like someone who could be broken before.
Wilbur says, “I’m sorry.”
You should be, Tommy does not say, even if some part of him wants to, because fuck it, it’s almost Christmas and he doesn’t want to be angry anymore. Not at Wilbur. He takes a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth, just like Sam taught him.
“It’s okay.” He offers the lie tentatively, palms open, as though force of will can make it less of a lie.
“It’s really not,” Wilbur replies tiredly. At least he’s honest, now. His left hand reaches up, worrying at his guitar strap, and Tommy can’t help but notice the way his knuckles are cracked from the cold, covered in a latticework of dead skin and scabs, some old, some fresh, some broken open and beading with blood. “I am sorry, Tommy, really. I should have told you.”
He can’t look Tommy in the eyes, instead staring off to some distant point past Tommy’s right ear.
“Why didn’t you?” Tommy can’t help asking.
Wilbur scoffs. “I didn’t want to. I— look, who wants to tell their little brother they’re homeless? That they went to New York City to make it big and failed? Fucking nobody, that’s who.”
The confession is equal parts stinging and comforting. Little brother, Wilbur said—he hasn’t called Tommy that in years, not that Tommy can remember. Little brother. But he still doesn’t trust him enough to tell him the truth.
“I wouldn’t have minded.”
“That,” says Wilbur tiredly, “is not the point.”
“Then what is?” Tommy asks, helpless. Wilbur doesn’t answer, just looks back down at his feet, clad in scuffed, muddy boots. The laces are fraying on the left one. There’s bird shit spattered across the toes, but Wilbur doesn’t seem bothered.
“You said things were fine, last time we talked. In the postcard.”
Wilbur pivots a half-step to the side, twisting his shoulders away from Tommy, looking out over the pond, the ducks in the water with their fluffed-up feathers, the pigeons slowly fluttering down to the pavement and strutting around his feet like old friends. For an absurd moment, Tommy wonders if the birds know his brother better than he does.
“Yeah, well,” Wilbur says stiffly, voice straining for nonchalance and falling dramatically short, “I lied.”
❅
This day is going nothing like Tommy hoped, but it’s not all bad, he tells himself. It could be worse, even if he struggles to come up with how, exactly, as he trudges along behind Wilbur toward the nearest subway station. Things between them are stiff, almost cold, and Tommy keeps gnawing at his lower lip until he tastes blood as he stares at Wilbur’s back ahead of him. His coat—the one Phil got him for college, Tommy remembers—is stained and wrinkled, and there’s tiredness evident in even the slope of his shoulders.
“Where are we going?” Tommy asks, taking two quick steps to catch up and walk at Wilbur’s elbow. Wilbur doesn’t look at him, and Tommy tries to tell himself it doesn’t hurt.
“A friend’s place,” Wilbur says. “It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here. We’re going to get somewhere warm, and you’re going to call—what’s your guardian’s name again?”
“Sam,” Tommy answers on reflex, and then: “What? No, I’m not.”
“Yes,” says Wilbur, “you are. I don’t want him calling the cops on me for kidnapping or—or child endangerment.”
Tommy says, offended, “I’m not a child.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
Tommy doesn’t have a good comeback for that, never has, so he just huffs out an annoyed sigh, breath a pearl-white cloud in the icy air. Typical Wilbur. The argument is well-worn, comfortable in its familiarity, and it makes Tommy feel a little less shut out as they descend into the subway amongst crowds of last-minute Christmas shoppers. Somewhere in the distance, someone is playing a saxophone, a jazzy rendition of “Silent Night” echoing almost eerily off the tiled walls. Someone at Tommy’s elbow is humming along.
They change trains twice before they get to wherever they’re going, and both times Tommy resists the urge to reach out and grab the back of Wilbur’s jacket, the loose material of his sleeve, to keep from getting separated in the crush. As they make their way towards the second, Wilbur snakes out a hand and wraps cold fingers around Tommy’s wrist when the crowds get bad, and Tommy is more than happy to allow himself to be led through the station. He's been in big cities before, but New York is a beast all its own.
After another short walk in the windy streets, Wilbur stops outside a shop with no sign and a pastel pink awning. The front window is painted with a simple loaf of bread. A strand of bells over the door jingles cheerily as they step inside, light and heat and the yeasty smell of baking bread washing over them all at once.
Wilbur says, “Welcome to the best bakery in New York City, Tommy.”
A short young woman pops her head out of the back, blonde hair tied up in pigtails and glasses not unlike Wilbur’s sliding down her flour-streaked nose.
“Hey, Wil!” she calls cheerfully. “Be right with you!”
“Hey, Niki,” Wilbur calls back, and leads Tommy over to a booth by the glass case at the back of the shop, filled to the brim with different mouth-watering pastries. The booth is cracked red vinyl and there’s a light fixture with a bottle-green glass shade hanging over it. It matches none of the other furniture in the place, a jumble of tables and chairs and stools that Tommy thinks would look more at home at someone’s garage sale than in a bakery.
“Is this the bakery you wrote me about?” Tommy asks, hand straying automatically to his pocket for the postcard. Wilbur bobs his head in a nod.
“Yup,” he says, popping the p in that way of his, and the woman—Niki—comes around the counter to slide into the booth beside Tommy, propping her elbows on the table.
“What’ll it be today?” she asks, and artfully cuts Wilbur off before he even finishes opening his mouth. “My treat.”
“Niki,” says Wilbur in a tone that indicates this is an old song and dance, well-worn in its familiarity. A tone that says he knows he’s going to lose this argument but can’t quite give it up without giving it a shot anyway.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Niki scolds cheerfully. “It’s Christmas.”
“Not for another two days,” Wilbur grumbles, but anyone can see Niki’s won this round. “Whatever you need to get rid of is fine.”
Niki smiles in satisfaction and then turns to Tommy.
“And you are?” she asks.
“Niki, this is Tommy,” Wilbur says. “Tommy, meet Niki. Best baker on the East Coast.”
Niki kicks him under the table—Tommy feels her knee flex against his own, hears the thunk of boot against wood as Wilbur tries to kick back and misses. Typical.
“Flattery gets you nowhere with me, mister,” she says.
“Only because you already give me free food,” Wilbur tells her, and for the first time since Tommy found him, a real smile breaks out over his face, crinkling up his nose and nearly wiping away the exhaustion. He looks like the old Wilbur, the one Tommy met when he was nine years old, the one who brought home a guitar from a charity shop and stayed up all hours of the night practicing until Tommy stomped into his room to throw a pillow at him at three in the morning—which of course escalated into a pillow fight and both of them being grounded for three days. Wilbur used to smile like that a lot. Tommy wonders when he stopped.
Wilbur folds his arms on the table, foot tapping almost inaudibly on the floor.
“Niki,” he says, “I know it’s a big favor to ask, especially now, but the heat is out at my place again, and Tommy’s supposed to stay the night—”
Niki waves a hand, already halfway out of the booth. “You two can crash at my place tonight, no problem!”
“Thanks, Niki,” Wilbur says, sounding relieved but not too relieved, and Tommy can’t help studying him across the scuffed tabletop, wondering when Wilbur got so good at this—at obscuring the truth. At lying. “You’re a lifesaver. Mind if Tommy uses the phone in the back to check in with his guardian?”
“Not at all,” Niki says, and then she’s off as the bells over the door herald the entrance of a pair of customers bundled in heavy winter coats. Outside, it’s started to snow, tiny flurries of white flakes gusting through the air like powdered sugar from a sifter.
Once she’s gone, Wilbur turns to Tommy with an expectant look.
“You’re not serious,” Tommy says. Wilbur just keeps looking. “Fine, I’ll call Sam, if it’ll make you happy.”
“Very,” replies Wilbur, and gets up to guide him around the counter where Niki chats with the customers, pushing through a swinging door into the kitchen behind, then ducking through another doorway into a small office at the very back corner of the shop. There’s a cordless phone sitting on the corner of the desk and Wilbur folds his arms and leans against the doorway, apparently intending to watch Tommy to make sure he actually calls Sam.
Tommy sighs, picks up the phone, and starts dialing.
❅
Sam, it turns out, is a bit less understanding than Tommy had hoped. Just so I’m wrong about everything and nothing goes like I thought it would, Tommy thinks, somewhat bitterly, as Sam winds his way through a lecture about discussing things with him first, Tommy, Christ it’s like you want me to have a heart attack or something on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry,” Tommy says, twisting the toe of his tennis shoe into the worn rug beneath the desk. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I just—”
I just missed Wilbur. I just wanted to hug him again, not have to talk to him over the phone for half an hour twice a year and wonder if I’ll ever see him again. I just wanted Christmas to feel like Christmas again.
“I just wanted to see Wilbur,” he settles for, voice coming out so small and sheepish that he hates himself for it, has to resist the urge to steal a glance at Wilbur, still lingering in the doorway in his peripheral, arms folded. “I didn’t mean for it to go this way.”
“I know, Tommy,” Sam says, audibly softening. “It’s just—this isn’t the kind of thing you expect your kid to do less than a week before Christmas. Look, I’m gonna get the first flight up that I can, okay? I don’t want you coming back by yourself. I know,” he continues, cutting off Tommy before he can protest, “you’re capable of taking care of yourself. I do. But you shouldn’t have to, okay?”
“Okay,” Tommy agrees quietly. He’s so caught up in the warring thoughts in his head, he hardly even registers how casually Sam throws out the words your kid. Maybe Sam doesn’t, either.
❅
(Tommy holds the phone out to Wilbur, grimacing faintly.
“He, uh, wants to talk to you,” he says, and Wilbur takes the phone but pointedly waits until Tommy has ducked out of the office to raise it to his ear.
“This is Wilbur,” he says into the receiver.
“Sam,” says the voice on the other end, tight and either not quite angry or very good at keeping anger controlled. “Look, I’ve just got one question for you. What the hell do you think you’re doing, letting him come visit you like this?”
Wilbur pinches the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “I didn’t let him do anything,” he says, doing his best not to snap back because the man is clearly worried about Tommy, who is for all intents and purposes his son, a fact which Wilbur will not allow himself to be bitter over. That’s the thing about Tommy. You can’t let him do anything. He does something, or he doesn’t, and it’s always on his own terms. “Look, I’m sorry, really. I didn’t expect this.”
“They told me about you when I first started fostering him,” Sam says, something edging on accusatory or perhaps just exasperated in his tone. Something protective, something that needles at Wilbur because he is supposed to be the one looking out for Tommy; he is the big brother—or he was, anyway. He’s not sure what he is anymore. “About how he’d always run away to you. And you’re telling me you didn’t expect this?”
And—
Here is a secret: Wilbur never expected Tommy’s love to last this long. Never expected him to keep caring despite it all, through years and distance and missed phone calls and postcards full of lies with the only truth to them printed on the front in four measly words: wishing you were here. Most days, Wilbur is wishing that.
And—
Here is the truth: Wilbur did not expect this, has never been loved like this, and he doesn’t know what to do in the face of it.
“He’s never done anything like this before,” Wilbur says tiredly, “not on this scale. I didn’t think—”
I didn’t think he’d want to see me again. Didn’t think he’d show up this year, of all years, like some kind of goddamn angel. Didn’t think I was still important enough to him for this. Didn’t know I ever was in the first place.
“Maybe,” says Sam coldly, “you should have.”
And Wilbur can’t help but agree.)
❅
Tommy slips away from the office door after a moment or two, feeling guilty for eavesdropping even a little, and makes his way back towards the front of the bakery. The customers are gone, now, and Niki follows him out from behind the counter with a plate full of cookies and cream puffs and other sweet treats that make Tommy’s mouth water just by the look of them.
“Tommy,” she says carefully, setting the plate down and settling into the booth across from him, “I wanted to ask. About Wilbur—you know he…doesn’t have a place to stay right now, yeah?”
“You mean, do I know he’s homeless?” Tommy asks bluntly, but Niki doesn’t flinch. “Yeah, I know. Met his old landlord earlier today. I thought you didn’t know?”
Niki smiles wryly. “I do. He doesn’t know that I do, or maybe he just doesn’t want to admit it, but I’m not stupid. I’ve known for months, now. Why do you think I keep letting him stay over at my place?”
“Why don’t you just tell him?” Tommy queries. Why all the fucking lies?
Niki shrugs. “If you know Wilbur, you know how stubborn he is. He’d never accept my help like that.”
She doesn’t say, he’s too damn proud, but both of them are thinking it. It’s the truth, after all. Wilbur isn’t one to accept help easily, Tommy knows. He knows it because Wilbur refused tutoring for physics in eleventh grade, preferring to spend late nights and early mornings studying relentlessly until he set the curve in his class at the cost of a semester’s worth of sleep. He knows it because Wilbur brushed off Phil’s offer to help him cook Phil’s birthday dinner the first year all three of them were together, and he ended up burning the casserole and dropping the pie, so they had to order takeout and eat it with the windows open to clear out the smell of burnt cheese and smoke. It’s just another part of Wilbur, like his love of David Bowie or his hatred of angel hair pasta or the way he plays guitar chords on his seatbelt when he isn’t the one driving, and Tommy knows all about it.
“If he ever wants to tell me the truth, that’s his choice,” Niki says, after a long quiet moment has passed. “Until then, I’ll be here for him as best I can. Sometimes that’s all you can do.”
Just then, Wilbur emerges from the swinging door to the back, tugging distractedly at his fringe and effectively ending the conversation. When he sees the plate on the table he lights up, crowding in next to Tommy and swiping a candy-cane-shaped cookie. In one bite, half the sweet is gone.
“Cookies,” Wilbur sighs contentedly, around a bite of shortbread, spraying the table with crumbs. “I love cookies. Niki, you’re my favorite friend.”
“I thought I was your only friend,” Niki tells him, grinning cheekily.
Wilbur claps his free hand to his chest in faux shock. “Lies! Slander! I am wounded,” he declares, pouting. He sways dramatically to the side, throwing his arm around Tommy’s neck and covering both of them in cookie crumbs. Tommy jabs him in the ribs, but Wilbur refuses to move. “I have Tommy!”
“Brothers,” says Niki sagely, “don’t count.”
❅
When Niki goes back behind the counter to attend more customers, Wilbur turns to Tommy, cookie and theatrics momentarily forgotten.
“Sam says he’s getting the first flight up, but it probably won’t be until Christmas day,” he says. “So you’re stuck with me for at least tonight.”
Tommy perks up. “At least I get to spend Christmas with you, then!”
“You don’t want that,” Wilbur says before he can think better of it. Tommy frowns at him, at his unwavering conviction—because Wilbur knows Tommy doesn’t, or shouldn’t want to be here, not this year, not this time—jutting out his jaw in that stubborn way of his he’s had since before Wilbur met him, probably. Knowing Tommy, he came into the world bargaining.
“You don’t know what I want, Wilbur,” he says, stressing the second half of Wilbur’s name like he always does when he’s annoyed.
Maybe I don’t know you at all, Wilbur does not say, thinking of the fondness in Tommy’s voice when he talked to Sam on the phone, the fierceness in his posture when he faced Wilbur in Central Park, tears still wet on his cheeks, and demanded answers Wilbur couldn’t give.
❅
(Have you told Phil? Tommy asks hesitantly, that night in Niki’s cozy little apartment, elbow to elbow with Wilbur in the bathroom, dollar-store toothbrush in hand.
Wilbur freezes for a moment, half a dollop of toothpaste on his own toothbrush.
No, he says after a long, long moment, jerking his shoulders down from where they’ve shot up, hovering around his ears. I’m fine.
He’s clearly not fine, but Tommy doesn’t push it, is almost afraid to push it because Wilbur looks halfway to breaking just at the mention of Phil’s name, hand squeezing his toothbrush so tight his knuckles have gone white and split the too-dry skin open afresh. He doesn’t seem to notice the blood welling up as he caps the toothpaste.
Wilbur does not say: I have to be fine, does not say, what kind of adult am I if I can’t make it on my own? He also doesn’t tell Tommy about the fight he had with Phil after graduating, either, the one where they both said things they didn’t mean and can’t take back, the one that means he hasn’t seen Phil since. Wilbur doesn’t tell Tommy a lot of things, and both of them know it.
Neither knows what to do, and so they brush their teeth in silence and go to bed, Tommy in Niki’s little guest room, Wilbur on the couch, and that is that.)
❅
Tommy wakes on the morning of Christmas Eve to Wilbur yanking the covers off his bed. He yelps at the sudden rush of cold air and curls deeper into his warm spot on the mattress.
“Time to get up,” Wilbur announces, eyes bright and hair still damp from the shower. He looks much better than yesterday, now clean-shaven and less exhausted after a full night’s sleep.
“Noooo,” Tommy groans, pressing his face into the sheets. “I won’t! Gimme back the covers, Wil, you can’t make me!”
He closes his eyes and for one glorious moment, almost drifts back off into sleep, into a dream he’d been having, something about dogs and hot air balloons and forests of tree-shaped cookies—
Which is about when Wilbur sticks his fucking icicle fingers on the back of Tommy’s neck. Tommy shrieks and knees him in the stomach, making Wilbur wheeze and half-collapse onto the bed in breathless laughter, but the damage is done. Tommy is decidedly awake.
“Fuck you, man,” Tommy grumbles, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “What the hell was that for?”
“It’s Christmas Eve,” Wilbur says, still a little breathless, flopping his head over to look at Tommy from his spot on the mattress. “I thought, y’know, while you’re here I might as well show you my city.”
(There’s pride in it, the way he says my city. The city that ate him up and spat him back out again, the city where he sleeps on benches and under bridges, where he lies through his teeth to a friend who already knows the truth—and still he loves it. Enough to call it his. Glancing over at Wilbur sprawled out on the bed, too-long legs hooked over the side with his heel knocking rhythmically against the shabbily carpeted floor, Tommy thinks he can relate.)
“Oh,” says Tommy quietly. And then, when he registers the uncertainty furrowed between Wilbur’s brows: “That sounds cool. I’d like that.”
“Well then, you’d better get your ass out of bed,” says Wilbur, “because it’s half past nine and New York waits for no man.”
❅
It has been years since Tommy spent a holiday with Wilbur. They only spent two Christmases together at Phil’s before it all came crashing down, but they were the happiest Christmases of Tommy’s life, and Wilbur’s, beside. Today it feels like Wilbur is aiming to give them a run for their money.
He shows Tommy the giant tree in Rockefeller Center and takes him ice skating in the rink there. They feed the pigeons in Central Park, which swarm around them, some going so far as to perch on Wilbur’s head and shoulders and outstretched hands, eating cheap birdseed out of his palms like he’s an old friend or a storybook character.
(“You’re like a Disney princess,” Tommy tells him, somewhere between awed and weirded out at the sight of a bird sitting directly on top of Wilbur’s head. “Like fuckin’ Snow White.”
Wilbur runs a knuckle down a pigeon’s fluffed-up breast, smoothing down the ruffled feathers. “You just have to show them a little kindness, is all,” he says. “Phil”—and here, his voice only falters a little—“Phil used to say so all the time. You remember how he had all those birdfeeders in back of the house? They remember when people treat them well.”
Tommy watches the birds putter around Wilbur’s feet, brush their wings against his cheeks, and wonders if every bird in New York City knows his brother, knows he’s kind.)
Later, they sit in a church for a while, elbow to elbow on the back pew, enjoying the free heating and the choir rehearsal up at the front, eating soft pretzels and roasted chestnuts Wilbur buys with the scraps of change he digs out of his pockets. He doesn’t buy any for himself, and he won’t let Tommy pay, but he gives in when Tommy waves half a pretzel under his nose and refuses to take no for an answer.
(Wilbur pretends he doesn’t notice the way Tommy slips dollars and nickels and dimes into his pockets when he thinks Wilbur isn’t paying attention, replacing every bit of change Wilbur spends that Christmas Eve.
What did I do to deserve you? Wilbur thinks.
The truth is this: nothing at all. It’s never been about deserving.)
❅
(“Do they come if you call?” Tommy asks, gazing at the trees full of cooing pigeons all around. He’s half joking, doesn’t expect Wilbur to take him seriously, but then he leans in with a secret dancing in his eyes, grinning a grin Tommy hasn’t seen in a long, long time.
“Here,” says Wilbur, reaching into the bag of birdseed tucked in his pocket. “Give me your hand.”
Tommy reaches out a palm, and Wilbur pours the birdseed into it. The fluttering around them increases, sounding something akin to the wind through a field of tall grasses, or a rushing river.
“Now throw it,” Wilbur tells him, and Tommy hurls the birdseed up into the frosty air, watching it come down all around them like golden-white raindrops. And the world explodes into feathered wingbeats around them.
Dozens of birds fill the air, flapping down from the trees towards the seed on the ground, circling like orbiting planets with Wilbur and Tommy as their sun. There could be twenty or a hundred—Tommy can’t tell. Everything is grey and white and drifting feathers, and all he can hear is wingbeats. Wingbeats and the sound of Wilbur’s laughter, high and clear and delighted.
“They can hear it,” Wilbur says, right in his ear, and Tommy thinks if there’s any kind of magic in the world, he’s found it right here among the pigeons with his best friend at his side.)
❅
When they pass a department store, Tommy ducks inside and emerges triumphantly ten minutes later, shoving a bundle of something into Wilbur’s hands.
“Tommy?” Wilbur asks, uncomprehending.
“Merry Christmas,” Tommy tells him, bouncing on his toes. Wilbur rearranges the item in his hands and realizes he’s holding a brand-new knitted pair of fingerless gloves. “So you can still play,” Tommy says, nodding towards the guitar case slung over Wilbur’s back.
“Oh,” says Wilbur quietly, unable to stop staring down at the gloves in his hands.
Tommy elbows him. “Well, don’t act so excited.”
“Thank you,” Wilbur says, and means it. Tommy seems almost startled at the conviction in his voice, but grins easily enough in response.
“’S nothing,” he says. But it’s not. It might be everything, Wilbur thinks, slipping the gloves on, shielding his chapped knuckles from the cold. But it’s certainly not nothing.
❅
As afternoon trickles on towards evening, Tommy insists on buying them both cups of hot chocolate from a street vendor. As they wrap chilled fingers around painfully warm paper cups, Tommy can’t help shivering in the winter wind. Wilbur seems to notice and nudges his arm.
“Hey,” he says. “Want to go somewhere warm?”
“Please,” Tommy says fervently, and Wilbur laughs.
“I know a place,” he replies. “Let me show you something cool.”
They make their way down crowded sidewalks to Seventh Avenue, where Wilbur hangs a right into an alley and leads Tommy to a fire escape tucked against an ornately constructed square building.
“Is this…?”
“Carnegie Hall,” Wilbur says smugly, starting up the ladder. “C’mon!”
It takes some doing to get up the ladder without dropping or spilling the hot chocolate, but they manage. Tommy reaches the top of the fire escape just as he sees Wilbur pushing open one of the windows ahead. Tommy has no idea how it’s unlatched, but he has an inkling Wilbur had something to do with it.
Following Wilbur’s beckoning hand, he slips inside to find himself in some kind of—storage room, maybe? The space is dusty and crammed with dozens of old instruments and light fixtures and swathes of fabric. It looks like somebody’s old attic, not something Tommy would expect from Carnegie Hall.
He starts to ask what is this place, but Wilbur holds a shushing finger to his lips.
“Listen,” he whispers, so Tommy does.
And there’s music.
Wordlessly, Wilbur puts a hand on Tommy’s shoulder and guides him over to the center of the room, where spotlights are arranged under a raised grate, leaving just enough open space to peer down into the concert hall very, very far below. The seats are red velvet, and the stage is shining wood, the orchestra arranged just so. They’re playing a Christmas carol, one Tommy recognizes—he knows the strains of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” like an old friend. He’s never heard it played like this before, though, only sung.
He sinks down to his haunches, gazing out between the spotlights with Wilbur close at his side. When his calves begin to ache, he switches to kneeling, and when his knees complain he shifts to sitting, and for half a dozen songs, the two of them simply sit at the very top of Carnegie Hall, sipping their hot chocolate, and listen to the orchestra play.
When there’s finally a break in the music and Tommy’s cup is empty, he whispers:
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” says Wilbur, sounding almost proud. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve heard from up here. It’s amazing, Tommy.”
“Pretty much,” Tommy agrees. He peers around at the jumble of objects around them, dusty and forgotten. “This place is pretty cool.”
“It’s one of my favorites in the city,” Wilbur says, leaning his temple against an old music stand, limned in the golden light of the concert hall below.
They sit in silence for a while as a new song starts up, quieter than the ones before. Finally, unsure if it’s the tiredness or the companionship or the simple aching in his chest that pulls it out of him, Tommy speaks.
“Wilbur,” he says, playing with the paper cup in his hands, the inside rim tacky with hot chocolate residue, “you know you could—come home with me, right?”
Wilbur looks at him, blinking owlishly behind his glasses, uncomprehending.
“What?” he asks.
“Come home with me,” Tommy says again, emboldened. “I know—Chicago’s not, not fuckin’ New York, or anything, but…I miss you. And you could, you could stay with us, with me and Sam—”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Wilbur answers flatly. There’s something about his face, his eyes, that’s closed off now, like a door has slammed shut and all the joy and wonder from earlier in the day is gone, all boxed up and shoved in a musty corner to wait for better days.
“Why not?” Tommy demands. “We—Wilbur, you and me, we were like family! You can’t just—”
“We were family, Tommy,” Wilbur says, sharp and almost bitter, and Tommy pulls up short. And then, softer, “We were. But now we’re not, okay?”
He looks away, unable to meet Tommy’s eyes.
“Wilbur.” It’s a plea. A question with no answer.
“Maybe,” says Wilbur, even softer now, “we should stay that way, because I’ve been a pretty shit brother in the grand scheme of things, haven’t I?”
“I don’t care,” says Tommy stubbornly.
“What?”
“I said,” Tommy repeats, “I don’t care. I don’t care if you’ve been a shit brother, because you’re still my brother, and I’d rather have a shit brother than none at all. Why won’t you let me in, Wil? Why won’t you let anyone in? Why won’t you let us love you?”
“Because,” starts Wilbur, but he seems unable to formulate an answer, casting around for words that evade him, hiding beneath dusty sheets and behind old harps and harpsichords alike.
“Fuck you,” Tommy says fiercely. “You can’t stop me from caring about you.”
“You shouldn’t.” Wilbur’s shoulders are hunched as he climbs to his feet, turns towards the cracked-open window, and he still won’t look at Tommy. It’s like he’s talking to the idea of Tommy instead of the person right in front of him.
“And why the fuck is that?” Tommy challenges, nostrils flaring.
“Because,” says Wilbur again, voice suddenly wet, fingers clenching and unclenching at his side, whole body vibrating with tension like a violin string tuned too tight, “I didn’t exactly plan on being around that much longer, and it would have been a hell of a lot easier on us both if you hadn’t come at all.”
For a long moment, everything is silent. In the concert hall below, the music has ended. The crowds are going home, back to their families for Christmas Eve. The orchestra is packing up. Tommy stares at Wilbur, and Wilbur stares at his feet, trembling violently with the force of his confession.
“Wilbur,” Tommy says. He can hardly think of anything else to say, throwing out the name like a lifeline—for whom, Tommy isn’t sure. “You can’t—you don’t mean that.”
Tell me I’m wrong, he’s pleading, but when Wilbur finally looks at him, the exhaustion and misery and anguish in his eyes, the absolute self-loathing Tommy sees, tell him he’s not.
“No,” says Tommy.
“Yes,” answers Wilbur, sounding guiltier than Tommy has ever heard him, worse than the time he shattered a measuring cup trying to melt chocolate in the microwave and broke the vacuum cleaner trying to hide it before Phil got home, worse than when he picked up Tommy three days before Christmas and confessed he was leaving all those years ago. Worse than every time he’s called to say he isn’t coming home this year, or the next, or the next.
Tommy finds himself on his feet, pushing past Wilbur, still rooted to the spot and shaking like a leaf in high winds.
“Fuck you,” Tommy gasps, tears welling up even as he tries to dash them away. “Fuck you, Wilbur. I can’t believe you.”
“Tommy,” Wilbur says helplessly, half-reaching out a hand, but Tommy dodges easily and clambers out the open window.
“I hate you,” Tommy tells him, the words choked with tears. He doesn’t know if he means it. Before Wilbur can say anything, Tommy turns and rushes down the fire escape, off into the darkness—alone.
❅
It’s a curious reversal of roles, Wilbur thinks distantly as his feet carry him down familiar streets while his head does anything but, that things should end up this way, with Tommy lost and Wilbur not knowing where he is. He doesn’t have the first clue where to start looking for Tommy, hasn’t any idea where he might think to go, except for one place—the one he’s headed now.
Niki’s bakery is still open despite the fact that it’s almost eight o’clock and the snow is coming down faster now, piling up on sidewalks and awnings, coating Wilbur’s hair and glasses and lashes as he walks. Wilbur pushes through the door and immediately sees that it’s empty except for Niki behind the counter, and something inside of him breaks, then.
“Wilbur,” Niki starts, and then pulls up when she sees his face, smile fading. “Wilbur? What’s wrong?”
“I fucked up,” Wilbur says, the words barely scraping out of his aching throat. Is his vision blurry because of the snow on his glasses, or is he crying? He can’t tell. “Niki, I fucked up, I really fucked up and now Tommy’s gone, and I don’t know what to do.”
And he’s definitely crying now, the jumbled mess of emotions that has been tangling in his chest for months now finally getting the better of him, churning and frothing and overflowing all at once as he holds a hand over his mouth and tries not to sob. It’s Christmas Eve and Tommy is off God-knows-where in New York City because Wilbur couldn’t accept a good thing for a good thing, couldn’t keep his mouth shut and let himself have this one last day. Because Wilbur ruins everything for everyone, doesn't he? He's not content to stop with his own life, no; he's got to make everyone around him miserable, too, he thinks bitterly.
Immediately, Niki is out from behind the counter, guiding Wilbur to a chair at one of the tables and moving to flip the sign at the front door to the side that says Closed! in cheerful looping script.
“It’ll be fine, Wil,” she says, crouching down beside him, three fingers resting lightly on his wrist. “We’ll figure it out. Just breathe, okay? Just breathe.”
Wilbur breathes. It’s not easy when great ugly sobs keep trying to tear their way out of his chest, but he tries.
From the back, he can hear the phone ringing faintly. Niki doesn’t move, not until Wilbur swipes at his eyes and tilts his head towards the door.
“You can get it,” he says, voice hoarse. “I’ll be fine, Niki. I just need a minute.”
Niki looks unconvinced, but the phone rings again and she pulls herself to her feet.
“I’ll be back,” she promises. As soon as the kitchen door swings shut behind her, Wilbur bends forward and presses his forehead to his knees, shuddering through a fresh wave of tears. This isn’t how this was supposed to go, to be. Any of it. Tommy was never supposed to come, wasn’t supposed to see Wilbur like this, to hear just how bad it was from his own damn mouth.
He’s just managing to pull himself together when Niki re-emerges from the back, phone in hand. A frown pinches the corners of her mouth, furrows between her brows.
“It’s for you,” she says.
❅
Because of course things can’t stop going wrong—Sam’s here early.
“I got a seat on a flight tonight instead of tomorrow,” he says over the phone. “I just got in. Where can I meet you?”
“I can meet you at the airport,” Wilbur rasps. He braces himself to break the news, rubbing his forehead with a shaking hand. From across the table, Niki looks on with evident concern.
“Is something wrong?” Sam asks, halfway between alarmed and suspicious.
Wilbur closes his eyes. “I don’t know where Tommy is.”
Silence. And then—
“Say that again.” Sam’s voice is low and measured and righteously furious. He sounds almost as angry as Wilbur feels at himself. “Because I don’t think I heard you right.” You’d better hope I didn’t hear that right.
“We had,” says Wilbur, “an argument. He ran off. I’ve been looking, but I—I don’t know—”
He cuts off, voice breaking, free hand rubbing fiercely at his eyes.
“Okay,” Sam says, like he’s trying to figure everything out, sort each word into its proper place as he says it. “Okay. Fine. Just—just meet me at the airport. We’ll talk there.”
Wilbur in no way wants to talk to Sam, not about any of this, doesn’t trust himself to look him in the face without doing something he’ll probably regret, but he nods, and then realizes Sam can’t see him nodding over the phone, so he manages to croak out a rough okay, to work out the details before hanging up. He hands the phone back to Niki.
“I’ve gotta go,” he says. “Can you—”
“I’ll stay here in case Tommy turns up,” Niki says, beating him to it, and Wilbur is almost knocked off his feet by the overwhelming surge of gratitude he feels towards her. Niki really is his best friend, he thinks.
“Thank you,” Wilbur says fervently, and then he’s back out the door, into the snowy New York night.
❅
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all that shit, Wilbur thinks, navigating LaGuardia airport, which is packed to the brim with last-minute travelers. Wilbur meets Sam by the baggage claim, the only stationary point in an ever-moving river of people. He’s not sure what he was expecting from Tommy’s guardian, but he’s just—normal. Plain, even, wearing a much cleaner coat than Wilbur’s. It’s dark green, over a rumpled dress shirt and slacks. He looks tired, but his eyes are mostly kind.
Wilbur expects anger, yelling, fury, but in the end, Sam just regards him with something like understanding. He isn’t sure how to feel about that.
“Tell me what happened,” Sam says, and for the most part, Wilbur does. He doesn’t elaborate on what the fight was about—not the breaking point, anyway—because frankly that’s none of Sam’s damn business, but he tells as much of the truth as he can without baring his situation and maybe his soul to someone else tonight.
When he finishes, Sam looks thoughtful, adjusting the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulder.
“Okay,” he says. “Where do you think he is?”
Wilbur blinks. “How should I know? Tommy’s never been here before.”
“No,” says Sam, “but you know him better than anyone else, don’t you?”
(If there’s any bitterness in Sam’s tone as he says it, Wilbur can’t tell under the exhaustion, the worry that they both feel. Everything is starting to feel cloudy and faraway. Carnegie Hall feels like years ago; this morning, a decade.)
Do I? Wilbur thinks. Do I really?
He thinks of every phone call they’ve ever had, every secret Tommy has told him, every late night they spent sitting on Phil’s roof, swapping fears and hopes and dreams like trading cards. Remembers how small Tommy looked in the passenger seat of his car when Wilbur told him he was moving. Thinks of every night Tommy turned up on his doorstep in college, sometimes soaked to the bone, always hopeful. He knows Tommy’s favorite movies, favorite bands, his least favorite foods to boot. There’s no one Wilbur knows better than Tommy.
He tries to think where would I be if I were Tommy, but he can’t quite focus past the worries crowding his head about dark alleys and falling snow, and the pervading thought that it’s his fault Tommy is out there in New York after dark instead of at home, safe, beside a Christmas tree decked out with far too many lights just like he loves—
Wilbur thinks, lights. Thinks, Christmas trees.
(They only spent two Christmases together at Phil’s, and one after that, but they were the happiest holidays either of them ever had, and Wilbur has never forgotten the utter glee in Tommy’s eyes every time they put up the Christmas tree, every time he got to plug in the cord and watch the tree light up, room set aglow.)
Wilbur says, “I know where he is.”
❅
(The truth is, Sam was furious to hear the news, was prepared to blame Wilbur Soot entirely for Tommy being missing in New York City on the night before Christmas. Maybe he still does, and maybe Wilbur blames himself too, but the moment Sam catches sight of the other man in the crowded airport terminal, damp and disheveled and eyes red in the way that means he’s been crying and crying hard, well—it’s hard to stay angry, when faced with such regret. He knows, at the heart of him, that Wilbur couldn’t have known this would happen, anyway. It’s just so easy to look for someone to blame when you’re worried about someone you love. From the look in Wilbur's eyes, Sam thinks he knows that too.
Wilbur looks wretched, even more than Sam feels, and he thinks they understand one another in this, in their common worry, their shared care for Tommy.
So Sam tamps down the angry things he meant to say, and instead he claps a hand on Wilbur’s shoulder, trying to ignore the way he flinches as though expecting a blow, and says: let’s find him, yeah?)
❅
If there’s such a thing as Christmas magic, Tommy thinks he must be scraping the bottom of the barrel by now. Getting here, finding Wilbur, the best Christmas Eve he’s had in years—and still, he’s trying for more.
Gazing up at the brightly-lit tree before him in Rockefeller Center, at the star shining atop it, Tommy folds his hands on his lap, gloved fingers burning from the cold, and makes a wish.
Starlight, star bright, he almost whispers on instinct, but doesn’t, so the man sitting next to him won’t give him another of those funny looks of his.
(He’s a taxi driver, kind enough to park his car at a meter and walk Tommy to Rockefeller Plaza; a concerned stranger willing to stick around to make sure a teenager on his own on Christmas Eve is okay, and maybe, Tommy thinks, that makes him a kind of angel. He’s the very same cabbie who picks Tommy up outside of Carnegie Hall, who puts the car in park and turns over his shoulder to look at Tommy hunched in his backseat, snow-damp and tear-stained, when Tommy says take me anywhere, I don’t care where.
Look, kid, he says, gruff but not unkind, you can’t be sayin' that kinda thing to just anyone in New York. It’s dangerous.
I’m sorry, Tommy croaks. I just—I don’t want to be here. And I don’t know where the fuck to—to go.
There you go again, the cabbie says. He has a pink braid, Tommy notices through the haze of tears and emotions he can’t quite process, a pink braid coiled up around his head. Tommy doesn't think he's ever seen someone with pink hair before. New York has something for everyone. You don’t wanna be here, okay, that’s a start. Where do you wanna go?
Tommy swipes his wrist across his eyes, trying to collect his thoughts. Um. Somewhere with lights? he asks hopefully.
The cabbie gives him something that’s not quite a smile, but more like the idea of one, ghosting over half his face. I know just the place.)
Tommy pulls a knee up to his chest and wishes (or maybe prays, or perhaps hopes) with all his might that Wilbur will be okay. I won’t ask for anything else for as long as I live, he thinks. If he can just be okay. If I can help him.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” the cabbie next to him says, like he can hear Tommy’s thoughts, and Tommy turns his head away from the tree, from the star, to look at him, but as he does, he catches sight of something else out of the corner of his eye—two figures at the other end of the plaza.
Tommy freezes when he hears a voice call his name. Wilbur’s voice. The bottom of the barrel, and it just keeps giving. Maybe—maybe wishes count for more, on Christmas. Or maybe Tommy’s dreaming, but it must be a good dream, he reckons, so why bitch about it?
Slowly, he stands, turns on the spot to see Wilbur standing there, snow on his glasses, Sam at his side. It looks like he’s been crying. Tommy knows the feeling. He blinks, and before he can even get either of their names out, can stop to wonder how Sam is here already, they’ve both taken off running, and then Tommy is running, and they meet halfway. Sam grabs Tommy in a hug so tight all the breath whooshes out of his lungs.
“Don’t you ever,” says Sam, sounding closer to tears than Tommy has ever heard him, “scare me like this again.”
The best response Tommy can muster without any air is an affirmative sort of wheeze, but it seems to be good enough for Sam. Over Sam’s shoulder—because Sam, while not as short as Phil and not as tall as Wilbur, is short enough for Tommy to see over his shoulder in a hug—Tommy sees the indecision on Wilbur’s face, the discomfort, and makes a choice. He worms a hand out from Sam’s embrace, slipping it under his arm and reaches out to grab at Wilbur’s wrist.
Stay, Tommy mouths at him, and Wilbur does.
Behind them, the cab driver has disappeared. Tommy never sees him again. Sometimes, he wonders if he was ever even real, or just a kindness Tommy imagined. A Christmas ghost, like something out of a storybook. An angel. Tommy’s never sure—but he thinks that might be okay.
❅
(For a moment, standing in Rockefeller Plaza and watching Sam and Tommy’s reunion, all Wilbur can think is, I shouldn’t be here.
Because here is a secret: in the back of a cab, speeding its way towards the one place in New York City that Wilbur hopes beyond hope they’ll find his little brother, Sam makes a confession.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this, he says, laughing. He’s always had the worst timing for these sorts of things.
What do you mean? Wilbur asks from his corner of the backseat, though he thinks he might not want to know the answer.
Well, says Sam, rubbing sheepishly at the back of his neck, this Christmas—well, I want to adopt him. And I was planning on telling him on Christmas, you know, as a surprise. You can imagine what it was like when I realized he’d run off.
Oh, says Wilbur, struggling to control his breathing. He feels very small, all of a sudden. Congratulations. That’s great.
It sounds hollow even to him, but Sam accepts his offered well-wishes nonetheless.
Selfish, Wilbur thinks, biting back a bitter laugh. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Tommy’s not even your family, not really. You made sure of that. He doesn’t have any right to be jealous, especially not now, but—well. He’s only human.
For that impossibly long moment in front of the largest Christmas tree in the country, Wilbur does not belong, but then Tommy reaches out, and Wilbur has never been able to stop himself from reaching back. This is just the way of things. Tonight is no exception.)
❅
They take the subway back to Niki’s bakery. They’ve all had quite enough of cabs for now. Standing on the platform, waiting for the train to arrive, Tommy sidles closer to Wilbur, knocking their shoulders together.
“Hey,” he says.
Wilbur glances over at him. He looks terrible—worse than yesterday, even; completely exhausted, utterly spent, like he’s been tossed through a rinse cycle, half-heartedly wrung out, and tossed over a line to dry—but a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth despite the fatigue.
“Hey,” Wilbur says back.
“I was thinking.”
“That’s a first.”
Tommy slugs him on the shoulder for that, and Sam glances over at the two of them with a raised eyebrow. They blink at him innocently, and he snorts, shaking his head. When he turns away, giving them a little privacy, Tommy sticks his tongue out at Wilbur.
“Shut up and let me finish,” he says. “I was thinking that you should call Phil.”
Just like that, the smile evaporates from Wilbur’s face, replaced with a faint grimace.
“What,” Wilbur whispers, “if he doesn’t want to hear from me?”
(What if he’s disappointed in me? What if I’ve let him down? What if he’s still angry, or he doesn’t love me anymore, after everything I’ve done, all the ways I’ve failed?)
Tommy shrugs. “You didn’t want to see me.”
That’s not true, Wilbur thinks, because it isn’t. He thinks, quietly, that there’s no one he’d rather come find him this Christmas than Tommy. But he can’t quite say any of that, can only shake his head and hope Tommy understands even half of what he means.
“You’ll never know,” Tommy tells him, “if you don’t try.” He grins, nudging Wilbur again, leaning on him until Wilbur half-stumbles, half-shuffles to the side and smacks his shoulder lightly. “C’mon,” wheedles Tommy, face smushed against Wilbur’s shoulder. “It’s Christmas, Wil.”
“Maybe,” says Wilbur, propping his chin on top of Tommy’s head. Sam is pretending not to notice their scuffle, for which he’s intensely grateful. “Maybe.”
He’s right, after all. It’s Christmas. Maybe anything can happen. Maybe things can be okay.
❅
For the second night in a row, they find themselves in Niki’s little apartment. Wilbur feels bad about asking this of her, about the four of them jammed in like sardines in the little two-bedroom flat, but hotels are expensive, and Niki insists, and it’s hard to say no when she does that. Sam sleeps in the guest room by unanimous vote, though he offers to take the couch, leaving Tommy on the sofa and Wilbur on the floor beside it, curled on his side and trying to ignore the way the floor is pressing bruises into his hip and shoulder. It’s warmer and more comfortable than a bench out in the cold, at any rate.
“Wilbur,” Tommy whispers, long after Wilbur thinks he’s fallen asleep. “What you said at the symphony. Were you—” he swallows, and Wilbur can hear him shifting onto his side, face half-hidden in the pillow. “Are you going to…”
“Kill myself?” Wilbur whispers back. Somehow, this feels like the only way to have this conversation—flayed open, heard but unseen, whispering secrets into the darkness. He doesn’t think he could find the words he needs if he had to look Tommy in the eyes right now.
“Yeah,” Tommy says softly. Wilbur rolls over onto his back, wide-open eyes gazing up at nothing but darkness. A starless sky.
“I was,” Wilbur confirms, the words bitter on his tongue. And it’s true. He’s never had a particularly easy life, but the last few months of it—he’s never felt worse. Darker nights, shorter days; he hasn’t felt properly happy, much less okay for so, so long. At least, not until today. Not until Tommy showed up in Central Park, slotting his way back into place by Wilbur’s side like a puzzle piece he didn’t even realize he was missing.
“Was?” Of course, Tommy would catch the tense change. He’s always been more observant that people give him credit for.
“It’s not,” says Wilbur, “that I’m okay now. Nothing is okay, least of all me. But…today was good.”
A heartbeat passes. Another. Tommy breathes out. Wilbur breathes in.
Wilbur says, “Maybe tomorrow can be, too.”
“Just…” Tommy sighs. “Don’t let this be the last time I see you, okay? Please.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Tommy,” Wilbur says. Not now. Not yet.
“Yeah?” Tommy asks. “Good, 'cause neither am I.”
Wilbur can’t help himself. He’s still himself, after all. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” He doesn't know it, but he's not the first person to say those words to Tommy tonight.
“Fuck off,” Tommy tells him, and then he yawns.
“Get some sleep,” Wilbur whispers, smiling. Tommy makes some kind of garbled protest in reply, but Wilbur hears him burrowing down into the blankets and cushions with a sigh.
For a few minutes, they’re both quiet. In Niki’s cozy little apartment, no one is stirring, no one but Wilbur as he turns his head to watch the minutes pass on the LED display of Niki’s VHS player across the room. When the numbers tick up to midnight, Wilbur closes his eyes.
“Merry Christmas, Tommy,” he whispers.
“Merry Christmas, Wilbur,” Tommy mumbles back from the depths of the couch. There’s a shifting of fabric, and when Wilbur reaches his hand up, he finds Tommy’s easily, reaching back from out of the darkness and blankets.
Tomorrow, when Tommy boards the plane, he won’t look back. Neither of them can say what the future will hold, where it will take them, if Wilbur will follow or stay behind in the city that devours pieces of him every day, the city that cannot love him back. Nothing is certain. But for now, in the dark, on Christmas, they are together, and all is quiet. All is well.