“Look, I don’t care what you and your perfect little wife think. It’s just too much responsibility. I’m out. I can’t send him to therapy and shit like that. I’m not made out of money.” Catalina stubbed her heel on the floor. I heard her rummaging through her Chanel bag for her cigarettes. She wasn’t gonna find them. I smoked half the pack in the backyard while she was getting high in her bedroom. The rest were in my bag.
“If money is an issue—” Sparrow started.
“Bitch, please,” Cat cut into her words viciously, spluttering. “Keep your money. And I hope you are not dumb enough to think you’re better than me, with all the help you’re getting from your husband and harem of nannies and tutors. Sam’s the spawn of the Devil. I can’t do this alone.”
“You’re not doing this alone,” Troy ground out. “We have shared custody of him, idiot.”
Fire blazed in my chest. I didn’t know Sparrow and Troy had legal custody over me. I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded important.
“Either you take him or I drop him off at an orphanage,” Cat yawned.
In a way, I was relieved. I always knew once Grams died, Catalina would get rid of me. I spent the last few weeks worrying she’d set the house on fire with me in it to get insurance money or something. At least I was still alive.
I knew my mother didn’t love me. She never looked at me. When she did, she told me I reminded her of him.
“Same Edward Cullen hair. Same dead, gray eyes.”
Himwas my late father, Brock Greystone. Before he died, he was employed by Troy Brennan. Brock Greystone was weak and pathetic and a weasel. A rat. Everyone said so. Grams, Cat, Troy.
My worst nightmare was becoming like him, which was why Catalina always told me I was so much like him.
Then there was Uncle Troy. I knew he was a bad man, but he was an honorable one, too.
The wiseguys down my block said he had blood on his hands.
That he threatened, tortured, and killed people.
Nobody messed with Troy. Nobody kicked him out of the house or yelled at him or told him he was their worst mistake. And he had that thing about him, like … like he was made out of marble. Sometimes I looked at his chest and was surprised to see it moved.
I wanted to be him so much that when I thought about it my bones began to hurt.
His existence just seemed louder than anyone else’s.
Whenever Uncle Troy disappeared in the middle of the night, he always came back bruised and disheveled. He’d bring dunks and ignore the fact he smelled of gunpowder and blood. He would tell us bad jokes at the table while we ate, and to make sure Sailor wasn’t scared anymore, he’d tell her he saw the monster family that lived in her closet move out.
One time he bled all over a donut, and Sailor had eaten it because she thought it was Christmas frosting. Aunt Sparrow was close to nuclear explosion. She’d chased him around the kitchen with a broomstick while Sail and I giggled, swatting it about and actually catching his ear twice. When she finally caught him (only because he let her), he captured both her wrists and lowered her to the floor and kissed her hard on the mouth. I thought I saw some tongue, too, but then she swatted his chest and giggled.
Everyone was so happy and laughed so much, Sailor had an accident, and she never had accidents anymore.
But then I’d felt my chest tighten because I knew they’d send me back to Cat later that afternoon. It reminded me I wasn’t really a part of their family.
It was the only good moment I had. I’d play it over and over, lying in my bed, every time I heard Cat’s bedsprings whine under the weight of a stranger.
“We’ll take him,” Sparrow announced coldly. “Off you go. We’ll send you the paperwork as soon as our lawyer drafts the documents.”
My chest filled with something warm just then. Something I’d never felt before. I couldn’t stop it. It felt good. Hope? Opportunity? I couldn’t put a name on it.
“Red,” Troy breathed his wife’s nickname.
And just like that, my insides turned cold again. He didn’t want to adopt me. Why would he? They already had one perfect daughter. Sailor was cute and funny and normal. She didn’t get into fights, hadn’t been expelled three times, and definitely hadn’t broken six bones in her body doing dangerous shit because pain reminded her she was still alive.
I wasn’t an idiot. I knew where I was headed—the streets. Kids like me didn’t get adopted. They got into trouble.
“No,” Sparrow snapped at him. “I’ve made up my mind.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. I got really scared. I wanted to shake Cat and tell her how much I hated her. That she should’ve died instead of Grandma Maria. That she deserved to die. With all her drugs and boyfriends and rehab trips.
I never told anyone how she used to give me shots of rum to make me sleep. Whenever Troy or Sparrow paid us surprise visits, she’d rub white powder on my gums to wake me up. She’d curse under her breath, threatening to burn me if I didn’t wake up.
I was seven when I realized I was an addict.
If I didn’t get the white powder daily, I shook and sweated and screamed into my pillow until I ran out of energy and passed out.
I was eight when I kicked the habit.
I’d just refused to let her give me rum or powder. Went crazy every time she came near me with that stuff. Once, I bit Cat’s arm so bad a part of her skin stayed in my mouth, salty and metallic and hard against my teeth.
She never tried again after that.
“You’re fucking lucky my wife is stubborn as hell,” Troy hissed. “We’ll take Sam, but there will be stipulations—and many of them.”
“Shocker,” Cat bit out. “Let’s hear them.”
“You’ll hand him over and sign all the legal paperwork, no negotiations and without asking for a penny.”
“Done,” Cat cackled humorlessly.
“You’ll fuck off from Boston. Move far away. And when I say far, Catalina, I mean somewhere he can’t see you. Where the memory of his deadbeat mother doesn’t burn hot. Another planet is preferable, but since we can’t risk aliens meeting you and thinking we’re all cunts, two states away minimum is my requirement. And if you ever come back—which I sincerely recommend against—you’ll go through me if you wanna see him. You walk away from him now, you lose all your motherly privileges. If I catch you messing with this kid, my kid…” he paused for emphasis “…I will give you the slow, painful death you’ve been begging for almost a decade, and I will make you watch your own death in the mirror, you vain waste of oxygen.”
I believed him.
I knew she did, too.
“You’ll never see me again.” Cat’s voice rattled, like her throat was full of coins. “He is rotten to the core, Troy. That’s why you love him. You see yourself in him. His darkness calls to you.”
That was when I turned into a pillar of salt. Or at least that’s how it felt. I was afraid if someone touched me, I would shatter.
I could be like Troy.
I had darkness. And violence. And all the things that made him great.
I had the same hunger and disdain for the world and heart that was just that—a heart—with nothing much inside it.
I could turn a corner.
I could be something else.
I could be something, period.
That was a possibility I’d never considered before.
Cat left not long after. Then Troy and Sparrow talked. I heard Troy pour himself a drink. They discussed lawyers and what to tell Sailor. Sparrow suggested they send me to a Montessori school, whatever the heck that was. I tiptoed my way to bed, too tired to care about my own future. My knees knocked together, and I felt the beef jerky crawling up my throat. I made a pit stop in the bathroom and puked my guts out.
Orphan. A mistake. A monster.
I didn’t know how much time passed before they walked into my room.
I pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want to talk. All I wanted to do was to lie there with my eyes closed, scared that they’d decide they didn’t want me after all or that they were going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.
I felt my bed dip as Sparrow sat on its edge. I had Boston Celtics green and white linen, a PlayStation, a TV, and a Bill Russell jersey hanging on my wall. My room was painted green and full of framed pictures of me with Troy, Sparrow, and Sailor at Disney, Universal, and in Hawaii.
My room back in Cat’s house was just a bed, a dresser, and a trash can.
No paint. No pictures. No nothing.
I never asked myself why.
Why the Brennans took me in.
Why I was a part of this fucked-up arrangement.
“We know you’re awake.” Troy’s whiskey breath fanned my hair over my eyes, making my nose twitch. “You’d be an idiot to fall asleep on a night like this, and my son is no idiot.”
I cracked my eyes open. His silhouette took up most of my room. Sparrow put her hand on my back, rubbing it in circles.
I didn’t shatter.
I released a breath.
I’m not a pillar of salt after all.
“Are you my real pops?” I blurted out but wasn’t brave enough to look at him when I asked. “Did you knock Cat up?”
I should’ve asked this long ago. It was the only thing that made sense. “You’d never give me the time of the day otherwise. You can’t let me hang out here just because Grandma Maria once scrubbed your toilets. Am I a bastard?”
“You’re not a bastard, and you’re not mine,” Troy said point-blank, averting his gaze to the window. The Boston skyline stretched out in front of him. All the things he owned and ruled. “Not biologically, anyway.”
“I’m a Greystone,” I insisted.
“No,” he hissed. “You’re a Brennan. Greystones don’t have the heart gene.”
I’d never heard about that gene. Then again, I skipped school most days in favor of smoking cigarettes outside bars and selling whatever it was I stole that day to help pay for my next meal.
“I ain’t perfect,” I sat up, glowering. “So if that’s what you want, some perfect yes-kid, kick me out now.”
“We don’t want you to be perfect.” Sparrow rubbed my back faster, harder. “We just want you to be ours. You are Samuel. A gift from God. In the Bible, Samuel was gifted to Hannah after years of praying. She thought she was barren. Do you know what barren means?”
“A woman who can’t have kids.” I shuddered. To have kids, you first had to make them, and I knew exactly how people went about making them—I caught Catalina practicing a bunch of times with her clients—and it was damn gross.
Sparrow nodded. “After Sailor was born, the doctors told me I couldn’t conceive again. Turned out, I didn’t have to. I have you. Your name means ‘The Lord Hears’ in Hebrew. Shma-el. God heard my prayers and surpassed my every expectation. You’re exquisite, Samuel.”
Exquisite. Ha. That was a word I’d use for a famous painting or some shit, not a nine-year-old ex cocaine addict, recovering alcoholic, who was an active smoker, and half the size of kids my age.
My childhood was such a bust, my innocence and I no longer shared a zip code, and if she thought a few home-cooked meals and some back rubs were going to change it, well, she was in for an unpleasant surprise.
“Tell me why I’m here. Why I’m not in an orphanage. I’m old enough to know,” I demanded, balling my fists really hard, clenching my jaw. “And don’t talk to me about the Bible. The Lord may have heard Hannah, but He sure as shit ain’t been listening to me.”
“You’re here because we love you,” Sparrow said at the same time Troy answered, “You’re here because I killed your father.”
Silence descended. Sparrow shot up from my bed, her eyes really wide and really big, staring at her husband. Her mouth hung open like a fish. Troy carried on.
“He said he deserves to know. He’s not wrong, Red. The truth, Sam, is that shortly before your father died, he kidnapped Sparrow with every intention of killing her. I had to save my wife and did so without thinking twice. I wanted you to have a father figure. A person to look up to. The plan was to take you to basketball games every now and again. Provide guidance, advice, and a fat college fund to kick-start your life; getting attached was never in my plans, but it happened, anyway.” He looked me right in the eye. “Very early on I realized you were not a project. You were family.”
“You killed my father,” I echoed.
I knew Brock Greystone was dead, but Catalina and Grandma Maria always said it happened in an accident.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“Who knows?”
“You. Me. Cat. Aunt Sparrow. God.”
“Did God forgive you?”
Troy smirked. “He gave me you.”
Depending on who you asked, that could be seen as a punishment.
Now Brock was dead, and Cat was gone. The Brennans were my only shot at survival, whether I liked it or not.
“All right?” Troy asked. With his Southie accent, it came out as “Aight?”
I stared at him, not sure what to think or do.
“I’m going to go get some dunks now.” He leaned down to grab my shoulder bag, retrieving Cat’s pack of cigarettes from it. It was close to midnight. He was definitely going to one of his “businesses.”
“Donuts always make everything better,” Sparrow pointed out, carrying on with the lie. “Be safe, honey.”
He bent down to kiss the top of her head. “Always, Red. And you…” he tousled my hair with his massive palm “…no more cigarettes. This shit could send you to an early grave.”
That was the moment I decided I was going to smoke until my lungs collapsed. Not because I wanted to defy Uncle Troy, but because dying young didn’t seem like a bad idea.
When he left, I turned to Sparrow. My nerves were shot. I couldn’t trust myself not to vomit again, but this time in her lap. And I never vomited, never cried.
“He didn’t want to take me,” I said.
She ran her fingers through my hair, brushing it back to normal. “No, he didn’t. But only because he didn’t want your mother to walk out of your life.”
“But you didn’t give a shit about that. Why?”
“Because I know no mother is better than a bad mother, and every day you were with her made my heart hurt.”
“Grams left, too.”
“She didn’t leave, honey. She died. It wasn’t up to her.”
“I don’t care. I hate women. I hate them.”
“One day you’ll find someone who changes your mind.” Sparrow smiled privately, like she knew something I didn’t. She was wrong.
Grams died and left me with Cat.
Cat almost killed me multiple times.
Women weren’t reliable. Men weren’t either, but men I could at least punch in the nuts, and men never made any promises. I didn’t have a father or a grandfather to get mad at.
“I will never change my mind,” I muttered, fighting my heavy eyelids that demanded I pass out.
I crashed in Sparrow’s arms hours after Troy left.
When I woke up the next morning, I found a golden chain on my nightstand.
I scanned the Saint Anthony charm on it. My initials was engraved around the coin.
S.A.B.
Samuel Austin Brennan.
Years later, I’d learn Troy and Sparrow petitioned to legally changed my name from Greystone to Brennan the same hour they filed for full custody of me.
I knew who Saint Anthony was, the Patron Saint of all lost things.
I was lost, but now I’d been found.
Next to the necklace was a paper plate with a glazed donut and a hot cup of cocoa.
I was a Brennan now.
Boston underworld aristocracy.
Privileged, respected, and feared above all.
A legend in the making.
I intended to live up to my namesake at any price.
I would never be lost again.
My parents failed, but me? I’d prevail.
I would rise from the ashes and make them proud.
Would soar into the sky.
This was the first time I felt this way.
Certain.