Stone, page 13
“Did you read them?” I ask.
She shakes her head hard. “Never. Those were personal to him. I know he wrote in them religiously, and he specifically asked me to have you read them. But that’s all I know.”
“Then how can you know they’ll help me?” I ask, desperate for her to give me some truth that will make it easier to find the courage.
“Because while I don’t know what he wrote in those journals, Brooks talked about you so often, I know he wanted only the best for you. I know he loved you deeply. I know there’s nothing in those journals that can hurt you.”
Christ… that’s exactly what I was looking for. Some reassurance that I wasn’t getting ready to read something that could destroy me, but I’m still not sure if now is the time to delve into it.
When we reach the condo, we move silently up the stairs and come to my door first. Harlow pauses, her hands tucked in her coat pockets. “I’m glad you came to the meeting with me tonight.”
And even though this might open me up to pain—because tonight has opened a door with Harlow—I can’t help but admit, “I’m glad too.”
She smiles again, starts to turn away, then looks back as if having second thoughts about something. “Want to grab dinner or something? Watch a movie?”
Her request shocks me almost as much as her telling me she was going to an AA meeting. Is she asking me on an impromptu date? Is this just a friendly invite to lighten the remainder of the evening?
Are we expanding a friendship? Is this something more?
Admittedly, any of these options freak me out.
I toss my head toward my unit. “I’ve got a mid-morning practice, and I think I’m going to turn in early.”
Not a lie at all about the practice, but I don’t fall asleep on any given night until close to midnight.
Harlow smiles brightly, not in the least offended. “Well, that’s a standing neighborly invitation if you want some company. I know it’s hard starting out in a new place.”
So… it was just an attempt to expand friendship, which should relieve me, but instead I feel slightly disappointed. I have an overwhelming urge to grab her by the shoulders, haul her in, and kiss her.
The imagery of that is so real and so disconcerting, I step backward into the wall. Harlow stares at me, head slightly tipped as if I’m confounding her.
Hell, I’m confounding myself.
“Well… good night,” I say, and turn to unlock the door.
“Good night,” she says, and I hear her walk down the hall away from me.
Once in my condo, I lean against the jamb and let out a long breath. My heart is pounding, and I have no clue why.
I glance down the short hallway to the immediate left that leads to the master suite. Having been in Harlow’s condo the other day, I know her unit is the mirror of mine, and her room is just on the other side of the wall.
I also know that within this master suite are the journals detailing my brother’s life. The thought of reading them makes me slightly nauseated.
But something Harlow said tonight reverberates in my head.
We’re only as sick as our secrets.
Hiding truths and the stress and pain that come with it is not good for anyone. If I ignore Brooks’s secrets stored within those journals, am I perpetuating my own pain? Is that cost greater than the torment of ignorance?
All that is an unknown.
But what I do know is that I feel like I’m doing Brooks’s memory a disservice if I refuse to acknowledge those things. It would be as if Brooks showed up on my doorstep and told me he had secrets to share that might cause me distress.
Would I invite him in? Or would I ask him to leave?
The answer to that is so stupidly simple, I push off from the doorjamb and head to the master suite, determination fueling my strides.
This is only the second time I’ve been in this room since moving into the condo—the first time to peek inside and make the absolute decision I wasn’t going to sleep in here, and the second time when I checked the closet and found the box holding his journals. But I didn’t touch it.
Now I move directly to them, taking the white banker’s box down from a shelf and carrying it to the bed. I toss the lid to the floor and peer in at the contents.
I’d envisioned Brooks—with all his good taste and designer strengths I’ve seen throughout his home—would have slick, leather-bound journals. Instead he kept his thoughts in spiral-bound notebooks of varying colors.
After a slight hesitation, I make myself reach in and pull them out, knowing that if I waver, I’ll go scurrying out of this room and might never come back in.
Spreading out the notebooks, I count five in all, each holding two hundred pages’ worth of my brother’s personal life.
I grab a purple one, open the cover, and see the page filled with lines of words in blue ink. There’s a date at the top of the first page and then words just start flowing. No delineated paragraphs. No doodles. Just lines and lines of my brother’s thoughts that I gloss over and don’t read in detail.
I go through the other journals, looking at the dated entries, and put them in order. The first journal—a dark-green spiral notebook—starts in his junior year in high school. That was my freshman year of college.
He didn’t journal every day and some were just a few lines long. Other days, he might write a several paragraphs.
For some reason, I don’t start on the first page but rather flip through and skim until certain words catch my eye and cause me to read with more depth.
Many of the entries are tirades about our father, and perhaps I focus on them because I understand them so well. Our father was a tyrant when it came to school and hockey, riding us both hard to perform greater than his greatest expectations and coming down on us if we didn’t. He used his hands on us, never meek about slapping if we didn’t measure up.
I learn quickly that Brooks got double the pressure once I left for college because he was the only target for my dad’s control and abuse.
One entry dated in the spring of Brooks’s junior year strikes hard.
I’m so tired of Dad comparing me to Stone. I’m tired of hearing about Stone’s greatness all the time. I’m never going to be as good as him on the ice, and I wish my dad would understand that. Sadly, I can’t tell him this because I don’t want the repercussions.
It pains me my father did that, especially since he wasn’t especially proud of my college years on the ice. At least he never told me such. He wasn’t big on affirmation, more on instilling fear.
The one thing I do marvel at is that Brooks’s entries have nothing but good things to say about me. While Dad may have been shoving my supposed greatness down my younger brother’s throat, Brooks still looked up to me. Recounted our phone calls, my visits home, and his excitement of me returning for summer break.
In other words, my brother’s feelings for me were still pure and untainted by our father.
Lifting my head, I glance around the bedroom. It doesn’t seem as off-putting as before. My gaze moves to the other journals, and I know I’m not going to be able to stop reading. It doesn’t matter that it’ll probably take me hours upon hours or that I’ve got a mid-morning practice.
Now that I’ve started, I want to see it through.
I move over to the bed, prop myself against the headboard, and dive back into the journal.
CHAPTER 15
Stone
The sun rose about an hour ago, and I’m exhausted.
Tired to my bones, sick to my heart, my gut full of volcanic fury at my father.
There’s some mental self-flagellation going on for being so passive the last few years, and reading Brooks’s journals has only made that burn brighter.
And I’m still not done.
I push up from the floor where I’ve had my back propped against the side of Brooks’s king-size bed. I haven’t left the room all night, alternating between lying on top of the bedspread while I read to pacing around with a notebook in hand as I absorbed his memories. Occasionally, I perched on one of the two chairs near the window, and this past hour, as my eyes grew heavy, I moved to the floor and leaned against the bed with the frame digging into my back, hoping the discomfort would help keep me awake and on task.
I’ve got a handful of pages left, but I take a moment to push up off the floor and ease my cramped muscles and aching joints. I stretch, the last notebook in dark purple still in my grip, and then yawn deeply as I glance at the bedside table.
Almost seven thirty a.m., and I’ve got to be at the arena by ten.
I’ve absorbed so much information in the last several hours, I feel like my head is about to explode.
There was a lot of good—so many entries where my brother memorialized moments we spent together. Calls I would make from college when we would spend hours on the phone talking. Brooks wrote that it was “one of his favorite escapes” when I called because things seemed normal.
He wrote about his excitement as summer approached after my first year of college, knowing I would be coming home and of all the trouble we would get into.
I devoured the words with a smile plastered on my face about how ecstatic he was when I got drafted by the Boston Eagles. It wasn’t nearly the same level of enthusiasm as when he got accepted into college, but he was determined to follow in his big brother’s footsteps.
When I was with the Eagles and won the Cup, it was the one and only time he made drawings and doodles in the journal. He wrote of his pride and joy and punctuated it with rough sketches of the Eagles’ logo and of my jersey number.
There was a touching entry about his realization that he was gay. He’d suspected as much since he was a young boy, but he chronicled his first kiss with a guy who went to our high school who, in a million years, I never would’ve thought was gay. But then again, I never suspected Brooks either.
That entry was quite detailed, and it moved from a fumbling kiss to roaming hands, and I had to stop reading. I didn’t want or need the details. That was private to Brooks, and I’d no more read his accounting of his first time if it was with a woman than I would with a man.
I can imagine how my brother felt, though. The validation that must have come that he knew who he was. I remember well the intoxication of being with a girl for the first time, and I imagine Brooks reveled in his experience as much as I had.
I skimmed to the last paragraph of that entry.
I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders. Things are clear, and I’m ready for my future.
The experience had brought solace to a young man who was tortured over his sexual orientation and whether his feelings were real.
I was a bit brokenhearted, however, by the very last sentence: I can never let our parents know because I can’t handle their hate.
It was my brother’s first real indication that there was going to be some level of isolation in his life because of who he was. He didn’t mention anything in his pages about whether he would tell me, and I found that troubling.
Despite the good, there was a lot of bad shit that I read too.
My father was relentless in his harassment of Brooks after I left for college. With me no longer around to control, he focused all that extra on Brooks. He also used me as a means to motivate my brother, comparing my greatness with my brother’s weaknesses. I found through numerous entries that if Brooks wasn’t making my father happy between how he performed in school and on the ice, my father would throw me in his face. He would laud me as the successful one in the family and would say, “Why can’t you be as good as your brother?” on almost every occasion where he found fault.
This was abusive. It may not have been delivered with fists or belts, but every word cut deep. I know, because I used to get the same when I lived at home. But Brooks had it worse after I left because there was no one to share the abuse with.
It was, in my opinion, the start of the systemic poisoning that my father insinuated into my brother’s mind and is probably the foundation of all that was bad between us at the time Brooks died.
Other entries were incredibly bittersweet. When I first got injured while playing with the Eagles, Brooks was beside himself with worry. He knew just how catastrophic even a simple injury could be to a hockey career.
I had to step away from my reading after one particular entry Brooks made after I got released from the Eagles and sent down to the minors. Brooks was just starting his career with the Titans, and he was so conflicted over my fall from grace. So much so, he couldn’t even enjoy his fortune because he was far too worried about my misfortune.
During this time, he documented my father’s continued mind games. He was no longer throwing at Brooks how great I was as a means to motivate him to perform better. Instead, it was a lot of shit-talking about my failures to help Brooks shine brighter. My father apparently spoke a lot of crap about me to my little brother and used it as an opportunity to launch from my coattails to his.
God, my dad was such a dick, and Brooks knew what he was doing. He never shared that with me, though, not wanting to cause me pain.
Learning about Brooks’s struggle with alcohol addiction within his writings was very subtle, and I might not have recognized it had I not known now that he was, in fact, an alcoholic. There were lots of entries about parties he attended and good times with friends and teammates. Many of those ended in admitted blackouts.
A lot of his alcohol intake seemed associated with his sexual orientation, or rather, the isolation he had because of it.
He talked about men he would date and how he was only comfortable eating dinner or sitting at a bar with a man if alcohol was involved. It was his way to push past his fears.
He was very strict, though, when in the presence of other men out in public. He allowed absolutely no displays of affection and kept all that within the privacy of his home. He got pressure from the men he dated, most unwilling to live a closeted lifestyle. It tore Brooks between having safety from my father’s wrath and truly being happy with his personal life.
And it wasn’t just my father who made things difficult on Brooks for being gay. It was the league as a whole. Historically, male-dominated sports have a crude culture within the locker room that has kept gay men quiet. The unenlightened behemoths think being homosexual means weakness or frailty, and that leads to inherent bias. I myself have heard so many gay jokes within the locker room, I know that if I were in Brooks’s shoes, I would’ve never come out to my team either.
All those things weighed heavily on him, and I could see chronicled over time when he started needing alcohol to dull the pain. There were times when Brooks would come home after practice or a game or even a trip out shopping, and he’d crack open a fifth of bourbon. He would sit and drink all night until he fell into blessed sleep.
I learned within the journals that the breaking point was when my brother slept through an alarm and missed a practice with the Titans. In the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal. He was fined, which was expected. But it scared him badly to know that he could’ve slept through the alarm to make it to the airport for an away game. He went to his coach and explained he thought he had a problem.
His coach helped him that day find a place to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and that is where he met Harlow.
Not only did I get to learn so many beautiful and awful things about my brother—making me feel closer to him than I ever have despite the fact he is dead—I got to know Harlow Alston through my reading.
Brooks had so much to say about his new friend. Not only the support she gave him to maintain sobriety, but in all other ways outside of their shared alcoholism.
They spent a lot of time together, either at his condo or hers. They often ate dinner together when he wasn’t at games. They vacationed together. She went out on dates with him, playing the wingman so he would feel secure that he wouldn’t be outed.
She was there for him during all his triumphs. She bought a season ticket to cheer him on, and she was always there to make sure he stayed on a sober path.
While he didn’t necessarily say it, I guarantee he helped her stay on that same straight and narrow as well.
I don’t regret reading a single word. Every bit of the information—good and bad—was healing to my soul. It’s a bit devastating to know I could’ve learned this stuff myself had I just made better efforts to repair my relationship with Brooks, but it was enough to know he loved me in the end, so much so that he wanted these journals shared with me.
In addition to being exhausted from taking all this in, I have newfound anger toward my father, so much so I’m now feeling the need to hurt him in some way. Over this past year, things changed between me and my brother, and I can tell that the estrangement was actually manufactured by my father.
While Brooks had withstood years of my father using me as a weapon over him, either by making me a saint or a villain, it’s clear that this past year, Brooks started to doubt me. There were entries that Brooks would write after talking to our father. Apparently, Dad was telling Brooks that I was talking crap about him.
Dad told me tonight that Stone is fueled by jealousy over my success. He told me that Stone wants what I now have and that he can’t stand me for having it. He said Stone hated me for being in the pros… that Stone blamed me for his inability to make it back up. None of that seems like Stone, but Dad is insistent.
They were flat-out lies my father was telling in his efforts to keep injecting that poison. I know Brooks couldn’t see it, but my father did it for purely self-serving reasons. Brooks’s star was now on the rise, mine had been snuffed out, and my dad knew the one person Brooks loved the most was me. My dad knew if he could remove me, then he would have Brooks all to himself.
The thing that hurt was that Brooks started to believe it.
Stone is so standoffish, it makes me wonder if all the things Dad has been telling me are true. It’s hard for me to believe that, but I don’t talk to Stone enough these days to know otherwise. We’re trying to find some free time so we can get together, but I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble.
