Everything Changes

sweat has broken out on Norm’s forehead, his face is deathly pale, and his breath is becoming labored to the point that I’m scared he might start hyperventilating. “Norm,” Lela says. “Are you okay?”
    He nods to her, taking a few deep breaths. “Sit down for a moment,” he says to me, his voice thin and raspy.
    “I’ll stand.”
    “Please,” he says, his eyes beseeching me from the couch. After a few seconds I relent and take a seat on an ottoman.
    “You came here to dump your kid on us, didn’t you?” I say.
    Norm shakes his head. “I came here to see if I had what it takes to be a father again.” He runs his arm across his face, and I can see that his eyes are watering. “I looked at that little boy depending on me to take care of him, and all I could think about was you and your brothers, how I’d failed so miserably with you. Some men just don’t have it in them. That’s something I resigned myself to a long time ago. My father didn’t. I didn’t either.”
    “Didn’t stop you from having another one, though, did it?”
    “Nothing ever stops me,” he says, shaking his head miserably. “I’m the king of ‘this time.’ This time is always going to be different. Except it never is. And it was fine when I knew Henry had Susan. But when I became his sole guardian, I was terrified. I love him, but I loved you and your brothers too, and that didn’t keep me from losing all of you. I came here to see my sons, to see how badly I’d messed up, and to see if you could forgive me. I know it’s stupid, but I somehow thought that if I could be a part of my sons’ lives again, it would give me the confidence to think things could be different this time around.”
    “So it was never about us,” I say bitterly. “We’re just the scene of the crime.”
    Norm looks at Lela, and then back at me, frowning. “I’m old, Zack. You have no idea how fucking old I am.”
    “Just say it.”
    “What?”
    “You want us to do it for you.”
    Norm sniffs, unable to meet my gaze. “I just need help.”
    “Bullshit. You want out, like you always do.”
    “I want the best for Henry,” Norm says, tears running down his face. “I’m sixty years old and I don’t expect to see seventy. I’ve got a bad heart and no bypasses left to do. And I look at Henry, and he’s so beautiful, so absolutely perfect, and I don’t want to fuck him up too.”
    My rage is electric, coursing madly through my veins, igniting my blood as it goes. “Fuck you, Norm. You had no right.”
    “I’m sorry, Zack.” He reaches out for me and I pull away as if repulsed.
    “Fuck you.”
    He reaches for me again, and this time his weight shifts and he tumbles forward onto the glass coffee table, which cracks under his weight, sending him falling on his knees onto the jagged shards. He sits still in the wreckage, sobbing silently into his hands, until Lela sits down beside him, pulling his head into her chest and rocking him slowly back and forth, the way she used to hold me in my bed when I cried at night, empty and aching for something that I am only now beginning to get through my thick skull had never existed to begin with.

    I hang out in Pete’s room for a bit, while Norm and Lela hold a whispered conversation below. Pete has trouble understanding the concept of a half brother.
    “He has a different mother?” he asks me for the third time.
    “That’s right,” I say.
    “But if he’s our brother, how come we didn’t have him before?”
    “He’s only five years old.”
    “I’m too old to have a five-year-old brother.”
    “No,” I say. “You’re not.”
    He thinks about it for a moment. “What’s his name?”
    “Henry.”
    “Henry,” he says thoughtfully. “What does he like?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Does he like ice cream? Which flavor?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What’s his favorite show?”
    “I don’t know anything about him, Pete,” I say. “I just found out about him myself.”
    “Will he think I’m stupid?”
    “You’re not stupid.”
    “Maybe a five-year-old would think I’m stupid.”
    “I don’t think anyone would think you’re stupid.”
    “You’re just saying that because you’re my brother,” he says, punching me lightly in the arm.
    “Well, so is he,” I say.
    “Oh, yeah,” Pete says, nodding. “I keep forgetting.”

    When I come downstairs, Lela is sitting in the dark, sipping at a tea glass, looking into space. “Where is he?” I say.
    “You