Twenty
“Has it really been his entire life?”
The question was softly spoken, unexpected and a little jarring. Jason swallowed hard, setting down his coffee mug. He leaned back, regarding Elaine with a measuring look, brow furrowing.
How does she know?
The previous day was just a series of jagged moments in his memory. Lingering in bed and making love with Joslyn. His phone ringing non-stop. Answering. Marissa on the phone, telling him it was back, that Peter was sick again, asking where he was, saying he needed to come home. Panic. Elaine telling him not to go, that his brother wanted him to stay.
He’d talked to Peter later. His brother had sounded exhausted but had repeated what Elaine had said—that he wanted him to stay where he was, at least for now.
“It’s time for you to live a little,” Peter had told him. “Take a chance, little brother. Don’t worry about me. What happens to me happens whether you’re here or not. Stay there—stay with her. You love her. Don’t screw that up.”
Jason didn’t think leaving would have screwed anything up, but if Peter wanted him to stay, he’d stay—at least a little longer. He hadn’t had a vacation since the one he’d taken a few weeks after getting out of the service years before. This was his break—such as it was.
He glanced toward Joslyn for a second and felt a little warmer. As breaks went, it definitely wasn’t bad. His gaze shifted back to Elaine. “That’s quite a question when you haven’t even had a cup of coffee this morning.”
One corner of her mouth curved into a faint smile. “It’s just been bothering me all night,” she said, heading for the coffeemaker on the counter. “Ever since he and I talked.”
Jason nodded slowly, watching her. “Then you did talk.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Yeah, for a couple hours. Maybe longer. I think I kind of lost track of time.”
“He has that effect on people.” Jason idly reached for Joslyn’s hand and found it readily, her fingers warm and strong as they squeezed his. “Peter can be pretty engaging when he tries.”
Elaine nodded slowly. Joslyn squeezed his hand again.
“You haven’t answered her question,” Joslyn said. “Honestly, I’d kind of like to know, too. You’re pretty worried about him.”
“I am,” Jason admitted. “But he also told me to stay and I intend to.”
Elaine slid into a chair at the table, a mug cradled between her hands. “So has it been?”
Jason nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, at least as far back as I can remember. It’s, uhm, it’s why he and I are estranged from our parents. Marissa still talks to them a little but not about us. They kind of lost the privilege of being a part of our lives because of some stuff they did when we were younger.”
“You’re estranged from your parents?” Joslyn asked, brow furrowing. “I mean, I knew they weren’t a part of your lives but I thought they were just…gone, you know?”
“That’s because it’s hard to explain. It’s easier to just gloss it and leave it be.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Elaine said, taking a sip of her coffee. “Talking about that kind of stuff can be shitty.”
“That’s one word for it,” Jason said, then managed to smile. “Complicated and painful and confusing kind of fits this one better.” He sighed, brushing his thumb across Joslyn’s knuckles. “Peter and I were legally emancipated from our parents when were teenagers. There was a trust involved that was earmarked for us and my parents were basically dipping into it for Peter’s medical treatment without any of our consent against the terms of the trust. That was the case we made in court—the larger chunk of it, anyway.” He smiled sadly and shook his head. “The real problem that Peter had—and I guess a little bit of Marissa, too—was the fact that our parents kind of ignored I existed. He was everything and I…I guess he felt like they treated me like I was nothing and honestly, I’m not sure how wrong he was in hindsight. They were always hyper focused on him. Marissa basically raised me. Uncle Ezacaius helped when he was around but he really wasn’t around much because he was working all the time. He helped with the emancipation, too.” He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “So we were legally on our own when I was sixteen and Peter was seventeen. He’s was already halfway through a bachelor’s by then. I was still in high school.”
“I didn’t realize you guys were that close in age,” Joslyn said softly. “For some reason I always thought he was older.”
“Well, he is Doctor Peter Grey,” Jason said with a crooked smile. “Genius-level intelligence does that kind of crazy shit. A lot of the heavy lifting and developing that went into the tech we’re using for Universe came from his dissertation project.”
“He said he wanted it to help people,” Elaine said, staring down into her coffee.
Jason nodded. “Yeah. He’s been working on some things as a side project to the game on the down-low, stuff to maybe help veterans and other victims of traumatic injury with physical and mental recovery. It’s important to him to make a difference and give a little back. Or a lot, if you ask some people.”
For a few seconds, he stared off into space, thoughts drifting to a conversation now a year past, when he’d gone looking for his brother to tell him it was time to come eat dinner. It was Thanksgiving, and Peter had quietly snuck off to Brannon’s office to snag a little bit of peace from the crowds that had descended on Marissa’s house for dinner. Their uncle had been there for once, their parents decidedly not in deference to both Peter and Jason—and to a greater or lesser extent, their uncle, too. He’d found Peter sitting near a window, notebook in hand, jotting something down in his tiny, neat handwriting, the page already half full of calculations and notes. Jason had asked him what he was doing and Peter had just smiled and shook his head.
“A dream,” he’d said. “Something beyond the boundaries of a game but built on the game to help people who need it the most. Not ready yet, but someday. Someday, Jason.”
“We hire a lot of vets,” he said quietly, almost as an afterthought. “About half my team are, then a bunch of the programmers, a couple of the GMs. Marissa’s got a few on her business team, a couple in HR. It just—we try but in some ways it doesn’t feel like enough.” He thought back to Zander and the first time his friend had tried out the immersion functionality of the game. He could still remember the look on the artist’s face. It had been a year since he’d walked at that point, and the game had let him run. For someone who’d been an athlete in high school and was facing the very real possibility of never standing again, let alone walking, that had meant the world. That had been the first time he’d really begun to understand what Peter was trying to accomplish with his side project. Things had started to click, slowly but surely.
“Is that because of you?” Joslyn asked softly.
Jason shook his head. “Not entirely. It was something important to us, though. Brannon’s brother and dad did stints in the RAF and one of our uncles that we never see was in the service, too, but Mom never talked about what he was doing or when, just that he had. Then there was me.”
“You guys are incredible,” Elaine said softly. “You know that, right? Everything you’ve done so far with Universe and the technology and everything? It’s insane, it’s wonderful.”
He shrugged slightly. “It’s just something we set out to do—Rissa and Brannon and Peter and I. And we did it.” He swallowed hard, reaching for his mug and gulping down a deep swallow of coffee before he trusted himself to speak. “Peter keeps saying it’s his legacy—the thing he wants to pass down to our niece and any other kids that Rissa and Brannon have, any family I eventually have. He never talks about having a family himself.”
The lump in his throat was so huge it threatened to choke him. He gulped down more coffee, trying to swallow the lump down with it. It helped, but it didn’t go away. You couldn’t just drink away feelings, no matter how much people tried with the beverages of their choice or just the beverages at hand.
Joslyn’s fingers tightened around his for a few seconds and he exhaled, glancing at her. From the corner of his eye, he saw a flicker of pain pass through Elaine’s expression, one she smothered quickly. She stood up, heading for the counter, where she stood for a few seconds before she opened a cabinet and got down a plate. Jason watched her as she took out some bread, the butter, started making herself toast.
His lips thinned.
Peter reached out to her. That never happens.
“I’m not going to let him quit,” he said quietly. The statement was for himself, but mostly for her. “I never really say it, but I think he knows. He just smiles at me when I answer. I don’t know what he believes anymore.” That part was at least a little bit of a lie. He didn’t know, but he suspected.
It just hurt to think about what he suspected.
“Good,” Elaine said after a few seconds of silence. “Because I don’t want him to.”
“Neither do I,” Jason said softly.
“How have you guys managed to keep all of this a secret?” Joslyn asked softly. “How is it that no one knows?”
“Think about it,” Jason said quietly. “How much does anyone really know about us, Joss? Yeah, we’re out there on the internet talking about what we’re trying to do, talking about our goals and the game and maybe a little bit about us, but how much does everyone really know?”
“Only as much as you’ve been willing to reveal,” Elaine said, leaning against the counter, watching them. “We know that you were a soldier who served in the Gulf. We know that Marissa and Brannon met in England and got married in Ontario. We know Peter’s a genius with a Ph.D in computer science and technology. We know it’s a family business and you aim for it to stay that way and what you guys want to do is make games that speak to people and touch them in ways that most games don’t. You’re not in it for the money—you’re in it for the joy.”
Jason nodded slowly. “And you know that because we’ve told you. The rest? We keep that under wraps. If you hadn’t seen one or two very specific casts, you don’t know that my niece exists, let alone ever seen her. You don’t know what I told you about our parents, you don’t know about Brannon’s family—you just know very specific slices of information, things that we’ve told you—and nothing else. It’s by design. It’s to protect us—to keep things that should be private, private.”
“Makes sense,” Elaine said softly. “Moreso now, given what your brother told me.”
“How much did he tell you?” Jason asked, stomach sinking for a second before it righted itself.
“He told me what happens. What happened.”
Jason winced and exhaled. “Oh.”
“I don’t like that look,” Joslyn said, studying him. “What did happen? You said that something changed when I asked you last night after you talked to him.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “What we thought was nothing was actually something. His neurologist was wrong. Doesn’t happen often but at the same time we kind of fooled ourselves.”
“He said the same thing to me,” Elaine said. “I’m sorry, Jason.”
“For what?” He glanced up at her, brow furrowing. “You didn’t do anything to us, Elaine. You did what he asked and he was right. My being there isn’t going to change anything, not right now. I just—I worry about him. He’s my big brother and I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
There was that lump, that tightness, the dread that coiled in his belly and left his stomach sour. There it was again, rearing its head as he once again confronted the fact that his brother was sick, that they never knew what was going to happen. Every day was one day at a time—and every day was a gift to all of them.
“He said you don’t know how or why he got it or even what it is,” Elaine said softly. “Is that really true?”
Jason nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, it is. It’s a mystery that even after more than twenty years, we can’t figure it out. Our parents couldn’t, his doctors haven’t been able to, and I don’t know that we have a prayer of ever sorting it out. There’s no evident triggers, no real reason it seems to flare up, it just does and there’s nothing we’ve ever been able to do to change or stop it. We treat the symptoms and hope.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “And every time we hope it doesn’t come back this time, that there’s not a next time it flares up because damn it all, he doesn’t deserve to go through this hell. He’s never hurt anyone in his life. It’s just not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair, though,” Elaine whispered, then turned away again. “He’s sweet, though. Your brother. He seems that way, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Jason murmured. “Yeah, he is. He’s a good guy.”
Elaine nodded and said nothing. Jason swallowed, glancing at Joslyn. She shrugged. Apparently, she didn’t know what to make of the statement, either. At the same time, that moment didn’t seem the right one to press, to ask Elaine to elaborate.
Jason kept watching Elaine for a few seconds more as she finished fixing her toast and then joined them at the table. She met his gaze as she settled in, picking up a piece of toast. “He seems a little lonely.”
“He is.”
She nodded and didn’t say anything else. What had Peter said to her when she’d talked to him in the game the day before?
Did it matter?
Maybe, just maybe, it didn’t.
“So what do we do now?” Joslyn asked, swirling her coffee in her mug. “With…everything?”
“We keep on keeping on,” Jason murmured. “That’s what he wants, so that’s what we’ll do. No one can know outside of the family and us. That’s how this works. That’s how he’s always planned it. We’ll figure it out.”
There was a little part of him that was glad that for once, though, they wouldn’t have to figure it out alone.
