Colin knew there was an irony to his wanting to spend the rest of his life in school – a place he’d always hated – but that’s the way it was. He didn’t dwell on the irony and he generally didn’t dwell on the past. He wouldn’t have been thinking of any of these things at all if it hadn’t been for Evan’s comment about visiting his parents tomorrow. What Evan still didn’t grasp was that simply being in the same room as them was stressful for both Colin and his parents – especially if the visit wasn’t planned well in advance. Had he shown up unexpectedly, he knew they’d sit uncomfortably in the living room trying to make small talk while memories of the past filled the air between them like a poisonous gas. He’d feel waves of disappointment and judgment radiating out from them, apparent in the things they said or didn’t say, and who needed that? He didn’t, and neither did they. In the last three years, he’d tried to keep his infrequent visits to about an hour, almost always on the holidays, an arrangement that seemed to suit them all.
His older sisters, Rebecca and Andrea, had tried to talk to him about making amends to his parents, but he’d shut down those conversations the same way he’d done with Evan. Their lives with their parents, after all, had been different from his. They’d both been wanted, while he’d been a big fat whoops seven years later. He knew they meant well, but he didn’t have a lot in common with them. Both of them were college graduates and married with kids. They lived in the same upscale neighborhood as their parents and played tennis on the weekends. The older he’d gotten, the more he’d come to acknowledge that the choices they’d made in their own lives had been a lot smarter than his own. Then again, they didn’t have serious issues.
He knew that his parents, like his sisters, were essentially good people. It had taken him years in therapy to accept the fact that he’d been the one with the problems, not them. He no longer blamed his mother and father for the things that had happened to him or for what they had or hadn’t done; if anything, he considered himself a lucky son of two incredibly patient people. So what if he’d been raised by nannies? So what if his folks had finally thrown in the towel and shipped him off to military school? When he’d really needed them, when other parents probably would have given up, they’d never lost hope that he could turn his life around.