Always Sylvia arranged her features into a suitably sorrowful expression. Uncle Nicky had gone and they were all to feel very sad, and sorry for Nate and his family. And she was, she knew that Nate would be unhappy, and that made her want to find Uncle Nicky and beat him with her tiny fists until he was sorry. She did not think that she herself would actually miss him very much though. He was also just more a source of curiosity than misery right now. He hadn’t died. You had to feel sad when someone died, but he was just ‘gone.’ Also, it meant that Nate was coming to stay. She had been disappointed when she had learnt that it wasn’t forever and ever, but it was going to be for at least two weeks, and that was very exciting. She was perfectly happy to trade Uncle Nicky being a member of their family for Nate coming to live with them.
When they arrived, she could see Nate had been crying, and then her face wasn’t pretend any more, because she never wanted anything to make Nate cry, and she ran forward and hugged him tightly, and then hugged Jeremy too because she knew she had to. She slipped her hand into Nate’s whist the grown ups were exchanging boring grown up talk about hello, and so terribly sorry and such.
“Come on,” she told him, “I’ll show you where you’re sleeping.” She pulled him away, up stairs to the guest bedroom nearest her own suite.
“How are you?” she asked.
I’m fine.
Two words. That was all he needed to say. If he had been writing it down, Nathaniel would have needed to use three words - I am fine - but since he was just speaking, and just speaking to Sylvia even more than that, he could get away with just saying two words. Two short words, even. He opened his mouth, determined to say them, but they stuck in his throat.
Even with all of his mother’s reassurances, Nathaniel had still not wanted to see anyone or leave his house. As long as they didn’t leave the house, he could pretend that his father was only on a trip, which had happened before. Admittedly, he had thought angrily, it would take a heck of a surprise – Nathaniel couldn’t even imagine the kind of surprise Dad would need – to make up for how much he’d upset Nathaniel's mother and Uncle Alexander with those papers, the ones which had made everyone confused, but…still. As long as they had been at home, there had been a chance it would all just go away. Their departure this morning had been delayed by Nathaniel starting to cry again at the realization that once they went to Uncle Alexander’s, there was really no way that things could just go back to normal.
“I – I heard Uncle Alexander tell Mama that Father did something wrong,” said Nathaniel in a small voice. “I wasn’t supposed to hear them, but I did. Do you know what he did?”
He was hanging all his hopes of finally understanding his situation on Sylvia. Maybe Uncle Alexander had said more to her, or she had overheard him say something to Aunt Avery, or – or maybe she’d just ask him and tell Nathaniel what he said later. If his father left for good and Uncle Alexander told Sylvia ‘no’ about anything in the same week, the foundations of the whole world were bound to crumble. Both of those things couldn’t happen at once. They just…couldn’t.
“He left,” Sylvia replied cautiously. Nate looked like he might cry, and she really didn’t want that to happen. Well, she ninety percent didn’t. To say that she hadn’t pictured Nate sobbing on her shoulder and her being the one and only person in the universe who could understand and make him feel better would have been a lie. There was a difference, however, between the fantasy of being the one to make it all better and the reality of seeing him have some kind of emotional breakdown. She knew, anyway, that Nate already loved her more than he loved anyone else in the whole wide world. She just enjoyed the idea of melodramatic proofs of that manifesting themselves. “Daddy said he decided not to be a part of our family any more.” Although Sylvia was mildly curious about where Uncle Nicky had gone, she had been willing to take at face value her father’s statements that he was bad and he was gone, because daddy was always right about everything. She felt it was a decent answer to Nate’s question too, because abandoning the family did, in her eyes, constitute doing something very wrong indeed; the family was everything.
Nathaniel looked around the guest bedroom, which was…a guest room. There were none of his own things here – his comforter and pillows, his bedside lamp and the books which had migrated from his bookshelf to his nightstand, his desk (perpetually messy despite Mama’s best efforts to induce him to clean it) and wardrobe…his photographs. He had not, he realized with something near panic, packed any of those. He wanted his photographs, he wanted to go home….
“Why would he do that?” he asked Sylvia. “How do you even do that – how do you just – decide you don’t want to be part of the family anymore?!” He realized he had raised his voice and immediately felt horrible. “I’m sorry. I’m not angry at you. I just – “ he took a deep breath. “How do you do that? I can’t just say – oh, Simon’s my brother now and Jeremy isn’t, or Uncle Alexander’s my dad now. You can’t just do that.” It was not his habit to make such firm statements to Sylvia, he usually thought his cousin was cleverer than he was, but this he knew. Your family was your family, for better or worse. Mama was Dad’s wife, Jeremy and Nathaniel were his sons, Uncle Alexander was his brother, Grandmama was his mother, and Simon and Sylvia were his nephew and his niece. He couldn’t just decide those things weren’t true. If that was how things worked, why – anyone could decide anything at all. A shopkeeper could decide he was a member of a good family and demand that they give him money – after all, if you could decide not to belong to one family, what was stopping you from deciding you were part of another one? It just couldn’t be done. “Why would he even want to do that? Were Jeremy and me – was I – were we not good enough, or….”
“Grown ups can though,” whispered Sylvia. “They can decide that other people aren’t in the family. If… if they do something really, really bad then there’s…. The ‘D’ word,” she shifted uncomfortably. Disownment was not a pleasant subject. Most of the time it hovered over them, an invisible spectre that they knew of but just didn’t talk about. “So maybe they can decide for themselves too. I-I don’t know why anyone would do that though,” she said, her confusion bordering on being offended. The Family was practically sacred, in Sylvia’s book. No one could not want to be part of their family any more, when it was the best thing one could possibly be. “Maybe he went crazy or something,” she suggested. She didn’t think it was a very nice idea and she wasn’t sure how it would go over with Nate, but it was the only idea she could think of that made the facts fit. Not just the fact that he’d left The Family but also that he’d left his family, he’d left Nate, who was the most wonderful person in the world. “No! No, Nate of course not,” she wrapped her arms around him fiercely, as he questioned whether he had failed to be good enough, “You’re wonderful, Nate. No one would ever want to leave you.” She stroked his hair, trying to think of something reassuring or consoling to say. “It’ll be ok,” she promised him, “You’ve got me,” it might have been a little egotistical on Sylvia’s part to think that she could be any kind of adequate substitute or make up for the abandonment of a parent, but it was, for once, not just selfishness on her part - whilst she did regard her rightful place as being the centre of Nate’s universe, that at least in part came from the genuine and close friendship that the two of them had; that is to say, she did not just automatically regard it as her dues, as she did with some others, but regarded herself as central in Nate’s world as the logical return on the fact that he was the centre of hers, “We’ll always have each other.”
Nathaniel didn’t know what to think about his cousin’s theories about his father’s sanity, but he did know how he felt about her reassurances. He hugged his cousin back, wondering if he was somehow disloyal to his mother and Uncle Alexander and Aunt Avery for only now, for the first time, feeling the tiniest bit better. He didn’t have to pretend for Sylvia like he did for everyone else – didn’t have to be so good so Jeremy could see how to behave, so Jeremy and Mama and he assumed Uncle Alexander (Uncle Alexander did not seem as sad as his mother did, but Dad was – had been – his uncle’s brother and brothers were supposed to love and be loyal to each other) wouldn’t be even more upset than they already were because of him. “Always,” he agreed.