Chapter 4
After lunch, Colin walked with Brandon down Commercial and stopped in a few shops. Colin’s favorite was called Hook. It sold t-shirts, sweats and other clothing with fascinating, original nautical images and themes. Laughing over them with Brandon, he bought several of the less-suggestive items for his niece and nephews. Christmas was months away but it was hard to shop for kids who literally had everything, so he usually opted for unique and quirky.
Eventually they strolled slowly back to the captain’s cottage on Pleasant Street David had purchased several years earlier. It was a small but charming house, painted a buttery yellow. Brandon had planted chrysanthemums and replaced summer annuals, beginning the transition to autumn. The couple had spent most of their summer weekends in Provincetown, in part to prepare for their wedding, but mainly because it was a perfect place for two men to be in love.
And they were very much in love, Colin knew. One could hardly pass the other without reaching out a hand to touch. Whatever Colin’s one-time crush for Brandon might have become had circumstances been different, he had no doubt Brandon and David belonged together.
Seeing them reminded him of how little affection he found in his own adult life. Hookups happened now and then, if he could overcome his nerves and get out of his own way. Even when he did hook up, though, the other guy never invited him to stick around for breakfast. Maybe he just wasn’t good at sex, or perhaps it was the nature of his own upbringing.
As an introverted middle child to Type A parents, the well-intentioned pressure Margaret and Jim Felton had poured on Colin’s shoulders sometimes felt as if it would crush him. As far back as he could recall, the parents shuttled him from enrichment activity to play date to guided mindfulness as they searched for the thing at which he could be a prodigy.
His sister Katherine excelled at everything—gymnastics, math, flute. Griffin, younger than Colin by three years, was born to play soccer and football. He was even elected prom king, for Christ’s sake.
But Colin? Nothing seemed to come naturally to him. Piano lessons, soccer, swimming, even singing—his parents sent him to class after class. If he didn’t triumph in the first day (and he never did), they yanked him, afraid to scar his psyche. They would blame the inadequate teachers and move on to the next attempt.
By the time Colin was ten, he thought he had tried every peewee sport, every musical instrument, and every form of art. In the name of encouraging his freedom, his parents let him spend no time on anything at which he was merely mediocre. As a result, he entered junior high with the firm conviction there was nothing in the world he was good at.
At least academics came more easily to him than art or sports. His parents pushed the administrators of the elite prep school he attended with his siblings to enroll Colin in the most advanced classes available.
He was barely able to keep his head above water. It meant endless nights and weekends of studying. He discovered, though, being alone in his dorm room or the library was preferable to the longing he felt when he watched a group of schoolmates head to the pep rallies or athletic fields for a game.
If there weren’t already enough walls between him and his classmates, the chauffeur made it worse. His parents insisted on sending Watkins to pick up Katherine, Griffin and him on weekends or at holidays. He’d be waiting by the black town car to drive them from their school in New Hampshire to their ostentatious house in Saddle River, New Jersey. They were far from the only rich kids at school, but none of the others seemed to flash it about the way his parents did.
Colin tried to get them to stop but his mother just laughed. “Oh Colin. You don’t want to be crammed into a train or a bus for hours. Trust me. This is better for you.”
Katherine pouted, “I’m not sitting on a bus because you feel guilty or something.” Griffin just shrugged; it made no difference to him.
With no support, Colin backed down.
It wasn’t until his senior year he found the strength to resist the plans his parents made for him. They wanted him to go to Yale, as Katherine, their father and their grandfather had, to study actuarial science and business. Quietly, Colin applied for and got into the University of California Berkeley to pursue international studies. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do with that degree. What he did know, however, was working with Katherine and their father in the family’s insurance business would not be his future.
He weathered the storm of parental disapproval and of threats to refuse tuition, and finally—for perhaps the first time in his life—he won. The helicopter parents who had second-guessed every decision he ever made caved and let him go to California.
Getting away helped. He missed his well-meaning, smothering parents. Being on his own, though, gave him the courage to step out into the sunshine. He would never be as natural and easy-going as his brother Griffin, or as take-charge and dynamic as Katherine, but he found groups to join. He slowly started to make some friends.
The Queer Student Union was perfect for him. The LGBTQIA group was active in addressing issues of gender and orientation identity, and it organized events around campus. Colin discovered he was good enough at graphic design to work with some marketing students on posters and flyers for their various events. The first time he opened a box from the printer to find posters with his design made him ridiculously proud.
An unexpected skill he found was the ability to solicit other student groups to pair for special events. One of his early successes was a combined effort of students from the Black and the Queer student unions to celebrate Black History Month. He got so involved in finding performance space, obtaining concession permits, and recruiting presenters he barely slept for a week. The evening came off without a hitch, and the student union made him special events coordinator in his sophomore year.
It was at a joint fundraiser between his union and the immigration alliance that he met Pranav Banerjee. Pranav was a law student, a few years older than Colin, and active in rounding up speakers to address the student body about issues of immigration. After a panel discussion on the impact of immigration policy on families, at a small reception, Pranav drew Colin aside.
What started as a conversation in a darkened corner turned to a light touch here, and quick caress there. Suddenly Colin found himself making out with funny, passionate, handsome Pranav. That night Colin finally lost his virginity. When he woke up in the morning, sticky and pleasantly sore, to find warm brown eyes and a wide grin facing him, his heart flipped.
Pranav kept it casual between them, though. He must have known how Colin felt, but he was careful about the amount of time they spent together. Maybe once a week he’d call Colin over to his place, or agree to see a movie. It didn’t matter. Colin waited patiently for each call. He tried to be satisfied with the time Pranav gave him because when they were together, it was glorious.
Pranav liked to cook and he started coming over to Colin’s apartment once in a while to assemble fantastic dishes from Southern India. Sometimes other students would join them. When Colin looked around his small dining room to see men and women chattering away as they enjoyed Pranav’s cooking, his heart would fill to bursting.
It lasted for three months, until Colin got a phone call from Pranav. He’d been picked up by immigration officials for overstaying his visa by several years. Colin was shocked. He had no idea Pranav was in the country illegally, or what to do about it. The authorities began deportation proceedings.
“Can you help me?” Pranav asked, and Colin didn’t know what to say. He’d had no occasion to brush against the law, ever. The idea of being detained, even deported, was completely foreign to his consciousness. And his parents would never give him money to help Pranav get a lawyer.
Trapped in his own consternation, he must have hesitated too long because Pranav said, “It’s okay. I get it. Take care of yourself, Colin.” He disconnected.
A few weeks later, Colin heard Pranav had been deported to India. They never spoke again.
So many questions ate at Colin as he tried to understand what had happened. How had Pranav managed to stay past his visa? How did he enroll, and work, and find a place to rent? How much fear had he lived with, that immigration officials would one day catch up with him? Had he made some mistake that led to the unraveling of everything he worked for? What would happen to him, back in India?
What, if anything, had Colin meant to him? What more could Colin have done?
The lack of answers drove him to become increasingly involved in the immigration alliance. By the time he graduated, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. His trust fund gave him plenty of freedom to take an unpaid internship in Washington with the non-profit center called the Immigration Initiative. Once a low-salaried position opened up, he took the job. He’d been there ever since.
The work was rewarding, and worth the aggravation when his father tried to get him to come join the family firm instead. His mother, at least, seemed to accept his choice. She’d even held some fundraisers for his organization, drawing big money for their little non-profit. Detente seemed to be the word of the day with his family. He’d take it.
But he wondered, often, what became of Pranav and whether he blamed Colin for his weakness. In quiet moments, the shame of it rolled through Colin like a wave crashing on the shore, leaving him cold and breathless.
It hit him again, as he walked the quiet streets of Provincetown. Maybe Hernán didn’t want his help at all, and maybe he was right to reject Colin the night before. Maybe he could tell Colin wasn’t strong enough to see it through, to work with Hernán and help him to stay safe.
He didn’t even know why he’d made the offer of help to Rudy in the first place. Surely it wasn’t just Hernán’s dark eyes stirring something inside Colin. The quiet confidence Hernán had in himself, the humor and warmth he’d shown, even the way he stood up to Gerald… All of that spoke of a strength Colin envied and, truth be told, found attractive.
He’d heard Hernán clearly tell Gerald he didn’t sleep with men, so at best Colin was setting himself up for more heartache. Even if he persuaded Hernán of his sincere desire to help, even if they became allies, Hernán would be able to give him nothing more than friendship.
Well, so be it. Colin would keep the attraction he felt to himself, and focus on helping Hernán because it was the right thing to do. To say thanks for pulling him from the harbor and getting him to safety, and because he’d been unable to help Pranav when he needed it. Then, once he’d given whatever aid he could to Hernán, they would inevitably go their separate ways.
Yet Colin was unable to kill completely a spark of hope.
Hernán stood on aching feet, scrubbing the seemingly endless stack of pans, pots and plates. The humiliation of the encounter with Gerald burned in his stomach and had him grinding his teeth.
Rudy shot anguished looks in his direction every time he came through the kitchen. It wasn’t Rudy’s fault, no matter what he thought. Gerald Nimble singled Hernán out for no better reason than he sensed his helplessness. He was just the latest in a string of people who saw something they wanted in Hernán’s face there for the taking.
He’d been told since childhood he was beautiful. Sometimes it was an old woman, stroking his cheek or running her hands through his thick hair as she exclaimed at how pretty he was. Sometimes it was a girl at school, looking up at him from under dark eyelashes and offering a shy compliment.
One terrible time, when he was very young, it was a worker delivering sodas to his tío’s grocery.
Hernán’s immediate family was mostly gone by then, either to the United States or to heaven. His father made the border crossing when Hernán was an infant; he’d never known the man except from letters and phone calls on scattered holidays. His mother left El Salvador when he was five and took his older brother, putting him and his younger sister in the care of his father’s mother.
Abuela was a stern and unloving woman who narrowed her eyes when Hernán was too effusive or happy. “Pedro left me with two useless girls,” she’d say to him. “What will you do when you start bleeding like a woman—stick a tampon up your ass?”
He asked her once for a princess Barbie for his birthday. She beat him. “Boys don’t play with dolls or they turn into homosexuals. If you turn out to be a fag, I’m throwing your useless ass onto the street. I’m not raising Pedro’s faggot son.”
His hand still ached from the day he told Abuela about the man in the grocery store. She hit it again and again to make sure he told no one else. Lesson learned, he kept it from everyone—even Rudy—in case they thought he wanted what the man had done to him. He learned to keep quiet, and to avoid attention. He grew his hair longer and let it fall in his face, even though that too angered his grandmother.
Being away from her was one of the few good things about where he found himself. He missed his home terribly sometimes, because apart from Abuela, he’d managed to have a happy childhood. He could still call up that sense of safety, of security, he’d known playing soccer in the street and other games after school with kids who were his friends and neighbors.
Even more than his friends, though, he missed school. Hernán wanted an education more than anything, and as he grew older, he had dreams of becoming a teacher. In his little school in the Las Margaritas neighborhood of San Marcos, he sat straight in his desk each day, and felt polished and bright. His homework was always completed, always neatly organized, and almost always correct.
His teachers adored him, for the most part, because they could see his hunger. At the end of the school year, his teacher Mrs. Alvarado would give him a first place present. Miss Cruz got him to read poetry, though he knew to keep those books in school and far away from his grandmother’s sharp eyes. Miss Cruz also encouraged his writing, and entered one of his essays on the history of El Salvador in a competition. He won.
That feeling of pride, at being the smartest kid in his class and having the best grades, made up so much for the biting sarcasm from Abuela. His other family and neighbors, at least, would be proud of him. They gave him respect for his drive, and would tell him about their expectations.
Languages were his best subject of all. He studied English avidly, and practiced with the few American tourists he encountered or who wandered into his uncle’s grocery store. He’d spend hours flipping through his textbooks with their made-up dialogues and their cultural discussions.
One of his teachers loved to play old black-and-white American films when she hadn’t prepared a lesson, and those got him into reading books in English like Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Enchanted by the indigenous people he saw and their brightly-colored clothes, he learned Nahuatl. After that, he managed to pick up a smattering of some of the other languages including Quiche, Mixteco and Zapoteco.
When he was older, he moved on to French. A teacher in his college encouraged his natural linguistics skills, and even got him started with Arabic.
For all his facility with language, though, mathematics escaped him. His sixth-grade teacher was Mr. Muñoz, from Colombia. Mr. Muñoz tried every technique he could think of to make Hernán understand. He even offered to tutor Hernán at his house. They picked a Saturday afternoon, but his grandmother heard about it first.
“You aren’t going there,” she decreed. “He lives alone. A real man shouldn’t be a teacher anyway,” she said as she threw a dark look in Hernán’s direction. She muttered “maricón” as she turned away, and he didn’t dare ask if she meant Mr. Muñoz or Hernán.
He was afraid to tell Mr. Muñoz, too, because he didn’t want to say why he couldn’t go to the teacher’s house. Instead, he just didn’t show up. Mr. Muñoz was polite to him after, but didn’t try so hard to break through Hernán’s difficulties.
Even with his poor grades in math, though, Hernán thrived. He talked to his mother and father three or four times a year. He did what Abuela told him to do around the house, and otherwise stayed out of her way.
He spent as much time as he could with his favorite tío, Juan, helping him in his grocery store. Oh, and the trips to the countryside to visit family for holidays. His aunts and uncles had places with creeks, mango trees, jocote trees. He and his cousins all raced to climb to the best branch with the best view. Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve were exciting because he got to wear new clothes. Even as tight-fisted as Abuela could be, she bought Hernán and his sister Brijith new outfits for the family gatherings. They would sit among their family and watch fireworks launched to celebrate the New Year.
He saw how everyone mocked his older cousin Rudy, of course, until Rudy’s father took him away to the United States. He learned from that to hide many things about himself—many desires—from his family. Still, his life was mostly good.
Until the Cuernos del Diablo. Until they picked him, and stalked, and stabbed. Until he ran, and fell prey to Lonnie, who dragged him…
No. That’s done.
He had to find a way to escape from Gerald’s demands without putting Rudy’s job in danger. But he had no clue how to accomplish that. Reluctantly, he thought about Rudy’s words. The man Hernán had pulled from the harbor said he could help. What if he can? What is there to lose?
Stupid thought. Despite the small favor Hernán had rendered, the stranger would no doubt demand payment for any help. And what could that young, soft, kind but transparent Colin do against a vile bastard like Gerald anyway? Hernán was grasping at clouds to even consider talking to him like Rudy wanted.
The problem was his. He had a little more than a day to come up with a way to neutralize Gerald, or he would have to submit.