Chapter Text
It's a simple fact that in life, you can't have everything you wish for. Conrad Fisher knows that better than most. At his core, he is not a pessimistic man. Just a realist. And for a while now, life has been teaching him, time and again, that what he wishes for just doesn't come true.
—
“Spring breaks loose, the time is near"
He can pinpoint the exact moment it all went upside down, like the world tipped on its axis and the life he had always envisioned for himself became infinitely out of reach. The exact second in which everything changed, setting him on a collision course with the inevitable destruction of everything he once thought possible.
On a warm spring afternoon, his last couple of classes cancelled for the day - he doesn’t even remember why anymore - he opens the front door of his house, determined to sneak into his room and spend some quiet time reading The Lord of The Rings. School has been kicking his ass with preparations for finals, and all he wants at this moment is to nerd out in peace for an hour or so. Instead, the moment the front door opens, he hears the unmistakable sounds of his mother crying, his father saying something about how it had meant nothing, how it was just sex and it meant nothing, how it would be different this time.
And then, much more terrifyingly, they are talking about tests, and hospital appointments, and her prognosis about time left, and how they will get a second and a third opinion, and Conrad thinks he’s entered into an alternate reality where his dad is a cheater, and his mom's cancer is back and incurable. He thinks this must be some fever dream that he needs to wake up from immediately. But he's not asleep, and there is no such thing as infinite worlds and different versions of the same people. Conrad stands there, body half in through the front door, one hand clutching his keys, the other his school bag, stuck in between the urge to walk in and demand an explanation, and the desperate need to turn back the clock to a time when none of this is happening.
Fight or flight. Unable to move, unable to do anything but listen as his parents argue over love affairs from days gone by, and as he slowly begins to comprehend what the stern resignation in his mother’s voice means, Conrad feels like the air has been sucked right out of his lungs. Whispers like “I can’t do it all again,” and “I am tired,” and “I want to go on my own terms,” and “I AM doing it for the boys,” and “We’ll tell them in the fall, I want us all to have one last happy summer” slowly register into his brain. No, lungs is not quite right. He is actually certain all the air has left the room, the house, the whole damn universe, and anyway, who cares if he can’t breathe in a world where his mother will soon be gone.
Conrad’s out the door, into his car and halfway to Cousins before he even knows what he’s doing. It isn’t until he feels wetness dripping from his cheeks, down his chin and onto his pants that he realizes the edges of his vision are blurring and he has been hyperventilating ever since he left the house. He feels like an outside observer in his own body as he tries to recognize his surroundings, takes the next exit off the main road and pulls the car into a parking lot near Rocky Nook. He gets out of, kicks off his shoes as if they have personally offended him, and then the second his feet touch the sand on Grays Beach, he is running into the water as fast as his legs can carry him. Conrad walks waist-deep into the ocean, and it’s the cold water that shocks him enough to make him feel like he can finally breathe again. In, pulling the air into his lungs as the momentum of the water tries to drag him into its depths. Out, forcing his fear and despair past his lips and away from his body as the waves crash around him on their race to the shore.
In. A wild thought comes unbidden into his mind. His phone is in his bag in the car, dry and safe from the ocean, in perfect working condition. He could call Belly right now. Belly would know what to do.
Out. He can’t tell anyone. His mom doesn’t want them to know. He can’t tell his brother, he can’t talk to Laurel, or Steven, or his dad… Not that he even actually wants to talk to his dad, but he doesn’t have the bandwidth to unpack the reality of his father’s infidelity at this moment. He can’t pick up the phone and share this with Belly, lean on her.
In. Even if he could, would he? Belly, who has been the definition of everything good and beautiful for as long as he can remember. Belly, who brings light and sunshine the moment she walks into a room. Belly, who represents love and joy and happiness, and looks at him as if he can make everything right in the world. Belly, who loves Susannah as if she’s her own second mom.
Out. He knows, in his heart, that he cannot be the one to take that away from her. He can’t look her in the eye and tell her her favourite person is sick and dying. And he certainly can't do it over the phone.
His clothes are soaking wet and sticking to his body, and somewhere in the back of his shell-shocked mind self-preservation kicks in, and he walks backwards until the waves are lapping around his knees. Then, he stands there. He stands, a tiny insignificant particle in the limitless expanse of water and the endless loss cementing itself in his soul, and builds walls around his heart, brick by brick. He stands and builds, until he can picture himself walking into his house and pretending life is the same as it had been that morning when he left for school. He pictures himself sitting at the dinner table with his dying mom, and his cheating dad, and his poor clueless brother, and acting like the same Conrad he's always been. He pictures himself talking to Jeremiah, playing video games with him, having a drink, or breakfast, or any other mundane thing brothers might do, and not blurting out that their mom won't be there this time next year. He pictures himself not showing that he’s drowning in resentment towards his dad. He immediately chastises himself when resentment creeps in towards his mom too, for making a liar out of him without even knowing it. For making him grieve her when she's right there with him and will be for months to come. He can't blame her for this, because what kind of man would that make him.
The ironic thing is, he thinks as the ocean continues its endless dance around him, he had been excited for summer to come. In his dreams, Belly is the answer to every question his heart might ask. Those hopes he’s only allowed himself to acknowledge in the quiet of the night had begun to form into maybes and half-built plans. Things with Aubrey had been going downhill for weeks now, and Conrad knows it’s because every time he closes his eyes, it’s Belly he sees in his mind. He knows she can sense it too, that he’s been withdrawn and distracted. He’d been planning to break it off with her this weekend. He’d been planning to maybe see if he can overcome his fears of change, and screwing things up, and maybe, just maybe, asking Belly out for some ice cream, or a walk along the beach, or a rematch of Shoot Your Shot. Now, there’s no world in which he can do that. He can’t possibly look her in the eye and ask her out, not with the secret of what is coming between them. He will still break up with Aubrey though, it’s the right thing to do.
He weaves a book in his mind, and in it he puts his dreams of tentative hands holding on the boardwalk, of shy but sure kisses in the moonlight, of soft skin and whispered moans and cries of pleasure in the dead of night, of reaching for her and holding her close and never letting her go. Conrad gives the book a title, “What can never be,” binds it with a single solid thread of gold and then buries it deep behind the walls he’s built. This life belongs to the Conrad of this morning, whose mom is happy and healthy and will be there to cheer him on the loudest as he graduates from college, and will help him pick out furniture for his first apartment, and smile at him with tears in her eyes as he marries the sunshine girl of his dreams. This life belongs to someone else now, and it will never be his, so he puts it in a book, closes it, and vows to lose it in his mind.
Conrad stands in the water, and allows himself to live a whole lifetime that will never be in the space of mere minutes. Eventually, he starts to feel his body shivering and his logical brain provides useful explanations like cold shock, exposure, and scarier terms like incapacitation and hypothermia. He forces himself to make his way out of the water and slowly makes his way back across the sand bank and over to his car. Like a mental checklist, he goes through the simple steps of finding his socks and shoes, putting them back on, opening his trunk and retrieving a pair of dry jogging shorts, changing out of his soaked pants, climbing back into the driver’s seat, starting the engine, turning the heat on.
He drives home, prepares himself to act as if nothing is amiss, to say nothing and hold everything, and give his mom the perfect summer she dreams of. With every mile he puts between himself and that shore, the deeper he buries the book in his mind. And he knows, with a certainty he’s never wished to have, with every fiber of his being, that the life he’d only just allowed himself to dream about will never come to pass.
—
Life goes on, somehow. The walls hold strong, the book stays buried. Conrad goes through the motions, finds ways to cope. Makes it through, day by day. So what if he drinks more than he ever has before, and has started smoking weed at random times throughout the week. He’s a teenager who’s been dumped by his girlfriend, and no one thinks to question that excuse. In the end, it’s Aubrey who breaks it off between them, after he fails to show up to a date or reply to her texts three days in a row. In a sick way, it works out well for him, because the adults use his broken heart to justify his rapid withdrawal from everyone and everything. He doesn’t mind. It means he can spend his days in his room, avoid family time unless absolutely forced to be present. It means he doesn’t have to constantly lie to everyone’s face and pretend life’s just peachy, and his mom is not dying and actively doing nothing to try and prevent it.
Hiding the truth from Jeremiah is the hardest, it eats at him day and night, because his brother has the right to know, damn it. But it’s not his secret to tell. So he smokes, and drinks, and loses himself further into the recesses of his mind where every terrible scenario has already happened, so he might as well embrace it.
—
"And I snuck in through the garden gate every night that Summer just to seal my fate"
When they go to Cousins that summer, his father does not. Work in London, his mom says, and honestly, Conrad is glad. One less thing to hide, one less pretense to maintain. He’s been terrible at even being in the same room as his dad, so that at least works to his benefit.
He runs into Nicole at a party at somebody’s house, and even though he barely says five words strung together, they hang out most of the night. She kisses him, and he doesn’t push her away. Does it again the next day. The sad truth is, it’s easier going to Nicole’s and spending time with her, than it is being at his own house with his dying mother and the brother he can barely look in the eyes.
“Hey, this thing is only casual, right?” He asks, in what he hopes is a nonchalant tone, and she bursts out laughing next to him by the pool. He takes that as a yes. Breathes easier for a moment, knowing that at least in this one thing he is not a fuck up and a failure.
Things get harder (read: impossible) when Belly arrives. The moment he lays eyes on her, it’s like the sun is peeking through the clouds for the first time in months, fighting to light up the world even through a storm. The book in his mind starts rattling against its shelf, threatening to fall and spill open and send all those dreams he buried back into the world. He drinks more, kisses Nicole harder. Knows all of it is wrong, but he still doesn’t know what else to do.
Tries to spend as little time as possible around Belly, because he feels like the words might just spill out of his mouth without any sort of permission the second she walks into a room. Thinks that every moment he spends with her, he’s in real danger of breaking down at her feet, telling her everything, begging her to help him, to hold him, to make it all better. He’s pathetic like that.
“He’s had a hard time adjusting after the break up,” he overhears his mom telling Laurel one day, when the summer kids are out on the beach and he’s supposed to be heading out to meet with friends. In reality, he is planning on sneaking a bottle of something up into his bedroom and pretending he’s not there. The absurdity of him acting this way because of a schoolboy fling registers in his brain though, and he might have laughed if his body could remember what laughter feels like.
Suddenly overwhelmed with the need to prove them wrong, that he can be normal and have fun, he goes to the beach and joins Jere, Steven and Belly for a game of beach volleyball.
Tries not to flirt with her. Fails miserably anyway. Pathetic. At least he's trying.
But he knows that he’s a ticking bomb, that all that pent up grief and confusion and frustration at how useless he feels is bubbling just beneath the surface, waiting to overflow and send his entire life into even further disarray than it already is. So Conrad sets about pushing her away instead, because what else is he supposed to do.
He can’t be her friend without the book trying to rip through the golden thread and become a reality. And he certainly can’t allow himself to try to be more than her friend, because everything is fucked, and nothing is right anymore. She’s getting attention from boys, and there’s a jealous rage burning through his chest every time he sees Cameron (or Cam Cameron, as Jere calls him, which is just fucking ridiculous) making mooney eyes at her. But then again, it’s not like he can even blame the dude, because that’s exactly how he looks at her.
Tries to stay away. Fails. Pathetic.
It’s really a very frustrating cycle, but he finds that being near her and bickering is better than not spending time with her at all. He’s failing on all fronts these days.
He does stop smoking though, because she asks him. Well, tells him really. And when Belly needs something, his immediate reaction is always to do whatever is required of him to give her what she wants. Which is vastly inconvenient at present, because his mom is slowly deteriorating right before his eyes, and he can’t even use weed to pretend it’s not happening. He drinks more. Turns out, wine tastes alright after the third glass regardless of the price tag of the bottle. Nicole notices he’s even more in his own head than at the start of summer, but she’s not the kind of girl to question him about it. It’s one of the things he likes most about her.
His carefully built walls come crumbling down on an otherwise regular Thursday while he’s teaching Cleveland to sail. The boat is rotting, his life is rotting, the world is rotting, everything is fucked, and Conrad can’t breathe. There is an almost unavoidable urge to jump into the water growing inside him, to allow the ocean’s cold embrace to make him feel something other than fear and panic and failure. If Cleveland wasn’t holding a hand to his chest, he thinks he might actually leap. As it stands, there’s nothing to do but try to ride the wave of panic, and then the words are tumbling out of his mouth, he can’t stop them or hold them in any longer, and then they are out into the world. It’s real. His mom is sick and she is going to die, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
It’s not about stepping on a crack anymore, his whole world is covered in cracks. They are everywhere, it’s only a matter of time before everything comes crashing down around him. But something Cleveland says weaves its way into his consciousness. It’s not on him. He is not the one who will keep his mom alive, he can’t turn back time and make his dad a better man. The one thing he can do is do his best with the people he loves while they are there. And that includes Belly.
He stops hiding and pushing her away. Lets life take its course.
Once the truth is out about his mom, lifting the weight off his shoulders, he feels lighter than he ever has. Admitting he needs her, he wants her, feels as easy as breathing. Easier actually, considering Conrad has found breathing occasionally quite difficult recently. When his lips first touch hers on that beach, their beach, he knows his fate is sealed. There will never be another girl for him. He will never feel about someone else the way he feels about her. The book bursts wide open, dreams flying around in every direction, filling the world in bursts of color he can only see with her slender hand held safely in his.
Conrad smiles. He laughs, a pure, unadulterated burst of joy feeling his lungs, and he thinks they will be alright after all. His mom will fight, and she will win, as she has before. He will hold the only girl he’s ever loved close and never let go. They will be alright. He can have it all, his dreams are within reach. It will be okay.