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He takes after an older brother he’s never met.
Everybody says he’s the carbon copy of his dad, but if you were to ask his dad, he would tell you something else.
He smiles when people point out the resemblance because, of course, it is there and nobody could ever deny it; but his dad always says that he resembles his oldest son more.
“It’s like you stole Trey’s whole face,” he says.
As he got older and learned about everything his dad had done to the people he cared about, and what his oldest brother would grow up to do to those he cared about too, he sometimes wondered if his dad saw him as a replacement for Trey; a second chance to do things right with him.
Sometimes, he wonders if his dad chokes on Trey’s name when saying his.
He has the same smile as his older sister who died.
Growing up, his mom would pinch his cheeks and say, “Look at that beautiful smile! Same as your sister’s.”
He knows it’s a compliment and he knows Marissa was world-renowned for her breathtaking smile but, he doesn’t particularly like it.
He knows Marissa will always be family but she died before he was born; she never even had an inkling that he would exist. It’s not even that he didn’t remember her, it’s that he never knew her.
His smile does look like hers did—he’s studied her pictures next to a mirror long enough to know it’s true—but he doesn’t want to be compared to a ghost.
It seems his whole life is spent in the shadow of those gone long before him.
The stories he learns of his parents from before he was born make no sense to him.
He hears stories of his mother, his independent single mother who’d always been the strongest person he’s known, marrying man after man so they could support her. His mother, who raised him with so much love and joy and patience, blind to all the drinking and partying of his oldest sister and then becoming controlling of every aspect of her life. His mother, who is so attentive to him, leaving Kaitlin to fend for herself in boarding school and ignoring her at every turn.
He hears stories of his father, who had always wiped his tears away and hugged him when he had nightmares, making his brothers cry and making fun of them for showing any type of emotion. He hears stories of his father, who had always protected him from all the evils of the world, being the evil in his brothers’s world, shoving them and punching them down.
He shouldn’t have been brought up in a world full of love.
He shouldn’t exist.
But he does, and he was.
He thinks his parents see him as some type of second chance, a way to make up for all the damage that came before him.
Growing up, he noticed the difference in how his oldest siblings were brought up.
He can’t even remember when he first learned about Trey and Marissa, it was as if from the womb he came to the world with the knowledge of his siblings deep in his blood. It was just a truth so simple about the universe, the same as the fact the sun rose every morning, Nobody knows where my oldest brother is and my oldest sister is dead.
That has always been normal to him.
But something that became appallingly clearer as he grew up, is the difference in how these two siblings were brought up. More specifically, how Marissa is much preferred to Trey.
His house has as many pictures of Marissa as it does of Kaitlin and him, framed and littered all throughout the walls and surfaces. There are even some with Ryan, no pictures of just him, but pictures with Marissa and even some with his mom and Kaitlin. But there are no pictures of Trey anywhere. He only knows what he looks like from an old picture of him and Ryan his dad keeps in his wallet.
And not just that, but they didn’t talk about Trey much.
His dad mentions the fact that he looks like him and that he’s been gone for years, but he doesn’t really talk about him (though, his dad doesn’t talk much about his life before meeting his mom and that has everything to do with everything he did in the past).
His mom doesn’t talk about him and when he asks, her smiles become so tight that it probably gives her a headache.
Kaitlin doesn’t know anything about Trey so she can’t talk about him.
Even Ryan, who grew up alongside Trey, doesn’t talk too much about him. He hears more stories about Marissa from him than about Trey.
He didn’t understand why until many years down the line.
He’d known that before he was born, before his parents had even met, Ryan and Marissa had dated and that they had loved each other—his mom says that Ryan was the love of Marissa’s young life. He knew that the history between all his siblings was complicated and something he would never understand.
He just didn’t expect the history between his three elder siblings.
He learns about how Trey had hurt Marissa by trying to rape her. He learns that Ryan confronted him about it and how Trey almost killed him. He learns that Marissa shot Trey in defense of Ryan, almost killing him. He learns that Trey ran off after that and that’s why he’s lost to the world. Ryan tells him that the last he heard from him, he was a casino dealer in Las Vegas.
Selfishly, what he gets from that story is that his family was never meant to be a whole one, that he was born at the edge of many different family trees and didn’t belong to a single one.
He doesn’t see Ryan that often while growing up and he can’t say he blames him.
He doesn’t live in Newport but he lives in the same state while Kaitlin lived all the way on the east coast and she managed to visit a lot more.
For all the problems Julie had with her daughters, she was never truly the villain in their stories. She wasn’t the best mother but she made the effort and she and Kaitlin got along now as if there had never been a time where being related by blood was all that brought them together.
But Frank had been the villain of Trey and Ryan’s stories. He had been the great evil they ran from, the one they hid from and planned ways to take down.
His dad and Ryan had made up before he was even born, but Ryan would never forget everything Frank put him and their family through—the terror, the bruises, the littered beer bottles; the fact that he’d had to make himself so small and invisible it lingered in the fact he was so quiet and reluctant to say how he felt.
He can’t imagine what it must be like for Ryan, seeing Frank be the dad he’d always wished he’d had growing up. He knows that’s probably why he doesn’t see him as often, because seeing it would only open up the wound.
He doesn’t understand why his dad was so awful to his brothers but not to him.
His dad had hurt so many people in his life, but he has never hurt him.
He has to reckon with the fact that his dad may be the villain in many people’s stories. He has to reckon with the fact his dad may be a bad person but he’s his favorite son.
He has so many siblings yet he is so alone.
Kaitlin visits as much as she can and he knows that she loves him, that he’s her baby brother who she’ll always love to bits. But they didn’t grow up together, she has her own life, one that doesn’t include him anywhere near the center stage.
He knows Ryan loves him too, but it’s much more distant, like a cousin rather than a brother. He has another family, with other siblings who probably don’t hurt to look at. Other siblings who don’t have the face of the brother who tried to kill him or the father who made his life a living hell, nor the smile of the girl he once loved. Other siblings who aren’t a reminder of everything he’s lost.
Trey is gone from the face of the earth and he will probably never get to meet him.
Marissa is six feet underground. He probably wouldn’t exist if Marissa had lived.
His siblings are stories, figures from another time.
They’re part of his origin story, but he’s barely a blip in theirs.
He is a mosaic of all that came before him.
He looks like his dad, and he carries the weight of his love, something his other sons didn’t get to carry.
He has his mom’s eyes, and he knows she’s hurt others in horrible ways to get her way.
He has his brother’s nose, and he reminds him of the horrors of his childhood and of his complicated history with his other biological brother.
He has the same high cheeks as his sister, and he knows she mourns the family she grew up with.
He takes after a brother he’s never met.
He has the same smile as his sister who died.
These people who make up his family, even though he’s not sure he really makes theirs.
He bears all that came before him on his shoulders, trying to hold on to it all.