Swift as a Coursing River | Ongoing

1. The fault line

Their lives are still whole, but Edwin sees the fault line. It's thin, barely a crack, but it's already widening as he's sitting there on the couch next to Ellen.

"What's this all about, dad? Why did we have to sit down?" Sandra crosses her arms.

After their Saturday dinners, they usually all do their own thing, but today, Edwin asked for a moment to talk. Ellen ordered everyone to sit down in the living room with her easy authority and he added: "We have something to tell you." That was the first crack and now his grown daughters have smelled blood. Tamara might not say anything, but her gaze is just as piercing.

"Is mum pregnant?" Sandra asks. She leans forward to have a better look at Ellen's stomach.

Edwin sputters, but Ellen parries: "It's more likely you are pregnant. Have you been trying?"

Sandra and Luis share a look, but they laugh. "Are you promoting sex before marriage now?" Sandra jokes.

Ellen chuckles. "You think I waited until marriage?"

Luis squirms next to Sandra, but she laughs: "Mum! I don't have to know that!"

"And yet you started it."

Edwin looks at his hands. They're trembling on his thighs. He almost wishes it was his age, but 56 is not quite that old. It's the jokes. No, not the jokes, but the conversation. The jokes gloss over the crack and he wants to forget it's there, but he can't.

"Dad?" Tamara cuts off the conversation. "What did you want to tell us? It's not bad, is it?" Edwin looks at Ellen. Is it?

"We're –"

"I'm –"

"We're getting a divorce."

"Because I'm gay."

The silence barely lasts a second. "You're gay?" Sandra exclaims. Tamara and Luis are silent, but Tamara stares at him and Luis is just ... Luis. It's no wonder he and Sandra fit so well: he steps back, so she can talk. Or maybe he's awkward. He's family, but he never enters fully, never feels at home in their house.

Edwin still feels at home, but an extra layer has wormed its way between him and that sense of belonging ever since he came out to Ellen. Her reaction was not unlike Sandra's. Everything is surreal. Nothing's real anymore: not being gay, not being married to a wonderful woman, not the impending divorce.

"I am." More words are lost. He planned this – he did – but as with Ellen, his speeches dissolved somewhere between "I'm gay" and the crack. She had to draw the answers out of him, but then again, there are no answers, not ones he knows.

"But you're ... Why did you marry mum then?"

"I didn't know. I never thought I might not be ... I might be ... It was the logical thing." This is the one question he wishes to answer for them. To prove their life as a family was not a lie. Or maybe it was.

You're such a good actor that I can't trust you anymore, Ellen had said at first, when she was hurt and crying. He's such a good actor he can't trust himself. He knows he's attracted to men, but if he could fool himself for 50 years, why couldn't he fool himself now? Maybe he just wants a divorce.

The distance between him and his family is already growing. In his mind, he holds on, but the best he can do is watching as Ellen explains: "We had a talk about everything that's between us and we decided a divorce is the best thing."

"I agree," Tamara pipes up. "You don't deserve ... You don't need to be shackled. To each other."

Sandra fixes her gaze on Edwin. "Do you have a ... person?"

"No! Absolutely not." Does she really think he would cheat?

"It's just ... Why now? Are you that dense?"

That stings. "I don't know, okay? Maybe I am. This whole thing is a mess." Edwin wishes he never realised. He would have happily lived his life. Without ... all this.

***

The break isn't clean. Not because he fights with Ellen or because his daughters are a little distant, but because their lives were once whole and now there's a fault line. Every break comes with debris and they pick pieces they want to keep, leaving holes behind. They sign papers, and papers, and even more papers. They unsnarl what was once entangled, but some threads break and there's not much to save of them.

Edwin considers himself lucky they don't have to split the lives of Sandra and Tamara. Sandra has her fiancé, and about two weeks after his coming-out, Tamara announced she is looking for her own apartment, now that she has a stable job.

One evening when Ellen is away with friends – her own friends, not the ones they used to share, but he doesn't know if they still share them – he asks: "You're not moving out because I am, are you?"

Tamara regards him until she has seen too much for his taste. "No. I was ready to move out before the divorce. And I think it's good I'm doing it now."

"You think so?"

"How would you feel if you moved out and I kept living here? Or how would mum feel if I went with you? Not to mention that would make the search for an apartment harder."

"I just don't want you to make things easier for me. You do what makes you happy. Not what makes us happy. We're still your parents. I- We'll suffer the consequences of our own choices." She's right, but everything's changing and there's nothing to hold onto.

"I know that." She stares at the quiz on the TV. "Do you want to meet someone? You know, once the whole divorce is over?"

"I guess so. I've not thought about that, only what has been happening." It seems strange and far away, to think about himself with a man, even if it feels stranger to think about himself with a woman now. He's never taken women to bed other than Ellen because they've been together since they were nineteen. Were together. He never thought about taking women to bed. He never thought about taking men to bed either, but now the idea has grown to monstrous proportions. It's not constantly on his mind, but it feels as if there was a switch pressed that lets him appreciate men's bodies. As if he removed the blinders that kept that appreciation at bay.

"Did you never even think about it before? You didn't feel like you were missing something? Aline is my best friend and it was great when we lived together, but it's just not the same." Tamara wraps her arms around the knee she pulled up to her chin.

"I didn't see it." Edwin looks at the flashing colours on the screen. The volume is so low it's only a murmur. "I was supposed to like girls and there was one girl I liked more than the others, so I thought that was it. Others talked, but ... They say so much. I thought it just wasn't me." His friends liked to boast. If they exaggerated the dangers on their camping trip or the skills of their basketball opponents, why wouldn't they exaggerate how hot their girlfriends were? How much fun they had in bed? And Ellen was fun, and hot. The sex was good – even without a frame of reference – but sparks were for romance novels.

"And you never, like, looked?" Tamara asks that question while studying the TV, but she glances at him through a single curl that escaped her braid.

Edwin thinks back to changing rooms and pools and TV shows. He looked, sure, but he didn't look. He didn't look twice. He didn't process. He saw a guy, and he saw he was hot, but he didn't feel it. He never questioned it. Men could appreciate other men. He wanted to be like them, not with them.

"None of your business." He smiles to soften his words. "Some things are private."

Tamara grins good-naturedly. "I think you should go out. Meet some other gay people. Friends, you know?"

"I will if you stop offering me advice."

Edwin wonders about the friends that didn't call, the friends Ellen said called. He always was friends with groups, not with individuals. He doesn't fault them for choosing Ellen over him because it was probably unintentionally. She has the charm, the attention; he's ... there. Maybe he should take some initiative. New beginnings. It feels more like an end.