Baby Jay

A vibration creeps up Jay’s spine. He can’t decide if it’s an urge to help Michael or deny him until he realizes it’s a combination of both, one instinct urging him forward, and another rooting him where he stands.
“Come on, it’s… it’s starting to get bad again,” Michael says.
Jay lifts a hand, willing himself to move forward. Michael may be a bastard, but he doesn’t deserve agony, and if Jay turns on him, whom will Michael have left?
“Michael…” Mom’s voice shrinks to a squeak. Finally, she unfreezes, crawls across the floor, and arches over Michael, protective. “Please tell me I’m not crazy. Tell me this is real.”
“…Hey Mom, hey Dad. It’s been a while. And yeah. It’s real.”
“What happened? What is all of this?”
“I’ll explain. Just get me back in the bin first, and put some cleaning fluids in there. I know it sounds weird, but it keeps me alive.”
Mom pulls back, nods over and over, as if constantly needing to convince herself that yes, this is happening. “Eric, turn the bin over for me.”
Dad jolts, like he’s remembered he’s actually here. That this is real. His dumfounded gaze shifts from Michael to Mom to Jay and back.
“Eric!”
He lurches and lumbers across the garage, flipping the bin upright.
Mom gathers Michael into her arms and lays him the deepest part of the chemical pool, in the bin’s corner.
“Um, hey son. Looking good,” Dad says. “I mean, definitely better than a corpse.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” says Michael.
A thousand emotions play over Dad’s face, all clumsy and dull through his drunkenness.
As Mom tilts the bin, letting the excess chemicals roll onto Michael, her eyes lock with Jay’s, and her movements slow.
“You knew about this the whole time,” she says. “And you didn’t tell us.”
Jay waits for Michael to chime in and say it was his idea to keep Jay quiet.
When he doesn’t, Jay tries to explain, but the words come out wrong: “It was complicated.”
“My son is alive, and suffering, and you didn’t say anything.”
“Mike said you’d ‘suffered him enough in life.’ He didn’t want you to suffer him in death.”
“He wouldn’t say that.” She turns to Michael. “You wouldn’t say that.”
“Go easy on him,” Michael says.
Mom swings back around, glaring. “You knew, and you lied, and… and my son is alive. He’s alive. Everything—this whole year—was all a waste. All the fighting, and crying, and grieving, and stress, and my marriage and… You didn’t say anything.”
A cold ball of steel sits in Jay’s throat.
It’s not fair. He bends and breaks himself to hold the family together. He’s decoded their suffering, speaks their tongues. He navigates them, cares for them, withstands them.
None of which stops Mom’s glare from piercing him. Holding Michael’s bin to her chest, she storms past Jay. Their shoulders bump, and Jay spins with the momentum. He doesn’t will it—at least, he doesn’t think he wills it—but he cocks his fist. Mom catches sight from the corner of her eye and skitters away, curling over Michael’s bin and turning her back to Jay. She makes herself a shield.