The only time Amber has not seemed exhausted by my existence today is the brief window between the handyman finally shutting off the fire alarms and our leaving to get Chinese food for my family.

The vacation has not gone well. My parents were supposed to be at our rental house in Mystic, Connecticut, for check-in at 4 pm. The Wednesday before, my mother's car had been making noises, which resulted in a mechanic visit on Thursday, where they diagnosed that the vehicle needed all its brakes replaced. They, the shop attached to the dealership where my parents bought the car, had no parts for that common repair. By Monday, when we left, the mechanics had yet to look at the car and noted thirty in the bay ahead of hers. My parents left the mechanic's shop around the time Amber and I arrived at the house, where the fire alarm blared for the first forty minutes.

In the window of blessed quiet, we nestle on the sofa and watch an episode and a half of Good Omens 2 while eating small snacks to sustain ourselves. Amber might have been happier if I had forked over for a Prime subscription and left them home with the cats, though it would raise more problems than it solved.

The house is imperfect. Amber and I were supposed to stay in a tiny cottage behind the main house to avoid my mother's dogs--pet-friendliness was a rental requirement. We cannot. A previous occupant had broken the key off in the lock, and the owner hadn't gotten around to caring about the lack of safety of that--though he did provide a key that didn't go to anything, as though to trick us into blaming ourselves.

In planning these vacations, I do all I can to please people, but I do not want to keep doing it once I arrive. I want to relax, but everyone wants to say, "Well, I don't know about this thing we've already decided. Maybe I want to do it, but maybe I don't. Let's have more options, buddy." No, sorry, the decision was made. We are getting Chinese food because everyone knows what Chinese food is, and no one needs to navigate the menu long to find something they know they like. We are not looking at other restaurants, especially if Amber and I are the only ones to pick it up.

Within three hours of arrival, everyone is on one another's nerves. We have another hundred hours together.

Amber and I eat about half our Chinese food (minus an eggroll, which will not reheat well) and then, as is our habit, save the rest for lunch tomorrow.

Bryan says, "I ate twice as much as the two of you put together!"

I fire back, smirking, "You weigh as much as the two of us put together."

"That was cruel," my mother says.

"But a little funny?" I ask.

"No," she says, "just cruel."

My family does not bring out my best face. Undoubtedly not the most generous.

I feel remorse, which is not helped by Bryan looking at Amber and me and declaring that he does weigh as much as the two of us put together.

"So, Alyssah could powerlift you too!" I say though she will not be doing that any time soon. Owing to overexertion without sufficient rest, my niece tore ligaments and requires surgeries that will take six hours to accomplish. Otherwise, she will be hobbled for life.

My relationship with Bryan is not defined by contentiousness, but such is not absent. In a sense, it is not personal. He is like a changeling, aware he has no business with a human family. He resents that his true fae parents never came to retrieve him. It would explain why he desperately tries to attach to found families who do not care enough about him. None of these people are lasting, but I doubt he wouldn't trade us for one of them if they would stay and mother him for the rest of his life.

This isn't so different from Dan or me, both unsure we belong where we appeared. I love my parents and brothers, perhaps more than Bryan does--or in a way more comprehensible to the world at large. As a child, I always looked to the stars for my grounding. Unless the tape mercifully lost its magnetism, my parents have a cassette of me, tow-headed and tiny, confessing to have been the byproduct of an alien abduction.

I wonder how much Dan ever had a use for us. He tolerated us, but we were always emblematic of a life he would escape the moment it was propitious. He credited the political and economic climate of New York--and my parents would not contest him on either--but it did not bother him that he would be leaving us behind with it. He had his family, fathering the majority (and dad to most). That he remained as long as he did was not for our benefit but for the lack of a better offer.

Days before vacation began, his job brought him to the Hudson Valley. We had dinner at the most authentic Italian-American restaurant I have ever visited, one so committed it would not have been a surprise to find a gun in the toilet cistern and whose bread rolls were so rich that I was full before appetizers.

He was Dan. He was unchanged unless tiredness could be said to be a change. We did not miss one another and were not especially glad to see one another, but in the way of people who did not think of themselves as estranged; we were not sorry to see the other but could not find the torment my mother had at having her oldest here, knowing and fighting that this dinner would be all she got for an indefinable while.

My mother suggests Dan might finish his work early and pop over to Mystic for a day. I don't know that she believes this, but she says it. Though he could, in theory, finish his work early--I do not understand the nature of the project that drew him for a week--he will not come. He may call one of his local friends for a beer, but I have some skepticism even for that. He participates in our group chat, and his children are recipients of my mother's largesse, but this is possibly the extent to which he wants to be involved. We speak via links and memes. With little comment, we sent one another our Wordle scores. However, outside having exhausted every other outlet for tech support, I cannot fathom the circumstances under which I would call him.

I understand families loving one another but I've never grokked them cleaving together. My brothers were never my best friends. I don't see how they would have any use for that. Bryan wanted our acceptance of his totality, and he never received that. Perhaps he will always be ruled a little by the bitterness of this, that we saw all he was and all that was important to him and suggested he might want to modulate outside more intimate relationships. We said and thought this from love, from understanding how unnecessarily hard he made his life otherwise, but that isn't how he heard it. We were never the family that would have looked him in the eye and said, "Of course, yes. All of that is fine. Shine your light how you wish." The more we tried to guide him to safer ground, the more this part of his life consumed his money and free time.

I am independent of my family, though I engage my parents on the phone and interact with Bryan on social media. Around monthly, we do something together, though vacation is the most extensive production.

For all he wishes otherwise, Bryan is dependent on my parents, and maybe they (at least my mother) want it that way. He has dinner with them weekly, going home with leftovers enough that he doesn't have to cook for days. (I do not know to what degree Bryan cooks. He has no partner, and his tastes do not seem extravagant, so I wonder if he would see a reason to become acquainted with a spice rack.) Often, when my parents do something outside their home, they invite Bryan. He has factored them into his weekly routine, something I had not done for over a decade, when I was an impoverished and underemployed writer/teacher. Bryan earns more than I do and has fewer outlets besides what must be insurmountable student loans, so he should have less reason to rely on their culinary generosity.

I don't want to be in Mystic. Or, rather, I don't want anyone else here. The idea of a few days to myself to discover a place without rigid plans is appealing, but it is not something I am likely to do. I would want company, even if it meant that company would like me to do something else after I presented all the options.

Amber has their patterns, the exercises they do every night that are part of their psychological and emotional practice. Vacation will not alter these. They also scheduled an online therapy session on Thursday morning where, in their position, I might have said, "Doc, I'll see you the week after. Vacation in my therapy this week."

That night, Amber and I negotiate around the glass hexagon shower stall near our room. It is a too-visual metaphor. We are supposed to be vulnerable and intimate, doing something we do most nights, but we get in one another's way because it is not meant for two people. I tap the faucet with my elbow, and the water goes cool. I open the door to get a soap--there is no room in the stall for it--and Amber notes that I am getting the floor wet. "It's not a perfect system," I state, but it could be more perfect for Amber. It is not my floor, and I refuse to expend too much care if it becomes damp.

After this, Amber says, as they often do, that it is their bedtime and they are grumpy. It is vacation. One must be flexible. When it comes to vacation with my parents, more so. From long experience, I know that anticipating most things working as planned is naive.

I have been having mental health issues lately, so I am perhaps magnifying their irritability, but it is still present. Among the things neurotypicals do not know about depression is that it physically hurts. I'm not sad and in a bad mood. Background sounds hit me. Thoughts tighten parts of me I did not know could be tight. The soles of my feet, my fingers. Light scolds me.

I cannot help that Amber would rather not be here. I am sure they would not willingly leave me to vacation at home without me, though they would be happier bereft of some responsibilities for a little while. They wouldn't let themselves be liberated. They would promptly find as many responsibilities as they could. Why is Amber here but for some familial obligation? We have already had a day in Lake George and several in Ithaca. They may have had enough of being away from home.

There is comfort in the direction and structure, something vacations with my family lack despite my efforts (which likely makes it worse). I want to avoid being responsible for giving someone else structure here. I picked a house that meets the qualifications in a small city. Beyond that, I like the other person or people to be on their own. Overlapping plans are ideal, but need they be constant?

The beds are too hard for Amber, as are all the beds in the home. Even the coveted cottage has hard beds. It is difficult to say to what extent this place is made for comfort and not merely housing. As we find quirks and nonfunctioning parts, this rental might be a coat of beige paint over a crack, a Potemkin village. I ponder whether the blaring fire alarms upon arrival were not a metaphor as well.

I tell Amber I will assume they are okay unless they tell me differently because mind reading makes me anxious. They say they are okay, then amend that my parents buy too much crap on vacation. I assure them this is not something we are capable of helping.

The following day, when I come out of shaving in the cottage--it is more private, and someone is in the house bathroom--my mother informs me that she and the dogs will be moving. "I'm not sure if your father will join us, but everything will be easier with the dogs there."

Though I will miss the private shaving space I conjured up, I cannot disagree. It is a small sacrifice for greater domestic accord this week.

On the first day, no one is too impressed by the aquarium. We are too old for it, and it has grown smaller since last I was here. My family is done with it in a couple of hours. Amber and I go to a sea lion show, meaning we miss their leaving, so we wander a strip mall beside it with surprisingly lovely shops. When I was here with Daniel and Leonard over a decade ago, it might have been one shop that sold us fried dough that required more than two plates and fed the three of us past satiation.

Our rental is less than a mile from town, but my family opts to drive and pay a steep parking fee since my parents are in their sixties. Amber and I pop back and forth to town. We like a walk.

Once we get back from the aquarium, Amber and I decide to get ice cream, choosing a shop that is too near the middle of the drawbridge. As we exit, the bridge has begun to rise. We cannot leave, so we lick the stickiness from our melting cones and watch with appreciation this feat that must seem less exotic to the locals. All the tourists distinguish themselves by taking out phones and filming the massive cement blocks counterbalancing, gliding up with a gentleness that verges on implausible.

My family put me in charge, which comes with making most of the meal decisions, which has never been my favorite. Sometimes, the decisions are based on "You have given me these parameters/Have told me my cousin insists we go there/We could get reservations for the slot you requested. I am not vouching for the quality." I do not have any inside knowledge beyond a few minutes on Google, but I still cringe when we order nachos at Chapter One, and they might as well be Velveeta on Tostitos. Food can be dicey in the best circumstances since an appealing menu can hide slop, and locals can know a hole-in-the-wall is the only place worth getting a lobster roll.

In the car later, Bryan takes gulps from his flask, swishes them around as though mouthwash, gargles, swallows, and then repeats the process.

By the third swallow, I say without meaning, "Don't do that. It's too weird."

"You shouldn't tell Bryan not to do things," Amber notes when we are in a store away from my family.

Bryan is undoubtedly neurodivergent, but the exact sort of divergence is lost on me. I know factors, most of which give people pause when I tell them (and I do not make a habit of telling people), but I cannot diagnose him into a whole.

Amber, who diagnosed themselves as autistic years ago, takes this a little personally. What if Bryan gargling in the car is a self-soothing technique and not just annoying? I cannot know. However, I feel I can counter that it triggers my misophonia, so I am still permitted to find it irksome, even if it is rude to tell him to stop.

I think Bryan has yet to be secure, or I have not encountered an environment where he is at ease, which I find a continual surprise. He is nearly a doctor, with more degrees than I recall and an alphabet after his name, but he still reacts as though all he has going for him is a litany of fabrications. The fact that he is a psych nurse practitioner doesn't impact him enough. It seems almost painful to lack confidence when there is little reason. He is an intelligent, educated guy with a suspicious number of friends for someone his age. When is he going to feel that he is enough?

Every day of this vacation, he talks to friends on the phone about what he should name the stuffed penguin my mother bought him from the Mystic Aquarium gift shop. It is a topic I would consider briefly, if at all, but it preoccupies him. He sets up polls, discounts one because it is a tertiary Disney character, and asks my parents for the fifth time what they think of the frontrunners. Even at the pre-adolescent height of my stuffed animal appreciation (probably about nine years old), I cannot imagine spending more than a few minutes baptizing a bit of polyester and fluff.

(On the other hand, I was disproportionately frustrated that my Fitbit died and I would need a new one, so I am not claiming I am immune to the intensity, simply direction.)

Bryan wants to be special. That's why he says he speaks seven languages he learned on Duolingo rather than just saying he's learning one. Learning one language is commonplace yet impressive. He cannot allow himself such a humble boast.

When he was young, he claimed that he fluently knew twenty-seven languages. I once deflated him by asking him to name twenty-seven languages. It's just a ludicrous thing to say, so far beyond possibility that he had to expect no one would believe him. He wants to be a prodigy, but we are both about thirty years too late for that to be an applicable term. He is special, but that's not enough for him. He needs it to be fantastic, not feasible. So he hangs out with people who are exceptional in a pejorative sense, those willing to indulge a fantasist. He doesn't need to, but it is what he has done for so long. It's his ingrained habit.

This has plagued him his entire life. Dan had a rebellious personality until a girlfriend tamed him into sweater vests. He was sometimes a bastard, but he was a popular one.

I had my scholastic, beloved weirdo persona, my literary plaudits. From fourteen to forty, I was not single for more than two months at a time and maybe nine months in total; when I was a teenager, I only needed to smile and joke to have a girl's number.

Bryan fell in the cracks. He only had a solid personality in college. Or, he did, but it wasn't Dan's and mine, so it wasn't as good. Bryan has maybe dated four women ever--one of whom we referred to as Little Hitler and another who stalked him for years because he kept encouraging her. (He is asexual, so he isn't keen on relationships that might turn conventionally sexual.) He always felt less-than, and our family didn't help with that. He pushed himself farther and farther from normality because he thought these people would embrace him in a way we never would. He never needed to. We joke and tease, but we are generally supportive.

We go on the Seaside Shadows ghost tour. Our guide, Kim, is a charming blonde woman dressed in a Gothic ensemble, the uniform of this tour. She works in aquatic research during the day and ghosts at night. No one in this group is bothered by the dichotomy, but we just paid $30 a head to walk a few blocks for 2 hours. We have selected for credulity or at least suspended disbelief. Why be contrary?

Kim tells us about her father and uncle's experience with a time slip--when people feel they have inexplicably been taken to another time and back. A guy in the group loudly explains this concept to his partner, though he struggles with the term. He had previously brought up having gone to the Pine Bush UFO Museum. I mention having been a presenter at the UFO Fair. If he hears me is anyone's guess, but he does not acknowledge. Doing so might make me spookier than him, which cannot be allowed.

Kim discusses the Pigman in the river--which she assures us was the subject of a missing person's case, and we can find the police report if we need evidence. The short version is that children saw some porcine monster drowning a woman in the river before diving in after her and never resurfacing. A body was never found, and the presumptive identity of the victim remains a mystery.

During her tale, some teenagers fifty feet away kick soda cans. The spooky guy runs at them as though they were about to attack the group, and he meant to get them first. The kids look at him in bafflement, not moving, until he skulks back to the group.

This man then tells Kim he kept hearing splashing under the dock, implying the Pigman was eavesdropping on his tale retold. Kim speculates it might have been fish. He rules this unlikely. Kim mentioned she has a pet pig, so she would doubly be the expert here.

The townsfolk do not honor the solemn duty of the ghost presenter. Outside a bar, an older man shouts across the street that they wouldn't believe a thing Kim claims. My $30 says otherwise, at least for the next hour and 45 minutes. The bar features an unidentified body under the street, a shadow in a top hat, and the poltergeist of a former patron who steals Christmas decorations. Who is to say this white-haired gent isn't angling to be the next stop on the tour?

Like America as a whole, Mystic--or Stockton and Grafton, since Mystic is a notional town that exists on the bridge and shores but not much further--is built on Native American slaughter. Colonists set a fort on fire and murdered or enslaved those who survived. Since then, Mystic has hosted such statistically frequent and severe fires that Kim cannot get homeowner's insurance.

After Pigman, most of the stories are what one would expect: apparitions in windows, breath on necks, and stacked books. I enjoy these, but the most noteworthy is that the place where we have reservations the following night is haunted by a captain and his niece, Ada, the latter who died of scarlet fever.

Kim mentions that people have seen colored light in the windows of the Captain Daniel Packer Inn. Bryan interjects that he sees "multiple full-body apparitions." Kim smiles and replies that it is a shame he didn't take pictures of them, then is waylaid by a group of women who want to talk to her about witchcraft.

Within seconds, asking Bryan about the "multiple full-body apparitions" with mock excitement becomes my entertainment, which he doesn't appreciate. I've heard worse pick-up lines, though Kim reacted with practiced neutrality.

The tour ends in the darkness beside a dock. I expected Kim to loop us around to the beginning, but she clarifies that is all there is. She offers to walk us back to the light, but it is a straight shot up the street. We have nothing to fear from townspeople, tourists, or Pigmen. I planned that we would see a planetarium show the next day. We walk there, but it is inclusive of the museum, not, as the site suggested, an experience exclusive of it. My father asks if we would still want to do it. As the show is half an hour long, it has been intermittently raining all day, and it would amount to more than $200 with admission and the show, I nix this. The investment is a six-minute walk, so I cannot feel too bad about the mistake, which is not to say that I do not express undue frustration at the setback. After my mother catches her breath, I state our only other option now is to go home and rest before dinner, which interests my family more than another activity. We stop at the museum gift shop on the walk home, where my mother tricks me into picking out a stone turtle she gifts me to make me feel better. This does not, per se, do this, but I accept it.

It is fractionally possible my family is not tallying up my win/loss ratio when it comes to vacation meals and activities. They are glad not to have to do the planning, so my failings may not occur to them.

The Captain Daniel Packer Inn would have a better claim to fancier dress than Chapter One. The menu alone suggests this will be a better meal than we've had. I point out that the Inn serves a wild boar gnocchi. The sure source for the meat must be pigmen in the brackish river.

The restaurant is empty of all but staff when we arrive. It would only be a more upscale eatery without the story of Ada attached. With it, we look to shadows as though they might hide celebrities. We don't expect to meet Ada or the captain, but we would not be averse to someone making introductions.

Before we get our drinks, my mother brings up the books of ghost experiences Kim had assured us the restaurant keeps. Our waiter, Zach, is new, but he asks and presents us with two books, spiral bound, one red and one black. One is labeled for the past and the other for the present. There's no third one for the future, as that would be prophecy.

Amber takes one, and I skim the other. We pipe up with observations.

"There's a fake gourd that keeps appearing in the accounts!"

"This seems active in July and around Thanksgiving!"

"Is the portrait of Washington haunted?"

The books are not even a third full. Many of the recollections are from children, a few of whom include chibi faces and sketches of drinks, which I adore. One girl's account mentions seeing orbs while editing a video for TikTok on her phone. She helpfully gives her username for those curious, but I'm not eager to check out the account of someone who renders their age as ten and a half.

I tease Bryan again about the multiple full-body operations in the windows last night. He falls to sullen quiet, then erupts that this is why he keeps to himself in his room. I had assumed that was his nature and not something meant pointedly.

We mentioned that Kim is pretty, though engaged.

"Plus, she has a pig," Amber notes. "I get the appeal."

"You'd go polyamorous for Kim?" I ask.

"For a pig?" Amber says. "I would consider it."

Bryan remains surly despite our saying we understand why he said this to her. In far different shoes, I might make a ridiculous brag to have the attention of our guide momentarily.

When he grows more visibly vexed, I asked him if the issue was the girl or the ghost, meaning this sincerely. He is far from the mood where he will clarify.

When our meals come, my mother gives Bryan a few hunks of lobster with crab stuffing, eventually improving his mood. Amber and I offer him the account of the hauntings in a similar spirit, but he gleans no more than we already had.

The meal passes quickly, though it is the best we've all had so far, even to the extent that my father sees someone else's lobster roll and repents the one he had earlier in the trip. In Lake George, we know what to expect and where. Here, everything is a discovery, and we resent that. We would be better served by an itinerary of the best possible things to do and eat, which is an impossibility given how immediately such a list would be abused by advertisers.

My mother asks Zach if he can look the other way while Bryan, Amber, and I go to the more haunted third floor. He says that it is not a matter of sneaking. We are welcome to it.

We wonder aloud if the narrow steps are where visitors hear the little girl playing.

The third floor is unlit and we do not find the switch to change this. Why ruin the atmosphere?

It is only another level of a restaurant, no matter what it might have been 150 years ago in Ada's brief time. We saw the same green carpet, wooden chairs, and tables on the floor below. There is nothing special on its face. The feeling is eerie. I do not deny this. However, this has more to do with being in an unlit part of a building with faint permission. We would not have all had the courage to sneak here unsanctioned and surely not as a bold group.

I wander more broadly and quickly as though I can catch a ghost unaware. The journals mention the men's room, but all the bathrooms have turned unisex. I take my guess and pee in one, riding the line between worrying I will look in the mirror to see a little girl with a bob haircut trying to catch an eyeful and hoping for it.

I am disappointed a long-dead girl doesn't interrupt my flow. I yield to the knowledge that no one would ever believe me if I said otherwise. I would side-eye myself if I claimed I had witnessed a ghost girl, and I am me, so it is an anatomical feat as well as an epistemological one.

When I return to the main room, Bryan sits meditatively on the floor. Indeed, he was annoyed I did not believe he had seen ghosts in the windows. I still don't believe him, but I understand he is not bothered that we teased him about bragging to a ghost tour guide. He doesn't care about an attractive woman, given his asexuality and the aesthetic model of the women with whom he surrounds himself, and indifference to Kim is no great surprise. Bryan cares that Kim's trained credulousness made him feel momentarily extraordinary. As his older brother and practice paranormal enthusiast/skeptic, I deflated this without a moment's enjoyment. I then kept doing it because I assumed we were all on the same page about his blustering innocent enough nonsense. His claim was better than the man trying to label the fish eavesdropping cryptids and running at teenagers.

As we prep to leave the following morning, my mother underscores we will not return to Mystic.

A flaw in this vacation is that we were together, but not really. There wasn't the downtime where we could connect, something I will fix for next year. Otherwise, it is a series of meals and activities we are nearly doing in parallel.

After my family has gone, Amber suggests we revisit the town since the shops should be open and there is an art museum to visit. The shops have nothing astounding, though they are a fun way to kill time until lunch and the museum opens.

For me, the best part of the museum is not the exhibition but the sketchbook, where visitors have drawn masterpieces that dwarf some of what hangs on the walls. They remind me a little of the childish scribbles in the ghost journals.

Near the end of the visit, Amber asks if they should buy one of the pictures from locals. They're cheap, and they feel bad about leaving them unpurchased.

I asked them if they wanted to buy one from beauty or from pity.

They do not get a picture.

last watched: True Blood
reading: The Man Who Was Thursday