Something in the Blood
Copyright© 2026 by Sparhawk99
Chapter 5: The Family That Will Not Answer
He stayed at Samir’s three more nights before the guilt of it started to outweigh the relief. Not because anybody made him feel unwelcome — Samir’s mom kept feeding him without comment, Nadia had taken to including him in her cartoon ranking systems like he’d always lived there — but because Eli understood, in some old, practical part of himself, that a stranger’s kindness had a shape and a limit even when nobody said so out loud. He didn’t want to find that limit the hard way. Samir didn’t argue with him about leaving, exactly, but he didn’t make it easy either.
“You don’t gotta figure this out alone,” he said, the morning Eli started talking about the shelter downtown, the one Ms. Hart’s card had pointed to. “I’m just saying. The couch is still here.”
“I know,” Eli said. “I appreciate it. I just — I gotta figure out what’s actually going on with my family before I can figure out anything else. And I can’t do that from your couch forever.”
Samir didn’t love that answer—Eli could tell—but he let it go, the same way he’d let a lot of things go over the last few days. Patient in that unhurried way that had started to feel, to Eli, like the closest thing he had left to steady ground.
He spent those days making calls. Not just to his parents and sisters, who’d already shown him what they were willing to give, but working outward through the family the way you’d work a phone tree—aunts, uncles, cousins, the wide, sprawling net of Calders and Vosses that had always, up until four days ago, felt like an asset. Like backup. Like the kind of family where if your parents ever really let you down, there’d be somebody else in the wings to catch you. He found out, one call at a time, that this wasn’t true. Or wasn’t true anymore. Or maybe had never been true in the way he thought.
His uncle Pete, his dad’s brother, picked up on the second ring. Friendly at first, the way he always was. “Hey, birthday boy, how’s eighteen treating you?”
Eli, encouraged by the normal tone of it, said, “Not great, actually. Did you know Mom and Dad kicked me out?”
There was a pause on the line that told him everything before Pete even said a word.
“Yeah,” Pete said, careful now, all the easiness gone from his voice. “I heard something about that.”
“You heard something about it? Pete, they didn’t even give me a reason. I don’t have anywhere to live. I’m still in high school.”
“I know it’s rough, kid.”
“Then why’s everybody acting like this is normal? Why won’t anybody just tell me what’s going on?”
Another pause, longer this time. When Pete spoke again, his voice had gone flat and final in a way Eli recognized, because he’d heard that same flatness in his dad’s voice at the kitchen table. “It’s not really my place to get into family stuff between you and your parents. You gotta talk to them about that.”
“They won’t talk to me. That’s the whole problem.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you, Eli. I’m sorry.” Something in the way he said sorry — quick, automatic, like a door closing — told Eli this call was over whether he had more to say or not. A second later, it was.
His aunt Carol, his mom’s cousin, didn’t even let him finish his first sentence. “Eli, honey, I love you, but I really can’t get in the middle of this,” she said in a rush, like she’d been waiting by the phone with a script ready. She hung up so fast he wasn’t sure she’d even heard his question.
His cousin Marcy, closer to him in age, someone he’d actually been friends with growing up — summer barbecues and one memorable, disastrous camping trip — picked up sounding wary from the first word, like she’d been warned he might call. “Hey,” she said. “I can’t really talk long.”
“Marcy, come on. It’s me. What’s going on? Why is everybody acting like I did something?”
“I don’t — Eli, I really don’t know what to tell you.” A pause, then quieter, like she was moving to a different room, checking she wasn’t overheard: “It’s not really about you doing something. It’s more complicated than that. There’s stuff with the family that’s — it’s not really mine to explain.”
“Then whose is it? Somebody explain it to me. Please.”
“I gotta go,” Marcy said, sounding for a second like she might actually cry. That threw him worse than the flat refusals had, because at least those he could be angry at. Marcy’s voice cracking made him feel like he was asking her to carry something too heavy to hand off over the phone. “I’m sorry, Eli. I really am. I’ll — maybe I’ll call you back sometime. I just can’t right now.”
She didn’t call back.
It went on like that for days — a rotating cast of relatives, some cold, some apologetic, none of them saying anything close to an actual answer. They all circled the same shape without naming it, like there was a hole in the middle of the family that everybody knew the outline of but nobody would walk into. Eli started keeping a list, almost without meaning to, on the back of one of Ms. Hart’s printed sheets — who he’d called, what they’d said, how long the call lasted, whether they’d sounded sorry or just wanted off the phone. It didn’t add up to an answer. But it did add up to a pattern, and after enough calls the pattern itself started to feel like the closest thing to information he had: nobody would explain, and everybody, in their own way, seemed to think there was something to explain.
The one call that got under his skin worse than any of the others was to his second cousin Wade, who he barely knew, had maybe met four or five times at family things over the years, who picked up sounding surprised Eli even had his number.
“Oh — hey, man. Didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“Yeah, sorry, I got your number off my mom’s old phone book. I wasn’t sure if you’d even remember me.”
“No, no, I remember you. You doing okay?” Wade asked it easy, like small talk, like he genuinely hadn’t heard anything, and for a second Eli let himself hope this might be one normal conversation in a week that hadn’t had any.
“Honestly, not really. My parents kicked me out and nobody in the family will tell me why. I was hoping maybe you’d heard something, since you’re not — I don’t know, since you’re a little further out from the main part of the family.”
There was a pause, and then Wade, sounding like he was picking his way carefully across something, said, “I mean — I heard there was some stuff going on. Something about you not wanting to come to the gathering, or—” He stopped himself, hard, like he’d walked further than he meant to. “You know, I don’t really know the details. I just heard there was some tension. I wasn’t trying to — forget I said anything, man, it’s not really my business.”
“Wait,” Eli said, sitting up straighter on Samir’s couch, some instinct in him going alert all at once, like a dog catching a scent. “What gathering?”
“It’s nothing, man, honestly, I don’t even know what I’m talking about, I just heard secondhand—”
“Wade. What gathering.”
“It’s just, like, a family thing. Out at the farm. I don’t go, it’s not really — it’s an older-generation thing, mostly, some of the cousins go, I don’t really—” He was talking fast now, tripping over himself, clearly wishing he could take back the last thirty seconds. “Look, I really don’t know anything, okay? I probably shouldn’t have said anything. Just talk to your mom, all right? I gotta go, I got somebody at the door.” There wasn’t anybody at the door. Eli could hear nothing in the background — no doorbell, no knock, just Wade’s breathing and then the line going dead, fast, the fastest hang-up of the whole week, like Wade had realized, a beat too late, that he’d handed over something he wasn’t supposed to.
Eli sat there with the phone in his lap for a long time after that, turning the word over. Gathering. Out at the farm. He knew the farm — the Voss farm, his aunt Lydia’s place, a couple hours out from town, where they’d had a handful of big family things over the years. A wedding once. A Fourth of July when he was maybe ten that he barely remembered except for fireflies and somebody’s dog getting into the cake. He hadn’t been out there in years. Nobody had asked him.
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