He grows up without his parents. No offence to Wendy, she's great and looks after him, gives him anything he could ever want, but he doesn't count her as a mother even though he knows that she is, at least biologically. When he thinks about his mother, he remembers smiles that came mixed with tears, a kind of hazy recollection of brown hair and the smell of flowery perfume, the way that she used to hold him and Thomas tight and kiss them on the top of the head. Thomas, he doesn't remember, but Abel does.
He lives with the knowledge that his family were killers, that his grandmother killed his mother, that she had a hand in the absence of a grandfather he had never known, that his father had chosen death over raising him. Sometimes, lying awake at night looking up at the ceiling, he wonders if it's because he couldn't stand to look at them and see his mother and know she wouldn't be coming back. He sees the sadness in Wendy's eyes as he says or does something that must remind her of people that are mere ghosts in her memories now, and pretends that those small flickers of emotion don't cut him right down to the core. He's glad that Thomas doesn't remember, or at least he doesn't seem to, that his little brother can grow up without the weight of a thousand bad decisions pressing down on his shoulders, that he can look in the mirror and feel content with what he sees, instead of the crushing sadness and anger that Abel feels when he sees his father's eyes looking back at him, the same ones he sees in his dreams. His father got his wish, and Abel does grow up hating him, but not in the way he was probably supposed to. Being a criminal, all the illegal shit, he doesn't care about any of that because he knew that it wasn't all his father was. It couldn't be, not with all the love that he remembers feeling whenever his father had been around. What does make him angry is the absence, the void that's left behind where his parents should be, and he hates his father for not protecting them all, for sending him away and choosing not to follow, for forfeiting the chance to be there as they both grew up. Most of all, though, he hates himself, hates the way he looks and the way that Wendy can't look at him without seeing the ghost of someone he thinks of as equally a good man and a coward.
He moves away, when he's just finished school, but he can never seem to escape the shadow that hangs over him no matter how far he goes and he never goes back, not even when he gets the call for Thomas' graduation, or the invitation to his wedding that eventually finds him when he settles down somewhere in Iowa for a few months. He remembers to call just enough to let them know he's alive, but eventually even those fade off until the only people he talks to are the waitresses in the roadside diners and whoever he's doing off-the-books work for that month. His hands grow rough and scarred, his skin becomes more tanned over time, and his hair lightens practically white underneath the relentless sun of Arizona, Nevada, Texas. His eyes stay the same. He sees Thomas' name in a newspaper one year, too many since he dropped contact and never bothered to pick up a phone again, in an article about promising young entrepreneurs and feels a familiar stab of pride that his little brother is making something of himself.
The world doesn't change or stop, doesn't even notice, when his heart stops beating one night in a dirty motel room with an empty bottle of liquor resting on the bed next to him. There are no people to mourn him, no one to cry at his funeral or tell stories about his life now that he's gone. It's only him and the bottle in that room, at least twenty years since he said goodbye to Wendy and disappeared. Just him and the drink and his demons, but it doesn't matter to him, if it ever had. There never was anything left for him to fight for, not when he knew his baby brother would be looked after, and he's so tired of trying.