Under the Rainbow

by Celia Laskey

  * * *

  • • •

  WHILE DRIVING HOME from work the next day, I notice the flyer from Jamal on the passenger seat and decide to take him up on his offer. It’s not like I have anything better to do. And it felt so refreshing, him knowing nothing about me. I pull into the parking lot and count seven cars in a little cluster, none I recognize. As I open the front door, a gust of hot air envelops me—they must have cranked the heat. I take off my jacket and walk through a grid of gray cubicles. An inflatable palm tree is propped in a corner, a pink flamingo pool floatie rests on a chair like it’s hard at work, and a yellow crepe-paper sun hangs over the ceiling light. A half-drunk Miller Lite sits on someone’s desk, the sweat from the bottle creating a small puddle that creeps toward a cat-face mouse pad. On the computer screen, a PowerPoint slide says, “You cannot identify an LGBTQ person just by looking at them,” next to a picture of a middle-aged man in khakis and a checkered button-up shirt.

  A teenage boy appears from a hallway and catches me snooping. It takes me a second before I realize it’s Zach, one of Dylan’s friends from school. My heart speeds up. I wasn’t expecting anyone from town to be here. Zach and Dylan were never especially close, but I remember him coming to the house a few times and eating copious amounts of string cheese.

  “Mrs. Ivingston?” he says, his face flushing. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m not really sure,” I say. “What about you?”

  “I’m volunteering for AAA.” He crosses his arms and stares at the floor. “It looks really good on college applications, and there weren’t any other places in town that needed volunteers.”

  “That’s great, Zach. I’m sure it’ll be really good experience.”

  “Could you do me a favor?” He clears his throat. “Could you, like, not tell anyone that you saw me here? I just don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”

  I nod. “Sure, I understand. And if you could do me a favor right back, could you . . .” I run my fingers through my hair, pulling at a small knot until it comes loose. “Could you not mention Dylan to anyone here?”

  He gives me the sympathetic smile I was hoping I wouldn’t have to see tonight. “Sure, Mrs. Ivingston.”

  I follow Zach to a large conference room, where a group of about ten people sit around a table, wearing leis and eating snacks. Whitney Houston is playing just a little too softly for a party. Zach sidles up to a girl with long auburn hair and whispers something that makes her burst into laughter.

  Jamal gets up and throws a lei around my neck. “Hey, you came! Sorry it’s not more lively. We probably shouldn’t have had it in our office, but it’s the only place we could really turn up the heat. You want some rum punch?” He gestures to a gigantic bowl of bright pink liquid.

  “Do you have any beer?”

  He hands me a Bud Light and I tip my head back, taking a long swallow. “Wow, tastes like high school.”

  He laughs as he opens another beer for himself. “I wasn’t drinking beer in high school yet. Mostly peach schnapps.”

  “That’s what all the girls drank,” I say, my hand flying to my mouth as I realize that might be an insulting thing to say to a gay man.

  “Who do you think I was hanging out with?” he says, giving me a wink. Then his face gets serious. “Being here kind of feels like being back in high school.”

  “In what way?”

  He shudders a little bit. “All my old insecurities ganging up on me.”

  “Oh? What kinds of insecurities?”

  His eyes move from my khaki pants to my cubic zirconia wedding band to my pale blue eyes. “I don’t know if you’d understand.”

  “I’d like to.”

  “I’m just a little too visible here. The way you looked at me when I walked into the bank yesterday—I could tell it wasn’t malicious, but I could also tell you don’t see many people like me.”

  My cheeks go hot. I hadn’t realized I’d made a face.

  “So I do everything I can not to draw too much attention to myself,” he goes on. “Calling employees ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ and keeping my hands visible so they don’t think I’m stealing anything. Or deepening my voice when I talk to strangers, and not saying things straight white people wouldn’t understand.”

  I remember him calling me ma’am at the bank; how his formality seemed strange at the time. “What kinds of things?” I ask, curious about what he thinks I won’t understand.

  He smiles skeptically. “If I said, ‘No tea, no shade,’ what would you think that meant?”

  “That you were thirsty and hot?”

  Jamal bursts out laughing. “Not even close, but a good guess. It basically means ‘No offense, but . . . ’ Which means you’re definitely about to say something offensive.”

  I laugh, too. “I’ve never heard that before.”

  He takes a drink of his beer and looks at me quizzically. “You must be changing the way you’re talking to me, too.”

  “No,” I say, thinking he’s referring to changing my word choice or speech patterns. But what about my omission of Dylan’s death? What category does that fall under?

  He tilts his chin downward. “Really? Not even a little bit?”

  I nod, my cheeks burning.

  “Huh.” He shakes his head. “That must be nice.” He pauses, then says, “You went to high school around here?” His tone is somewhere between a question and a statement.

  I nod. “Right here in Big Burr.”

  He grimaces, then tries to hide it.

  “Did you ever think about leaving?”

  “No,” I say. “Or not until recently. I met my husband at KU, he got an accounting job at the beef packing plant and kept getting promoted, I got pregnant, my parents were here to help out with the baby, and it just kept going like that. I know it might be hard for you to believe, but for most of my life I’ve been content here. There are a lot of things I like about Big Burr.”

  His brow arches. “Like what?”

  “Being close to family is important to me, especially for these last few months,” I say, before remembering to censor myself. But it’s true that I don’t know how I would have gotten through Dylan’s death without them. After losing my role of mother, I reverted back to daughter, letting my mother stop by every day to cradle me in her arms and scratch her fingernails over my scalp like when I was a little girl. She read to me and cooked me pancakes, the only food I could stomach for weeks. But being treated like a child is only appealing for so long, especially as the weeks stretched on, and finally I had to tell her I needed some space. But I can’t say any of this to Jamal, so I speed ahead like my slip never happened. “And most of my friends have known me my whole life. I own my home, and I didn’t have to go into debt to do so. I can take walks in the nature preserve without seeing another soul. And the sunsets will blow your mind.”

  “I’ll give you the sunsets,” he says, smiling. “What makes you think about leaving now?”

  “I don’t know. Lots of things. Where did you go to high school?”

  “A small town outside of Orlando. Kind of like here, actually—real white, real straight. I got to Miami as soon as I could. I don’t really know anyone gay who stayed in the town they grew up in. Like, if you want to meet someone, if you want friends who understand you, you get yourself to a city.” He takes a drink of his beer and looks at me curiously from over the bottle. “Why did you come today?”

  “I thought it would be nice to meet some new people. And because I think equality is really important, obviously,” I add on quickly.

  He extends his beer bottle and clinks it against mine. “Cheers to that.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I STAY AT THE PARTY until well after the sun goes down, drinking five beers and talking to almost every person there. Eventually the music gets louder and I even dan
ce a tiny bit. I forget about Dylan for whole minutes at a time. But as soon as I walk in the door of my house, the stale air presses in around me and all that weight comes flooding back. As I step out of my shoes and climb the stairs, small grains of dirt stick to the bottom of my bare feet, reminding me that I haven’t vacuumed in weeks.

  In the bathroom, I listlessly brush my teeth, watching blue foam drip off my chin in the mirror. Then I notice a very faint light coming from under Dylan’s door. I squeeze my eyes shut, thinking those beers really must have done a number on me, but when I open my eyes, the light is still there. It seems to be moving across the floor. I spit out my mouthful of toothpaste and wipe my face on the sour-smelling hand towel.

  My tongue goes dry and my heart beats in my hands as I walk toward Dylan’s door. I am absolutely certain that when I open it, Dylan will be standing there in his patched jeans and maroon hoodie. He’ll push his bleached hair out of his eyes and look at me half guilty, half defiant, like when he used to come home after curfew. Sorry I scared you, he’ll mumble. But I’m back now.

  I gently push his door open. The beam of light falls first on the Cold War Kids concert poster over his bed, a line-art cityscape with large puffs of pollution pouring out of smokestacks. A small plane is about to fly into one of the billows. Dylan always talked about going to college in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, and I think about what Jamal said about moving to a city. What was Dylan running from—or toward? Even though I never had a desire to leave Big Burr, I hoped he would, so he could have an interesting, unpredictable life.

  I could always feel Dylan’s teenage reality crashing against his adult potential. The teenageness of wanting to fit in, of going to a party then speeding across pitch-black back roads, pressing the soft pad of his foot against the gas pedal as he raced to keep up with the car of friends in front of him, until he reached seventy miles per hour per the cop’s estimations, but the thing was he hadn’t even been drinking, not a trace of alcohol in his blood levels, and I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. All that teenage reality smashed up, literally, against his surety that he would escape Kansas and double-major in music composition and computer coding, just in case the whole music thing didn’t work out—that’s how practical he could be.

  I follow the light down to where Richard’s face is illuminated by the glow of Dylan’s laptop. He’s sitting on the floor, his back pressed against the foot of the bed, the computer on his thighs. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I thought you were already asleep,” he says.

  “I was out.”

  “Out? Where?”

  “Do you really care?”

  He sighs and turns back to the computer screen. “Did you know Dylan’s friends are still writing on his Facebook page?”

  “I didn’t even know his account still existed.”

  “Come look.”

  I lower myself onto the carpet next to him. Seeing Dylan’s profile picture is a punch to the gut. It’s a photo he took himself, in this room, in half-light, his face blurry and his eyes looking up and to the side.

  Richard scrolls past photos that Dylan’s friends have posted on his wall. Dylan playing guitar at one of those garage concerts he and his friends used to organize, his eyes squeezed shut, his lips slack. “Remember that night?” his bandmate Steven writes. Dylan and his friend Cady standing in the middle of a cornfield, fog floating up from their feet. Behind the thin layer of fog their hands are clasped together, fingers interlaced. Had they dated? Kissed one night? Been in love, or what they thought was love? “I hope you can see this,” she writes. Richard scrolls extra quickly past a photo of Dylan driving his Buick, a hand-me-down from my dad, the wind forcing the waves out of his hair, still the brown he was born with, not yet bleached. He’s smiling at whoever took the photo, which means his eyes aren’t on the road, which means maybe his accident wasn’t a one-night experiment with danger but a routine of reckless driving. In between the photos are poems about God picking flowers, stars in the night sky, and meeting in the light.

  “Every time I visit his page, I tell myself I’m finally going to delete it,” Richard says, closing the laptop. On the lid, there’s a sticker of a zombie Snow White about to take a bite out of the glowing apple logo in the center.

  “Why do you need to delete it?”

  Richard rubs his finger over the apple. “It lets me pretend he’s still here.”

  It’s been months since Richard and I have been so close to each other. I had forgotten the way he smells, like plain bar soap and thyme. I think about reaching out and touching him, but I can’t imagine how that would feel, or what would happen next. He’s already standing up.

  “Richard,” I say.

  He looks at me tiredly.

  “Sleep well.”

  * * *

  • • •

  MY BEST FRIEND Lorraine comes into the bank the next afternoon. She stands beside the red velour stanchion and lets people go ahead of her until I’m free.

  “Hi, honey!” She fiddles with a barrette in her permed hair. “Have you gotten any of my messages?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “So many people have been calling.”

  Lorraine reaches across the desk and squeezes my hand. Her acrylics press into my palm. “We all just want you to know we’re here, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Me and the girls are going to see My Third Cousin’s Wedding tomorrow night. It’s supposed to be funny.”

  “All rom-coms are supposed to be funny. Whether they actually are is another story.”

  Her bottom lip wavers. “You’d tell me if you weren’t okay, right?”

  Of course I’m not okay, Lorraine, I want to say. My son is dead, and I’m supposed to feel bad that I don’t want to see anyone? Every time I see her she wants to rehash it. How I’m feeling. If I’m eating enough. If I’m sleeping. If I force her to talk about her own life, she’ll catch herself halfway through mentioning some problem at work and put a hand to her mouth. “Look at me complaining, after all you’ve been through. Everything’s just fine with me.”

  “I’m okay, Lorraine,” I say. “Maybe I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I DON’T CALL Lorraine the next day or the day after that. Instead, I text Jamal. He gave me his number at the luau—the first new number I’ve put in my phone in years.

  Do you need any volunteers at AAA? I’d love to help out, I type.

  Sure! he writes back. Are you free today after work? We’ll be stuffing envelopes and could definitely use an extra hand.

  When I walk into the Acceptance Across America office, I find Jamal and a few other task force members in the middle of a heated debate.

  “I bet it was Barb, that asshole,” says Tegan, who always calls unlikable women “assholes” and unlikable men “bitches,” as I learned at the luau the other night. “She’d do anything to get the billboard off the top of her store.”

  “What about that teenager from our anti-bullying presentation at the high school?” says Harley. “He just stood at the back, dead-eyed, mime-shooting all of us.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “You know our half-burned billboard on Main Street?” says Jamal. “Someone spray-painted DEATH PENALTY FOR DYKES across it.”

  My mouth falls open. “That’s terrible. I haven’t seen it. Do the police have any suspects?”

  Everyone laughs or rolls their eyes.

  “I’m sure they’re working very hard to crack the case,” says Karen, the director. “Just like they worked so hard to figure out who tried to burn it down.” She presses her pointer and middle finger into her right temple and closes her eyes. “Let’s get back to it.”

  Jamal hands me a stack of forms and envelopes, a sponge, and a dish of water. “We’re sending out feedback forms,” he
says. “We’ve been mailing them out because so far no one has come to our in-person focus groups. I’m just hoping we get back, like, two of them that don’t say ‘FUCK YOU FAGS’ in all caps.”

  I glance at the form. The first question reads, Have you had an interaction with an Acceptance Across America member? If so, how would you rate that interaction? A question farther down asks, Has your opinion about the LGBTQ community changed since the arrival of Acceptance Across America? If so, has your opinion become more positive or more negative?

  “Well, if you send me one, I’ll give you a positive review.”

  “What would you say?” Jamal asks.

  “I’d say . . .” I try to think of a way to sum it up. “You all make me feel very accepted.”

  “Awww.” He brings a hand to his heart, half making fun of my saccharine comment. “Acceptance Across America, at your service.”

  * * *

  • • •

  BEFORE I EVEN realize it, I’m spending all my time with Jamal and the Acceptance Across America group. Sometimes volunteering, other times just hanging out. Fancy cocktail parties, board game nights, and long weekend afternoons of binge-watching RuPaul’s Drag Race fill what used to be empty hours. One day, Richard passes me in the hallway and says I look different. Different how? I ask. Kind of like you did before, he says. So many of the task force members have had terrible things happen to them: Harley was homeless in their early twenties because no one would hire someone whose gender they couldn’t figure out. David lost most of his closest friends and countless acquaintances to AIDS. One of Tegan’s friends, a Black transgender woman, was shot to death two years ago and the police never even bothered to find a suspect. Jamal said he tried to commit suicide when he was a teenager. Sometimes I wonder if the reason I feel so at home among them is because of our shared grief—even though I still haven’t told them about Dylan.