Call It What You Want

by Brigid Kemmerer

  “The guy was asking if you know the alphabet?”

  “Yes.”

  I snort. “Prick.”

  She smiles. “My words exactly. Well. My word.”

  Once upon a time, she might have criticized my using that word. Not too harshly—Mom has always said that words are words, and it’s more about how we use them—but she would have made a comment about it. Especially at the dinner table. In front of my father.

  She certainly wouldn’t have used a word like that herself.

  When Dad pulled the trigger, it completely toppled our family dynamics.

  I spin pasta on my fork.

  “Come on,” she says. “Talk to me. At least my own son knows I know the alphabet.”

  “I’ve heard you can read, too,” I say.

  “Sometimes I have to look up the big words.” She’s kidding. Mom has her master’s in business management. It’s ridiculous that she’s stuck temping, but it’s a tough balance being able to take care of Dad and still put in a full day’s work.

  I rifle through my memories of the day. I don’t want to talk about any of it.

  “Do you ever see Connor anymore?” she says, her tone musing. “I’d hoped his parents would leave you boys out of it all, but—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Connor.” I stab another piece of chicken.

  A blanket of quiet tension drifts over the table, and we eat through it, our weird sentry watching over us from the end of the table.

  I wonder if he’d notice if I put a literal blanket over his head.

  Suddenly, I can’t eat anymore. I put my fork down. “I have homework.”

  “Rob.” Mom’s voice is quiet.

  “What?” I keep my eyes on my plate.

  “I’m worried about you.” A pause. “I’d really like it if you’d see someone.”

  “We can’t afford it.” I stand up, taking my plate with me.

  “There’s a counseling center on—”

  “No.” I push through the swinging door into the kitchen, then scrape my half-eaten meal into the trash can.

  When it first happened, I went to a psychologist. The woman wanted me to draw pictures and talk about how they made me feel. I told her they made me feel like I was in kindergarten, and I got the hell out of there.

  I haven’t gone back.

  Mom pushes through the swinging door. “Would you please talk to me?”

  “I am talking to you.”

  “Rob.”

  I hate that I have the same name as him. I hate it.

  But what are my options? Bob? Bert? No.

  I start to place my plate in the sink, but then think better of it and rinse it to put in the dishwasher. “School is fine,” I tell her. “Connor is fine.” I grab one of the pans from the stove and run it under hot water. “I just want to finish the year and get out of there.”

  The water runs hot, almost too hot to bear, but I thrust my hands into it and scrub hard. The air behind me is so quiet that I think Mom has left the kitchen.

  Her hands settle on my shoulders, and I jump. Suds fly.

  “You were such an outgoing kid,” she says. “It’s not good for you to lock yourself in your bedroom all the time.”

  I duck and swipe suds off my cheek with my shoulder. “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine.” She pauses. “You shouldn’t be carrying all this—”

  “You shouldn’t, either.”

  “Please, Rob.”

  It’s the please that gets me. Mom never asks me for much. I try not to ask her for much. We’re trapped in this private hell together, so we try to take it easy on each other.

  I drop the pan in the sink and snag a dish towel, then turn around to look down at her. She’s six inches shorter than me, and I can see every gray hair along the edge of her forehead.

  She wouldn’t like me pointing that out. I know from experience.

  The gray doesn’t matter, though. When I was a little boy, I always thought she was beautiful, and I still think so, even now. Soft cheeks. Warm eyes. Kind hands. Connor’s mom is always hard. Pointed joints. Severe makeup. Stiff hairspray and rigid styles. Mom wears loose dresses, her hair long and wavy. Workout videos in the living room have replaced a personal trainer at the gym, but she stays active.

  I can’t remember the last time I ran a mile.

  “Tell me what you want,” I say, my voice low. “I’ll do it.”

  “I want you to start going to the free counseling center on Mountain Road. Once a week.”

  I roll my eyes. “Mom—”

  “Didn’t you just say I could tell you what I want and you’d do it?”

  “Fine.” I try not to sound surly. I fail.

  “And I want you to get out of the house and get some exercise. Three days a week.”

  “It’s thirty degrees outside.”

  She pokes me in the chest. “So run fast.”

  I smile.

  She doesn’t smile back. “We’ll get through this,” she says quietly. “Okay?”

  I take a breath. “Okay.”

  From the dining room, my father begins making noise. It sounds like a persistent humming, but there’s no mistaking the element of panic in it. Something is frightening him. Or causing him pain. Or something we won’t even be able to identify.

  Mom and I burst through the door.

  The smell hits us both at once.

  I don’t know if he recognizes that we’re here, but he doesn’t stop the noise. He won’t stop until he’s cleaned up.

  Early on, Mom once lost her patience and started screaming at him. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” I thought she was losing her mind. I thought she’d hurt him. I wrestled her away from him, and she burst into tears and sobbed all over me.

  He didn’t stop humming then, either. She was clutching me, sobbing into my shoulder, and behind her, Dad was sitting in a pool of his own crap, groaning incoherently.

  I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run.

  I probably would have, if she hadn’t been hanging on to me so tightly.

  When Mom finally got herself together, her breath was shaking. She didn’t look at me. Dad was still humming, a sound that was growing into a keening panic.

  She didn’t look at him, either. She walked out of the house and slammed the door.

  I couldn’t leave him there like that. I cleaned him up the best I could.

  It was my seventeenth birthday.

  Now, I’m used to it.

  I sigh. “I’ll get the stuff,” I say.

  In a weird way, homework is a relief. My bedroom windows are dark and cold, reflecting my studious self bent over a physics textbook. Dad’s in bed, his clothes are in the laundry, and Mom is downstairs falling asleep in front of the television. The house is silent.

  Too silent.

  I’m jittery, thinking about what I’ve agreed to do for my mother. When I went to the art therapist, I remember telling her about finding my father, and she kind of paled and said, “Wow. I’m not really sure what to say.”

  If a professional doesn’t know what to say, I sure don’t.

  I haven’t talked to anyone else about it. Everyone knows I found him. They don’t need the details. I’m perfectly content to keep those locked up in a corner of my brain, collecting dust.

  Except … those memories aren’t content to stay locked up. They come out when it’s quiet. When I’m stressed. When I’m lonely.

  Like right now.

  Do you ever see Connor anymore?

  I keep thinking about the ten dollars in the cafeteria. The expression on his face when I tried to give it back. How, for one flickering moment, he thought I was going to hurt him.

  I dragged your ass a mile through the woods, I want to say to him. You couldn’t pick up the phone when my dad almost died?

  My phone is sitting on the desk beside me. Dark and silent, much like the house.

  The only person who ever texts me is my mother. And she’s downstairs.

  I
wonder what Connor would do if I texted him.

  I don’t even know what I’d say.

  I don’t know what he’d say.

  Knowing him, it would be a smartass response.

  Or more likely, no response at all.

  I can’t focus on this homework. My brain is spinning out like a top gone wild. I don’t want to talk to anyone, yet I’m also desperate for someone to talk to. But who wants to hear about a wild evening spent changing your father’s overflowing diaper? No one.

  I shove my physics book into my backpack. I’ll be up at the crack of dawn anyway, so I can do it then. I yank free An Ember in the Ashes, my latest fantasy read.

  A piece of notebook paper was stuck to the book, and it flutters to the ground. I snatch it off the carpeting.

  Maegan Day’s phone number.

  Without thought, I type her number into my phone.

  ROB: Did you ask Mrs. Quick for a new partner?

  Her response appears almost immediately.

  MAEGAN: Who is this?

  ROB: Are you trying to avoid multiple partners? Who do you think?

  No answer comes back.

  Maybe I was kind of a jerk. I’m not exactly swimming in remorse about it.

  Okay, maybe I am. A little.

  ROB: It’s Rob

  MAEGAN: The attitude gave it away

  ROB: So did you ask for a new partner or not?

  MAEGAN: Not

  ROB: OK

  Nothing. Though I haven’t given her much to respond to.

  I don’t really know why I texted her. No, I do. Desperation. The need to send words into the world and get a response.

  But I don’t know her. It’s not like I can spark a conversation. We’re from opposite ends of a spectrum. Or we used to be. I skidded straight off the end of the spectrum last spring, and I’ve spent the last eight months drifting.

  But she’s the only other person in my message list.

  MAEGAN

  MOM

  Before, it was just Mom.

  This is so depressing.

  ROB: When do you want to meet?

  MAEGAN: Anytime

  ROB: Wegmans in 30?

  MAEGAN: 30 minutes? It’s after 10

  ROB: They’re open til midnight

  She says nothing.

  I wait. And wait.

  ROB: You said anytime. Sorry. So when do you want to meet?

  Nothing. I sigh and pick up my book.

  We’ll get through this.

  Mom means well, but I feel like we’ve been trapped here for all eternity. Through implies an ending point. Dad won’t get better. He won’t die either, not for a while anyway.

  She should have said, “We’ll survive this.”

  That’s not a relief, either. Is survival the best we can hope for? Isn’t that what Dad’s doing? Maybe he’s the lucky one in this scenario. He barely knows what’s going on.

  Lucky. I consider the mess I helped my mother clean up after dinner. And to think he wanted to put a gun to his head before.

  But at least he doesn’t know. Only we do.

  Without warning, my chest tightens. My eyes burn.

  Hell, no. I am not crying over this. And why? Because some girl I don’t care about didn’t want to meet at Wegmans to measure drop distances? I’m so pathetic.

  I sniff it back. Clear my throat.

  My phone chimes.

  MAEGAN: I need time to get dressed. See you at 11.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Maegan

  Mom is asleep, but Dad is up, watching SportsCenter. There’s only one thing that would get my father to let me borrow Mom’s car at eleven at night without too many questions: tampons. Even still, he says, “Can’t you borrow some from your sister?”

  That almost throws me, but then he catches himself and grunts, his dark eyes returning to the screen. “Right. I forgot. Go ahead.”

  I don’t know if he thinks all her feminine supplies evaporated the instant her egg was fertilized, but whatever. It gets me out of the house. I tell him I only like the brand they sell at Walgreens, because he won’t ask for details, and that will give me an hour before he expects me home.

  The car is dark and cold, but I don’t bother waiting for it to warm up. I shiver and shift into drive.

  I’m not usually up this late, but I have too many secrets rattling around in my head. I wish Samantha hadn’t confided in me. This is too big. Too much. It was a relief to avoid the dinner table, until I realized I was going to have to lock myself in my room to avoid blurting out all this information to my mother.

  I’ve even been avoiding Rachel. Every time I look at my phone screen, my fingers itch to type out the whole story.

  My poor sister. That man’s poor wife. My poor family. What about her scholarship? What about her education? Will this ruin her life? Will it ruin his? What will happen to the baby?

  At the center of it all is Samantha. Is she a victim? An accomplice? Am I supposed to pity her or resent her? Somehow I don’t have enough information, but at the same time I have too damn much.

  These thoughts were rattling around my brain so hard that when my phone chimed, I nearly burst through the drywall.

  Then it was Rob Lachlan—and he was as much of a jerk as he was at school.

  But at least it gave my brain something new to think about.

  Rob sits on a bench in front of the store, breath leaving his mouth in long streams that make it look like he’s smoking. His dark hair drifts across his forehead, fluttering into his eyes in the wind. His hands are buried deep in his pockets, his eyes fixed somewhere in the distance, maybe even on the stars overhead.

  No backpack. Figures.

  When I approach, he stands up. His eyes are dark and inscrutable. “I’m surprised you came.”

  I can’t read anything into his voice. I have to stop myself from saying the exact same thing. A part of me worried this would be some kind of prank.

  I realize he’s still waiting for an answer.

  “You were right.” I suck a shivering breath between my teeth. “I did say anytime.”

  He says nothing. He doesn’t move. He looks a little … scattered. My eyes narrow a fraction. I wonder if I’ve misread this entirely. “Are you high or something?”

  His entire demeanor darkens. Standing turns into looming. He glares down at me. “Did you ask if I’m high?”

  “You’re just standing there! You don’t even have a backpack! I’m trying to figure out why you wanted to meet at eleven o’clock. You sure don’t look ready to do homework.”

  He takes a long breath, then looks away and runs a hand through his hair. “That’s great. Thanks a lot, Maegan.” He turns and heads for the front of the store.

  I have no idea whether he expects me to follow or if this is a dismissal.

  I storm after him. The store’s sliding doors swish open like they’re in a hurry to get out of his way. He strides toward the staircase that leads to the upstairs café seating area, then takes the steps at a jog, two at a time.

  It takes me a minute to catch up to him, and when I do, I realize he’s at a table that’s covered in notebooks and textbooks. He’s in the process of packing them all up.

  Into the same backpack he had this morning in calculus.

  “Wait.” I haven’t pieced this all together in my head yet, but I’ve assembled enough to know I’ve read this all wrong. “Wait.”

  His angry eyes flick up to meet mine. “You said you wouldn’t get here until eleven. I couldn’t keep sitting around the house, so I headed over. It’s dark outside, and I didn’t want you to have to park and walk in alone, so five minutes ago I went down to wait on the bench.” A vicious yank at the zipper on his bag. “Or maybe I’m high and wasting your time. Who can tell?” He grabs his bag and walks away.

  Not only was he ready to work, he was being chivalrous.

  I go after him. “Please. Rob. Wait. Stop. I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it.” He doesn’t stop. “Ask Quick f
or someone else. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Would you stop? Please?”

  He doesn’t. He takes the steps going down nearly as fast as he went up. This time, I try to keep up with him.

  He practically leaps off the bottom step to stride toward the store entrance.

  I attempt the same thing and my foot goes out from under me. I grab at the railing to steady myself, but my bag goes skidding across the floor and I land in a heap at the bottom of the stairwell.

  I swear like a sailor. The last step is digging into my back in a way I’m sure I deserve.

  I make enough noise that he stops and turns. “Did you just fall down the stairs?”

  “No, it’s an illusion. I did it all with mirrors.” Thank god it’s winter and I’m wearing jeans.

  By the time I’m standing, Rob is holding my bag out for me.

  “Thanks.” I’m humiliated for so many different reasons that I can barely look at him.

  I force myself to look up. Rob’s eyes are as dark as they were when we were standing in the parking lot, but now his are shining a bit, his mouth a thin line.

  My dad has this thing he does when my sister or I get emotional. He’ll put a hand on our shoulder and kind of turn us away, then say, “Take a minute.” He means for it to be reassuring, for us to get ourselves together before facing him. As if we need that minute to preserve our dignity. I’m sure it’s a cop thing, something he learned for when a crime was too much to bear, but he couldn’t break down in front of his officers.

  He had to do it last spring, when I stood shaking in the principal’s office, wondering if cheating on the SATs was going to ruin my life.

  It didn’t, but it’s never felt right to be on the receiving end of that momentary dismissal. I’ve never been able to put my finger on why, until this moment, when Rob’s rich-kid-jock facade slips a notch and I see a glimmer of vulnerability underneath.