Darius the Great Deserves Better

by Adib Khorram

  “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  “It’s okay. I’m glad you’re home.”

  I let Mom and Dad through, and Laleh followed, bringing Dad up to speed on everything he’d missed—including, according to her, “Miss Hawn doing Mike Progressions.”

  Dad looked from Mom to me.

  “Microaggressions,” I whispered, and slipped out to grab Dad’s suitcase.

  I popped the trunk and fought the big suitcase, which kept catching on the rubber lip of the trunk. Usually Dad packed his suitcase perfectly flat, but this time it was lumpy and awkward, like he’d balled up everything and tossed it in, rather than folding or rolling his clothes into neat rows.

  I set the unwieldy suitcase on its wheels and pulled out his smaller one, then grabbed his leather Kellner & Newton messenger bag from the passenger-side footwell.

  “You hungry?” Mom asked. “We have some kabob left.”

  “Some” kabob was an understatement.

  We had enough leftovers to feed the entire Chapel Hill High School varsity men’s soccer team.

  “Here. Sit.” Mom forced Dad into his seat at the table. Laleh clambered into the seat next to him and kept up her tales about school.

  The kettle was ready, so I filled the teapot and hauled the suitcase upstairs.

  Mom followed me.

  “Thank you, sweetie,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  “You can leave it there. I’ll sort out the laundry.”

  “Okay.”

  I laid the suitcase in the corner by the closet. Mom unzipped it and started pulling out clothes.

  Sure enough, they were all jumbled up, and mixed in with Dad’s shoes, which weren’t even in the drawstring cloth pouches he normally used.

  Mom let out a sigh so quiet I might have imagined it.

  I thought about her living through Stephen Kellner’s depressive episodes before.

  I thought about her living through mine.

  I thought about how she had to grieve her father on top of all of that.

  “Um,” I said. “Do you want some tea?”

  “Yes please.”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  While Dad ate his kabob, Grandma and Oma came downstairs. They had changed out of their Persian Casual clothes too, into comfy sweatpants, though Oma still had her hair up.

  “Don’t get up,” Grandma said, but Dad did anyway. He gave them each a kiss on the cheek.

  “You need a shave,” Oma said.

  Dad just shrugged and went back to his dinner.

  Everyone was quiet for a second, the kind of quiet you could snap like a twig.

  I said, “How was California?”

  “Busy,” Dad said.

  “When do you have to go back?”

  He sighed. “Monday.”

  “At least it’s warm there,” Grandma said.

  Oma nodded but didn’t add anything. She was studying Dad with pursed lips.

  The silence came back.

  That’s the thing about silences. Sometimes they keep coming back.

  “Anyone else want tea?”

  “Sure.” Oma glanced at Grandma and then back at Dad. “You sure you’re doing okay, Stephen?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right.”

  Grandma rested her hand on Dad’s shoulder. “You look tired.”

  “Really. I’m fine, Mom.” Dad smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

  What was happening?

  There was some shrouded tension lurking in the kitchen, but I couldn’t figure out why, so I did what I always did and poured some tea.

  “What’s this?”

  “Dragonwell.” I handed Dad the mesh strainer of steeped leaves so he could smell. “Pan-roasted green tea. From China.”

  Dad gave the leaves a long sniff. “It smells good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does it have much caffeine?”

  “Not really.”

  “Hmm. Better make something stronger next, so we can stay awake for Star Trek.”

  “Really?”

  Dad smiled, this time for real. He had dark bags under his eyes, and his hair was a mess, but for the first time since he’d been home, he looked like my dad again.

  “Really.”

  THE VISITOR

  For as long as I could remember, Dad always had a rule: one episode a night, unless it’s a two-parter, and then we get to watch both parts. (Three-parters still get split up into three separate nights, for some inexplicable reason Dad refuses to disclose.)

  But when we finished “The Way of the Warrior, Parts I & II”—where Worf from The Next Generation joins the crew of Deep Space Nine—Dad didn’t turn the TV off, or even stop the next episode from cuing up.

  “We’ve got to make up for lost time.” Dad’s voice was hoarse, and he cleared his throat as he scooted closer to me. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “I’ve missed this.”

  I cleared my own throat. “Me too.”

  We were quiet for a second. Not the brittle silence from the kitchen, but a comfortable sort of silence. Dad breathed, and I breathed, and I sank into the couch under the weight of his arm.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you really doing okay?”

  Dad hit pause (the teaser for “The Visitor” had just started) and looked at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just, last time you were home, you said you were depressed.”

  Dad’s mouth twisted to the side.

  “And you seem . . .”

  “What?”

  Rumpled was the first word that came to mind.

  But I couldn’t say that.

  I couldn’t.

  “Tired,” I said instead.

  And then I said, “Sad.”

  And then, because I didn’t know when to shut up, I said, “Lonely.”

  Dad sighed. He stared at the screen and ran the back of his index finger under his lip, tracing the gaps in his beard.

  I wanted Dad to say something. To answer me.

  But instead, he wrapped his arm around me again, grabbed the remote, and hit play.

  “The Visitor” is one of the best episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’s about Captain Sisko’s son, Jake, trying to bring his dad home after he gets lost in time.

  It was just my luck, watching an episode like that, when my own grandfather was lost to me forever.

  When I was afraid I was losing my dad to depression.

  The last time Dad’s depression got really bad, we lost each other for almost seven years.

  I didn’t think I could take it if he drifted away from me again.

  Next to me, Dad was crying. Not just a single tear, like he usually had, but full-on crying. He sniffed and wiped his eyes and then he made this sound, like a groan or a whimper, and he pulled me so close to him I thought he was going to crush me.

  I wrapped my arm around him too, and we held each other for a long time.

  “Dad?” I asked, once it seemed like he had calmed down enough to talk.

  “Sorry.” Dad wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. “That just really got to me.”

  “It’s okay. Really.”

  I wanted Dad to know it was okay for him to cry in front of me.

  When the episode was over, and the ending credits played, I handed him a couple Kleenex and used one to blow my nose.

  Dad leaned back and sighed.

  “One more?” he asked.

  “Um.”

  It was already past midnight.

  “Please?”

  Dad had this thing in his voice.

  It broke my heart to hear it.

  “Sure.”

  So
we watched another episode (“Hippocratic Oath,” which is kind of a forgettable one, to be honest), and I leaned my head against Dad’s shoulder when I started getting sleepy. Dad rested his hand on my head and played with my hair.

  I couldn’t remember Dad ever doing that.

  Mom did it all the time. But Dad never did.

  He kept combing it back and playing with the three little whorls in the crown of my head.

  “Hey,” he said, not much louder than a whisper. “Does it ever make you feel worse, being around me when I’m depressed?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  Dad’s fingers paused on my head.

  “You sure? It doesn’t make you more depressed?”

  “I’m sure. Why?”

  Dad’s fingers started up again. He was quiet for a long time.

  I stifled a yawn.

  “Sometimes being around your grandparents . . . I don’t know. It makes me feel like I’m thirteen again, lying in bed and thinking depressed thoughts. And feeling their depression too, like a cloud over the house.”

  “I didn’t know Grandma and Oma had it too.”

  “Well, they don’t like to talk about it. And they’ve never been to see anyone for it, so they’ve never been officially diagnosed. I always thought they might be bipolar.”

  “Oh.” I stifled another yawn. “Did they make it hard for you to get help?”

  Dad rested his chin on my head. “Sometimes. They wanted me to manage it on my own.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  My eyelids got heavy. I kept blinking, but I knew I had to stay awake.

  “Is that why we never see them?”

  “No. Maybe.” Dad sighed. His breath tickled my hair. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh.”

  “Them being here, I thought . . . well, I want you and your sister to have a better relationship with them than I did.”

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure Dad’s plan was working.

  But I couldn’t say that to him.

  I yawned.

  Dad chuckled.

  “Okay.” He kissed my head again. “You need to get to bed.”

  “I’m awake,” I said, though my eyes were closed.

  “All right.”

  I let Dad hold me. And I held on to him too.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he whispered. “I’m going to be okay.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION

  “Darius, can you take the trash out?” Polli asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Most of our trash actually went into the compost—we gave it to a farm-to-table restaurant down the street to use in their garden—but I had to sort it first, because sometimes people threw outside trash in our cans: plastic wrappers, empty glass bottles, used Red Bull cans.

  I didn’t understand the point and purpose of Red Bull.

  Once I’d gotten everything sorted and dumped into the big compost bin, I ran to the bathroom to wash my hands and make sure I hadn’t spilled anything on myself.

  “Excuse me?” a twenty-something in a beanie with huge gauges in their ears said as soon as I stepped out front.

  “Hey. Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a gift for my partner.”

  “Oh. Do you know what they like to drink?”

  “She doesn’t like caffeine,” they said.

  So I led them over to our herbal selection. I talked about rooibos and fruit-based and butterfly-pea flower, letting them smell sample tins as we went.

  From the counter, Kerry hollered at me. “Darius, we need more nitro!”

  The back of my neck burned.

  “Um. Sorry. Will you be okay? I have to . . .”

  “Sure,” Beanie Person said.

  “You can ask up front if you need more help.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’re about to do a tasting,” Mr. Edwards said when I got back with the nitro tanks. “Just got a new batch of Darjeelings in.”

  “Awesome.”

  I started to follow him, but I heard a shout and a clang and the sloshing of liquid. A table had just spilled a full carafe of iced hibiscus, which was dark purple and sticky from agave nectar and hard to get off the floor if it set too long.

  Polli waved me down. “Darius?”

  “I’ll take care of it.” I turned to Mr. Edwards. “Be right there.”

  I mopped the spill up, and then helped break down some boxes for recycling. I was headed to the tasting room again when Kerry said, “Darius. I need some Uva. And New Vithanakande.”

  “Tins?”

  “Packs.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’ll be a second,” she said to this tall, beardy person with a trucker hat waiting at the register.

  To be honest, they were the last person in the quadrant I would have expected to be looking for fine teas from Sri Lanka.

  “Thanks,” Kerry said when I handed off the packs.

  “Sure. I’m gonna catch this tasting if it’s okay.”

  “Have fun.”

  Mr. Edwards and Landon had already steeped four different cups of Darjeeling, and were dipping their spoons into the third when I knocked on the tasting room door.

  “Just in time,” Mr. Edwards said. “Grab a spoon.”

  I sat next to Landon and dipped my spoon into the first tea.

  “Mm,” I said. “It’s good.”

  “First or second flush?” Mr. Edwards asked.

  “Um.”

  I smelled the tea, studied the liquor, took another sip. It was lighter and smoother.

  “First?”

  “Good. What else?”

  “Floral?”

  “Hm.” His lips pursed for a second. “More spicy than floral, I think. Cardamom.”

  “Oh.”

  It didn’t taste like cardamom to me at all, and I drank cardamom all the time.

  I tried number two. “Um. Tropical?”

  “Yes, guava and passionfruit. Be more specific when you taste.”

  That burning in my chest came back: this weird, kind of fluttery feeling, like I had a pulsar lodged behind my sternum, spinning and flinging electromagnetic radiation outward in rapid intervals.

  I wished I could just drink the tea and enjoy it.

  Next to me, Landon’s pen scratched against his notebook.

  Mr. Edwards cleared his throat. “How about this third one?”

  “Kind of nutty? Like almonds?”

  “Better. And number four?”

  I felt like I was back in Algebra II. And there was no Chip to help me study either.

  I sniffed and sipped and thought.

  “Fruity.”

  “Grapefruit,” Landon added.

  “Right. You’ve got to work on that palate, Darius.”

  The pulsar spun faster.

  And I had that ridiculous feeling again, stronger than ever.

  Like I didn’t like working here anymore.

  Like sooner or later, tea was just going to be another test for me to fail.

  “All right. Better get cleaned up. Good work.”

  “You mind taking care of it?” Landon asked. “I’ve gotta do some stocking.”

  I cleared my throat. “Sure.”

  I emptied the cups and put them in the dishwasher, wiped off the table, and told myself everything was okay.

  Really.

  * * *

  I was going to go home after work, but Landon invited me over.

  Landon almost never invited me over. For some reason, we usually hung out at my house.

  So when he asked me to come over, I knew I had to say yes.

  Land
on and his dad lived in a condo downtown, just a couple streetcar stops away from Rose City. It was in a remodeled art-deco office building, on the eighth floor. Landon punched in the code to the front door and led me up in the elevator. He grabbed a paper notice wedged into the door frame and let us in.

  Every time I saw Landon’s home, I was kind of amazed. Their living room had these big windows that looked out over downtown—you could even see Rose City Teas, if you were tall enough, like me—and everything was white and chrome and sleek.

  Landon led me to the angular black couch. “You want anything?”

  “I’m good.”

  He sat down and rested his head against my shoulder.

  “You okay? You were awfully quiet today.”

  “I don’t know. I just . . .” I played with the hem of my shirt. “I don’t know.”

  Landon snaked his arm behind me to hold my waist. “Talk to me.”

  I didn’t know how to tell him how tired I was of never having the right answer at tastings.

  How I just wanted to drink tea and share it with people.

  How I wasn’t happy at Rose City.

  I didn’t know how to say any of that out loud.

  So instead I said, “I’m just worried about my dad, I guess.”

  “He still depressed?”

  “Yeah. Plus I’m still sad about my grandfather.”

  “I get that.”

  “Babou loved tea. Now, every time I make a pot, drink a cup, it’s like . . . it hits me. I don’t have a grandfather anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I took his free hand in mine and twined our fingers together. “It’s okay.”

  Landon kissed my shoulder.

  I sighed.

  He smiled at me, and then leaned in closer to press his lips against mine, warm and soft and lingering.

  It was gentle and nice. His hand moved from my waist to the back of my neck, fingers playing along my hairline before moving up my head and twisting into my curls.

  I shivered.

  Landon leaned back. His lips were red and a little chapped in the corner. His tongue darted out at the spot.

  “Is this okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, because when we were kissing, I didn’t have to talk. I didn’t have to think.

  I didn’t feel that pulsar in me anymore.

  Landon scooted closer until he was almost in my lap and kissed me again. He tapped his tongue against my teeth, and I opened up a little bit to meet it. But then he did this thing where he hollowed out his cheeks and sucked my tongue into his mouth.