by Rowan Massey
When I stood, my legs were wobbly, and my nose was running down my face, but I just wanted to go to the phones and get it over with. So I did. Too weak to run again, I stepped into the rain and walked, one simple step at a time, through the mud, until I was there. Only one of the cruddy phones was undamaged enough to work. I picked up the receiver and took a few deep breaths.
“Hello,” I said, checking to see if my voice sounded like I’d been crying. It did, but I couldn’t help it.
The coins clinked into the phone. I wasn’t sure if the number I was calling was correct, but I’d seen it on our phone’s electronic display a hundred times, and all but a few of the numbers were clear in my memory. It rang three times, then someone picked up.
“Hello?” Sweet. Friendly.
“Toni?”
“Lysander? What are you doing?” Tense. Accusing.
“I-I…she won’t get up…there’s nothing to eat.” My voice was quickly turning into a whine.
She made a frustrated sound and sighed. After she asked me where I was, she told me to stay in the car and wait for her. She hung up.
By the time I was back in the car, I was soaked down to my underwear and freezing. I didn’t want to take my clothes off in public, but it was too cold to do anything else. My shirt and pants wanted to stick to my pale skin. I ended up kicking wildly in frustration when I couldn’t get my jeans off. I was trapped—anxious. But they came off eventually. Unsure about my underwear, I found my dirty, dry clothes before taking them off, then put the others on as fast as I could. All of my clothes had been worn until they stank, but they felt wonderful once I was fully dressed. I wrapped my blanket around myself, sitting in the fetal position in my seat. I pulled it up over my wet hair. Mom stirred but didn’t say anything, only turned over.
I’d been worried Toni would show up when I was half naked, but I sat ready for hours before anyone showed up for me. My stomach grumbled endlessly, and I had a weakness in my core that made it hard to sit upright any longer. I dug through all the junk and found a bottle with a little more wine in it.
It was getting late into the night when I heard the -STARI-tap-tap of a knuckle against glass. I was so ready to receive some food that I jumped across the steering wheel and opened the driver’s side door without looking at who had knocked.
It wasn’t Toni at all.
Pastor Julian got in the car with an irritated look, slamming the door closed and running a hand down his dripping face. He looked at me as if I were a dirty piece of trash. I sat there awkwardly, wondering what I’d done that was so horrible.
“Mom is sleeping,” I said meekly.
“I can see that,” he said, glancing into the backseat. He seemed angry. I thought he would wake her up, but he didn’t. He faced the windshield and started mumbling to himself. Now and then his eyes squeezed shut. At first I thought he was praying, but then I made out the word fuck and knew he wasn’t. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. I hoped he would drive us to get fast food.
“All right,” he said, finally. “I’m going to leave some money. Give it to her when she wakes up. Tell her this is the last of it and that I don’t want to be bothered again.”
He took a thin stack of bills out of his coat and reached across me to stash it in the glove compartment.
“But…” I started uncertainly. “I can’t wake her up. She won’t get up.”
“By the smell of it, she’s drunk. She’ll wake up eventually.”
“We’re hungry.” I was whining again. We was easier to say than I. He was such an asshole, but I needed him if Toni wasn’t going to help.
“You’ll eat when she wakes up.” He put his hand on the door handle and turned away, but I grabbed his coat sleeve.
“Please,” I said, more tears pushing at my eyes. “I don’t know what to do. You have to help me.”
Instead of sympathy, I got anger.
“Do you have any idea how much shit I’m in after everything I’ve done for you two? I’m losing everything. Everything!” His hot breath hit my face.
He’d barely ever said anything past hello to me before, and I started shaking—partly from hunger, and partly from stress.
“Have you been drinking?” He asked, accusingly. His face loomed closer to mine, and he sniffed. “This is just more trouble. I shouldn’t even be here.”
He pulled his sleeve out of my grip, opened the door, and hurried out of the car into the rain. I saw his form disappear into the darkness.
I sat stunned for a long time. Eventually, I went again through the rain to call the number on the cop’s card. It was almost morning. By the time he got to me, I was too tired and emotionally exhausted to talk to him. I let him find the things he needed by going through the mess in the car, then quietly did what I was told.
We went to the shelter but weren’t there long. Mom was convinced to go to a rehab program, but that meant I went into a group home. My memories of being there are a haze, and I don’t want them to clarify.
After Mom got a job, I went back to living with her. We had welfare and a place in the housing projects. She’d gotten somewhat sober, but had picked up smoking. The sick smell of cheap cigarettes started turning into the smell of home.
Time went by quickly, and I managed to catch up at school by the skin of my teeth. I’d stupidly thought Mom would notice me if I proved I was smart, but her level of interest in me hadn’t changed. She herself was studying just as hard, having enrolled in night school. The certificate she earned got her a management job but we still didn’t have much.
I moved on, but that night contains memories I never managed to rewrite in my scrambled brain. I’ll always remember the lessons of my rainiest day.
Chapter Nine
Zander Age 18
EVERY NIGHT FOR three days I’d been laying down in the dark, posing like a dead person in a coffin, and summoning the memory of my night with the guy I thought of as Mr. Intimacy—the man who had so sweetly taken my fake virginity. But I’d been making a change. I held Clay’s picture in front of my nose and put his face in place of Mr. Intimacy’s. Who knew what he would be like once I met him, much less what he’d be like in bed, but I had to associate him with good sex. It was already helping. I wanted to get to a point where I could jerk off while thinking about the revised memory.
It was Sunday night and I had school in the morning. I was tired even though all I’d done all day was watch YouTube and try on outfits, nitpicking over how old each item of clothing made me look. The problem of youth was making me more and more nervous. I thought about trying to grow a beard but it wasn’t me and I knew it would make me look ridiculous in the end. I’d written down things like “Walk tall with confidence” and “Don’t carry a backpack”. On Saturday, I’d gone to the mall and stolen a pair of gray loafers, leaving my old, green sneakers in their place.
Not wanting to nod off quite yet, I checked my phone one last time, holding the bright screen over my face. I squinted and wished I could turn the brightness down lower. Lottie had been talking to me every day, showing me her meals. We exchanged selfies and competed to be the one with the silliest face. It was incredibly unlike me to do shit like that. My fake persona was escalating into an extremely wholesome thing with her. I didn’t care how weird it felt because I badly wanted her to like me. I’d already embraced that need completely. Ignoring the fact it couldn’t last and that she may hate me forever after what I was going to do to her dad, I absolutely needed her to be my best friend. Having discovered what it felt like to have a sibling, I couldn’t allow it to slip through my fingers so soon.
Remembering that I hadn’t yet done anything wrong and could still take it all in a normal direction was always a shock, like splashing cold water in my face when I was half awake. Reality kept disappearing behind my obsessive fantasies. The sickly sense of having done a freakish deed was always with me.
Seeing that Lottie hadn’t answered my last message, I had a pang of disappointment. Fuck my life if s
he was already getting bored with me.
Switching to a dating app, I looked for Clay again. Lottie had told me she was putting him on an app whether he liked it or not. She’d texted, “OMG I think I’m bonding with Dad lol” after she’d gotten him to sit down and do it with her, but then she’d gone AWOL. I hadn’t gotten another message.
“Twenty-two,” I whispered to myself, then made a frustrated sound and rubbed my face. “Twenty-one. I’m twenty-one.”
The problem with the ages eighteen or twenty-one was that they risked sounding too convenient. Maybe I could pull off twenty. Ages that were still in the teens weren’t going to cut it. I spent ten minutes looking at all the selfies I’d been taking and started to settle on that age.
I went back to the dating app and flipped through the profiles. I almost went past his picture.
He was hugging a black dog, which was laying down in front of a brick wall. His arm was blurred from petting the dog’s chest, and he had a big smile on his face. He was wearing black-framed glasses and a blue T-shirt.
My name is Clay, and I live in the downtown area. I’m an editor/writer/reviewer and father of a teenager. Looking to date a good man. I enjoy spending time with friends, reading, travel, working out, and watching movies, but I spend 90% of my time reading something or other. I love hearing people’s life stories. Ask me anything. I’m an open book. I’m into anything or anyone that’s weird, original, or tragic.
The only thing I felt was nausea. I put the phone face down against my stomach, which blocked the light, putting me back into a darkness that immediately soothed my eyes. My sense of time was becoming warped, and I was getting a gentle vertigo. Instead of sensing the usual up or down of gravity, in my minds eye, I was stuck onto the side of the earth like a magnet on a fridge door.
My mind was just distracting me. I stopped thinking about my body’s relation to the earth, and opened my phone again. His sweet and almost shy smile was gleaming at me. This was the man whose life I’d set out to ruin.
Clay Corden.
Chapter Ten
Clay Age 38
MY SON’S PICTURE was exactly where I’d left it a dozen years ago. I’d been unable to look at it anymore—not day in, day out. The image was scanned and backed up somewhere in my digital mess of photographs, but I wanted to finally dig up the original. I’d put it in a manila envelope and stuck it up against the wall in my clothes closet as if hiding it from myself. When I held that dusty, old envelope and saw the mold damage and the way it had warped from the damp, I gave in to everything I’d been locking away since his eighteenth birthday and cried. Sobs shook my shoulders, and I couldn’t make myself open the envelope. I stood in my closet and simply let myself fall apart.
He was seven years old when Leona allowed me the privilege of owning a picture of my own son. That year, Lottie had graduated from kindergarten, and I’d started calling Leona on the last phone number she’d given me. The photograph had come in the mail a week after she’d finally answered one of my calls. She’d said something that had really shut me up. Now, I couldn’t even remember what she’d said. I just knew I didn’t call her again during the year he was eight.
After several minutes crying, I opened the envelope, took the photo out, and looked at his little face. He had freckles just like Lottie’s. That detail hadn’t faded out of the image. There wasn’t as much damage to the paper as I’d feared. He had a curly mop of hair. A big grin showed off his missing incisors. I knew he didn’t look like me or his mother, although I could barely visualize what Leona looked like anyway. He appeared to be happy, which had comforted me back then.
My muscles were stiff, and I walked into my kitchen almost like a robot. I’d bought a frame to put it in. I’d never done that because of Lottie, but I had plans to tell her about her brother.
It took a few minutes to unpackage the frame and put the picture inside. I couldn’t stop a fresh mountain of shame from building up as I went across the house and put it in a central spot on the mantel. It was such a pathetic gesture that it was painfully humiliating, even though there was no one there to see me.
I covered my face with my hands. I couldn’t stand myself. I’d hated myself for giving up on him for the past eighteen years, but since his age meant I had a sliver of a chance at finding and meeting him, I couldn’t distract myself anymore.
Instead of facing the ugly facts of the kind of man I was, I’d buried my head in books for half my life. It had started with being locked away and neglected during my childhood but I was starting to accept that it was, at least in part, a toxic form of escapism. As if fate had it in for me, I’d been recently beginning to accept that after half a lifetime of nonstop reading, books could actually get boring—every story derivative and every theme or topic done to death. It was like the world was shrinking and fading out. I hadn’t thought it was possible to run out of books I wanted to read, but that was exactly what was happening.
At the same time, Lysander was turning eighteen, and that meant meeting me was up to him. When I’d called Leona on his birthday, she had seemed ready for me.
“I’ll tell him about you on Christmas,” she’d said firmly. “It’s up to him. Don’t call me and pester me again.”
I hadn’t called her again, but I was impatient. Preparing myself to meet him was a gargantuan emotional task for which I had no help. My life had become lonely, despite technically having so many friends. Maybe I’d retreated. Maybe I’d been depressed for a while.
I scrubbed my face with my hands and plopped down on the sofa. Lottie had been unusually open to spending time with me over the weekend. We’d had a pretty good time setting up a profile on a dating app. Although, I still wasn’t really on board with dating again, especially not when I was waiting to hear from my son for the first time.
Remmy ambled over and placed his head on my knee, claiming the head scratches he felt entitled to. I told him he was awesome and perfect, petting his abundant, black fur, which had been making a mess all over the house for almost nine years. His presence was soothing, and I laid down to watch TV. I’d been binge watching something silly about incompetent cops, and I put it on, but couldn’t pay attention.
I’m a selfish piece of shit. Why do I exist? I’m pathetic. I’ll never be a good dad or a good anything to anyone. I hate myself. I hate myself so much.
If someone saw me right then, what would they see? Was the pain evident in my face? Catherine had suggested that I was going through a midlife crisis, and picturing myself there in the light of the TV, cuddling my dog and feeling sorry for myself, I had to consider the possibility.
I was turning into a slob. Showers and workouts were getting skipped, and I’d even forgotten to feed Remmy on one especially bad day. Was that what a midlife crisis looked like?
I’d been too clingy with Lottie of late, and I hated myself for looking to her to fill the void incubating inside me. Yes, I’d nagged her into spending extra time with me. Yes, I knew it was bad parenting to rely on her to alleviate my loneliness. And yes, I knew what she was doing with that you-should-be-dating garbage. She wanted me to find an adult to share my time with, so that she could go be a teenager in peace. She’d already texted to ask me if I’d talked to anyone yet. I still kept running over the humiliating conversation we’d had about my dating history. She’d looked at me with pity when I’d told her I’d “never had time for a real relationship”. I’d had time. And I’d chosen to escape into books.
With a heavy sigh, my gaze wandered back to Lysander’s picture and I tried to push myself to do it for the sake of being a healthy man when I met him, instead of a needy, depressing loser. I sat up and pushed some books around to find my phone and look at the app. For a second, I wasn’t sure if I was looking at the right thing, because there were four—no, five messages.
My knee-jerk reaction was to think they must be desperate, or prostitutes, or spammers. Or maybe Lottie had succeeded in crafting my profile to make me seem appealing. Three of them simply
said hi. I opened one of their profiles, saw that he seemed alright, and instead of saying hi back, I stared at the screen until it went black. Being friendly and coming up with things to talk about was the last thing I felt capable of doing.
I read at the messages again. The next two were unattractive to me, one was a couple, and the fifth was a young man named Zander. God, had he messaged the wrong person? But no, his message was definitely for me.
Zander: I have a weird and tragic story for you.
There were few things more appealing to me than real-life people who had good stories to tell. Most people were boring, but I could sit through those stories too. I just enjoyed being around people. Or I had. When I was a teenager, I’d carried around a notebook and asked people for stories from when they were my age. I’d been just young enough to get away with something like that without seeming too strange.