The Kids Are Gonna Ask

by Gretchen Anthony

  t.mcclair@guavamediausa.com

  To: thorJJ1979@gmail.com

  Re: Hi Jack

  Jack,

  Still haven’t heard anything, so I guess you are mad. And you’re right. We had no idea what was happening and what kind of a mess we might be getting you into. It’s our fault. I just hope you don’t hate us. But if you do, I hope you won’t feel that way forever. I’d still like to meet you someday.

  Sorry again,

  Thomas McClair

  [BEEP]

  Maggs! Where you all at? I’m getting thirty-three thousand phone calls a day. These kids are hot. Call me.

  [BEEP]

  Maggs. Maggs. Maggs. Pick up! Maggs.

  [BEEP]

  Have you figured out yet that I’m just going to keep calling until you answer?

  Trigg:

  OMG!!! [screaming cat face emoji] So don’t kill me but I sort of talked to a reporter about you [oopsies emoji] [finger biting emoji]

  Trigg:

  I didn’t tell him anything. I swear. I mean, not really anything. Just like that you aren’t super into being a part of the popular crowd but that’s cool because you’re more about your writing and you’ve been so sad since your mom died and...

  Trigg:

  That we’ve been friends for so long I know you better than anyone and there’s no way you want all men to get castrated or whatever that Eaton witch said, even though you did sort of make a joke that someone should do that to Nico. But I made the reporter swear not to use that part because you were just mad that Nico always teased you so much and he promised he’d be fair in whatever he wrote...

  Trigg:

  See? Nothing bad. I was just sooo sick of my phone ringing I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Trigg:

  Have you texted Kyle Larson yet???

  Thirty-Four

  Savannah

  Savannah came down to dinner with a pile of freshly typewritten pages.

  “The Kids Are Gonna Ask: The Final Episode.” Thomas looked at her. “What’s this?”

  “We’ve got to wrap it up sometime.”

  As he began reading, she knew he wouldn’t like what she wrote. Nor did she care.

  “You can’t blame Sam Tamblin for—” He stopped to find the quote on the page. “For surrendering to the darkest devils of corporate greed. And you for sure can’t accuse our sponsors of being eager to endorse the on-air abuse of children by cable news privateers.”

  “Even though they did,” she said.

  “At best, that’s debatable. At worst, that’s defamation, and we could get sued.”

  She shook her head at the assertion. “Let them sue us. I’d gladly pay back the zero cents we’ve seen in podcast profits.”

  Thomas kept reading. “Oh my god, Van. It’s not Mom’s fault, either.”

  “I don’t say it’s her fault. I argue the destructive power of family secrets.”

  Thomas dropped the script to the table. “You’re being crazy.”

  Oh, he did not just say that—

  “So now I’m crazy, huh? Are you sure I’m not being combative or irrational? Or how about overly emotional!” She was hollering, and it felt incredible. “Let me get this straight. I get attacked on national TV for a massive secret that you were hiding, but I’m not allowed to get upset about it. You, however, get to mope around all day begging me to forgive you.” She began to mimic Thomas with the most ridiculous version of him she could muster. “I’m so sorry, Van! How did I know that could happen?”

  “That’s not fair.” Thomas’s voice was even, but his eyes began to pool, red and wet. It was pitiful.

  “Oh, poor widdle Thomas can’t handle it when his sister feels her feelings!”

  Maggie, who’d been watching silently, suddenly spoke up. “Keep going.” She smacked a hand to the table. “You both need to just get it out.”

  They both shot her stay out of it looks.

  Savannah went on. “Keeping our father from me? Really, T? I suppose I’m not allowed to be mad about that, either!”

  “I couldn’t tell you because you were always off with Trigg!” Two fat tears ran down Thomas’s cheeks. “And when you were home you were always like, Get your own life, Thomas! Go get some friends, Thomas!”

  Savannah felt her throat clamp shut. She hadn’t seen him cry since they’d lost Mom. She couldn’t stand it. “Oh, for—”

  “No!” he screamed. “You wanted to get into this!” He wiped his tears with shaking hands. “You think it’s been easy for me? You think I didn’t want to tell you about Jack? You—of all people, Van, you’re the only one who could even come close to understanding what it was like for me to finally find him. Except, every time I wanted to tell you, Trigg was here, or you were mad at me or I don’t even know what!”

  Now they were both crying. Even Maggie down at the end of the table had to wipe her face with her napkin.

  Savannah felt like she’d been turned raw side out, no part safe from pain knifing at her.

  “I don’t know why we ever did this!” Thomas put his head in his hands and sobbed.

  For a long moment, they all simply surrendered, letting the tears come. Katherine Mansfield clicked across the floor and lay down at Maggie’s feet.

  Eventually, there was nothing but silence.

  Savannah’s mind was a stew. All at once she was totally alone. Mostly innocent. Partly to blame. Completely confused.

  Finally, she said, “I’m sorry if I made you feel alone, T. I didn’t mean to. I know how terrible it feels.”

  He didn’t speak, but his tears began to calm.

  “I’ve been mad, obviously,” she continued. “But I guess I’ve been confused, too. This wasn’t supposed to be our mystery to figure out. She was supposed to tell us. Mom was supposed to answer our questions.”

  Thomas ran a hand across his cheeks and shook his head. “She would have, Van. She just died before she could.”

  “No,” Maggie interrupted. “That’s not actually true. You both asked. On occasion. Thomas, you asked once when all your friends were joining Cub Scouts and attending meetings with their fathers. Your mom offered to take you and you said no, you wanted a dad, like your friends, and why wouldn’t she just tell you who yours was?”

  Thomas’s gaze fell to a spot on the table and didn’t move.

  “And, Savannah, you used to leave her notes. Little folded scraps of paper on the breakfast table or under her bedroom door at night. They said things like, Did he die? And Do I look like him? And Have I ever seen him? She’d show them to me and ask my advice and I’d assure her that she’d know what to do when the time came. But then you’d never press her for answers and, essentially, she let the moment pass.”

  Savannah hadn’t thought about those notes in years, but the old anxiety came rushing back. Because that’s why she wrote them—that flutter in her stomach she sometimes couldn’t shake. The panic that maybe she’d seen him somewhere on the street or in the store or at a party, and maybe he knew who she was but didn’t say anything. Or worse, maybe he’d passed by like a stranger. “I forgot about those.”

  Maggie put a hand to her chest and kept it there. “You were young. Always just young enough that she wondered if it was better to tell you something you may not be able to process or wait until she knew you could.”

  “I hate that.” Savannah felt her rage bubble to the surface again. “I hate that she never told us. I hate that she never told you. I hate that she didn’t trust us. I hate that she died. I hate that we haven’t been thinking about anything except missing her since she left.”

  Her whole body began to shake. Again.

  “You should hate it,” Maggie said. “And your mom a little bit, too.”

  Savannah eyed her.

  “I mean it. Your mom died just before you hit
the age when you were supposed to start hating her. Teenagers aren’t supposed to love their parents. They’re supposed to battle them. Those years are your last obstacle on the path to adulthood—it’s a time meant to teach you how to stand on your own. You’re supposed to vanquish the forces holding you back.”

  “What is this,” Thomas said. “Game of Thrones?”

  Maggie smiled. “My point is, when a mom dies—especially the way Bess did—it’s hard not to think of her as anything but a saint. The innocent woman who died too young.

  “But you missed out on an important transition. You’re stuck in a Mommy holding pattern, when really, you ought to be pissed off at her. Probably for lots of stuff, but most of all that she left you with a big fat wart of a biofather mystery on your backs.”

  The metaphor gave Savannah a mental hiccup. Biofather wart?

  “It wasn’t her fault, though,” Thomas argued. “It’s not like we can do anything to bring her back, no matter how pissed off we get. Believe me.” His face flushed and Savannah heard a hitch in his throat as he forced out the last few words. “If it were just a matter of getting mad, I would have made it happen a long time ago.”

  She closed her eyes. Couldn’t look at either of them. “She didn’t tell us anything. And I do hate her for that.”

  At this, Maggie moved to the chair next to Savannah’s and put out a hand. “For what it’s worth, love, I hate myself for not pushing her more.”

  Thomas stood up and came around to join them. “I don’t think I can hate her yet,” he whispered.

  “That’s okay,” Maggie whispered back. “Maybe someday.”

  They laughed. The ridiculousness of this family. Their situation. All of it.

  “Love you, Van,” Thomas said. “Love you, Maggie.”

  “I love you, too, T,” Savannah answered. “Love you both.”

  Maggie gave them a long, luxurious squeeze. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But come what may, we’re not going to falter. Deal? We’re in this together—the three of us—right up ’til the end.”

  “Deal,” Thomas said.

  “Okay,” Savannah added, thinking that for the first time in a while, she might actually believe it.

  There they sat, the three McClairs, huddled and worn. And for the moment, it was enough.

  Email

  t.mcclair@guavamediausa.com

  To: thorJJ1979@gmail.com

  Re: Hi Jack

  Jack,

  Just one quick note because I was thinking about everything that’s happened and I should apologize, too, for not telling Savannah about your emails. I guess I was trying to protect her? Make sure you were legit before she got her hopes up. I don’t know. But, I guess I understand if you’re angry about that, too.

  Thanks,

  Thomas McClair

  Thirty-Five

  Jack

  In low country, summer brought two things—tourists and storms. Jack tolerated the tourists, since he couldn’t make a living without them. But he loved a good storm. Every day about lunchtime he’d start watching the horizon, over where he knew the heat and humidity were just beginning their invisible churn, rising up against the colder skies above.

  Funny that was how storms formed, he’d always thought. A dance between opposites. Forces that found each other irresistible, regardless of the consequences.

  Jack had been watching the horizon his whole life. Eastern Colorado was flat, a great open stretch of land at the center of the North American Plate. He knew how to read a storm. Sometimes the dance between forces spun itself into towering marshmallowy clouds. Other times, it cut great menacing gashes across the sky.

  Today, the clouds had lined up as a squall—a white wall of rain stretching north to south, as far as the horizon could hold. The rain was still miles away, but Jack knew it was time to get off the water.

  “Need to head in,” he told his charter. His clients, two retired guys he’d taken out countless times, knew what they saw and reeled in their lines without argument.

  Jack turned the boat toward shore.

  Usually when storms came, Jack used the downtime to plan for the next morning’s charter, or even to deal with the pile of laundry in the middle of his apartment. But today, he owed Ford an answer by end-of-business. And he still didn’t have one. The only thing he knew for sure was that his intentions had always been good.

  “Storm’s picking up speed, Jack. Good thing you turned us when you did.” One of his clients had stood up and pulled a Coke out of the boat’s cooler. “How’d a Yankee like you ever start fishing down here, anyway?”

  “My granddad taught me,” Jack said. Normally he would have left his answer there, but these guys hadn’t given him much trouble over the years. No reason to shut them out. “South Platte River runs straight through Colorado. Bass and crappie mostly. Some catfish.”

  Summer afternoons when Jack was a kid, his granddad would swing by the farm in his red Chevy truck and holler, “Hop in, Junior. It’s too hot to work on a day like this.” There’d be a basket of sandwiches from Grandma in the back and two bottles of Mr. Pibb in a cooler on ice. “For when we catch our limit.” Then they’d pull away, down the long gravel drive to the road, their cloud of dust never quite thick enough to block the view of Jack’s father coming out from the barn to scowl.

  “Even a dumb fisherman can be lucky enough to land a fish or two,” his granddad had told him. “But to really call yourself a fisherman, you gotta be able to set a hook when the moment is right, and to get to that point, you’re going to have to do everything that comes before it right, too.”

  Standing on a crumbling concrete slab on the banks of the South Platte, Jack’s granddad drilled him on the step-by-step: hook, bobber, worm.

  “Don’t wait ’til that bobber goes under, Junior. Your worm’ll be all eaten up if you go that long. You wanna watch it for a nudge. Not the current hitting it or a wave—those are steady. Predictable. You’re looking for the unexpected, like something’s interested. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll feel it, too. Nothing huge, mind you. Again, like a nudge. It’s subtle, but you’ll get a feel for it.”

  He’d taken his granddad’s advice with him all the way to the coast.

  On Tybee, Ford fished rivers, too. Most charter companies specialized in deep sea fishing, but Ford ran inland charters. Dozens of channels and creeks flowed south out of Savannah, slicing the Georgia low country into bite-size pieces on its way to the Atlantic. They were full of redfish and sheepshead and drum.

  “When people ask me why I hired a Colorado boy,” Ford said once, “I tell ’em it’s because you were raised on the river. And rivers require a special way of thinkin’.”

  Jack’s first trip on Tybee, Ford took him out on the South Channel, close to the bridge, under the shadow of Fort Pulaski. The same place he’d been anchored the day he got his first glimpse of Thomas and Savannah.

  “Let’s see what you got, Jack. Gonna be fishing for drum today, and they’ll give you a good fight. We’ll look for the black drum, since they’re easier. Basically dinosaurs, and a little bit dumb.” He anchored under an overpass and brought over a bucket of bait. “Nothing a drum loves more than some good stinkin’ shrimp.”

  Starting that very morning, Ford taught Jack to fish all over again. Gone were the days of spinners and bobbers. Now he baited shrimp, squid, mullet and crabs. And for a long while, he barely caught a thing.

  “Reel and then pull,” Ford hollered. “Quit doing the opposite—you’re workin’ too hard. Reel—faster than that. Now pull.” One trip, they’d gone out for sheepshead and it’d taken Jack all day to finally get a knack for what it felt like when they were nibbling on his line.

  “They ain’t gonna hold up a sign for ya, Jack. You gotta learn the subtleties. These sheepshead here, they bite the back legs off the crab and start to
suck the insides out. That’s when you wanna pull up. Hard and fast. Don’t give them a second to slip away.”

  Ford pushed the cork handle of Jack’s rod deep into his armpit. “Now, Jack! He’s gonna fight you with everything he’s got. Use your leverage. You got it!”

  Jack was soaked from head to toe in spray and sweat. The muscles in his back burned and his arms radiated with heat. He was wasted. Totally spent. But he’d finally recognized all those signals Ford had been telling him to pay attention to, the fish on the line his reward.

  Now, here he was, fifteen years older and still on the water. Only this time, no one—not his granddad and not Ford—could step up to tell him what signal to feel for next.

  He brought the boat into the landing and helped his clients unload their catch.

  “You wanna join us for a beer at The Crab Shack, Jack?” one of them hollered.

  “I’m booked this afternoon,” he responded. “Thanks, anyway.”

  “With these clouds coming, Colorado boy?” They laughed and carried on until Jack heard them drop coolers into the bed of their truck. “See you next time, Jack!”

  He waved them goodbye.

  The storm had taken three giant steps forward, and layers of gray now roiled in the clouds, tumbling over one another as they approached.

  The first fat raindrops fell on his windshield as he pulled out of the lot. To his left, the waters of the channel had gone gray and kicked whitecaps against the wind. To his right, the marsh had gone silent, the life within it hunkering down for the storm to come.

  Most days, Jack loved the channel, fond of any landscape that looked eager for a fight. Today, though, he looked toward the marsh. More than anything, he needed shelter.

  A few minutes later, he found himself at Janie’s door.

  “I had a feelin’,” she said as she answered his knock.

  He took a seat on the faded love seat and Janie opened the cooler she kept by her desk. She handed him a bottle of water.