by RJ Martin
“Only in the summer.” I didn’t like any motels anymore. I think after cleaning rooms for a while, no one would. One good thing about my seasonal job: I had a pass key my dad forgot to take back last fall. I forgot it was on my key ring until I needed to remember it. “We all can’t be international playboys.”
“We can’t be you, either.” He kissed me again as we fell across the bed. We left the TV off and lay with our clothes on for almost an hour. We kissed, and he whispered about some of the places he saw but only ones that reminded him of me. “When I was away, Jace sent me to France.”
“Why France?”
“I don’t know. Just because, I guess.” He shrugged and stroked my chin. “I was in this little village in Provence. These two dudes rode by on their bikes, and I imagined they were us.” As he eased my shirt over my head he said, “On the beach near Cannes, a guy was lying facedown on his blanket and his build was like yours. I stared at him and had to squint because the sun was shimmering from the suntan oil on his back.”
“I don’t tan.” I bit his nose. “It’s bad for your skin, remember.”
“Was there anything that reminded you of me?”
“Yeah, but then I stopped going to church.”
“Good. I was jealous.” His tongue tickled the back of my throat. I always thought kissing like that was ridiculous, movie nonsense, but when done right, like Rusty just did, oh wow. As his mother would write, Rusty took me. Just to be clear, I remained a virgin, but the shortstop got quite a show.
“CLOSE YOUR eyes,” I said as I got out of the car. “Or we won’t be able to do it.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
I came around the driver’s side, and I shut them for him, one finger on each eyelid. I kissed him and if I moved even a millimeter backward, his lips would be off mine. A tear ran down his cheek and that was when I shut my eyes too. This was our good-bye. His lips left mine, and I kept my eyes closed as I heard the sound of gravel beneath his tires. Once I knew he was gone, I opened them. It wasn’t much different because it was really dark outside. At least there were stars, and I stared up at them to find the break in the trees that led to the path I slowly followed home.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“WHERE HAVE you been?” Dad stood in the hallway and blocked the way to my room.
“With Rusty.” I stared him in the eye. He had that challenged look big guys like him got. It kind of made them irrational, I think, and normally I wouldn’t have done it. Especially considering how out of line I was. Still, I felt like he had to know that ignoring me meant I no longer felt I had to pay attention to him or his rules.
“Hank.” Mom came from the kitchen so now I was boxed in. “Maybe we should let him sleep a little first.”
“Your mother was up all night.” The sentence didn’t sound like a question, and I could tell he was concentrating to make sure.
“So was I.” Wrong answer, and Dad took a step my way. That was something new too.
“Daddy!” Angie was behind him. She was home! “He’s just upset because Rusty left.”
I looked past my father to study my sister’s face. She had a tan and her hair was a little shorter, and off her face in a ponytail. What really interested me, though, wasn’t her new look but how she knew.
“You don’t have to pretend not to be happy about it,” I spat at both my parents. “Your gay son will be alone now until I turn eighteen and can get out of here. Until then I’ll try not to embarrass you or anything.” This I directed more toward my stunned father. I never talked like that to him before. Other than that night at Big Bart’s, I hadn’t said this much to him in, like, forever.
“What’s gay?” Mark asked.
“When you act wimpy.” Luke stood just behind him.
I looked to Dad to say something. This was the moment. If they thought it meant wimpy now, it would be only a few years until their opinion of people like me would be set, and not in a good way.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Mom said.
“It means I like boys.”
“Jonah!” Dad grabbed my arm. I don’t think he’d touched me since before… well, before.
“We like boys,” Luke said.
“Are we gay?” Mark added.
In the awkward weirdness of the moment, I swung my arm up and free of my father’s grip. He didn’t come after me, and I burst into my room and tears both at once. I fell face forward on my bed and pulled the pillow over my head. My thoughts shifted back to Rusty. Why couldn’t I make it hurt less? The door opened just a little bit, and a moment later I felt the washcloth soaked in cold water on the back of my neck.
“Go away.”
“In a minute,” Angie not Mom said.
“Now.” I tried to throw the cloth off.
“No.” She kept it firmly in place.
“Please.”
“You know why Rusty came back?”
“He found out about what was happening with the angel stuff.”
“He knew because I called and told him.”
“Really?”
“You’re my kid brother.”
“I’m not a kid.” Somehow she’d gotten me to stop crying. I wished I had her way to spread sunshine even when all I felt was dark. I rolled over on my elbows and looked her over.
“So you finally grew a pair.” She poked my stomach a few times. “I’ve been at you for years, and you finally stuck up for yourself.”
“That’s not why you tortured me.”
“Maybe partly.” She shrugged. “You don’t know.”
“I’ll add it to the list.” I was starting to feel every new answer came with a sheet of questions, and the essay kind, not multiple-choice or true/false. “He hates me, you know?” I was back on my dad.
“No.” Angie shook her head. “Just because you’re gay, you don’t need to start doing the whole drama thing.”
“Well, then he loves me less than you and the twins.” I fell backward and thudded against the mattress. In the hall I heard a loud creak. “Go away!” The creaking became heavy steps I knew were my dad’s. Angie looked at me, then lay back stiff as a board. She kicked her feet and punched her arms into the air as she let out a kind of aggravated shriek. It took me a second to get I should do the same. When I did, it felt great. We kept going for, like, forever until we both stopped at once, out of breath and smiling for real.
I KEPT my head down at the bigger, louder public school. My moment of wanting to be noticed and admired was really over. So was the thrill of not being alone. I didn’t even have Angie to pass in the halls because she was going to graduate from her new school down in North Carolina. She already had a ton of friends down there. My sister ruled everywhere, I think mostly because she was fun and nice. For all her ambitions to be glamorous, she never looked down on anybody like some of her friends did, and made everyone want to be around her. Since that morning last week when she stuck up for me, I started to really admire her and was glad for my older sister. Angie was off to college in the fall, somewhere near my grandparents probably, but she was going to be at least a little free. She was only home for spring break, and once she left again, I figured, things would only be worse.
“Jonah, there you are.” Mom sat at the kitchen table, and my whole body froze as I saw the nurse from the hospital beside her. She wasn’t in her scrubs, but I recognized her face. “Ms. Rodney has come to see you.”
“All I did was talk to her.” I had a crap day at school. If this lady came all this way to tell my parents she would be so disappointed. Sneaking around the hospital was nothing compared to what followed, especially to my dad. He was seated in Grandpa Hank’s old recliner in the family room. The only reason I knew was because I saw a baseball game on the new TV.
“Jonah, please sit,” Ms. Rodney said in her airy island accent. She pulled out a chair for me, even though it was my kitchen. “I saw you on television, kissing.” She blushed a little, and I figured I was the only gay kid she’d ever visited
at home. Or maybe I was going there with the drama again. Angie was right as always. I needed to knock that off. “I remembered how you were at the hospital that day.”
“I only talked to her.” I spoke to my mother more than the nurse now. “And I left as soon as you told me.”
“Which I shouldn’t have done.” Ms. Rodney put her hand on mine, and I realized that was the first time anyone had touched me in days. “You really helped. I want you to consider volunteering a few days a week.”
“Jonah’s always been very compassionate,” Mom boasted and started making me feel better. “He’s been volunteering to help since he was a little boy. Paper drives and feeding the poor.”
I turned my head just a little and saw on the screen the game was being played at night. It wasn’t even live. After a closer look I figured out it was the now long-gone Montreal Expos. My father was thinking about Grandpa Hank. More than anything they shared their love of that reliably lousy team. Dad was watching his DVD of their one good season.
“I used to worry he was being exposed to too much too soon,” Mom continued. “But he always seemed to thrive on it.”
“And where did it get me?” I kicked back from the table. “I only want to work for money.” Rather than go to my room, I darted out the back door, grabbed my bike, and rode.
The Naylor house was all lit up, but I knew even before I got halfway up the driveway no one was home. In the breeze that always came when the sun set by the lake a For Sale sign swung from a wooden post. Rusty was even more gone now. I rode to the end of the dock where we’d been together barely a week that seemed like a year ago now. It took me over an hour to ride here, and it would be another to go home.
I didn’t get back to our road until it had been dark for hours. I had a cell phone, but I didn’t call home because with Rusty gone, I didn’t think it would be a big deal to be so late. I thought about stopping at Chad’s. On Friday night he’d be with Darcy. They were my friends, but it was different now. They went out of their way to make me feel a part of things. I just couldn’t help thinking about when I should leave, that they might want to make out.
As I chugged the last stretch of our road, Dad’s truck lumbered toward me from the direction of our house. He had on his high beams and I had to shield my eyes. He slowed way down as he passed me, did a U-turn and went home. He’d gone out looking for me? Had to be because nothing else explained it. Maybe he was worried about me? Or was he worried I was out embarrassing him?
I didn’t say anything when I came in and he was back in his recliner. I found a sandwich wrapped in cellophane on the kitchen table. In the hallway I could hear Mom reading to the twins. I usually stopped to listen because she was a master storyteller and tonight she was speaking in character as a locomotive narrator. “Whoo, whoo,” she whistled as I slipped into my room and shut the door.
“JONAH.” DAD shook me awake, and I could tell by the steady rocking of his hand on my shoulder he’d been at it for a while.
“What’s going on?” I was too delirious to be happy he was talking to me.
“Get dressed.”
IT WAS, for real, the middle of the night. I had time to calculate it on the ride after Dad and I left home. The back of the truck was full of his camping gear. He didn’t say why we couldn’t wait until morning or where we were going. We hadn’t been camping in years, and back then Angie always came too. It wasn’t so bad back then, before the killing (hunting/fishing) lessons started, and I had to disappoint him again.
He drove close to eighty and that was not normal for my—five miles over the limit and no more—Dad. He still wasn’t talking, and seemed fixated on getting wherever it was he was taking me. We turned off the interstate onto a road that, even at night, I knew I’d never been on before.
“Where we headed?” I gave in when I started to feel a little scared. “New fishing spot?”
“You hate fishing.”
“LEAVE IT,” Dad said when I reached for the tent. “We’ll get it later.” He handed me a flashlight. “Stay on the trail.” He pointed with the beam, and I could see roots and rocks.
“Is it safe?”
His answer was to drop a hand on my shoulder and guide me forward. After a few steps he let go again and I kept moving. We walked for almost an hour as the trail narrowed. If I wandered off, Dad’s arm came down again and turned me the right way.
“Why don’t you go first?” I held up the flashlight toward his face, and Dad shielded his eyes. I saw them, though, in the half second before he did it. He looked old, tired, worried, and maybe mad. It was not all that different than the face he made every time the twins had a setback or when Angie took off. It was different too. What if we didn’t bring the tent because we wouldn’t be sleeping? I knew he was wearing his old ranger’s sidearm. He always did when he was deep in the woods. Was my dad taking me out here to erase a mistake? No way, I couldn’t believe I thought it, even for like a millisecond. Still, I’d never been what he wanted from a son, and he hadn’t given me clue one to why we were out here.
“I’m getting tired.” I slowed down. Maybe if I stalled him, Dad would have time to reconsider if he was really thinking of doing something crazy. Bodily harm I put officially off the table, but maybe he was planning on reasserting his authority, to lay down the law far from home and Mom defending me.
“We’re almost there.”
What if he brought me here to tell me how ashamed he was, my clothes were in the truck. If I didn’t straighten up he was dropping me off at a bus station and never wanted to see me again? That idea I couldn’t shake off as easily. “Can we stop for a minute?”
“No.” He was right behind me now and put a hand on each shoulder to march me forward. I dropped the flashlight on a rock, on purpose, anything to slow us down. There was a slight pop as it went out. “We’ll use the moon.” Dad didn’t break stride.
“Ow.” I stepped on a root. “What if I fall?”
“I’ll catch you.”
My calves burned, and that meant we’d been climbing. One more step and the trees parted to reveal, in the faint dawn, a massive panorama of more mountaintops than I’d ever seen. Blue hulking specters as old as time stretched to the horizon. His hand slid from my shoulder down around my waist. Rather than take comfort, I panicked. He hadn’t hugged me in so long, I couldn’t remember him ever doing it.
“Dad?”
“I’m here.” Honey-tinted beams of sunrise pierced the gaps between summits and the valley flooded with a gusher of light. The glow warmed my face and arms as he held firm. We were both soaked with sweat, and my dad smelled a little like hard work and soap, but I didn’t want him to let go.
“From now on,” he whispered so close, I felt the words. “This will be our church.”
“Easter’s not until tomorrow.”
“We’ll still be here.”
Part of me thought this was kind of corny and stuff, but I remembered JC was the one thing my father and I always shared. He came to my masses. We lit candles together and would change the fronds behind the crucifixes in our house every year on Palm Sunday. We didn’t do it this year, and I now knew part of why I missed church was about my dad. I leaned back a little, and when I realized he was letting me, I put all my weight against him. With my back buried in his chest, my father kept one arm hooked around me as we watched the sun completely clear the peaks and burst across the sky.
THE CAFETERIA at Lake Henry Regional did not have JC or the saints but was a kaleidoscope of bright colors on the ROY G end of the spectrum. I wondered if all public high schools looked the same. This one could have been any I saw on reality shows or cable movies about teens with problems. I used to always feel I was better than them; I was perfect, destined to be with JC. Now, I was just in the mix.
I looked at the sunny yellow walls covered with posters of kids achieving and missed my saints. How I used to have my whole future planned. I did everything I could to keep that dream alive. I just never stopped to think ab
out if it was still what I really wanted. If I could be happy in that life, lying all the time. Maybe that was why I started looking to JC so much. You could say Rusty was a gift, a version of JC sent by divine providence to show me my mistake. Help me get free before I went too far. Or there was no intervention from on high, Rusty came along at a time when I really needed him to, and the rest was my doing and mine alone. Neither, both—I guess it didn’t really matter. I was way better off than before and that was the important thing.
“Can I sit down?” Dwight Aaron, tall and blond as ever, didn’t wait for an answer.
I nodded too surprised and confused to speak.
“Why am I here, right?” Dwight opened wide to take a bite of his thick sandwich that had like all the turkey and cheese from the meat tray in it. “After what happened to you,” he talked with his mouth full. “My folks said I had to quit too.”
“What does that have to do with you?”
He looked me in the eye as he chewed.
“Really?”
He slowly nodded a few times as he sipped the first of his three milks.
“That’s why you got so mad I let Karen Whitten think you were into her.”
“That was part of it.”
“So why did you still go on retreat?”
Color entered Dwight’s cheeks and he seemed suddenly interested in the wall behind me. Me. He was into me. I let it drop because I didn’t want to. I figured if I was too eager or not flattered enough or whatever I might ruin it. Really I was thrilled. Dwight wasn’t exactly my type, but I needed to move on anyway. “So, you’re gay?”
“Yes.” He looked around a little uneasy. “I’m not that out yet, okay.”
“Hang with me. You will be.”
“That’s what I’m counting on.”
Now I smiled too and took one of his chips. We bantered about the difference between our schools and whose parents said the most squirm-inducing stuff during the “what it means to be gay” talk. Dad gave me mine on the ride down the mountain. The thing I remembered clearest was the rules were no different now. He expected me to stay the “decent” kid I’d always been and not let anyone treat me like I wasn’t.