by T. J. Klune
I FINALLY clear my head (wake up? regain consciousness?) and realize I’ve been in the parking lot for a while. The fog outside has seeped its way into the car, and my hands feel chilled, and my neck is stiff. Opening the door, I look at the stairs that lead up to the door where a little boy is waiting for me with hurt in his eyes and venom in his veins. One foot falls in front of the other, and somehow I make it up the steps.
I’ve barely inserted the key into the door when it whips open. Creed is staring at me, the Kid curled in his arms. I try to ignore the sight of his little shoulders shaking.
“What the hell is going on?” Creed hisses.
I’m bone tired, my brain on auto pilot. I slowly push past Creed’s shoulder and close the door behind me. It snicks shut, and I don’t want it to open ever again. I think it’s a fine idea to stay here forever, curled up in a ball in the corner, feeling the gentle current wash over me. Floating is always better than hurting.
“I swear to God, Bear, if you don’t tell me what the hell just happened, I’ll—” Creed begins again.
“You’ll what?” I say quietly. “What will you do?”
This stops him and his eyes narrow. “What did she do to you? Why the hell did she come back?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Tough shit,” he says. “Otter brings the Kid home, and they’re both furious, and all they will tell me is that your mother is with you and that she’s trying to make amends or something.”
I laugh, but there’s no humor. “Or something,” I agree.
His eyes soften, and for a moment, I am startled to see the green and gold that I never noticed he had. It’s duller than Otter’s, but it’s there. I look away.
“Bear, what did she do to you?”
“Do you really want to help me right now?”
He nods.
“Then I need you to do me a favor.”
“I told you. Anything.”
“Go home.” I raise my hand before he can retort. “Go home and leave us alone for now. I know that all you want to do is help. I get that. I love you for that. But I need you to be away from me right now.” I can’t tell him it’s because he looks way to much like his brother and it’s annihilating me.
He still looks like he’s going to protest, but he sees something in my eyes or hears something in my voice, and his shoulders sag. I raise my arms, and he transfers the Kid to me. Sadness rips through me as I feel my little brother tense at the exchange. I think he’s going to struggle but instead, he hooks an arm around my neck and buries his face into my chest. I feel him shake. God. I turn to walk down the hall.
“You have to let me help you,” Creed says, and there’s desperation in his voice. I look back, Lot and a pillar of salt notwithstanding, and he looks almost as lost as I feel. He says, “I remember the last time this happened, how stubborn you were, how strong you had to be. I remember you, Bear. You two can’t do this alone. Please.”
“We are alone,” I say, and I walk down the hall into the bathroom, shutting the door behind me.
TIME passes. Then:
He shudders in my arms. “She did this, didn’t she?” I hear him whisper.
I don’t know what to say.
“She did this. She did this. She did this! She did this!” The last coming out as a small cry, breaking.
I find my voice. “I’m sorry, Kid. I did what I had to do to protect you.” I don’t know if he can hear me because he’s still chanting, “She did this, she did this,” in a low voice, rocking in my arms. Has he always been so small?
“I’m sorry. But I have to keep you safe. I have to make sure that no one can take you away from me. Can you see that?” My words are soft, as I know saying them any louder will make them false. “I made a promise to myself the day she left. Through all the anger I had, through all the fear I carried, the guilt, I made a promise. Do you know what I promised, Kid?”
He rocks. She did this she did this.
I raise my hands and put them gently to his face, stilling his movements. His eyes fix on mine, and I wonder just how much one kid, no matter even if he’s the Kid, can take before he cracks. I put my forehead against his.
“Do you know what I promised?” I ask. He shakes his head and a small drop of water falls from his eyelash. “I promised myself that no matter what happened, that no matter where we went, no matter what came our way that you would always be first in my life.”
He groans softly.
“I promised that you were going to go to school, that you would always get whatever you wanted. I promised that I would put everything I had into making you proud of me and making you someone I would always be proud of.”
“But—”
I shake my head. “Quiet.” I kiss his forehead, and his little arms go back around my neck. “I never wanted you to go through what she did to us ever again. I thought that I could be strong enough for the both of us. I wanted to give you what I never had. And—” And I can’t continue because the words have become stuck in my throat. His hands clutch at the back of my head, and I feel anger and despair rip through me, and I cling back to him.
“Earthquakes?” he whispers in my ear. “Papa Bear?”
I nod. No one knows me better than he.
He slides his way from my lap and puts his hand in mine and tugs. He pulls me to the bathtub, and we climb in. He crawls back into my lap and tears start to fall, and we feel the world shaking around us, the ocean at our feet and getting higher. Eventually we drift away, going wherever the current takes us.
YOU did this, it whispers. I feel it crawl up from the black and flit behind my eyes, sparks shooting in the darkness. When you get to look back, when the memories and the faces of those involved start to fade, just remember: you did this. At least you will always have that, right? Right? Bear?
Oh, Bear.
You did this.
SOMEWHERE, a phone rings.
There is a moment of deceptive clarity, those few precious seconds between waking and awake where everything is right, everything is okay, because the slate is clean. The world makes sense because it’s not a place with hurt and anger. It’s just blank, a perfectly imperfect sane insanity. Then logic sets in, synapses fire, muscles spasm, the heart makes itself known as blood vessels and veins constrict and contract, and I remember everything. My eyes are tacky and crass. My throat feels like I swallowed gunpowder, my head the victim of a hangover from alcohol I never drank. I force my eyes open.
I’m still in the bathtub. Alone.
The phone rings again, and I hit my head on the soap dish on the wall as I try to move to pull it from my pocket. I cringe, and my finger bends painfully as it’s stuck in denim. My ankle is on fire. I curse and yank the phone from my pocket, the ones and zeros of the display saying Anna. Anna. Anna. I hit ignore. It’s so much nicer to be able to hit ignore rather than having to ignore a ringing phone.
“Tyson?” I rust out. The bathroom is semi-dark, the door propped open slightly, and sunlight spills in through the crack, illuminating a toothbrush. I pull myself up slowly, discovering quickly why people don’t spend the night sleeping on porcelain. I open the bathroom door, squinting at the light. It looks like morning. “Kid?” I say, a little louder this time. No response.
I ignore the way my heart picks up speed, skipping here and there. I go down the hall to our bedroom. Empty. Hers too. I check the kitchen. The living room. The balcony. I check the closets, the cabinets. Under the table, over the table. “Tyson?”
My phone rings again. Anna.
I run to the front door and open it, stepping out into the cool morning air, and look around wildly. Someone laughs. A truck drives by. There’s a TV playing somewhere close. A siren. A dog barks. A sneeze and a horn. This morning sounds normal. It’s a lie. I pound on the door next to mine. Nothing. I pound again.
It opens slightly, Mrs. Paquinn’s eye peering out. It widens when it sees me, and she opens the door fully. One hand is clutching her robe at the n
eck. “Bear?”
“Is he here?” I say, shattered. “Is Tyson in there with you? Kid!” I shout past her.
She shakes her head. “Bear, he’s not here. I haven’t seen him since I left him with you last night.”
“He’s—he’s gone?” I tell her or ask her. I don’t know which. “I can’t find….”
She steps forward and pulls me into her arms, but I take the path of most resistance and stand rigid in her arms. This is no time for hugging, I think. Hugging time is not now.
“Don’t you worry, dear. We’ll find him. He can’t have gone far.” And with that, I can’t stand on my own anymore, and I fall forward. She’s tiny, but strong, so much stronger than she looks. I clutch at her, and she pats the back of my head. She smells like an old lady should, dusty flowers and old wrapped butterscotch candies.
I can’t help myself as I being to wonder about this woman. This tiny woman who has been front row for the drama of her next-door neighbors for the past three years. This woman who would seemingly drop everything if I needed her to watch Tyson. Questions rise randomly in my mind, shaming me that I don’t know the answers. How did her husband (Gerald? Jonathan?) die? Why doesn’t she have kids? Why does she do what she does for me? What in God’s name possesses this woman to stand here in this early morning, holding onto me while I melt down, while the chemical cocktail that is my being gets shaken and stirred? And then, all of that’s gone in a flash when my true fear comes to the surface, something I have been scrambling with since I first called out my little brother’s name.
“What if she took him?” I moan.
She pushes me back and clutches my face in her hands, her eyes fire, her voice frozen steel: “Then we will fight like hell to get him back. No matter what it takes.”
My phone rings again. Anna. Jesus fucking Christ.
Mrs. Paquinn drops her arms as I connect the call. “Anna, now’s not the time,” I say harshly. “Ty’s—”
“Here with me,” she interrupts. “Bear, what’s going on? He was pounding on my door, and Creed’s saying your mom was there?”
“He’s… what?” I look helplessly at Mrs. Paquinn. She steps up and takes the phone from my hand.
“Anna? It’s Mrs. Paquinn. Fine, dear, thank you for asking. Tyson? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. No, I don’t know what that’s about. No. No. Just as long as he’s safe. Uh-huh. Bear will be fine. He just had a bit of a scare. No, I’ll drive him over. I don’t think he should be operating a vehicle at the moment. Okay, now. Bye-bye.” She flips the phone closed and hands it back to me.
“He’s with Anna?” I brilliantly deduce.
She nods. “Apparently he showed up this morning, banging on her door. She has him safe and sound. Now go close your door, and we’ll get you to him.” She reaches back into her apartment and grabs car keys off the little table near the entrance. When she turns back around, she sees I haven’t moved. “Derrick, now.”
I shut the door, and she takes my hand and pulls me down the stairs. It’s so bright outside. I try to gather my senses, try to regain control. He’s safe, I tell myself. He hasn’t been taken. He’s safe. The bigger questions try to crowd in, like why would he go to Anna, and why had she already known about what had happened from Creed. I can’t answer those right now, so I push them away.
“We can take my car,” I mumble as she jerks me around the corner to the parking lot.
She sniffs delicately. “That’s sweet of you, but there is no way I am getting in that death trap of yours. I get upset every time I see you and Tyson get in to go someplace because I know that you are going to be driving home one day, and it will catch on fire.”
I don’t think I’m right in the head yet because I can’t understand what she means. “Fire?”
“Fire,” she agrees. “No, we can take my car. My husband bought me this car shortly before he passed, God love him. We never really had nice things, not that those things are ever really important. But one day he drove home in this big beautiful car with a smile on his face like I’d never seen. He told me that, regardless of whatever happened to him, he would go knowing he got to drive me around like a princess.”
“But isn’t your car a piece of shi—”
“You hush your mouth, Derrick McKenna! You’re not too old to have it washed out with a bar of soap.” Her eyes flash in my direction, and I see the smile lurking behind the lines of her face.
“Yes, ma’am.”
We round the last corner and she jingles her keys as we walk up to her early-eighties Caddy. It’s built like a brick shithouse and colored to match. She walks over to the passenger side and unlocks the door, opening it and waiting for me to get in. I sigh and try to think if I’ve ever driven with her anywhere. I ignore every story I’ve ever heard of an old driver barreling through a crowded marketplace. I sit down, a thin cloud of dust springing up around me as my ass bounces in the seat. She slams the door and walks around the front of the car. Her shoulders are almost as high as the hood of the Caddy. I think this maybe is a bad idea, but her threat of soapy waterboarding quells any retort I may have. She gets in the car, and I stare because her head barely clears the steering wheel.
She grins at me and pulls the seat forward, smashing her chest into the horn, which gives an angry gasp. She giggles and reaches down into the door pocket and pulls out sunglasses that cover her entire face. She looks like a 1920s actor in blackface makeup. The car roars to life as I scrabble for my seat belt. There isn’t one.
“That thing broke years ago,” she tells me as she clicks her own belt into place. “I just finally cut it out. But you can be rest assured that whenever Tyson is in this vehicle, he is always safe in the backseat.”
I want to get in the backseat.
She smiles again and hits the gas.
MINUTES later I am discovering what it’s like to be driven by a woman who thinks the world will end if she doesn’t keep the gas pedal firmly against the floor and that apparently there’s no such thing as the “Oh My Fuck God” handle bar for me to hang onto in an early-eighties Caddy that’s the color of shit.
Mrs. Paquinn glances over at me and must see the blood drained from my face as she says, “Oh, dear, you really must calm down. Haven’t I told you that I used to race stock cars as a young woman?”
I feel my shoulders release slightly. “No, I think you must have skipped that part,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Well, good. Because I have never raced stock cars, and that would have been a lie.”
I try to make myself smaller in the seat, thinking about how after all the shitty things that have happened in the last twenty-four hours, it would be a perfect end if I was splattered all over the windshield.
She turns to look at me as we narrowly miss plowing into a nice family of four.
“Now, am I going to have to pretend to not be nosy or are you going to tell me what happened with Julie?”
I shake my head as my hands tighten onto the seat corners. “Why else would she be here? To screw everything up like she—oh my God watch out!—like she always does,” I finish weakly as she almost rear-ends a stopped car. She goes around it instead, into oncoming traffic, and rounds the next corner at the same speed.
“I can figure that much on my own, Bear. I must admit that I had the darnedest time leaving you boys alone with her last night. I thought it would be okay because you had that Oliver with you. He’s even bigger than my Joseph was, God love him.”
At the mention of his name, I forget that we are traveling sixty miles an hour through residential streets. Sadness takes fear’s place.
“Bear? Honey? Did I say something wrong? That look on your face is breaking my heart.”
I shake my head.
“It wouldn’t have anything to do with the way he had you pressed against the wall outside my door last night eating your face, would it?”
Oh shit. My face snaps to hers, and even though I want to beg her to watch the road, I see there’s no hatred or disgust in her eyes. T
here’s only love and it’s directed at me.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” I mutter.
“I didn’t see too much,” she assures me. “I heard a bang from outside and looked out my window and saw you two.” She reaches over and pats my lap. “I must say, though, I never thought I would live to see the day when a Bear got mauled.” She chuckles quietly. I smile weakly and think about how black his eyes had been, how my breath had gotten caught in my throat as I felt his hands upon me, my back pressed against the apartment wall. How his breath had become my own, and how I had just wanted to spit and hiss and rut right there. “I love you,” he’d said.
I know. I think I’ve always known.
I shouldn’t be thinking of these things. I can’t be thinking of—
(Oh God)
For a moment, I am gone, traveling back days and weeks. I rewind past the earthquake, past the ocean, past the ugliness that was my cowardice, past her. I am with him.
He grins up at me from his spot between my legs, his chest pressing against my cock as he rests his head in one hand and draws meaningless shapes on my stomach with the other. His long legs stretch out and dangle off the edge of the bed.
“Okay, what did I say that time?” he asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. How the hell am I supposed to know what you’re spelling. This is stupid.”
He rolls his eyes. “It’s not stupid. You’re stupid. Guess.” He starts the shapes again.
I close my eyes, trying to focus on the movement of his finger. He goes slower, and again, I have no idea what he’s trying to say. The nerves in my skin tingle as he ghosts his way around and around. His big hands are like fire. I grunt softly and arch, trying to relieve the pressure that is building in my loins. I hear him chuckle softly, and he presses his chest downward.