by T. J. Klune
“You can. And you will. It’s hard, I know. And it won’t feel like you can actually do it, but I know you can. You hear me? I know you can.”
And he did. Eventually.
We sat there, slumped on the floor, giving him space but making sure he knew we were still there. He breathed in and we counted. He breathed out and we counted. It went on and on like that for a while.
And it did end. It always did. That was the fucked-up thing about it. It would end, but it could always come back. It was a quick fix. Nothing more.
His skin had a little color to it once his throat loosened enough for him to breathe erratically.
“Can I have some water?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Otter said. “I’ll get it. Be right back.”
He rubbed the back of my head as he stood and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Shit,” the Kid muttered, rubbing his hands over his face. “Shit. Fuck. God-fucking-dammit.” He knocked his head against the door, hard.
“Hey,” I snapped at him. “Don’t do that. You’re going to make things worse.”
“I thought… dammit. I thought I was getting better. I thought I could—” His voice broke as he shook his head.
“It’s okay. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out. Okay? I promise you. We’ll figure it out.”
He laughed bitterly, and I tried not to recoil. I’d never heard him make a sound like that before. “We’ve already figured it out,” he said, and it was like he was mocking me. “I’m fucked-up in the head, Papa Bear. Or hadn’t you heard?”
“Don’t say that.”
He snorted. “It’s true.”
“You’re trying to piss me off. It’s not gonna work.”
“Whatever.”
“You know what? Being a dick isn’t going to help you right now. You get me? You’re sixteen, but I’m still your big brother, and I will kick your ass if you try to sling that shit at me.”
He gaped at me, dark hair sticking on his sweaty forehead.
I glared right back.
“That…. I might actually believe that.”
“Good. Because I’m serious.”
“About what?” Otter asked, coming back into the hallway.
The Kid rolled his eyes. “Bear is threatening to abuse me if I don’t stop acting like a dick.”
“Sounds about right,” Otter said as he crouched back down beside us. He tried to put the glass up to the Kid’s lips, but Ty just sighed and took it from him. He drank on his own, grumbling as we made him finish the entire thing.
By the time Otter took the glass away from him, we were all sitting on the floor and the Kid had pulled my hand into his lap, tugging on my fingers, refusing to look at either of us.
We waited, because it was the right thing to do.
Finally, the Kid muttered, “I don’t suppose we can just forget about this.”
“Nope,” Otter said cheerfully. “Not going to happen.”
“It was part of the deal we had,” I reminded the Kid. “Before we came out here. And before we let you cut back on your therapy. Anything like this happens, we talk it out so we can understand what triggered you. And if we can keep that from happening again.”
“Yeah, well. Don’t know what you can do about this. It was stupid.” He groaned. “Jesus.”
Otter glanced at me before looking back at the Kid. “What was it?”
“It’s nothing—”
“Tyson.”
He thumped his head against the door again, but it was just a tap. His eyes were closed, but he didn’t let go of my hand. “It’s not—it wasn’t anything big. It—I don’t even know why it happened. I was walking home and this—this woman was yelling at her kid, and wires got crossed and I thought it was her and—it wasn’t. I know it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. But I thought what if it was, and then I just kept spiraling until—”
“Okay,” Otter cut in. “That’s good. We get it. Don’t get yourself worked up again.”
I tried not to show the relief I felt at that. Not because of what he’d said (because fuck that and fuck her too), but for the fact that he’d been able to get it out and into the open. It hadn’t always been that way. I thought it meant he trusted us. That he was doing his part. And that it was working. No matter how smart he was, no matter what he’d been through to get to this point, he was still only sixteen. When you’re sixteen, things seem much bigger than they actually are.
Well, I thought as Otter bumped my shoulder. Most of the time.
“That’s… okay?” I tried.
“Gee, Papa Bear. Thought of that one all on your own?”
“Don’t get smart with me.”
“Someone has to.”
I thought of Otter’s binder full of I WANT TO HAVE A BABY WITH YOU and decided I needed to be as parental as possible, just to show him I could. “I can still ground you, you know.”
Otter sighed.
The Kid’s eyes flashed open at that. “You can’t ground me.”
“Bullshit I can’t. I am your guardian. You are a minor. You don’t get to talk back to me.”
“You probably shouldn’t have said that,” Otter muttered.
“A minor?” the Kid said, sounding outraged. “Do you know what I’ve done in my life? I am a college student. I have convinced four people in the last six months that the cow meat they were shoving in their faces was obtained via nefarious means that involved nonregulatory practices that any normal person would have considered barbaric. Did you know that in 2000, the number of animals murdered for food was almost ten billion? And that was over a decade ago. The human virus has only expanded since then—”
“Give me your phone.”
“This isn’t going very well,” Otter said helpfully.
“My phone?”
I held out my free hand. “The kids in my classes look like they’ll die when I take their phone away, so I assume that’s an appropriate enough punishment.”
“But I just had a crisis.”
“Exactly. So you shouldn’t be looking into a bright screen for a while so you don’t… get a headache. Or something.”
Otter’s face was in his hands.
“Maybe I’m emotionally devastated and need to look up online how to cope with my feelings on message boards where people with similar issues post with awkward usernames!”
“You have your laptop,” I said. But then, “Which you can only use with supervision for an hour a night. And you aren’t allowed to use your Super Nintendo.”
“Jesus Christ, what year do you think it is?”
“He’s got a point,” Otter said. “And it’s not even a Nintendo. It’s an—”
“And you will come straight home, and you will go to bed by eight! No. Seven thirty.”
Both of them were staring at me.
I scowled at them.
“This might be my fault,” Otter told the Kid.
“I’m not giving you my phone,” the Kid said.
“I pay for it.”
“I use it.”
“Do we need to put a hit out on the unsuspecting mother you saw?” Otter asked, brushing the Kid’s hair off his forehead.
The Kid sighed. “Violence never solves anything. Mostly.”
“I’ll do it,” I told the Kid. “If you want me to. I’ll find her and take her out. I could probably get away with it too. No one would suspect the mild-mannered schoolteacher in the library with a candlestick.”
The Kid rolled his eyes. “Mild-mannered. Really. That’s what you’re going with.”
“We could all plan together,” Otter suggested. “I think between the three of us, we could plan the murder of someone we’ve never met and probably have no hope of finding and figure out how to get away—yikes. I really need to stop talking. I blame this on the both of you.”
And Ty laughed then, and it was a little hoarse and maybe a little forced, but it was better than it’d been before.
Maybe it wasn’t… appropriate to go about it the way we were, but
hearing Ty laugh made it okay. That excuse probably wouldn’t hold up in court when I was on trial for murder, but I would worry about that later.
“You need the bathtub?” I asked the Kid quietly.
He hesitated for a moment before shaking his head. “I’m fine. I’m good. Probably take a pill and let it work.”
HE WAS getting changed in his room when I went into the hallway bathroom that he used. I frowned at the towels on the floor, picking them up and hanging them on the rack. There was the orange pill bottle near the sink, the one that wasn’t to leave the house. Any doses he needed, he pocketed, so it lowered the risk of some junkie college student pilfering them out of his bag when he wasn’t looking.
I picked up the bottle and popped off the lid. Initially he was taking up to four milligrams per day, but with the diagnosis of panic disorder came increased doses of up to six milligrams. He was resistant at first, until we all sat down and discussed what we thought was going to be best for him. And we did keep track of the pill usage. We weren’t stupid.
Which is why I frowned at how empty the bottle looked.
I rattled it around.
The pills bounced.
Maybe he—
I shook my head as I fished a pill out. I put the lid back on and set it back down on the counter.
When I knocked on the door, I heard a muffled “Hold on.” I leaned against the doorway, listening to Otter move about in the kitchen, washing up the remains of our interrupted dinner. And then I remembered the binder, sitting on the table, no doubt waiting for us to continue. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a single reason to tell Otter no, aside from that I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready, and that made me feel like the world’s biggest asshole. Because he wanted it so, so badly, and I was the one holding us back.
The Kid opened his door, looking exhausted, eyes a little puffy. He wore sweats and a thin white shirt. “Your hair’s getting a little long,” I said quietly. “Need me to schedule a cut?”
“I can do it.”
“All right. Hey, we should hang out this weekend. Go get lunch. Maybe go to the movies or something. What do you say?”
His smile was forced. “Yeah. Sounds good, Papa Bear.”
I nodded slowly, bouncing the pill in my closed fist. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
“Yeah. I know. I just… I’m tired, is all. It’s been a rough day.”
“Yeah, I get that. Getting grounded is always tough.”
He rolled his eyes. “Not gonna happen.”
“Says you. No TV. Go to bed.”
“Jerk.”
“Little shit.”
He grinned, and it was real. “Love you too.”
“Got your pill.”
He held out his hand.
I hesitated. “Hey, weird thing, but. Did you….”
“What?”
“Seemed to be a few less Xanax in the bottle than there should be.”
He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Yeah. That was my bad. I was getting my dose yesterday while brushing my teeth. They fell in the sink. Faucet was running. They melted fast. Forgot to say anything.”
And yeah. That happened. Hell, I’d done something like that before. “All right,” I said, handing him the pill. “Just… if you need—”
“I’ll come to you,” he said. “I promise.”
“Yeah. Okay. Good night, Kid.”
“Night.”
And he closed the door.
I stood there, just a little longer.
THE BINDER was gone when I went back to the kitchen.
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.
There was a strange little ache in my chest, but I ignored it.
Otter closed the dishwasher and leaned against the counter, drying his hands. “He doing okay?”
“Think so. Not the first time it’s happened. Won’t be the last.”
“Maybe. I just can’t tell if it’s getting better or worse.”
I frowned. “What?”
“Between his decision to want to come here and everything he was leaving behind, I don’t know what to make of it sometimes.”
“Because of him.” We both knew who I meant.
“Yeah.”
I sighed. “Yeah. Did we do the right thing? You think?”
“Keeping Dom’s kid from him?”
I winced at that. “Yeah.”
“Some days I think so,” he said, holding out his hand for me. I took it and he pulled me close. “Other days, I don’t know.”
“He’s going to find out. Eventually.” Which was a day I wasn’t looking forward to.
“I think we did what we thought was right. At the time. Maybe it was a crush, or maybe it was hero worship—”
“I think we both know it was more than that.”
“Yeah.” Otter frowned. “Probably. But we told him we’d follow him whatever his choice was, and he chose to come here. Maybe it had to do with Dom and Stacey, and maybe it didn’t. But he was hurt either way, and we did the best we could. He made his choice, and we went with it.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not going to blow up in our faces,” I muttered against his chest.
“We’ll deal with it when the time is right.”
“We can’t leave it for the last possible second. I don’t want us going back to Seafare without him knowing. That would probably just make things worse.” The thought of him finding out by seeing Ben for the first time scared the hell out of me.
“Okay,” he said easily. “We’ll figure it out. Promise.”
His hand was in my hair, and I knew he had let it go, but for some reason, I couldn’t. “The binder.”
He tensed. Just a little. “Yeah?”
“Can you… hold on to it? For now. Don’t—don’t get rid of it. But, maybe just set it aside? Just for a little while.”
“I can do that,” he said, like it was nothing. “I can definitely do that.”
“It’s not like I don’t—”
“Bear, it’s okay. I promise. It’ll hold.”
Sometimes I thought Otter was our reward for all the crap that had been slung on me and the Kid in our short, complicated lives. And if he was, he was the best thing I could have ever asked for. It sucked that he got the shit end of that deal. “Sorry about dinner.”
He kissed my forehead. “It happens. We have all the time in the world.”
2. Where Bear Finds Out
I SHOULD have seen it for what it was.
And maybe I did. Maybe I saw all the signs but chose not to believe them. Maybe I subconsciously ignored them, because I knew the Kid couldn’t be that stupid. He couldn’t be. He was the Kid. He was the smartest, bravest, fiercest person I’d ever known. His convictions were ironclad, his heart strong, his head in the right place. I knew that. I knew all of that.
“How’s school going?” I would ask him.
“Fine,” he would always say. “Good. Real good.”
Later: “Figure out a major yet? What you want to do with your life?”
“Not yet. I’ll get there. It’s early yet.”
And later still: “Not on the Dean’s List?”
“You know how it is, Papa Bear. Competition is hard-core. I can’t do it every time.”
“No, it’s okay. I know. Just… you know you can talk to me, right? If you need to? I’m here.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
Dom’s name was never mentioned, at least not by or to the Kid. And aside from the time Dom had shown up on our doorstep demanding to see Tyson, I hadn’t really talked to him. Sure, there were texts every now and then, congratulations on the baby and the wedding. There was the how is everything going? and no, doesn’t look like we’ll be coming home this summer, sorry, but Otter was the one that kept in contact with him. I didn’t blame Dom for what had happened or the choices he’d made, because I couldn’t. I’d been the one to introduce him and Stacey. I’d been the one to start all of this, and maybe the
reason we never talked about Dom was because I was too worried the Kid blamed me for everything.
And later, after the truth had been told, I’d think how if Dom had been there, if he’d still been a part of the Kid’s life, that he’d have seen it. He’d have known. If it’d happened at all.
And that… well.
That hurt too.
THE DOORBELL rang one summer afternoon. I was home sick, curled up on the couch with a blanket, surrounded by discarded tissues, tea cooling on the coffee table in front of me. I was zoned out in front of horrible daytime TV, unsure why the panel of women were shrieking at each other when just a moment before they’d seemed like they were the best of friends.
Otter was out of town, having been hired by some political website I’d never heard of (“I would have been surprised if you had.” “Hey! I know things!”) to follow around an up-and-coming Martha’s Vineyard reject on the campaign trail as he ran against some stuffy incumbent. Otter had shown me the picture of the man he’d be stalking (“Photographing, Bear, photographing”), and he’d been all wavy hair and perfect white teeth, and I told Otter in no uncertain terms that if this douchebag tried to get all up in his shit, I’d cut them both.
Otter, for some reason, had found that hysterical and apparently attractive at the same time, because he kept laughing while also trying to give me a hand job. It was really an awkward experience, but then he’d twisted his wrist just right, and I’d sucked on his neck while he snorted in my ear.
You don’t say no to hand jobs.
He’d been gone for a couple weeks and wasn’t due back for six more days, but I wasn’t pining. No, of course not. I was just sitting on the couch, dying, while my husband was hundreds of miles away from me.
“Because I don’t feel bad enough about that as it is,” he’d told me on the phone when I told him as much.
“Good,” I’d said. “Because I’m pretty sure my lungs are about to fall out of my mouth.”
“Well, you do sound terrible.”
“Thanks. Really.”
“I can come home. You know—”
“Stop. Don’t. I’m just feeling sorry for myself. You’re doing good with what’s-his-name. Has he hit on you yet? Everyone knows that most young Republicans hire gay hookers and have sex with them.”