The Long and Winding Road

by T. J. Klune

  But it’s not like we don’t have other shit going on. We’ve managed to convince everyone that we don’t want a baby shower, but we’ve somehow found ourselves registered for shit at Target anyway, with daily deliveries coming of packages of all shapes and sizes filled with diapers and shampoo and toys and something called a Newborn Starter Kit filled with bottles and nipples that have anticolic valves built in. It’s overwhelming after a while, all this shit that I would have never even thought of, like sterilizers and diaper hampers and video monitors that I’m pretty sure are more high-tech than I’m capable of dealing with.

  Everything is piled up in the nursery to the point where stuff was starting to get stacked on top of each other. We moved the crib we already had to our bedroom, given that we’d want to have it there when they came. We debated back and forth about buying another one, but Anna had told us it’d be enough for the both of them, and that they probably wouldn’t want to be separated for now.

  And now we’re in the middle of July, sitting down on the floor of the nursery, sorting through another wave of gifts we’ve received. Anna’s to my right, the Kid to my left with Dom at his side, and Izzie across from me. JJ and AJ are at their grandparents’ house, and Otter and Creed are having some weird bro-time, leaving me to deal with unwrapping some sort of contraption that looks fucking painful.

  “What the fuck is this?” I ask, trying to figure out which side is up.

  Ty has a lapful of something fuzzy that squeaks, and Dom is in the process of trying to clean up all the pink and blue wrapping paper that covers the floor. Izzie is reading a book on newborn bathing techniques that came with a bathing station, having looked horrified when I asked why we couldn’t just wash them in the sink like we had been when we were kids. (“That explains so much about you.”) Anna is sitting with her back against the wall, looking amused as she watches me get more and more disconcerted with every package I open.

  “Why are there suction cups?” Ty asks, squinting at the thing in my hands.

  “It’s a breast pump,” Dom says.

  I drop it as if it has scalded me. “It’s a what?”

  “Maybe you should have looked at the box before you tore into it,” Anna says. “I swear, you’re worse than JJ at Christmas.”

  “I don’t have breasts,” I say, scandalized. “I can’t make milk.”

  “Says the sink baby,” Izzie mutters, blowing a strand of hair from her face.

  “Dear Bear,” Ty says, reading from the card that came with the pump. “This wasn’t on your list, but I assume your wife will need one. And if you still don’t have a wife, you are living in sin. Signed, Helen Woolley.”

  “Fucking Helen,” I snarl at the breast pump. “She knows I’m married to Otter. She will rue the day she sent me this contraption. Rue.”

  “Who is Helen Woolley?” Dom whispers, obviously not wanting to incur my wrath.

  “Librarian at the middle school,” Ty whispers back. “She was ancient when I went there.”

  “She thinks she can mess with me and my gay husband? Boy, is she sorely mistaken. I shall have my revenge, Helen Woolley! See that I won’t—oh look, it lights up. That’s kind of neat. Ooh, it even beeps. Is that to let you know your boob is done or something?”

  We all look at Anna.

  Except for Izzie, who sighs and rolls her eyes.

  “You are so special, Bear,” Anna says seriously.

  “I have no use for this.”

  “Okay. So return it. Or give it to Megan and Marty. You said they were planning on having kids of their own, right?”

  “You want me to regift the breast pump? That sounds horrible.”

  “Are you going to use it?”

  “Well, no. Do you want it?”

  “Regifting,” she reminds me. “And I have one.”

  “But this one lights up and beeps when your boob is done. And what if you have another kid? This is super hard-core.”

  She snorts. “Right. Another kid. Don’t tell Creed because he doesn’t know it yet, but it’s time for me to Bob Barker the hell out of this situation and spay and neuter my pet.”

  We gape at her.

  She shrugs. “I’ll hold his hand while it happens.”

  “Savage,” Izzie mutters, holding out her hand for a high five.

  “I’ll never understand girls,” I sigh.

  “You tried,” Anna says. “I suppose it’s the thought that counts.”

  I picked up what remained of the box the pump came in and put it back inside. “We will still send a thank-you note to Helen, even though she’s a homophobic asshole. Izzie, don’t say that word because it’s bad. I’m an adult, and therefore I can speak how I wish.”

  “Are you sure about that?” she asks me without looking up.

  “Which part?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Brat.”

  She’s smiling, though, and it’s nice to see. She’s slowly been coming out of her shell, getting used to her place here with us. It probably helped that the visits so far from the social worker have gone so well, given that Otter and I are old hats at it. Erica Sharp was able to track down Izzie’s father, and he didn’t seem to give two shits about Izzie. Which was good in the end, because he was doing twenty years in Georgia for armed robbery. We’d thought the news would hurt Izzie, but she’d only sighed in relief and asked if that meant she was able to stay with us for good now. When I told her that looked like it’d be the case, she began to settle, talking to us more rather than just to Ty. It was obvious that she felt more comfortable around him, but she was giving Otter and me a chance. Last week, she’d even come to us and asked for something she’d seen online, some bug-hunting kit she’d found on Amazon. I’d been so taken aback that she’d actually asked for something that I hadn’t hesitated in handing her my credit card.

  (“Wait, a bug-hunting what? Izzie, you better not let those things loose in the house, you hear me?”

  “Bear’s scared of bugs.”

  “You shut your mouth, Otter. I am not. I just don’t like them when they fly. Or crawl. Or come near me. Or are alive.”)

  Erica thought we’d get to go before a judge to finalize guardianship sometime early in the new year, which we were all trying to stay cautiously optimistic about. Erica had pulled us aside and told us she thought it was a done deal, but we’d learned to be careful about such things. “This is a good thing, guys,” she’d told us. “You’ll see. I’m never wrong about situations like this.”

  We already had everything we needed to get her registered for the new school year next month, something she wasn’t exactly thrilled about. Otter and I decided that we’d wait to talk to her about it more until August, but she knew it was coming, whether she wanted it to or not.

  I think she let a couple of bugs into the house on purpose for that.

  I was concerned for a little while that she’d feel we were shoving her aside with all this baby shit, or that she’d think she inconvenienced us by appearing when she did, especially with the twins on the way. When we sat her down to tell her that she wasn’t in the way, that we wanted her here, twins or no twins, she looked at us a little funny before saying that she knew that. “Don’t be stupid, Bear,” she’d said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve already done more for me than Mom ever did. I’m not worried about that.”

  I’d never felt so bad and so good all at the same time. It was an odd feeling.

  So we’re all right. Mostly. I’m still not happy about Ty’s living arrangement, but I don’t think Dom has smiled this much since I’ve known him, so they must be doing okay. I’d told Tyson that he absolutely cannot get married until he finishes college, and he’d given me such a look of horror that I immediately felt better about the entire situation.

  Except now I have a breast pump in my lap, and I’m plotting ways to make a ninety-year-old bigot pay for her crimes.

  My life is strange.

  “Do you really need all this stuff?” Tyson asks, frowning at a giant
vat of some kind of cream he’d unwrapped. “Isn’t it a little overkill?”

  Dom and Anna had matching eye rolls, like they couldn’t believe the childless people in the room could be so naïve. I forgot every now and then that Dom went through this exact same thing while we’d been in New Hampshire, and I felt guilty at the fact that we hadn’t been there for him like he was here now. There wasn’t much I could do about it, but it still doesn’t sit with me right.

  “Trust me,” Anna says. “You’ll need all of this and more. Those hundreds of diapers you have stacked against the wall? That’ll probably last you a couple of months, if you’re lucky. Formula? Gone by Thanksgiving. Wipes? Probably will have to buy more by the time Halloween decorations go up.”

  The Kid stares at her, aghast. “That’s such a racket.”

  “Newborns cry, poop, eat, and sleep,” Izzie says. “And that’s it.”

  “How do you know?” Ty asks.

  “I read about it on the internet.”

  “You’re researching newborns?” I ask, oddly touched.

  She sighs and puts the book down in her lap. “There are going to be two of them,” she says. “And I’m going to be their aunt. Of course I’m researching newborns. I plan on being their favorite out of anyone, so I need to get a head start.”

  “Aunt Izzie,” I say. “You know, I never really thought of that. Weird, right? You’re only thirteen years old, and you’re going to be an aunt.”

  “I was a late mistake,” Izzie says. “It happens.”

  I frown at her. “You’re not a mistake.”

  “I know that. Mom didn’t.”

  “Well. Just as long as you know that.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Bear. My ego isn’t that fragile. I’m not you and Tyson, after all.”

  “Hey!” my brother and I say at the same time.

  “High-five,” Anna says, and Izzie grins smugly.

  “Little sisters are a pain in my ass,” I mutter as I hand Dom more wrapping paper. “And you’re going to be the best aunt ever, so don’t you worry about it.”

  She’s pleased, I can tell, but she tries to hide it with a scowl. She’s not very successful, so she picks up the bath station book again and puts it up close to her face.

  Anna winks at me, not fooled in the slightest.

  “I think that’s everything,” Ty says. “At least for today. Who knows how many other things you’re gonna get between now and when the babies get here.”

  “Most of this is coming from Alice and Jerry,” I say. “Apparently, they don’t know the meaning of moderation.”

  “They’re grandparents,” Anna says. “It’s sort of in the job description. I guarantee you that JJ has convinced them both that he never gets to have ice cream because his mom and dad are mean, so they’re probably buying him pints and pints of Chunky Monkey. I learned my lesson the hard way with that. Grandparents get to give the kids whatever they want, and then they send them home for the parents to deal with the fallout.”

  “Maybe I should have just skipped to being a grandparent,” I say, finally seeing the floor underneath us again. “It sounds easier.”

  “Nah,” Anna says. “I’m not going to lie. It’s going to suck for a while. You’ll be cranky and get no sleep, but then one day, your kid won’t pee on the toilet seat or the floor, and it’ll be crazy how proud you are of them. Until they promptly forget the next time and it somehow gets on the wall.”

  “JJ sounds like he was a handful when he was little,” Izzie says, turning the page.

  “Yeah,” Anna says with a sigh. “This was last week. Apparently, he was pretending his penis was a fire hose because Creed thought it was funny.”

  “Bet you wish we hadn’t broken up, huh?” I ask.

  I’m offended by how hard she laughs at that.

  And how long it goes on for.

  And how she cries a little too.

  “That was a bit of an overreaction,” I mumble.

  That sets her off all over again, so I throw wrapping paper at her face, which leads to Izzie throwing some at me, and then Tyson and Dom randomly start making out and we all yell at them for being so disgusting.

  It’s nice.

  TY AND Izzie are in the backyard, Izzie showing off the bug finding kit. Tyson looked a little green at the thought, but he let himself be pulled outside, but not before he kissed his boyfriend, who had to go get ready to go on duty. He was working the two-to-midnight shift this summer, in hopes that he can get an earlier shift once Ty starts school so they’re at least able to see each other in the evenings. I have faith they’ll work it out somehow.

  Ty had kissed his cheek and whispered that he better come home in one piece, something that I gathered was said every time Dom left for work. I worry about him when he’s on duty, of course, but I can’t imagine what it must be like for Tyson. But Dom is doing what he’s always wanted to do, and no one can begrudge him that.

  So it’s just Anna and me at the table, our tea cooling in mugs in our hands. It’s been a while since it’s just the two of us, and I don’t know how often we’re going to be able to do this once the twins come.

  For a long time, Anna and I had this… weirdness… between us. Most of it had to do with Otter’s homecoming and everything that happened after. I hadn’t handled things the way I should have, and it took a while for us to get back on an even keel. But she stuck by me, even when I didn’t think I deserved it, so I must have done something right to have her still want to be by my side after all these years.

  Family is funny like that, I guess. Our pasts are woven together so much that I don’t know that we could ever be torn apart.

  “You and Creed good?” I ask her.

  “We’re fine, Papa Bear,” she says. “He makes me want to pull my hair out nine days out of ten, but then he always makes up for it on the tenth day.”

  “Three guys in the house, though.”

  “Right? Karma, I guess.”

  “For?”

  She shrugs. “Something, I’m sure. How are you and Otter?”

  I blink. “Fine. Why? Did he say something? Because if he did, he’s a fucking liar. How was I supposed to know that pole was there in the parking lot? I didn’t mean to back into it.”

  “Really, Bear? You didn’t know that stationary pole was there?”

  I scowl at her. “There never used to be a pole right in that spot.”

  “And no, he hasn’t said anything. Not bad, at least. He’s just as goofy in love with you as always.”

  I grin at that. “Pretty awesome, right? No one’s spilled the secret that I got the better end of that deal, and it’s been years. By the time he’s figured it out, the twins will be here, and he won’t ever get to leave me. It’s the perfect plan.”

  “Trap him with kids,” Anna says, knocking her mug against mine. “That’s devious. I like it.”

  “Eh, I learned from the best.”

  Her eyes narrow. “If you’re talking about me—”

  “Nope,” I say hastily. “Not at all. Never even crossed my mind. I was talking about these… other people I know with… kids.”

  “Mmm,” she says, sipping her tea daintily. “Good. What have you done just for you two, though?”

  “Um. What?”

  “When was the last time you had sex?”

  “Wow. Just going for it, are we?”

  “You’re not the beat around the bush type, Bear.”

  “Well. Maybe I should be the beat around the bush type. That way, I could avoid moments like this.”

  “We left behind personal boundaries years ago when I went from having sex with you to having sex with the brother of the guy you cheated on me with.”

  “I’m still not ever going to be used to you saying that. And I didn’t cheat.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Physical, emotional. Same thing.”

  “You know, one might think that if you keep bringing that up, that you’re still not over me.”

  S
he snorts tea out her nose.

  “That’s not very polite,” I mutter, handing her a napkin.

  She wipes her face, her eyes a little wet. “Oh, you do always know how to make me laugh.”

  “It wasn’t that funny.”

  “Agree to disagree. Answer the question.”

  “I don’t even remember what we were talking about.”

  “You, Otter. Sex.”

  “Right. Can we get distracted again?”

  She glares at me.

  “Fine,” I say with a sigh. “We do make time for each other. I mean, the last time we had sex was… okay. Wait. I know this. Hold on. We did—do hand jobs count? Because I think they count. Since they count, it would have been… I know this. Um.”

  “Right,” she says. “And while you’re vacillating, I’m just going to sit here and stare at you until you realize it’s been a while.”

  That can’t be right, can it? Sure, we’d been busy preparing for the twins, and Izzie, and just life in general, but it can’t have been that long.

  But for the life of me, I can’t even remember. All I can think about is being exhausted or nervous or both.

  “Crap.”

  “There it is,” Anna says.

  “Well, Otter is getting old,” I say. “Maybe it’s harder for him to get it up. And please don’t tell him I said that. I don’t like sleeping on the couch.”

  “Right,” Anna says with a snort. “Because Otter doesn’t end up on the couch with you halfway through the night.”

  “He doesn’t like sleeping without me,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck. “Even when he’s mad at me.”

  She shakes her head. “I know I don’t have to worry about the two of you. You guys are good. You always have been. But you can’t forget to take moments away from all of… this. Pretty soon, it’s not going to be just you and Otter anymore, Bear. You’ve got Izzie now, but then there are going to be two more entirely dependent upon you. You have to be sure to set aside time for each other, or it’s going to get rough. It will get rough.”

  I’m starting to form an idea I’m not entirely comfortable with. “You and Creed?”