Misconception

by Ryan Boudinot

  I approached the counter and explained where I needed to go and that I only had ten dollars. The lady wearing bifocals frowned and reiterated the price of the ticket, then said, "Next in line, please." I walked slowly to a seat by a vending machine and pounded my knee with my fist. I still had some change so I called Paul's house. One of his brothers answered and started dicking around when I asked if Paul was there, so I yelled at him. Paul picked up and said, "Oh, man, are you busted."

  "What? Didn't you guys get my note?"

  "Yeah, but your mom called and said she wanted to pick you up. Where are you? We've been driving around all day looking for you."

  In the background Paul's mom said, "Is that Cedar? Where is he?"

  "Paul, I need money. I need to get back home. I don't know what to do."

  Noises on the phone rustled then Paul's mom spoke. "Cedar? Where are you? Your parents! Tell me where you are. We'll come get you."

  I told Mrs. Dills where I was and added, "I don't have enough money to get back home." I gave her the phone number of the pay phone. She told me not to leave the station. I hung up and visited what appeared to be hell's restroom. The stalls were all locked and required a special token that cost twenty-five cents. Having just spent my last quarter, I did what it appeared every visitor to this lavatory did and pissed in the sink. That night I managed to catch some restless sleep on a bench under buzzing fluorescent fixtures. When I woke, it was morning and my sleep-deprived father was standing over me.

  "Here's the deal," he said wearily, "you tell me everything, I'll tell you everything."

  We had a six-hour drive ahead of us. The inside of the car was a shitty, sad place of food bags, empty soda cups, and newspapers. I drank coffee from a paper cup and ate a breakfast sandwich. My dad seemed too exhausted to bitch me out, reserving his energy for getting us back to the verdant edge of the state.

  I retold the abortion story, this time with a new villain, George, making his malevolent appearance. I hoped to avoid punishment with my candor, but what exactly had I done that deserved punishment? I hadn't followed the prescribed routes of action that any adult would have counseled me to take, like talk to my parents, a psychiatrist, a cop. Instead, my actions had proceeded from theories about George, Jerry, and the loyalty of paternity. I told my father about Jerry showing up at the Greyhound station, Rambo, the pan of hot oil. Now would have been a good time for him to cross-examine me, but he stared at the road, nodding occasionally, saying nothing. I reminded myself that he'd heard worse tales than this. He conferred daily with drug dealers, arsonists, the fraudulent, and the scheming. I tried putting myself in his position, dealing with some tiresome bullshit about rescuing his kid from a bus station hundreds of miles from home. I expected at least an acknowledgement that my problems were worth sympathy. The more I could tell he didn't care, the more I became embarrassed at what was rolling out of my mouth.

  When I was finished he said, "You done?"

  "Yeah."

  "My turn, then," he said, as though he had been waiting for me to shut up. "Your mom took pictures of me with another woman."

  The inside of the car became like the heaving tissues of an internal organ, lined with sticky and diseased mucus. The blood in my head throbbed. He had nothing to say about my problems. A windshield-wiper blade captured a bug, its legs wriggling futiley as its yellow guts were squirted out of its thorax. My dad took another sip of his cold coffee.

  "I saw the photos of you with that woman," I said.

  "You jerked off onto a photo of that woman. Your mom thinks it was me."

  "She'll believe me before she believes you."

  "Whatever."

  "Who is she?"

  "Her name is Lorraine."

  "How'd Mom get the pictures?"

  "She took them from the parking garage across the street from the federal building."

  "What does she do?"

  "Look, Cedar, it doesn't really matter right now what she does or who she is."

  "So, no one is really being up front. Except me."

  "This will all have to be ironed out in court. I recommended a good divorce lawyer to your mom."

  "That was nice of you."

  "I should be really fucking mad at you right now, Cedar, but honestly, I don't have the energy for it."

  "Don't you even see what kind of problems I'm dealing with?"

  "Your bullshit is so miniscule compared to what I'm up against, let me tell you."

  "What you're up against."

  "You're going to hear contradictions coming from both sides. It's up to you to choose what to believe."

  "Since when did we become sides?"

  "I need to use the men's room. Rest stop ahead."

  We pulled over at the rest area, where a roped-off patch of lawn designated for people to walk their dogs had been denuded of all flora by urine. Some pear-shaped World War II vets wearing their pointy hats sat behind a table set up with cookies, a coffee urn, and a sign that said DONATIONS GLADLY ACCEPTED. Their wives sat beside them, happily crafting sock puppets. I considered running into the woods while my dad peed, but he returned from the men's room before I could act on the impulse. I took a couple cookies and fed the remainder of my summer's earnings through the slit in the coffee can. We rode the rest of the way home in silence.

  I still believed that both my parents wanted me, a belief that became harder to maintain when my dad deposited me at the house. Sleep deprivation had wrung any remnant of polite conversation out of my father. My running across the mountains seemed a massive inconvenience to everybody, almost as inconvenient as having to now punish me. There was a terse meeting of the three of us on the front porch, some language inserted in predictable places about trust and responsibility, and stern expressions. "I made you an appointment to see a counselor tomorrow," my mom concluded. The statement landed as an insult. Which of us needed a counselor? My parents exchanged some loveless logistical information and my dad got in his car and went to catch the ferry.

  I found my room undisturbed, a histology book open on my desk where I'd left it, next to a plate that had once borne a corn dog, the stick adhered to a smear of blood-dark ketchup. I lifted my mattress and crawled underneath it. My mom came in and sat down on the end of my bed, on my foot.

  "You must be hungry," she said.

  "I'm okay," I said, my voice muffled.

  "I need to tell you some things that will upset you."

  "Like Dad cheated on you?"

  "Yes. What did he tell you?"

  "He knows you've been following them around like a detective."

  "I suppose that's right."

  "And that he jerked off onto that photo."

  "I know it was you who did that to the photo."

  Saying nothing, I admitted my guilt.

  "When I met your father we had strong feelings about what was right and what was wrong. I worry that you lost your chance to feel that way. That no one's been there to help you sort it out."

  "I'm sorry."

  "It's not your fault. How's Kat?"

  "I haven't talked to her since she punched me in the nose," I said.

  "I came close to punching your father in the nose."

  "How come you didn't?"

  "Good question. He deserved it. Can you breathe under there?"

  "No. I'm slowly suffocating."

  "Before you die, can you promise me one thing?"

  "Okay."

  "Promise you'll come to me sooner next time something like Kat's situation happens?"

  "Okay." It occurred to me that I might ask my mother how she was holding up. I imagined that she must have been feeling pretty bent up about my dad. But I held my concern, believing, stupidly, that to offer her comfort would have prevented her from providing comfort to me. She laid down on the bed, on the thick barrier between us, distributing her weight evenly along the length of my body and began to softly ciy. I reached up from beneath the mattress, found her hand, and held it as I fell asleep.

&nb
sp; The counselor worked in an office park surrounded by fir trees and the building reeked of antiseptics tarred up with artificial gardenias. His name was Mr. Cox and apparently he specialized in troubled teens. He shared the building with other boring businesses where boring people did boring-ass things. His Latino secretary led my mom and me to his shag-carpeted sanctum, more a living room than a place to shrink heads. He rose from a creaky swivel chair and pumped our arms in introduction, his handshake like a limp rag. His voice that of a sportscaster doing the playby-play at a golf tournament. He wore a yellow polo shirt tucked into black-and-white checked slacks. Mr. Cox said he'd talk to me alone first, then to my mother, then to both of us together.

  My mom left, announcing she had an errand to do. I sat down on the couch. A cigarette disintegrated in a nest of butts in an ashtray on the desk. Leaning back in his chair, Mr. Cox slid his fingers inside his waist band. The gesture would have been perverted if his pants hadn't wholly negated his sexuality.

  "You can laugh at my name," Mr. Cox said. "Most people do."

  "My friend has a cousin named Dick Dills," I said.

  "That's good. I'm going to have to write that down in my little blue notebook." Then, apropos of nothing, he started to sing, "Doe, a deer, a female deer. Ray, a drop of golden sun. No? Not a fan of The Sound of Music? Well then, tell me, Cedar, what's on the other side of the mountains?"

  "I'm not a runaway. I always meant to come back. I'm not like the other kids who come in here. I don't do drugs, I get good grades. I'm studying medical text books on my own because I'm going to be a doctor."

  "And you needed to go on a little road trip to find someone."

  "Yeah. I needed to find my-" I stopped. Mr. Cox didn't deserve to hear the real version. I suddenly understood that our transaction was no more important than one that occurred in the drive-through of a fast-food restaurant. He expected to give me a particular kind of ser vice in exchange for a certain kind of emotional currency. Then my mom could be billed for it.

  I said, "I guess it was me I was trying to find."

  "Did you in fact find yourself? Or did you come to be more lost?" Mr. Cox said.

  "Why do you think you can help me?" I asked.

  "I don't," Mr. Cox said. "In fact, I'm pretty sure your mother wasted fifty bucks sending you here. What makes you think I can help you?"

  "I don't really."

  "Then we're on equal footing, aren't we? See, Cedar, the simple fact is that because your family is relatively well off, and because you've maintained a reasonable level of academic achievement, you'll probably be just fine. I'll send you home with a couple brochures about a support group for kids of parents going through divorce and we'll call it even, how's that sound? You wouldn't believe the parents I get who drag their kids in here after catching them with a wine cooler. Ooooh, big crisis. They're beside themselves. Convinced their children are on the path to addiction. It doesn't really work that way, most of the time. The kids that really need help are the ones whose parents wouldn't ever consider sending them to a counselor." He started a new cigarette with the ember of his dying one. "You upper-middle-class kids will go off to college and have more-or-less healthy, heterosexual relationships, have careers, and produce children of your own that you'll send off to counselors after you catch them having sex or taking mushrooms. Meanwhile, I can make money off you people and afford to go in on a time-share on the Oregon coast and buy myself a snowmobile. Not that my own life is so great, when it boils down to it. My third wife just left me for a cosmetic surgeon, as a matter of fact. A guy who fixes noses and knockers, and right now I think they're in the Marshall Islands. Some fucking place where she sends me Polaroids of herself, topless, on a beach, with a mai tai in her hand, getting lotion rubbed on her tits by Frank's disembodied arm. Yeah, just happened a couple weeks ago, so you can tell I'm sorting through a few issues of my own. It's actually kind of refreshing to me that you find me full of shit, because that means I don't have to pretend I give a fuck. So, you ran away. Wow. No one's ever done that before. You must be the first teenager in history to pull off something like that."

  "What are you going to tell my mom?"

  "I'm going to tell her that you're the most brilliant goddamn fourteen-year-old I've ever met. That your grasp of the ethical dimensions of your actions is beyond what most adults are capable of. I'll throw in some reference to a study I read in a Danish mental-health journal about superadvanced levels of emotional intelligence in adolescents. It always impresses parents when I name-drop Piaget or Jung. How's that sound?"

  True to his word, when my mother returned from her errands, Dr. Cox told her that I was one of-if not themost gifted children he had ever worked with. "Mrs. Rivers, you can imagine the riffraff I get in here. Your son is a beans of light in the darkness of adolescence."

  I was dismissed while my mom spoke to Mr. Cox alone, and spent ten minutes smugly flipping through the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Years later my mother would tell me that Mr. Cox had explained that he'd tried to inflate my ego with praise and encourage me to imagine a better self. He told her that leveling with smarter kids and pretending he didn't care about their well-being sometimes elicited a level of trust from his young clients. By giving their self-image a little boost, often at his own expense, he provided them with an idealized template of themselves toward which they might slowly work. In other words, he'd tricked me into letting him help me.

  Ever since we got it, our answering machine had featured the same awkwardly formal greeting. It was my father's voice, implying we simply weren't available, rather than not at home, to confuse would-be criminals who were calling ahead to determine whether it was safe to burglarize the place. My mother had changed the message in the past few days, recording a bland greeting in which she only acknowledged the phone number that had been called, naming none of the residents or former residents of the house. Hearing the new greeting crushed me, knowing that my dad's overly formal delivery, the same comfortable message that we'd had for three years, had been taped over forever.

  When we returned home after my counseling session with Mr. Cox, I came in through the kitchen to find the answering machine recording and amplifying a call through its little speaker. It was Kat, quietly saying she needed to talk to me. Meanwhile, my mom dropped her purse on the floor and uttered a word or two of profanity. I was paying attention to Kat's message-in-progress as I crossed the room to pick up the phone, so it took me a moment to realize that somebody had broken into our house. As my hand settled on the receiver my mom said, "Wait." The plants on the end table had been knocked over, and were lying in piles of that weird dirt with the white pellets in it. The living room couch was absurdly upside-down, legs in the air. My mother said, "Don't touch anything. We need to leave." Kat hung up and the message machine started fast-forwarding and rewinding according to its own unfathomable logic.

  Standing in the driveway, it took some effort to separate these two facts, our house getting trashed and Kat's message, as if they were tactile and auditory components of a singular loathing. My mom called 911 from her car phone. A short while later a cruiser pulled up and a female cop slowly walked toward us, uncapping a ballpoint with her teeth. She introduced herself as Officer Stoner, the best name for a cop I had ever heard. A statement was given. My father's name was intoned. While Officer Stoner put on latex gloves and dusted the place for fingerprints I crawled into my mom's car and called Kat. Veronica picked up, sounding far away. Kat picked up on another line and told her mom to hang up. We waited for the click.

  "What happened? Why'd you call and leave that message?"

  "I need to talk to you. Today. Can you meet me at Burger King in, like, an hour?"

  "I don't know. Our house got broken into."

  "What? Whatever, meet me in an hour."

  I pushed the phone's antenna back into its orifice and punished myself by not cracking a window in the baking interior of the car. Officer Stoner came out of the house with my mom behind her. The
y motioned me to come over.

  "What?" I said.

  "We need you to show us your room and let us know if anything is missing," my mom said.

  Inside, the sweaty residue of the intruder made the back of my neck itch. He'd been there and there, he'd seen this stuff over here, he had walked down this hall. I pushed open my bedroom door and saw that he had pulled up my mattress and thrown it against a wall. My porn mags were spread across the floor. My microscope was smashedstomped on, apparently. But all my belongings seemed to be here, churned into disarray.

  I leaned against the door frame and soberly told the officer there was nothing missing. I picked at a solidified paint drip on the bathroom door to keep from puking. My mother played the answering machine tape in the next room and we stood quietly as Kat's warbly message bounced around the house again.

  "That's my girlfriend," I said. "Or she used to be."

  "Do you have any reason to believe her message was in reference to what has happened to the house?" Officer Stoner inquired.

  "She wouldn't do anything like this."

  "We're just trying to narrow the possibilities," my mom said.

  "Do you have any reason to believe this may have been done by your father?"

  I was about to say no. I looked at some broken pottery, some National Geographies ripped from their ordered, golden shelves, and thought of the time he threw his briefcase at the refrigerator. "I don't know," I said. Then, because I hated him, added, "maybe."

  The officer asked a few more questions, then left. That was it? That was the extent of the crime-scene investigation? Didn't they want us to come down to the station and pore over dioramas of our house to recreate the intrusion? Later, we'd learn that the only fingerprints she had found were those belonging to our family. My father had an alibi formalized in court records of cases he had handled that day. Apparently, none of our belongings had been stolen, which meant the intruder had either not found what he was looking for or never intended to take anything in the first place. For days I'd feel on the verge of discovering something tangible that was missing, almost hoping to justify my sense that something irretrievable had been lost.