Beast

by Brie Spangler

  Right before she’s halfway down the tree, JP calls out, “What about your show at the café?”

  “What about it?” she hollers up. “Are you going to take back all the money just because I think you’re unhinged? Cool. You two are seriously made for each other.”

  Jamie vanishes, and JP and I are left behind like chumps.

  The gate slams shut and he turns to me. “None of this went the way I wanted. This is hard—like, for real.”

  “What’s hard, being honest for once?”

  “Well…yeah.”

  “Jeezus, enough already.” I get my frozen butt cheeks in gear to leave. Not to catch Jamie, but to go finish my homework and go to sleep because I know I’ve lost her forever. He grabs me.

  “I have nobody,” he says in a rush. “I said I was sorry. I apologized, like, so many times. When you left, I realized I have nobody. I just want to hang out again, that’s all.”

  “Groom a sycophant.”

  “Can we start over?”

  I blink and we’re in third grade again. He’s changing the world with a wave of his hand and I’m jumping as soon as he says how high. No thanks. But then like a bad connection, the video of us stops loading on our grade school years. Back when we played all day. Then it hiccups to middle school, when we went to Cannon Beach and all we did was walk to and from tide pools and talk about cool stuff. Back when I never felt more trust for another person that wasn’t my mom. “JP…,” I say.

  When people get hurt, what do we do with the past?

  “Dylan.”

  “I’m sorry I never wanted to talk about your mom and I always ignored it,” I say. “It’s real shitty you have to live in a tree house.”

  “Thanks. For finally saying something.”

  “But everything else? I just…I don’t know.”

  And I leave too. When I get back over on the other side of the wall, my crutches are gone. Fine. Be that way, universe. I’m going home. By the time I get home, I’m frozen to the core and the house is quiet. Our car is gone. I open the front door and there’s only one light on in the hallway. “Mom?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  I shuffle into the kitchen and see a note on the table.

  If you get this note, I found your phone on your bed and I’m out looking for you. Please call me so I know you’re safe!

  I love you. Mom

  I pick up the note and stick it on the fridge under a magnet, wondering if she’s out there driving around in circles and really asking Dad for help. I wonder if she feels as helpless as I do when I hear nothing in return.

  I drag myself up the stairs and toward my bedroom window. It slides open with all the ease I remember and it’s just as difficult as the last time to get out onto the roof. I mean, even more so because I’ve grown almost six inches since I broke my leg. No wonder the somnabitch is taking so long to heal.

  Ah well. It’s all good.

  I sit on the moldy shingles and swing my feet over the side, embracing the cold dark night in February and waiting for the sun to rise again.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I sit up there, on my roof, and watch tiny sparks of gold tickle the trunks of the trees as the sun rises. Hazy pinks and yellows gradually waking up. My street is quiet. All the nosy neighbors still sleeping. I keep thinking it’s my turn to sleep too, but I don’t want to. My eyes are heavier than me and yet they refuse to shut. The sun compels them to stay open. Just a little while longer to watch a new day dawn.

  When her car rounds the corner around 5:15 AM, I wave. The car speeds up, parks, door slams, and she sprints around to the side of the house below where I’m sitting enjoying the sunrise.

  “Dylan!” she shouts.

  I raise my finger to my lips. “Shhhh…people are sleeping.”

  “Oh my god.” Mom races to the front door and I hear her clambering up the staircase and opening my bedroom window as fast as her almost-forty-year-old self can go. “Dylan.” She squeezes out through the frame and onto the shingles. “Sweetheart?” I’m jealous of how easy it is for her. She slowly crawls toward me and crouches on her knees. “Please don’t jump, please, let’s figure it out, let’s talk about it. Just don’t jump, okay?”

  “I’m not going to jump.” I kinda don’t want her to be up here with me, but I’m tired. It’s been a long night. I feel a little punch-drunk. She can sit if she wants to.

  “Oh, thank heaven.” She exhales. “What are you doing? Where have you been? I’ve been up all night, worried sick, driving around looking for you. What happened?”

  “I had to do some stuff. Then I came home,” I say. Everything is opaque, my eyes are so tired. “Have you ever had that walk-into-traffic, but just-kidding, but not-really feeling?”

  “Dylan.” Mom grabs my arm. “You’re scaring me.”

  “Don’t be scared. I’m not talking about for-real walking into traffic. Just like, I don’t know, that blink-and-you-miss-it wave of zen shit. Like a peace treaty inside yourself.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But you’ve felt lost, right?”

  She loosens her grip. “Of course.”

  “You have that unbelievable failure, the kind that smells like burnt hair, and it’s awful. But then it’s over.”

  “Have you been burning hair?” she asks with concern.

  “No. I haven’t slept in twenty-five hours and I’m loopy as hell. Indulge me on my shitty metaphors.” I laugh. “But like, that place where there’s no fighting. There’s nothing to fight over. Everything is done.”

  Mom frowns. “Then I suppose you’re lucky to have reached that point. I have not.”

  “You haven’t? Ever?”

  “No, everything is burnt hair for me,” she mumbles.

  “Nuh-uh,” I say.

  “I’m a thirty-nine-year-old college dropout and a single mom with a son who wants to wander into traffic. Obviously things are not okay.”

  “You’ve got to trust. And not bug phones.”

  “Oh.” She pats me on the knee. “So that’s what this is about. Well, I won’t apologize for that. I need to know you’re safe. And you better believe if I see that little blue dot of yours standing still in the middle of I-5 in the future, I’ll come running. That’s that.”

  “Take it off my phone.”

  “Who’s paying for your phone?”

  “Trust the process of life, Mother.”

  “It’s hard to be trusting when said child skips school, has grown-up sleepovers, and stays out all night. Trust is earned, Son.”

  “Fair point,” I admit. “Let’s compromise.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “That thing comes off my phone and I start paying for the bills.”

  “I don’t want you getting a job. School is too important.”

  “Football will cost money,” I say. She flinches. “How about I call if I’ll be late.”

  “How about you’re supposed to do that anyway?”

  “What’s it going to take?”

  She sighs. “Finish out sophomore year with good grades and no more of this funny business that’s been happening since fall, and then we’ll talk about removing it for junior year. I need to see progress.” Mom hugs me. “And let me in. Talk to me. I want to be in your life.”

  “You are.”

  “Dylan.”

  I look up at the sunrise. Low and lazy with February’s tilt. “I love Jamie.” There. It’s said. “But she doesn’t love me and I have to accept that.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.”

  “I lost the greatest girl I’ve ever known because I wasn’t okay with myself,” I say. “And now I’m past the burnt hair, I aired out the room, it sucks I’m never going to see her again.”

  “Maybe we can have her over for dinner some night.”

  “She won’t come.”

  “You need to put up a fight! Girls like effort. Go in there and make sure she knows that you’re—”

  “Jamie knows what
she wants and it’s not me, and I can’t say I blame her,” I say quickly. Mom looks all crestfallen. I put my arm around her. “Don’t be sad.”

  “I want so badly for you to be happy, though.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “So that’s where I was all night. I needed to apologize to her.”

  “I guess it didn’t work.”

  “Does it look like it worked? I’m here all alone without a time machine.”

  “If you could go back a couple months, what would you fix?”

  “When I learned she was trans, I would say, ‘Cool.’ And then we would go get a pretzel.”

  “And what am I up to in this do-over?”

  “You’re into it. The omnipresent worrying is at bay.”

  “But you know why I worry, right? It’s what moms do.”

  “Most moms,” I say, feeling for JP.

  “Maybe I’m not supposed to admit this, but in junior high when it appeared you were into girls, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Not because being gay is bad or anything, but because you don’t want your kid’s life to be any harder than it has to be. People can be so heinous,” she says. “When I was out in the car with Jamie’s mom, Jessica, she was telling me how scared she is for her daughter. How much she loves Jamie and how every night she loses sleep worrying that bad things are always waiting around the corner. That she worries all the time about how hard Jamie’s life might be. I…didn’t want you to be involved in that. I wanted you to stay away to make things easier for you. It was wrong. Will you forgive me?”

  “I guess so. It’s awful, but I get it.”

  “So I want in on this do-over too.”

  “Then I guess you’d be like, how nice we get to have my son’s girlfriend over for dinner. Let’s make crab cakes with real crab.”

  “Real crab, huh?” She laughs. “I’m very happy to hear we’ve won the lottery in this alternate reality.”

  “Just sucks it’s only that. This is a whole new world.”

  A whole new world. Since I’m delirious, all I can picture is a boat made of souls, tearing through the surf and crashing onto a beach made of stars. They explode on impact, flying into space. Some stronger than others. Some disappear completely. “I think about Dad all the time.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’ve never needed him more than this past year.”

  Mom holds me even tighter. “Oh, sweetheart.”

  “What do you think he’d say about me and Jamie?”

  “Well…” She rests a finger on her chin. “I think all parents want their kids to be happy. And I think good parents learn and adapt so that happiness grows. He would do the same.”

  “Do you think Dad’s out there?” I ask. “Not like in heaven or anywhere like that, but what made him a person, does that exist?”

  “It has to. I need it to. He is still very much alive for me,” Mom says.

  “Is that why you never remarried?”

  She swallows with a thump. “Partly.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t imagine loving another person the way I loved your dad,” she says. “When we met in college, I fell madly, hopelessly in love with him. All my friends thought I was nuts because he was too big and too tall and too this and too that. You know what that’s like; you’re just like him.”

  “I do.”

  “But I didn’t care. I knew we were meant to be. Then we had our little surprise, you, right before senior year. We decided he would stay in school and I’d get my degree later. By the time we bought this house, he already had cancer. We just didn’t know it yet,” she says. “We had so many dreams for this place. We were going to plant a row of arborvitae right over there.” She points. “Change out that ugly fence for a new one.”

  “Why don’t we do those things, you and I?”

  “Time. Money. It all slips away.” Mom sits there. I don’t think I ever noticed how sad she was before. I always thought the sighing and the pining was her just being a mom.

  “We need to sell the house,” I say.

  “I’ll never do such a thing.”

  “We can sell it, move to an apartment. It’ll be fine,” I say. “It’d be a lot less stress.”

  “You’re my number one priority.” She hugs me tight. “You come first.”

  “Don’t you think Dad would want both of us to be happy? I’m not a Labrador; I don’t need a yard.”

  She lets me go. Her gaze slides to the shitty chain-link fence.

  “I think it’s time we get happy,” I say.

  “Perhaps you’re onto something.”

  Now I hug her. “We’re going to be okay.”

  She stops and holds my stubbly cheeks in her hands. “I’m very proud of you.”

  “You are?”

  “Of course I am! You’re a dream kid,” she says. “Most of the time.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  My hair has grown since fall and she brushes some off my forehead. “I think we should have Jamie over for dinner,” she says.

  “I already told you, that’s out.”

  “Well, maybe another girl sometime. Or boy.”

  I look up to the sky. “I know that book you have gave you a million options to support in the most helpful Helpy McHelp-Help way, but here’s the honest truth: I’m just a guy who likes a girl. So I’m whatever that’s called and that’s it.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Sounds good to me.”

  My face is crusty and my butt is cold. The sun is up and there’s not much more to this day than an eventual trip to the hospital. I need sleep. My mom nuzzles me like a kitten or cub or something and I bust up laughing.

  “What?” she cries out.

  “Nothing. I love you.”

  “Well, good, because I love you,” she says. “I’m freezing. Come inside with me and get ready for school.”

  I get to my knees and start to inch across the roof. “I’m going to bed.”

  “No way. If I have to go to work, you have to go to school.”

  “I promise I’ll be good tomorrow, but all I want to do is sleep until my doctor’s appointment,” I say. “It was going to be a half day anyway.”

  Her mouth crunches up, but I can tell she’s thinking about it.

  “Play hooky with me—have a sick day. Make waffles and watch Netflix.”

  Now she leers at me with a wink. “Now you’re the bad influence.”

  “Yay,” I cheer.

  She goes in through my window and then I do. I shut it. She closes the lock. “You need to dust, Dylan. Good lord, look at this.” Mom shows me her filthy finger.

  “Day off,” I remind her, and collapse into bed.

  Pulling up my covers, she rubs my shoulder through the blankets. “I’ll wake you up when it’s time to go.”

  The door shuts with a click and I’m out.

  A heavy, deep hole opens up and I slide into it and close the lid. Warm and soft, I feel my dreams tiptoeing in after a while. Wild great things that make no sense and I’m along for the ride, until blackness hits me like a gong and I’m unconscious.

  I dream of Jamie. That plane of hers is there and she’s coming down the ladder. I’m waiting on the tarmac, wearing a suit.

  Something stirs me.

  “Dylan?”

  I don’t want to be awake. “Is it time to go?”

  “Um, I don’t know,” says Jamie.

  My eyes fly open. Sitting up, I see her. She’s red in the cheeks, her hair is a tangled mess, and she’s pulling at her hands over and over. “Is this a dream?”

  “I’m afraid not.” She looks to her wet boots. Then, carefully, up at me. “Hi.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mom stays stuck to the floor in my room, eyes whipping back and forth between me and Jamie. I didn’t notice her before. “I’m going to the kitchen,” she says. “Does anyone need anything?”

  We shake our heads no. I still can’t believe Jamie is here in my house, not just in my house, but in my room and breathing and everythin
g. It is a dream. I’m speechless.

  “Okay then, um, so that’s where I’ll be and I’m going to leave the door open, okay?” Mom tilts her head and glares. “The door stays open.”

  “Fine. Open,” I mumble.

  Behind Jamie, Mom gives me two thumbs up before she jets away, and I laugh at her. “Am I bothering you?” Jamie asks.

  “No, my mom’s being a nut.”

  “Oh.” Jamie paces the floor, leaving behind a spot of wet and dirty carpet from where she stood. I am so happy to see that mud, but she’s oblivious. Every movement is stiff with cold, and she rubs her arms inside the sleeves of her coat. Her light is dim. “I didn’t mean to come up here.”

  “That’s okay.” I sit up in bed and pull the blankets in.

  “I left JP’s house and walked. And walked and walked and walked. Fuck-it stomped all over town. Thinking. I thought about everything. Then around midnight, I saw your crutches lying in two different places a block away from each other. I was like, those are longer than mammoth tusks; they’re definitely Dylan’s,” she says. “I worried someone stole them or something. So I brought them here.”

  “Someone did steal them.”

  “Well, that’s a shitty thing to do.”

  “Sometimes people are shitty.” Like me.

  “Hmm,” she murmurs in agreement. “I was going to leave them on the front steps, but your mom saw me. She asked me if I wanted to come in.”

  “It’s pretty cold out.”

  “Yeah.” Jamie rubs feeling back into her ears. “So I thought okay, and then she asked me if I wanted to say hi because you were upstairs and I thought why not, so here I am. Hi.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Not really.” Jamie leans against my desk and takes in the shapes and sights of my room. “It looks a lot different in the sunlight.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’ll be honest with you, I’m stalling for time.” Jamie hides holding a tissue to her eye and disguises it as a runny nose before putting it back in her pocket. “I don’t want to go home and hear ‘I told you so’ from my mom.”

  “She doesn’t mean it like that.”

  “The heck she doesn’t. She ‘doesn’t approve of my choices’ these days,” Jamie says. “And I don’t want more therapy. It took forever to get it down to two sessions a week. I’m tired of feeling like a project. I wish people would just believe me when I say I’m fine.”