by Eric Kester
The doll and I didn’t recycle much. But we did hang out pretty often when Dad and Brett were out doing football stuff. No tea parties or anything, but I remember watching all the Patriots games with him and teaching him the rules of football. We could afford internet back then, so I also introduced him to the joy of watching YouTube videos of douchey skateboarders eating pavement. I also remember using him as a wrestling dummy, body-slamming him off the top bunk into a fortress of pillows. He took it like a champ. He always had a smile on his face, even when his head popped off and I had to play surgeon by delicately securing it back onto his torso with a sledgehammer. He didn’t talk anymore after the operation, so he was like Brett in that way.
Dad eventually found the doll. Who knows what he did with it, but I’m sure it didn’t involve recycling. I wasn’t too upset since I was getting bored of the doll, anyway. But I’d gotten a small taste of being responsible and caring for something, and honestly I kind of liked it. So I wanted something to replace the doll, something that might even care for me back, something living. I knew Dad would not be down with a girly pet like a gerbil or guinea pig, so for my next birthday I asked for a rat. Mom was horrified by the idea, saying, “No, Wyatt, that’s disgusting.” But I said, “Ugh, Mom, I’m a boy and I have my needs.”
My eighth birthday party was an elaborate affair that featured a hybrid pirates/spacemen theme. I dressed up as a knight with a sword, which I think some people were internally questioning, theme-wise, but I was the birthday boy, so deal with it. When it was time to unwrap gifts, I went straight for the large box with holes poked in it. I carefully cut along the wrapping paper with a pair of scissors, eager to get my hands on that little fur ball with his chompy front teeth and long wormy tail. I tore off the paper, placed the box on the ground, and lifted the lid to feast my eyes on the rugged glory of … a tadpole.
I was furious, of course, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just abandon the thing. So I named him Mr. Giggles and brought his water bowl to our attic room and placed him high up on the bureau.
Mr. Giggles was pretty antisocial. He spent all his time chilling inside his tiny plastic castle. He never left that castle, even when Nate and I smushed our giant doughy faces against the glass and politely screamed at him to come out and play. Sometimes when I was alone Mr. Giggles would emerge from the castle for a quick swim. This made me want to show him off even more. He came out only once when Nate was there, but instead of doing his cool signature move where he swam in super agile figure eights, he just slammed his head repeatedly into the wall of his bowl. Nate laughed at this, so I, as a responsible legal guardian, punched him in the arm. I also expressed my concern that maybe Mr. Giggles had poor vision and needed glasses. But Brett, who’d been lying up in his top bunk, put down the playbook he’d been reading and said no, Mr. Giggles’s vision is fine. What he needs, Brett said, is a bigger bowl so he doesn’t feel so trapped and hopeless.
Brett had a point, but I knew I was raising Mr. Giggles well because he was growing rapidly. My mom said I was an excellent “daddy,” which in my view was an unacceptable term, so she suggested “caretaker,” which was a little better, though we ultimately settled that I was an excellent “Tadpole Development Specialist.” It was tough to play with Mr. Giggles, but we had some epic staring matches (I always let him win). I read online that tadpoles love fresh water, so I switched his water four times a day.
One afternoon when I came home from school Mr. Giggles was not in his bowl. I frantically ran downstairs and asked my mom if she had seen any thieves enter or exit the apartment because we had a full-blown kidnapping on our hands. She inspected the scene of the crime and noticed a little trail of water droplets leading from the base of our bureau out the door and down the stairs. After following the trail downstairs, Mom returned and gravely told me that Mr. Giggles had grown legs, leapt out of his bowl, and “moved on to a better place.”
I was shocked at how readily my tears flowed, and humiliated that Brett was there to see me turn into a puddle. In between sobs I asked if Mr. Giggles had jumped to his death, if his life in the bowl was so terrible that he had grown legs just to climb out and fling himself off the bureau’s cliff.
Mom and Brett looked at each other, then told me that Mr. Giggles had grown legs and crawled down to the beach and was now happily swimming with all his frog buddies in the ocean. This made me feel better because, if you haven’t been paying attention, the natural sciences aren’t exactly a strong subject of mine.
Still, I was heartbroken over the unexpected loss, and as I cried over Mr. Giggles, cried over my failure as a caretaker, and cried about crying, my mom just kept rubbing my back, softly repeating, “You’re a good boy, you’re a good boy.”
* * *
“His name was Mr. Giggles,” I said to Brett as we looked out over the cliff.
“Mr. Giggles,” Brett repeated to himself. “That’s right. I found him dead on the kitchen floor, you know. He escaped that little bowl, but couldn’t escape our apartment.” Brett’s slurred speech sounded distant, like it had arrived by a gust of wind here on the edge of the cliff. “We have to get out of here, Wyatt.”
“Okay, sure. Let’s go home.”
“I mean Grayport. We have to escape. Like Mom did. Like Mr. Giggles tried to.”
I had always assumed Brett, like me, desperately wanted to leave town—otherwise, our future would be making minimum wage on a fishing boat. And that’s if things went well and red tide didn’t reduce our life to a restless waiting game of empty bank accounts, empty fridges, and broken toasters. It would be life like it is now, in other words, only with no football to distract us from the fact that our life was essentially just one giant fourth-and-long. But I was surprised how hearing Brett say this aloud made me profoundly sad. I thought about all those people at tonight’s game, thousands of them, little boys and little old women alike, and how they cheered on Brett—our Brett from just over there on Pine Street—as he played his ass off not to make the town proud, as they imagined, but to earn a college scholarship so he could leave us forever. This made the town seem pathetically naive, like a fat kid getting excited by a small kiss from a girl who probably had already forgotten his name.
“You’re going to escape,” I told Brett. “The Boston College recruiter was there tonight, and remember how he said they’d give you a scholarship for—”
“They said the same shit to Dad back when he was a senior,” Brett interjected.
This was only the second time I’d ever heard Brett swear. I turned and watched him watching the waves crash into the rocks below. I thought about Dad hurting his hip senior year and losing his college scholarship, and I thought about his old teammates always telling me how Dad could move on the football field as smoothly as a dolphin swims in the ocean.
The rotating beam of the lighthouse slashed light across Brett’s profile in intervals, and I was a little startled by the weathered face revealed in the glare: gravelly stubble peppered Brett’s sallow cheeks, and his eyes looked vacant and tired. He looked just like the man he hated.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Brett didn’t answer. Instead, he slowly knelt down into a crouch. He placed one hand on the ground to steady himself. With the other he reached up to his forehead. He rubbed it, wincing.
“The bottom of Dad’s whiskey bottle.”
“What?” I was having such a hard time following Brett’s train of thought.
“The bottom of Dad’s whiskey bottle,” Brett repeated loudly. “That’s where I put the dead tadpole when I found it.”
My mouth literally fell open. “You serious?” I pictured my dad taking a big final swig of whiskey, then, feeling that slimy glob of a creature catch in the back of his throat, spewing out his drink in a high arc like one of those European fountain statues. This story was so incredibly unlike Brett, the kid who never cursed, never missed curfew, and who called everyone “sir,” including Dad.
“That’s pretty amazi
ng,” I said, chuckling softly. “Dad must’ve yelled at you pretty good.”
Brett wasn’t laughing. “Yeah, sure. If that’s what you want to call it.”
A heavy silence hit me like a punch to the gut. I tried thinking back to the days following Mr. Giggles’s death. Was that the start of it all? Of Brett’s unwavering discipline, of him calling Dad “sir,” of him silently planning his escape from Grayport?
“You have a gift, you know that?” Brett said, turning to look at me for the first time.
“I do?” This was a weird turn. In a flash my mind went over possibilities: Was he about to tell me I was a good listener? Or had a great sense of humor? I felt a little flutter in my stomach. I can’t believe I’m describing it this way, but it was almost like butterflies.
“Your gift is that Dad doesn’t give a shit about you.”
Oh.
The thing is, Brett was right. Sure, I could complain that Dad had never encouraged me before, but he never scolded me either. When he found my doll, for instance, he picked it up by the ankle and left the house without another word. He was a heartless old bastard. But even though I reminded myself of this all the time, it still bothered me. That’s what sucked most about this. If you’re upset hearing that someone doesn’t give a shit about you, then that means you give a shit about them. Is that pathetic? I don’t know.
“I wish Aunt Jackie had room in her apartment for us,” I said. But Brett’s attention had switched off again. He stood up and looked east down the shore. When the lighthouse beam swung that direction, you could make out the silhouette of Grayport Stadium, so tiny from this vantage, like a little plastic castle enveloped in a bowl of fog.
“Seriously, what’s wrong?” I asked again.
“Headache,” Brett said. “It’s the lack of nutrition. I can feel it.”
He could’ve been telling the truth. Meals had been tough since the fridge went bare. A couple of neighbors had given us “good luck” treats leading up to the big game, so we had a bit of banana bread and meat loaf in our stomachs. We also got a twelve-pack of Jell-O cups; we had the red ones for dessert and saved the green ones to eat for breakfast. It sucked being hungry—it felt like an indignity reserved for miscreants, shifty ex-cons who chose narcotics over nutrients. But at least this would help me lose weight. Brett, though, was having his regimented diet disrupted.
“We should get home,” I said. “It’s getting freezing out.”
I started walking away from the cliff, and Brett followed.
* * *
The two-mile hobble home took over an hour. We didn’t talk much, and I was fine with that—our conversation on the cliff, both in length and in content, was such an intense upgrade from our usual exchanges, and I didn’t want to topple the progress we made.
When we walked up to the second-floor entrance of our apartment, I’m sure Brett and I were wondering the same thing: whether Dad was home.
The glow of the TV from the living room immediately gave us our answer. We walked through the kitchen and stepped into the TV room. The Blakemore game was already replaying on Grayport Local Access, but Dad had passed out before my winning catch.
We had got there just in time—the last play of the game was coming up. I watched Brett break the huddle, watched myself run up to the line and miss the block on Derek Leopold. My catch looked even more impressive than I imagined. As the camera swung to the right to follow the ball’s flight, you could just make out Leopold smashing the crown of his helmet into Brett’s forehead. On impact, Brett’s body collapsed to the turf with a sickening lack of life, like a puppet cut loose from its strings.
I looked at the real Brett standing next to me. But he wasn’t looking at the TV. He was staring at Dad slumped on the floor with his back leaning against our dirty little couch, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s leaning against his ruined hip. Brett’s eyes were wet, a possible first. But that’s not what caught my attention most. Most alarming was that Jeremy had been right earlier—the black pupils in each of Brett’s irises, those vivid green emeralds usually so full of depth, were two different sizes.
Suddenly, the TV zapped off, leaving the three of us in total darkness. I crouched to the floor and fumbled for the remote lying next to Dad. I hit the POWER button, but the TV didn’t respond. In the darkness I groped my way along the couch to the floor lamp that stood in the corner. Its cone-shaped shade was dented and crumpled from various projectiles that Dad had angrily sent flying over the years. I tried switching it on. Nothing.
“Power’s out,” I said.
“Not out,” Brett replied. “Turned off.”
I thought about the pile of unopened bills from the electric company scattered throughout the kitchen. I looked down toward Dad. His sprawled-out body was a shade of darkness so deep it stood out against the surrounding shadows. His outline consisted of a total, all-encompassing darkness, the kind that’s so rich and pure it doesn’t seem real, like an emptiness that is less than nothing, a black hole. I wondered if it had always been there, the darkness, since he was born, or if it first appeared when he tore his hip and the very ligaments that were supposed to carry him forward to football glory—the fabric of his identity—were ripped open. I don’t know if the darkness had spread quickly or slowly, but it had definitely bled into his heart by the time I was born.
I looked toward Brett’s silhouette. His head was tilted down and he was rubbing his forehead, like he was thinking, or in pain, or both.
This was not the physical pain I felt, not the pain I had stupidly reveled in just hours earlier at the party. The pain I’d felt was tangible, localized, and obedient. Even if it hurt badly, I knew I could carry it. But Dad’s pain—and now Brett’s pain—seemed unbearably heavy in its emptiness.
“Are you okay?” I asked Brett for the second time that night.
“Grab his feet,” he slurred.
We’d done it so many times before, the process had become automatic: Together we dragged Dad to his room and lifted him into bed. I untied and removed his shoes while Brett got the bucket and placed it within puking distance of Dad’s head. We turned him on his side, adjusted the pillow under his neck, and laid a blanket over him.
When we were done, we brushed our teeth, trudged up to our attic room, and went to sleep without saying good night, all three Parkers in their own beds, each in his own unique state of consciousness.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
The stench of rotting fish jolted me awake. I didn’t know what time it was, but the room glowed with a hazy morning light that seeped in through the open window next to my bottom bunk.
I wondered if Brett was still in his bunk, but that was soon answered when a disembodied groan from above made it seem like the top mattress had come alive.
“Ugggggh.”
“Brett?”
“Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Actually, I don’t know. I feel like crap.”
“How so?”
“My head is pounding. And it’s way too bright in here. Opening my eyes hurts.”
“Oh.”
“Do you think this is how Dad feels every morning with his hangovers?”
“Dunno,” I said. “I think his entire body hurts him all the time.”
“It feels like an elephant sat on my head.”
“I know the feeling. An elephant sat on my head last week when Trunk pounded me in the shower.”
My bitter response caught me by surprise. I guess deep down I was bothered by how long it took Brett to defend me from Trunk. We may not have been that close, but we were brothers. Where was Brett’s loyalty? His protective instincts? Why did it take so long for them to kick in?
My welts from the fight had nearly faded away, but it was the first time either of us had ever mentioned the brawl. Still, I instantly regretted talking to Brett that way. I don’t know what felt more unnatural: standing up to Brett, or standing up for myself.
There was a long pause befo
re he responded.
“That was my bad,” Brett finally admitted. “I wanted to give you a chance to defend yourself, you know? You gotta learn that you can rely on yourself.”
That logic teetered annoyingly along the line between astute wisdom and complete bullshit, so I didn’t respond.
“I should’ve stepped in sooner,” Brett went on. “I’m sorry. Really.”
I lay there and thought for a while. I should’ve been relieved, but I wasn’t. The phrase I should’ve stepped in sooner echoed in my head. Not for what it meant, but for how much Brett slurred each s.
“You were pretty out of it last night at the party,” I said.
“Was I?”
“Do you remember any of it?”
Brett didn’t answer immediately. I suddenly felt very hot under my sheet, so I kicked it off onto the floor. “Well,” he said after a moment. “I have a vague memory of you sniffing Haley’s hair.”
“I was smelling it.”
“Same difference.” The s in same was slurred, but Brett’s voice had at least become lighter, more playful. Whatever tension we just had seemed to have dissolved.
“No,” I sparred back through a widening smile. “There’s a big difference. Sniffing is active, like a choice to be creepy. Smelling is totally passive and innocent. I just happened to be in the waft zone of her hair’s aroma.”
“Waft zone?”
“You know, the area where you can, like, luxuriate in occasional whiffs of someone’s essence.”
“And this is your argument for how you’re not a creep?”
“Shut up.”