Paul wasn’t someone you could talk to, but at least he was alive. Colin waved a hand in front of his face. He didn’t even blink. His eyes only changed in the sun, as if someone had poured cream into their usual coffee color. “Don’t look at the sun,” he said as he stepped in front of his brother and blocked the light. “It’s bad for you.” When Paul inched over to see the street, Colin grinned. “It’s bad for you, stupid,” he said. “You’re such a fucking retard.” The word flashed in his head, retard. It was the only word for someone like Paul. There was nothing a retard could do, nobody he could tell. Before he could change his mind Colin lunged at his brother and put his hand over his eyes. “Got you now!” he said, wrapping his free arm around Paul’s chest. The way Paul screamed—like a caged chimp at the zoo—was the funniest thing Colin had ever heard. “This is the death grip!” He was weakening as he laughed and he knew he couldn’t hold on. Paul was wearing a pair of sweatpants and Colin peered down at them over his shoulder. “Got your balls!” he said, but before he could latch onto anything Paul broke free and elbowed him in the stomach. Colin was still trying to breathe when something slammed into his mouth, his eye, his cheekbone, his ear, and by then both boys were screaming.
“Fuck!” He pushed Paul away and stood up from the bed. “You fucking cocksucker!” It wasn’t until he looked at his hand and saw the little oval of blood that his eyes began to burn. He left for the bathroom before Paul could see him cry.
In the mirror, Colin could see why everyone hated him. His lip was halfway swollen and a line of blood reached across his chin and down into his shirt collar. A red half-moon bordered his left eye, and both were bloodshot. After he took off his shirt and wiped away the blood, everything made sense. You couldn’t help but hate a frail little faggot like that, a waste of the Y chromosome. “You’re such a pussy,” he told his reflection. He dried his eyes with his shirt and sat on the edge of the tub, his face hidden in his hands. “Total dickless piece of shit,” he choked, but nobody heard him as he sat with his arms locked around his chest. Nobody caught the names he called himself. Nobody saw him put his hands together and nobody knew what god he prayed to, what promises he made. Nobody saw him unfold his hands and look at his wrists where the blood flowed fragile and breathless and blue. Nobody saw him look at his mother’s razor hanging in the shower. Nobody knew what he was thinking.
If there is such a thing as too much goodness, his father had written, it is the phrase I’d use to describe my youngest child. That was it, all by itself on its own page. When, Colin wanted to know, had his father figured it out? When had he realized that Colin’s goodness was only a ruse, that his youngest child—his baby boy—was the monster who’d finish them all?
When he returned to the bedroom, it was like he’d stepped back in time. “Sorry,” he said to Paul as he tossed his bloody shirt into the hamper. He sat next to him on the bed. He’d never before wanted so badly to pat someone’s thigh, like everything would be okay. That’s what that meant, wasn’t it? You just put your hand on someone’s thigh and patted it twice: Yeah, it’s hard, but it’s okay. I killed our father but it’s not a big deal. Our mother’s going crazy but it doesn’t matter. I’m going to hell but it could be worse. But he knew how Paul would react. Instead he looked out the window and tried to feel his brother’s excitement, reaching into his own pocket and rolling the lighter’s wheel in his finger as they waited together for the same car.
After winter break was over, Colin tried to prepare himself for the moment he’d hear Victor’s voice or get hit with his smile, the second he’d break upon his disarming Oh, Colin like dandelion fluff on fresh blades of grass. He’d been wrong, hadn’t he, to be so afraid?
When his mother came home that night he lit her cigarette as planned, but—before he could decide whether or not to tell her about Victor—she gasped. “You look like you just fought your way out of jail.” She tilted his face toward hers. “Who did this? Tell me in the car. The last thing we need is a broken nose.”
In the emergency room they stung him with cotton swabs and touched his face with cold, powdery gloves. They asked him to look here, then there. His shirt came off as they checked his breathing and his heartbeat. When they left he put it back on. When they returned they helped peel it off, even though he didn’t need help. They checked his ribs for cracks, his back for bruises. “I think I’m fine,” he said, but the two nurses ignored him as they commiserated over their sons’ canceled hockey game. His mother sat in the corner, biting her lip as she tapped her fingers together. “I was sitting with Paul on the bed,” he’d muttered on the ride over. “I might’ve bumped his leg or something, or maybe I wasn’t—maybe I didn’t think about it. I might’ve been stupid and patted his leg or whatever. Like, he was sad.” Everyone else in his life was a good person. That he lied to them, that he hid who he really was, made him feel toxic. “I fucked up,” he said, halfway to a choke.
“Don’t say fuck,” she warned. A few houses later she softened, putting her hand on his neck. But he had fucked up. Want to know what I really fucked up? he could ask, and explain what happened in the basement that Sunday night two Octobers ago. Thinking of it that way, those fourteen months opened up behind him like in movies when the ground splits in two. This is how you don’t go back, he thought, and wanted to scream and smash everything in the car. He wanted to grab the wheel and swerve into a tree. Again that old compulsory feeling, as though his mouth might tell her the truth without his permission. Instead, as they neared the hospital, he began to cry. “We’ll help your brother adjust,” she said as she rubbed his neck. “You know he hurts, too.”
While the nurses asked him to walk back and forth across the room, a policeman poked his head through the curtain and beckoned for his mother to follow. Colin’s balance suffered, watching them through the curtain. The policeman’s shadow was pointing at him, gesturing toward the curtain with his thumb. His mother was nodding or shaking her head. She bit a hangnail from her finger. The policeman put his hand on her shoulder. What had they learned about him? What had they found out? “Stop walking,” the nurse holding his hand said, and she turned to the other. “This boy’s fine.” On the ride home his mother said nothing, and he knew that asking would make his punishment come quicker—his transfer to the cops when she surrendered him. Over the break, she spent several evenings in a row on the phone, locked in her bedroom. But that was all. Their Christmas, their New Year’s—it was all as normal as they could make it, the disabled family that they were.
When school resumed, Colin went back to worrying about Victor. He tried to believe he’d misheard everything. But when he walked into his last class there was no Victor to confront—only a young woman shuffling papers at his desk. When class was over he found Paul waiting on the same steps, hunched over the concrete looking at the ice with the same stare. There was no black Toyota waiting. They caught their bus just as it pulled away from the curb. They sat in the front with the seventh graders and the kids who never spoke. Different houses and different street signs went by, no sight of that hidden park and no threat of his hidden life. He’d never been more bored. It hadn’t even occurred to him, that he wouldn’t ride home with Victor.
The next day he tried again. Again Victor was out. The day after that it seemed normal, this woman lecturing the class on mitosis and meiosis. When Colin began to think that Victor had been fired, that someone had found out what Colin had made him do, he couldn’t look at the parking lot without wanting to cry. Then he saw him, the following week, nonchalant as he erased names and diagrams from the board. “Sorry to have missed you,” Victor said when class was over, when Colin didn’t move from his seat. “I’ve been sick.”
They walked out together. The heaviness Colin had carried for three weeks was vanishing. Victor, too, seemed happier. After that, he didn’t ask Colin about girls or what he thought about at night. Even when Colin and Chelsea briefly tried to be a couple, Victor didn’t press for information. It was Colin who brough
t it up. “We’ve been going out for a couple days now,” he said as they passed by that road—his favorite road.
Victor tightened his grip on the wheel, mouthing lyrics to a song that wasn’t playing. “Good for you,” he said. As they approached a stoplight he rapped his knuckles on the window. When they stopped, the car sat there trembling. The windshield looked chewed around the edges, frost scalloping forward from the trim.
“We haven’t kissed yet. But I think we will this weekend.” It was awful, how Victor wouldn’t look at him. Colin wet his lips. “How old—” His voice cracked. “How old were you when you had your first girlfriend?”
The light turned green and Victor let the car roll into the intersection. “To tell the truth I don’t remember.”
Colin leaned back in his seat. The familiar houses skipped by faster than he hoped. When they pulled into the driveway Colin stalled, rifling his pockets for his keys even though you could hear them jingling with every sweep of his hand. “I can’t find them,” he said with a fake laugh, ashamed at how bad he was at lying. He and Chelsea broke up the next day—their friendship meant too much to her, she said over the phone, in tears while Colin watched TV.
Those afternoons went back to what they’d always been. Victor talked about the body and Colin listened, wishing he’d talk about his body. The neighborhood did what it could to hibernate. On the last day of the semester Colin was shaking, aware that if the errant hand or the dark question didn’t come now it never would. Paul had stayed home sick and they were all alone, student and teacher. What he wanted was to tell Victor everything, to open up like a fish slit along the belly and pour every last secret at this man’s feet. I’ve sucked a cock before, he wanted to tell him, and he wanted it to sound like he was the best cocksucker in Roseville. Instead he kept quiet while Victor went on about the heart, how it beats and beats for seventy, eighty, a hundred years without stopping. “Think of it,” he said, opening and closing his fist. “Think about doing this for a hundred years, never tiring.” When they pulled into the driveway Victor smiled. “Good luck next year,” was all he said, and that was the end.
After that, Colin would go back to riding the bus, sitting with Paul among all the other losers, listening to him groan and panic at the noise around him. He’d have to protect him from the thrown-around trash, the obnoxious kids who liked to flick each other’s ears and thump each other on the skull. He knew he’d think of Victor while he sat there, how he came so close to knowing something so important—some crucial fact, he decided, necessary for survival.
Andy had been wrong. Victor wasn’t dangerous. Here was a man who could tell you everything, if you knew how to ask. He could show you everything.
Colin hadn’t figured out how to ask, and when he walked into the house he found he would be alone on those bus rides. “I didn’t know how to tell you so I thought I’d tell you after,” his mother said. There were boxes stacked along the foyer walls. Heather was leaning up against the kitchen door frame, her lip trying not to tremble. “Colin,” his mother said, in that way that was supposed to soothe him, and he knew Paul no longer lived there.
Why all this? What it isn’t: comprehensive, complete. Given that up. Image of life as one of my uncle’s fishing trips. What he’d catch and what he wouldn’t. “The one that got away”—he used this for everything. The car on sale that got away. The deal on cruise tickets that got away. His first wife, before I was born, who got away. As though there was nothing he could do. All the things he missed were the things he remembered. “We almost moved to New York when I was a baby”—as though New York was gone forever. As though it was beyond him.
As though he was helpless. Colin loved it when he found something in the notebooks that resembled the man he’d known. This uncle—Colin’s great-uncle, he calculated—he had never met. He could be the great-uncle who got away, but he realized his father didn’t want him to think of life like that. But how could you not? If his father hadn’t died, for example, would God hate him like this? Would his best friend have seen through him, used him, and cast him out of his life? Would his mother have sent Paul to the special home for boys like him?
Would Paul—still at home and not at all angry—have kept Heather from leaving?
Even though she did nothing but call her brother things like creep and fag and her bitch, Heather’s presence was a sad comfort. With Paul no longer home, Colin realized just how rarely Heather spent the night, anymore, and how some days she only stopped by to grab a clean sweater or a hat she’d left behind. Her bedroom was how she’d left it, but every time Colin went in to spy on her, something else was missing—a lamp or a pillow, a hairbrush, her stereo. It felt like she was vanishing, bit by bit, until one day she’d cease to exist altogether.
Their mother didn’t seem to mind. “It’s so quiet around here without your sister,” she said while Colin made dinner. She was sitting at the kitchen table, watching as he sliced carrots. When Paul left, only two weeks earlier, it was a complaint. “It’s quieter,” she’d said as she blinked herself into feeling okay. Now it sounded chipper, as if they’d killed an animal that lived in the walls. “I never thought I’d have peace and quiet again.”
Colin peered at her from beneath his brow. “You could be nicer to her. She might actually like being here, if you were.”
The oven creaked like something inside it was trying to get out. Colin glanced at the temperature. When he turned back to his mother she was pushing herself away from the table. “You have no idea what it’s like,” she said. From then on they didn’t talk about Heather. Paul they talked about but only as though he was on some kind of quest, backpacking all over Europe or going to school in Asia, not sitting in some locked room in a huge old house in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, waiting for his mother’s car to wind its way down the endless driveway, through the frozen trees.
On his first afternoon alone, Colin switched every television in the house to a different channel. It sounded like one of the holiday parties his parents used to throw. That was all he wanted—voices. A man’s baritone was most comforting, vibrating its way down his spine. The stretch of afternoon between school and dinner had never been so long. He began to read faster, half a notebook every day; and always, before bed, sneaking the one special notebook from its hiding place and reading, over and over, his father’s account of hell itself. Without the arguing voices on TV, all he heard was each floorboard’s creak as it called his name. All he saw were hands pushing their way through the cracks. You’re too old for nightmares, he tried to tell himself. At least when he wasn’t too young to be reading this—stories on the Internet that could waste an afternoon. What boys were for, he was learning from these stories: kidnapping, controlling, shaming, binding, tormenting, enslaving, and, in the end, rewarding.
At first he didn’t answer the phone. Then he noticed how the same number—one particular number—called at the same time every day, ten or twenty minutes after he walked into a quiet house. Then he imagined that Heather had lost her cell phone and that she was calling, desperately, from her boyfriend’s apartment. Something in her life had gone wrong and she needed Colin’s help. The next afternoon, when he got home from school, he dropped his backpack in the kitchen doorway and waited. She’s crazy, he’d say about his mother, but not in the way Heather wanted. That’s just who she is and she loves us and you should please come home. And if that didn’t work: Let me live with you. When it rang he jumped away from the desk. Would she be nice to him, like when they were young? “Hello?”
“Colin. It’s good to hear your voice.”
Even without seventh period Life Science, Colin still ran into Victor, passing from one class to another or walking by the lunchroom before the morning bell. Victor would smile and Colin tried to look happy and confident like everyone else. It wasn’t as if he never thought about him, how his voice had felt in the confines of that Toyota. His legs began to tremble, standing there in the kitchen. His lips moved against each other but not in
any motion you’d call a word.
Victor went on, energetic as ever. “I hope your last semester has been treating you well. It’s a tough time for a lot of kids, middle school. Especially one like you. With your situation I mean. How have you been? The last couple weeks?”
“I’m—I’m okay.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Colin heard a loud clack through the phone. Victor cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot, Colin.”
“Yeah.” He held the cord in his hand and wrapped its ringlets around his finger. His mother had always loved the look of an old phone. “I should go.”
“You’re growing up to be a good-looking boy. You’re a lot taller.”
Colin looked down the hallway. He wanted Heather to step out of her room, as though she’d been hiding all along. He wanted Paul to be there, dragging his hand along the wall. He wanted to hear the thump of Paul’s fingers against the spot their father had always meant to spackle.
“Are you staying out of trouble? Adolescence is a difficult time. These in-between years. Sometimes you just can’t trust yourself.” Another clack echoed through the earpiece. Colin held the phone away and put it back to his ear, afraid he might miss something. “What I want you to know is that I’m here, Colin. If you ever have questions, concerns. I’ve been there.”
“My mom is calling. Bye, Mr. Miller.” He hung up without trying to intercept and decode whatever Victor might have said. He held his hand over the phone, waiting for it to ring again, unsure of his plan if it did. It didn’t—not until the following day, at its usual time.
Image of life as a motor or machine missing one bolt, rattling itself further out of alignment until it hurtles itself in all directions, its weight diminishing, its pieces scattered. Image of life as the pieces themselves, nothing but leftovers. What was this? his father had written, as though he’d pointed at something right then, on the ground. And this?
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