by T. J. Klune
Calm down, I tell myself. He’s around here somewhere. No need to panic over nothing.
“Kid?” I say louder, waiting a moment to see if I get a response. None comes. “Ty?”
I’d also be lying to myself if I said I don’t believe the world is a scary place anymore.
I’m about to walk calmly (read: run) to his bedroom when I hear his high-pitched laughter coming in through the open window in the kitchen. I look out and see him talking to someone just out of sight. He’s talking animatedly, his hands rising in the air like he’s giving another sermon on the state of the economy (don’t ask). Something about this rubs me the wrong way, not knowing who he’s talking to. If it’s one of his friends, fine, although I don’t know how many live around here. If it’s a neighbor, cool, even if I hadn’t met any myself. If it’s some guy from the Internet named BigTony225 who promised him gifts of edamame and a trip in a windowless van, then we’re going to have a big fucking problem.
I throw open the front door just in time to hear him say, “Dominic, my brother’s not going to care if you come in. He’s not that scary. The scary one already left this morning. Besides, you’ve got to try the Kashi cereal I have. And then I can introduce you to the wonders of CNN in the morning. It’s better then because they haven’t quite hit the stupid fluff pieces they do later on. Those make me want to shoot myself in the foot. Who cares about the top ten ways to land a man? There’s a war going on, people! Priorities!”
Dominic. I remember that name. Ty had included Dominic in his thank-God prayer over at the Thompson house. I wonder again if Ty has an imaginary friend, until I hear a gruff reply, a voice much deeper than I would expect from one of the Kid’s friends, those that he has. He has a couple of buddies that he hangs out with every now and then, but that seems to have tapered off a bit. I had asked him about it, only to have him shrug and tell me that sometimes they just weren’t on his same wavelength. I had reassured him that no one was on his wavelength.
“Well, yeah,” the Kid says, sounding slightly exasperated. “But they’re not home so what are they going to do? You don’t have to tell them.”
And since the Kid now sounds like he’s trying to convince someone to do something they shouldn’t, I make my presence known by closing the door behind me. The Kid doesn’t jump like he’s guilty; instead, he smiles at me and waves and then says something else and reaches out and grabs onto an arm and pulls as he walks toward me.
The person following him is someone I haven’t seen before. He’s big, bigger than a kid his age probably should be, which I’d estimate to be fourteen or fifteen. He towers over Tyson, his dark eyes watching me warily under bushy eyebrows, but still allowing himself to be pulled toward me, like he’s resigned to whatever is about to happen. His dark hair is shaggy around his face, spilling onto his neck, above the neckline of a stretched and worn shirt. His jeans have the knees blown out and his right shoe is untied, the laces frazzled and dirty as they drag behind his shuffling feet. Who the hell is this and why is Tyson grinning like that?
As soon as they reach me, the Kid lets Dominic go and jumps up into my arms, his hands immediately going to my hair as he babbles away about something or another. I hear him, halfheartedly, my eyes drawn to the new guy in front of us, who has stopped a few feet away and is looking down at his feet, kicking at a rock, his arms behind his back like he’s at parade rest.
“… and I think he might be my best friend in the whole wide world so you have to be nice to him,” I hear the Kid say as I tune back in. “He’s awesome, but really quiet, and I try to get him to talk more, and he’s starting to, but I think he’s really shy, and mostly he just sits there and listens to me, so that makes him my favorite kind of person, and I think you should let him come in and have breakfast with us, but you can’t be mean and do that whole ‘I’m Bear. I’m an adult, so you have to do whatever I say’ thing that you always do because sometimes, Papa Bear? Honestly? You gotta just let me be me.”
I can’t help it as I chuckle quietly. “Take a breath, Kid,” I tell him as I set him down. He looks up at me and grins as he holds onto my hand. “And I always let you be you,” I remind him as he jerks my arm toward the other boy, who is now looking nervous, chewing on his bottom lip as we approach. “Anyone else would have put you up for adoption by now.”
He rolls his eyes at me. “Too soon, Bear. I’m still emotionally scarred and that was in poor taste. It probably just set me back at least another couple of years. Hey, at least it’s more fodder for my therapist.”
“Uh-huh. Keep the act up, Kid. I’ll take you down to open-mic night if you think you’re that good.”
He scowls at me, if only for a moment, before a wide grin splits his face almost in half as he looks back at his friend. “Dominic, I’d like you to meet my big brother. Don’t let what you just heard fool you; he can actually be almost funny. Sometimes. Bear, this is Dominic. He lives a couple of houses down.”
The other kid in front me glances up at me quickly and sees me watching him expectantly and drops his gaze back toward the ground, mumbling something under his breath.
“Sorry?” I say gently. “Didn’t quite get that.”
The Kid sighs. “He said it’s nice to meet you, and he likes the Green Monstrosity because it’s the color of sea foam, and that’s one of his favorite things to look at because it’s always shifting.”
I know he actually didn’t say all of that, not unless I got trapped in a time vortex and lost six seconds while standing in my front yard (weirder things have happened), but I can’t help catch the quick look he shoots the Kid, the small smile that quirks one side of his mouth, how one eyebrow arches quietly before his forehead smooths out again and he looks back down at his shoes.
Huh. Odd.
I hold out my hand, and it sits there for a moment before the Kid whispers something to Dominic, who sighs and reaches up and grabs my hand, pumping it up and down just once, his grip warm and calloused, his huge hand engulfing my own. He lets go and hazards another glance at the Kid, who nods at him and laughs like it was the funniest thing he’s ever seen.
“So, Dominic,” I say as the Kid quiets. “Haven’t had a chance to meet any neighbors yet. Have you lived here long?”
He mumbles something I can’t make out.
The Kid starts to translate, but I shake my head. “Couldn’t catch that, Dominic. You’ll have to speak up. I’m an old guy, hard of hearing, wouldn’t you know.”
“For a while, yeah,” he says, a little louder, his voice sounding gruff, as if just the act of those four words is more force than it’s exerted in a very long time. This is almost a foreign concept to me, as I never shut up, not even if I want to. The Kid looks expectantly between us, the grin still on his face like this is the greatest thing he’s ever experienced. I wonder, if only for a moment, why the hell I haven’t met Dominic yet, why I really haven’t even heard of him aside from the brief mention at the Most Awkward Dinner Ever, especially if he’s got the Kid grinning the way that he is, a smile almost solely reserved for those that know him best. Jesus Christ, who the hell is this kid and how did he knock down my Kid’s walls so quickly?
I look at him with a new appreciation, knowing that if he’s got the Kid’s loyalty somehow already, then he is someone I have to make sure I watch closely. It’s strange, though, and it causes me a slight unease that Dominic is obviously far older than Tyson, yet the Kid is making proclamations about best friends like he’s known the guy for years. So maybe Dominic is a loner, but why the hell would he want to hang out with a nine-year-old? I assume even loners have some kind of social status they are worried about. I can’t say it’ll do much for his popularity if he’s hanging out with a kid who doesn’t shut up about anything and is surrounded by people older and bigger than he is.
Then I catch another of those sneaking glances aimed at the Kid, who has decided to fill in the silence with a running diatribe of our family history. I hear Ty say, “And then she came back and sai
d she was going to take me away with her, but Bear was like ‘oh, hell no’, and we got an attorney named Erica who is soooo awesome,” and I notice the way the area around Dominic’s eyes tighten, the way his mouth flattens out to a thin line as soon as he heard about our mother’s actions. It takes me a second before I can really understand what I’m seeing on his face, but then it’s gone, and he stares at the Kid, nodding every now and then. I swear what I saw was anger. Like he was angry at our mother, not so much of her abandoning us to begin with, but the fact that she came back and tried to take Ty.
Strange guy, this one is.
“… and now Bear is trying to adopt me, but he’s still going to be my brother, not my dad,” the Kid continues. “I don’t have a dad. Okay, well I do have a dad; I’m not, like, Jesus or anything. I just don’t know who he is, but that’s okay, ’cause I’ve got Bear and Otter and now you, so who needs anything else?”
Dominic mumbles something I can’t quite hear, his eyes again going hard.
“No, I don’t think so,” the Kid says quietly.
“What did he ask?” I say.
The Kid looks up at me. “He asked if there was a chance that Mom could get custody of me.”
I snort. “Like hell. There’s no fucking way that’s going to happen. You’ve got my word on that, Kid. I’d die before I let that happen.”
The Kid grins at me in that adoring way he has sometimes, and I have to remind myself that I can’t cry in front of strangers and that I need to stop my eyes from leaking so much as it is and that I would die before I let Julie McKenna know any part of Tyson. She might have given him life but she has nothing to do with who he will become. She is not his mother. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t need one. He’s got me. And Otter… and now apparently some random kid named Dominic, who again has just said something that I couldn’t hear. If this guy is going to be around, we are going to have to have a little talk about what it means to be audible.
“Yeah, we know how it sounds,” the Kid replies, glancing at me. “We don’t understand why she came back either. Maybe we’ll never know. But there’s no point in worrying about it now, right? If you worry too much about what could happen, you’re never ready for what does happen.”
“Jesus, Kid, you sound way too much like me,” I tell him. “That can’t possibly be healthy.” But he’s right, of course, right about so many things. It’s been weeks since our mother came back, and for the life of me, I still can’t understand the whys and the hows of what had happened, what her intentions were. Why had she come back? How had she known about Otter being in San Diego? What was her end game? When we’d met with the attorney for the first time, she’d asked us if we’d seen anyone around that we hadn’t seen before, someone that could have been following us, checking into our lives. That thought had chilled me like no other, the thought of someone following us around, digging into our lives, trying to stir things up that are better left dead and buried. We have too much on our plates already to be worried about looking over our shoulders or finding someone digging through our trash. The unfortunate side effect of all of this is I’m convinced that every new person I meet is her spy (my imagination tends to be overactive, in case you haven’t noticed), and if I could have my way, the Kid would be locked in his room until the custody situation was resolved. Or maybe until he turned eighteen.
This, of course, leads to horrific thoughts of the Kid at age eighteen, realizing that by having him skip a grade, we’ve now put him on a track to graduate before he turns eighteen, which means he’ll go to college before he’s eighteen, and oh my God, what if he gets to skip another grade? What if he graduates high school when he’s only twelve and then gets accepted to Harvard or Yale and he has to move across the fucking country? There’s no way in hell he’s going to go by himself because I will be sitting there with him in every fucking class he’s taking, glaring at the blonde busty coed named Tiffani who flirts with him and invites him to the first big kegger of the year at Phi Beta Gamma, asking him if he’s ever tried a shot called a blowjob. She’ll lick her lips when she says it, running her tongue over her bubblegum lip gloss because she’s in college and has no inhibitions because she no longer has to listen to daddy (which means she’s a whore).
And of course he’ll want to live in the dorms, and he’ll be roommates with some guy who calls himself Tugboat and who will want to share doobies with him, and everyone knows marijuana is a gateway drug. Soon, the Kid will be hooked on crack and meth, and then he’ll make the biggest mistake of his life while high on PCP and will sleep with that blonde and busty Tiffani (who’s undoubtedly waiting for the Kid to get so fucked-up that he won’t say no) and get her pregnant. He’ll have to drop out of school so he can support his bastard family by working nights at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and then he’ll go home every night to his trailer in a trailer park known for getting hit by tornadoes at least four times a year.
By then he’ll have at least three more kids, and he’ll start getting a beer gut from drinking too many PBRs, and Tiffani (that bitch, I hate her!) will gripe and complain that he needs to take care of her, that he promised her a life filled with wonder and adventure, but instead they live in this shithole, and she had plans for her life, didn’t he know that she had plans? She was going to become a professional cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys! But she can’t now because Tyson has dragged her down with him! He’ll come home one night after getting fired for refusing to sell beef jerky to a trucker in a sleeveless shirt because didn’t that trucker know how they process the jerky? He’ll find her in bed with a rough trick named Desmond who has tattoos on his arms that say neat things like “Fuck” in Aramaic (because that’s how Jesus would have said it) and “Mom” in cursive letters because he is a momma’s boy at heart.
Ty will pack up the kids (by now there’s six of them) and hit the road, going from town to town, performing with traveling circuses as part of his band The Kid And The Kids, where he and his children sing and dance, covering songs from such classic bands like Journey and Destiny’s Child. One night, in the middle of performing an a capella rendition of Hanson’s “MMMBop” somewhere in Nebraska for folks in an elderly assisted-living community, he’ll feel a stutter in his heart and will drop down dead, his children gathering around him, tears on their little faces (my poor nieces and nephews!) and some scary carny will start singing “Dust in the Wind” horribly off-key. Tyson’s children (Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Randy, and Michael) will pack up their belongings and start hitchhiking across the country, still trying to perform as just The Kids, but even they can see that there is something missing without the Kid, and so they’ll disband and go their own separate ways.
And this will all happen, I know, before Tyson turns eighteen.
“Don’t worry,” I hear the Kid tell Dominic, who’s watching me with concern in his eyes. “Bear’s just being Bear. Sometimes he gets these thoughts in his head, and they sort of take on a life of their own. You can tell it’s not a good one this time because the skin under his left eye is twitching like he’s trying to wink. Trust me when I saw he’s not winking at you. Just give it another second and you’ll see what I mean.”
“You are not allowed to sing ‘MMMBop’ to old people in Nebraska!” I almost shout at him. “Tiffani is nothing but a whore! I don’t care if she gives you Tito!”
The Kid sighs. “See?” he says to Dominic. “Don’t even try to figure out where that came from. I assure you the logic chain in Bear’s head makes sense if you actually know him, and by ‘makes sense’ I mean in a Bear way, but for a newbie like you, it’ll probably just break your mind.” He turns back to me and glares. “Are you trying to scare him?” he scolds me. “I thought we could save the family crazy for another day. This is why I don’t have many friends, Papa Bear.”
“Oh, please,” I scoff at him, hearing Tito in my head trying to convince my other nieces and nephews to get the band back together again. “You don’t have many friends because
of your own weirdness. Don’t blame it on me.”
Please, guys; this is all I have now. Dad would have wanted us to get back together! For old time’s sake! Mmmbop, ba duba dop—
Shut up, Tito!
“And I’m not crazy,” I add.
“Who is Tiffani and why is she a whore?” Dominic asks me quietly, his eyes almost amused.
“Dominic, don’t get him started!” the Kid begs. “You don’t know what you’ll unleash!”
So I explain my entire logic line to Dominic and the Kid, who by the very end has his face pressed hard in his hands, like he’s trying to smother himself to get away from me, and Dominic nods with each of the points I make. His dark eyes do a little dance when I say the names of the Kid’s kids. For a moment, I think he’s just humoring me (but who cares if he is? He’s, like, only fourteen, and I can do grown up stuff when and if I want to without having to ask anyone permission. Okay, I usually ask Otter first, but that is so not the point. Crap. I usually ask the Kid too. Fine. That was a bad example. Whatever). But when I finish, Dominic is not running in the opposite direction, screaming as he flails his arms over his head. He’s not even looking slightly petrified as people normally do when I open my mouth and words fall out. No, he’s watching me like he’s taking me seriously, and before I can call him on it, he turns to the Kid and says gruffly, “Makes sense to me. Tiffani is obviously a whore.”
The Kid’s jaw drops as he glances between the two of us, starting to sputter in such a way that only he can do, so filled with righteous indignation that you would have thought we had lambasted every core ideal he’s ever fought for. Maybe there’s something to this Dominic besides an uneasy façade.
Before I can tell the Kid to calm down, before I can so much as form a thought to put his mind at ease, Dominic reaches out a hand and drops it on the Kid’s shoulder, and wonder of all wonders, the Kid silences almost immediately. I’m sure this has to be a momentary thing, that the Kid will start up again, his protestations louder, his eyes wider, and his stance almost combative, but it doesn’t happen. The Kid stops talking, takes a deep breath, rolls his eyes, and shakes his head.