I prefer to believe it’s a spray-tan. Even if his hands are still practically translucent.
“Do you two know each other?” He flickers his eyes over my face quickly and then darts them back over my shoulder to the crowd waiting for him in the hall.
Mack opens his mouth and I stitch it shut with a single look. Nope. This isn’t time for confessions.
“Yeah, we went to high school together.” I quickly answer, heading off whatever is percolating in Mack’s brain.
“Oh, good. Good. Ok. Well, uh, Nurse Brickman will go over your schedule with you. If you have any issues or questions, you can get a hold of me any time.” He spits out the words quickly, as he watches the reporters like a kid who’s desperate for his parents’ attention.
“Ok, thank you. I appreciate the tour, Dr. Galt.” Mack walks across the room and shakes his hand. My boss can barely find the enthusiasm to move his arm up and down a couple times before he abandons the handshake for the closest thing he’s ever had to fans outside the door.
Mack’s military escorts shake his hand and clap him on the shoulder before leaving us alone together.
Suddenly the biggest room in the hospital feels like it’s folding in on itself as the space between us seems to disappear.
Space, time, distance. It’s funny how your heart can so quickly forget the very things that ripped it in half.
I’m not sure if I want to kiss him or slap him, maybe both. Either way, I want an excuse to touch him.
“What?” I ask. I know that cocky smirk, like he just heard a punchline that he hasn’t bothered to share yet.
“Brickman? Seriously?” He covers his smile with the palm of his hand and I realize slapping him would definitely be the better option.
“Yes, Brickman.”
“You got married?”
“I did.”
“To Joel Brickman?”
“That’s the one.”
“Do you have kids?”
“One.”
“You got married and had kids with Joel fucking Brickman? Come on! I mean, I know when I left town there was slim pickings, but your science partner?” He rolls his eyes.
“At least Joel was there for me. Unlike some people.” I snap at him. “Besides, you shouldn’t speak badly about the dead.” I rub the empty spot on my ring finger, regretting my decision to put my ring in a safety deposit box a couple of months ago. I told myself that it was time to stop wearing it when the anniversary of his death snuck up on me.
“He died?”
“Yeah, that’s what that means.” My words are tinged with frost.
The twinkle extinguishes from Mack’s blue eyes and his smirk settles out into a line. “How? I mean, I’m sorry to hear that. He was so young!” I can see him trying to connect the dots.
“Yeah, he was hit in a head on collision. It was instant.” My voice is flat and quiet, yet the words feel too loud.
“I’m sorry.” Mack steps toward me and I hate to admit how much I want to throw my arms around his neck and nuzzle my head into his chest. How much I want to feel him run his thumb over the back of my head and to hear his voice tell me that it’s all over now. That all the hardship, the heartache, the confusion, they’re all in the past and that he’s here to take away all my pain.
Instead, I step aside and walk over to the window, putting the space between us that I need in order to get my head on straight.
“I’ve been following your story. You know, like on the news and everything,” I confess to the glass, taking a deep breath. I turn around and let myself get lost in his eyes once more. “I’m sorry about the men you lost, Mack. And about what you’ve been through.”
His eyes flicker and for a moment he goes somewhere else. Somewhere far from Colorado. From me.
He shakes his head slowly and his eyes focus as he clears his throat. “Thanks. I’m just happy to be home now.”
“I’m happy you’re home too,” my voice cracks. Damn it. “I, uh, I’ve got a great program outlined for you here,” I stuff my hand in my pocket and pull out my phone so I can bring up his schedule. “I know you’ve been working hard on walking again, and I can see you’ve put in the hours with how well you’re doing.”
My mind snaps into nurse mode and I force my emotions back down my throat and bury them deep in my gut. “But, I’m gonna get you running again. By the time you’re finished here, you’ll be living the same as you did before the …” I don’t want to call it an accident. I saw the footage, just like the rest of America, and it wasn’t some kind of tumble that took Mack’s leg.
“Before I mistook a grenade for a soccer ball? I always get them confused. It’s all those little octagon shapes on them. Practically identical.” he jokes and I smile back at him, happy to let the awkward moment go.
I look down at the screen of my phone and see that my son’s school has been calling and texting me.
What the? I scroll through the messages, piecing together the situation. Perfect. Just perfect.
“Everything ok, Lauren?” Mack hovers near me and I can smell his scent. The little hairs stand up on the back of my neck as I breathe him in.
“No, I’m sorry, but I’ve gotta go. Crap.”
“What’s going on?”
“Chris, my son, he just got suspended from school. I’ve got to go pick him up. Is it alright if I go over the program with you later?”
“Yeah, sure. Of course.” Mack waves his hands at me. “Go deal with your delinquent kid,” I know he’s joking, but the comment hits a bit too close to home. He has no way of knowing how much Chris has been acting out since Joel died. How he’s fallen in with a crowd that keeps me up at night sick with worry. How I pray to God to show him the way out of this darkness before he ruins his life.
“Thanks, ok, I’ll probably be back in a couple hours and we can go over it then.” I start walking toward the door.
“No problem. Hey, if you need good old Captain America to do a public service talk with your boy, swing him by here sometime. I’ll straighten him out for ya,” he smiles.
I nod politely and bite my tongue. As I walk toward the door I don’t tell Mack that a sit down with him might actually be the best thing for him. After all a heart-to-heart between a boy and his father can probably do a world more good than anything I can pass on to him.
Especially when his father is a famous, American war hero.
11
Lauren
2014
I pull into the school parking lot with my head buzzing like a beehive and my stomach filled with dread. This is the same elementary school that I went to when I was Chris’s age. This is the school where I met Mack Forrester. Now his son is walking the same halls, charming some of the same teachers and stirring the same shit up as his dad.
Even if Joel hadn’t died last year, Chris would still be a handful. It’s in his DNA as much as the almond skin tone he gets from me is, or the mischievous smile he gets from Mack.
Since the day he was born, Chris has always been a handful. I was blessed with the kid who climbed out of his crib and pulled the curtains down when he was one. The kid who decided the bathtub was an ideal place to put garden snakes when he was four. The boy who stole cardboard and other trash on garbage day for months so he could build a huge Evil Knievel style bike ramp across the street of our subdivision.
It was two days in the hospital getting his leg set and casted up for that one. And, of course, about a week after it was removed he built another ramp. This time it was sturdier and he landed the jump. He also got to spend almost an entire month in his room being proud of himself.
Even before Mack was all over the news, I never had a chance to forget him. Not when his son has been putting me through the paces, giving me no rest, and melting my heart with his father’s signature smile.
Once Joel passed away, Chris spiraled out of control. Simple pranks and adventures took a darker turn toward destruction. He dropped out of almost all of his activities, giving up everythi
ng except football for a group of boys that look like a gang in training. All they’re missing are little name tags. Hello My Name is: Thug.
Initially when Joel was killed in the accident, I took Chris to a psychologist who said that he’d stop acting out after six months or so. We just hit the anniversary of Joel’s passing a few months ago and, if anything, Chris has only stepped up his efforts. I feel like he’s an engine that’s picking up steam on whatever this track is that he’s decided to head down, and I’m left feebly standing at the end holding my arms out to try and stop him. But we both know he has the power to mow me down.
I make my way into the principal’s office. A path I wish I couldn’t sleep walk to. My son is sitting on a little plastic chair against the wall across from the school secretary, Miss Wilmot. I give him a look and as he tilts his head and peeks up at me from under the brim of his ball cap. He knows he’s in shit, the flash of fear in his eyes doesn’t escape me.
However, the older he gets, the more we’re both coming to realize that a mother only has so much power. I can yell until I lose my voice, I can take away every single thing that he enjoys and ground him, but I can’t seem to change this path he’s on. He won’t be happy until he watches his entire world go down in flames. He doesn’t know yet how difficult it is to build a life from ashes.
Miss Wilmot looks over her glasses at me with a look that instantly transforms me back into a ten-year-old. My gut twists up into a knot and when I reach the edge of her desk I’m surprised that I don’t have to stand on my tip-toes to look over at her. It’s strange how a place or a moment can make us all children again. Like decades of growth haven’t slid by us. Like our timelines shrivel down, depleting years of experiences with a single stare.
“Ms. Brickman, how nice to see you again. Too bad it’s never under different circumstances.” She looks over her wire-rimmed glasses and I stare down into my palms. How does she do that? I need to bring her to my house to give Chris that look when he’s acting up. I’d most certainly have a much different son.
“Mr. Vaughn is waiting for you in his office, you can go right in.” he continues.
“Thank you,” I mutter, my ears burning up and the skin on the back of my neck prickling as I watch my feet shuffle to the office door. Put my hair in twists and my feet in Mary Janes because somehow the last eighteen years of my life have disappeared. I’m a butterfly who lost her wings, crawling into the office.
The door is open and Mr. Vaughn doesn’t look up from the file folder he has under his nose when he waves me in. “Come in, come in. Sit down, sit down.” he repeats himself.
I sit across the desk from him and fold my hands in my lap, waiting for him to stop reading whatever the folder holds. It’s thick and tattered around the edges. Chris Brickman is written down the side tab. I swallow hard when I try to imagine how many offenses that folder must hold for it to be so thick.
“Ms. Brickman.” I jump in the worn office chair as the principal jolts me from my thoughts. “As you can see, your son has had another incident here that we need to discuss.” Mr. Vaughn carefully places the file folder on his desk and fans several sheets out across the top.
“What happened?” My mind races with possibilities. What have I already been in here for this year? Disrupting classes, fighting, skipping school, the list swirls through my mind as I wait for the next step in his delinquency to be reached.
“Christopher was found with explosives in the boy’s bathroom today, Ms. Brickman. I’m afraid that between our zero tolerance policy on weapons at school and the damages that he and his friends did in the restroom, he’s facing expulsion this time.” Mr. Vaughn squints his already beady eyes at me, waiting for me to close the gaping hole my dropped jaw has left in my face.
“Explosives? Are you sure? I mean, I know you’re sure, of course,” I raise my hands like I’m trying to clutch my words from the air before they reach his large, flat ears. “I have no idea where he’d get them, I mean. Did they make a pipe bomb? Or maltov cocktail? Or …” I wrack my brain.
“Cherry bombs.” Mr. Vaughn answers me matter-of-factly.
“Cherry bombs?” I parrot his words, but they don’t match the pictures in my head. “That was the explosives?”
“Yes, Ms. Brickman. Christopher and a couple other students decided to drop a handful of lit cherry bombs into a student toilet this morning and blew it up.”
“Blew it up? It exploded?” I try to imagine the scene. Are cherry bombs that powerful?
“Well, it blew the lid off the seat, yes. And it also made a terrible mess. There was water everywhere.” His face flushes a deep maroon as he relives the horror.
“Cherry bombs.” I sit up straighter in my chair, suddenly feeling my butterfly wings return once more as I transform back into the twenty-eight-year-old I am.
“Yes.” Mr. Vaughn nods severely.
“Those were the explosives? So, Chris and his friends threw cherry bombs in a toilet and it blew water all over the floor?” The visions I had of shrapnel and smoldering tile laying in broken piles of the boy’s washroom are replaced with the kind of innocent foolishness that boys do so often, even Bart Simpson has been immortalized doing it on the Cartoon Network.
“That’s correct,” the principal snaps at me. He points down to the many forms he fanned out in front of his folder. “As you can see, I have plenty of witness statements, including one from your son admitting that he was the one who brought the explosives to school today and that he participated in the destruction of school property.” He taps his finger like he’s trying to communicate in Morse code against the sheets.
“Ok, so, Chris and his friends pulled a prank with some cherry bombs and now he’s getting expelled? Isn’t that a bit much? I mean, boys do this kind of thing all the time don’t they?”
“No, Ms. Brickman, boys don’t. In fact, with only three months left of the school year there has been exactly one incident with explosives in the school …”
“With cherry bombs, you mean?”
“Yes, with explosives. And it was Chris who incited it. If you’d like to take a look at his record, Ms. Brickman, you’ll see that Chris is often the ringleader in such cases. As I said, there’s a zero tolerance policy with weapons at this school.”
“Cherry bombs.” I repeat.
“Any weapons.” he answers firmly. “Unfortunately, I can’t extend Chris anymore chances. If his behavior wasn’t getting progressively worse with each incident, then I could think about suspension. However, it’s clear that he’s not getting the guidance he needs outside of school hours in order to modify his behavior.”
Well, that does it. “Listen, Mr. Vaughn. It’s one thing to drag me in here from work and try to make my kid sound like he’s a school shooter for throwing some cherry bombs in a toilet, ok? But, it’s quite another when you decide to insinuate that I’m not pulling my weight as a mother. If you bothered to look at that file, you’d see that a little over a year ago, when my husband died, I became a single mother. I don’t expect you to use that as an excuse for Chris, but it might explain his escalating behavior a bit. Maybe if you’d ever bothered to send him to the school counselor, you’d know that too. So, instead of sitting there judging my parenting skills, maybe you should be analyzing your supervising practices a bit.” I stand up, breathing in deep into my lungs. My transformation back to adulthood is complete and I’m ready to take my kid and go. Enough of this garbage. I turn on my heel and head toward the office door when Mr. Vaughn clears his throat.
“Ms. Brickman, before you go, we need to discuss the matter of financial compensation for the damages.”
So much for my dramatic exit.
12
Lauren
2014
“It’s no big deal, Mom.” Chris slumps into the passenger seat and buckles himself in. “Mr. Vaughn is such a dick. I mean, he’s had it in for me all year just cause he caught me kissing Hannah. He’s a total douche.”
I don’t disagree.
/>
But that stays in my head. There’s zero chance I’m sharing that information with my son. What I personally think about his principal doesn’t change the fact that my kid is expelled from school and I have no where I can put him.
At nine, he’s much too old for daycare and too young to legally look after himself. With only a few months left in the school year, there’s no way I can just get him back on track in another school. We’re basically screwed. I’m screwed on child care; Chris is screwed on having any hope of passing the fourth grade. What a mess.
Fucking Vaughn is a douche.
“Listen, I don’t want to hear it. And don’t you dare talk about your principal that way.”
“Ex-principal,” Chris corrects me.
Lord, give me the strength to keep my hands on the wheel so I don’t smack my child. I know it’s been nine years and I’ve never hit him, but I swear, I’m losing my patience.
“Do you think this is funny, Chris? Do you have any idea how badly you’ve messed this up? You’re expelled, Christopher. That means I’ve got to try to figure out how I can get you back in school. In case you haven’t noticed, I have a job I need to go to every day so I can keep food in your mouth, but now I’ve got to use my breaks to call around so I can get you back in class. And if that doesn’t work, you can look forward to being the oldest kid in your fourth grade class next year!” The skin underneath my fingers pinch as I tighten my grip on the wheel.
I glance over at Chris, he’s emotionless and staring out the window. I want to shake him and hug him at the same time. I want to soothe him and tell him I know how hard it’s been for him since he lost his father.
Well, Joel wasn’t his biological Dad, but Chris didn’t know that. He was only two years old when Joel and I started dating. Joel had tried to pursue me before that, in his own awkward way. However, after spending the first year of my nursing program with a belly full of baby, I was in no hurry to find another man.
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