“Hey, Zeke! I wasn’t expecting you for like, thirty minutes,” Zack said. His grin looked thin and drawn, as if he were trying to ignore how tired he was. “Dad’s in the bedroom. Come say hi!”
Zeke glanced around the old, triple-wide modular house. It hadn’t changed much since he lived there, but it had worn down. The laminate on the kitchen cupboards was warped and peeling. A water spot stained a six-foot uneven area of the ceiling, and the royal blue carpet was threadbare and browning at the edges. The couch hadn’t been replaced since he was a kid, and was more duct tape than fabric. Even the TV was the same, a dinosaur tube as deep as it was wide. Depression settled onto his skin, a sense-memory of times past. He breathed in through his nose and caught the musty scent of spray cleaners over cheap rotting wood and burned plastic. The floor creaked miserably as he walked across it to follow his little brother down the hallway to the left, past the laundry room, where rust had eaten a hole in the floor beneath the swamp cooler encrusted with decaying insulation. A mouse skittered out from under the water heater door and fled down the hole in the floor. Zeke shuddered. His dad had never been the best housekeeper, but Zeke had never seen the place this bad before.
“We’ve been trying to clean it up,” Zack said apologetically. “We’ve been working on it for six months. Four feet of trash in every room of the house. It was like a rat’s nest in here. Literally, there were freaking rodents everywhere. We dug him out and disinfected the place, but....” Zack shrugged and nodded at the curling seam seal on the wall. “It’s disintegrating.”
“Then why not just bulldoze the whole thing?” Zeke asked, wrinkling his nose.
“We’ve talked about it,” Zack sighed. “But Dad won’t leave. He’s not all there, Zeke. He’s sort of...I don’t know. He’s not seeing what we’re seeing, or he’s seeing something we’re not, or something. There’s something really wrong, but....” He shrugged unhappily. “His insurance won’t pay for him to stay in a nursing home or a hospital for an extended length of time without some kind of acute illness or injury. We’ve tried, but at this point all we can do is babysit him and wait.”
“Wait for what, exactly?” Zeke asked. The future spread out before him, grey and constricting, the relentless burden of his crazy father in every scene. He passed a hand over his eyes and sighed.
“Anything,” Zack said. “Any change, for better or for worse.” He knocked twice on the thin rickety door which was peeling in jagged splinters.
“We don’t want any,” Jimmy’s voice said merrily from the other side. “Come back tomorrow.”
Zeke moved to open the door, but Zack held up a finger. He counted to ten, then knocked again. This time, the door swung open, revealing Jimmy in nothing but a pair of stained boxers and an ancient pink terrycloth robe.
“Zack! Where have you been, I waited all day! I get lonely in here, you know, you can’t just abandon me to go chase girls whenever you feel like it. Dad-blamed kids and their parties....” Jimmy continued to grumble as he shuffled across the floor and sat in his armchair. The leather was splitting in a dozen different places, but unlike the couch, these splits had been left raw. Jimmy kicked up the footrest and hit a button on the remote, turning the TV on. Zeke’s eye drifted lazily to the colorful noise, then a shock split his heart and ran down his spine to his feet. His mother’s urn was sitting in front of the television, with a portrait of her face taped onto the lid and a decapitated doll body taped beneath it. Jimmy flipped through the channels.
“I don’t like that damn show, Althea! No, no, no! It’s just a bunch of sluts slutting around drinking slutty drinks and wearing slutty clothes. Why do you even want to watch it? No, I don’t hate you for being a woman, Althea, I love that you’re a woman! Fine, fine, you know what, we’ll watch it.”
Zeke’s eyes grew painfully wide as he registered what he had just witnessed. His dad, arguing with his long-dead mother about what to watch. It was as if his childhood was set to replay in front of him, except this time it had been written by Roald Dahl and directed by Tim Burton.
“Is it always like this?” Zeke asked.
“No,” Zack said quickly. “Sometimes it’s worse. Sometimes it’s better. At least he recognized me this time. I’m not sure he even saw you.”
“Dad,” Zeke said loudly.
Jimmy cast an irritated glance at him as a bright pink title rolled over a city skyline on the TV.
“What do you want, Zeke? Come to break some more beer steins?”
“Yep,” Zeke said, before Zack nudged him hard in the ribs. “What? That was fifteen years ago, Zack, and it was one beer stein that he didn’t even like, and it was an accident, and don’t elbow me!”
“You’re regressing,” Zack said thoughtfully. “Happened to me and Ben too, for a little while. It’s not a big deal, just keep an eye on it. Don’t let him pull you into his crazy.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Zeke said with a scowl.
“I wasn’t either,” Zack admitted. “But before I knew it, I was feeling like a teenager and acting like a teenager, and suddenly he was trying to parent a kid that doesn’t exist anymore, with a brain that doesn’t function. There were a lot of things thrown at my head before I figured it out. You’re the parent now, Zeke. We’re the grown-ups here. We are in charge.”
“Are we?” Zeke asked, watching his father warily. Jimmy’s pale blue eyes were glazed over under his fierce scowl, and his steel-grey hair sprang from his head in all directions. He picked up a half-eaten apple and began to chew on it, muttering a conversation with the dead Althea between bites.
“I threw away every belt, sandal, and wooden spoon,” Zack said defiantly. “We are in charge.”
“Great,” Zeke said. “So what do I do with him?”
“He needs his pills at six, they’re in the medicine cabinet, in the blue organizer. Everything’s labeled, just give him what’s there. Other than that, just make sure he drinks water and eats something. Keep him from wandering off or setting anything on fire. Babysit him like he’s four.”
“A four-year-old wouldn’t be watching this show,” Zeke commented as the sitcom morphed into soft-core porn.
“A very advanced four-year-old,” Zack said, rolling his eyes. “Just keep an eye on him, alright? Please. I can’t be late to work again.”
“Alright,” Zeke sighed. “Get lost, I’ve got this.”
“Okay.” Zack took a step toward the door, then paused. “Call me if you need anything. If you can’t reach me, call Ben. If you can’t reach him....”
“I know where the emergency numbers are, Mom,” Zeke teased, bitterness and exasperation expressing themselves in a sideways twist of humor. “Go to work.”
“Alright, alright, alright,” Zack said, slinking away. He cast a worried glance over his shoulder, then an alarm started chiming on his phone. Cursing, Zack ran out of the house and hopped into his car, zooming out of the driveway without a backward glance.
“Well, Dad,” Zeke said with a sigh. “I guess it’s just you and me.”
“Don’t talk about your mother like she’s not in the room, you ungrateful brat,” Jimmy growled. “Show some got-danged respect.”
Zeke slumped and slid down the door to sit heavily on the uncomfortably worn floor. Show some respect. Sure, Dad. I’ll respect her enough to get that fucking fashion doll off of her final resting place. Mom hated those dolls with a passion. Zeke’s phone twittered at him. Micah was calling, again. He sent it to voicemail and didn’t respond with a text. He couldn’t deal with Micah’s issues, not today. He couldn’t even deal with his own. They were both grown ass men, and it was long past time for each of them to deal with their own shit. There wasn’t time for any of that in-depth soul-baring that Brandy had told them to do, and there wasn’t any point to it anyway. It wasn’t like Zeke was angry enough about anything Micah had ever done to want to kill him, no matter how beastly his brain became.
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to kill you, though,” Zeke realized in a murmur.
“Hey! Quit talking to yourself, you look like a crazy person,” Jimmy admonished him. “I don’t know, Althea, he’s your kid! Don’t give me that look. Just because I stirred the pot don’t mean I wrote the recipe. That one’s all yours.”
Zeke sighed and dropped his head against the door. Yeah, he was the crazy one. That made sense. Jimmy argued with his dead wife for a while longer, but Zeke tuned it out. It was too weird. Too real. And, if he was strong enough to admit it to himself, far too painful. He still missed his mother with every breath, and he knew that her absence had shaped his life in ways that he would have changed in a heartbeat if he was able. Knowing a loss that deep at such a tender age had ruined him. No child should have their heart broken that way, it just wasn’t fair. After that, every crush, every fantasy, every loving feeling inevitably leads to the core-adamant certainty that the object of affection would be unceremoniously ripped away, lost forever in a gold-plated jar.
Looking up at her urn, Zeke saw his face reflected in the shine, warped in a way that made his green eyes look far too big. He saw a child in the reflection, and he looked away quickly. This was why he hadn’t wanted to come back here, not now, not ever. There was too much history in this house. Too much death and loss and memories of screaming into pillows while hot tears pasted the cheap fabric to his cheeks. Grief over his mother. Weathering a beating. The tragic obsession of his first love, and the subsequent shattered heart. There was nothing for him in this house. Nothing but pain.
“Your mother says she loves you,” Jimmy said suddenly. “She’s sorry she had to take that trip when you were a kid. I don’t know why she can’t just tell you that herself, but I suppose I can play messenger boy if you two want to play these childish games.”
“Fuck you, Jimmy,” Zeke spat as tears blurred his vision. He blinked them away, and found Jimmy staring at him with a puzzled expression before blinking and turning back to stare passively at the TV. Zack’s reminder echoed admonishingly in his head. We’re in charge now. Jimmy wasn’t all there, which meant that Zeke couldn’t go off on him the way he had dreamed about for so many years. Jimmy wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t understand why Zeke was so angry, wouldn’t remember all of the things that he had done to deserve Zeke’s wrath. He was a child, wrapped in the husk of the man who had made Zeke’s life a living hell since his seventh birthday. It was a cruel twist of fate that forced Zeke to be the caretaker now.
“Ben and Zack must trust me a lot more than I would trust myself,” Zeke commented, not expecting an answer. “The tables have turned, old man. I’m the powerful one here. You’re too weak to fend me off. What’s to stop me from ending all of this right here and now?”
Jimmy turned his head slowly, his eyes wide and unfocused. “Your mother says to tell you that you’re a better person than I am. She’s being a real pain in my ass today. She wasn’t like this when Zack was here. You’re making her yell at me, shut up or go away. We’re watching.”
Zeke bit back a heated retort. It wouldn’t do any good. However Jimmy’s brain was degrading, it hadn’t lost sight of one very important fact: Invoking Althea’s opinions of him was still the best way to get him to change his behavior. Somehow, Zeke felt like he still had a chance to make her proud. Zeke wasn’t religious or spiritual, never had been able to reconcile the idea of beneficial magic in such a cruel world, but he damn sure missed his mother.