4. Where Bear Meets Two Very Different People
Otter got me upstairs, and I started slinking around the room, dancing and asking him if he thought I was sexy. He said he thinks I’m always sexy. Then I threw up and blamed him for letting me drink too much. And then I passed out.
It’s a good thing he says he loves me, because I’m a train wreck.Of course it probably hadn’t helped when Otter—without discussing it with me first—had pulled out a check in the amount that his parents had fronted me to cover the custody attorney. And damn it if it wasn’t like an electroshock to the heart when he’d told them (against their protestations, of course) that we didn’t want their money, that he was man enough to take care of his own family just fine. Anything the Kid or I needed would come from him and that was final. He had already resumed his prior position at the photog studio he’d worked at before fleeing Seafare, and while that in itself was not a lot of money, he’d done more than well enough for all of us during his time in San Diego, and we didn’t have to worry about finances anytime soon. Part of me was horrified at this unintended emasculation (my old pride rearing its ugly head—I don’t know if I’ll ever be rid of it), but then he’d looked at me with such earnestness in his eyes that any argument to the contrary died in my mouth. And, I’m not ashamed to admit, there was something so unbelievably hot about Otter’s words, that glint in his eyes that just begged for his parents to speak against him, to doubt he could provide what he said he could. He believed it and therefore I believed it.
But that didn’t help when I hugged his mother good-bye and noticed it was much stiffer than the one I’d gotten in greeting. I couldn’t help but notice the way his father couldn’t quite meet my eye as he shook my hand. Anna’s parents were still too blown away to do much but mumble at me as Otter practically carried me from the house.
I’ve never understood their hesitation on the matter, but I know how much it hurts Otter. It was only a couple of nights ago that we’d lain awake in the dark, with him telling me in a low voice how surprised he was when he came out and was met with an almost cold indifference, how that surprise had quickly turned to anger and outrage that his parents, seemingly leftleaning quasi-hippies, would make such a big deal about something he considered so small. There was one point when he’d described the look on his father’s face when he’d come out, and his voice had cracked ever so subtly, but I heard it, that breaking cadence that tore at me like claws, and did the only thing I knew how: I gathered him up in my arms, stroking his hair as he lay on my chest, both of us waiting for the tremors that rolled through his chest and shoulders to subside.
If there’s one thing I know about, it’s earthquakes.
But it’s easier for me to say “fuck you” to his parents than it will ever be for him, and this is something I realize very clearly. My dad was never
around, even though Jerry was kind of like one. My mom… well, you know about her. Alice was there more than she was. But there’s a knowledge in me, something that understands that these are not my parents. So while I can do my best to make sure that Otter is okay, that he knows he will always have a home with the Kid and me, I can still view the situation with a cool detachment that quickly turns into self-righteous anger. It bugs the crap out of me that I’d be so quick to distance myself from Jerry and Alice, but then I’ve never been in this position before, one where I gave a damn about someone other than the Kid and myself (I know, I know, what about Anna, right? It sucks. It really does. But something Creed said has stuck with me, even though it’s almost cold. Anna was my girlfriend. It’s just fucking different, okay?).
But I can’t do any of that. I can’t cut them out, because Otter can’t. They are a part of him and, by proxy, a part of me. So naturally, I started thinking of ways to fix it. And if history is any judge of the future, then I’ll probably just end up making things worse.
I T’S two days before I have my first class and three days before the Kid
makes the move to the fifth grade with the awesome David Trent. Otter’s at the studio for the morning, getting reacquainted with the daily grind after having had a four-month vacation. He’d climbed over me when the alarm had gone off, nuzzling against my ear before heading off for the shower. I’d have joined him, but it was way too early, especially since he’d decided to hit the gym before going into work. I did my own workout by pulling the covers back over my head and sinking back down into the warmth. By the time I wake up again, he’s gone, but there’s a cooling cup of coffee on the nightstand next to me with a note that says some stuff I won’t bother repeating. Let’s just say Otter obviously thought he was writing into Penthouse forums when he’d authored that lovely piece of smut. And apparently he has more faith than I do with just how far I can bend my body.
I don’t need the coffee after that, to be sure.I hear the familiar sounds of CNN from the living room as I stretch and walk down the hallway, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, wondering just how much more I should unpack today. There’s still a shitload of boxes, and they’ve been sitting there for a while, and I know if I don’t get started now, they are still going to be there sixty years from now. I’m lazy. Sue me.
“Morning, Kid,” I say, yawning as I enter the living room. It’s empty.The kitchen is too. There’s no note on the table, and I’d be lying if I say my heart doesn’t stutter in my chest. It’s unrealistic, I know, to expect
whatever is going through my head right now to happen, but the last time I’d lost track of the Kid, it had been a waking nightmare, one that I’m not ready to relive so quickly. It’s not that I’ve gotten complacent, but more that I’ve finally started to believe in a future that had never seemed possible.
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 thankGod 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 said 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.
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!
“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.
And that’s it.
Who the fuck is this kid?
Apparently, he’s God , the voice says, slightly amused. Because only God himself could have shut the Kid up that quickly. And that easily. Lord knows you’ve never been able to do that.
It’s right. Holy shit, maybe he is God.“Do you want to come in and have some Kashi?” I hear myself ask. “If that sounds gross, it’s probably because it is. I have Lucky Charms, instead.”
“Papa Bear never had a childhood,” the Kid explains darkly. “So he’s trying to have one now. It only gets worse from here. Trust me. Pretty soon, he’ll have you watching SpongeBob and your brains will be leaking out your ears.”
“You used to love SpongeBob,” I remind him. “You even had that SpongeBob blanket when you stayed—”“Bear,” the Kid groans, drawing my name out for six or seven syllables. I’m further amazed when I realize he’s blushing. “Do you have to tell him everything? We’ve talked about this. Better seen, not heard. You know this.”
I grin evilly at the Kid and he looks fearful. “I’ve even got some pictures of the Kid as a baby,” I tell Dominic conspiratorially. “There’s one of him playing in the bathtub when he’s like four, where he made a beard out of soap on his face and he used to call himself Major Awesome of the Awesome Brigade.”
The Kid starts after me, and I take off running back toward the house, laughing at him over my shoulder, a look of pure murder on his face as he shrieks after me, his voice high-pitched and hilarious. We reach the door and I throw it open, sidestepping the Kid neatly. He runs past me before he can stop himself, his shoes sliding on the tile in the entryway, and I pull the door shut in his face, holding the handle as he yells at me through the door, trying to jerk it back open.
Kids. Mother Nature’s hilarious miracles.
“You coming?” I call out to Dominic, who’s still standing where we left him, that quiet smile still on his face. At hearing my words, the smile fades slowly, and he looks over his shoulder, glancing down the street as if undecided. “Look,” I tell him. “I don’t want you to do anything that’ll get you in trouble. Do you need me to call your parents or something? Clear it with them? I should probably meet them at some point if you’re going to be around here. Gotta make sure they’re okay with it, you know?”
He turns back to me quickly, schooling the troubled look on his face a little too late for me to miss it. Dominic smiles quietly at me again and walks toward me, waiting to speak until he’s standing next to me, looking at the door that’s still shaking against the Kid’s wrath. “They won’t mind,” he tells me, averting his eyes. “I can tell them later.”
So he’s big. And quiet.
And a liar.
Great.
I’m about to tell him where I hide the Lucky Charms when my cell phone rings, playing a polyphonic rendition of “Achy Breaky Heart.” Fucking Otter, I think as I grin and reach for the phone. I leave the boys at the table and look down at the display. Speak of the devil.
“You know,” I say as I answer the phone and head up the stairs, “it was cute the first four hundred times you did it, now I just really hate that song.”
“Is that so?” he growls in my ear. Uh-oh. Either something’s wrong or something is very right.
“Uh-huh,” I say carefully. “So… what’s up with you?”
“Where are you?” Otter asks me.
“In the bathroom,” I tell him, obviously not checking my hairline in the
“I didn’t call you to talk about work,” he snaps at me. “Where’s the Kid?”
“In the kitchen with his friend Dominic. Dude, he’s not imaginary, but you should totally see him. He’s got to be like the biggest fifteen-year-old I’ve ever se—”
“Later,” Otter says, his voice low. “Our bathroom?”
“Well, yeah, I’m not going to—”
“Lock the door.”
Without even thinking about it, I do. The lock clicks into place, and I glance at myself in the mirror again, seeing that my neck is flushed, my eyes a little wider than they were just a moment before. I know this voice now, this one that’s breathing heavily into my ear. I can’t believe what the fuck we’re about to do, especially given the fact the Kid and Dominic are literally like twenty feet away. This is so fucking wrong.
“You know,” Otter says heatedly, “when I left you this morning, you looked so fucking edible curled up in the blankets. I was awake awhile before the alarm went off, just watching you, wondering if I should wake you up.”
“Yeah?” I manage to say, my dick already half-hard, pressing against my sweats. “Why didn’t you?”“Because I was in no mood to be gentle with you,” he grumbles. “And you looked like you needed gentle.”
Oh fuck. “I don’t always need it gentle,” I tell him as quietly as I can. “You know you can….”
“Can what, Bear?” Otter asks. “What can I do?”
He laughs, and it sounds harsh in my ear, raking against my skin, causing me to shudder. Say what you want about the man, but he knows exactly what buttons to push. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he tells me. “You hard yet?”
“Fuck you,” I snarl at him. “You know I am.”
“Grab your dick, but don’t jerk off.”
Rational thought tries to break in for a moment, and I curse myself for allowing it. “Aren’t you at work?” I ask him as I thrust my hand down the front of my sweats, squeezing my cock but not pulling on it. “People can hear you!” I bite back the moan threatening to burst out.
“Only one in the studio today. Where’s your hand?”“Where do you think? We can’t do this, Otter. The Kid and Dominic are in the kitchen! They’ll fucking hear me.”
“Then you better shut up and let me talk, don’t you think? But, I do have to say I like the little noises you make. There’s times when I’ve got you spread out in front of me, your face pressed into the pillow, that hot ass of yours sticking straight up into the air.” His voice drops again. “Those are the times I just want to break you in half. You should see yourself like that. Like the only thing you want is me. Like the only thing you see is me. God, how you fucking moan my name.” He groans softly. “Words can’t do it justice, Bear. Maybe next time I’ll record it so you can see exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Ah… Jesus.” This isn’t something we do very often, the dirty talk, the words I can barely get out, knowing how stupid I sound when I say them. But Otter must have his master’s in smut because the words that pour out of his mouth sometimes are not something that I would ever hope to hear repeated outside the bedroom. But he knows exactly what kind of an effect it has on me, the bastard. Lately, it’s turned into a sort of game, to see who comes first. The score is currently eight to zero. Yeah, who do you think has eight?
“You like that, don’t you?” he asks me, his breath quickening. “Want to make a movie with me, Bear? We could play it later, when I’m fucking you again, so you can watch yourself getting fucked. See what you look like when I’m buried in your ass?”
“You’re not going to win this time,” I tell him through gritted teeth. “You’re gonna go first.”“Bear,” he sighs in my ear, his voice having just the right timbre, the right amount of love and cadence that I jerk my hand once up my shaft and spill over my hand, a strangled noise bursting from my throat as my hips buck, knocking against the sink. I try to curb it so he doesn’t hear, but he hears it anyways, chuckling deeply as he listens to me finish.
“How the hell do you always win?” I snap at him, leaning over to catch my breath, my hand sticky and warm. “You totally cheat, don’t you?”“Jerked off before I called you,” he says, laughing louder now. “That doesn’t count!”
“Otter, nine. Bear, zero.”
“I’m going to get you back, you know.”
“Really?” he says, sounding way more interested than he probably
“Jesus.” He sounds like he’s squirming. “You know how much I fucking love you, Papa Bear?”
I do. But I’m an ass. “How much?”
So not fair. “I love you too,” I mumble back, ignoring the blushing Bear in the mirror.
“Wanna go again?”
My phone beeps. Another call coming in. I glance down at the screen. “Shit, I gotta take this. It’s Erica.”
He sobers instantly. “I thought we weren’t supposed to hear from her until next week?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “What if….” I don’t know how I’m going to finish that, but somehow Otter knows what I’m trying to say.
“You answer it, Bear. Answer it, listen to what she has to say, and then call me back. It’s going to be fine. You’ll see. She probably has some good news.” Otter, the eternal optimist.
“When can you come home?” I ask him, hating how I sound, but suddenly needing the big guy here with me, to protect me from what, I don’t know. It’s strange to think how fiercely independent I used to be before I traveled to the safer lands of Codependency. I was never one for middle ground, it seems, as I’ve gone from one extreme to the other. But it has to do with the fact that I know Erica doesn’t call early. She’s a stickler for a set schedule. If she said she would call next week, then that’s when she was going to call. Something had obviously happened. It’s the only reason she’d call before she was supposed to.
“Talk to her,” he tells me gently. “Then call me back, and if you need me, I’ll come running. You got me?”
“I got you.” I clicked over. “Hello?”
“Derrick, it’s good to talk to you again,” Erica says, in that tone of voice that says she doesn’t have time for bullshit. Strangely, she’s one of the few people in my life that I make an active attempt to keep my mouth shut around. “How’s things?”
She’s not really asking to get a response, just out of politeness. One might think that she comes across as kind of a bitch, but I suppose you have to sound like that if you’re going to be a lawyer.
“Good,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “You weren’t supposed to call until next week.”“Are you freaking out?” She sounds amused. Okay, maybe she is a bitch.
“Should I be?”
“You are, aren’t you? You’re totally freaking.”
“You never call early,” I remind her.
“Why do you automatically assume it’s bad?”
“If you were in my shoes, you wouldn’t have to ask that question.”
Fun fact: everyone in my life thinks they’re a comedian. “Are you trying out new material or something?” I ask her irritably. “Like, to use this in opening arguments to get the jury on your side? If so, you should probably try again. I would vote to put you in jail along with whoever’s on trial.”
“I can see why Tyson wants to live with you,” she says. “You’re so much fun. I can feel your emo-angst through the phone. It feels like tears.”“Aren’t you supposed to be professional? I could totally fire you, you know.” And I have half a mind to, because she’s obviously dragging this out as long as she can just to fuck with me.
“You could, but you won’t. I’m too good at what I do,” she says breezily. I can hear the clackclackclack of her keyboard through the phone. She’s probably not even paying attention to anything I’m saying.
“Your ego’s showing.”
“You can’t handle the truth!”
“Is that the only reason you became a lawyer, is so you could say that
line?”
“Of course not,” she scoffs. “I became a lawyer to make lots of money
and drive a fancy car. But, as it turns out, family law isn’t that big of a
“Now who’s filled with angst?”
“Enough chitchat,” she says. “You ready?”
Sweat pops out and beads on my forehead. I look down and see come drying on my hand, cold and congealed. Tyson laughs loudly from the kitchen, the sound bringing a smile to my face before it drops back off again.
“You’re starting to breathe heavily,” Miz Erica Sharp says. “If I hadn’t met that pile of sex you call your boyfriend, I’d swear you were flirting with me.”
Wow, if she thinks that’s breathing heavy now, she should have heard me two minutes ago. “Just fucking tell me!”“Tyson has been assigned a social worker. She’ll be in contact with you later today or tomorrow to set up a first visit.”
I don’t know how to take that. I hear one thing and a billion other things flash through my mind. Of course we knew this was coming, that it was part of the process, but I’d gotten it in my head that it was going to be down the road a bit before this ever happened. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad.
“Uh… okay? And what does that mean?”She laughs. “It’s a good thing, Bear. That means your petition for custody of Tyson is moving forward a lot quicker than we could have hoped for. Regardless of what people think, the courts like it when families stay together. So the fact that your case is being pushed forward this quickly is a good thing. Stop being all dire all the time.”
She has a point, even though I won’t let her know it. You can only get knocked down so many times before you start shying away from a raised hand, even if it’s extended in kindness. While I know we’re better off than we ever were before, it’s still hard to get our expectations set too high, as we always seem to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s a shitty outlook to have, but it’s a habit the Kid and I have not yet broken. Of course, I should be the one leading by example, but knowing the Kid, he’ll be the one dragging me along. I don’t know what it’s going to take for me to get over myself, but I would do so gladly.
“I just want this to all be over,” I mutter. “I just want the Kid to be mine.”“He is yours,” she tells me as gently as she knows how. “All that’s going to change is that a piece of paper will agree with you and won’t allow anyone to say otherwise. Try not to forget that, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you called the therapist’s office yet?”
Uh-oh. “Uh… I was going to do that as soon as we got off the phone.”
How the hell can she ask that? “Of course I am!” I snap at her. “Isn’t it pretty fucking obvious by now?”
“Two things: one, try to watch the language when the social worker is in the house. I’ve heard she can be kind of a hard-ass, and we don’t need anything knocking you down on her list.”
“Oh, dang,” I say. How fucking stupid is that?
“Better. Two: it would be pretty obvious to me had you already called and set up the appointment like I told you to do. Do I need to call Otter? Or Mrs. Paquinn? Or Anna or Creed? Don’t make me tell on you.”
And she would too. Our lawyer is a tattletale, and my family is nosy as all hell. They’ve all already gotten on my case about my signing the initial petition a day later than I was supposed to. (Creed: “It’s only a signature, dude. The first step and all that jazz.” Anna: “Won’t you feel better once this whole thing is over with? Just sign the damn thing!” Mrs. Paquinn: “I would forge your signature if I thought it would help, but I can’t do that because that would be bad karma and my face would probably fall off and I’d forever be known as The Woman Who Pissed Off Buddha” (don’t ask). Otter: “I’ll blow you if you do it right now” (I totally took him up on that one). The Kid, his lip trembling, his eyes wide but glinting: “Don’t you want to get custody of me, Papa Bear? I thought you loved me! I wish my mom were here!”) So I don’t take Erica’s threats idly, knowing full well she has the rest of the cool kids on speed dial.
I mumble something at her, to which she replies, “Sorry, didn’t catch that.”“The Kid is going to freak,” I say again, a little louder.
“And yet, you both don’t have a choice. You forget I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of one of his rampages. Do you remember what happened when he found out I’m a registered Republican?”
He’d asked her what it felt like to live without a soul and to have Fox News make love to her without having bought her dinner first. And that’s
me cleaning it up quite a bit, knowing I’ll now have to have a darn filter with the social worker coming in. We’d had a long talk with the Kid after that little colorful burst of Kid-ism (“Do you even know what a Republican is, Bear? Pretty soon, she’s going to be having me want to vacation back East with my perfectly coifed hair and starched sweater vests and vote on giving tax breaks to the rich! I demand you fire her!”). He might act like an adult, but he’s still a Kid and needs to watch his mouth, and I told him as much. He’d looked at me so incredulously when I’d threatened to ground him for a week for every curse word he used. When he saw that I was serious, he grumbled dark things at my person that undoubtedly would have been hilarious had I not been trying to prove a point.
“I remember,” I sigh. “But you haven’t heard his views on psychotherapy yet. And trust me; you’ve heard nothing until you’ve heard that.”
“I know,” she says. “And I know sometimes it can feel like a burden to be in charge of a gifted child, but you have to make him understand, Bear. And you can’t be worried about the reprisal. You’re the adult, remember? It’s not as if you are doing this just to upset him. It’s a state requirement, and it’s going to be the only way the courts will agree to grant you custody.”
“I’ll call today,” I say, knowing there’s nothing left to argue with. “And then?” she asks.
God, she’s so annoying! “And then I’ll call you back with the date and time of the appointment so you can call to verify. You’re a flipping hardcore female dog, you know that?”
Erica laughs. “Subtle, Bear. Real subtle. I can see where the Kid gets it from. And for the amount I’m being paid for this, you bet I’m going to be a flipping hard-core female dog.”
There’s a question I’ve been avoiding, and it’s one that I want to ask but am not sure if I want to know the answer. I’m sure she would have told me had she found anything out, but I still can’t help but wonder. Gathering my resolve and trying to sound as casual as possible, I ask, “Have you found her yet? Or anything?”
I hear her stop typing on her keyboard, a sure sign that I have her undivided attention. There’s tiny little sigh, and I almost want to know what she’s thinking right now, wanting to see everything she sees. But instead of saying anything further, I wait.
Silence. Then, “I’m surprised you haven’t brought that up sooner, Bear. What happens if I say yes?”I think hard for a moment, only to realize it would change nothing. I tell her as much. “Have you, then?” I ask. “You know, found her?”
“No, Bear. We haven’t.” I don’t know which answer I was expecting, and I don’t know if the one I’ve gotten makes me feel relieved or not. “She hasn’t filed taxes in the last three years, so it’s unknown if she has a job or not. And so far, the search through the DMV database still only shows her Oregon driver’s license. And an old unpaid speeding ticket from 2004.”
“I remember that ticket,” I tell her quietly. “She was late for work. Again. The cop almost arrested her for screaming at him. She got fired, and for weeks afterward, all she could do was blame the cop, that the cop got her fired, that she was going to sue him and the Pizza Shack and get a bunch of money and travel. She said she always wanted to travel.”
Wow , it sighs. That didn’t come out sounding like you have issues at all. Why do you remember these things? Why do you care? Could it be that Bear still wuvs his mommy? It chuckles. I wonder what she would say if asked to name a memory she has about you. A good one. Any good one. What do you think she would say, Bear? You think she would say anything at all? Let’s be honest: if she did say anything, it would probably be the clichés she seems to live her life as now, the evil mother quoting scripture against the horror that is homosexuality. The Bible says… Leviticus says… God says. Fuck her. Fuck her and your memory of her. The quicker it’s gone, the better off you’ll be. You can’t forget unless you consciously decide to do it. Why hold on to her when she thinks nothing of you?
“Bear?” Erica asks, and then she hesitates, but only for a moment. “Do you ever miss her?”
Before I can even consider formulating a response to that, there’s a knock at the door. “Bear?” the Kid asks. “Why are you locked in the bathroom? Are you talking on the phone while you empty your bowels? That’s so gross. You better not have ever done that while talking to me!”
“I gotta go,” I tell her.
“Call the therapist,” she says. “Today. And call me if you want me to be there when the social worker comes, although I think you three will be fine.” “Oh, please. So you can bill us for the trip down here? You wish.” “I can’t wait to hear the date and time of the therapy appointment!” she says cheerfully as she hangs up the phone.
I set the phone down near the sink.
Bear.
I know this is going to be heard for yu to read.
Do you ever miss her?
I need yu to do something for me.
I can’t—
Please don’t try looking for me.
I have to leave.
I won’t—
Do you miss her?
No. No. No, I don’t, not even if there was a moment that—
six i was six six and a half maybe
—when I’d come into the old apartment we used to live in over on River Road. The apartment that had the swings that always squeaked and the old man who lived next door who spent every day sitting in a chair staring out the window, sipping something out of a chipped tea cup. The pathways between the buildings were chipped and cracked, and a woman who lived next door said one day someone was going to trip over the cracks and would be able to sue and be set for life because what was a little pain if you had a lot of money? Don’t step on the cracks or you’ll fall and break your back (and become rich)! Money made everything better. I would always jump over each crack as best I could because I didn’t want to get hurt. I didn’t want to have to sue anyone. I didn’t want their money.
i left a little bit of munny to help yu out for nowI came home one day from school to that apartment on River Road and found my mom sitting in the living room on that old couch covered in cigarette burns and food stains. Her face was in her hands, and I could hear the subtle gasp of a choked sob, and this was my mom, and I was so little—
maybe seven i was such a little guy
—and I ran to her and jumped in her lap and told her—
don’t cry mom it’s going
—it was going to be fine, that somehow—
i promise it will get better and better and
—we would find a way to make whatever was making her sad go away, that I would do everything I could to make her happy, and did she want to see the gold star I got on the picture I drew because the teacher said I did so well, that I was like an artist and so very, very talented? I wanted to tell her how that praise had made me feel, how starved I’d felt for any kind of attention, that I’d begun to think of my teacher Mrs. Terrance like she was my friend, like she was my mother, like she would take me home with her one day to her big house that would be warm and smell of fresh bread, and there would be gold stars all over the floors and ceilings, and she would look down at me as we walked through the door and tell me that this was my home too, that I would get to stay with her forever because she loved me too. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t say that to my mother. Even then, I knew the power words had. To heal. To hurt.
So I held my mother while she cried, and eventually the tears subsided, and she began to hiccup softly, and this made me giggle, and she almost looked like she was going to smile at me, and I forgot about the house filled with gold stars because one smile from my mother was worth a billion gold stars and a billion Mrs. Terrances and a billion houses that smelled like fresh bread. I knew this was going to be a moment I would remember because it would be for me, it would be because of me; she’d seen fit to smile at me, and then her mouth would open, and she’d tell me how proud she was of me, how thankful she was I came home when I did, that I just make everything better, that I was her son, her only son, and God, how she loved me, how she couldn’t live without me and how she never, ever wanted me to leave her. There would be love in her eyes that were so very much like my own, and for the first time that I could remember, we would be connected somehow, and I would know that she was my mother, that she wanted me there with her and no one else, especially not the one-named strange men (Bob or Greg or John or Bud) that came in with her late at night, both of them whiskey-drunk and laughing as they tripped over chair legs on their way to the kitchen to get more booze, the smoke from their cigarettes trailing over their shoulders like contrails from planes in the sky.
But this… this was different. There was something there, something emotional, and I would take it for what it was, like the great gift that it was. Oh God, how this was going to be the moment, the first true moment of my life when I’d finally get what I had always dreamed about. There were tremors then, almost like a precursor to an earthquake, the room around us silent except for the tiny sniffles from my mother.
The smile never formed, and the words that came out instead— i need a drink and a smoke
—cut me, ran me through, and I cursed myself for thinking otherwise as I broke inwardly, for thinking that maybe, just maybe, I would know what it felt like. She stood up and stumbled slightly as her knees popped. She walked toward the kitchen, glancing at me over her shoulder and—
bar tonight so you’re on your own for dinner kiddo—there was a flash in her eyes, but it was the opposite of recognition, like lightning behind clouds, and I—
i’m going out to the bar tonight so you’re on your own for
—knew that it would not happen today, that it might not happen ever. But I was six (maybe seven?), and my ideals had not yet been shattered, my faith had not yet been shaken. I trudged off to my room, passing the kitchen while my mom lit up a Marlboro Red and splashed Jack over a couple of ice cubes. I lingered for a moment in the doorway, but I was invisible. I was a ghost, even though I could not haunt her, even though I could not make her look up and scream and scream and scream. I went to my room and closed the door behind me.
We lived there for maybe a year before being evicted and forced to stay with a woman who made me call her Auntie Sherrie and smelled like peach Schnapps and sweat. She always had stale hard candy in her thrift-store purse. I don’t know if we were related, but it doesn’t matter because she moved away and we got another apartment, shabbier than the one on River Road. The new apartment didn’t have swings or a man sipping tea in the window. The paths were dirt so there were no cracks for me to jump over. I never saw my Auntie Sherrie again. I asked about her years later, but Mom said she had been killed by a drunk driver. I asked who the drunk driver was and if he was dead too. She said the drunk driver was Auntie Sherrie. Peach Schnapps, wouldn’t you know.
There was no Ty then. No Creed, no Anna. No Mrs. Paquinn. There was no Otter. God, how there was no Otter.
None of them were real to me yet. I couldn’t even imagine them. I never found out what made my mom cry that day.
I DON’Tknow why I thought you needed to know that. Maybe….
No. Never mind. W E’RE sitting across from Georgia Erlichmann in the living room the next
day, the Kid to my left and Otter to my right. The social worker is opposite us, a small laptop perched on her legs, the keys clacking, writing only God knows what. She’s smaller than I expected her to be, and younger, given the gruffness of her voice over the phone. Her brown hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, seeming to provide a cheap face lift as her eyebrows are almost in the middle of her forehead. Either that or she’s in a perpetual state of surprise.
I smile at her, trying to show her I have not lost any teeth due to the manufacturing and use of meth. She ignores me and glances around the living room and types something else. I look around then too, wondering what she sees. The living room is wide, a large couch against one wall, a flat-screen TV set over the fireplace, two recliners against the other wall. The carpet is a light brown (which goes amazing with the green color on the outside) and is clean. Otter wants to pull it up for the hardwood floors underneath, but we haven’t gotten to it yet. It looks like a normal living room. So why is it like she’s typing a fucking novel about it?
I’m sure she’s been in much worse homes, and probably has stories that would make me nauseous to hear, so one would think she would be relieved at being able to be in a nice home, with nice people. But she’d perfunctorily shaken my hand when she’d arrived in her nondescript government-issued vehicle, smiling only when the Kid had wandered in, asking how he was in her slightly accented English. The Kid had responded warily. I wanted to kick him in the shins and tell him to behave, but then I realized what that would look like in front of a social worker and was able to stop myself from having the Kid taken from me within the first five minutes of her visit.
It didn’t help when she’d walked in the kitchen after I’d gone in to get her a cup of tea and she’d seen Otter kissing me gently on the lips, trying to get me to calm down, to make the nervousness that was blaring through me quiet to a dull roar. She’d made a small noise in the back of her throat and started typing something on the damn laptop, and I could only imagine it would say something like, The two homosexuals were engaged in anal sex on the kitchen table, using gravy as a sort of lubricant. The smaller man (obviously the “bottom” in the relationship) had a collar around his neck attached to a leash held by the larger man (a dominant “top”) who pulled on it and repeatedly asked “Who is my bitch?” The smaller man would say he was, that he was the bitch. This is not a good home for a child to be raised in. I recommend we move Tyson in with a heterosexual couple who are not into gravy sex and know that leashes are only for dogs as soon as possible. I pulled away from Otter, restraining myself from shoving him, not wanting her to think I was capable of spousal abuse as well. I’d muttered something as I blushed and went back to the tea like it was the most important thing in the world.
And then she had the nerve to—
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back it up. Spouse? Did I just think spouse? When the hell did I start thinking of Otter as my husband? I don’t want to get fucking married! I’m twenty-one years old, goddammit! Goddamn the Kid for talking about gay marriage all the fucking time, like it’s something that I want, like it’s something I think about all the time. It’s not. I don’t think about it at all. I never have. Otter doesn’t, either. Besides, he wouldn’t want to marry me. That’d just be weird. Who would change their last name? Derrick Thompson makes me sound like I yacht at Martha’s Vineyard and have a stick up my ass. Oliver McKenna sounds like he… well, okay, that sounds all right. I guess. If you like that kind of thing. Where would we even do that? It’s not legal, so it’s not like it would be recognized or anything. I suppose we’d know, at least. That’d count for something, right? Maybe we could to some kind of civil ceremony, though, down at that spot on the beach. We could do it at dusk, and the sun would be setting behind us, and we could wear those tuxes that we wore the first time we were down there, that time that had started horribly wrong but ended so wonderfully right. He’d be looking down at me, and I’d be looking up at him, and the sun would be like a halo at the back of his head and that gold-green would flash at me, and I would know it meant forever because he is forever and as our family looked on, he would lower his face until his lips met mine and—
—and holy fucking shit, did I really just go there? My mouth is dry, my cock half-hard. And I’m staring at Otter. Who’s staring back at me, his eyes dancing like he knows exactly what I’m thinking about. No way. No fuc— (social worker is here, dang it!)—flipping way.
Georgia clears her throat as she looks back up at us, interrupting my mini freak-out/Barbie Fantasy Dream Wedding. I hope she doesn’t see the insane gayness in my eyes, because I don’t know if I can shield it. She doesn’t smile. I choke on my tongue as I think of a ring sliding over my finger.
The doorbell rings.
I jump up immediately, wondering if that is God saving me. “Don’t know who that could be,” I say, still trapped on a beach, Otter whispering “I
do” somewhere in my head. “No one ever comes over here. Er, I mean, we have people over, we’re not like some crazy shut-ins.” I laugh, and it comes out sounding like I’m a crazy shut-in. “People come over here all the time. Wait, that didn’t sound right, either. I know what I just said sounds like. It’s only people we know that come over here. We’re not drug dealers or anything.” Oh, God, shut up! “I don’t even know any drug dealers. Otter works for a photography studio, but I only think it’s fashion photographers that get hooked on cocaine, and he doesn’t do that anymore. Fashion photography, not cocaine. I don’t even think he knows where to get any? Otter, do you know where to buy cocaine?” He shakes his head, his mouth quirking at the sides, obviously not going to speak. I wish I could do that. The Kid has his face in his hands. “So there’s that,” I tell Georgia, who is watching me with a badass stoicism that chills me to the bone.
I get up and start walking toward the door as the bell rings again. “I’ve never even seen drugs before,” I continue for some odd reason. (Not so odd, it tells me. You just like to hear yourself talk, apparently. Are you trying to make this worse?) “Except on TV and in movies. I’m sorry. I just lied to you. I saw a marijuana joint once when I was sixteen. I didn’t touch it, though. It was just kind of… around me. Okay, so they smoked it around me, but I refused to partake because users are losers, you know? I would never put that in my body, because my body is a temple. Wow, that sounded conceited. I’m sorry. I’m not conceited and I don’t do drugs and I talk a lot when I’m nervous and why haven’t you said anything about the tea?”
I open the door. Dominic is there. And Anna. And Mrs. Paquinn. Nope. Not God saving me. God jerking me around. Again.“Hi, guys!” I say loudly. “It’s so normal for you to stop by like this in the middle of the day. And none of you do drugs, either!”
“Not since the sixties!” Mrs. Paquinn says just as loud, like she thinks we’re playing a game. “But then everyone did drugs in the sixties! Free love, wouldn’t you know. I remember this one time I took two drops of acid off a sugar cube and somehow ended up in Wyoming, after having followed what I thought was a pink koala across state lines for six days. I couldn’t believe it when I finally came down and saw that there wasn’t a koala, after all, but a group of frightened Japanese tourists who thought I was stalking them for their yen! To this day, I still haven’t figured out why the Japanese would want to go to Wyoming. It’s not exactly a hotbed of Asian activity.”
“Ha, ha! That’s quite the story, Mrs. Paquinn,” I say through gritted teeth, sure my jaw is going to snap in two. “I don’t know if we need to discuss that in front of the social worker who is here right now for the first time.”
“You’re just as subtle as the Kid,” Creed says. From somewhere. “Creed?” I whisper, looking around. Where the hell—
Anna rolls her eyes and shoves her phone into my hands, Creed on the other end on speaker phone. “You totally thought I was invisible, didn’t you?” he accuses me. “Dude, are you on Pink Koala Acid today or something?”
“I didn’t think you were invisible,” I snap at him, even though I sort of did. “Not that I do acid or anything,” I call back into the living room, wanting Georgia to know I’m not tripping balls right now. “What are you all doing here?” I hiss as I turn back to the three in front of me.
“Ty texted me and said the social worker was coming over and that you needed all of us here to keep you from going insane,” Anna explains, like it was the simplest thing in the world. “Looks like we may be a little too late.”
“Did he?” I growl.“I did not!” he shouts from the living room. “Please don’t put me in the bad closet tonight, Bear! I promise I’ll be good!”
“That was a joke,” Otter explains hastily to the social worker. “Tyson and his brother have a very… selective sense of humor. You have to kind of get used to it.”
Georgia’s reply is to type something else on her computer.
“Well, of course it was a joke,” the Kid says, sounding offended. “But it’s not funny when you explain it’s a joke. Thanks, Captain Ruins All My Fun of the Suck The Fun Out Of The Room Patrol.” (This causes me to laugh quite loudly, only because it sounds exactly like something I would say. It’s these little moments when I’m reminded he belongs to me that make everything we’ve been through worth it. Even if I’m thinking of putting him in the bad closet, wherever that is.)
“How do you know Dominic?” I ask Anna and Mrs. Paquinn, once I’ve stopped yipping like a hyena.“We just met!” Mrs. Paquinn says, looking fondly down at Dominic. “He was walking up to the door when we arrived. I was so happy to see he wasn’t a figment of Ty’s imagination! I was worried because I had an imaginary friend once too. My parents eventually had to have an exorcism performed on me.” She shakes her head sadly. “Happy Clown Charlie never came back after that, but at least my bed stopped shaking and no one else died.”
No one else?Dominic snorts before looking back at me. “Ty texted me too,” he says in that quiet, gruff way of his. “I know a thing or two about—”
“Dominic?” Georgia says from behind me. “I thought that was you. I was going to stop by after I finished up here, since I was in the neighborhood.”
Uh, what? “You’ve got a social worker too?” I blurt out.
He blushes but doesn’t speak.
“He lives with his foster parents, a few houses down,” Georgia tells me, watching him with what almost looks like fondness in her eyes. “Dominic and I go way back, isn’t that right, Dom?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he rumbles at her.
“What are you doing here?”
Dominic grins at Tyson and reaches out and touches his shoulder before lowering his hand to his sides. It’s a simple act, but one that obviously means something to the two of them. I don’t know what it could be.
“And Creed,” Creed says from the phone.
“Third person,” I warn him. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
“Mrs. Paquinn does it all the time!” he gripes. “And I have labs tonight, so nope!”
“I’m seventy-six,” Mrs. Paquinn scolds. “I’m allowed to talk about Mrs. Paquinn that way. People just think she’s senile. You do it, and you sound like a douche bag.” She looks at Georgia. “Hello, I’m Mrs. Paquinn. I babysit the Kid from time to time.”
“She doesn’t always talk in the third person,” I say to Georgia quickly. “And she’s not senile. And she doesn’t always say things like ‘douche bag’ in front of Tyson.”
“Well, not all the time,” the Kid says.“Tyson’s my friend,” I hear Dominic tell Georgia. “I wanted to make sure he was okay today. It can be… you know.” He shrugs as he blushes. He must realize as I do that this is the most I’ve ever heard him speak.
She nods at him sympathetically, and I wonder at that, at this kid yet again, this kid who Ty saw fit to include in his social worker SOS. Why is he in foster care? What happened to his family? Every horror story I’d ever heard on the news about kids being removed from their homes because of horrible abuse and/or living conditions flashes through my head, and my heart breaks a little then, not knowing what he’s been exposed to, wondering if that’s the reason he’s so quiet, because he’s seen things that no kid his age should see.
Or maybe I’m thinking too much. Maybe there’s a logical explanation for it. And maybe it’s none of my business.But I can’t help notice the way Georgia watches Tyson and Dominic as they speak quietly to each other, that small smile never really leaving Dominic’s face. Georgia looks surprised, if only for a moment, then pleased. Otter notices it too, and shrugs behind Georgia’s back, mouthing “later” to me.
“Why did everyone go quiet?” Creed demands through the phone. “Did you mute me? Are you all talking about me behind my back? Bear and I hugged for like six hours! I’m not mad anymore! Anna, I’m sorry that I said I wish I could have sex with him, but it’s not like I’m going to do it—”
“It’s a straight-guy thing,” I explain to Georgia as I grimace. She’s looking at me like that doesn’t even begin to make sense to her, which is probably true. I resist the urge to explain fully and in great detail, but just barely. Erica is right. I overshare. Nobody likes an oversharer.
Georgia seems to snap back into hard-core mode, looking at our new guests suspiciously. “And who are you all?” she asks.“I’m Anna,” Anna says. “Bear’s ex-girlfriend and current friend.”
“I’m Mrs. Paquinn,” says Mrs. Paquinn kindly and slowly. “But, had you been listening to me earlier, you would have heard that already.”
“And the young man on the phone?”
“Creed,” Creed says. “Otter’s brother, Bear’s best friend, Anna’s… whatever. I live in Phoenix, so I can’t be there right now. You know what I can’t wait for? The future. That way everyone would have video phones, and I could actually see what was going on. This is lame.”
“You could always hang up,” I grumble.
“In your dreams, fruit loop.”
“Should we discuss what apparently you dream about?” Anna snaps at
him.
“I’m never going to live this down, am I?” Creed sighs.
“Not as long as I have memory.”
“We put the fun back in dysfunction,” the Kid tells Georgia. “That’s one way to put it,” Otter says.
“Are there other ways to put it?” Mrs. Paquinn asks, honestly curious. “I
should think I’d like to hear more.”
“And everyone else was just leaving,” I say, glaring at Anna and Mrs.
Paquinn. “Thanks for stopping by to say hi. I’ll call you when we’re done.”
They look like they are going to protest, but Otter starts ushering them toward the door, Dominic glancing over his shoulder, a look of worry on his face as he catches my eye. I shake my head once and smile at him, but his eyes are troubled as Otter tells him that he can come back later.
“Sorry about that,” I say to Georgia. “They’re just… worried.”She’s watching the closed door. “You know,” she says slowly, “most of the time I go into homes, it’s because the situation calls for it, that I am supposed to make a decision on whether or not I feel a child is safe. Unfortunately, a lot of the times a child is not safe, and I have to remove them. There’s times when that decision is overturned in court and I have to watch as the kid gets put back into a home that’s not fit for even a dog to survive in.” She looks down at the Kid before turning back to me. “In my years of doing this, I’ve gotten a thick skin. You have to, with some of the things that I’ve seen. But this house… this is a first for me. For once, there seem to be too many people who care what happens to the child. And that’s a problem I wish I had more often.
“I’m going to need copies of your schedules, because I will be dropping by for visits, some announced, some unannounced. I’ll be honest with you all, this process can be long, and it can be exhausting, and it can strain people like no other. But it’s worth it. It has to be worth it. So you will let me do my job, and you will watch out for Tyson, and we won’t have a problem. Do we understand each other?”
We nod.She looks down at Tyson again. “And you,” she says, her accent lilting over her lips. “When I ask you questions, I expect you to be honest with me. It will make things easier on you and your brother. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the Kid says. “And just so you know, there is no bad closet. I was just playing around.”She smiles at him. “I figured. Although, with that mouth of yours, I wouldn’t be surprised if you belonged in one.”
His eyes narrow. “Are you even allowed to say things like that?”
“Don’t tell anyone, okay? Tyson, can you do me a favor and go play outside for a bit? I’m sure Dominic is waiting for you. And if the short experience I just had is any indication, I believe Mrs. Paquinn and Anna are probably hovering near the door, trying to listen in.”
“We are not!” Mrs. Paquinn shouts through the door.Ty laughs and opens the door, going outside and closing it behind him, already starting to chatter excitedly.
“How long has Dominic been coming here?” Georgia asks us. “To be honest,” Otter says, “that was the first time I’d seen him. Bear
“Why?” I ask. “Is there something we should know? I was unaware he was in foster care. I told him yesterday that I’d like to meet his parents if he was going to be coming over here, especially if he was going to be in our house. He kind of dodged it, but I figured I could just walk down there.”
“First things first,” Georgia says. “I’ll need to be shown the house, bedrooms, bathrooms, and the like for my report. We can walk and talk.” She walks back into the living room to get her laptop, and we trail after her.
“Now,” she says. “How long have you two been together?” “Er… uh… what? Just….” That was unpleasant.
Otter saves me. “Just over four months.”
She arches an eyebrow at us. “You two move kind of fast.”
“And Anna? She said she was your ex?”
I was told a while ago that this whole process would be like having my entire life put under a microscope, so I can’t say these questions are
unexpected. But it’s still awkward having to talk to a complete stranger about things I couldn’t talk about with the people closest to me for months. “She is,” I say warily. “But she’s with Otter’s brother now.”
“Interesting,” Georgia says as she types something else onto her computer.“Do we get copies of this report?” I ask her, wanting to know exactly what she’s saying about me.
“You do. Worried?”
“Of course not,” I scoff. She looks like she doesn’t believe me. “And there is no chance of you and Anna trying to… work things out?”
“Over my dead body,” Otter mutters as he crosses his arms against his chest and glares at Georgia.I roll my eyes. “What the big guy means is no. There’s no chance.” “And you two are committed to each other?”
He cocks his head at her. “Meaning what?”
“Otter, I—” I start.
He holds up his hand at me. “Let her answer the question, Bear. If she’s
“Meaning,” Georgia says, “are you two exclusive with each other? Or are there any other parties involved in your relationship? Together only four months, and yet you live together in a house with a young child?”
I understand the point of her question. I understand the logic behind it as I understand she’s just doing her job. But what I don’t understand is this dark feeling in the pit of my stomach, that senseless thing that had arisen when I’d seen Otter and David Trent shaking hands. That look in Otter’s eye, that knowing expression on David’s face. There was knowledge there, intimate knowledge, and it bugged the fuck out of me, even though the same could be said about Anna and me.
It’s jealousy and I hate it. Otter and I have never discussed exclusivity, and now that it’s being thrown back in my face, it’s not sitting right. I’d just assumed there was no one else. Like we were pigeons (seriously, they mate for life. Now you can’t say I never taught you anything) or something. Too late do I realize that everything I’m thinking is probably spread blatantly over my face. I look up at Otter, who grins that crooked grin and shakes his head. You think too much, his eyes tell me. Why are you such an idiot sometimes? that smile says.
“There’s no one else,” Otter says to Georgia. “And there won’t be, either. Bear’s it for me and has been for quite some time.”Ow, my heart.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice far rougher than I’d hoped it would be. “Otter ’n me. There’s not gonna be anyone else.”
She chooses to ignore the scratch in my voice, but when she turns her back to check locks on the bedroom doors, Otter reaches over quickly and tucks me under his big arm, kissing the top of my head, leaning down to whisper, “Only you, Papa Bear. It’s always been you.”
Yeah, yeah, big guy. I hear you. That doesn’t mean that feeling will go away right now. But he doesn’t need to know that. I internalize now, remember? I smile up at him, but there must be something still there because he sighs and squeezes me tighter before stepping away.
“I met Dominic six years ago, when he was nine,” Georgia suddenly says, distracting me from my idiocy. “Tyson’s age. I’d received a phone call from my boss at three in the morning, asking me to get down to Mercy Hospital, that I had a new case.” She opens the door to Ty’s room, and we follow her in. It’s bright, the open window letting in sunlight and a sea breeze. She pulls a digital camera out of her back pocket and snaps a few photos of the bed and the walls, where Tyson has posters of Einstein (tongue stuck out, of course), Gandhi, PETA. “Vegetarian?” she asks.
“By his own choice,” I say. “That’s what he wanted, so I supported him.”“He’s not a normal kid, is he?” She asks as she stands in front of a new addition to his poster wall, a large black and white photo of a woman with duct tape over her mouth, the words NO H8 written on her cheek.
I shake my head slowly. “That doesn’t even begin to cover it. He’s… different. But in the greatest way possible.”
“I see,” she says, trailing her hand trailing over a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World on his desk. “I got to Mercy Hospital and was met by the SPD outside the room I’d been directed toward. At that moment, I didn’t have a whole lot of information, just that it was bad. I could hear screaming coming from inside the room behind the cops, could hear the doctor and nurses inside trying to get the kid to calm down. I asked the police what had happened. The officer I spoke to had apparently been one of the first to respond. He had blood on his uniform, so much blood. He was young, barely out of his teens, and I found out later he’d been on the job a week, still shadowing a more experienced officer.”
“His last name is Miller, isn’t it?” Otter asks quietly. “Dominic Miller?” Georgia smiles sadly. “Yes.”
“How’d you know that?” I ask Otter, even though the name sounds
familiar to me too.
“Because it was all over the news,” Otter says. “It was everywhere for a
long time.”
“Wait,” I croak out. “That’s the woman who….” I can’t finish. Georgia looks out the window and does it for me. “His mother was the
woman. His father was that man. The officer told me that Dominic’s father
had come home one night after a long night of drinking. He found his wife in the kitchen. He said that she dropped a plate and that the noise caused him to snap. There’d been a few calls out to the house before, neighbors hearing screaming coming from next door, but you know how that goes. The cops would show, the woman would say nothing was wrong, that she didn’t want to press charges, that she’d gotten that bruise on her face by accident. She was just clumsy. There was never any evidence of abuse to Dominic, at least not physical. But emotional and verbal abuse can be just as damaging, and to this day, I really can’t say all that went on while he was growing up.”
I don’t want her to go on, because all I want to do is run downstairs and grab the Kid and hide him behind me, hide him from Dominic. I’m ashamed at these thoughts, horrified that I could actually have them, but my priority is the Kid, and I don’t know Dominic. I don’t know all he’s seen. I don’t know the state of his mind. He could just be a big kid that speaks quietly. Or he could be just like his dad.
But I can’t look away as Georgia continues, her voice going flat. “So his mother dropped the plate, and Jacob Miller snapped. He would say later that he didn’t know why the sound of the plate shattering on the floor caused him to lose it, or even if he was the one that caused her to drop it, only that he just couldn’t take it anymore. He dragged Crystal Miller by her hair and punched her in the face a few times, causing her to black out. And from there he said he just couldn’t stop. He said he hit her again and again and again. He didn’t know that Crystal’s… screams had caused Dominic to wake up. He didn’t know that Dominic had come into the room. He didn’t know that his son was watching him beat her to death. Dominic apparently started screaming and slapping on his back, but he still didn’t stop. He only stopped when Dominic had gotten a pair of scissors from the drawer and had stabbed his father in the side seven times.”
“Jesus Christ,” Otter mutters.“The police arrived ten minutes later to find him sitting between his two parents, his mother dead and his father dying, covered in blood, holding the pair of scissors. They asked him what happened. He told them that his dad made his mom go away and he tried to help. And then he dropped the scissors and started screaming and didn’t stop. He was still screaming when I got to the hospital an hour later, although his voice had gone hoarse by then.” Georgia stops, her jaw set, her mouth a thin line. I wonder what I should say, but she beats me to it. “His father eventually confessed, and Dominic was hailed as a hero, but when I first saw him, he was covered in blood, his mouth stretched open, and that noise coming out from him is something that I will never forget. And he only stopped after having been given a sedative. When he woke up, he didn’t speak again for another six months. What happened after that is something you should hear from him, if he ever wants to tell it.
“But I do remember one other thing the most, something that sticks out in my head and probably always will. I’d worked with him and a psychologist for months, and even though he never spoke, I still hoped we were getting to him, somehow. It was little things, really. I’d ask him how he was day after day, and sometimes he would nod. He’d bring me a book he wanted me to read to him. And then one day, I took him out to eat to this little diner near the beach and passed him something, napkin, ketchup, I don’t know. He didn’t ask me for whatever it was, but he needed it just the same. But… he watched me for a moment and then said, ‘Thank you.’ Two words. But those two words meant more to me than anything else I’d ever heard. And that’s when I knew that he’d be okay. Maybe not all the way okay, but okay, nonetheless.”
She turns back to look at me and Otter. “I’ve heard him speak more today than I’ve heard in any one day in the last six years. I don’t know what has happened to him, or what Tyson did that no one else has been able to do, but it can’t go away. His foster parents are nice people, but they don’t completely understand him, and they’ve got two other foster kids, as well, with varying degrees of emotional issues. He’s been described as ‘cold’ and ‘removed’. ‘Emotionless’.” She laughs bitterly. “And those are words I’ve used myself. But that was not who I saw today. You can’t know how big of a step it is, to know that Tyson texted him and Dominic came running. That’s not something I ever thought I’d see, that he cared that much about another person to do that. And that smile? I don’t think he’s smiled in the time that I’ve known him. Not like that. That’s the smile that a kid his age should have. Not one who has seen what he has.”
“He was doing that when I met him too,” I tell her, my mind reeling. “But only at the Kid. I just thought he was shy.”
“Your brother is an amazing person, Derrick,” she says, looking amused. “I can see that already. You’ve got a good home here, a start to something, and I am pulling for you guys. My reports are going to be honest, and I won’t pull any punches because my concern is for Tyson, as it should be, but you and Oliver keep doing what you’re doing, and I think everything will work out.”
“You don’t think it’s odd for a fifteen-year-old to be hanging out with a nine-year-old?”
Georgia laughs. “How old were you when you latched onto Oliver?” Dammit. So not the same thing, even though it kinda sorta is. The Kid isn’t going to end up with Dominic when he gets older, like Otter and me. There’s still that difference.
And you know this how? it asks.
I ignore it.
She begins to walk past us and stops when Otter reaches out and grabs her by the arm. “Is he dangerous?” he asks, his voice low and hard. “I understand what he means to you, and I can’t even begin to imagine what he’s been through. No one should have to go through what he did. But I won’t put my family in danger if he’s going to be like his father. I don’t care how beneficial you think his friendship with the Kid is. If there’s a chance he can harm Bear or Tyson, then you need to tell me now so I can end this before it gets too far. I won’t allow him or anyone else to take them from me. They’re mine.”
Georgia looks up at him, not intimidated in the slightest. “Only four months, huh?”
“I’m not fucking around,” he barks. “Answer the question.”
“At some point in our lives, we make a decision on whether or not to be like our parents.” She glances at me when she says this, and I don’t know why. “But it’s up to those that love us to help us know whether that’s good or bad.” She gently pulls Otter’s hand from her arm, and before I can stop myself, I call out to her.
“His voice,” I say. “He damaged his vocal cords, didn’t he?”She nods without turning around. “Barring surgery with highly unsuccessful odds, he’s going to sound like that for the rest of his life, like he’s choking on gravel. But I think that’s the least of his worries, don’t you?”
Then she walks out of the room.
We’re quiet for a moment. Then, “The Kid will want to know why.” Otter nods. “If we tell him he can’t see Dominic anymore, he will.” “I have to keep him safe,” I say, my voice cracking.
It only takes him two strides of his long legs before he’s wrapped himself around me, crushing me into his chest, protecting me from whatever haunts us both. Whatever we’ve gone through, the Kid and me, it’s nothing to what Dominic has seen. It’s not even fair to compare it. But I don’t know if I can allow that kind of darkness in my brother’s life.
Shit.