Chapter 37
They got Scipio and answered, as best they could, Hannah’s questions.
She’d been through something like this before, and she understood better than most, so she let them go quickly.
On the drive home, they were quiet except for Scipio’s pleased whines.
The Lab was so happy they were back, as a matter of fact, that he kept trying to climb into the front seat to sit on Jem’s lap.
The evening had a misleading rhythm to it.
Tean started dinner—he had noodles, and there was some ground beef he was sure was still good, and they definitely had tomato paste and a jar of those little pearl onions.
And, at some point, Jem took over, which meant it was Tean’s turn to take Scipio outside to throw the ball.
They ate with the TV on, a random episode of Buffy.
Xander and other kids at school were possessed by the spirits of demonic hyenas.
The biggest problem, in Tean’s opinion, was the hyena laugh.
“It’s a popular misbelief,” he said as Jem turned the volume up. “It’s only one species: the spotted hyena. And it’s not amusement; it’s frustration, often a cry for help.”
“Babe,” Jem said as he turned the subtitles on.
“Right,” Tean said. He collected their plates. “It’s just that the more dominant hyenas actually use lower tones—”
Jem paused the episode. “Come over here so I can wrestle you.”
“You know what?” Tean said. “I’m going to do these dishes.”
All of that was normal. All of that was good. Well, not the wrestling, which Jem enjoyed way too much.
What wasn’t good were the slips. The skids backward.
Tean was taking an open box of spaghetti noodles out of the pantry, and for a moment, he saw the cigarette burns on the soles of Rydel Owen’s feet.
Or he stooped to collect a ball for Scipio, and he was back in the basement, facing that hunched thing that was sloping toward him.
He took out the trash, and the smell put him back in that hallway, with its butcher-shop reek.
Scipio insisted on sleeping between them.
When Tean woke, he called Jem’s name until he got a mumbled “’sup?”
“I’m going out to the living room.”
The noise that followed was a little too mumbly for a proper mm-hmm, but Tean decided to take it for acknowledgement.
He read. And then he tried to read. And then, for a long time, he sat on the sofa in the shrinking darkness of the small hours. Thinking.
The next day, though, the rhythm was off.
Tean was still on leave. And Jem, after returning the Subaru, was officially out of a job.
Tean tried to make the morning enjoyable.
He whipped up a batch of pancakes—according to Jem, his specialty, although Tean insisted there wasn’t anything special about adding water to Krusteaz.
Tean even proposed some fun alternatives.
They could try milk instead of water. Or what about a little sour cream—wasn’t that a thing people did? Or almond milk!
But Jem always asked for his favorite: Tean’s specialty.
The pancakes turned out perfectly, as usual.
Jem fried up bacon and eggs. He poured them each a glass of orange juice because it was, as he put it, basically the same as eating vegetables.
They ate. This was what couples dreamed about: a slow start to the day, the luxury of time to make meals together, to eat together, to enjoy each other’s company. They cleaned up together.
And Tean had no idea how people did this without going crazy.
“Go work,” Jem said with a laugh.
“What?”
“You look like you’re going to crawl out of your skin. Go do something. Go play with your chemistry kit.”
“No, this is our time together.”
Jem raised his eyebrows.
“We went through something traumatizing together,” Tean said. “And it was only yesterday. We should be—”
“Watching each other eat pancakes?”
“Supporting each other!”
“Babe, I’m good. Go measure a ferret or whatever.”
“People do measure ferrets, actually. There are all sorts of metrics to evaluate the health of a population, or how environmental changes might be impacting them, or—oh.”
Jem flopped onto the sofa and smirked at him.
“A dick joke, Jem? Really?”
“Life is a dick joke,” Jem told him. And then he started to play on his phone.
Even though Tean was, technically, still on leave, he still had access to his DWR email and cloud storage.
In their home office, he finished reading a few reports, made some notes to himself for follow-ups, and checked his calendar to see if he could reschedule a visit to Weber River.
He sent Hannah a note about bluehead sucker spawning and started to catch up on the rest of his emails when a quick reply came from Hannah.
You’re on leave! Stop working, or I’ll tell Ed!
Which was so unfair.
He did catch up on his emails, though. He never had enough time in the office.
The newsletter was from a professional organization, and the article that caught his eye was a stub, barely more than an announcement. A new wolf sanctuary had opened in Grand Junction, Colorado. They were looking for a qualified wildlife veterinarian.
He got up from his desk. He put his hands on his hips, and then he dropped them to his sides again, fingers aching like he’d touched a live wire.
He walked over to the window and then back to the computer.
His pulse beat in the hollow of his throat.
The window looked out on the house next door, but it didn’t matter, because he couldn’t see anything. It was like staring into a flashlight.
When he got to the living room, Jem was curled up on the sofa, scrolling on his phone. “Did you know that every job in the universe is stupid?”
Tean laughed, and it startled him out of that strange space.
Partially, anyway. He sat on the sofa, and Jem stretched out his legs to put his feet in Tean’s lap.
Tean ran his hand up Jem’s bare calf. The golden hair there was soft, almost downy.
He scratched Jem’s knee lightly before reversing course down the back of his leg.
“You know you don’t have to find a job right away,” Tean said.
“That’s sweet of you, but yeah, I kind of do. We have this thing called a mortgage.” And then, with a definite tone, Jem added, “You made me get one.”
Tean laughed again. “We’ve got some savings. We can cut back on expenses.”
“If you say McDonald’s, I swear to God, I’m going to throw myself off a mountain.” Jem glanced over like he was about to say something else, but whatever he saw on Tean’s face made him stop. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” Tean said. And then the words just slipped out of him: “Have you ever heard of ghost nets?”
The easy good humor that was Jem’s normal expression faded into seriousness. He rolled onto his back. Propped himself up. And then he shook his head.
“It’s—well, it’s not only nets. They call it ghost equipment or ghost gear. But the idea is that its equipment, mostly for fishing but also some other maritime industries, that gets lost or abandoned in the ocean.”
“Shit.”
“And because it’s plastic, it doesn’t break down quickly. So, it’s out there basically forever. And animals get caught up in it.”
“Like the plastic rings from six-packs.”
“Yeah, exactly. But on a different scale. Some of the nets are huge. And there are hundreds of thousands of tons of this stuff floating around out there.”
“What happens to the animals that get caught in it?”
“A lot of them die. They get trapped. They’re easy prey, or their mobility is so limited that they can’t get the nutrients they need.
Bigger animals don’t necessarily have that problem, but it can be…
worse. Whales just drag this stuff along with them.
But it cuts into their skin. And it catches other stuff, so then they’re towing more weight.
And the cuts get deeper. They get infected.
They can lose flippers. They can die, too, eventually. ”
“God. That is so fucked up.”
“It is, isn’t it? And do you know what’s even more fucked up?”
“Swear jar,” Jem whispered.
“You literally just said it!”
“What’s the more fucked-up part?”
Tean fought the urge to follow up on the injustice of the swear jar rules, and instead he said, “The messed-up part of this—the seriously messed-up part—is that it doesn’t get better until someone actually does something about it.
Ghost nets don’t magically go away. They stay out there.
They kill animals—we don’t even really know how many die from this.
And then, even after those animals have died, the nets stay out there, killing more of them every year.
It just keeps going. It’s like this perpetual motion machine of death, and you know the part that makes me feel like I’m going crazy?
Like, this is proof that the universe is insane, and we’re all crazy too? ”
And Jem, because he was Jem, said softly, “It’s our trash.”
“It’s our fucking trash, Jem. These massive killing apparatuses that we’ve set loose on the world, these things that torture and starve and maim innocent animals—it’s not some master plan. There’s no supervillain trying to take over the world. It’s just the shit we were too lazy to pick up.”
Jem sat up. He found Tean’s hand and squeezed it.
“It’s just—” Tean stopped. Shook his head.
The sting at his eyes surprised him, and he had to blink them clear.
“That’s not even what I wanted to talk about.
Not really. But I wanted to tell you that I’ve been thinking about what you said.
About how I’m the only one who can figure this out.
How I have to figure it out for myself. And I’m trying, Jem. I am.”
“Not by yourself,” Jem said. “Not alone.”
“I know. I love you, and I’m so grateful for you.”
The silence that settled over them had a comfortable quality, warm and pilled and soft.
Jem spoke first. “I miss your weird facts.”
“They’re not weird. They’re dark. They’re depressing. They’re horrifying.”
“I know, babe. It’s cute. And I miss your doom spirals. You care so much about—about everything, honestly. I miss hearing that. I miss getting to see how much you care.”
Tean closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he opened them again.
“I feel like I’ve spent the last year caught in a ghost net.
Like I’ve been trying to live my life, and I’ve been trying to act like everything is normal, and the whole time, I’ve been dragging all this…
all this shit around. And I need to stop doing that. I think I need to stop doing that.”
Jem nodded.
“And I think one reason—maybe the reason—I’ve felt so…
cut off or disconnected or whatever you want to call it, I think it’s because I feel like I did something wrong.
Like I don’t deserve to be loved.” Jem opened his mouth, but Tean shook his head, and Jem shut it again.
“So, I guess part of it is learning how to forgive myself. Because there isn’t anyone else I can ask.
And that is—” His voice thinned in spite of his best efforts. “—hard.”
“I know, babe.”
“I’ve tried so hard to be good.” He laughed, and he was surprised to find he was crying.
He wiped his face. “It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. Like I’m a little kid.
But I have. I tried to be good when I was growing up, and I…
wasn’t. I couldn’t be. And then, after that, I tried to figure out another way to be good.
And I couldn’t do that either. And I’m so angry.
And I feel guilty. And I’m scared, which is insane, because there’s this part of me that still believes that if I’m good enough, if I follow the rules, if I do everything right, I won’t—I don’t know.
I won’t die. Bad things won’t happen to me.
The people I care about will love me the way I want them to love me.
And I know that’s not true, and I hate that I can’t get rid of that part of myself. ”
Jem held both his hands now. “You were doing pretty good with the forgiveness stuff. I liked that stuff.”
Even to himself, Tean’s smile felt tired. “Yeah. Well, I’m going to work on that. I promise. And I think maybe I need to talk to someone.”
The expression on Jem’s face was unexpectedly wary, but all he said was “If you want to, babe. If you think it would help.”
Tean nodded. “Camus says—”
Moaning, Jem flopped back onto the sofa.
Tean laughed.
“I can’t. I can’t, Tean. Camus? The guy with the boulder?” But then Jem popped upright again and said, “Okay. I’m ready. Lay it on me. We’re getting real, real dark.”
“Not this time,” Tean said. “Not really. Camus has a book called The Plague. And it’s about, well, a plague, and how people respond to it, and—I’m not doing a very good job summarizing it.
But one of the characters talks about how even the best human beings can’t avoid killing or letting others kill, because that’s how they understand the world, how they think they’re supposed to live.
And, I guess, because that’s how the world is, even for the best of us.
We all kill to stay alive. We kill to protect ourselves.
We kill to eat. We let others kill so we can eat.
So we can be safe. Life is built on death. ”
“I thought you said it wasn’t dark.”
“I spent a lot of years focused on how…how inescapable it all was. The pain and suffering. The cruelty. Even in nature. Especially in nature. ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw.’ That’s how Tennyson described it. But do you know what I forgot?”
“That somehow, in a universe that’s entirely random and dictated by chance, enough miracles happened in a row that somebody invented the Big Mac?”
Another laugh escaped Tean. “Something like that. I forgot that just because there’s cruelty in nature, it doesn’t mean there isn’t kindness too.”
Jem seemed to think about that for a moment. “Is that what Camus says?”
“Kind of. I mean, because it’s Camus, there’s not exactly an answer.”
“God fucking forbid,” Jem muttered.
Tean’s smile grew. “But there is something. Camus says—well, this character says—that what he can do is be on the side of the victims. Help other people. Work against the suffering and death and meaninglessness of the world.” Tean’s throat tightened.
“I can’t change the fact that we live in this world that’s built on death and suffering.
I can’t change how people think they’re supposed to live.
I can’t even change the fact that I’m part of it.
But I can do something different in the future. I can help. I can be better.”
Jem’s eyes were wet. He blinked rapidly, and when he spoke, his voice had a catch in it. “You’re pretty hard on yourself.” He swallowed. “I think you’re perfect.” His hands tightened around Tean’s. “But whatever you want to do, I’ll be there with you.”
Tean nodded. “Together.”