Chapter Twenty-Two
Everett
I’ve never seen my mother cry.
I’ve never heard this rough, teary grate in my father’s voice.
And I’ve definitely never been in a group hug with Colonels Irene and Hank Greer.
Chicken swipes at Dad’s chin from her kitty carrier strapped to my front, which finally breaks up this surreal battery of firsts. Mom and Dad stand back, immediately at attention, and my own posture clicks rigidly into place. Some things you just can’t unlearn.
Dad wipes furiously at his eyes, ordering the snot back into his sinus passages with sniffs so violent, I flinch. “Is that a…feline strapped to your person, son?”
“Affirmative.” I fit my palm over Chicken’s head like a little army helmet and begin to stroke her downy gray fur. After a few seconds, she aborts her attack against my parents. “This is Chicken.”
“Why did you name it that?” Mom asks, her pink, puffy face exceedingly puzzled.
“It helped when I first gave up meat for Louise. Anytime I was tempted by BBQ, I was forced to think of my beloved cat.”
“Genius,” Dad huffs in complete seriousness.
My brows rise. This is getting weirder and weirder.
Mom coughs into her fist. But for her muddy hazel eyes rimmed in pink, all evidence of the brief display of emotion has been banished. “Son, would you accompany us into our office for a long-overdue debrief?”
A question? Not a command?
My eyes travel longingly over to Maisie, her form distant now as Gemma leads her inside Washington Hall.
I knew Mom and Dad would want to immediately review every piece of intelligence we’d gathered on the road, but I’d hoped to have Maisie by my side for the interrogation. “I don’t know…maybe later?”
“Your mother and I want to apologize, son. We will likely do a subpar job, but please allow us to try.” Dad pauses to swipe at his still-leaking eyes. “God knows it’s been too long in coming as it is.”
“Hank,” Mom chides under her breath, glancing around to inventory who might witness the unseemly crying. “Think of company morale.”
“You’re right. Let’s relocate to the privacy of our office,” Dad says with another one of those Dyson-powered sniffs.
“Um. Okay, then.” With that, my parents turn in lockstep and march toward Washington Hall. What else can I do? Chicken and I follow behind.
Once inside their office, I take a seat in a wooden chair with leather arms, the kind where the padding’s been hammered into place with brass-headed nails. The seat is surprisingly springy and cushioned. Comfortable.
Are Mom and Dad getting soft in their old age?
Surprising me further, they pull up two of the wooden armchairs across from mine until we’re sitting in a triangle, our knees almost touching.
“Son, we are so happy to see you,” Mom begins, and after a stilted pause, she places her hand on top of mine.
I squirm in my seat, feeling incredibly vulnerable in this triad of their unbridled attention. “You’re probably just surprised I made it this long.”
“No,” Dad says, shaking his head with a considering frown. “You were always strong and brave. Incredibly resourceful. And you are an expert on the zombie genre.”
I stare at them over the frames of my glasses. “Uh. What? Are you thinking of some other son?”
“I’m thinking of the boy who was so passionate and determined to do what he loved, he stood up to two decorated colonels and defied their commands at age eighteen and has been taking care of himself ever since.
” Mom meets my shocked stare with one of her own.
“You built a whole life for yourself, Everett. A wonderful career doing exactly what you loved, with a family you made on your own. We are very proud of you.”
“Then…excuse me. What?” I blink rapidly at the words I longed to hear every day of my high school years, my eyes tearing up against my will. “How can you say that when you disowned me?”
“Disown you?” Dad leans over and places a hand on top of my other one. “We didn’t disown you, son. We never owned you to begin with.”
My eyebrows rise nearly into my hairline as my parents hold both my hands like we’re in some strange military séance.
“We did have to learn that, though,” Mom says, more softly. “When you first started your teenage rebellion, that’s all we thought it was—rebelling for the sake of rebelling. We thought that with discipline and a firm hand, you’d come to your senses and fall in line.”
“You thought I’d become just like you. That’s what you wanted.” The words come out defiant and, even after all these years, laced with an anger I thought I’d numbed out completely. “You didn’t want the real me.”
“We thought we were raising you. Doing what was best for you. When you want the world for your child, it’s hard to accept NYU.” Mom makes a face, like my alma mater is the educational equivalent of dollar-store mac and cheese.
I roll my eyes and retract my hands, feeling duped that I actually thought this was going to be an apology instead of another pile-on about all the crackpot decisions I’ve made.
“Okay, well,” I say as I stand up, hoisting Chicken higher onto my chest. “Glad to see you still feel exactly the same as always.” I make to leave, but Mom’s voice cuts through the scrape of my chair.
“We told ourselves we knew best. But Everett, we didn’t. And it kept us from knowing you at all.”
I freeze, still facing the door.
“But we’ve been trying to fix that ever since, son,” Dad says. “And we’ll try even harder now that we finally have you back.”
“How?” I spin on my heels. “You left me alone for years! You didn’t visit me at college.
You didn’t check on me. You didn’t come to my graduation.
I had to do everything by myself, like I was an orphan instead of a kid whose parents withdrew their love the moment they didn’t get their way.
How have you been trying to fix anything? ”
“Well.” Dad takes a deep breath in. “We’ve been watching horror movies.”
My head rears back so far, my neck pops. “What?”
“We couldn’t understand why you threw away the life we wanted for you, so we tried our best to understand the one you were making for yourself. We’ve read every article you’ve published, every film review, every post on your social media. We’ve watched every single movie you’ve ever mentioned.”
“You…have?”
Mom nods. “Even the ones you hated.”
“Why?” My eyes dart between them, waiting for one of them to pop up out of their chair and yell siiiiike!
“So we could hate them, too,” Dad replies. “Obviously.”
“That’s…” I blink at them. “That’s hundreds of horror movies.”
“It sure was,” Mom says, folding her arms over her chest. “You watch some sick stuff, son. Your father almost couldn’t take it.”
Dad regards her with the wariness of someone who’s been teased for this for years. “Everett’s braver than me. We’ve been over this.”
I sit back down, genuinely flabbergasted.
All those texts that started with “What are you watching now?” and “How’s the world of horror?
” and “Hate to interrupt movie night…”—I thought they were snide digs, cutting little reminders that what I did for a living wasn’t enough.
That what I loved didn’t matter. That I was beneath them and their expectations for me.
I ignored each and every one of those texts, sometimes fuming for hours at their implications.
But the meaning I assigned to them was just that—what I assigned to them. Not the truth.
I feel completely unmoored.
“Really? What did you…think?”
“Well, your mother loved Hereditary.”
“Your father slept with his rifle for weeks.”
He folds his arms. “I prefer the artsier stuff. The Lighthouse. Midsommar.”
“Because you’re chicken.” Mom huffs.
“Because they’re compelling!” Dad points a finger at her face. “And they’re just as scary.”
I stroke Chicken’s head to ground me on this earthly plane as I listen to Mom and Dad recap every horror movie they’ve loved and hated, debating in real time which movies were the scariest, the campiest, the best use of body horror, quoting words I wrote years ago to justify their positions and arguing good-naturedly about where they felt I was wrong.
“Lamb was a work of art!” Dad insists. “Terrifying!”
“It’s about a lamb-man, Hank!” Mom throws her arms in the air, then looks to me. “Back me up, son.”
But I can’t say a thing. They talk and talk, and I listen.
I listen to how, one movie at a time, they’ve made my interests their own, showing the kind of fervor for cinema I haven’t seen since my days at NYU.
Eventually I start piping up, too, unable to sit back and let these boomers hold court on The Babadook without me.
It feels like we could talk all night. It fills me, fuels me, lighting up sectors of my own brain that have long felt out of reach.
“Now, our favorite horror movie in recent years was The Substance,” Dad says, a subtle shift in his tone. “What’d you think of that one, son?”
I breathe in deeply through my nose. “I—heard it was great.”
“Have you watched anything since Louise passed, honey?” Mom asks softly. “You certainly haven’t written anything.”
“I haven’t watched a horror movie in years.” I redirect my gaze to Chicken and smooth her fur down her neck. “Haven’t been able to.”
Mom’s and Dad’s heavy hands are back, bringing with them the weight of feelings I’ve forgotten how to carry. “We’re so sorry, son.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” I sniff back the return of my own tears. “Louise was the reason I started communicating with you again, you know. She wanted me to be happy.” I smile through the melancholy. “And she knew that part of me would always hurt without you.”
“We’re grateful to her,” Mom says. “For loving you and taking care of you all the years we couldn’t.”
“All the years we didn’t, Irene,” Dad corrects quietly.
Mom releases a shaky breath, then nods. “Didn’t,” she agrees. “We are so sorry about that, too, son. So sorry.”