7. The Worlds Stupidest Question #2
“Audrey isn’t going anywhere,” I seethe, but it doesn’t sound how it should.
I’m angry, enraged even, but my body doesn’t get the message.
My voice is impersonal and as unaffected as ever.
Despite my best effort to force some feeling into my eyes, I know it doesn’t work.
That only adds to the buzzing. Why can’t I be normal for Audrey?
Why can’t I smile back at her and tell her I love her?
Why does what I feel not seem like love?
It should, I imagine, but love is a good thing, and how I feel about Audrey isn’t good.
I don’t feel a thing when Mom sags onto the porch swing, trying to get as far away from me, her son, as possible.
Trying to disappear right into the wood.
I can’t even imagine how long she sat here waiting for us, how long she stewed in her worries, and how much it took for her to say a single thing to me.
I should leave it there. Normally, I would, but I’m choking like that little boy in the bath. Only I never die.
I just choke and choke and choke and choke.
I should stop, but I lean down, leveling my eyes with my mother's. Noting the way she stills, her breath held tight in her lungs. Wondering how long I can keep her like this. How long she’ll hold her breath if I never look away, if she feels half as suffocated by me as I do.
“Unfortunate things happen every day to people with good intentions, Mom. Audrey needs me. It’d be a shame for something to get in the way of that. ”
She flinches.
She’s always fucking flinching. Ever since I can remember, she’s been terrified of me.
Long before I deserved it. She knew from the start that something was wrong and made sure Dad and I knew too.
Hell, maybe she even manifested it. Audrey’s really into manifesting right now; she read it in one of her vapid magazines.
She said you can make something happen just by thinking really hard about it.
Mom always thought hard about me. The one and only time I ever saw her drink, it was after she hung out with Mrs. Fisher, Audrey’s mom.
She stumbled into my room, slurring about how I’d ruined her on the way out.
She said it was like giving birth to a sack of razor blades.
That I was the only baby she would ever have.
That when she was pregnant, she’d dream about a tiny boy crying in her arms. His tinker truck had broken, and he needed her to help him.
I never cried, and I never cared much for toys.
I hadn’t understood at the time why she seemed so disappointed.
I was a good kid. I didn’t make messes. I listened, polite, smart, quiet. I did nothing wrong.
Ever.
It wasn’t until she’d sobered up the next morning, guilt and shame written on her face with neon paints, that she felt bad for saying those things.
She felt. It occurred to me then that I was supposed to do those things.
Cry, make messes, be rude and loud like the other boys.
She was worried she’d hurt my feelings; maybe she’d even hoped it would have. She hadn’t, and that hurts her.
And I didn’t care. I just ate my breakfast, seemed easier than whatever she was dealing with.
She didn’t finish her pancakes, barely took a bite.
I lean in closer, so close I can smell the coffee on her breath.
Waiting to see if there’s any of her ever-elusive courage.
Her eyes only well with tears as I jerk away.
My mind buzzing as I head inside, my jaw clenched painfully.
My lungs freeze in my chest, and if I was choking before, what the fuck could this possibly be?
Audrey, Present Day, 1994
It’s been two days… two entire days since I came home.
Two days since I haven’t taken my eyes off the Bell Funeral Home.
Its lights burning well into the night. More specifically, it’s been two days since the shiny car pulled up in the middle of the night, a tall dark silhouette stepping out and disappearing inside without any fanfare of arriving home for the first time in ten years.
My poorly prepared spaghetti sits forgotten beside me, the porch swing creaking with each push of my bare feet on worn boards.
If you can call it spaghetti, I burned the canned sauce.
Now it’s just undercooked sticky plain noodles in a bowl.
The swing creaks again, drawing my attention to the rusted bolts keeping it together. Just one of the many little things you notice when a home loses its love. The happy bustling lives within that made the creaky porch swing and rough wooden boards less noticeable. Had it always been like this?
The cracks in the foundation, the way the roof bows in the tool shed around back.
When you’re a kid, no matter how screwed up life had gotten, to a degree, things are still magical.
There's a tangible hope and illusion of being so sure of what the future holds for you. A blind trust in the people who would figure out all of it with you. I’m not sure about other people, but for me, I can pinpoint the exact moment in my childhood when a once vibrant world dimmed.
When the vivid greens, blues, purples, reds, and pinks that made up my world were traded for duller… less exciting colors.
My stomach growls loudly enough to startle me, quite a feat considering my music blares from inside.
It’s not the pasta's fault, but I glare down at it anyway. I can never get the noodles right. They’re either mush or still too hard.
The sauce itself was fine before I drifted to the windows again and let it burn, but it still tasted better in my memories.
When Mom would mix it on the stove and follow Dad around the house making him taste test for her, even though it came from a can and tasted the same every time.
Before her friends took up too much of her time, and she was too plastered to cook.
Things were pretty much utter trash before the two remaining members of the Bell family abandoned their home, their everything, and vanished.
What came after… I could’ve used my best friend.
Of course, life moved on. Eventually, I stopped secluding myself and made more friends than I’d ever had before.
Jess and Bryan were the first of many… but nobody has ever compared to the strange boy I grew up with.
The boy who sat stoically through my tears and held my hand, fought my battles and… made life worth smiling through.
I’ve spent years coaching myself not to be bitter about it.
Grief makes people act out in all kinds of ways.
I just… hadn’t expected nothing from him.
I was the only person in the world who got something from Gideon Bell.
He took it away overnight, no explanation, no goodbye, no promises.
Nothing. The wound in my chest is healed over, but it’s tender even now.
I’m convinced it always will be. As the night drags on, I give up on eating altogether, opting for my sketchpad instead, crossing my legs underneath me and begging the boy…
the man across the street to stalk over and ask me what I’m drawing.
I would tell him this time.