32 #2
As he sped home, Adrien couldn’t help but experience a sick excitement bubbling up in his chest. What if his mother had finally died?
When she’d stopped treatment, the grief counselor had spoken to him about feelings of liberation surrounding the death of a family member—how it was perfectly normal to feel relieved and even joyful when someone they loved was finally free of suffering.
But this wasn’t quite that—it had nothing to do with the end of his mother’s suffering and everything to do with the end of his.
Maybe once she was gone they could get her medical debt— all her debt—squared away.
Jessica wouldn’t have to work two jobs anymore: she could go to art school like she’d always wanted, having dreamt of following in her brother’s footsteps.
He could get help for David, bring him to a therapist. And maybe…
maybe he could have something for himself, too.
He boarded the elevator upon reaching their apartment building, the doors opening to a peculiar scene: Jessica and David were standing in the hallway before their front door.
Jessica looked grim while David was as blank-faced as always.
Adrien was shocked to see his little brother outside the bedroom, let alone the entire apartment.
“Hey,” Adrien said, reaching out to him. David dove wordlessly into his open arms. “Hey, hey—what’s going on?”
When Jessica looked at him, he could see tears gathering on her lash line. “Mom found Marcos’ letters.”
The world fell out from under him.
Adrien didn’t need to ask anything else.
He stared at the closed apartment door. It was like he was about to step into a courtroom to be convicted of murder.
“You should leave,” Jessica told him point-blank. “Don’t even bother getting your stuff, I’ll send it to you. I’ll—here.”
Something wet and warm was pressed into his fist. Adrien looked down in shock to see that Jessica was handing him a wad of money damp with tears.
“Jess, where did you get this?!” he hissed. She smiled at him ruefully.
“I’ve been saving my tips,” she told him. “Just in case something…”
Jessica trailed off. She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Adrien could sense the myriad of situations implied by her words.
“No, it’s yours,” he handed the money back to her, turning to face the door instead. It loomed in front of him, like the entrance to a mausoleum.
“You don’t have to go in there,” Jessica told him. “You don’t have to hurt yourself like that.”
But he did. He was beholden to his mother and her words and her opinion of him. Because some way, somehow, this was all his fault. If only because she had said so.
“ It wouldn’t have been like this if you’d stayed at State .”
He opened the door.
The apartment was eerily silent.
Joyce was sitting on the ashy sofa, smoking through the hole in her neck.
In the past few years, it looked like she had aged two decades.
No one would have ever believed that she was only forty-four with the way her skin was lined in wrinkles, plastered to her bones.
Marcos’ letters were sitting in a pile next to her.
“You really thought you could keep this from me, huh?” she croaked, voice so placid that it was disturbing. “Between the art and the boys. ” She scoffed. “I should have known something was up. The only thing out of your goddamn mouth that summer was Marcos. Fucking. Flores.”
Adrien stood there and listened.
“And here I thought you cared about your siblings,” she sneered at him, eyes beading up with tears.
“What?” Adrien asked, taken aback.
“You really thought it was okay to come home and expose me , expose your little brother and sister to that fucking faggot disease ?!” she screamed. “I’m already dying and you thought it was okay to come home and act like you’re some sort of goddamn saint prancing around here infecting us with—”
“What the hell are you talking about, Mom?!” Adrien asked, shaking his head. “What disease?! I’m not sick!”
“ LIAR !” she screamed, picking up the handful of letters and chucking them at her son. “You think I didn’t see those homeless homos down in the Castro dying in the streets?! You expect me to believe you weren’t spreading your legs for that queer boy like some kind of little—”
“SHUT UP!” Adrien shouted. The timbre, the depth of his own voice shocked him. He’d never yelled like that before. “Don’t you dare call him that!”
“YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO COME INTO MY HOUSE AND GIVE MY CHILDREN AIDS!” Joyce countered with a snarl before she broke into a coughing fit.
“ You’re insane !” Adrien sobbed. “Mom, I don’t have HIV! I don’t have AIDS! It doesn’t even work like that—you can’t catch AIDS from living with someone! Why would you even think that?!”
“It’s all my fault!” she started to sob in turn. “I should’ve gotten remarried, should have given you a father figure before you turned to sin! Now I’ll have to watch my only son burn in Hell! This is my punishment for raising a queer son! It should be you dying, Adrien! Not me!”
She was babbling. Everything that came out of her mouth was pure vitriol. Only now, when she saw “corruption” in him, was she at fault for anything—and she still somehow managed to make herself out to be the victim.
Fury boiled to life in Adrien’s chest. Marcos had been the best thing that had ever happened to him, the only person who had ever told him that he deserved to be more than his mother’s servant and punching bag.
In their few months together, Marcos had been better to Adrien than Joyce had been to him his entire life.
He had treated Adrien with nothing more than utmost love and patience.
They had never done anything wrong, neither of them.
And here his mother was, dying and cursing his love. His heart. His personhood. His very being. Saying that he was confused and dangerous and sick in both mind and body.
He was done.
He didn’t have anything else to say to her. He turned around and left the apartment.
And maybe he should have turned around and left six years earlier. It probably would have been for the best. She had been selfish her whole life, why couldn’t he have been greedy for one moment?
He didn’t say goodbye to Jessica or David. There was no reason to explain why he was leaving. They’d listened to what their mother had said, had heard her screams from the other side of the door. Besides that, he didn’t know if he could bring himself to say goodbye without breaking down.
Evening found him walking along Ocean Beach.
It was halfway through October—“second summer”, as the locals called it, which always brought the tourists in.
They were all crowded on the breakwater terraces at the bottom of the Great Highway seawall, drinking beer, listening to music, and laughing.
A kid barely out of toddlerhood was carrying bucketfuls of wet sand up from the shore and dumping it all over the concrete.
“Careful of the waves, kiddo,” his dad slurred as the kid went back down to the sea for more. The tide was getting high and the kid would get thrown up against the seawall if he wasn’t careful.
Adrien sat on the steps and looked out over the ocean.
His eyes fell to the rubble of the breakwater, composed out of debris and discarded gravestones.
He’d known about them long before Marcos had told him about the water organ.
They had freaked him out as a child and his initial thought was that someone had thrown the whole grave—body and all—into the sea.
He’d run into his father’s arms crying, pointing at the fragments of the headstones. As calm as ever, his dad had taken him by the hand and led him to where the shore met the waves, peering out at them.
“It’s a little scary to see a grave in such a weird place, huh?” he’d said, tone gentle. “Don’t worry, nothing bad happened. They’re left over from a long time ago.”
“What happened to the bodies, Dad?” Adrien asked, eyes round and fearful.
“Well,” his father began in a patient tone.
“A long time ago there used to be a lot of cemeteries here in San Francisco, but since they took up so much land, there was no room for new houses to be built for all the living people. So what happened was the city had to dig up all the graves and move them down south to Colma to bury them again.”
“They dug them up ?!” little Adrien choked, aghast.
“They did,” his father confirmed with a nod. “It’s because there was lots of room down there and not enough up here. So when they buried the bodies in Colma, they used some of the old graves to make the breakwater: that way it would help protect the people living close to the beach from big waves.”
“So… the dead helped the living?” Adrien asked.
“Yeah, I guess they did,” his dad said with a smile.
It was a morbid memory, but one of the clearest Adrien had of his father before he died.
When he got a little older, he sometimes wished his mom had died instead of his dad. The thought had made him so guilty that he could have thrown up.
Because his mom hadn’t always been a bad woman.
He had some fond memories of her—mostly her smiling and laughing with her friends, dancing with their dad in the kitchen, playing with him, his siblings, and their dog.
But that was all from before his dad died, and all of his mother’s happiness and kindness had disappeared with him—
“MY SON!”
Adrien looked up just in time to see the little boy disappear below the waves. The plastic bucket that he’d been gripping bobbed in the water above him. The tourists on the terraces were standing up, gasping and pointing at the water.
Adrien didn’t have time to wait for any of them to act.
He hit the water before he realized what he was doing.
It took everything in him to prevent his tail from coming out.
Pouring his focus into preventing its formation, he was unable to navigate the suction of the undertow.
Without the aid of his tail, the tide thrashed him about, sending his body rolling.
He let himself be pushed back to the shallows before diving below the waves again.
The frothy water, tangled with seaweed and trash, endlessly assaulted him from all angles.
Every now and then he could see a head, a leg, a hand sticking up out of the waves, flailing violently.
If only he had his tail, his extra limbs, he could slice through the seaweed, break through the violent tide. But he couldn’t risk being seen, couldn’t risk exposing himself.
Back down into the ocean he went, limbs questing until they secured around the thrashing form of the child. He held on despite himself, getting pelted with slaps and splashes—another wave hit him and—
And
An image of Jessica and David standing in the apartment hallway burst like fireworks over his mind’s eye. He hadn’t even said goodbye to them. He wished he’d said goodbye to them.
There was warmth at the crest of his brow and then nothing else. The waves pulled him back out into the ocean. The foam around him turned pink,
And then red
Spots broke over his vision, white at first and then
Black.