Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift (12 page)

Maybe that’s what is missing from Kyle—fun. He looks miserable, and he surely is making his parents miserable. He’s making me miserable, too. As Dr. Buckley would say, that’s an awful lot of power we have given one boy over all of us.

In fairness to Kyle, he’s not the only reason I’m in a bad mood. The Dallas Cowboys really messed up tonight. They led by twelve points, 34–22, with five minutes and forty-one seconds left in the game, and they still managed to lose. Eli Manning passed for one touchdown, and Brandon Jacobs ran for one, and with a two-point conversion, the Giants won 37–34. The Dallas Cowboys blow a lot of big leads. In this case, it wasn’t Tony Romo’s fault—he threw for four touchdowns. A lot of times, though, it is Tony Romo’s fault.

I shake my head and remember that I’m here for Kyle, not for the Dallas Cowboys. I make myself a promise in the dark, but not like the kind in the Pat Benatar song. I promise that I will work hard while I am here to have fun with Kyle, to show him what fun
is, to remind him of the good times we used to have together and can have again.

It feels good to have settled on a course of action. It’s 12:48 a.m. now. The fun starts in a few hours.

OFFICIALLY MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2011

From the logbook of Edward Stanton:

Time I woke up today: 8:33 a.m. (not counting the hours I stayed up past midnight). Fifth time this year I’ve been awake at this time.

High temperature for Sunday, December 11, 2011, Day 345: 43 (according to the Boise newspaper). Same as the day before.

Low temperature for Sunday, December 11, 2011: 26. Just one degree colder than the day before.

Precipitation for Sunday, December 11, 2011: 0.00 inches

Precipitation for 2011: 19.40 inches

New entries:

Exercise for Sunday, December 11, 2011: None, unfortunately. I drove, I ate, I watched the Dallas Cowboys, I went to bed. I need to rectify this today.

Miles driven Sunday, December 11, 2011: 464.9

Total miles driven: 688.3

Addendum: I’m in Boise now. “Fun” is the key word. Kyle clearly isn’t having any, and neither are his parents. Neither am I, if I’m honest about the situation, and I always like to be honest. I am here now, and I want to make the best of this visit, because soon enough I will be going home and then on to Texas to see my mother, and I do not know when I will see my friends again.

Fun. It’s the most important word there is right now. That seems odd to say. I’ve never considered whether words ought to be ranked in terms of importance, although I know that etymologists like to track the frequency with which words are used. But frequency and import are not necessarily the same thing. Let’s just say that fun is a very important word for Donna, Victor, Kyle, and me right now. There is no need to give it any more gravity than that.

I have a breakfast of oatmeal, which is fast becoming one of my favorite foods now that Dr. Rex Helton has recommended it to me as I battle my type 2 diabetes. Donna sits with me and we talk. I tell her about my diagnosis, and she’s greatly interested in that, because she’s a nurse and has seen the effects of unchecked diabetes up close.

“Helton is absolutely right, Edward,” she says. “This is different than juvenile diabetes. You can beat this thing. You can shed the weight and get your sugars under control, and you can come off this medicine.”

“It makes me pee a lot.” I pop a hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s impolite to talk about peeing.”

I hear Kyle’s voice coming up from behind me. “Peeing is cool.”

He says it like those cartoon characters on the music television channel, and then he chuckles stupidly like those two guys do.

“OK, wise guy, come have some breakfast,” Donna says.

She slides a bowl toward him, and he sits down in the chair to my right. I get a better look at him in the morning light, and he gets a better look at me.

“Looks like your face is healing, dude,” he says.

I touch the skin around my nose.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Man, you really got your ass kicked.”

Donna snaps, “Don’t even start, young man.”

He looks up at her, then digs into his breakfast.

“Had you ever been beaten up before?”

“You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to, Edward,” Donna says.

I put down my spoon. I don’t mind answering.

“Beat up? No. I got picked on a lot. There were even boys who might have tried to beat me up, if they thought they could have gotten away with it. But, no, nobody ever did that before. I wasn’t ready for it.”

“Are you going to learn to fight so it doesn’t happen again?”

Kyle’s interest in this topic flummoxes me.

“I don’t want to fight,” I say.

“But what if someone wants to fight you?”

“I’ll walk away.”

“What if you can’t?”

“I can’t imagine that circumstance. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. I just can’t imagine a situation where I wouldn’t have a chance to leave and extricate myself from what was happening. ‘Extricate’ is a good word, by the way. I love it.”

“Whatever. Maybe you don’t have much of an imagination.”

Kyle is a very perceptive young man.

“I don’t.”

“So maybe it will happen again.”

This conversation has become circular, but I am loath (I love the word “loath”) to end it because Kyle is actually talking to me. The problem is that I don’t know what to say to him that will
keep the conversation alive without going over the same things we have already addressed. That will exhaust me and make me cranky.

Donna, however, does know what to say.

“How about we talk about something other than who is going to be beat up by whom and when?”

I love that Donna uses her pronouns properly.

Kyle does not seem interested in another topic. He goes back to eating his cereal, and we sit in silence.

And as we do, I keep thinking back to the question Kyle asked me. What
would
I do if someone wanted to beat me up and I couldn’t walk away?

I think about it and think about it. Kyle isn’t talking and Donna is reading the newspaper, so I have time to give the question the proper attention. The problem is that I just don’t know what I would do. It’s too much hypothesis and not enough fact for my brain to process it. I’ll just have to hope it never happens.

Donna tells me that she has cleared her entire day for the three of us to do things together. First, she says, we’re going for a nice, long walk so I can get my exercise regimen going. Donna Middleton (I keep forgetting that her new last name is Hays) is a very logical woman.

“I’m not going,” Kyle says.

“Oh, yes, you are,” Donna says. “Young men who are polite and respectful get to spend time alone if they want, because they’ve earned that right. Young men who get expelled from school are made to spend endless, agonizing hours with people who love them.”

She picks up his bowl and mine and carries them into the kitchen. Once her back is turned, Kyle makes a very rude gesture toward her that is known as flipping someone off. I am horrified, and I guess the look on my face tells Kyle that, so he flips me off, too.

We go north on Donna’s street, North Twenty-Fifth, and pass cross streets with names like Lemp and Heron and Hazel, all of which are interesting names to me. This subdivision doesn’t seem like the ones in Billings. In the neighborhood I live in, the street names are on a theme: Lewis, Clark, Custer, Miles. They’re names of important people in Montana’s history. But here, I don’t know. I will concede that I don’t know my Boise or Idaho history, but I don’t see any order to these names. I don’t know what a “lemp” is. A heron is a kind of bird. Hazel is an old woman’s name, or a color. Farther up, we cross Bella Street and then Irene Street—those are definitely women’s names. Bella is a very popular name right now because of those vampire books and movies. So is Edward, unfortunately. When I worked at the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
, people kept telling me that I was on Team Edward, which I guess has something to do with those movies. I didn’t like that.

On the other side of Irene, we turn right and walk down to a pretty park on the corner. Donna has hooked her arm in mine, and we’re talking—well, she is, mostly—the whole way and smiling at each other. Kyle hasn’t said a word on the whole walk, and most of the way he’s been a few feet behind us, his head down.

“Do you like it here?” Donna asks me.

“It’s a very nice town. Do you like it?”

She doesn’t answer immediately. I look across the street as I wait.

“I miss Billings,” she says. “I was there a long time, and I had a lot of friends. But there are possibilities here, and Victor has such a good job. I can see a future.”

Kyle, from behind us, says: “Ha.”

“You don’t see a future?” I ask Kyle.

To be honest, I too am a little flummoxed by what Donna said. I’m not sure I trust the idea of seeing a future. I don’t like predictions, and I don’t think they are reliable. I prefer facts.

“No, all I see are a couple of douches.”

Donna turns around to face her son. She is twitching. I have seen her this angry before, and I remember hoping that I would never see it again. This is what hope gets you.

“Who are you?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Not so many days ago, I had a son. He was a good kid. He was sweet and he was kind. But he’s not here anymore. Do you know what happened to him?”

“Maybe you left him in Billings, you bitch.”

My left arm shoots out, and my hand grabs Kyle by his coat. This surprises me, as I did not ask my left arm and hand to do any such thing.

“Let go of me, you fucking freak.”

Donna slaps Kyle across the face. Hard. The sound of her hand against his skin reverberates (I love the word “reverberates”) through the cold in this empty park.

Kyle looks at her. He looks shocked, like someone told him something incredible and scary. He looks at me. Donna is twitching beside me. I want to start running and not stop until I am away from here and what just happened.

And then Kyle starts crying. He cries and he cries and Donna stops twitching, and she reaches for her boy, and he tries to shove
her off, but she reaches for him again, and he lets her pull him in. He sobs into her shoulder, and Donna is crying, too. There’s a very small voice inside of me that says I should hug them, but that impulse does not prevail.

I sit down on a park bench and I watch them.

I wish I weren’t here, but I also feel like this is where I am supposed to be.

Those two things, together, make no sense.

How can I help my friend when I am lost, too?

By Kyle’s own action, he is stuck in his bedroom again, the door closed. Donna says she isn’t sure if Kyle is locked away from the rest of us, or if we’re locked away from him. This is one of the things I like about Donna. She is clearly hurting for her son, and though she can cry and hug him when he needs it, she’s also not one to let him slide when he acts inappropriately and calls her a nasty name like “bitch.” (I’m setting aside, for a moment, the fact that he called me a freak. That hurt my feelings, but I’m trying to remember that none of these things with Kyle are about me. He will have to do something to repair his relationship with me. That much is clear. But that can wait for another time.)