Divisions (Dev and Lee) (37 page)

“You needn’t bother going upstairs,” the female otter says. She articulates every word primly, glowering at me from beneath a wide white hat. I’ve never seen an otter look less playful.

“Who the hell are you?” I ask, though I have a pretty good idea.

Her little ears flatten at the curse, and she gives a look all full of judgment at my mother. “Eileen, you don’t have to let him go upstairs.”

Mother is panting slightly, glaring at me. Fur fills the air around us, and not only mine. “Don’t curse. All the things you’re here for are in the front hall.”

I stare through the dining room at the back stairs. “There’s a lot more stuff I want.”

Father walks up behind me. “What’s going on, Eileen? Did you not pack everything up?”

Mother and the otter turn to look at him, and I dart between them, making it to the staircase quickly. Footsteps thump behind me, but I get to the top first, cross the hall, and slam into the closed door to my room. I wrench at the handle, but the door still won’t open. There’s a metallic clank with every shove. I notice, then, the hasp and padlock that definitely were not there at Christmas.

“What is this?” I turn, facing Mother, who’s standing at the top of the stairs, panting harder now.

She won’t look directly at me. Her ears are back. “You…you turned your back on that life. I want to preserve it.”

“I turned my back? You turned your back on me! Those are my things!”

“Not now. You were my cub at the time, and you didn’t take them with you.”

I press my paw to my door. Father tries to work his way around her. “Wiley,” he says. “It’s just some childhood things. We can have this argument later.”

I can’t smooth my bristled fur down, but I breathe deeply. “All right,” I say. “But what about my pride jacket and books and stuff? Do you really want to keep those too?”

“No,” she says.

“Then let me in to get them.”

She takes a deep breath, and even Father waits, knowing something is wrong before she opens her mouth. As it happens, the answer comes not from her, but from the high-pitched voice of the otter behind her, on the staircase. “Those things are gone.”

“Gone?” I say. Mother still won’t look at me. “Gone? Mother?”

“They were…burned.”

I actually don’t believe my ears. I must have misheard, I think. “I’m sorry. They were burned? Who burned them?”

“It was…” She folds her arms and takes a breath.

“Who? Jesus?”

“Wiley,” Father says, warningly. He puts a paw on Mother’s arm, but his ears are down too, and his tail is curled around his leg. “What do you mean, Eileen?”

“It’s a practice they recommend, when a cub is lost…”

“Lost?” I yell, and Father puts his paw up again, the one with the wedding ring still on it.

The otter, Mrs. Headcase or whatever, pipes up. “If the cub has made it clear that he has no interest in saving his soul, the burning of his tainted possessions is a way for the parent to cleanse herself and move on.”

Even Father looks shocked at that. “Really, Eileen?” he says.

“It helped,” she says, and pulls away from him. “I felt more liberated afterwards.”

“Great.” I am surprised to hear the snarl in my voice, and Mother’s wide eyes show that she is equally startled. “I’m glad burning my things made you feel better. Is that standard practice? Did Vince King’s parents do that in front of him?”

“I think you should leave,” Mother says, voice trembling.

“Did they? Did they burn his clothes before he went into the garage and put a shotgun to his head?”

“Don’t let him manipulate you, Eileen,” the otter says. “We’re not allowed to talk about that.”

“Not allowed? Why not? Because when something goes wrong and one of the people you torture blows his goddamn brains out, you just erase him from existence? The way you’re trying to erase the parts of me you don’t like?”

Mother takes a step toward me. “Don’t you utter profanity in this house.”

“I’ll say whatever the
fuck
I want.” I pound on the door again. “What the hell happened to you?” I look at the otter, behind her. “Is this some kind of cult where you have to be with an ordained brainwasher at all times?”

“Calm down,” Father says, though it’s not clear whom he’s talking to.

“Leave this house now.” Mother lowers her voice, but her paws are shaking and her ears are flat and tight against her head. Her eyes narrow and they don’t leave my face.

“Not without my books! My posters, my old clothes, my—”

“None of that is yours!” the otter says shrilly behind her.

“Mother,” I say, deliberately ignoring the otter. “I want my things.”

She takes another step forward, and this time my father holds her back by one arm. She gestures with the other. “No. Mrs. Hedley’s right. You have made it perfectly clear where your life is and what you intend to do with it, and that room,” she points with an unsteady finger, “that room is part of the life you left behind.”

“I’m not leaving anything behind!” I shout back. “You’re the one who’s changed, you’re the one who’s found religion and abandoned her family!”

Her jaw sets; her voice goes cold. “I left nobody,” she says. “My family left me.”

We stand there, the only sound our harsh breathing, until the otter says, delicately, “Do I need to call the authorities?”

She has her cell phone out. Mother stares at me another moment. Father turns to the otter and says, “Nobody needs to call the authorities.”

This doesn’t satisfy Mrs. Headwound. “Eileen?”

“I’m fine, Celia,” Mother says after what she deems an appropriate silence, I guess. “They’ll go.”

“I’m not going anywhere—”

“If you’d prefer I have Celia call the police,” Mother says, and lets the threat hang in the air. The otter, halfway down the stairs, pauses there.

“We’ll leave.” Father steps around her before she can finish and grabs my paw. I pull it away; he grabs it again.

“No!” I yell. “She’s being a selfish bitch! She’s only doing this to spite me!”

Mother folds her arms. “I’m sorry that you couldn’t control your temper during this visit.”

“What happened to all that shit you said on the phone? Wanting to get along, wanting a day of peace and harmony? Had you already burned my things then?” I resist Father’s attempts to drag me down the stairs, but to be honest, he’s not trying very hard.

“I meant it all. I’m still holding a place for you in my life.”

“You’re not holding a place for me. You’re holding a place for your sanitized, straightened out, Stepford version of me. That fox cub is gone, Mother.”

“Don’t you think I don’t know that,” she says.

I start to walk around her, following Father. “I was willing to give you a chance,” I say, maybe only lying a little bit. Okay, maybe a quarter. Half at most.

“You came here intending to fight,” she says. “You never gave me a chance. Ever since you went away to that school, you haven’t given me a chance.”

“You never even tried to understand,” I shoot back. “You think you know all about me just because I finally told you the truth about myself, and you’re dead wrong, but you don’t care, because you have a bunch of friends telling you you’re right, you’re the victim.”

“I
am
the victim,” she almost cries.

“All that shit about making up and being nice was just for what? To try to get me to go straight? I’m
gay
, Mother. I have a boyfriend. We have sex, a lot.”

“All right,” Father says, because Mother really is near tears now, and he pulls me the rest of the way down the stairs. Mother stays at the top, rubbing her eyes. Through my anger, I almost feel bad.

At the base of the staircase, Mrs. Headshot stands aside, looking perfect and self-righteous, standing ramrod-straight under her wide-brimmed hat. I’m still fuming at Mother, and I’m angry that I made her cry, and I’m angry that she made me, and this fucking bitch of an otter is right there in front of me. “Were you the one who called the Kings? Did you put up that goddamn web page?”

She doesn’t answer at first. Of course it’s ridiculous; she lives out here, a thousand miles from the Kings; she wouldn’t have flown out there on a day’s notice. She might not even know them. But she might know the people who run the website. “You might as well have put the gun to his head and shot that poor kid yourself.”

Her expression doesn’t waver. “Everyone is given a chance at salvation.”

I don’t miss her pointed stare at me as she says that. Father’s pulling me toward the kitchen, out of the house, but I glare back at this church-otter and say, “You want to ascend to heaven right now?”

“Wiley!” Father pushes me into the kitchen. “Get out and get into the car.”

But the otter follows us. “I lost two sons to the homosexual agenda,” she says. “I know the pain poor Eileen is going through.”

“She hasn’t lost anyone!” I yell. “She’s pushing people away, just like you probably pushed your sons away. What’s their names? I want to look them up and tell them they are fucking lucky to have gotten away from a crazy psycho mother like you.”

She stays icy calm, following as Father drags me back through the kitchen. “I have no sons, not anymore.” Behind her, Mother appears at the doorway. “I tried to save them and I failed. It’s my hope that I can help other parents.”

“You’re the one who’s lost.” I wrench my arm away from Father. He puts a paw on my shoulder, but I say, “It’s okay, I’m not going to do anything. I just have one more thing to say.” I point at Mrs. Headfuck but I’m looking at Mother. “You say you lost your sons, but you know they’re alive out there. How would you feel if your sanctimonious hate-filled preaching made your son put a gun to his head and pull the trigger? Because that’s what you and your people did to that family.”

Those would be great words to stomp out on. Mother actually looks like they affected her, so I turn around intending to do just that. But that otter says, “They
are
dead, as far as I’m concerned. I tell their story as a cautionary tale to other parents who think they can live with their sinful children. Eventually the sin takes over, if the children are not corrected in time.”

Father sees my eyes go wide and my ears go flat, and he doesn’t take chances this time. “Get in the car,” he snaps, and shoves me at the front door. “And don’t you dare come back in. I’ll get the boxes out.”

“Get them onto the porch,” I say. “I’ll carry them to the car. I promise I won’t say another word.”

And I keep that promise, but only because Father also tells the two women to stay in the kitchen—I’m sure Mrs. Nineteen-Fifty is only too glad to—and he shuts the door. He puts boxes out on the porch and I carry them to the van in silence, staring at the white fog of my breath and flexing my fingers so they don’t get numb in the cold. I stack boxes on the cold metal floor, throwing them harder than I need to against the walls. Father comes out to help, to push the boxes into more orderly stacks, and we don’t say a word.

He turns the heat up full blast and backs the van out. I blow on my fingers and rub my ears to warm them as fur flies around us. My lips are cold and I still don’t trust myself to say anything. The radio plays some adult alternative song about the color blue, but to its tune I just hear my mother’s words, over and over.
The life you left behind. My family left me.

I force them out of my head. If she’s going to consider me lost to her, then she’s lost to me too, and that’s just too bad. I haven’t thought that much about her since the beginning of the year, not until my father brought her up.

“When I didn’t graduate college,” I say. “You were both pretty upset.”

Father’s ears come up. “I still think you made a mistake,” he says. “Look where you are now.”

“I’m going to be fine. I have a rich boyfriend.”

“And a job in Yerba. But a college degree is never a bad thing to have in your back pocket.”

“Jesus Fox, Father.”

He pauses. “You are doing well for yourself.”

“Thank you.”

The music changes to a cover of “Jingle Bells” by some female singer, a bobcat, if I recall, with a throaty voice. “How are you so much better about my life? You started out kind of…” I wave my paws. “Distanced. Did you and Mother ever talk about it? How did you go in different directions?”

“We talked about it. I said there wasn’t much more we could do. Your mother wanted to send you to a counselor to get you to finish college. Looking back, it was probably for more than that.” He keeps his eyes on the road, but his ears toward me.

“Did she start going to church again then?”

“No, it was just, um. February of this year? It was good, you know. She hadn’t been doing much around the house and she was getting involved in the community. That otter started coming over to visit, and they had a little group playing games. She was preachy as—well, you saw. But she was Eileen’s friend, and I had an office to go to and friends to talk to, and she didn’t. So I just went out, or hid in the basement.”

“You didn’t try to talk her out of it?”

“Wiley…” He shakes his head slowly. “Did she change because I wasn’t talking to her? Or did I stop talking to her because she changed? How can you know these things? I tried. I was always there, I asked about her friends. But she started getting more and more dogmatic. And when she talked about you, she talked as though you’d chosen your life to wound her personally.”