Man Made Boy (27 page)

WE’D JUST CROSSED into Oklahoma when Claire broke the long silence to mutter that she was hungry. She pointed to a little roadside country diner.

“Really?” I asked. “That place?”

“I like Americana,” she said flatly. “Chicken-fried steak, biscuits and gravy, that sort of thing. You got a problem with that?”

The truth was, I’d never had country stuff before. This whole rural Midwest area made me feel a little uncomfortable. Like I was too “urban” to fit in here. Not tough and manly enough, I guess. I knew that was dumb. I’d survived a lot of stuff. I could handle myself. But I couldn’t help feeling like there would be some unshaven cowboy type who was going to say some cheesy line about me being a “soft, city boy.”

I was also worried there’d be more staring. I was really not in the mood for more staring.

But what could I do? We were both hungry, and it wasn’t like I was going to admit my nervousness to Claire. She’d be all over that.

So I just said, “Whatever. It’s fine,” and pulled into the parking lot.

It was a narrow place with wood paneling, small booths along one wall, and a long, white Formica bar along the other. A few guys were at the bar drinking coffee, and an old couple sat off in a booth in the corner.

We sat down in a booth by a window and looked through the menus. It was pretty simple, so it didn’t take long to read cover to cover. Then we just stared out at the empty Oklahoma plains as the clouds gathered for an afternoon storm. I wasn’t sure how much longer we were going to do the not-talking thing, but I wasn’t going to be the one to break it. In the silence, there was only the distant clink of dishes and the whiny steel guitar sound of a country song on the radio.

Claire closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “I love American country music.”

“Really?” I asked.

“You don’t?”

“Not all Americans like country.”

“It’s not just for Americans, anyway.” She turned back to the window. The clouds grew darker and the grass on the plains bent down in waves. The music played on, some guy singing about his pickup truck breaking down or something. I didn’t get it. I guess I didn’t get a lot of things.

Finally, I asked. “Why do you like it? Country music.”

“It’s about loss.”

“A lost truck?”

“Sure, there’s the obvious layer. Lost money, lost possessions, lost love. But it’s more than just that. This guy is thinking, ‘Everything would be okay if I could just get this bloody truck working again.’ Of course, deep down, he knows that it actually
wouldn’t help all that much. But that’s all he can handle thinking about. The rest is too big. Too complicated. If he looked directly at the gigantic pit that swallowed his life, he’d probably just go mad. Country music is about when life isn’t simple anymore. It’s about innocence taken away too early, too harshly. It’s about losing the things you can’t get back.”

I hadn’t been expecting a response like that from her. Something that open. I was thinking of telling her that, when the waitress came over. She was a middle-aged human in an apron, a little heavyset, her brown hair streaked with gray and pulled back in a bun. She looked tired. But she smiled as she looked at Claire and said, “What can I get you, sweetie?”

“I’ll have the chicken-fried steak, please,” said Claire. Her politeness surprised me, too.

“You’ve got one pretty accent, there, miss,” said the waitress, her eyes lighting up.

“Er, thanks,” said Claire.

“Where you from?”

“London.”

“In England, right?”

“Yeah,” said Claire.

The waitress frowned for a moment, then said, “Sorry, darlin’, we ain’t got any hot tea.”

Claire smiled slightly at that. “I like coffee just fine.”

“Oh, well, we got plenty of that. So what brings you all the way out here?”

“I like it here,” Claire said. “Lot more space than back home.” Her accent was getting a little thicker and I realized she was playing it up for the waitress. She seemed to enjoy being seen as exotic.

“Well, bless your heart,” said the waitress. “You got that right,
we got plenty of space. I love that
Downtown Abbey
show, don’t you?”

“Sorry, haven’t seen it,” said Claire. “I don’t watch the telly much.”

“Wish more kids were like that,” said the waitress. “My kids, seems like that’s all they do.”

Then she turned to me and I braced myself for the inevitable look of surprise or shock or disgust when she took in my stitches. But it didn’t come. In fact, I was the one who probably looked surprised. I couldn’t see it before because she’d been turned toward Claire, but now that I was looking at her dead on, I saw that she had a huge burn mark on the side of her face.

“And what about you?” she asked me.

“Uh, I’m not from England,” I said.

She turned back to Claire and smirked. “Fine-lookin’ fella you got here, but he ain’t too bright, is he?”

“Not especially, no,” said Claire, also smirking.

The waitress turned back to me. “Sweetie, I meant what do you want to
eat
?”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess I’ll have the same thing.”

“Good choice.” She winked at me. Then she went back to the kitchen.

“I like her,” said Claire.

“Because she said I was dumb,” I said.

“That too.” She smiled again briefly. “But also, she didn’t even flinch at your stitches.”

“You noticed that?” I asked.

“Of course.”

A moment later, the waitress was back with coffee. A muted peal of thunder made her glance out the window at the purple clouds flickering with lightening. “Bad-lookin’ storm out there.
Good thing you’re in here where it’s safe.” Then she was gone again.

Claire curled her long fingers around her coffee cup and brought it up to her face. She inhaled deeply. Then she put it down, ripped open three packets of sugar, and poured them in.

“Not so bad here, is it,” she said.

“No,” I said. “It’s nice, actually. Good call.”

We sat and drank coffee and watched the storm for a while. The sky was as dark as night and when the sheets of rain came down, they blew almost horizontal. I’d seen storms before, but this was something different. All that space with nothing to stop the winds. This was tornado country, after all.

“I guess there’s probably something you should know,” said Claire.

“What?” I said.

“You asked earlier about Sophie and my parents.”

“Yeah, Sophie really didn’t want to talk about it. That’s what got us sidetracked to the mall.”

“There’s no easy way to say this. So I’m just going to lay it all out. Do you know much about my family?”

“Not really,” I admitted.

“Probably for the best. You don’t have a lot of assumptions. So Henry Jekyll was Sophie’s granddad. He was tired of being a goody-goody all the time. He wanted to be a bad arse. Cause some trouble, you know? But he still wanted to go to heaven and all that. So he created a potion that split his positive and negative sides into two different people in the same body: Dr. Jekyll and my granddad, Mr. Edward Hyde. Initially, Jekyll thought it was just a way to cheat. To have his cake and eat it, too. And he thought he could control my granddad. He’d let him go on a bender, get pissed, shag a prostitute. My granddad basically
screwed as many slags as he could afford. Which, with Jekyll’s money, was a lot. Spread their messed-up split personality seed all over London. But he didn’t want any grandkids to haunt him, so he made sure there weren’t any. Usually, by kicking the pregnant moms in the belly to make them miscarry.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah. Exactly. He was a bastard. So Jekyll, being a fine, upstanding English gentleman, was like, ‘Right, that’s enough of that!’ And he vowed never to take the potion again. But what he didn’t realize was that he’d used the potion so many times, it had altered him permanently. He didn’t need it to change anymore. He would fall asleep as Jekyll and wake up as Hyde. And that’s when he started to lose control. When Hyde really started to run amuck.”

She took a slow sip of her coffee, her eyes on the distant storm.

“Fortunately, Jekyll decided to man up and kill them both before Hyde got a chance to kick our grandmum in her pregnant belly. So our mums were born, but without fathers. Maybe it would have helped to have someone around who understood what it was like to be two people sharing the same body. Maybe then our mums wouldn’t have been so messed up. As it was, they were in and out of mental hospitals all through childhood. At one point, my mum went into a serious depression. She just hid inside and left everything for Sophie’s mum to deal with. And for a while that actually worked out. Sophie’s mum met our dad. He was a really nice, normal bloke. A banker. Made a decent amount of money. They had their first baby, our older brothers, Robert and Stephen. And it was weird, of course, what with having a baby that changed between two people at random, but they made it work. My mum would show up now and then, but mostly she just let Sophie’s mum
play homemaker and pretend they were normal humans.”

Claire stared out the window for a while as the storm continued to lash the plains, her expression unreadable. I wondered if maybe Sophie was telling her to shut up. Finally, she said, “But once Sophie and I were born, everything changed. Sophie’s mum went into some kind of postpartum depression, and suddenly, it was
my
mum who was in charge all the time. But my mum didn’t get along with our dad. They fought all the time. Sophie’s mum eventually got over her depression and tried to patch things up all around. But it was too late by then. Dad was sick to death of all the dual-personality crap, and especially sick of my mum. Things continued to get worse until one night they were fighting and my mum just lost it.”

Her face was tense as she stirred her coffee, the spoon clinking against the side of the mug.

“She killed our dad.”

She carefully placed the spoon on the table and took a sip of her coffee.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m not done.” She looked up at me. “That was just for context. This is the part you need to know. Our mums are back in a mental hospital. But that’s as much for their protection as anything else. Because Sophie’s brother, Robert, wants to kill my mum.”

“But wouldn’t that kill
his
mom, too?”

“No, he thinks he’s found a way to kill only one side.”

“Has he?”

“It looks like it. I haven’t seen or heard from Stephen in over five years. None of us can go that long without a switch.”

“He killed his other half?”

“Yeah, and he wants to kill
all
the Hydes. Including me.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s out there somewhere looking for you, isn’t he?”

“Yep.”

“So…we’re both running.”

“Seems so.”

The waitress appeared, sliding two plates of chicken-fried steak in gravy onto the table.

“There you go, folks. Enjoy,” she said.

“Cheers,” said Claire quietly.

We ate in silence, but it wasn’t an angry silence anymore. I didn’t know what kind of silence it was now. Maybe the scared kind.

Eventually, the storm died down and the sun broke through the thick cloud bank to shine on the glittering wet grass.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe we’ll be able to figure something out once we get to New Mexico. Mozart said the Sphinx is, like, the wisest creature on the planet. I’m hoping he can help me out with VI. Maybe he’ll have some idea about what to do about Robert.”

“Sure, Scarecrow!” Claire said in a goofy, American accent. “And maybe while we’re there, he’ll give Sophie some courage, me a heart, and you a brain!”

“Aaaand moment ruined,” I said. “Well done.”

“Thanks,” she said. “It’s a talent of mine.”

I WASN’T READY for the heat. As we moved from the plains into the desert, sunlight no longer felt like the gentle, life-giving rarity I’d come to love. Instead, it was relentless, hard, and mean. Sophie had spent so much of our money on clothes that we were in danger of running out of gas money before we got to The Commune. Claire said we’d use less gas if we didn’t run the air-conditioning, so we kept it off. We started to get grumpy. We argued a lot about stupid things, like who would pick the radio station or who was drinking more water. Then we stopped talking altogether and the only sound was the hot wind as it whipped through the open windows.