The Evolution of Ethan Poe, page 37
Afterward he’s so sweet to me. He keeps dropping kisses all over my face until I laugh and tell him to cut it out and stop treating me like a girl. “Maybe it’ll be my turn next,” I tell him as I push him onto his back.
“Was it okay? I mean, you know . . . I didn’t hurt you?”
“It was more than okay. Takes some getting used to, but—yeah. I’d do it again.” He looks drowsy, but I get up and toss his clothes to him. “If we don’t get out of this room before my folks get here, I won’t be allowed to see you again, let alone . . . you know.” I wrap the used condom up in about five tissues and toss it in the wastebasket. I’ll do something else with it later.
We’re barely back downstairs when I hear Mom’s car pulling up.
“I’m gone,” Max says. He grabs his stuff and heads for the back door.
“Did you hitch?” I ask his retreating back.
“Yup. Never did it before. It was kind of fun.” He winks as he shuts the door behind him; I figure he’ll wait until he’s sure he won’t be seen and then get onto the road to hitch home.
Dad wants to sit in his chair for a bit, and I help Mom get him settled, keeping an eye out for Max. I do see him, but no one else does, and he’s out of sight immediately. I have a secret smile the whole time I’m helping Mom make sure Dad has everything he needs.
Chapter 17
Saturday Mom takes me to see Kyle. He has another roommate now, a boy named Charlie who broke several bones and punctured something snowboarding. He has a friend visiting when we get there, and he’s full of himself, telling his friend about the magnificent move he was pulling when he went down, about how he knows just what went wrong, and about how it’s gonna be perfect the next time he does it. He says he’s gonna picture it in his head over and over, visualize it into perfection. Whatever. But then he starts going into how gross his injuries were, how he could see the bone sticking out of his skin.
Kyle’s half listening to him while Mom and I think of things to chat about, little news items, stuff at school. At one point when we’ve run out of subject matter he turns toward Charlie, then back to me, and grins. He jerks his head a little toward his roommate.
“What?” I ask.
“I’ve got him beat,” he says quietly.
Not quietly enough. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Charlie says, his voice a little belligerent. “What have you got?”
I’m thinking, Please, Kyle, don’t go into the shit-and-chair scene.
Kyle grins at him and lifts his right arm up. “Maggots.”
Well, I was not expecting that. “What?” Has he taken too much pain med or what?
Kyle looks at me. “They used maggots to clean the wound. I had them on for two days.”
I turn to Mom for a sanity check.
“Kyle,” she says, “please. Let’s not talk about that.”
“Why not? It’s cool!” He lets out a barking laugh. “Science isn’t everything. All the antibiotics they have? They couldn’t get the infection to stop. They had to use bugs.”
“Mom?” I ask. “What’s he talking about?”
She sighs. “They put sterile maggots on his wound so they wouldn’t have to cut away any more of the arm.” Kyle is right. Charlie’s bone splinters through the skin is nursery school compared to this.
Evidently Kyle wants the whole story known. “Maggots are fly larvae. They eat only the decayed flesh.” He sounds as proud as if they’d hatched from his own eggs. “They leave healthy flesh alone. Anyone who doesn’t see the intelligence in that is blind.”
And just like that, we’re back at ID again. ID. BIID. Whatever. I decide it’s not worth pointing out that flies evolved from something at some point.
Maggots. Yuck. I wonder if Kyle would be so over the moon about it if he didn’t think using maggots proves his ID point. It shuts Charlie up, and that’s good for something. But I’m thinking this image is going to be hard to get out of my head.
Kyle won’t be coming home until next week sometime, maybe Tuesday. He’s refusing to work with the people who’d like to explore prosthetic options with him. I guess he thinks a demon could inhabit that, too, though for myself, I can’t quite picture “stumbling” with a fake hand.
It’s weird seeing Dad weak, needing help to get up and taking stairs one at a time to avoid straining his wound. He tries to sleep on the couch at first, but it’s not very comfortable, especially after surgery, and he ends up back in his own bed, with Mom. The effect of his slow progress around the house sometimes means he moves really quietly, and he keeps startling Mom, sneaking up on her without meaning to.
It doesn’t take him long to get grouchy. Dad’s not a man who likes having anyone help him do things he should be doing for himself, and both Mom and I manage to set him off more than once trying to anticipate what he needs and making him feel helpless in the process. Sometimes, even though she’s right about what he needed, he pretends he didn’t want it at all. I can see that her patient is wearing her patience pretty thin, and mine’s not much thicker by Monday morning, when he sneaks up on me.
I’d just finished my shower, my back to the door, still toweling off, when he decides he doesn’t want to wait for me to vacate before he comes in to use the toilet. There was no knock, I’m sure of that. And with the overhead fan running to vent steam out, I don’t hear the door open, but when I feel the draft of cold air from the hall I wheel around to face the source.
The look on his face—I don’t know, scowl? Horror? Fury? Holding on to the door jamb with one hand for support, he points the other at me.
“Turn around!”
“What?”
“I said, turn around!”
Why? What—OMG. He saw the tat. The face, the tone, the posture all tell me he knows exactly what the rainbow colors mean. I stand there, frozen, not turning around, towel in my hands dangling down to hide my crotch, but this doesn’t make me feel any less vulnerable than if I’d had no cover at all. Turning around? That would be more vulnerable still. I don’t do it.
I half expect him to bellow the order at me again, and I’m wondering what will happen if he lunges at me in his condition. We stand there like that, a still photo that begs for a creative caption contest, until I hear Mom’s voice.
“What’s going on in there? Ethan, don’t hog the bathroom.” She appears beside Dad, takes in his expression and mine, and maybe she doesn’t know what’s going on, but she knows it’s bad. “Dave?”
He half turns to her, keeping his eyes on me. “Did you know about this?”
She looks at me, puzzled, shakes her head. “About what?”
Now it comes. “TURN AROUND!”
I turn just enough so Mom can see the tat, and I watch her face. Her eyes freeze for a second, but when she speaks it seems like she’s trying to downplay things. “No, Dave. I didn’t know he had a tattoo with lots of colors in it. But we both knew he had a tattoo.” She looks at him like she expects him to explain himself.
“Charlene, those aren’t just colors!” He grimaces at me. “Ethan, tell me you didn’t know what that meant. Tell me you made a mistake.” He’s probably hoping I’ll ask, What mistake.
Okay, this is totally not how I’ve anticipated telling him, standing here naked and getting colder by the second, dick shrinking into something less than manhood and inked ass there for all to see. Sometimes, though, you just have to play the hand you’re dealt.
“No mistake.” My chin lifts a little without my telling it to. I wish I had the balls to go back to toweling off, but I don’t quite.
Dad grabs a little harder on the door jamb, and Mom decides to take over.
“Dave, this isn’t where we should be having this conversation. Ethan, take whatever you need to your room so your father can use the bathroom.” She manipulates Dad so that there’s just enough room for me to squeak by without actually touching anyone.
Somehow I manage to throw on my clothes, grab my pack, and get downstairs before Dad’s done in the bathroom. “Here,” Mom says, and hands me a bag with four pieces of bread, some ham slices, and an orange—breakfast for the road. I throw them into my pack while Mom gets my coat, and I’m out the door before I hear the flush upstairs. She calls to me, “I’ll try to calm him down, Ethan. Be patient with him.”
Patient with him? How can you be patient with someone who wants to tell you that you aren’t who you know you are? Christ, but this is so not how I wanted to do this!
I’m way too early for the bus, so I just walk along the route it will take and wave it down as it gets close. I throw myself into an empty seat, pull my earbuds out of my pack, and play Queen songs, loud, until Max gets on and sits with me.
He knows right away something’s up. “You look like crap.”
“Thanks.”
“Seriously. What is it?”
I take a shaky breath. “Dad saw the tat.”
“Jesus.”
We sit there staring straight ahead until I add, “I was getting out of the shower. He didn’t knock. Mom intervened and got me out of the house before he could explode completely. But he knows what it means. The rainbow colors.”
More silence. Then Max says, “What are you gonna do?”
I shrug. “Mom’s gonna try and calm him down. But it’ll be ugly.”
The day drags, and it goes by much too quickly. I bounce back and forth between feeling terrified to face Dad and looking forward to a chance to stand up for myself, challenge his outmoded opinions, and face him down. At some point that pendulum stops swinging, and I’m both terrified and determined at once. And it occurs to me that taking a stand is something I’ve never wanted to do. About anything. But now I’m ready. This is me. This is my life.
But I know that even if I stand up for myself, there’ll be no facing him down. The only thing I have going for me is that he’s too sick to hit me very hard. I can’t remember him ever hitting me, actually, other than a few spankings when I was really little. Hitting hasn’t been his thing. But all bets are off now. And it wouldn’t actually take him hitting me to make things really awful. What if I can’t ever see Max outside school again? I keep hoping Mom will call and let me know something, but—no. And I don’t dare call her.
Max and I text all the way to his house on the bus after school, even though we’re sharing a seat. I can tell he’s trying not to let on how much he doesn’t want me to mention his name at home, how much he doesn’t want to be a part of that discussion. He doesn’t even realize that Mom already knows about him. He gives me a heavy look when he gets up. The last thing he texts, after he steps off the bus, is call me 2nite.
I take my time getting to the house from the bus stop. I have absolutely no idea what to expect inside. Well, I guess I have some idea. And even though I’m determined to face it, it’s still terrifying.
But when I get inside, all is quiet. Mom’s cleaning the oven, and Dad’s nowhere to be seen, which I take to mean that he’s upstairs in bed, resting. No doubt after throwing fits all day.
Mom looks up for a sec when I sit in the kitchen chair nearest her, but she keeps scrubbing. I open with the only thing I can think of to say. “Thanks for this morning.”
She scrubs for another thirty seconds, maybe, before she says, “You’re welcome.” She sits down on the floor and uses the back of a wrist to push hair off her forehead. “Just getting rid of some frustration, here.” She looks at me and smiles. It’s kind of a sad smile, and I don’t know what to make of this.
“What can you tell me?”
“It’s probably a lot like you’d expect. He had no idea. We talked until he’d gone round in too many circles and I got dizzy, so I printed out some things for him to read. About the pheromone study, and the animals. He took it upstairs. I can only hope he’s read it.” She rubs her face. “It might help for you to know something, Ethan. Your father loves both you boys very much. But he’s always felt closer to you. Maybe it’s Kyle’s tendency to be a little stiff, even a little prissy about some things.”
“Like the chores list?”
“Things like that, yes. So this has hurt your father.”
“Why? I’m still me. You said so yourself.”
“I know. It’s just . . . It’s just that he always felt like he had more of a connection with you. And to find out that something this basic is different—it hurts him, Ethan. You need to understand that so you can understand his reaction. He feels like he’s lost a son.”
“What, and gained a daughter?” My tone is so sharp it almost makes me wince.
She ignores this. “And also you need to remember that you—and I, actually—have had some time to get used to the idea. It’s brand new to him, and now that he knows I’ve known for a while it’s like we were keeping secrets from him.”
“We were. We had to. We knew how he’d react.”
Dad’s voice from the doorway makes me jump. “It’s also a question of trust, Ethan.”
Up is truth. It’s knowing I’m right. I coax my heart out of my throat and stand to face him. “Trust goes both ways.” It’s like this time, it was someone else’s voice. Not mine at all.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I knew you’d react badly. I knew you’d hate it. So I knew you wouldn’t trust me to know who I am.”
He shuffles over to the chair across from me, his legs barely moving the front sections of his red plaid bathrobe. “Sit.”
Fine. I guess we have to do this. At least Mom’s prepared him. She gets up and sits in the chair between us. Dad looks tired. Beaten. Worse than he has since the operation. I guess this is my fault?
“What am I supposed to do now, Ethan?”
“Do?”
“How do I know who you are? How do I talk to you? How do I trust you?”
These questions make no sense to me. I just shake my head, confused. Mom says, “Dave, if you have a question Ethan can answer, then ask it.”
Dad doesn’t look at her, only at me. “I don’t know you. You’re like a completely different person to me now.” His voice is as tired as he looks.
I don’t know where it comes from, but suddenly I feel strong. I feel something powerful supporting me. Powerful but also gentle. “Then let’s get to know each other. Where do you want to start?”
He blinks, obviously a little surprised by this response. And maybe by the calm energy underneath it. “How do you know?”
“That I’m gay? That’s easy. How do you know you’re not?” I want him to think about this for just a second, so I wait about five heartbeats. “Just take those feelings and turn them around a little, and you’re there. I like girls, Dad. I just don’t feel the same way you do about them. I feel like that about boys. It’s pretty much the same feeling, I think. Just goes in a different direction.”
He looks at me, but I can tell his brain is working harder than his eyes and he’s not really seeing me. Finally he says, “I can’t get there. I can’t understand why you’d want to be with a boy like that.”
“And I can’t understand why you’d want to be with a girl like that. It feels just as wrong to me as what I want feels to you.” Suddenly something Mom had once said about him leaps into my brain: Your father is an emotional child. He sees everything only as far as it relates to him, which means he can’t put himself in someone else’s shoes. Maybe this is partly where my calm is coming from. He’s the child. I have to lead. “Dad, I get that you don’t get it. I get that you don’t like it. But it’s real. It’s me. It always will be me. So we really need to get through this. You’re still my father. We just have to figure out how to go forward.”
He leans his elbows on the table and rubs his hairline with his fingers. “I don’t see how I can do that.”
“I don’t see how you can’t.”
He looks up at me like he can’t quite believe I said that. “I don’t understand who you are. What you are. My mind won’t go there. How can I go forward if I don’t know my own son?”
Mom says, “Give it time, Dave.”
“Time? Time? Time’s what I’m afraid of! Time will show that he won’t grow up into a normal man, that he won’t find a girl to settle down with, he won’t have kids, he won’t have a life!”
This yanks me out of my calm a little. “You still have another son.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not like you’ve lost your only chance at grandkids.”
“Is that what you—Look, Ethan. I don’t know what we did wrong. I don’t even want to know. I just want to know how to fix it. Because right now, something’s broken.”
Oh, man! “Why? What’s wrong with me?” Christ! I want to tell him he knows nothing. He’s a dinosaur. He’s stuck in the dark ages, a Neanderthal, an ignorant bigot.
“Nothing’s wrong with you! That’s the point. You only think there is.”
Deep breath. “Dad, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m gay. Both are true.”
“That can’t be true.”
“See, this is what I meant by trust going both ways. You can’t see inside my head, Dad. You don’t have a TV screen on my heart. You’re just gonna have to believe me.” I’m thinking I need to get out of here before I do something I’ll regret, and this is a good exit line. I start to get up. But Dad yells the word Sit at me. He might be the child, but he’s still the father. I sit. Hard.
“Young man, I don’t know yet what we’re going to do about this. But we’re going to do something. And in the meantime, you’re grounded.”
“Dave!” Mom’s standing now. “Ethan, please go to your room so your father and I can talk.”
That is an exit line. I go all the way up the stairs, stand in the hall, and close my door from the outside just loud enough to be convincing. Then I creep as quietly as I can to the top of the stairs so I can hear what’s going on.
“Ethan’s done nothing to be grounded for, Dave. He’s been very helpful with Kyle, he’s done everything he could to support me, and he’s thrilled that you’re home again. All right, he got a tattoo when he shouldn’t have, but if he didn’t do some things wrong it would be scary.”
