“Yeah. I guess he’s all right.” But that smile on my brother’s face says it all.
“Where do we go from here?” I ask him.
And somehow I know what he’s going to say, because it’s just like that time in this very place so long ago that I found him here when he thought all was lost. He’d said the same thing to me.
“We go home, Kid,” he says. “They’re waiting for us.”
“All of them?”
“No,” he says. “Not all of them, but enough. For now.”
And it is. I say good-bye to Mrs. P, telling her I’ll be back soon, before I follow Bear up the sand dune to the car.
We don’t say much on the way home. We’ve said enough already.
As soon as we’re in the driveway of the Green Monstrosity, the door opens and Otter comes out and circles to my side of the car. He opens the door and says, “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself,” I say back.
He pulls me out, wraps his arms around me, and lifts me off the ground. “I’ve got you,” he says so only I can hear. “No matter what. I’ve got you.”
And I believe him.
This is my family. We might not always get along. We might hurt each other sometimes. Things might seem unfair because we’ve loved, only to have lost. And there are days when it feels like we’re broken and there’s no way we’ll ever be put back together. Not with these earthquakes. Not with this ocean. Even now, after all that we’ve been through. But they’re mine, I think, and I belong to them.
The three of us fit together. We always have. Bear, Otter, and the Kid. It will probably always be this way, even if I’m not a Kid anymore.
It’s time I start remembering that.
16. Where Tyson Learns the Benefit of Therapy
“YOU KNOW,” Bear says, “it wouldn’t be that hard to find a new therapist. If you really wanted to.”
“I thought you liked Eddie,” I say, dropping my cereal bowl into the sink.
“Bear still hasn’t gotten over their first meeting,” Otter says, flipping through the newspaper. “It scarred him irrevocably, and he’ll never be the same. At least that’s what he says. I think he’s just a bit of a drama queen.”
Kori laughs quietly, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. We’ve only been home a few weeks, yet she’s gone from Corey to Kori and back again more times than I’ve seen in years past. Something has to be bothering her, but I’ve been so wrapped up in my own drama (what else is new) that I haven’t had time to ask her about it. We’ve only got a couple of weeks left until we leave for Tucson, and I need to see to it sooner rather than later.
“Drama queen?” Bear says, the outrage in his voice clear. “He asked me if I wanted to be sodomized with a baseball bat!”
“I don’t think that’s exactly how it went,” Otter says.
“Though that’s probably not too far from the truth if it’s about Eddie,” I remind him. Eddie Egan isn’t exactly what I would call a typical therapist. His ideology tends to be a bit warped. To be honest, I’m surprised his license hasn’t been revoked. But he’s the one who’s known me the longest out of the therapists I’ve been to, and he’s really not all that bad. Most of the time.
“You guys know the weirdest people,” Kori says. “Why would a therapist want to know if you wanted to have baseball-bat sex?”
“I don’t know,” Bear says. “It was just this whole… thing. And it’s not my fault all these kinds of people keep flocking to us. I’m the normal one here.”
We all stare at him.
“What? I am.”
“Normal is not something I’d use to describe you,” I say.
“Definitely not,” Kori agrees.
“And that is said with the utmost amount of love,” Otter says without looking up from the paper. “Well, as much love as can be given while saying you’re abnormal at the same time.”