Who We Are (The Seafare Chronicles 2)

So I held my mother while she cried, and eventually the tears subsided, and she began to hiccup softly, and this made me giggle, and she almost looked like she was going to smile at me, and I forgot about the house filled with gold stars because one smile from my mother was worth a billion gold stars and a billion Mrs. Terrances and a billion houses that smelled like fresh bread. I knew this was going to be a moment I would remember because it would be for me, it would be because of me; she’d seen fit to smile at me, and then her mouth would open, and she’d tell me how proud she was of me, how thankful she was I came home when I did, that I just make everything better, that I was her son, her only son, and God, how she loved me, how she couldn’t live without me and how she never, ever wanted me to leave her. There would be love in her eyes that were so very much like my own, and for the first time that I could remember, we would be connected somehow, and I would know that she was my mother, that she wanted me there with her and no one else, especially not the one-named strange men ( Bob or Greg or John or Bud) that came in with her late at night, both of them whiskey-drunk and laughing as they tripped over chair legs on their way to the kitchen to get more booze, the smoke from their cigarettes trailing over their shoulders like contrails from planes in the sky.

But this… this was different. There was something there, something emotional, and I would take it for what it was, like the great gift that it was.

Oh God, how this was going to be the moment, the first true moment of my life when I’d finally get what I had always dreamed about. There were tremors then, almost like a precursor to an earthquake, the room around us silent except for the tiny sniffles from my mother.

The smile never formed, and the words that came out instead—

i need a drink and a smoke

—cut me, ran me through, and I cursed myself for thinking otherwise as I broke inwardly, for thinking that maybe, just maybe, I would know what it felt like. She stood up and stumbled slightly as her knees popped. She walked toward the kitchen, glancing at me over her shoulder and—

bar tonight so you’re on your own for dinner kiddo

—there was a flash in her eyes, but it was the opposite of recognition, like lightning behind clouds, and I—

i’m going out to the bar tonight so you’re on your own for

—knew that it would not happen today, that it might not happen ever.

But I was six (maybe seven?), and my ideals had not yet been shattered, my faith had not yet been shaken. I trudged off to my room, passing the kitchen while my mom lit up a Marlboro Red and splashed Jack over a couple of ice cubes. I lingered for a moment in the doorway, but I was invisible. I was a ghost, even though I could not haunt her, even though I could not make her look up and scream and scream and scream. I went to my room and closed the door behind me.

We lived there for maybe a year before being evicted and forced to stay with a woman who made me call her Auntie Sherrie and smelled like peach Schnapps and sweat. She always had stale hard candy in her thrift-store purse. I don’t know if we were related, but it doesn’t matter because she moved away and we got another apartment, shabbier than the one on River Road. The new apartment didn’t have swings or a man sipping tea in the window. The paths were dirt so there were no cracks for me to jump over. I never saw my Auntie Sherrie again. I asked about her years later, but Mom said she had been killed by a drunk driver. I asked who the drunk driver was and if he was dead too. She said the drunk driver was Auntie Sherrie. Peach Schnapps, wouldn’t you know.

There was no Ty then. No Creed, no Anna. No Mrs. Paquinn.

There was no Otter. God, how there was no Otter.

None of them were real to me yet. I couldn’t even imagine them.

I never found out what made my mom cry that day.

I DON’T know why I thought you needed to know that. Maybe….

No. Never mind.

WE’RE sitting across from Georgia Erlichmann in the living room the next day, the Kid to my left and Otter to my right. The social worker is opposite us, a small laptop perched on her legs, the keys clacking, writing only God knows what. She’s smaller than I expected her to be, and younger, given the gruffness of her voice over the phone. Her brown hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, seeming to provide a cheap face lift as her eyebrows are almost in the middle of her forehead. Either that or she’s in a perpetual state of surprise.

I smile at her, trying to show her I have not lost any teeth due to the manufacturing and use of meth. She ignores me and glances around the living room and types something else. I look around then too, wondering what she sees. The living room is wide, a large couch against one wall, a flat-screen TV set over the fireplace, two recliners against the other wall.

The carpet is a light brown (which goes amazing with the green color on the outside) and is clean. Otter wants to pull it up for the hardwood floors underneath, but we haven’t gotten to it yet. It looks like a normal living room. So why is it like she’s typing a fucking novel about it?

I’m sure she’s been in much worse homes, and probably has stories that would make me nauseous to hear, so one would think she would be relieved at being able to be in a nice home, with nice people. But she’d perfunctorily shaken my hand when she’d arrived in her nondescript government-issued vehicle, smiling only when the Kid had wandered in, asking how he was in her slightly accented English. The Kid had responded warily. I wanted to kick him in the shins and tell him to behave, but then I realized what that would look like in front of a social worker and was able to stop myself from having the Kid taken from me within the first five minutes of her visit.

It didn’t help when she’d walked in the kitchen after I’d gone in to get her a cup of tea and she’d seen Otter kissing me gently on the lips, trying to get me to calm down, to make the nervousness that was blaring through me quiet to a dull roar. She’d made a small noise in the back of her throat and started typing something on the damn laptop, and I could only imagine it would say something like, The two homosexuals were engaged in anal sex on the kitchen table, using gravy as a sort of lubricant. The smaller man (obviously the “bottom” in the relationship) had a collar around his neck attached to a leash held by the larger man (a dominant “top”) who pulled on it and repeatedly asked “Who is my bitch?” The smaller man would say he was, that he was the bitch. This is not a good home for a child to be raised in. I recommend we move Tyson in with a heterosexual couple who are not into gravy sex and know that leashes are only for dogs as soon as possible. I pulled away from Otter, restraining myself from shoving him, not wanting her to think I was capable of spousal abuse as well. I’d muttered something as I blushed and went back to the tea like it was the most important thing in the world.

And then she had the nerve to—

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back it up. Spouse? Did I just think spouse? When the hell did I start thinking of Otter as my husband? I don’t want to get fucking married! I’m twenty-one years old, goddammit! Goddamn the Kid for talking about gay marriage all the fucking time, like it’s something that I want, like it’s something I think about all the time. It’s not. I don’t think about it at all. I never have. Otter doesn’t, either. Besides, he wouldn’t want to marry me. That’d just be weird. Who would change their last name?

Derrick Thompson makes me sound like I

yacht at Martha’s Vineyard and have a stick up my ass. Oliver McKenna sounds like he… well, okay, that sounds all right. I guess. If you like that kind of thing. Where would we even do that? It’s not legal, so it’s not like it would be recognized or anything. I suppose we’d know, at least. That’d count for something, right?

Maybe we could to some kind of civil ceremony, though, down at that spot on the beach. We could do it at dusk, and the sun would be setting behind us, and we could wear those tuxes that we wore the first time we were down there, that time that had started horribly wrong but ended so wonderfully right. He’d be looking down at me, and I’d be looking up at him, and the sun would be like a halo at the back of his head and that gold-green would flash at me, and I would know it meant forever because he is forever and as our family looked on, he would lower his face until his lips met mine and—

—and holy fucking shit, did I really just go there? My mouth is dry, my cock half-hard. And I’m staring at Otter. Who’s staring back at me, his eyes dancing like he knows exactly what I’m thinking about. No way. No fuc—

(social worker is here, dang it!)—flipping way.