More Happy Than Not

Genevieve is right: I don’t want this happiness, but blind happiness is better than inhabitable unhappiness.

After my shift, I go straight to my building, ignoring Baby Freddy’s shouts to hang out. I enter the lobby just as my mom exits the downstairs Laundromat, pushing the heavy load of clothes in a shopping cart. I come up beside her and take over, heading to the elevator.

“Genevieve and Thomas stopped by,” I say, keeping my cool.

She doesn’t even try and play it off or explain herself. “Thomas too?”

I press the elevator button. “Yeah. Did you only recruit Gen for the mission?”

“Outside your family, she loves you the most,” Mom says. “I thought that was my best shot.” Maybe so, but I guess Gen thought bringing along the guy I want to be my happiness might be a better bet. That girl is really something else. “I’m tired of this fight, Aaron. I know it’s my responsibility as a parent to give you the life you want, especially since I failed at getting you your own room and finding you a father who didn’t get so lost in his own head, but I don’t want to lose my son.”

The elevator arrives but we don’t get on. “I just don’t think I’m that different from him.”

“You are, my son, you are. You are kind and too good for the bad you’ve lived through. If you’re sure, if you promise me that in this moment, you’ll forgive me for signing off on your procedure, I’ll do it.”

I hug her, promising over and over that this is what I want, what I need, that there would never be any reason to forgive her.

“Hold on,” she says. Here we go. “I’ll sign off on one condition. I want you to visit Kyle and his family on Saturday.”

I get to see Kyle. That’s more than enough.

9

KYLE LAKE, THE ONLY CHILD

When Kyle and Kenneth were younger—twins still so identical even I couldn’t tell them apart—they made up this game called Happy Hour. They didn’t know what “happy hour” meant in the real world, but they heard it enough from grown-ups. They would come home from school and shout, “Happy Hour!” whenever their parents asked them to settle down and do their homework. They’d be granted one hour of playtime, relax time, whatever, before having to do work and chores. Happy Hour changed as they got older, transforming into a therapeutic judgment-free hour of bitching.

I don’t even know who Kyle bitches to now.

It required a lot of back and forth, but my mom teamed up with Evangeline to make this meeting happen. Mom had to sign a permissions request and a confidentiality form, and some other papers promising never to disclose the location of the Lakes to anyone except me.

I’m not sure what the penalties are, but I guess it would just be really shitty of her to send the block flooding to 174th Street, right off the Simpson Avenue train stop. I guess their housing budget post-procedure wasn’t very high; otherwise, they would’ve escaped to the deep end of Queens, not thirty blocks and several avenues over from where they started.

When I get to their apartment building, right beside a video rental store with a closing sign, I feel shaky. I press the intercom.

“Who is it?” Mrs. Lake asks.

“Aaron,” I say.

They buzz me in without a word. I walk straight to apartment 1E and knock twice. Both Mrs. and Mr. Lake—their first names lost on me—look taken aback when they open the door; it’s the wounds on my face, no doubt. I’m surprised at how happy I am to see them considering how little time I’ve wondered about them. But now I remember the sleepovers where Mrs. Lake would play video games with us, and I remember the times Mr. Lake would accompany us on school trips to the Bronx Zoo, always sneaking us candy. I hug them both at once.

They welcome me inside. It hurts to see an apartment so different from the one I saw my friends grow up in: the walls are beige, not rust orange; the windows have bars, like a prison cell; the TV in the living room is gigantic, not the flat screen Mr. Lake won from a sweepstakes last year. The game consoles are all still here, but all of Kenneth’s trivia and soccer games aren’t. The cat-shaped clock Kyle gave Kenneth for their tenth birthday isn’t hanging in the living room like it was in the last apartment. It really is like Kenneth never existed.

“You want some iced tea?” Mr. Lake offers.

“Just water, please.” Iced tea brings back another memory: of Saturday mornings over at the old Lake apartment. We had cereal in bowls of iced tea because we all don’t like milk.

She brings me the water and they sit across from me.

“How are you both doing?” I ask.

“Do you want the truth?” Mr. Lake replies.

I nod, knowing I’m about to regret it.

“Hurts every day,” Mrs. Lake chimes in. “There’s no forgetting. You see Kyle, and you expect big brother Kenneth to be tailing after him. There are still mornings where I almost ask Kyle to wake his brother up. It doesn’t matter that it’s been ten months or that we’re in a new home. I can never believe I lost one of my boys.”

Mr. Lake stays quiet. He used to make jokes about how Kyle isn’t actually his own person, just an alternate-universe version of Kenneth-gone-wrong.