Chapter Twenty One
I did everything I was supposed to do; everything I had planned on to get my wish for normal, but it left me wanting. Nub’s car turned the corner and disappeared from view and a notion plunged into my emptiness that good-byes help prepare us for death, each one a small rehearsal.
Entertaining such a thought made me miss our days of mindlessness and rowdiness even more than I had during the peak of our reunion with it the night before; the part before Soren had shown up and turned our roar into a stutter. I never had so many friends before, much less ones who could get me out of my head, and now I was losing them in a steady procession, each departure sending me further back into solitude and the over-examined life it fostered.
I looked around the hushed block, all the doors shut, the inhabitants sleeping late or dozing in front of the television or doing something virtual on their computer, and I wondered why they bothered putting away the party supplies every night, since the grills and coolers and speakers would be wheeled right out again. I suspected the practice lent some dignity to their lost summer. Nobody was going to drive through our neighborhood and see artifacts from a party that people were too lazy to clean up after. It was just us. And it was heartening to think that our parents had not totally forfeited the impulse for maintenance and routine. Even if they were just paranoid that the banks would come after them over any damage done to the houses, that still implied a level of responsibility.
The Fourth of July was the next day, and in light of all the concern being demonstrated over appearances, I imagined the date held more significance for a lot of the remaining residents above and beyond its traditional meaning, that they were holding out for one last blowout before bailing, saving their last party for when everyone else for thousands of miles was partying, too, and doing so out of pride, not to bury their shame. Then they would rejoin the workforce and move to a place where they could pay someone rent at the end of each month as proof they belonged there, for while the clean street and driveways could verify their civility to themselves, “upkeep” was not a very inspiring purpose. They needed to feel useful again.
My parents did not contribute any evidence in support of my premise. They were quite the contrarians, actually, at least when it came to the part about moving. They had been discussing when they would go back to work, but appeared content to live free of rent (and mortgage) for as long as possible. If the Fourth was to be the last party for some, it wouldn’t be for Mom and Dad, even if that meant drinking alone together on the weekends for the duration of our stay.
While there was something rather maudlin about their determination, be it steeped in cheapness or stubbornness, there was also good news buried inside their pact: each day the Sheriff’s Department didn’t show up to enforce an eviction notice brought me one day closer to High School Town with Miggy. And once the school year started, it wouldn’t matter when they moved, as I could make my case that transferring schools would be one more trauma they would be inflicting on me, one more than I could handle.
Realizing the high value of the guilt I had access to, and that my last remaining friend was my best one, helped me punch through the gloom that hung in the air left behind by Nub’s car.
I walked through the front gate to pay Miggy a visit, turning our lark from last night into tradition. No more scaling fences and burrowing through tunnels. I passed by the camera, deliberately paying it no heed, but couldn’t resist leaning back and blowing it a kiss for old time’s sake.
The Barrio was just as quiet as The Ranch, but for a different reason: the adults were at work. However much their recent spate of partying was imitative of the adults on our side of the wall, they were still limited on the number of days they could do so.
The relentless wind that powered through the valley always had a more cinematic effect on The Barrio when it stood dormant; the dust on its paths swirled in miniature twisters, the loose ends on the homes creaked and whined, and its many holes provided a chance for the gusts to whistle through them. The tightness and smooth surfaces of The Ranch offered little opportunity for the wind to create any drama; all it could do was irritate.
I knocked on Miggy’s door and Lourdes answered. The day was getting better by the moment. She smiled and I barely heard her say, “Hey, Nick. It’s been a while.”
Seeing her didn’t make me nervous, though. It inspired me. “Could you tell Miggy ‘2442’?”
“Um…” she waited for an explanation.
“It’s the code to our front gate.”
“Well look at you, gunning for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
“Yeah. The one for Physics is too hard. So you’ve got the day off, huh?”
“Every Wednesday.”
“Damn. Seriously?”
She looked confused. “Yes.”
“If I’d known that, I’d have been here every Wednesday.”
“Putting on some moves, too,” she laughed. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Time, Lourdes,” it felt great to talk to her again. “There’s not much time left. There never is, but I’ve been forced to learn that at a very young age.”
“Miggy!” she called into the house. “Would you come take this weirdo off my hands?”
She held the door open and I walked inside just as Miggy entered the main room from the hall.
“Caught me,” he said. “I was gonna pretend I wasn’t home.”
I noticed their grandmother wasn’t in her chair or in the kitchen and asked where she was.
“The cats ate her,” Miggy said.
“Miggy…” Lourdes wearily protested.
“Didn’t even notice for a while,” he continued. “We figured she was under the pile of cat hair.”
And on it went for the rest of the afternoon. Their grandmother was spending a few weeks with one of her other sons who lived a few valleys away, so we had the house to ourselves. When we reached a lull in our goofiness, I professed my gratitude at having them as friends, and my excitement over my parents’ freeloading since it appeared to be delivering us to High School Town. We then seriously considered whom we might focus on as potential landlords. Lourdes reminded us of how best to appeal to them before breaking out the yearbook. I appreciated how much more willing she was to provide not just advice but specific marks this time around. Her interest in helping us find a place had me hoping, as unlikely as it was, that we could room in the same house with her, but when she mentioned that she had a deal worked out with one of her friends on student council, she said nothing about including us in the living arrangements.
I invited them to the Fourth of July party the following night. I was embarrassed that the wall had become so much more insurmountable since our parents took to the streets. I thought maybe The Barrio would be having a party, too, but it was during the week, and schedules on this side were not so much affected by holidays as they were by how much work needed to be done. Lourdes was working during the day and was going to stay in town, but Miggy agreed to come over.
Due to intermittent dance contests and wrestling matches and snack breaks, our strategizing and philosophizing did not stay in one place for long. Some sessions were conducted outside in their yard, others inside the house, either sprawled in the main room or standing around the kitchen, and we had music playing the whole time, so we didn’t hear the gun shots. We just heard the screaming; screams that sounded as though they were coming from a little girl.
We went outside to see what was going on and saw Dulce running away from the The Ranch. I was surprised to discover her as the source of the screams. The sounds coming out of her reminded me of the princess sleeping bag I had seen in Shay’s empty house.
Dulce saw us and veered in our direction.
“Somebody tried to shoot me!” she cried as she reached us. “Please let me in!”
Lourdes led her inside as Dulce continued to gasp. “Nobody’s home at my house. Is there anyone behind me?”
Miggy ducked outside and came right bac
k in. “Nobody,” he reported.
“Someone tried to shoot you?” Lourdes sat her down on the couch in the main room and rubbed her back.
“I was climbing a fence to go see Chris,” she started to calm down, still breathing heavily. “One of the empty houses. The one I go through to get to the other house we use.”
“Use for what?” asked Lourdes, who then quickly figured it out before Dulce could answer. “Never mind,” she shook off her previous question. “So what happened next?”
“I was almost over the fence,” Dulce sniffed. “I was like balancing on the top, and I heard a shot, like a firecracker. It scared me, and I fell into the yard of the house. Then I heard another shot and the grass near me, like, exploded. The grass is all tall and dry from nobody living there, and the shot knocked a bunch of it over. I figured out what was happening and got real scared. I couldn’t move. Another shot blew over some more grass, and I didn’t know what to do…” she started to re-live the moment, it seemed, and looked terrified. “I thought if I go over the fence, then I’ll be right up there like a sitting duck, but I wanted to get back home, so I just did it. I climbed the fence as fast as I could and ran back here, and right when I started running a shot kicked up the dirt to the side of me and I started screaming, so I don’t know if there were any other shots.”
Now that she was finished screaming, running, and telling the story, she started crying.
Lourdes hugged her and asked Miggy to call the Sheriff’s Department.
“Tell them to go to Soren’s house,” I said. “I’ll give you the address once you’ve got them on the phone.”
“You sure?” Miggy asked as he was about to pick up the phone.
“Who else would it be?” I replied.
“I know the guy’s a tool,” Miggy said. “But you need more proof than that.”
I glanced at Dulce hunched over on the couch with Lourdes patting her on the back and looking as though her arm was getting tired.
“He showed me the room that Dulce and Chris have been using,” I said, watching as Dulce stopped rocking back and forth and sat upright. “It’s like his inspiration for thinking that your neighbors around here are trying to take over Rancho Hacienda.”
“What the fuck?” Dulce barked in my direction.
“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” I quipped.
“Didn’t you tell him the truth?” she said.
“I tried. But he’s got a raging hate boner for The Barrio and it makes him see what he wants to see. I tried talking to Chris, too, to warn him. But he wouldn’t listen to me, either.”
“Thanks to his own raging boner,” Miggy added.
He and I then waggled imaginary erections at each other in a mock fight, complete with clashing-sword sound effects.
“You think this is funny?” Dulce hollered. “That pendejo tried to shoot me!”
“Would one of you idiots just call the police,” Lourdes scolded us, but I could tell she was trying not to laugh.
Miggy picked up where he left off and dialed 911. I could tell that Dulce was glaring at us while I waited to provide Miggy the address when needed. Once I did so, I got up the nerve to look back at her. Her eyes were indeed trained on us, but she was unable to fight off the tears that were undermining her usual hard stare. I tried to contribute some verbal comfort to go along with the physical that Lourdes was providing.
“I’m sorry about what happened, Dulce,” I said. “I tried to explain the situation to him, the guy who was shooting at you. I really did.”
“How did you know it was our spot?” she asked me, sounding embarrassed.
“Who else would it be?” I shrugged.
“Maybe some of those freaky parents of yours over there. Don’t tell me none of them aren’t sneaking around on each other.”
“With princess sleeping bags and vampire candles?”
She wanted to get mad at me, but surrendered to a little bit of laughter instead.
Miggy hung up the phone and announced that a deputy was on his way.
“In how many days?” Lourdes joked.
“They said in about a half an hour,” Miggy answered. “There’s some dude staking out meth labs by that pimento farm on the way to High School Town.”
“They told you that?” Lourdes asked.
“No, but what else would they be doing around that dump?”
Dulce tried to remain the center of attention. “Do you think he was really trying to shoot me?” she blurted out in my direction.
“If he was, I don’t think he would have missed,” I said. “He loves spending time with his guns, so I imagine he’s a pretty good shot. He was just trying to scare you.”
“Why didn’t Chris say anything?” she said out loud, to no one in particular. Lourdes, Miggy, and I exchanged looks to gauge whether it was necessary for one of us to answer. I was about to say something, figuring it was my responsibility since I was the one who had spoken with Chris, but Dulce forged on before I could give it a shot.
“Pussy,” she said, and we all winced. “That’s all he wants from me. He wants it so bad he makes me run through the fucking border patrol while he sits back and waits on it. Waits for my pu--”
I interrupted her before she could say it again.
“That’s really not the case,” I said a little too loudly. “I’m pretty certain he just didn’t want to alarm you. He loves you.”
She looked at me sharply. “Did he tell you that?”
“Well…” I wasn’t sure what to make of her reaction. “Yes.”
She clutched her head and let the back of the couch catch her.
Miggy and Lourdes weren’t sure what to make of her response, either. “Hasn’t he told you?” Lourdes asked.
“Yes,” Dulce said as she stared up at the ceiling. “All the time. Guys have the biggest mouths.”
“He didn’t tell me anything else,” I assured her.
“It’s between us,” she railed. “It’s private. What we have is special.”
“You’re acting like talking about love is the same as talking about sex,” Miggy said.
“If he can’t keep his mouth shut about one, how can he keep his mouth shut about the other?” she growled.
“Sorry, I just don’t see it,” Miggy pressed on. “I don’t see what’s so bad about Chris telling someone he loves you.”
“Because people will laugh,” Dulce said, a slight crack in her voice.
Miggy heard the struggle and fell silent. We all did.
“Because no one will believe him.”
“We do,” Lourdes offered. “We believe him.”
Dulce snorted and put up her defenses again, though she spoke quietly when she addressed me.
“What was your reaction when he said he loved me?”
I really wished she hadn’t asked me that. I hesitated and she capitalized on the pause.
“Of course,” she said.
“Well, I didn’t laugh,” I defended myself.
“But you didn’t believe him.”
“I don’t believe anyone who says they’re in love when they’re in ninth grade.”
Lourdes appreciated that line. She provided an agreeable grunt and Dulce looked at her as though betrayed. Then she trained her pained expression on me again.
“I’ll bet you didn’t flinch even for a second when Blaine said he loved Lana.”
I took a moment to relish the chance to tarnish Blaine before responding. “Blaine never told me he loved Lana.”
“Seriously?” Dulce was stunned.
“All he wanted to do was tell me all the things they did, and I didn’t want to hear it.”
She looked at me with hatred that I assumed was intended for Blaine.
“You were right about him,” she said.
“I never said anything that bad about him to you,” I reminded her. “Only that he was popular because he was rich. Or pretending to be.”
“Yeah, well he was pretending to get it on with Lan
a, too. They didn’t do nothing, except for him begging all the time, telling her he loved her and then trying to unzip her pants.”
Now I was the one who was stunned.
“He told it to you all upside down,” she continued. “All there was to tell was how many times he said he loved her, not how many times they got down.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nonetheless I was reeling a bit. I was more disappointed in myself than I was upset with Blaine; disappointed I took him for his word, quite possibly because the thought of Lana doing something to someone, even if it was Blaine, was a turn-on. And refusing to hear the stories only made me a hypocrite; I could compromise my thoughts of Lana while assuming a righteous stance. I wanted an excuse to talk to Lana. Maybe Dulce had it wrong.
“Speaking of Lana,” I said. “Do you want one of us to go get her?”
“We don’t talk right now,” Dulce shook her head. “She turned everything around and said I was wrong to do what I do with Chris, just because she didn’t want to do much with Blaine. Acted like she was all religious and was waiting till she got married.”
“Maybe she is,” I said.
“She’s just scared,” Dulce countered.
“She’s smart,” Lourdes added.
“And I’m dumb?” Dulce was now thoroughly disenchanted with her one-time comforter from but a few minutes ago.
“No,” Lourdes explained. “It sounds like Chris treats you nice. Not like Blaine.”
“That’s what I told her,” Dulce lightly slapped Lourdes’ arm, as though they were old friends once again. “But she goes and get all superior on me.”
“Her feelings were hurt,” Miggy chimed in.
“I didn’t say nothing to her,” Dulce shot back. “She started it.”
“By Blaine,” Miggy clarified.
“And he’s good at it,” I added. “Very good at hurting people’s feelings.”
Everyone looked at me. They seemed to be waiting for an explanation. But I had none. I could tell them what happened between us, but that’s all. And I didn’t want to. I wanted to put him behind me for now, as far behind as possible, for I had a feeling he would go far in life, and I didn’t want to think that was the way the world worked. If I couldn’t lie to others very well to make it in that world, I could at least lie to myself to make my place in it bearable.
I changed the subject by asking Dulce if she wanted me to get Chris instead, or wanted to call him. She was still hesitant to cross into Ranch Ranch territory, so Lourdes and Miggy told her she could use the phone.
We didn’t want to hear the story again, so we turned on the television while Dulce bowed in the corner of their kitchen and replayed the events for Chris and seduced every bit of guilt and sympathy from him that she could. Neither Miggy nor Lourdes asked me any follow-up questions about Blaine; they either realized I didn’t want to elaborate, found Blaine’s crappiness obvious enough, or didn’t care. So we sat there and depended on the television to keep us from asking each other anymore questions for which we had no answers.
Dulce eventually came out of the kitchen. She seemed to be thrusting her heels into the floor with each step, and it felt as though the thin foundation of the house may not hold. She fell into a vacant spot on the couch and joined us in our inertia.
“Everything okay?” Lourdes finally asked.
“Yeah,” she answered.
“Is he coming over?” Lourdes asked.
“Nah.”
“Are you going over there?”
“Nah.”
Lourdes, Miggy, and I exchanged looks as she stared at the screen. I spoke up.
“Why don’t I go over and see if the deputy’s been there. Make sure Soren’s been warned. Then maybe you can go over.”
“Okay,” she said.
I reminded Miggy about tomorrow night, told Lourdes how great it was to see her again, and said to Dulce I was sorry for what happened. I lingered and tried to coax her out of the house with me, swinging my arms as I stood there and bouncing on my heels, but she didn’t budge.
“Got anything to eat?” she asked Lourdes and Miggy.
And with that I set off across what I hoped had been re-classified as a de-militarized zone.
My curiosity as to whether Soren would shoot at me too, should I climb a fence in the wrong direction, almost made me forget my vow to always use the front gate. I veered right in the alley and headed for the street that our gate shared with The Barrio. Upon reaching it, I noticed in the distance across the fallow fields that a Sheriff’s Department patrol car was driving toward the freeway. I turned left and walked beside the high, whitewashed cement wall, and past the faded sign we had battered so thoroughly while waiting for the bus, the sign that advertised the “Final Phase”.
Nothing appeared out of the ordinary as the gates parted for me and shushed closed after I passed through them. There was no evidence of an event that had left people lurking in their front yards gossiping. Perhaps it was still too early in the day, and no one had heard the shots above the volume of their electronics, or had seen the patrol car since they weren’t in the habit of looking out windows that rarely revealed anything new on the other side. Maybe the wind had blown the sounds away from the neighborhood and into the valley, carried the gunshots into the hills.
Soren was outside, though. He seemed to be waiting for me. He stood in front of his house, several doors down, looking in my direction. I avoided looking at him and went inside. Mom was monitoring the microwave oven as something slowly spun around inside it.
“Will you be joining us for dinner?” she asked me.
“No barbeque tonight?” I answered with a question of my own.
“Everyone thought it would be a good idea to take a night off and get ready for the big bash tomorrow.”
“All right, then. Dinner it is. Thanks.”
We were about to take our leave of each other until dinner, it seemed, but then she added: “Soren was just here looking for you.”
I wasn’t surprised. “Yeah, I saw him out front.”
“What did he want?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t talk to him.”
“I still don’t get it,” she shook her head. “He’s not that much older than you, but has a family and some life experience. I would think he’d be a great role model. Someone to hang around.”
“Did you notice anything odd before he came over?” I asked her.
“No.”
“Sounds? Unfamiliar cars in the street?”
“No. Why?”
The doorbell rang.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll get it.”
I answered the door.
Soren greeted me with, “Were you over the wall?”
I greeted him with, “You’re lucky you’re not in jail right now.”
“What was the reaction over there?” he asked.
“Shock. Panic.”
“Did you call the Sheriff’s office?”
“My friend did.”
He smiled and gestured toward his house. “Let me show you something.”
I sized up the situation for a moment, then leaned back into the house. “How soon till dinner, Mom?”
“Half an hour, maybe,” her voice carried in from the kitchen.
“I’m going over to Soren’s. Be right back.”
“That’s great,” she said, and clearly meant it.
I had never been to Soren’s house before, and never looked through any of his windows, either. His arrival had not only coincided with the diminishing returns on my voyeuristic reality checking, but once it became clear that he was spending some of his nights desperately searching for signs of the apocalypse, I did not want to inadvertently cross paths with him in a dark backyard, at least not without a bulletproof vest on.
He put a finger to his lips as we entered and whispered that his daughter had fallen asleep on the walk they had taken around the block after his previous visit to my house. She was slumped in the car seat
that he had detached from the stroller and set on the coffee table in the living room, her head tilted to one side with her lips puckered into a sleepy pout. She certainly was cute. As I grinned at her he murmured that his wife was pulling a shift at the hospital. Upon mentioning her it occurred to me that his wife was clearly in charge of the décor of the house. It was filled with furniture that was designed to appeal to a wife’s sense of nest-building without making the husband feel completely neutered. Framed photographs of the three of them were perched on every tabletop and hung on every wall, each frame unique, and each photo pretty much the same: beaming husband and wife on each side of a baffled baby. They reminded me of the pictures my family used to have in our old house, which we had stopped taking when I started to look like a kid who spent a lot of time in his room, and which we did not unpack after moving in to our new house.
Even the entertainment room was pretty standard-issue young couple. He led me there after we had looked at the baby for what seemed to me about thirty seconds too long. The room was decked with more pictures of themselves and their daughter and a couple of those old-fashioned looking French theatre posters framed on each side of the equipment center. I had expected Confederate flags and Nazi paraphernalia, at least a heavy metal band poster or two, and chastised myself for thinking in stereotypes.
He took his phone out of his back pocket and connected it to the television.
“I want to make sure you can get a good look,” he said a bit more loudly, now that we had some room between us and the baby. “I took the bug screen off the window in our bedroom upstairs so I can lean out and get more of a panoramic view,” he narrated as he tapped and slid his fingers around the front of his phone.
A video of the stark valley behind the fence line popped onto the screen in front of us, obviously shot from the window he had just described. He panned across the expanse, past the train tracks, past the remains of our bike race course, past the mounds over which we had jumped and off of which Blaine and Soren had shot cans. He held the camera phone as steadily as he could, reaching the point where it faced the fence line, slowly aiming it back and forth along the border.
“Do you do this often?” I asked as we watched the product of his surveillance.
“No. I usually just set the camera on the windowsill and review it later,” he said, keeping his focus on the screen. “I got lucky with this one.”
The perspective swung back in the direction of The Barrio, and he seemed to find a visual cue he had been waiting for to begin some prepared commentary:
“Even if it was just a couple of kids using that room, like you claim, kids like the ones who were in our neighborhood shooting bottle rockets with you last night…”
“I’ve known those guys since we moved here…”
“….that’s how it starts,” he talked over me, adhering to his speech. “Like I said. First it’s the kids, then the adults.”
In addition to rehearsing his spiel, he had apparently also timed it, for right at that moment Dulce came into view. She was walking toward the fence of a vacated yard, overgrown with weeds just as she described. I was so flabbergasted that he had taken video of the incident that I almost failed to process what he had just said.
“Adults?” I countered.
“Yes,” he said, thinking nothing of it. But a moment later he looked over at me suspiciously. “That’s not a grown woman?”
“That’s the girl who uses the room with her boyfriend. I told you about her.”
He turned his attention back to the video. We watched Dulce struggle to scale the fence, clutching the top of it while her feet slid on the boards as though running in place.
“I thought you were exaggerating,” he said.
“Nope.”
His disbelief drew him closer to the screen.
“So the boyfriend…” he started to speculate but wasn’t sure how to complete the sentence.
“You might like him. I think I mentioned before that he’s into vampires. He could be your new gun buddy.”
“Vampire fans aren’t like that,” he said, snapping out of his haze of realization. “They’re more artsy.”
I was about to question his claim, but realized Chris did adhere to that stereotype. We watched Dulce finally discover a method. She hurled one leg up to the top of the fence, and mustered up the other one after letting it dangle for several seconds. According to the description Dulce had given us at Miggy’s house, we were about to reach the part when shots were fired. I started to wonder if he had captured that as well, just as the screen went blank.
“I’m not so sure my wife would work that hard to make time with me,” he grinned. “Maybe when we were first dating.”
“You didn’t film the shooting?”
“I needed both hands to hold my weapon steady. I got enough on video, anyway.”
“Enough of what?”
“Proof.”
“Proof?”
“Of trespassing.”
“That’s not your house.”
“Doesn’t matter. The deputy said I was within my rights. I showed him the video.”
“Shooting someone trespassing on someone else’s property is okay?”
“I’m a Good Samaritan. They named a law after people like me.”
I needed a moment to gather my thoughts.
“I don’t believe it,” I finally said.
“Call the Sheriff’s Department. Again. I’ll give you the deputy’s name.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I explained. “I’m saying, okay, it’s your right. But does that make it right?”
“It’s a violation of property. And who knows what they might do once they’re in.”
“Yes. Who knows. Better kill them just in case.”
“I had no intention of killing her. And the deputy understood that. I just wanted to scare her.”
“But you could have.”
“Not a chance. I’m a good shot.”
“I mean it was an option. You could have if you wanted to.”
He shrugged. “Not worth it. The trial would cost a fortune.”
My disbelief imploded into a speechless glare. Soren could not help but notice my reaction.
“I’m just trying to be rational,” he said. “People get so emotional about these kinds of things.”
I stammered down a couple of paths before finding one I thought might work. “Would any judge be allowed to keep their job if they sentenced someone to death for stealing something from their neighbor’s yard?”
“You keep mentioning death and killing,” he replied. “I would never shoot to kill without first assessing the threat. No responsible gun owner would.”
“You couldn’t even assess the age of the person you just shot at.”
“That’s different.”
“And a lot easier, I would think.”
“It doesn’t matter. Like I said, I’m a good shot. I can wing someone if I have to. Shoot to injure.”
“Life is not an action movie, Soren!” I was yelling now.
“But I’m an action guy,” he said, maintaining a level of calm that I imagined was another way to convince himself that he was the reasonable one in our debate.
Waking the baby with my bellow didn’t help my cause, either. He seemed appreciative rather than upset that I had startled her and made her cry.
“See what happens?” he said.
Then he left to go hide behind his daughter again. He made a verbal show out of cooing to her in the next room.
I stared at the floor for a short while before exiting, neither of us exchanging a word.
Mom asked me how things went over at Soren’s and I told her exactly how things went. She didn’t say anything in return, but I saw her thinking, and tried to remember the last time I saw her doing that. She silently finished preparing dinner and asked me to tell Dad what happened when he came down to join us. I did so and then he started thinking. They looked at each other and thought some more. This was more
fun than the day we went to the coast. I started eating and watched them.
“Should we talk to him?” Mom decided to ask Dad.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I’m glad he’s keeping an eye on the neighborhood, but I suppose it might be a good idea to let him know we’re keeping an eye on him.”
“It does seem like he’s maybe getting a bit…over-zealous.” Mom agreed.
This was wonderful. They were openly questioning a previously-held position in my presence. I felt so mature. And not the kind of maturity I had to fake when they broke down in front of me, or had to swallow as I listened to them through their door and learned they didn’t always think very highly of me. This time it was mutual. We were equal parts of a conversation. I challenged their point of view and they took it seriously. Dad even joked that perhaps Soren wasn’t the only one who had been going overboard in his pursuits, and Mom and I chuckled knowingly.
Self-deprecating humor to boot! I was falling in love with them all over again. Their realization that they didn’t have to know everything to earn my devotion had finally caught up with my discovery of their limitations. The pressure was off. Our dinner that evening was like one long exhale. We didn’t eat and talk so much as we breathed. I asked them what some of the funniest stories of the summer were so far, and they told me tales of themselves and other parents making drunken asses of themselves, shared secrets of which parents had fallen into one-night stands with each other, none of which I had seen through any windows because they tended to take place during the parties before I would commence peeping, and even if I had witnessed one, I probably wouldn’t have known since I didn’t have a strong sense of who was married to whom.
When Mom and Dad asked me what kinds of mischief us kids had been making during our parentless phase that led up to the parent-ridden summer climax, I did not disclose the voyeurism, but spared nothing when it came to our group activities. (Which I rationalized was what they had asked for. I alone had engaged in the spying, and they had asked about the misadventures of us kids as a group. Hence, I was still indulging our newfound honesty.)
We then argued good-naturedly over who was the bigger group of idiots, the children or the parents. I naturally claimed it was them because they should know better by their age. They countered with no claims of superiority, and instead reasoned it should be a draw because the idiocy that starts in childhood never really goes away, it just goes through periods of dormancy.
I couldn’t recall ever feeling quite so satisfied as my head touched down on my pillow that night. As if my brain required at least one concern to keep itself anchored, however, I noted that we had all refrained from openly attaching any morals to the stories we shared, even though they were clearly as much confessional as they were entertainment. At least that’s how I heard them. That’s how I remember them. Maybe they were just funny stories. Maybe all we had to atone for was whether we told them well, whether we got a laugh, and any message imparted was created by the listener.