XL

by Scott Brown

  Anyway, the assembled mouth holes ate, and didn’t do much talking. When they tried, results were sketchy.

  “How was everybody’s day?” Brian actually said, out loud and for real.

  “Nothing,” Drew returned. Then he pushed away, got up. “Going to bed, g’night.”

  “Uh. Good…night?” Laura said, watching him go.

  Brian leaned over. “What’s going on?”

  “Y’know. Stress. Sweet Sixteen’s coming up….”

  Brian peered at me with diagnostic eyes. “Did something…happen?”

  “Huh?”

  “Between you two?”

  Hahahahahahaha…Oh, Brian! Where to begin? I thought of Drew’s pointing finger: Right at your head, brother.

  “No. Just, I dunno, a stressful time, I guess.”

  “That word again,” said Brian. “Stress.”

  “Puts it on himself,” I sniffed. “He doesn’t really have anything to worry about. Sixteen’s a dance, it’s just Portola again, and the Eight’ll be either Salazar or West Mira Mesa, and they’re both weak sauce—”

  “I’m not talking about Drew.” Brian put down his fork. “I mean: I’m not just talking about Drew. I’m talking about everything that’s been going on.”

  “Uh-oh. What are the chimps up to now? Are they running numbers?”

  But Brian was really staring me down, giving me the ol’ Recess is over. Now I saw: he was going to use this awkwardness to pile on overdue awkwardness. Parenting deferred is never parenting denied.

  “Will. I’m going to your appointments from now on. It’s not a request.”

  I put down my fork. Gently. I didn’t want to look bratty. Even though I felt bratty. But nobody likes a bratty giant. Only the gentle kind, the low-talking, no-sudden-moves kind. “So…you called Dr. Helman?”

  “She called me.”

  “What’d she tell you? That something’s wrong? Because she keeps telling me everything’s fine.”

  “She told me the same thing,” said Brian. “Look, Will, I’ve been pretty relaxed about all this, because at first I…I didn’t want to add to any…general hysteria—”

  “Hey, don’t side-eye me,” Laura warned him, “when you say general hysteria.”

  “I didn’t! I wasn’t!”

  “We give you guys a lot of leash,” Laura said to me, “we know that. But this is a pretty…unique time….”

  Brian put his hands together, as if saying grace. “If we’re continuing these hormone treatments—”

  “Oh, we’re continuing them,” I almost snapped. So much for brat suppression. “I mean, unless you want to put a vaulted ceiling on this place.”

  “Will? Hear me out. I should be there, and I want to be there.”

  “You already know everything, you know everything I know, which is nothing, and you know everything they know, which is also nothing, but with data to back it up.”

  “I want to be there. I want to be…”

  He trailed off.

  Because he heard it then. The sound. The cry. The call of the wild. I heard it, too. So did Laura.

  “…Monica?…Monica!”

  There are certain sounds that’ll stop you in your tracks. One of those is that of a largish-sounding human male in your front yard, at night, calling your friend’s name. A largish-sounding human male you did not invite.

  “…Monica!”

  I recognized the voice. It sounded like a death rattle in a crushed beer can.

  Laura—who didn’t know that voice the way I did—was at the door before I could stop her. “Laura, wait—”

  But the door was open already, and there he was, in a mist of Beam: Martin Eddy, navy pilot, retired. Looking drunk and defeated and nonspecifically at war with his surroundings, and that wasn’t strange. Looking that way on our front stoop, after dark? Was strange. Martin had on his old Miramar flight jacket and, for some reason, aviator shades. They were crooked, or maybe bent, like he’d put them on by falling face-first into an open box of aviator shades.

  Martin Eddy (6′2″) was not a small man.

  “Quick question: where’n the good goddamn is my daughter?”

  “Martin,” said Brian, stepping into the doorway, “you don’t seem well, buddy, let’s get you—”

  Martin shook his head vigorously, like a horse with a brain parasite.

  “You think I can’t tail a city bus?” Martin called into the house. His voice was still calm, but there was something swollen under it. “I was a fighter pilot, honey.”

  “Martin,” said Brian, in the voice he used to calm big cats, “I think there may be a misunderstanding. Monica isn’t here.”

  “See, that’s a misunderstanding. ’Cause I just saw her climb in your boy’s window.” He jerked his head at me. “Not this one, the other. Your little one.”

  “Go home, Dad.”

  Her voice was muffled by Drew’s bedroom door, but audible.

  Ah. So Monica was in Drew’s room. This surprising yet also not surprising fact sent a sour thrill through my GI tract.

  “Send my daughter out, would you, good buddy? She left before I could explain….”

  “Sleep it off!”

  I heard the door to Drew’s room open, and I knew this was about to get a lot worse.

  I could see Brian knew it, too. Monica was eighteen. She could do what she pleased. Martin was drunk. He could do what he pleased.

  So Brian Daughtry made a keeper move.

  He walked through the open front door, turned to me briefly, and said—

  “Lock the door, Will.”

  And because he’d said it to me in keeper voice, I did exactly what he told me. I shot the dead bolt.

  I could hear them talking on the lawn.

  Laura got out her phone. By then, Monica was standing in the dining room, hoodie and jeans pulled over pajamas. The clothes she’d fled her house in, clearly.

  “Don’t call 911,” said Monica. “Please. He’s…he just needs to sleep it off.”

  But Laura just shook her head and stepped over toward the kitchen, keeping the phone clapped to her ear. I heard her speaking in a low voice to someone on the other end.

  Drew appeared behind her. “Where’s Brian?”

  “Outside. Talking to him.”

  “I’m going out there.”

  “No, you’re not,” Laura said, in a voice that actually sat Drew down at the kitchen serving bar.

  We heard murmurs outside. Male voices transacting something, it wasn’t clear what.

  Then sirens. Distant, but nearing.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” Monica said to Laura, through her hand.

  Laura looked confused. “They told me someone had already called. Maybe the neighbors…”

  Monica looked at Drew. Drew looked away.

  “No,” Monica said. “It wasn’t the neighbors.” Her voice was several degrees below zero. For the first time since one-on-one, I actually felt bad for Drew. He’d done the right thing. But he’d done it on the sly, because he was afraid of Monica. The 911 call she’d forgive him for, eventually. But the fear? I wasn’t so sure.

  “It’s okay!” Brian called from outside. “We’re okay.”

  There was another sound. Coughing. The vanquished-sounding kind, the kind you associated with a fine mist of blood and bad news from the doc. It was Martin.

  Monica’d already turned and headed back down the hall. She picked a room that wasn’t Drew’s—the old computer room—went into it, and shut the door.

  Drew put his head in his hands.

  “Just give her a minute,” Laura said to Drew.

  She went to the door of the computer room. Knocked gently, announced herself, and entered.

  I wasn’t sure what the New Plan and its many vague
rules said about this situation. What was I supposed to do? Which room did I belong in? I was standing in the foyer like some gigantic useless weather vane on a windless day. Which friend was I allowed to comfort?

  Maybe no plan can withstand impact from a Martin Eddy, from an object of such size and sadness.

  Drew sucked on his teeth. I sent up a flare: “Hey, man, I think—”

  Drew went into the bathroom, and SLAM! went the door.

  He was in there awhile.

  Red and blue lights painted the foyer, made the wallpaper dance epileptically. San Diego’s finest had arrived. The Crisis was ov—

  THUMP!

  The front door rattled in its frame. A hard impact. Body-hard. Had Martin—

  “Dad?”

  I was alone in the foyer, studying the hallway chandelier I was now basically at eye level with. My father was out there, protecting us from a scary drunk. But I was bigger than my father, bigger and stronger. And I was doing nothing.

  So I flipped the dead bolt, jerked open the door, and saw…nothing.

  Then: Brian. Safe. Over by the curb, leaning into the window of a police cruiser, saying, “He’s a family friend….”

  And then, right next to me, in the portico, I saw Martin. At first I thought: Has he been shot? Tased?

  No. He’d just fallen against the door, and was now trying to right himself against a portico column. He looked deflated under his lumpy flight jacket, bald spot lolling like a haywire satellite dish. A little kid wearing his dad’s clothes—maybe that’s how all grown men look when they can’t stand up straight anymore and keep the illusion going. Martin’s dopey aviators were sprawled on the bricks a few inches from his hand, like a crushed insect. Without them, his unguarded eyes were the pink of an albino lab rabbit.

  “Hey. Big guy.”

  I wondered if I should help him up. Decided he seemed comfortable how he was.

  “Before I grab a ride,” said Martin Eddy, “with those fine gentlemen in uniform…I wanna have a talk with you. Who knows? We might not get a chance to conversate again.” He fixed those pink eyes on me. “I want you to know something. About your friend. Story of my birthday.”

  “Uh. You lost me, Martin.” I was in full humoring mode. I’d decided to treat him like a concussion victim. Keep ’em talking!

  Martin didn’t need prompting. He was on autopilot. “My birthday…few years back…she took me to the beach. Beautiful day. Sweet gesture. Picnic, barbacoa from my favorite truck, cupcakes with my name on ’em—very nice celebration, all the trimmings. Well. Not quite all the trimmings, and that’s why I brought…just this one little sixer, that’s it, slipped it in the cooler under the ice, big deal. But she sees it? And it’s freakin’ Armageddon. She’s screaming mad, You promised! You said you wouldn’t! This is why Mom left! Blah blah blah…”

  Martin was knocking a little rhythm against the doorjamb as he spoke.

  “And she gets so mad…she picks up her board…and she runs into the water. Now…this is Black’s, and there’s a warning that day, everybody out of the pond, ’cause the waves are, I dunno, thirty-five feet if they’re an inch. And here she is, fourteen years old, hundred pounds soaking wet, and just to spite me, see, she grabs her board, throws herself on one of these pro-grade waves, like she’s saddling a freakin’ dinosaur. WHAM! Bastard stomps her into the sand, then gives her a wallop with her own board. Had three fins on it, and those things, they’re carbon fiber, they’re like knives….”

  Martin made a claw with his shaky hand. Raked imaginary ribs.

  Slashes. Like a bear had taken a swipe…

  Fourteen? At Black’s? In thirty-five-foot swells? Why hadn’t I heard this story?

  “We go to a clinic, they patch her up—one of those fins was a quarter inch from nicking a lung. ’Nother one coulda severed her spine if things had wiggled a little different. Terrible accident. ’Cept it wasn’t, was it? An accident? She ran in there on purpose. She even ate it on purpose. I watched her flip her board. It wasn’t the wave! She had that thing handled. My girl’s a prodigy. But she kicked out on top, let that thing take her apart. Now…what would you call that?”

  I’m not saying a drunken Martin Eddy was the most reliable source.

  But something about this story rang a whole carillon of bells right down my damned spine.

  “Boy, does that girl get mad when people let her down,” he went on. “You notice that? When our Monica gets mad…well, she takes it out on the closest soul in striking distance. And that always turns out to be…the same…person….”

  Martin coughed, loudly. The sound of a car that wouldn’t start but kept cranking.

  Brian was walking toward us with an officer who didn’t look much older than me and was a foot shorter. “Will, get back inside,” he said.

  Martin was still coughing. Some kind of attack.

  The cop gave me a once-over—Holy shit, is Lurch here gonna be a problem?—then crouched beside Martin and said, “Mr. Eddy? We’ll give you a ride home.”

  Now I saw: Martin wasn’t coughing. He was crying. That’s just what crying sounded like when it came out of the broken thing that was Martin Eddy, fighter pilot.

  * * *

  —

  That’s how Monica Bailarín became our housemate, for a brief and not very sitcommish time.

  She wasn’t into the idea, at first. But she’d never experienced the full-court press from Brian and Laura combined. Unlike Drew and me, they weren’t so easily denied. I mean, she could have, if she wanted to. She was eighteen. But there are forces of nature stronger than legal/technical adulthood, forces stronger even than Monica Bailarín’s tungsten stubbornness.

  Martin Eddy was under house arrest, judge’s orders. He could only come out for treatment and group therapy. A nursing service checked on him three times a week. He was in the system now. That’s what happens when you call the police.

  Monica couldn’t live there anymore, of course.

  At first she’d said, “I’ll camp at BoB.” Because she was still mad at Drew.

  To which Laura answered, “No.” And this was a different kind of no, a no that Monica—raised by Martin Eddy—had never encountered.

  Three days later, we’re all brushing our teeth in the same bathroom.

  Brushing your teeth in proximity to someone is very different from being best friends with that same someone. Brushing your teeth in proximity to someone you once considered your one true love, but who’s now confirmed to be just a best friend—that’s just strange.

  Her smell was everywhere. Every time I sat down on a couch or got an extra pillow from the linen closet, this plume of Monica would rise and wash over me. I started having flashbacks: I was back at BoB on Birthday Night, and we were pitching my lifts off the cliff, into the ocean….

  Here it was. The Plan, writ large, writ now: the three of us never had to say goodbye, good night, see you tomorrow.

  Hooray?

  Monica slept in the computer room. I assumed she snuck out after everyone had gone to bed, slipped into Drew’s room—at least on the nights when they weren’t fighting. Were they still fighting? I didn’t actually know. Also, I didn’t like thinking about scenarios that involved Monica slipping into Drew’s room.

  Every morning, I’d come downstairs, and she’d be in our breakfast nook, reading Leviathan and not eating the oatmeal she’d made. She’d do this until 7:42, then eat all her oatmeal in three feral bites and jump into the Yacht with us.

  Every morning, I’d not-ask about the story Martin told. About Black’s. And the bear swipe on Monica’s back.

  There was less and less talking in the Yacht. Was it because we all saw each other all the time now? Is it what they said about old married couples? The mystery’s gone? On the contrary: everything felt like a mystery, everything and everybody. Two surly mysteries, and
one massive, puzzling medical mystery.

  “When are you gonna be done with Leviathan?” I asked, “You’ve been reading it, like, forever.”

  “I’m never gonna be done with it.” She was looking out the window. “It’s a reference book.”

  That’s all she said, the rest of the morning.

  * * *

  —

  And then, Tuesday night of the second week of this bad sitcom, I came down for my midnight snack (this was not a bad habit, it was a metabolic necessity) and found Monica at the kitchen table, eating yogurt in one of Drew’s old basketball camp T-shirts.

  I was wearing just boxers and a shirt with a cartoon vole on it. The vole was wearing a helmet and carrying a popgun, over a banner that read Vole Patrol. I have no idea what it meant, or was meant to have meant. It was just the kind of shirt you sleep in.

  “Chobani?” Monica asked.

  “Nothankee.” I got out a tub of heavy, gory Bolognese sauce instead. Went at it cold, with a serving spoon. I know: sexy, right?

  Monica watched me eat. I expected a joke. No joke was forthcoming. She just watched me eat meat sauce. She meant nothing by it, but something about the way I was being studied, in my natural habitat, annoyed me enough to ask a question I’d been suppressing.

  “What happened? With your dad?”

  It wasn’t a story Monica had volunteered. I didn’t necessarily expect her to spill now.

  But she did. A little. “I gave an ultimatum. He made a promise. Then he broke it. So I said I was leaving, and he started breaking things. Most of the stuff in my room, to start with. I said, Fine, break everything. And I left. And then he followed me.” She spooned out a dollop of yogurt, let it drop back into her cup again. “Keeps forgetting I’m eighteen.”

  “Well. You can stay here. With us. For however long. Until, I dunno, Irvine.”

  Monica laughed, like that was hilarious.

  “Right,” she said. “The Plan.”

  Was the Plan hilarious now? Had it become a joke, without my knowledge or consent? Wasn’t there something in the Plan about not changing the Plan without my input?

  My inner monologue was coming to a boil. The outer one stayed glassy.