Yes, police were at the door, but not for the reason she feared. Still, Jeff waited for half an hour before finally sneaking outside. Thankfully, he’d parked his car on the street so as not to draw the attention of any curious LDS congregant neighbors.
When Anne finally checked our answering machine and returned the calls from Target, the store’s security chief explained what Marcus had done but said they had let him leave with only a warning when they couldn’t locate his parents. In a way, my mom’s affair had just saved my big brother from having a rap sheet, from then on making it even harder for Marcus to believe her when she said, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Needless to say, Anne was now certain that she was the worst mother in the universe.
Anne hated that she couldn’t even acknowledge Marcus’s crime, much less punish him for it. Problem was, he was old enough to suspect what she was up to; the hotel freedom and unlimited use of Merrill’s car were his rewards for turning a blind eye. Now that unspoken agreement was compromising her ability to parent.
But love can make the most reasonable people keep right on doing the most ludicrous things. So instead of calling the adulterous weekends off, Anne devised a new plan to break up our little crime syndicate. No more hotels. From here on out, we were each to spend our Saturday nights apart, at different friends’ houses. Easy enough for Todd and Marcus, I thought; they had friends and went on sleepovers. I didn’t. I was now the odd man out.
II
By this time, puberty had begun to circle, amping up my crushes into what felt like undying love, and making me all the more motivated to kiss a boy, but failing to deliver a single inch in height or a strand of hair where it actually mattered.
I begged my mom to buy me a Hawaiian button-down shirt like the “cool kids” all had. But this shirt wasn’t for some fraud-show sequel. I genuinely wanted to look good for an impossibly cute boy named Jason, a new kid from New Jersey who had great style, who all the girls swooned over, and who (for reasons I couldn’t yet detect) actually wanted to be my friend.
Mobs of girls would literally chase Jason around the schoolyard at lunchtime. He’d eventually take refuge in the gym toilets, where I most often hid during any social hour. But instead of ignoring me or making fun of me, he actually struck up conversations: about Garbage Pail Kids, the Challenger space shuttle explosion, or Michael Jackson’s burning hair. He even invited me to his house to do homework one afternoon. There I discovered that his father had ditched him too. There I met his struggling mom and his siblings. And there he popped the biggest sixth-grade question of them all—he asked to play a game of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
I nearly suffered a twelve-year-old coronary, but this time I didn’t completely screw things. Instead, I quickly came up with a plan. “Isn’t that more like a sleepover thing?” I asked. And bingo, like Todd and Marcus had with their own friends, I secured a sleepover invite. I now had a place to stay come our first Saturday away from home and out of hotels. But unlike Todd and Marcus, I wasn’t just staying with a friend; I would be with the man of my dreams. All night. And guess what? My mom even agreed to buy me the Hawaiian shirt that would make my dream complete.
When that special night arrived, I put on my new shirt and kissed my mom goodbye. I rode my bike to Jason’s house and dropped my things in his room, but before we settled in for what should have been the best night of my life, Jason suggested we visit our girlfriends. It’s true: we had girlfriends. Not that either of us had ever actually spoken to them, but notes had been passed in class, and Jason had agreed to couple up with a cute brunette if her friend would agree to couple up with me. She mercifully acquiesced. And that was that, my first girlfriend, whom I never said a single word to. Because on our bike ride to meet up with them, Jason suggested, “Hey, let’s take Suicide Hill.”
It was years before I’d meet the hills of San Francisco, so at the time, Suicide Hill seemed to me to be the steepest there was. It had a four-way stop at the intersection at the bottom, so the skater punks and freestyle BMX anarchists loved to jam down it at top speed, ignore the stop sign, and tempt fate. Technically that made it more like Russian roulette than suicide, but parsing such things while pedaling for my life to keep up with Jason on the secondhand (if not thirdhand) bike my mom had picked up for ten bucks to replace the one I’d lost somewhere in the hills around my junior high school, I soon realized I was only halfway down the hill and already going deadly fast considering the junker beneath me.
I stopped pedaling, but that didn’t help. Likely appalled by my devilish intentions toward Jason, God must have told gravity to suck me down that hill and toward that intersection with as much force as possible. So as gently as my panicking hands could manage (about as gently as a vise grip), I squeezed the bike’s brake. My bike stopped on a dime. Bravo! Except that the good Lord’s momentum now shot me into the air like a rocket. It was a classic rookie move. I had hit the front brake, the front tire had locked up, and I was now flying over handlebars I refused to let go of, sending my bike into a flip in the air above me. I soon lost my grip, and bang! I hit the ground hard, chin first. Just enough time passed for me to feel the excruciating bolts of pain race up my face and down my spine before the bike came crashing down like a holy reprimand on top of my head, slamming my skull, chin, and jaw even deeper into the angry Texas asphalt.
Thankfully, I’d been hit in the head more than a few times at this point, so I didn’t completely freak out. I got up and sat down on the curb to let the pain fade like it always had before. The first thing I found different about this head injury, though, was that a chunk of my left front tooth was gone. My heart sank. As if I weren’t ugly enough already. The second thing I noticed was the river of blood flowing down the gutter below me. I looked at my hands, which had been cradling my jaw. They were covered in blood, and even more was pouring down. I ran to the door of a house and started banging on it and screaming, leaving bloody handprints up and down it like in some over-the-top B-movie crime scene.
When Jason heard my screams, he turned around and pedaled back. I didn’t need to see my reflection. I could tell from Jason’s expression that whatever small dose of cuteness God had given me was now gone for good. And my new Hawaiian button-down? Soaked in blood. Ruined. The fates, the universe, and God Himself had just canceled my night of amorous discovery in epic horror film fashion.
A white-haired woman came running out of the house across the street. She shoved me into her Lincoln Town Car and asked where I lived. That was a toughie. I wasn’t allowed home on Saturday nights. But surely this situation was worthy of rule bending, right? I was too rattled to unravel that, but when the woman raised her voice and demanded an answer, Jason gave it to her. At least now it wouldn’t be my fault when we invaded my mom’s top-secret weekend.
When my mom finally answered the door, the house smelled of perfume and home-baked bread. The look on her face was about as alarmed as the one on Jason’s had been. She thanked our good neighbor, told Jason to go home, and got a clean cloth, which she had me press to my chin. “Put pressure on it, Lancer. It’s going to be okay.” That was an order, not reassurance. I had to press it hard because I had to be okay.
She went to the phone, took a deep breath to calm herself, and called Jeff. “Hey. I have to cancel.”
“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked.
“Nothing.” It was clearly a lie. “Do you have Rick’s number? From the lab? He lives out here in Live Oak, right?”
Jeff gave her the number, but he didn’t like doing it.
My mom hung up and called Rick, then came back to comfort me as we waited for him to arrive. My mom understood childhood trauma all too well and proved so expert at comforting it, I was soon more worried about my Hawaiian shirt than what had happened to my chin, my tooth, or my jaw.
Rick finally arrived and drove as my mom held me on our way to the hospital s
he worked at. As the military doctors rushed to stitch up my face and x-ray my jaw, a beautiful young nurse appeared, holding my blood-soaked Hawaiian button-down. She seemed to know my mom, and she could tell from when I’d demanded the doctors not cut off my shirt that it must have meant the world to me.
“Do you wanna see a magic trick?”
I couldn’t move my jaw with all the doctors tugging on it, so I just nodded.
She pulled out some sort of chemical, poured it into a big glass bowl, and plunged my shirt into it. My eyes went wide as the liquid fizzed and bubbled. When she pulled the shirt back up, the blood was magically gone. Life could go on! Perhaps, like one of the characters in all of those miniseries my mom and I loved to watch, after years of plastic surgery and rehabilitation, Jason might find me attractive again and we could start over. Perhaps there was some gay God in heaven doing battle with our straight God and sending me this guardian angel army nurse to save the flamboyant Hawaiian-print shirt Jason had actually thought was “pretty cool.”
No. One look at my mom and I saw the same expression she’d worn when “Aunt” Louise had bought me that red wax gorilla.
It turned out that this nurse had once worked at Fort Leavenworth with someone named Jeff whom my mom now worked with, and every time the nurse waxed poetic about Jeff, my mom got more and more annoyed with her. And as it came to light that this Jeff guy often visited this nurse up in the ICU, and that he had chosen her over his commanding officer to swear him in during his initiation here, my mom lost it on both this nurse and the doctor who had been tugging on my jaw for ages now. “Aren’t you done with that test?”
“We’re trying to determine if his jaw is broken or displaced.”
“Well, it looks like you’re hurting him. Are they hurting you, Lancer?”
I nodded. They really were hurting me, and my jaw was broken, so the doctor was actually making things worse.
My mom’s eyes met the doctor’s, and all five foot nothing of her demanded, “Stop pulling on his jaw until you know if it’s broken or not.” She left the word “moron” out of this sentence, but we all heard it.
“I’m not some kind of an idiot, ma’am.”
“No? Have you been tested for that? I want a specialist.”
The offending nurse split, and the doctor followed. Alone with my mother for a moment, now with dozens of black wormy stitches squirming out of my chin, I managed to open my jaw just enough to ask the question she would have known was coming if she’d had her wits about her. “Who’s Jeff?”
But she’d lost her wits amid my trauma and her jealousy. She was completely caught off guard and now rather embarrassed. “Oh. Oh, just…someone I work with. I’m sorry, baby.”
Her hesitation exposed her lie. So I smiled.
“What?” she asked.
I shook my head to say “nothing,” but she knew I smelled a rat. At some point during the long silence that followed, the reality of my injury began to settle in, and with it, a little fear.
“Mom?”
“What, baby?”
“Thank you for being with me.”
She melted, stroking my white-blond hair. She could be so tough one minute and so soft and sweet the next. “I’ll always be right here with you, my Lancer. Forever. I promise you that.”
That gave me real comfort—and now I knew I had her right where I needed her. “Mom, if they can fix my tooth, will you make sure they make it look as normal as they can?”
God, I wanted to be normal so badly. She knew the feeling well. Recognizing that same fear in me now, lying in a bed that must have looked a lot like her childhood home, tears came.
“Baby, when this is all over, you’re going to look perfect. I won’t let them put a metal tooth in there. No matter how much it costs. I promise you that too.”
Promises were sacred to us, so I could relax now.
We sat there together in silence for most of the rest of that night.
* * *
—
The next morning, my mom got into an epic fight with Jeff. She demanded to know the nature of his relationship with the chatty nurse. He demanded to know why she hadn’t asked him to help bring her son to the hospital. What was clear now was that their secrets were destined to end their love affair just as surely as their truths might. So after agreeing to meet for a late-night ice cream, Anne finally came clean about her boys’ ages, her own age, and the fact that she wasn’t yet divorced from Merrill. Jeff told her that he wasn’t interested in anyone but her, not even that nurse, no matter Anne’s age or marital status. He loved her for who she was.
Looking back now, it’s clear that Jeffrey Scott Bisch was the first and only man besides me, Todd, and Marcus who truly loved my mom…and who was also devoted enough to shoulder the responsibilities that came with loving her.
My birthday was coming up in a few weeks, and now Jeff knew how old I would be. We had never met, but on his next free weekend, he went down to a hobby store and bought a World War II SB2C Helldiver model airplane with wings that folded up. He brought it to work on Monday, handed it to Anne, and asked her to give it to me as a birthday present. He was handing her a challenge: a loving way to say it was time to take their affection out of the shadows and share it with the three other precious men in her life.
When my mom got home, she put the gift on the dining room table. “Lancer, that’s a birthday present…from Jeff.” She knew damn well that I hadn’t forgotten Jeff’s name. She tried and failed to suppress a grin. The puzzle of the past months was quickly coming together in my mind. Lucky for my mom, my jaw was locked shut, so I couldn’t ask my usual probing questions. Instead, I quietly set to work turning that model into a masterpiece. If there was a new man in town who made my mom grin like an idiot, I damn sure wanted to make a stellar first impression.
III
A young, single, enlisted soldier rarely calls the same city home for much more than two years. He or she is always on to another tour of one sort or another. It’s a migrant life. By 1987, Jeff had already been in San Antonio for well over a year, and so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when his commanding officer informed him that it was time to pack up again.
Anne didn’t receive Jeff’s orders with the same delight we’d all felt when Merrill was punted off to South Korea. Jeff’s orders turned what had felt like a lovely fantasy into something far too real. Anne understood that the decisions Jeff’s imminent departure forced would have far-reaching earthly, heavenly, and familial consequences.
So with the clock ticking on Merrill’s return, and me slowly figuring out what Marcus already knew but wouldn’t say, my mom joined me in front of the sliding glass door, where, for the thousandth time, I’d spread out the contents of her craft box. That morning I had decided to sew an entire cast of sock puppet characters who had lived in my head for some time but had suddenly demanded physical forms. Marcus was in the backyard. He’d been out there all morning shooting arrows into the wall of our “tree house”—a shipping crate on stilts secured to a pair of thick Texas palm trees. Whenever Marcus became too focused on anything, destruction in particular, I knew something was amiss.
My mom began helping me sort through the spare buttons and colored felt to find options for noses, eyes, and hair. In a similar quiet time together, she had taught me how to sew. It wasn’t the most butch activity for a Texas boy, but in a home filled with men, she was happy to seize an opportunity to pass down one of her own mother’s skills. Now I loved that I was threading a needle the same way Cokie had to tailor my mom’s beautiful blue prom dress.
My mom broke our companionable silence. “I think you know I have something to talk to you about…”
My mind whirled and raced. There were always a thousand things I wanted to talk about.
“Do you remember Jeff? Who I work with? Who got you the
model airplane?”
Right. That conversation. I looked up at her. She was forcing her brow into a serious expression but her eyes were watery—filled with nerves atop a joy that made her shiver. This was the very first time I had ever seen true love in my mother’s eyes. That image of her face will forever live in the top treasure drawer of my mind’s memories. It was an absolute miracle. One of the greatest gifts I’ll ever receive. But I wasn’t ready to let her know that yet. So I composed myself and let out a trademark, understated “Sure.”
“Well, he wants to meet you guys.” She was terrified to say the next words. I could see it. And without meaning to, I neutralized her fear with the biggest grin she’d gotten out of me in a good long while. But because my yet-to-be-repaired, half-missing front tooth was giving her a salute, I quickly hid it again.
She tried to stifle her own smile. “So you wouldn’t mind meeting him?” she asked me.
A yes or no answer would have been a total cop-out, like some bad mother-son conversation from those movies of the week we both loved and hated. So I cut to the chase: “You love him, don’t you?”
My candor sent her heart tumbling, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. She knew I could read her mind. And although I’d never seen real love in person, I’d seen it plenty on big screens and small. My mom and I had cried together through Doctor Zhivago, The Winds of War, and The Karate Kid.
It all spilled out now, the entire story with all the details a mom could share with a twelve-year-old son. How she’d learned to cook spaghetti sauce from scratch for the dinners she’d made for Jeff on those hotel room weekends, how she called him her “bear,” how he sprayed the little teddy bear he’d given her with his cologne each time he came by, how he called her his “mouse” because of her pint size, and how she thought the only right thing to do now was to divorce Merrill before he returned.
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