The Boomerang Kid

by Jay Quinn

  She had also come to cope with her son’s bisexuality, though the homosexual part of it had disturbed her. Her upbringing had been sufficiently orthodox when it came to the subject. She had always felt it to be innately wrong, if not sinful. A frank discussion with Kai’s psychiatrist had done much to change her way of thinking. Dr. Roth had explained to her that bisexuality was just symptomatic of the hypersexuality that came as a part of Kai’s manic episodes. Even in a depressed state, hypersexuality was symptomatic. Combined with Kai’s poor impulse control, he would have sex with anyone if it offered some release. With his fetching looks and the outlaw, nonconformist personality he was already aggressively exhibiting by age fifteen, he was more than capable of finding sexual partners. The kind doctor told her it was more important to try and work on his impulse control than to worry about his morality. He encouraged her to be frank and open with Kai, especially in regards to protecting himself from AIDS and other diseases.

  Maura found herself buying condoms for her son before she had to pay for driving lessons. As a result, her aversion to Kai’s sexual proclivities when it came to other boys was outweighed by the realities of keeping him healthy in every way she could. While she never encouraged him in one direction or the other, she simply held her tongue and came to accept his choices of sexual partners as a product of his larger mental health issues. After awhile, she found she could cope with whomever Kai was sleeping with as long as he assured her he was being sexually responsible.

  Now she remembered Rhett telling her that Robin had asked for her phone number. She wondered how long it would be before that call came. She suspected Robin wouldn’t be as easily left as any of Kai’s other relationships.

  Kai returned to the kitchen with one of his black, hardbound sketchbooks which he laid on the table before stepping to the coffee pot and bringing it to the table for a heat-up. He held the pot over her cup and Maura nodded. As he poured a thin stream of coffee into her mug, Maura opened the sketch book and looked at the first page. Kai’s practiced and accomplished hand had caught a young man asleep on what looked to be a lounge chair on a deck. The following page was filled with a drawing of the young man’s face, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. The nose was slightly aquiline, the cheekbones pronounced and the chin dented slightly. If this was Robin, he was fey, and more cute than handsome. He had a look of somehow not being quite finished, stuck in a state between teenager and man. Maura flipped through the pages rapidly, scared of what she might see, rather than curious now. All of the drawings were too intimate for her to bear. She closed the book on a drawing of the boy nude. There were some things she didn’t need to see.

  “Robin, I guess,” She said simply as she slid the sketchbook across the table to rest in front of her son.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” Kai said flatly. “The fascinating little fucker. I did all those drawings within the past month,” Kai added and sighed.

  “He’s young, isn’t he?” Maura stated calmly.

  “He’s only three years younger than me, Mom. He’s legal. I’m not a pedophile for God’s sake,” Kai said with some exasperation. He took a sip of his coffee and sat the mug down with a quiet determination that flowed into his own pushing of the sketchbook away toward the center of the table.

  “Of course you’re not a pedophile,” Maura said calmly, “I never meant to give you the impression I thought so. He’s just young-looking, that’s all.”

  “He may look young,” Kai told her, “But he’s more mature and wiser than I ever will be.” Kai sighed and looked out the window. “I fucked up bad this time,” he reflected.

  “How?” Maura asked him, her bluntness and language carefully gauged to measure her son’s. “How did you fuck up with Robin?”

  Kai turned his attention from the backyard to meet his mother’s eyes and said, “I fell in love with him, that’s how. I don’t usually do that. I mean sex is one thing, but it’s messed up when you fall in love.”

  “Oh.” Maura replied simply and sipped her own coffee. After the silence became noticeable, she said, “If you were in love with Robin, then why Linda?”

  “It was because I was in love with Robin that I started seeing Linda,” Kai told her evenly. “I’m not gay. Have you seen the way the world looks at gay people? The hell with that. I thought if I started sleeping with a girl again, I’d get over Robin and, you know…”

  “No, I don’t know,” Maura said truthfully. “I don’t understand that part of you. I never have. But, I’ve never been the kind of person who had sex just to scratch an itch.”

  Kai chuckled at that. “I wish I was more like you. Life would be a lot easier.”

  “What does Robin think about you and Linda and the painkillers,” Maura prodded.

  Kai shook his head and looked away again, “He’s in love with me, still. Go figure that out,” Kai told her.

  “What do you think he’s going to do now?” Maura asked her son. “I mean, he’s not going to stop loving you just because you packed up and left.”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Kai said miserably. “I just know I have to get my own shit together before I’ll be any good for anybody.”

  “Don’t you think you have some responsibility for Robin—or for Linda for that matter,” Maura asked him directly.

  “Linda can take care of herself,” Kai said harshly. “She wasn’t ever that big a deal to begin with. It was about the painkillers mostly. She put herself where she is. I didn’t ask her where she got the stuff. I just got it from her, then it was about the money. She made enough money off me by the time it was all said and done. I don’t give a shit about Linda.”

  “But what about Robin?” Maura pressed.

  Kai threw up his hands and rolled his eyes. “What about Robin, Mom? What about him? The truth is he’s hurting right now and there’s not much I can do about it. I have to deal with hurting too, and getting off fucking Oxycontin, and finding work. What do you want me to say?” Kai demanded.

  Maura shook her head at Kai’s outburst and paused, waiting for the air to clear before she softly said, “Are you still in love with him?”

  “Yes,” Kai answered without hesitation.

  “How did you leave it with him then?” Maura asked. “Did you tell him it was over?”

  Kai looked at her and hesitated before he said, “I told him to give me some time to get it together and we’d talk. I didn’t make any promises. I just told him we’d find some way to work it out.”

  Maura nodded. It was as she’d begun to think. She felt relieved in a way that Kai had finally fallen in love. At least he had the capacity to fall in love after all. She reached across the table and took Kai’s hand in her own, squeezing it lightly. “Then you did make a promise, son. You’ll just have to find a way to work it out.”

  “Like you did with Dad?” Kai demanded sullenly. “You left him, still loving him. For all those years I was growing up, you never stopped loving him. I can’t live like that.”

  Stung, Maura let go of Kai’s hand and reached for his cigarettes and lighter. As she drew one from the pack, she said, “Then don’t. Take my advice and find a way to be with him.” She lit the cigarette and exhaled. “You can, you know.”

  Kai rubbed his eyes for what seemed a long time before he muttered, “Whatever.”

  Maura smoked in silence while she studied her son’s face. He looked fatigued now in a way that he hadn’t when they’d first begun talking. His hands trembled when he took his pack of cigarettes and lit one as well. There was resolve there. There always had been, especially when he’d hit rock bottom in one way or another. He certainly was in a complicated set of circumstances, but it wasn’t hopeless. She’d seen him through worse. She’d see him through this.

  Chapter Four

  KAI TURNED DO WN the opportunity to meet his mother’s boyfriend when she invited him to have dinner with them at Pebbles. He was beat. What he wanted more than anything else was to be able to sleep, but he knew if he crashed so early in the ev
ening he’d never be able to sleep through the night. He’d hit a period of sleeplessness again. He’d wake up every night between two-thirty and three and that would be it for the night. He’d be alone in the loneliest time of the entire day when the normal world slept peacefully. He hated that more than anything. So he sat in his mother’s kitchen and stared out the bay window as night drew down over the old neighborhood.

  For a moment, he closed his eyes and saw himself clearly in the dawn light in that gas station parking lot off I-95. He’d been up for the dawn and the sunset the day before. Now he craved sleep but his mind was still going ninety-five miles an hour. Heidi didn’t have his problems. She had her dinner and a long walk around the perimeter of the neighborhood and now she was fast asleep on the carpet just outside the kitchen door. Her paws moved as she galloped deep in some doggy dream. Kai smiled watching her.

  He sipped at his Diet Coke and for a few long minutes considered taking another painkiller. The ease it proffered tugged at him, but that tug was exactly what he feared. He didn’t want the tug to turn into an insistent pull. Besides, he knew the pills should be saved for special occasions or times when he was feeling particularly bleak. And the way his mood was descending, a bleak time seemed inevitable. He knew it was normal to crash after he’d been in a manic phase, and he’d been manic since the Thursday before, when he’d reasoned his sudden departure from the Outer Banks. Usually he cycled more rapidly from low to high to low. Often his moods could swing dramatically within the same day rather than days or weeks.

  This sudden burst of mania had been awhile coming on. The more he felt trapped by the way things were going, the more he felt the mania stealing through him as cold and quickening as a chilled IV drip. It was like a fight or flight response in ordinary people, but in him, the rush of adrenaline seemed to go on for days, infusing him with a physical dread of staying still, staying stagnant, staying sane.

  It had all started when he and Robin had run into a group of guys he knew at the lunch place every local on the beach frequented. This one jerk had decided to make a comment about—Robin and about Kai being with him—that made the other guys snigger. The shame and anger it caused in him had grown into a full-fledged panic attack. He couldn’t finish his lunch, and his heart felt like it would bang out of his chest. His feet tapped out his confined urge to jump up and grab the guy by the throat and smack the shit out of him. But he didn’t do that. Instead he swallowed his rage and acted like nothing was wrong at all.

  Still, Robin had known he was upset. He did a good job of trying to hide his concern from Kai, and hated the fact that Robin loved him and that he loved Robin in return. It was so damned inconvenient and unfair.

  Sitting in his mother’s kitchen Kai helplessly listened and watched as the scene in the lunch place played over and over in his head while he stared vacantly out the bay window across the table. Each time the scene played again he felt all the rage and shame anew. It was like he couldn’t erase the tape, and its endless loop tormented him afresh with every repetition. Finally, to break the cycle he pushed back from the table abruptly and stepped over Heidi to go to his room. He found the little bottle of painkillers still in the pocket of his jeans where he’d kicked them off once he’d gotten home. He actually got the bottle out of his pocket and opened it before he got control of himself.

  Instead of taking one of the damn pills, he stepped over to the dresser that sat under his bedroom window and opened his underwear drawer. Though he had been gone for two years, he found the drawer still held the stack of clean boxer shorts he’d left there when he’d moved back up to the Outer Banks. He shoved the bottle under some boxers at the back of the drawer and was surprised when another brown medicine bottle appeared. He picked it up and looked at the label. It was what was left from a prescription for Valium he’d gotten from Dr. Roth back then, the last time he was home. Kai shook the bottle and felt the heavy clunk of the pills inside. He opened the bottle and saw it contained perhaps half a month’s worth of a script. He must have put them away in case he needed them.

  Quickly, he popped two of the ten-milligram tranquilizers in his mouth and dry-swallowed them. The Valium was really what he needed, as hyper as he was. He laughed as he screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it back in its hiding place. He sighed, and shook his head. As glad as he was that he’d found this old prescription, he knew it was no substitute for what he really needed to break this cycle of mania and depression. He needed to get back on his real meds, and sooner rather than later. He decided then and there to call Dr. Roth’s office as soon as it opened in the morning. He knew that if he was in a crisis, his old psychiatrist would see him as soon as he could—and if he wasn’t in a crisis now, he didn’t know what one was.

  Feeling better on the promise of relief the Valium offered before it even kicked in, he made his way back to the kitchen and sank once more into his chair at the table. He lit a cigarette and took a long drink of his soda. There was nothing to do now but wait for the pills to take hold. Maybe then he could find some rest. As it was, the pills hit his empty stomach like lead fishing weights and he grew nauseated. The back of his head was gripped in a vise of dull ache. As he rubbed his neck he thought about how long it had been since he’s eaten.

  The day before, when he’d finished packing the truck, Robin had made him a sandwich, and Kai had only eaten half of it then. When he was manic he lost all taste for food. He ate part of the sandwich then, more as a gesture acknowledging Robin’s consideration than because of any real hunger. That was over thirty hours ago. Now, his body was starting to override his brain in its demand for sustenance.

  Kai finished his cigarette before he stood and glanced around his mother’s kitchen for something to eat. On the counter was a loaf of fresh sunflower bread from Publix, an old favorite. The refrigerator offered all kinds of options including some tasty frozen entrees, but Kai didn’t want to wait even for the time it would take to microwave them. Besides, his nausea was growing and the thought of meat or sauce made him queasier still. He decided on a carton of banana-flavored yogurt and a couple of slices of bread.

  Returning to the table, Kai ate methodically, not really enjoying the flavor or texture of his dinner. He ate because his body demanded it. He took no pleasure in the food itself. Still, by the time he’d finished, threw away the empty yogurt carton and wiped the tabletop free of bread crumbs, he began to feel better. The tight grip at the back of his head started to ease and his nausea miraculously disappeared.

  Kai sat back in his chair and tried to concentrate on the music coming from the radio on top of the refrigerator. It was tuned, as always, to Love 94, the local smooth jazz station. For years he’d tuned into that station and the calm, sophisticated melodies and downbeat heavy rhythm tracks never failed to soothe him. He felt the chemical charms of the Valium begin to seduce him and the food begin to quiet his stomach and aching head. For a few minutes, he thought he could relax a bit now, let down his guard. Then he thought of Robin.

  At this time, between the end of the work day and early evening, Robin would be at the gym. With a flinch, Kai remembered waiting at Robin’s house, which had really become his own home, waiting for Robin to appear at the front door up a flight of stairs from the dirt driveway. Once he’d come in, Kai would hug him briefly and wait for him to ask what he’d cooked for dinner. Whatever Kai had made, Robin would be happy.

  That’s the way their days had spooled out in the year they’d been living together. It was the most contented time Kai could recall. His happiness living with Robin was what had made him quit his meds. For the first time in his life he felt sane and calm. Now he had fucked it all up, for sure.

  There was no doubt Robin was hurt now, worse than in any of the ways Kai had hurt him before. If the raw ache Kai felt as a result of his decision to leave Robin behind on the Outer Banks was real to him, he knew Robin was hurting in the same way. The responsibility he felt in causing Robin that hurt was crushing his mind. His brain ached w
ith it and he couldn’t get away from the feelings of regret and shame that he felt.

  After these thoughts had intruded on his appreciation of the jazz blowing sweetly from the radio for some time, Kai glanced at the clock. If he called the house now he’d be sure to miss Robin, who was still a half hour or so away from finishing his routine at the gym. Kai wanted to communicate that he’d arrived safe and sound, but he didn’t want to actually talk to Robin himself. Kai felt too fragile for that. He knew if Robin said the least little thing to make him question his actions any more, he’d fall into a million little pieces. And he couldn’t risk that, not now.

  So he stood and walked once more into his bedroom, which was lit by the last rays of the sun in its west-facing window. He found his cell phone and quickly punched in the number for Robin’s house. It rang several times as Kai prayed that Robin wouldn’t be home. At last, Robin’s home voice mail kicked in. Kai felt bathed by the sound of his familiar voice on the recorded greeting. When he at last got the beep preceding his message he said, “Hey, baby. I just wanted to tell you I got here safe and sound. The drive was a beast, but Heidi and I made it fine. My mom’s happy to see me, so that’s good.” Kai paused and licked his lips nervously before he said, “I miss you, you know that. And I love you. I’ll talk to you soon, I swear. Bye.”

  Once he’d managed to get that out he quickly pressed his thumb on the button to sever the call. Guiltily, he imagined Robin returning home and checking his messages. He knew it wasn’t enough, not after all they’d shared, but it was the best he could do for the time being. Kai closed his phone and put it on his dresser to hook it up to its charger, and then he left his room and returned to the kitchen’s solitary comfort.