The Boomerang Kid

by Jay Quinn

  “You’re living on Gatorade, Hershey bars, and cigarettes,” Maura said despairingly. “Can’t you at least begin to eat? That toast is the first real food I’ve seen you put in your mouth since Tuesday.”

  “I’ve been eating and drinking the right things, Mom. The Gatorade is keeping me from getting dehydrated and the chocolate helps too. It has endorphins or something,” Kai explained patiently. “The toast was actually pretty good. I might have another piece in a little while. I swear.”

  Maura just shook her head and put her hand over his wrist. “What you will never understand is how much it hurts me to see you suffering. Really Kai, I can’t stand to watch you like this. Please tell me you’ll be better soon.”

  “I’m already better,” Kai said to reassure her. “I didn’t talk about it because I didn’t want you worrying. Now you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  Maura searched his sunken eyes for any hint he might be lying just to make her feel better. She found nothing dishonest in his returned gaze. She took a long drag off her cigarette and thumped its ash into Kai’s ashtray. “Is there anything I can do? Do you need anything?”

  Kai patted her hand and shook his head.

  Maura sighed, started to speak, and then abruptly cut herself off.

  “What is it Mom,” Kai asked tiredly.

  “Nothing, not really,” Maura said and hesitated. At last, she said, “I was just wondering how much of this depression cycle has to do with me telling you I’m pregnant again. I mean, you have to be shocked, and it does affect you m some very real ways.”

  Kai laughed and shook his head. “Mom, as hard as it is for you to believe you’re not responsible for my mental problems, the truth is, you’re really not. I think it’s great you’re having another kid. I really do. If I’m worried about anything it’s your health. I want you to be worried about yourself for a change, okay?”

  Maura lifted her hand and patted his scratchy cheek. “How are you doing going back on the real meds?” she asked with concern.

  “I’m fine, Mom. I’m taking them just like I’m supposed to. I won’t lie and tell you I don’t feel like the gears in my head are stripped, but don’t worry about it. It’s okay,” Kai told her once more.

  “Have you spoken with Robin since you’ve been going through this?” Maura asked him carefully.

  Kai nodded and smoked a moment in silence before he said, “That’s good news I’ve been saving to tell you. Robin’s coming down the week of Thanksgiving. He’s flying in on the Sunday before and has to fly out the Friday after, but he’s going to come down. That’s what I’m holding onto.”

  “Oh baby that is good news,” Maura said as she visibly brightened. “So you’re feeling a little less conflicted about your relationship, then.”

  Kai shrugged, but betrayed his nonchalance by saying, “All this is going to be easier for him and for me if we have something to look forward to. We’ll see what happens.”

  “He’ll be here in only three weeks or so. Maybe I should buy some new linens for the guest room and clear up some of the clutter in there. I’ve just been tossing stuff in while Matt and I were fixing up the house. The guestroom is a mess,” Maura said eager to have something she could control and put her hand to.

  “Mom,” Kai said gently “Robin will be sleeping with me and staying m my room. I don’t think you need to worry about the state of the guest room.”

  “Yes, of course,” Maura said briskly. “What am I thinking? Of course, you’ll want him with you. I just never—”

  Kai laughed at her sudden embarrassment. “Mom, we lived together for a year. And we might end up together in the long run. Just be cool, everything will be fine.”

  “I’ve got to go to work,” Maura said as she stood and ground out her cigarette in the ashtray. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually looking forward to it. You’re enough to make me want to run out screaming with my hair on fire, this morning.”

  Kai laughed once more as he stood up as well. “C’mere,” he said as he opened his arms. Maura stepped into his embrace and he hugged her long and hard. “It’s okay, Mom.”

  Maura was surprised to find the easy tears coming as she clung to her son. He was rawboned and rangy but the strength in his enfolding arms was real. She always forgot how strong he was when he was in the center of the storm he created all around him. She furtively let him go so she could wipe at her eyes.

  “Are you crying?” Kai asked as he grasped her shoulders and pushed her away gently. “No crying is allowed,” he told her.

  She sniffled and looked at his hollowed eyes and his sunken cheeks bristling with his unshaven beard. Her child was undeniably a fully grown man for all he could lapse thoughtlessly into childhood occasionally. “Okay” she said finally. “No crying.” With that she slipped from his grasp and walked to her bedroom to finish getting ready for work.

  Kai poured out what was left of his coffee and refilled his mug. Once he had it doctored the way he liked it, he left the kitchen and went into his room for his Strattera. He eyed the chest of drawers, but instead of getting what he craved with every screaming nerve, he turned instead and picked up the bottle of Strattera and fished out his morning dose. He also opened his bottle of lorazepam and hesitated before he took only one from the bottle. Quickly, he tossed both pills in his mouth and dry-swallowed them before he turned and left his bedroom without another glance for the chest of drawers under the window.

  In the kitchen, he found his mother standing over the toaster once more. He knew she wouldn’t be satisfied until she watched him eat another piece of toast before she left. The scent of toast actually smelled good to him now. He sat at his place at the table and took two hot sips of his coffee before he ground out the remains of the cigarette he’d left burning in the ashtray and lit another. He heard the toast pop up and as he’d expected, his mother placed it on another paper napkin and set it in front of him before crossing her arms and leaning back against the kitchen counter.

  “Eat that while it’s warm,” Maura told him.

  Sighing, Kai laid his cigarette m the ashtray, picked up the piece of toast and by folding it in half, managed to get half of it in his mouth. He chewed for a moment, then asked his mother if she felt better.

  “Yes, I do,” she replied, and smiled as she reached for her purse waiting in its spot under the wall-mounted phone. “You’ll call Bill this morning?”

  “As soon as I get showered and shaved,” Kai promised.

  “Okay then,” Maura said as she bent and kissed the top of his sweaty head. “I’m off.”

  “Have a great day and don’t worry about me, okay?” Kai admonished her.

  “I’ve worried about you every day for the past twenty-seven years,” his mother said as she shouldered her bag and made her way out of the kitchen. “Why should today be any different?”

  Kai chuckled as he heard the front door open and then close behind her; he then heard her key turning the lock home. Obediently he finished his toast before he settled back to enjoy the solace of the lorazepam unknitting the muscles in his shoulders. Bringing his mother to tears what not something he wanted or needed that morning. He had enough on his plate as it was. The sight of her tears on his behalf always shamed him and made him feel hopeless and small.

  Kai almost never cried. Considering the amount of time in his life he had been clinically if not suicidally depressed, that was a remarkable fact. The last time he had cried was when Mack the Doberman had to be put to sleep. Even then, he had taken the big dog alone to the vet’s office and stayed with him as the doctor gave him that last merciful shot. The dog had been nearly twelve years old and was covered in the fatty tumors that Dobermans are prone to; still, losing the dog made him cry when he could never cry for himself.

  For most of his life, really until he’d met Robin, Kai always looked at his own life from a remote, detached perspective. The only way he could deal with his mental torment was to view it as dispassionately as
he could, as though it were happening to someone else. Now, he looked down at the long thin razor scars that ran up the insides of his forearms and remembered watching the doctor take out the stitches when he was nine years old. His mother had had tears trickling down her face as the doctor clipped the sutures and extracted them with a pair of tweezers. He remembered the doctor asking him how he could do that to himself. Quite honestly, Kai told him he didn’t think he was cutting himself, he was just killing that other little boy. The doctor had looked at his mother significantly and said, “Can you tell me how he knew to make vertical cuts, not horizontal ones?” His mother had shaken her head without answering. The doctor gently rubbed Neosporin into his forearms and said, “If you ever want to hurt that other little boy do you promise you’ll tell your Mommy first?”

  Kai always remembered what he’d told the doctor. He’d said, “It wouldn’t matter. She can’t help him.” Even then, there had been a part of him that dwelled utterly separate and alone.

  Kai calmly finished his cigarette and fought the temptation to remember anything more about being a small child. It hurt too much. He mentally just drew a curtain on that little scene as he always did if he went further back in his memory than the past four or five years. He made a conscious effort to block any memories of his life before he was eighteen and left once again, to try to live with his father. Of his mother, he tried to remember her separate and apart from him. There were a few happy times he liked to recall from when he was small, but instead of focusing on his experience, he tried to concentrate on his perception of his mother’s experience of the same time. It was from this remove that he retrieved his past and much of his present experiences. But that remove had cost him dearly.

  Viewing himself from his remove was what allowed him to act so abominably toward Robin by cheating on him with Linda for drugs and social status as a straight man. Realizing he was in love with Robin had forced him to integrate his life view for the first time. Kai wanted to be in love with Robin, he wanted to experience every tender, passionate touch and taste for himself, but realizing that in doing so he was admitting he was gay scared the hell out of him.

  Sitting in his mother’s cheerful kitchen, Kai saw for himself how deluded he had been for so long. For a moment, he knew he’d trade anything to be sitting out in the chill morning air of Robin’s back deck gazing at the Wright Brothers’ Memorial, rather than sitting in Sunrise, Florida, trying to make it all right. He’d done what came natural to his old self—he’d run away to try and start over. But Kai realized he never should have left Robin in the first place. Unfortunately his life had progressed to a point where his do-overs came at a high price.

  Kai knew Robin loved him. He had known it all along and with that knowledge, he’d opened up to Robin. He’d told him painful truths about his past. He’d admitted to his personal demons and his mental illness. There was no ugly fact about himself he didn’t show Robin, and Kai had dared him to keep on loving him. Every flaming hoop he’d set up for Robin to jump through he’d passed with flying colors. Now that he saw this, he wondered what in the hell he was going to do.

  Robin’s life was set up on the Outer Banks. He had a good job he was good at. He had a secure lease on that little house in Wrights Shores. Would or could he really give all that up in order to move to Florida to be with Kai? In his way, Kai knew how selfish it would be to ask that of him after everything else he’d put Robin through. But Kai also knew he didn’t want to leave South Florida for the beach again. It was too easy to fuck up there. He’d set his patterns and engraved them in stone. He knew too many druggie people and too many people who made it easy to just get by, watching the summers turn until he’d find himself like his dad. He didn’t want his dad’s life, with a bitch of a girlfriend half his age, a bad back, and a rental cottage in Avalon Beach for a home.

  Down here in South Florida, there was an opportunity to start clean. No drugs. New work to fuel the new reputation he’d begin to build. Here Kai felt like he could get it right before he turned thirty. The bitch of it was there was no Robin, and Kai knew he might never allow himself to love anybody else like that ever again. Kai was a loner by nature, yet in Robin he’d found someone who respected all his boundaries and gave him the space around himself he needed. Besides that, Robin was strong on his own. He never sapped Kai’s strength or clung to him needlessly. Robin had loved him enough to let him walk away.

  Now Kai had to convince Robin he was worth the risk of staking his whole life and future on. Even as he thought this, Kai felt the pull of that brown bottle of painkillers in his chest of drawers. He knew all he had to do to make all of these swirling thoughts calm down and make sense was to get up, walk to that back bedroom, and just cut one pill into quarters. A quarter bump would take the physical need and emotional doubt away. It would be as easy as what fifteen steps could lead him to.

  Kai stood up and walked into the living room and then to Heidi’s curious gaze, back into the kitchen to stand gripping the corners of the sink as if it would anchor him to the spot and force him to fight the great urge to swallow just a quarter of a piece of a pill.

  The only thing that stopped him was the realization that within a couple of weeks, or even days, all those little blue pills would be gone. Down here in South Florida, Kai didn’t know where to get more. They were definitely out there. The whole nation was full of people who secretly lived through those little blue pills. Somewhere in Sunrise there was a cancer patient who was filling a thirty-day script and selling two-thirds of them to afford the one-third they couldn’t live without. Somewhere in Broward County there was some guy or girl who had a stash from a car accident that left them with nerve damage. Somewhere there was a doctor who could be as free and loose with his prescription pad as a stack of Benjamins could pass from hand to hand. Oh hell yeah, there were pain pills to be had. Kai knew it. But he also knew there was a jail downtown, just like there was a brother or chulo with a gun who thought one white boy with a habit was an easy target.

  Kai let go of the kitchen sink and sat down at the table one more. He sipped his cold coffee and lit a cigarette with the glowing butt end of the one before. Kai knew all these things and he knew he didn’t want to risk anything—no, damn it, he didn’t want to risk Robin anymore.

  So he sat and smoked and brooded alone, waiting for the jangling of his nerves to pass. He knew he could make a whole day of sitting in that same spot, chain smoking and going over and over his troubles in his head. That would be easy. The hard thing to do would be to fight his depression by getting up, getting showered, shaved, and dressed before taking Heidi for a nice long walk in the warmth of the early November morning. He also knew he’d promised his mother he would call Bill Kellogg about his home library project. Just following through on that little detail would mean he’d made some progress toward getting better. But Kai knew what a great effort just that small task would take.

  “What I want,” he said aloud, “is to be left alone.” There, he’d said it. That was one of the things the pain medication gave him, the pleasure and delight in his own company free of nagging doubt and depression. More than anything else, he just wanted to get high and postpone moving forward for awhile longer, because moving forward meant accepting responsibility for his life and what he was going to make of it. Kai liked talking of starting a new career as a custom carpenter of fine, detailed work, but he liked the idea of it better than actually doing it. Doing it meant he had to get out and deal with people, and people were all rough edges and thin slicing actions that cut him in odd hurtful ways. Interacting with people was too threatening for him. He felt as soft and defenseless as a baby right then.

  No one knew what an effort it took for him to even get out of the house to go to the grocery store or the post office. Ever since he’d come back home, he’d seen no one but his mother and Matt, and that was fine with him. The visit to Dr. Roth’s office was something that had taken days for him to emotionally prepare for. Kai had been surprised by
how easy it was once he’d actually done it, but the thin skin of dread preceding the event was remarkably resilient. It lay over all his actions.

  Now he tried to calm himself in preparation for his call to his mother’s boss. Kai knew he had no reason to dread the call so much; after all, the man wanted him, or at least the skill he could provide to make something nice. With his mind and hands he could make something tangible and lasting that would not only serve a utilitarian purpose, but would give Bill Kellogg something in his home to admire whenever he saw it. Kai liked that part of what he did. It was solid and real. He even liked the physical act of figuring out the project and actually constructing it. From selecting the wood to making the carefully measured cuts to assembling the thing with screws and his nail gun, to rubbing it with either paint or stain. There was pleasure in that. The hard part of the process was the interaction with other people it took.

  Kai sighed and stretched. “I can do this,” he said once more aloud. Then he took a final hit off his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. He stood and mechanically began to tidy up the kitchen from the small mess the morning’s breakfast routine had created. He put the coffee mugs and dishes into the dishwasher and wiped down the kitchen counters and table. After only a few moments, he looked around the sunny kitchen filled with morning light and liked what he saw. With everything neat and tidy it would be easier to move forward, even if his next step was only to get himself cleaned up and ready for the long empty day ahead. He promised himself he’d just take it all one step at a time.

  Clinging to that thought, he walked to his bedroom and found Heidi asleep on his bed. Kai felt a rush of affection for her, with her sleek gray body curled around so that her chin lay on her rear paws. Kai affectionally ran his hand over her back, and Heidi responded by wagging her stump of a tail rapidly but she didn’t open her eyes or stretch languorously under his hand. Kai smiled and turned to his chest of drawers. He took a deep breath and opened the top drawer, willing himself to only pick out a clean pair of boxer shorts. He chose a pair and closed the drawer immediately. Then he stepped to his closet and stripped, throwing his dirty clothes into a heap on the closet floor. From the neatly hung row of T-shirts, he selected a navy blue one to go with his white boxers before he closed the door and walked naked to the bathroom just outside his bedroom door.