Holidays passed. At Halloween, Oliver, newly 13, said he felt too old to go out. In truth, he worried that he would see people dressed up in too-familiar masks, juvenile caped heroes shadowed by half-bored but devoted parents.
Edward finally made a token Christmas appearance, taking Oliver to visit his grandparents at the cemetery. They ate limp turkey sandwiches and talked quietly, at the only table in the restaurant occupied by more than one person.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so busy. You’ve seen the news,” Edward said. Oliver downloaded four different news apps and habitually checked headlines. “I should call more, visit more. I will call more.” As Edward spoke his eyes kept drifting to the window, assessing every passerby for telltale bulges, aggressive postures. Oliver began to feel like Edward Clark’s hobby, an electric guitar stashed in a guest room closet, furtively taken up just seldom enough to lose all previous progress.
“There was an emergency,” his mother would always say, half-sincere. She said it through gritted teeth at first—until after months, and then years, she seemed to offer this genuinely. “You know he wishes he could be here.” Oliver tallied the number of times he heard these lines from either parent. “You’re the most important thing in the world to him.”
Other than fires and bank robberies and bus crashes, Oliver would think but wouldn’t say. It felt hard to compete with disasters. There were so many of them.
• • •
Oliver read the comics when he was happy and turned them into mulch when he wasn’t. Once, with the 24-hour news channel turned to the lowest volume, Oliver watched an ash-smeared boy, freshly rescued from some calamity, receive an affectionate hair scruff from Iron Thunder. Oliver looked down to see that he had shredded a pile of comics into confetti in his lap.
For a long time, he ferreted a pulpy biography around in his backpack, which he read eagerly while only understanding about a third of the words.
“It’s almost all fabricated,” Edward told Oliver during one abrupt period of familial piety. “Speculation and rumors.” He had spotted Oliver’s copy of Behind the Cobalt Cowl. Peace accords, rising oil prices, and a distracting set of Olympic games kept Edward from being busy, and he now saw Oliver at the divorce-mandated maximum number of visits.
“So then, what?” Oliver asked him. They sat on the balcony of Edward’s modest condo on a pair of dining chairs dragged outside for the sunset. They ate delivery pizza, as usual. “How did you—we get this way?”
“Genetic abnormalities, mostly.” Edward straightened in his chair, unaccustomed to candor. “Rare recessive predispositions toward strength in both families. Haven’t figured out the flight, yet. Maybe there’s some raptor DNA in there somewhere.” He held his face placid long enough that Oliver couldn’t tell if it was a joke.
“So . . . you didn’t give yourself superpowers in your lab?” Oliver said it like it was a joke. “When you realized the world needed a hero” This was almost verbatim from the first issue of The Wrath of Iron Thunder.
“People always try to write the story that suits them.” Edward grumbled often about the comics, about royalties, about how the artists always rendered him suspiciously light-skinned and with a thinner nose. “The truth is hard and rough and rarely poetic.” He looked out across the city, and Oliver did too. He imagined it sometimes from above, at night, the millions of lit windows flickering under him. “People like legends. They don’t like people.”
• • •
Oliver leaned inelegantly on the hood of Mrs. Blakeway’s relic Honda in the middle school parking lot. He and Cassandra had stopped to talk after class, and he hoped desperately to give off the impression that he was cool. Or clever, or easygoing. Anything would do.
“So, how do you like Mr. Clavelli for math?” Oliver was desperate for small talk. “I heard Breakfire was playing in town. Have you seen that music video?” Oliver was newish and unpopular, and Cassandra even noticing him seemed like a coup. “Do you like the Pathcrosser series?” It was a gamble to out himself as bookish, but Oliver realized his mouth was moving without his consent.
When Cassandra—long wavy brown hair, two seats back in homeroom and history, scary good at algebra—touched his shoulder, the space under Oliver’s palm began to burn. He hoped his blushing wasn’t obvious; he hoped she didn’t notice how his hands had begun to sweat uncontrollably. The whole car seemed hot, uncontrollably hot underneath his fingers, but he didn’t dare look away from the first girl he had worked up the courage to talk to. He prayed that his voice would, for one brief moment, maintain a steady tone (high or low, it didn’t matter).
Hey Olli,” Cassandra said. No one called him Olli, ever, though he was suddenly awoken to the appeal. “Do you want to go to the movies this weekend?”
The ancient Civic burst into flames.
Classmates would later describe it as an explosion, a massive fiery column of orange belching into sky. A car bomb, maybe; Mrs. Blakeway, surely all of their teachers, had shady pasts.
As Oliver would later emphasize to his father, he was very brave and chivalrous. Cassandra cried out at the fire, and Oliver leapt before her, flinging his tiny frame wide to shield her like a wiry teenaged aegis. They sprinted from the lot, screaming until someone called the fire department. Oliver would never forget the look Cassandra gave him.
The trampled boulevard before the school soon crowded with evacuated students and teachers. Oliver draped his too-small jean jacket over Cassandra’s shoulders, as he had once seen someone do on television.
“I’ll keep you safe. Take this,” Oliver thought he said. “You’ve got to keep warm.” It was June.
His father clapped him on the shoulder ineffectively when he heard the story, told him “good job.” He later upgraded to calling Oliver courageous, and Oliver beamed and beamed.
As Oliver would later admit quietly to his mother alone, he had been terrified. The way his fingers tingled with destruction, the danger he posed simply walking around. The shame he felt when, at last as the sirens peeled closer, fear became fuel and he ran faster than any around him could see, his feet eating miles of road and grass, trails of smoke in his wake, scorch marks across the soles of his shoes, wind screaming in his ears like in the engine of a jet, until finally he calmed and slowed and arrived, panting and tear-stained, two hours across town. He took a bus home in bare feet.
Angie did not say a word. She let Oliver tell the whole story before speaking.
“Of course you ran, son.” She shook her head and gave Oliver a tissue. “Nobody could blame you.” And after all, Oliver thought, running away was in his blood.
• • •
The car fire nearly prompted another move and name change, but these came soon after when Angie remarried and took Craig’s last name. Oliver decided to stick with Parker, his fourth surname in two years.
“I need to be trained,” he told his mom. “I need Dad. He’s the only one who can help me with this.” Angie held her hands submerged in the sink, not speaking for a second. He didn’t know if it hurt her feelings whenever he asked for this; Oliver, hating himself for being mad and petty, sometimes didn’t care if he hurt her feelings.
“I’ll try my best,” Angie said. “You know how busy he is.”
Eavesdropping by default, Oliver heard the phone conversation, the halting stops and starts. His mother so abrupt, giving no quarter, her fingers going white around the phone. His father agreed to meet at sunset (as Oliver had hoped) in a wide-open field two kilometers out of town (as Oliver had always imagined). There was a snide comment about the new husband, which Angie did not reply to until after she hung up.
When the day arrived, Oliver spent nearly an hour preparing. He changed shoes twice, unsure which ones were best-suited to flight. Arm deep in the recycling boxes, Oliver searched for supplies. He had no idea what he was looking for.
“No glass bottles,” Angie said. “It’ll be too hard to clean up.” It would be too dangerous.
“It’ll be fin
e,” Oliver grunted. What did she know about flight or his uncontrollable kindling palms? She was attempting to smother him, he decided; she was worried about how he felt with the house and the name and the Craig.
When Oliver left the house, declining her offer to drive him, there was a grocery bag near the door. She had packed two sandwiches— one for Oliver and one for Edward, each bag labeled. She packed the lettuce separate. Oliver took them sheepishly, still mad somehow, and at the same time practicing an apology in his head.
Oliver stood in the field where they agreed to meet. His father was never particularly punctual, and so Oliver mentally readied for a lengthy grace period. He searched the field for heavy objects, for the tractor tires and rusting shipping containers he assumed littered all of rural America. Iron Thunder graced so many comic covers with cars and I-beams hoisted above his head, his dark face betraying comically little effort.
He ran as quickly as he could, taking off his shoes to save the soles. He remembered challenging his father to races around their suburban yard when he was younger, speeding between the trees in the nearby woods. Was it once? Twice? Oliver tried to remember if he had merged the details, fusing many memories into one, and was sure there had to be more.
Oliver tried to take flight. The ability had arisen suddenly one day, as Oliver hovered about an inch over his seat in algebra class. He had turned red, glanced around at his classmates, and hoped and prayed that no one noticed him. No matter what he tried, he could not make himself go down. He took deep breaths, he thought about basketball, he thought about having to move again, and then gradually, thankfully, his legs met the cool plastic of his chair. Sheepishly, he had raised his hand and asked to go to the bathroom so he could be embarrassed by himself.
Now he tried to reclaim his accidental lift-off, throwing himself into the air, stretching phantom muscles and clawing skyward. He imagined sprouting wings and soaring across a riptide of wind; he imagined his feet as rockets spraying liquid fire and projecting him upwards.
The sun had long been set, and Oliver allowed himself to recognize that his father was not coming. He checked his phone for news updates: there was flooding in Thailand, a string of bank robberies in New York, a massive disease outbreak in England. Shoes in his hands, the uneaten sandwiches left for the birds, he walked back to the bus stop. He didn’t need to check his messages; he knew there would be none.
• • •
“I think it would be good for my self esteem,” Oliver said over dinner. He had prepared his arguments formally, writing them first in a notebook and then practicing them before his mirror. “And it would give me a chance to make more friends. You’re always saying I should be more social.”
“He’s using your words against you,” Craig joked.
“I know I’m not supposed to attract attention,” Oliver said. Oliver was now called Daniel Oliver Swanson, changing names and schools after he was spotted floating around the rafters of the gymnasium. “But I think this would be, you know, good attention. The kind that doesn’t get us onto conspiracy websites.”
When he managed to visit, Edward often proscribed heroism; he was against Oliver making a name for himself. It would only alienate him from others, it would only lead to more houses and surnames and tabloid photographers. Eyes were dangerous.
“It’s weird that you think I’d stop you,” his mother said, reaching to take his hand in hers. Was she eager because it might anger Oliver’s dad? Had Oliver decided to go for it for the same reason? He hated second-guessing her motives. Or his own. “You’d make a great James. Or a great giant peach.”
“You haven’t read the book.”
“I won’t need to, I’ll see the play.” She smiled.
Oliver managed to take the role of a background insect, and as the understudy for James, he tried not to hope for injury or sickness to befall the lead actor. And on Thursday night, after two thrilling performances, when Darren Pulanski hammed around too close to the edge of the stage and snapped his tibia, Oliver tried not to wonder if his powers extended to predicting the future.
People filled the rickety metal folding chairs that lined the auditorium. Standing below a spotlight, Oliver tried not to hear the skittering drumbeat of three hundred and thirty-six hearts, he tried not to smell the scent of so many breaths coalescing into a gaseous cloud of mouthwash, tooth decay, and barbecue sauce. So many eyes, each pair felt like they were braced against his skin. His mother had suggested focusing on one person in the crowd.
She sat three seats from center, four rows back, hugely pregnant and with Craig grinning and struggling with a camcorder. Five rows in every direction were filled with relatives and family friends, summoned at Angie’s call when she put the word out that Oliver would take the lead role for the last show. He willed himself not to notice the empty seat to her right, focusing instead on the seat to her left, where Craig awkwardly fumbled with his recording equipment.
Oliver had come around to Craig—in spite of, or because of, Craig’s obvious desperation for Oliver’s approval. He had been the one to tell Oliver about the baby, acting like Oliver was the father of the bride.
“Well, I think it’s important I tell you something. We tell you something.” He had been sweating and wringing his hands. “It’s big news, and I will understand if you’re not okay with it, or you want some time.”
“Spit it out.”
“We’re pregnant, Oliver.” He had looked down, like a dog nervously batting the wet carpet.
“’We?’” Oliver had said, letting Craig off the hook. “So are you going to, like, tag-team the contractions or what?”
Oliver decided he would perform for his little sister, the tiny murmur he heard within his mother, who could not see Oliver and thus would probably not be a harsh critic.
After dinner and ice cream and one illicit, celebratory sip of Craig’s beer when Angie wasn’t looking, Oliver and the family returned home. He could feel the adrenaline, actually could identify it as it sped his heart and dilated his pupils. More than once, Craig had to pull the car over, so Oliver could take a few celebratory aerial laps above a darkened copse of trees. Old family friends said that Oliver was made for the stage, that his now stably-deep voice had filled the space of the auditorium like warm honey.
Craig’s car pulled up the drive. Resting against the front door of the house was a crutch and a greeting card.
I’m sorry. I know you understand.
I hope you broke a leg.
Later that night, after they had all gone to bed, Oliver heard his mother whispering his name from outside of the house. Quiet, but meant to carry. Their own private Bat Signal.
Haloed in porch light against the dark of the street, Angie sat on the swinging bench. She held her abdomen in one hand, and the card in the other. She must have fished it out of the garbage after Oliver had stormed inside.
“I know it’s hard to believe it now,” she said, “but you might want this one day. He really does wish he could be here.”
Oliver wanted to rear back, to shout and wake Craig and the neighbors, but his mother held his gaze. He moved and sat beside her, holding his hands clasped together as they began to redden and steam.
“You can’t possibly be defending him. If he wants to be somewhere, he would be there.” He moved at the speed of sound when he wanted to.
“I’m not defending him. I’m just saying that maybe it’s not fair to compare us. I’m an accountant.” She seemed surprised to be saying this; Oliver remembered this as nearly verbatim from the hushed arguments he had tried not to overhear as a boy. “I wish he was here for you.” She caught Oliver’s gaze. “I wish he had been there for me. Maybe one day he’ll be able to be what you need him to be. But until then, maybe don’t burn down the whole building, you know?”
She sounded like she was reading from a script, one she maybe believed now, if she hadn’t years before. She had Oliver, and Craig, and the new baby. This house was better than the last three. Edward Clark co
uld only disappoint Angie by proxy, and this distance had softened her.
“What if it’s already burnt down?”
“Feel what you feel, darling. But maybe trust your mom that it’s complicated. Coming from me, you know that’s a lot.” She took the outside of his hand, Oliver flinching not to burn her, but she didn’t move. “Keep the card. The crutch, too, for a couple of days. If you’re still mad, throw them out.” Angie Swanson hauled herself up and moved to the door. “Porch light on or off?”
“Off,” Oliver said. “Please.”
He watched as his mother’s figure faded up the stairs, trailing into the dark of her bedroom. Oliver opened his hands and lit the porch aglow, letting the light from his palms fade, until he was surrounded everywhere in the dull grays of the night.
• • •
Oliver was summoned just before the end of the school day and stuffed into a taxi. Craig and his mother were already both at the hospital, the principal said.
“Joyous news,” Principal McLaughlin had said. “Not to worry. They’re both just out of the delivery room and couldn’t come by to sign you out earlier.”
His hands trembled the entire ride, and Oliver felt small and young as he made his way to the hospital front desk, asking in a croaked hush where to look for his mom. He imagined he would have to wear scrubs and wash his hands up to the elbows. A receptionist took in his expression, rode the elevator up with him, and deposited him in the room.
A strange arrangement—a Frankenstein Christmas card—appeared before Oliver. Mom in bed with a minuscule pink something in her arms. Craig pulled close beside her, his arms laced through the grates. Dad hovering nearby, his face warm and open and strangely paternal. The new family, built on the ashes of the old one.
“Oliver,” his mom purred. Epidural or glee? “Come and meet Lorelai.”
All of them stared at Oliver, their faces unreadable and adult and weird, and Oliver moved toward the baby, who was simple and easy to decipher. She was red and pinched and delicate, like a paper sculpture of a person, and Oliver declined holding her just yet. He wanted to wait until she looked more solid, like he wouldn’t be able to break her.
Behind the Mask Page 10
