Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  How were you supposed to raise a child? How could you turn them into young people you were proud to introduce to family or friends you hadn’t seen in years? How could you prevent this? she thought, looking at her youngest, her last, whose look of contempt, when her eyes met with his reflection’s, ruined everything. The waitress shuffled by their table and she stopped her to order a margarita. She was still waiting for it when the food arrived.

  “Grandpa and me made something like this,” he said as he picked apart his food. It was a giant hunk of meat with the bone showing on each end, almost black from hours of simmering. When he touched it with his fork the meat flaked off in slivers and she said it looked delicious. “Ours was better,” he said with his mouth full.

  She couldn’t stay mad at him. “You’re turning into quite the little cook.”

  “Stop saying that. You always say that.”

  “You’re becoming quite the upstanding young chef.” She tasted her own dinner. “Delicious.”

  “Restaurants are so boring,” Colin said. He still ate like a teenage boy, barely letting himself breathe between bites. His dinner was already half gone.

  “Shall I order the entertainment?” Diane asked. She waved her hand out over the restaurant as though, just behind the bar, at the far end of the room, was a troupe of performing chimps. “Or the girls? You want me to bring out the girls, Colin? Just like in the old days. Girls who dance around during dinner?”

  “Shut up. What old days? You’re being gross.” He wrinkled up his nose and scarfed down the rest of his food. The way he looked at his plate, at the last pools of sauce, made her think he might grab it with both hands and start licking it. No, she’d have to explain, this is inappropriate, this is not what human beings do. But as he dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin she knew her father had already enjoyed the privilege of that speech, and likely many others. It was his movement Colin echoed, his way of clasping it in his hands, of delicately wiping his mouth.

  How had she not spoken to her own father in six years? It seemed so impossible, something that shouldn’t have happened. But I’m angry, she thought. Be angry. Instead she wanted to cry.

  “What’s for dessert?” she asked. She smiled and was suddenly aware of tears in the corners of her eyes. She blinked as though something was stuck in her eyelashes. “We could also get something to go,” she said as she looked at the ceiling, her head tilted back. “Ugh, whatever this is, it stings.”

  “I—I don’t think so.”

  “What? You don’t want dessert?”

  “Maybe we should just go home?” He shrugged and slouched back in his seat again, trying not to hear her. She hated this restaurant.

  “Colin, did you bake a cake?” She realized it sounded like she was angry and she smiled. She reached for his hand but he wouldn’t move, like a mistreated dog.

  “It’s too loud in here,” he said.

  “I didn’t know you baked.”

  “Learning.” He looked out the window. It’d begun to snow and more of the street was out there, its snow-caught light brighter than anything in the restaurant.

  She didn’t care about baking. Even the cake, waiting for them at home—which she knew would be the best cake she’d ever had—didn’t move her, one way or another. All she thought about was Colin peering into the window of an oven, watching batter bubble up into bread like lava cooling to rock, and her father standing just behind him. What he knew, he was sharing. It was the simplest of images like these, lately, that filled her with an immense sadness, but not grief. This wasn’t like grief. She couldn’t explain it. “How…” she said, her throat beginning to numb from the drink. She swallowed and sat up straight. “How is he?”

  “Grandpa?” Colin shrugged. “Fine, I guess. We just cook. Or read sometimes.”

  “Does he ever mention me?”

  He frowned and looked down at the table. “Um. Only like, you know, Your mother wouldn’t want you doing whatever. Your mother wouldn’t approve, blah blah blah.” His Quentin voice was eerily accurate, the words cleaved from one another and enunciated like a stage actor’s. She smiled, even though she felt terrible. They loved each other, her son and her father, and all she’d done was drive Colin back and forth.

  “Anyway, he knows you don’t want to talk to him. So he doesn’t ask about you. It’s taboo.”

  “Taboo?” She laughed. “Like I’m some controversy? To tell the truth, the whole thing’s so stupid. Do you want to know what happened?” She waved her hand before he could nod or shrug or tell her how he didn’t care. “It’s completely stupid. You know Grandpa Patterson—you know he’s…you know. Right?”

  “Huh?”

  She sighed and looked around the room. Nobody was listening. Nobody could if they tried. “He never remarried is what I’m saying.”

  “So? He lives alone. Am I supposed to care?”

  “Colin, you’re not getting it. Basically I found out something the hard way. I walked in on him. He cheated on my mother—Grandma Jean. It wasn’t what we all thought. But it happened. A stupid grudge. Thirty years.” She laughed again as though it wasn’t most of her life, as if it were no big deal. “Thirty years I hate him, and for what? Six I don’t even speak to him and why? It’s nothing he could’ve done, you know? I think I get that now. Things were different when I was growing up. Anyway. It’s all stupid.”

  “He’s gay,” Colin said, louder than he’d meant.

  How he sat there, his eyes dead still—she knew he was using every last bit of energy to process this. She reached for his hand. He jerked it away. “Colin, look at me. I don’t want this to change how you treat him. He’s still your grandfather. It’s a lifestyle, isn’t it? Like I said, when I was your age this was all very different. Society’s changing. It’s normal now. Just different.”

  She’d made a mistake. He was too young, she realized—too mired in middle school where gay meant social death or torment. Again she tried to reach for him and again he evaded her comfort. Even in the dark of the restaurant she could see he was trembling.

  “Different, but not wrong. Not bad.” She felt as if she were talking to a toddler and she shook her head. “This wasn’t appropriate. For me to tell you. But I’m kind of glad I did. I don’t want you to treat him differently now. Will you still love him?”

  “Shut up.” Colin shook his head. “Just shut up, okay? I don’t wanna talk anymore.”

  “Okay. I just—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” He winced at the word and she let him get away with it. She knew it hurt him, too, and she was glad, at least, that he knew better.

  The waitress brought the dessert menu but neither read it. None of it looked like words, all scratched into the card stock in a fake script. Instead she was thinking of what she’d overlooked, all these years Colin was alive. If you considered the stereotypes—he loved cooking, he spoke softly, he’d always clung to his mother, he’d never been in a fistfight—it was so tempting. And what had he said, when she mentioned bringing out the girls, as though the restaurant would fill with strippers and belly dancers? You’re being gross.

  “I’m sorry,” Colin whispered. She couldn’t quite hear it, but with his head drooped forward like that, his shoulders limp like he’d fallen asleep, she knew there was nothing else he would’ve said. She reached, once more, for his hand. He didn’t pull away. She rubbed his palm with her fingers, found the ragged bitten-down edges of his nails. She wished there was room to guess or reinterpret, to be wrong, but she wasn’t wrong. It was a sad thing and she grew angry with herself. This is my son, she thought, and he’d never appeared more fragile. Everything she wanted to say she knew she shouldn’t. You poor thing, she thought, and brought his hand to her mouth. She kissed the back of it, right where the two bluest veins joined together. What was the word Alan had written? Fistula. Fistula, she thought, and kissed again that spot. She hadn’t understood but still she carried the word in her head. Fistula, like a supernatural villain, or a kitchen u
tensil. All that life had dealt her, and now this.

  As February went on and she neared her appointment, she tried, over and over, to broach the subject with the Tim in her head. So life’s gotten more interesting, she thought she should say, but it sounded flippant and mean. Would he judge her? Then it was the last Wednesday of the month and she kept looking at the clock. Six hours, she thought. Four hours. Three hours. When the Tim in her head asked her how she’d been, what broke open in her head was Daniel, how she’d thought getting fucked would solve everything. There was Colin, her little gay son she couldn’t protect. And there were, always, the nights she sat up reading her dead husband’s ramblings, so convinced of his suffering, his wisdom, that she herself agreed, halfway to tears, how right he’d been to call it quits. To give up. Two hours. Just before three o’clock she called Kathy. “I have the flu,” she said from the back of her throat. “I can’t make it today.” She held the receiver away from her head and coughed. “Can we shoot for next month?”

  It wasn’t a problem. For Kathy it was never a problem. A sigh, a drumroll of typing, an “all set,” and Diane would be alone with her brain until late March.

  Should their bodies make it home, soldiers are autopsied, washed, and scrubbed clean. From photographs—or in some cases firsthand memory—their living peers wire together broken bones and reconstruct flesh, down to the last seared-off birthmark or split-open childhood scar. Their hair is shampooed and conditioned and brushed back into place. The dead are then dressed in full uniform, each ribbon and medal pulled from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s overstock—something like a tool chest full of regalia instead of nails. Uniforms are pressed and tailored. Even for closed-casket funerals and cremations, the dead are worthy of salutation, as though they themselves are ready to carry a friend’s coffin to a quiet, unassuming grave.

  Only for soldiers. Hard to imagine anything so meticulous, so full of love, for ordinary men and women.

  Have I made my decision? Does any of this matter? Time to give up the pretense?

  Colin’s father had written.

  By March, Victor’s phone calls were something Colin expected, like the mail carrier showing up every day around three. He kept the cordless in his back pocket wherever he went, answering regardless of what Victor interrupted. Mostly he just listened. I saw you in the lunchroom today, Victor liked to begin, or I thought of you while I was out running errands. It wasn’t all that different from their car rides, except there was nothing to see—no houses, nobody reading mail in the yard, no roads to hidden parks. Often Colin paged through his father’s notebooks, Victor’s voice entangling itself with his father’s notes and observations. The dead are then dressed, he imagined Victor saying, bent over Colin’s still very alive, very undressed body. Once, while Victor described the blood’s migration during physical arousal, Colin softly pulled himself to orgasm. “I have to go,” he squeaked, his boy’s voice returning when it was most incriminating, and tossed the phone away from him. “What the fuck,” he whispered as he cleaned up his mess. “What the fuck what the fuck.” If anyone deserved this, he decided, it was him.

  When he wasn’t hiding in the basement or lost in Victor’s voice he scoured the Internet for traces of his sister. Heather’s updates on social media were cryptic and vague. There was nothing about where she lived, or even who she was with. If she came by the house it was during the day, when nobody was home. Even if he’d wanted to surprise her out in public it was impossible. If she posted a picture of food, she never disclosed the restaurant. If she was out shopping it was always just Out shopping! with a smiley face. Her hidden life made Colin feel even more criminal, as if she were trying so hard to live and that if he had his way—if he found her and interfered with her life—she’d have to hide all over again and find a new life somewhere else. He commented on everything she posted but she never responded, not even when he stopped asking where her boyfriend lived or when he could visit, instead just typing Hi or That’s a neat coat. He felt as though he wasn’t supposed to exist.

  On the first day it got above thirty, his mother walked humming into the living room. He clicked out of Facebook and pretended to play a game. “I was thinking,” she said as she looked out the window, the backyard damp with sunlight, but she wouldn’t finish.

  He put the computer to sleep. “I’m going to my room.”

  “I was thinking it’s been too long,” she said. “We’ve hung around too long.” When she turned to look at him she wasn’t crying, and until then he hadn’t realized that’s what he expected—that’s what he hoped to flee. “What do you say we take a vacation?”

  Next to the window she looked like a photograph. It was something she’d always done. All you had to do was study the family pictures hung in the hallway, how in each she looked like someone had directed her. She always found the right light and stood as though she was being watched, her hands (at her sides, by her mouth, fiddling with her hair) like the hands of models in magazines with too much on their mind. Now she was half-lit by the sun as if in a commercial for heart medication, her arms folded across her chest.

  “We could go somewhere nice,” she was saying.

  It hadn’t occurred to Colin that they could go anywhere. As a family they never traveled—only once, to Washington, DC, but he didn’t remember it. “Can we do that?”

  “Why couldn’t we?”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t it, like, expensive?”

  “It can be.” She turned back to the window, her face dissolving into the light. “But it’s not a big deal.” Her eyes scanned the sky. She kind of grinned, or tried not to, her chin dimpling just beneath her lip. “We have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars set aside.”

  Colin didn’t move. Sometimes his mother had a strange, stupid sense of humor.

  “From the insurance settlement,” she explained. “Your father.” She took a long breath and closed her eyes as though she was smelling a flower. “The sun’s starting to feel warm. Through the glass. On your skin, I mean.”

  “A hundred and fifty? Like…six digits?”

  “Don’t tell anyone. People change their mind about you when they know something like that. It changed my own mind, just having it. Please don’t tell your friends or whoever. Andy doesn’t need to know. Your grandfather. Chelsea. Just between you and me, right?”

  “Me and Andy haven’t been friends in forever.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Forget it. So we’re rich?”

  “Hardly. And we’re not gonna splurge. I was thinking San Diego or something. Cape Cod. I haven’t been to San Francisco since college.”

  None of them sounded like places he’d care about. “What about Paris?”

  “France? Neither of us have passports.”

  “We’re rich. We could buy them!” Colin pictured stepping off a plane with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, being driven around Paris by chauffeurs who’d call them Monsieur and Madame. He walked over and poked his mother in the shoulder.

  She shook her head. “Nah. I think you’ll like San Francisco. I forget who, but someone called it the Paris of the West. It’s pretty like Paris, all the buildings in rows. The streetcars, the hills, the palm trees, the flowers. Colin—” She reached out and hugged him without warning. “When’s school out for you? June?”

  He’d hoped when she said vacation it meant tomorrow. June felt like another lifetime, a hundred of Victor’s phone calls from now, a thousand hours of his father’s stupid notes.

  “Can’t we go sooner?”

  “We can tour Alcatraz, ride the trolleys, all that stuff. Do you know about the crookedest street in the world? That’s what they call it. It makes twelve or thirteen turns in a single block.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just beautiful.” She stepped back and looked him up and down. “Get dressed,” she said, even though he was already what he’d call dressed—torn jeans, torn T-shirt, socks full of holes. “I want to get one of those guide things
. The Secrets of San Francisco or whatever it’s called, with restaurants and stuff.”

  “We can just look that up online.”

  “Just go get your shoes and your jacket. Put some pants on.”

  “Uh, these are pants.”

  “I can see your underwear. They’re rags, not jeans. I guess we’re going to Penney’s, too.”

  On the way to the mall she talked about sourdough bread and how the seagulls swarm for it. She made him try on jeans and T-shirts before they went to the bookstore at the far end of the mall. He spun around for her like a drug-dazed runway model while she tried out what she thought was a British accent. “And the lovely Colin is wearing Levi’s, ladies and gentlemen.” She laughed until she began to cough her newly hardened smoker’s cough.

  “God you’re embarrassing.”

  “Isn’t he sexy, London? The man of any lady’s dreams. Or any man’s.”

  He stared at her. She was smiling, but not like it was funny. “Don’t make me puke,” he told her, and he slammed the dressing room door and shucked off the new clothes. Had he said something? Did he sound funny? Did he walk wrong? In the mirror he tried to look mean like all the boys at school. He gave himself a don’t-fuck-with-me look and hardened his muscles, which he now noticed, in the dressing room’s light, finally looking something like muscles. He touched his belly, newly sectioned into shapes. When had all this happened?

  She knocked on the door. “Honey, I’m sorry. That was just a bad joke. Are you okay?”

  He tried to be angry with her as they walked toward the bookstore but it wasn’t working. Her good moods were too rare. Whenever they walked by someone with stupid clothes or an ugly haircut she leaned in to whisper. “Do you think they stitched those pants onto her?” she asked about a girl who took up most of a bench, and they both snickered and snorted as they hurried on out of earshot. Sometimes he knew she was doing all that she could, that she was trying her best, that, despite the inexhaustible energy of love, one person can only do so much. He’d never felt so grown up—laughing with her at all the dumb, sad people who shuffled up and down the mall’s courtyard on a Tuesday night—full of pity for his own mother, who for most of his life had been invulnerable, all-powerful, who had known everything a human being could have known. If they hadn’t stopped for mochas and if she hadn’t told him to sit up straight and to stop slurping, he might have cried.