Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine

by Kevin Wilson

  “Is Adam in there?” Gina asked, as politely as she could.

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Could you wake him?” Gina asked.

  “He’s out cold,” the woman said.

  “Are you dressed?” Gina asked, waiting for the moment that she didn’t have to ask another question.

  “Sort of,” the woman replied.

  Gina opened the door and found Adam lying on his back, his mouth open like a cat could crawl into it and live there. The woman was shockingly young, her face so plain and unlined that it momentarily stole Gina’s breath.

  “How old are you?” she asked, fearing the police, all kinds of unpleasant charges, but the woman replied, “Twenty-one, as of last night.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Gina replied.

  “It was a big birthday party,” the girl admitted, smiling, as if she and Gina would become good friends with enough time.

  “Do you know how old Adam is?” Gina asked, feeling mean.

  “Thirty?” the girl guessed.

  “He’s thirty-six,” Gina replied, but the girl did not seem shocked.

  “I knew he was older, the stuff he talked about,” she said. “My mom has his album. She’s gonna freak.”

  “He has to go to work,” Gina said. “They’ll be here any minute now.”

  She nudged Adam, who moaned and then flipped over and pulled the covers over his head. “Not now,” he groaned.

  “Adam,” Gina said. “You have to go to work, right now.”

  “I’m going to take a sick day,” he said.

  “You can’t take a sick day, Peanut,” she said, instantly feeling embarrassed, remembering that this woman was right there. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “I quit, then,” he said.

  “Adam,” Gina said, wanting so badly to shake her son until his teeth fell out of his mouth, “I begged Martha Morgan, a woman that I don’t really like all that much, for her son to hire you. You cannot quit. You have to get up and go to work.”

  “I’m not going to work, Mom,” he said, finally pulling down the sheets, sitting up and wincing at the light and the hour. “I’m not going.”

  “You are,” she said.

  “I’m a fucking rock star, Mom. I am not going to push a wheelbarrow around in ninety-degree heat.”

  “You are not a rock star, Peanut,” Gina said, almost shouting. “You’re not a rock star anymore. Not for a long time. You are someone who does manual labor and lives with his mother.”

  “Mom, please,” he said, holding his head.

  The truck idled at the sidewalk; the horn honked twice.

  “Please, Adam. I’m begging you. Go to work.”

  Adam finally sat up. He stared at his mother with genuine disgust, great fury. He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said.

  He stood, put on the clothes from the night before, that bright orange T-shirt, and walked out of the room. He turned to his mother and said, “What you just said was very cruel. It hurt my feelings.”

  Gina felt her knees weaken. She felt the lifetime frustration of never giving her child what he wanted, of never giving anyone what they wanted. “I’m so sorry,” she said, but Adam was already walking down the stairs. He slammed the door shut, and Gina was about to cry when she realized that the woman was still in the room. She looked over at the girl, wearing only a neon-green tank top and rainbow panties, who shrugged and said, “Tough love, you know?”

  “Do you want some breakfast?” Gina asked suddenly, not wanting to be alone.

  “I would love breakfast,” the girl said, raising her arms in the air like she’d just won an election.

  The woman, her name was Tina, strangely enough, made coffee, while Gina cooked some scrambled eggs, adding rosemary because she now added rosemary to everything in order to seem fancy, having learned from her son that things like rosemary and tarragon and sea salt and saffron made regular things special.

  Tina was taking a break from college, had actually been made to take a semester off after a violation of the honor code. She tried to explain the particulars, involving copying notes for a test, but Gina could not keep up. Still, she was a sweet girl, had big plans for the future involving graphic design, and Gina felt that Tina might be good for her son while also realizing that her son would not be good for Tina.

  “How did Adam seem last night?” Gina asked. “When you met him?”

  “At first he was really standoffish. He was drinking with these guys from the lawn care place, and I kept flirting with him, trying to get him to open up and have fun. All my friends are at school, and it was my birthday so I just got drunk and tried to make my own friends, but Adam wasn’t having it. He said he was really tired, that he worked manual labor, had been doing it for years, and he just wanted to drink.”

  “He said he’d been doing manual labor for years?” Gina asked.

  “Yeah,” Tina said, suddenly realizing the lie. “That’s right. And later, when he wouldn’t stop talking about how he was a rock star and had just left the band to start a solo career, I didn’t even call him on it. Shit. Anyways, I went to sing karaoke and I was really bad, and the crowd started booing me, and that seemed to make him take notice, take pity. He walked up to join me and he sang this Coldplay song perfectly, even better than the Coldplay guy.”

  Gina knew, from having heard it many times, that Adam hated Coldplay. He hated all British pop singers, for some arbitrary reason.

  “That’s when he started talking about how he was a rock star, and how he’d hit a rough patch, that he wasn’t inspired. He said he was living with his mother, which was kind of an honest thing to admit, kind of baller, actually. I respected that kind of honesty. I’m living with my mom, too. He said you were trying your best, but he felt bad for being here, for disappointing you. Then we started making out and we came back here.”

  “I am trying my best,” Gina replied.

  “I can tell,” Tina said. “My mom always walks into the living room or kitchen and I’m already there and I can just see it on her face that she can’t believe this is happening, that I’m not at school, that I’m watching reality TV on her sofa. It’s real quick, but I can see how sad she is about it. That’s why I like going out at night, to stay away until she’s asleep and we don’t have to be in the same place.”

  Gina knew she made this same face when she found Adam, his front half hidden by the open fridge door, digging around for food. She made this face when she walked into her office and found him looking at expensive sneakers on eBay. But she thought that maybe she was better than Tina’s mother at hiding this expression of disappointment. She thought that Adam had not noticed because he was so intensely focused on his own unhappiness.

  Tina took her plate to the sink and washed it, putting it in the dish rack. “Thanks for breakfast,” she said.

  “Thank you, Tina,” Gina replied.

  “I probably won’t see you again,” Tina admitted. “This was kind of a onetime birthday thing.”

  “I understand,” Gina said.

  “Tell Adam good-bye for me,” Tina said, and then she walked to her car, parked in Gina’s driveway, and drove off, leaving Gina alone, waiting for Adam to return.

  That evening, Gina heard the truck rumble to a stop in front of the house, but she stayed at the kitchen counter, working on a crossword puzzle. After their fight, she knew enough to give Adam his space, the way his body expanded to take on so many edges that, if jostled, sent him into a rage. She heard the door open, and Adam walked into the kitchen. Gina looked up, but Adam walked past her, to the fridge for a beer. She noticed a cut on his leg, the skin around it angry and purple, and she stood up, alarmed.

  “Adam,” she said, “your leg.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, the words nearly vibrating with frustration. “I cut it on a trimmer. I wasn’t concentrating. It’s fine.”

  Without saying another word, he went upstairs to his room. Gina took some comfort in the fact that he did not slam the
door shut. A few minutes later, she heard him playing his guitar, lazy cowboy music, and she started gathering the ingredients for a simple dinner. The entire time that she cooked, Adam played guitar, singing in a deep, cartoonish voice. She made out the words lonesome and traveled this whole world and orphan.

  “Dinner?” Gina called up to Adam, just loud enough to be heard, her voice bending it into a question, as if Gina wasn’t sure what she was offering her son. There was no response.

  “Adam?” she said. When there was still no reply, she said, “I’m so sorry about this morning. I’m sorry that I hurt you. I never want to make you feel bad.”

  She carried the plate upstairs and set it in front of his door. “I love you, Peanut,” she said. She took a shower and then got into bed, when she heard Adam’s door open slowly, softly creaking, and then close just as quickly.

  She and her husband had almost never fought, hardly an unkind word between them, though rarely was the absence of anger filled with anything resembling affection. When they did argue, it was always over Adam, what he was doing with his life, how responsible they were for the person he had become, what they should have done differently.

  Her husband would always bring up a single event, when Adam was four. He had found a hammer in the toolbox in the hallway closet and then climbed onto the dresser in their bedroom to remove a small, oval mirror from the wall. He then tap-tap-tapped until the mirror was shattered. Gina had been making dinner and her husband was reading a magazine in the den, and Adam called out for them to come quickly. When they got to the bedroom, Adam was smiling. He placed the hammer on the dresser and then gestured to the broken shards of the mirror, which had belonged to her husband’s mother. Before Gina could say anything, her husband ran over to Adam and yanked his arm, which made Adam howl. “You son of a bitch,” he shouted at Adam. Gina wedged herself between them and was about to comfort Adam, when the boy took one of the shards of the mirror and dragged it slowly across his cheek, the violence so calmly produced that both Gina and her husband were too stunned to prevent it. A thin line of blood formed on Adam’s cheek, and Gina finally picked him up, held him against her, the blood smearing her own face.

  Behind her, her husband said angrily, “He did that on purpose, to keep us from punishing him.”

  “Well,” Gina said, kissing Adam, who squirmed in her arms, “it worked.”

  Early the next morning, Gina looked down the hall to find the plate, now empty of food, nothing but crumbs, sitting outside the door of Adam’s room. She smiled, then crept back into bed. Adam soon began his morning routine, getting ready for the day. When the truck pulled up, Gina stayed in her room. She heard the front door open and there was a moment of silence before Adam called up to her, “Bye, Mom,” and Gina shouted back, perhaps too loudly, “Bye, Peanut.”

  After he left, Gina got dressed and went to the supermarket, buying all manner of spices and produce, even some fairly expensive ribeyes. Tomorrow was Sunday, Adam’s one day off for the week, so Gina imagined a quiet day at home. Perhaps, in the afternoon, they could visit her husband’s grave. She imagined Adam driving the car, the windows down, a Dead Finches song playing on the stereo.

  Back at home, she cleaned the bathroom and put fresh sheets on Adam’s pull-out bed. She took the pile of his dirty clothes and washed them. In a pocket of one of his pairs of shorts, she found an empty baggie that smelled of pot, but she simply threw it in the trash and did not think of it again. If she had asked him about it, he would say that he had been holding it for one of the other guys in the crew, or that he had found it on the ground while mowing and placed it in his pocket to throw away later. Or, the more she considered it, Adam would simply say that he was just so shocked that weed was this cheap in Tennessee compared with Portland and it had been crazy not to buy some while he was here. And with any of these scenarios, her response would be the same, silence and acceptance.

  When Adam returned home from work, he pushed open the door, yelling for her to come quickly.

  “What is it?” she said, immediately worried, all the anxiety rushing back to her.

  “It’s good,” he said, holding up his phone, the screen too small for Gina to see what he was talking about. “Come upstairs and I’ll show you.”

  They went to the office and Adam sat down and woke the computer from its sleep mode. “Marty’s been e-mailing me ever since I got back here, but I stopped reading them. It was, like, the past, you know, so I didn’t want to get caught up in it. But today he called and left a voice mail, and I was driving home with the guys and I checked it.”

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  “Something amazing,” he said. He typed an address into the web browser and then turned the screen so she could see it. “Look.”

  Save the Dead Finches, the website said. Beside it was a box that read $42,377.

  “What is this?” she asked. “What does that mean?”

  “Marty set up this crowdfunding thing, like donations, I guess. He wrote about how we got all our stuff stolen and couldn’t afford to keep the band together. He set up all these incentives for people to donate, like signed CDs and personalized thank-you cards or some such nonsense. Someone paid $5,000 alone for us to play a house show for them and ten of their friends. But it’s only been up for four days and already we’ve got more than $40,000. It’s insane. And it’s still going. He’s been talking to venues and rebooking shows.”

  “So you’re not quitting the band?” she asked.

  “Not if we can still make this kind of money. We can still do a tour. We can buy new instruments, better ones.”

  “That’s amazing, Peanut,” she said, amazed at how much people were willing to pay to keep her son happy, having thought she was the only one.

  “Look,” he said, almost jumping out of his seat. He had reloaded the page. “$43,101 now! It won’t stop!”

  That night, Adam grilled the steaks and made an Argentinian chimichurri. They opened a bottle of merlot that had probably been in the house for more than a decade. Every few minutes, Adam reloaded the crowdfunding page on his cell phone and smiled.

  “I thought tomorrow we could go by your father’s grave,” she said. “Say a prayer. Take flowers.”

  “Hmm?” he said, staring at his screen, chewing loudly on a piece of steak. “Oh, Mom, I gotta get back to Portland. Marty says that I can stay with him. We gotta practice and all that, get ready for a new tour. I don’t think I can stay here.”

  “You’re going to leave tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Well, not immediately, but I’ve got to get myself situated. I’ll call Tyler tomorrow to let him know that I can’t stay on. That’s the right thing to do. The other guys will be bummed, for sure. But they’ll understand. They’ll be happy for me.”

  “I hope this makes you see how you need to stay positive, how things work out sometimes,” she reminded him.

  He nodded, looking back at his phone. “It does. Things do seem to work out for me. It’s like, things get really bad, but somehow it always works out.”

  “Just remember this the next time things get difficult,” she said.

  “I will,” he promised. “I’ll remember.”

  “I liked having you home,” she said.

  “It was nice,” he said. “You’ve always taken care of me.”

  “You’re my son,” she said, as if each time that she asserted this, it became more and more true.

  “And you’re my mom,” he said, holding up his glass of wine.

  Three days later, Adam was back in Portland, and Gina had the house all to herself again, almost no trace of Adam to remind her that he had even been there. He had even taken the guitar back home with him, saying that he really loved the tone of the instrument, thought it would make for some good songs. She still had his MORGAN’S LANDSCAPING T-shirt, kept it folded on the dresser in her room, but she regretted laundering it because now it smelled of detergent instead of him.

  It was eleven o’clock at ni
ght, but she couldn’t sleep. She checked the crowdfunding page and saw that the number was even higher than it had been the day before. Several news websites had written about the stunt. One had interviewed Adam and he stated, “It’s nice, you know, to remember that you are loved.”

  Gina went to YouTube and typed in “Dead Finches.” All the same videos came up and she scrolled through them. Then she typed a new search phrase, “Dead Finches Bitch, Your Dumb Ass Is Mine,” and it brought her to a grainy video of concert footage. She clicked on it and watched the video slowly gain focus as her son stood onstage, tuning an acoustic guitar. The rest of the band had left the stage, only Adam remaining for the final song of the encore. “This is a new song I’ve been working on. Brand-new, actually,” he said, never looking up from his guitar.

  Slowly, in a voice so beautiful that it broke her heart every single time, Adam softly sang, “Bitch, your dumb ass is mine.” The crowd hooted and hollered but Adam remained intensely focused, gripping the guitar tightly as he strummed. “Don’t bother sending a Valentine. Bitch, your dumb ass is mine. Until the end. The end. The end of time.”

  This was what had become their hit song, only after Adam, with Marty’s help, sanded down the original until it was saccharine and hummable and impossible to forget. The faster it got, the happier it sounded, the more popular it became. But Gina had always preferred this version, could hear her son so clearly in the song. It was meant to be slow, rumbling, uncertain. She heard all the anger and frustration in his voice, and yet, underneath that, his singing was so beautiful, so hypnotic, that you believed it truly was a love song. You knew that he was only saying these things because he could not articulate what he truly meant, that kindness always mutated just slightly inside of him and came out wrong. But Gina knew what was in his heart. Her son.

  She went back a few seconds in the song and listened to her son sing to a crowd of people, but really to her. “The end,” he sang. “The end. The end of time,” and Gina knew it was true.

  The Horror We Made

  The slumber party turned into a horror film and Jess wanted no part of it. As soon as Lanie mentioned the idea, their very own movie, shot overnight, Jess asked if she could handle the camera work. She decided very quickly that life would be easier if there was no trace of her involvement in the footage. Jess had enough smarts to know that slumber parties led to a very specific kind of embarrassment.