by Noah Harris
Something Good
“Do they ever get so big they might pop?”
The glee in Bodhi’s voice makes me think he knows the answer, and it occurs to me that I do not. As much as it’s become part of our daily life, every morning in the garden is a new lesson in what I don’t know, and it’s humbling. I’ve learned it’s best to be upfront about it.
“I think I might’ve seen them like that, on the ground. But I don’t know for sure.”
Bodhi nods, pushing at the melon with his foot.
“I think so, too.”
The twins and Poppy stare at us through the blueberry bushes, hooting and smiling, half hidden. The twins have recently learned to make a variety of sounds with their mouths, and it seems like half the days this summer have been spent trying to teach Poppy in turn.
Smacking, popping, blowing spitty raspberries. Almost whistling, which Bodhi can do, which along with the noises just about kills the twins and means they won’t rest until they’ve cracked the code. It’s been a summer of sound effects.
“Blueberry and a raspberry have a baby,” Rosemary begins, unsure of where she’s headed, but Huck is more than happy to nod in agreement and pitch in.
“They have a baby, and it looks like blueberries stuck together. It looks like grapes,” he says firmly, with an implicit welcome to any challengers.
Poppy looks directly into my eyes as she pulls a fat, ripe berry from the bush and places it between her teeth, biting down without closing her lips so that the juice runs down her chin. But her eyes are smiling, so I know she’s not trying to scare me. She passes another through the bush to Bodhi, who nods in thanks and drops it in the basket.
“Who can tell me what tonight is?”
They look at each other, wondering if there’s a trick to my question. I learned early on that certain kinds of jokes are not really appreciated by these kids, they like adults to be transparent, responsible with the facts. The twins can make crap up all day and even Bodhi has an imagination, but they won’t stand for being led on by a grownup.
“It’s the Fourth of July,” Bodhi says with his warm, grumbly little voice.
“Raspberries. Blueberries. Red and blue,” Huck says quietly, and Poppy holds up one of each, in case I’m not familiar. The blueberry carnage on her lips and chin is so adorable I want to take a picture, but I know she’d stage a revolution of her own if I tried. So I’m content to just look.
“That’s right. I’m making a trifle for our party. Red, white and blue.”
The twins seem to think that trifle is a fairly hilarious word, so I’ve been using it as much as possible all day.
“Cream, blueberries and raspberries,” Bodhi says with a sort of breathless wonder, and I can tell he thinks it’s going to be a lot sweeter than it actually is. Maybe I can layer in some cookies, or chocolate? A trifle was a terrible idea, I begin to sweat until I remember that these kids barely ever eat sugar, and they’ll probably think it’s as delicious as grownups do. One cool thing about Christian keeping up Ernest’s no-sugar rule is that anything sweet hypnotizes them with joy. It’s notable enough that I’ve stopped, too.
I got to wondering just how much of a hippie Ernest was, until I remembered that Christian never really had much of a sweet tooth growing up. He’d scarf down sweets and treats at my house, where nobody cared what you did, but only when offered. He didn’t crave them. His kids seem to be the same way.
They’re like him in the funniest ways. Out of the blue they’ll just make a face, or crack some strange joke, and I’ll go rocketing backwards in time, remembering so much of that lost time, when we were young, until I see it in their faces. They bring him back to me.
I had to laugh, standing on the front porch of Christian’s house that first morning. It felt like I was going on a date. Nervous and sweating, stomach gurgling, like I was about to meet his parents for the first time, not his kids.
At the same time, I felt about ten years old. Excited and giddy about the fun we were about to have. I remembered the smell of the honeysuckle and pine, the way the sun warmed everything so gently you could smell it, in waves. Standing out there, hoping it would be Christian who answered the door and not his dour parents.
He’d jumped at first when I said I wanted to meet them. I guessed the kids dictated so many of his decisions it was just one more thing. But of course he knew how silly that thought was, and immediately agreed. Now it makes more sense. Even I run all my decisions past the kids, in my head, adjusting for schedules and preferences, variations in taste or phase, weird little grudges.
The door opened, a sober-faced boy standing there staring up at me with the biggest brown eyes. Bodhi, the four-year-old. The eldest. He liked cars, trucks and airplanes and was moving on from dinosaurs although he still was, and remains, fond of them.
There was nothing in his expression to tip me off as to how he felt about all this, but as Christian said, “watchful and protective” is his default mode.
Bodhi is a good judge of character, he always says. It’s Poppy you should fear.
Christian rushed to the door, smiling awkwardly. His hands on his boy’s shoulders instantly calming him down, and I could suddenly see now how high he’d been holding them. He looked a lot smaller with his shoulders where they were supposed to be. I nodded respectfully, meeting his constant gaze, and he sauntered off into the house without another word.
“Wow.”
I hoped I sounded awed. Christian laughed.
“Yeah, he’s a little intense!”
Sure. Just a tad.
Christian took my elbow, guiding me into the house. It was less cluttered than that first day. The thought of Christian tidying up, trying to make everything look good for me, nearly choked me up.
He was always so fussy, so fastidious. When we were kids, a lawn like the one outside would have gotten at least a few bitchy comments. But looking around at the damage four babies can do, I wondered how he managed whatever stability he’d even accomplished. Christian wiped his hands on his shorts, and I could see a ghostly stain on his shirt. More casualties of fatherhood.
What I’d wanted for that first little meeting was exactly this, to see Christian in his natural environment. A grown man, a father. In my head he’d always been around my age, but still as impossibly glossy as when I was nursing my first true love.
The same as when everything about him was perfect and notable, and every tiny detail had some hidden meaning or value. I knew if we were going to have any chance of succeeding, I’d need to replace all that with the real man. The fact that he was gorgeous and smelled like honeysuckle to my alpha senses, was just a complication.
I didn’t want to see him brought low. But in the last ten years I learned nobody will like you if you like them first. Or more. Or out loud. Anything that turns him into a human, a regular Joe, something I could never imagine him being, makes it all easier.
Into the kitchen, where a rickety dining room table boasted a stack of vinyl placemats and a few leftover crumbs. Part of me was consumed by fascination, I just wanted to know what his days were like. I’ve always been intrigued by the minutiae of other people’s routines, because I’m so bad at my own. Even without the kids present, I was overwhelmed by the idea of his life. I couldn’t wait to see it up close.
Christian in the morning, and the evening, and the nighttime: All those men. As much as I’d wanted them, over the years, I could never get enough.
“Bodhi, would you do me a favor? You’re strong enough, I bet.”
He stands tall and proud as a hero, as I knew he would, no match for the implicit dare.
“I need a bucket of water from the hosepipe, and I need it to stay in the bucket.”
He nods, smiling. Once it was impressed on him how careful we have to be not to drown the blueberries, watering them has become a sacred duty.
The twins are impassive, watching him fetch the water, but the moment Poppy’s eyes dart toward the house, they are both on their feet
. Guests arriving.
“I bet that’s Goodboy,” I say, and the kids cheer. They’ve really missed him. Having met him and run a couple of full moons with him, I can say I get it. If I were as young as they were, I would climb in his lap and never leave. He’s just that solid. He’s rooted in the earth, Christian says.
I want to say he’s like a white noise machine, except that would sound like an insult and it isn’t. He chases away the noise, that’s all. I never thought I’d see a pack leader who was an omega, much less an unmated one, but when you meet Goodboy it all makes sense. We didn’t have anybody like him at school, when I was first learning to be a shifter, nobody with that deep silence, that knowing calm. It comes with age, and experience, and whatever Goodboy’s been through has certainly given him those things.
They say he was sarcastic, even snarky, before he joined the Army. But once he heard about the off-book accommodations arranged by the shifters in command, that was it, he loved the idea of bonding with others of his kind in that way. And when he came back, he was different. Quiet and melancholy at first, but eventually such a magnet that Christian has pointed out a few shifters on our monthly runs who moved here just for him.
Goodboy’s ranch compound outside town is a haven of sorts. Safe and still and welcoming to all. That’s exactly what he’s like, too.
“Poppy was going to come down. but she’s still getting ready,” Christian laughed. “Her main joy in life is making an entrance, so this should be pretty spectacular.”
He ushered me over to the island dividing the kitchen from the den, finger to his lips, to eavesdrop on the twins. I was excited to hear their very grownup conversations, out on the screened-in porch, in the nonsense language of three-year-olds.
Christian chuckled under his breath in anticipation, before we even knew what they were up to, and his delight in them was the loveliest thing I’d seen all day.
“Strong can fly for twenty-twelve hours,” Huck explains. “Then he has to sleep.”
Rosemary nodded, holding up a doll that looked vaguely like their older brother.
“Sometimes. But not all the time. He doesn’t have to fly if he doesn’t want to. And he doesn’t have to sleep unless he wants to either.”
She said this last bit with the awe and envy of a lifetime hater-of-naps. I could identify.
Huck considered that, then agreed. The truth, as they understand it, is a matter of negotiation. Sadly, I can identify with that too.
“Creature doesn’t fly. But she can make things fly,” Huck demonstrated, waving one hand in a vaguely magical gesture.
“And sing,” Rosemary insisted. “She can make it sing. Biddle talks to gardens.”
Biddle was Christian, and he pointed at himself silently, nodding.
How much of their time is spent telling stories about the people they love? Defining them. Labeling them. Stitching together whole rafts of concepts that almost make sense.
Almost, but not quite.
Eventually he stole forward, reaching back for me and approaching them slowly.
They looked up at us silently. A slight smile for their Papa, and a frankly measuring look for me. Both of them scanning at once, trying to come up with my story. My label.
Satisfied, apparently, they went back to their dolls and action figures after just a moment, and Christian gestured for me to circle around. We sat on the far side of them, as if playing our own game.
“Creature sees the Silly Man. Strong walks right to him and says Go away.”
A tiny businessman from Lego or something crept about at the edge of their little circle. The Bodhi doll, a muscleman, confronted him. In Rosemary’s hands, the little Poppy doll whistled and hummed some kind of spell at the businessman, and he fell over.
“Go away, Silly Man!” the twins shouted together, and fell forward onto their knees, barking and growling.
I half-expected them to shift, the adorable wolfishness of them so apparent. But no. I always heard shifters’ kids had some probability of being shifters from birth, rather than the mutation expressing itself at random in their teens. Double-mutation, I guess. But that must be an old wolves’ tale. A family with four shifters under five and only one dad couldn’t stay a secret for long.
I wanted to ask so many questions. I still do!
Huckleberry finally stood and walked directly over to me, our eyes level. He stared into my soul for an unnerving amount of time, and finally nodded.
“Scooter.”
He turned to his sister, and she agreed.
“Scooter. You fight the Silly Man.”
I nodded, trying to seem serious even if I was laughing on the inside.
“I fight the Silly Man. Absolutely.”
Christian’s relief when I turned back to him was like sunshine on my face, and then I went still. I felt little hands.
All over me. Patting. Investigating. The textures of my shirt and jeans, and even shoes and socks, under their tiny ministrations. I hoped briefly there might be something fun in my pocket for them to discover, but I was travelling pretty light. No such luck.
Christian and I smiled at each other in silence for a while as they went about their business. I wondered if he was as wary of breaking the spell as I was. And yes, he was. Even when you get to enjoy this weird sweetness all the time, it feels special. For me, it was soothing an ache I didn’t even know I had, deep inside me.
He leaned forward, ready to move on, but just then I felt them clambering over my back. One on each shoulder, and he broke out into sudden peals of laughter, shattering the moment.
“Okay. Once they start using you as a jungle gym, it’s all over. You don’t have to let them do that, though.”
I laughed, holding absolutely still. Yes. I really do.
I still can’t think of anything better. I felt blessed. Like when a butterfly lands on you, or you happen upon a fawn and it doesn’t immediately run away.
For a moment, Christian’s eyes clouded with something. Memories? Desire? Regret? But then he turned back into a half-stranger. We grinned and continued on with businesslike calm.
The twins spent the next hour crawling around on me at random. Never quite speaking directly to me but getting to know me quite well nonetheless. Sniffing, nuzzling, curious little cubs.
Goodboy raises his eyebrows high when he comes out into the yard. His silent greeting.
“Goodboy Miller,” I say, unsure how to impress upon him how happy I am to see him. “I’m picking berries,” obviously. “I’m making a trifle.”
He cocks his head at me and Bodhi puts the bucket down to touch his shoulder.
“A trifle is cream, blueberries, raspberries. Red, white, blue.”
Goodboy nods, grinning hugely. It’s his favorite day of the year, I remember Christian telling me.
“I brought surprises. Multiple ones.”
All four kids zero in on him with laser like intensity. I never noticed before moving in here how close the word surprise is to prize. Now they seem like the same word. I’d forgotten what it was like to be this young. This consistently impressed by the world.
I’m trying to relearn it. Goodboy is helping, actually.
Moving in was relatively smooth, those first few weeks. But I had no idea what to expect with the first full moon. I like knowing what I’m getting into, making sure I’ll be safe. The day before, your inner wolf is jumping around with excitement, so it’s soothing to consider every angle and possibility. But Christian just laughed when I asked.
When we arrived at Goodboy’s ranch that first time, I understood almost immediately why. There’s a sense of ceremony to everything Goodboy does, but especially out there on his own property. I guess because so many of us come to the pack messed up, by life, by being gay in a world that’s still getting used to it, by being a shifter in a world that still isn’t ready. He considered me quietly, stepped forward with his hands open, and waited for my reaction before leaning in to hug me.
He’s a lean and rang
y man, with the kind of taut muscled body you get from hard labor, not working out. Also, he runs very hot. It had been a warm embrace, and so clearly strong that for a moment I felt like a kid with his arms around me. Safe. It was a funny way to feel about a stranger, especially an omega. But there is an undercurrent of love to all he does.
Growing up, especially once I left home, there was always this sense of picking up rocks and looking underneath. Figuring out how somebody could disappoint you, right up front, so there were no surprises. But with Goodboy, I felt, from the moment he touched me, and it still rings true, there was nothing to him that you couldn’t see. He is a surprise, and a prize.
The other men were friendly but kept their distance as the moon rose. I didn’t know if it was because I was a stranger still. Later it became clear that they were giving Christian space, on Goodboy’s orders, and it had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel excluded or like the new guy. I just felt like we were there to become wolves, run around, kill some rabbits, smell some things. Then put our clothes back on when the sun came up.
I’ve been in packs like that, so it seemed normal to expect it. In L.A., it sometimes felt like you never saw the same guys twice. Which is a pretty strange thing, for a member of such a small population. But it wasn’t like that here I found. We sat in a circle, waiting for the moon. Goodboy handed a drum to somebody and I got very nervous that things were about to get weird, but it was actually nice. Like a heartbeat we all could hear.
The transformation itself was marvelous, one of the best I’d ever experienced. Sitting in that circle, breathing in unison, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Like slipping into a natural hot spring or rolling down a grassy hill on a summer day. Moving from A to B, like a dance we all just knew.
My first shift had not been like that. The older boys at school had been telling me what it was going to be like for a few weeks. I’d thought I was hiding my nerves, but I was very wrong. I believed them, which is not always the case. Some guys will keep protesting that it’s a joke until they’re half transformed, mouth going right up until it can’t anymore. But I knew I could feel what they were talking about the first time they ever tried to explain it.
