Kiss Kiss

by Various Authors

  She didn’t meet my eyes, which was a shame, because I really wanted to get a closer look.

  “Hey,” she said, a little breathlessly.

  “Mom? This is my friend Julia.”

  Julia’s eyes widened a little, and my mom turned to her and said, “Well, hello, Julia. I’m Margot.”

  Just Like Always (Julia)

  “So where are you from?” Margot asked as Crank closed the door behind us. The usual awkward question, which I never have a prepared answer for, though I should, since I’ve been asked a thousand and one times. One strategy, which I used this time while pulling off my coat, was to intentionally misunderstand.

  “Oh, I live in Cambridge, I’m a student.”

  Crank reached to take my coat and I said, “Wait—” and reached in the huge side pocket and took out my gift for Sean, then passed it to him. “Thanks,” I said, as he took both his mother’s coat and mine and hung them up. Weird. You don’t expect punk rockers to be so polite.

  Margot stopped near the couch, looking at Sean, and the look of sadness and longing on her face was indescribable. But she didn’t say anything.

  My heart nearly shattered for her when Sean said, “Hey, Julia.”

  I didn’t know why Sean and Crank hated their mother, but what had just happened was heartbreaking. I wanted to start crying, but instead, I mumbled, “Hey.”

  Margot and I followed Crank into the kitchen, and there I saw what was probably the strangest scene I’ve ever seen between a separated couple. Because Jack turned around, and his eyes lit up when he saw Margot. The two of them stepped close, a little hesitantly, and then embraced in a long, uxorious hug. His arms wrapped around her waist, tight, while hers went around his shoulders. She rested her head in the crook of his neck, and I saw her shoulders lower slightly as she let out a long, quiet sigh.

  A tall man with salt and pepper hair was sitting at the kitchen table. When we walked in, he stood, smiling hesitantly, then when Jack and Margot finally stepped back from each other, he said, “Margot, it’s good to see you.” Then he turned toward me. “And you must be Dougal’s girlfriend.”

  Crank muttered something, probably seriously obnoxious, and I said in as sweet a tone as I could muster, “Actually, we’re barely even friends. I’m Julia.” I held out a hand to shake.

  Jack burst into laughter, and the other guy chuckled and took my hand. “I’m Tony, the token Italian in this nuthouse. And please don’t take offense, but I’m single, and you’re just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. If you and Dougal aren’t a thing, well …”

  “Tony D’Amato!” Margot said in a scolding voice. “She’s young enough to be your daughter!”

  Tony grinned, and I tried to stifle the furious blush I could feel running down my face.

  “A man can still wish, even if he’s all old and broken down!”

  I didn’t know how to react to any of this, especially since the object of the party—Sean—was sitting alone in the other room. For just a second, I felt intense embarrassment at Tony’s comments. Then I let that pass. He was teasing. Much like Jack, he’d instantly accepted me here. And that made me suddenly feel a prick of tears in my eyes. I blinked them back.

  “Beer?” Tony asked me.

  “Yes, please,” I replied.

  Jack shook his head and said to Margot, “You see what happens when you let Italians in the house? They start going through your things and giving them away.”

  Margot giggled, and in that moment, she looked fifteen years younger. She had stepped away from Jack but kept a hand on his shoulder. Tony handed her a beer without even asking.

  “Few more minutes,” Jack said. “I told Sean I’d cook him whatever he wanted tonight. No food restrictions. No nothing. What does he do? Asks for pizza. Delivered.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Margot asked.

  Jack shrugged. “It’s the kid’s seventeenth birthday. Let him eat what he wants.”

  She nodded, the pensive expression returning to her face. We were crowded there in the kitchen, so I slipped around the table and sat next to Tony. “Since you made such a gentlemanly offer, the least I can do is keep you company,” I said. Then I fluttered my eyelashes at him outrageously.

  He nearly spit up his beer laughing, then cried out, “Jack, help me! This one’s beating me at my own game.”

  I grinned at him. “So, I’m trying to keep everyone straight. Tony, right? Friend of the family? Relative?”

  “God forbid I’d be related to any of these drunken micks,” he said. “I just come here for the free beer.”

  “Ah, shut up!” Jack said.

  Tony ignored him. “Jack and I have been partners on the force for what, ten years now?”

  “It’s been like a life sentence,” Jack replied, his tone sounding weary.

  Tony laughed. “Originally I says to the Captain, ‘Don’t make me partner with that guy, he’ll run off and get drunk right in the middle of a high speed chase,’ but then I met Margot, and she was so easy on the eyes, I figured I could survive Jack if I got to see her every once in a while. Plus, if Whitey’s mafia ever offed him, I’d be able to run off with her into the sunset.”

  Margot smiled, her eyes straying back to Jack. “You two are so bad.”

  Crank didn’t say a word, just leaned against a wall while slowly nursing a beer. And something just … didn’t add up. It was plainly obvious, from the way they touched each other, the way they looked at each other, the way they talked to each other, that Margot and Jack still loved each other passionately.

  Why the hell were they separated then?

  It didn’t make any sense at all.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Ah, that’ll be our last guest, Mrs. Doyle.”

  “I’ll get it,” Crank said. He stepped out of sight, and a few moments later returned with Mrs. Doyle in tow. She said hello to everyone, and that’s when Jack announced it was time to move into the living room. We got up, and everybody moved into the living room, just as the pizza arrived.

  Honestly, it was a fun little party. Everybody laughed and joked. Even Sean joined in, awkwardly telling a story from the manga he was reading, which convinced me I’d made a good choice in gifts.

  Every once in a while, I’d look over at Jack and Margot, fascinated. They were in their early fifties, I guess, but from the way they kept touching each other, you’d think they were teenagers. He kept a hand on her knee, and sometimes she’d reach up and touch his hair or his shoulder. They stayed close, very close. I couldn’t help but draw a comparison to my own parents, who were distant, sat at opposite ends of the table, and rarely touched or even smiled at each other.

  In some ways, the party reminded me of my own seventeenth birthday. The last time I had one with my family before everything completely fell apart. My birthday falls three days after Christmas, which used to make December the best month of the year, and now makes it the worst. But my seventeenth? It wasn’t bad.

  For one thing, school was out. Lana, my best friend, came over, and we spent Friday night watching bootleg first run movies from the States, eating chocolate, and laughing. Lana’s parents were Australian diplomats, and we used to spend a lot of time joking with each other about the differences in our countries, in the way we talked. Not so different from Jack and Tony, though somehow I couldn’t imagine them stabbing each other in the back and ruining each other’s lives.

  I shivered. It took me a long time to reconstruct my life, secretly, after what Harry did to me. Lana had been there. She knew how hard it was. She knew how delicate it was. And when the time came, it seemed like nothing at all for her to sweep the rug out from under me and bring my life crashing back down again.

  I struggled to bring myself mentally back to the present. I didn’t think anyone really noticed, until I saw Crank looking at me strangely. I spread my arms and raised my eyebrows as if to say, “What?” and he looked away.

  The one elephant in the room that no on
e mentioned was Sean’s reaction to his mother. Or rather, lack of reaction. Through the night so far, he’d not responded to her at all. Not one word. And I could see it was slowly killing her inside. Even when she smiled or laughed, I could see the sadness in her eyes. Profound sadness.

  Finally we got to the gifts. Crank had gotten him a couple of video games, and his dad bought him more comics. Tony and Mrs. Doyle both brought accessories for electronics kits. From the way he set them aside, I got the feeling that was an interest that had passed its time. His eyes opened wide when he opened my gift: a figurine of a character in the manga I’d seen him reading.

  “Is that Rei Ayanami?” he asked.

  Jack and Margot both looked puzzled.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Why her?” he asked.

  “Um … well … because she’s a little different and isolated. But also a hero. And even though she starts out very isolated, she comes out of her shell. Which is something I’m trying to learn how to do.”

  He put the figurine in his pocket and looked relatively close to me, like somewhere over my shoulder, and said, in a very formal tone of voice, “Thank you very much.”

  I swallowed and took a deep breath. Somehow that moment meant a lot to me. And that’s when I realized that everyone in the room was staring at me. Crank, in particular, gave me such an intense look it made me shiver. I couldn’t tell if it was love or hate, but whatever it was, it was scary.

  Jack passed over a small box. “And this is from your mother.”

  Sean reached out and took it in his hand and slowly weighed it. Then, without a word, he set it to the side. Without unwrapping it.

  “Sean,” Jack said.

  “I don’t want it.”

  Margot looked as if she’d been punched in the gut. She said, “It’s all right …” but you could tell from her face that it wasn’t. It wasn’t all right at all, and my heart was breaking for her. I just wish I understood what was going on, what had happened to cause this deep rift between her and her children.

  “It’s not all right,” Jack blurted out. “Sean, open your mother’s present.”

  “No, really, Jack,” Margot said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “Sean,” Jack said in a firm, almost threatening voice. He was turned halfway toward Sean, almost shielding Margot from her own son. Protective, and fierce, and very angry. My stomach twisted.

  Sean looked up and off to the side. “She’s just leaving again. I do not want her present.”

  A tear ran down Margot’s face, and then another, and then she started shaking.

  The rest of us were a frozen tableau, no one knowing how to react, when Jack stood up and walked toward Sean. “Sean, open your mother’s present. She came all this way to bring you a gift, and you’re hurting her feelings.”

  Sean stood up and faced his father and with hands clenched into fists at his side, he shouted, “Good! I hope I hurt them! I did not ask her to come here today! Why did you have to bring her here and ruin my birthday?”

  Mrs. Doyle shook her head and put a hand on Margot’s trembling shoulder, and Jack shouted, “Go to your room, Sean!”

  “Good!” Sean shouted. “Now it’s just like always!” And he reached down and picked up the gift, and threw it, hard, at the front window. Whatever was in the gift was hard, but the wrapping softened the blow a little bit. It hit the window with a loud whack, but the window didn’t crack.

  Jack surged forward, and Crank jumped up, physically putting himself in between them. “Dad, calm down,” he shouted.

  Sean’s face was marked with rage, eyebrows drawn down low and pushed together, and he moved toward his father. “What, were you going to attack me?”

  “Sean!” Crank shouted, putting his other hand against Sean’s chest to hold him back. “Chill out. Everybody chill out!”

  The room went silent, except for Margot’s tortuous, stifled sobs. Sean stalked off and then broke into a run in the hallway, his sneakers thumping on the stairs on his way up.

  Jack deflated, exhaling suddenly. With sinking shoulders, he said, “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Margot. I’m so sorry.”

  Nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to me. So I quietly got to my feet, stepped out of the room, and tiptoed upstairs.

  Don’t Get in the Way (Crank)

  As always after a blowup with Sean, my heart was pounding, and my stomach was twisted in knots. For the first time in a very long time, I felt a huge wave of sympathy for my mother. Seeing her like this now—broken, silently weeping—brought back memories I’d have just as soon not remembered.

  My mother, sitting there at the same couch with my father’s arms wrapped around her, wailing, “I just want to die! Please let me die!”

  I squeezed my eyes to shut out the memory, but it wouldn’t go. That was five or so years ago, right before she left, right before I left.

  Jack put his arms around her. He spoke gently, “Let’s go sit in the kitchen, get you some coffee or something.”

  She nodded, and Tony put a hand on her shoulder in sympathy. Mrs. Doyle got up to go, and I walked her to the door, and said, very quietly, “I’m sorry about that blowup, Mrs. Doyle.”

  She looked at me with level eyes. Sad eyes. “You just take care of your mom and your brother, young man. You’ve all been through a lot, but it will get better.”

  I wish I had her confidence. Sometimes I worried so much about Sean and his blowups. I’d been a bad kid, sure. But I never got so angry that I confronted Dad like that, except once, and he’d clocked me right in the face when it happened. Now, with Sean, it happened weekly around here and was getting worse. That was one of the reasons I was at the house so much. To give them some space from each other, to be a buffer.

  My mom and dad and Tony moved into the kitchen, and that’s when I realized … Julia had gone missing.

  I checked out the back door, but she wasn’t there, and the ground floor bathroom was open. So I quietly went up the stairs.

  Sean’s door was cracked, light streaming across the floor in the hallway. As I approached, I could hear him pacing back and forth, which he always did when he was pent up with energy. He was talking, a slightly disjointed and toneless monologue which occasionally broke into angry tones.

  “Why should I accept her gift? Or have her in the house? She left when I was twelve. She is not part of my life. She did not want to be part of my life. Why should she be part of my life now, when it is convenient for her?”

  Julia was in there. She said something, but it was quiet. I couldn’t really hear, so I moved closer. As I did so, I saw her. She was sitting on the floor next to his bed, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. He was pacing in circles.

  “I know,” he responded to whatever she said.

  He stopped pacing, suddenly, and asked, “Why don’t you get along with your mother?”

  I held my breath. She must have said something to him before I came up here.

  She took a deep breath and replied, “A few things, I guess. You know we lived in China most of my high school years? My parents … they went through a rough time for a while, especially the first two years. And I … I went through the worst experience in my life, and needed help, and didn’t get it from her. Later on, when things got really bad after we came back to the States, it was like she judged me, you know? She didn’t take the time to find out my side of the story, or listen, or be … a mom. Instead it was all about controlling me and sometimes saying things that made me feel bad about myself. Really bad. All the while, I was protecting her.”

  Sean started pacing again. This was his way of working out his energy, but sometimes it had the opposite effect, winding him up even more. I wasn’t sure what was happening here, because this was as real a conversation as I’d ever heard him have. He never talked about this stuff with us, that was for sure.

  “My mom used to cry at night,” he said. “All the time. I could hear her down the hall, and sometimes when sh
e was crying, it was about me. Like I was a broken toy, and she wanted to return me to the store. Or get me fixed. Every day it was another doctor, and she would tell them all about what was wrong with me.”

  She looked up at him, her hair falling away from her face. “That must have been really hard.”

  “I want … I—” He couldn’t continue the sentence.

  “You want your mother to love you the way you are?”

  “Yes!” he cried out. And the damnedest thing was, I could hear the sadness, the emotion in his voice. My brother, who was always, always monotone, unless he was angry. “Why won’t she just accept me for who I am?”

  He stopped pacing suddenly and slumped down to the floor next to her.

  She answered, “Sometimes … I think parents work so hard to keep us from making their mistakes, they won’t allow us to make our own. I mean … your mother loves you and wants the best for you. Anyone can see that. But she doesn’t know how to say it, except … to push.”

  “Can you really see it? I don’t.”

  “Watch her expression.”

  “I don’t … I don’t read expressions very well. They tried to teach me. My mother used to take me to social skills classes and teachers. They’d show me pictures with little round stick figure faces, and I had to say what the expression was. This person is happy. This person is sad. But those were not real people. I look at real people, and I’ve got no idea what they think. What do you see?”

  She turned to him, her expression somber. “I think your mother may be the saddest person I’ve ever seen.”

  He stared at the floor, and I could see the anger in his posture—his shoulders were hunched and his hands bunched into fists. “Because of me.”