by J. A. Rock
“How massive?”
“Sixty feet. Longer than a semitruck, with a head the size of a garage.”
“Ermahgerd.”
“I know. And although some scientists believe it to be an ancestor of the great white, the fine serrations of the megalodon’s teeth suggest it’s more closely related to the modern mako shark. But, at any rate, it was king of the seas, feeding on whales and other megalodons, until the changing climate and dwindling food sources trapped it in the ocean’s deepest trenches, beneath miles of frigid water.”
I yawned, trying to imagine the darkness of the room was the darkness of the ocean’s deepest trenches.
He bumped me. “You sleepy?”
I yawned again, my voice going high. “Nooo, I waa-aa hear bowww the . . . deeh trenshizz.” I closed my mouth with a hum and nestled closer to him.
“Okay, well, the megalodons were lurking in the deepest trenches. Until one day . . .”
I half listened as he told a story about a megalodon named Devil’s Tooth that escaped the trenches and rose to the surface to eat an evil surfer named Bodhi.
“Wait,” I mumbled, almost asleep. “She ate Patrick Swayze from Point Break?”
“Yep.” Ryan stroked my hair. “Her cruelty knew no bounds.”
“Your cruelty knows no bounds,” I murmured.
And then I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up in the night with him snoring softly beside me and yellowish streetlight coming in through the slats of the blinds.
I got up, pissed, then got back into bed and pulled him close to me. Lay there for a few minutes. Sometimes I had trouble sleeping in this apartment. And there were still mornings I woke expecting to see my old bedroom and feeling confused for a second about where I was. What was really weird was that sometimes this place made me feel homesick—not for my old apartment, but for my mom’s house. Which, don’t even ask me how that worked. I guess I’d felt so totally comfortable in my frat-house garage-sale pad and so glad to be living on my own for the first time that homesickness had never come up. But here, in this house full of adulting, I sometimes missed not being an adult.
Weird. I glanced over at Ryan, wondering if he ever felt that way.
I reached out and poked his jaw to see if I could get him to make an annoyed I’m sleeping noise. But he didn’t make a sound.
I’d never had a serious relationship before. I’d dated in high school and college, but I dunno . . . high school was high school, and in college guys maybe thought I was too immature for long-term stuff. What was happening right now was a big deal to me. I kinda wished I could talk to Ryan about that. I mean, I could. I could talk to him about anything. But sometimes with deep stuff, it was harder to start the conversation.
It was way easier to talk about megalodons and juicers and even panties.
I closed my eyes and imagined the room smelled kinda like dirty clothes and toast crusts instead of like new curtains.
And eventually I fell asleep.
My dad arrived in town Tuesday, and he asked if I’d go with him to get ice cream. Like I was seriously six.
So of course I said yes.
I was quiet as we headed out of the city in his rental car. We were going to this drive-in he’d been obsessed with years ago, out in the suburbs. He’d asked me if Mom and I still went there much, and I’d been kinda like, No, dude. Mom and I don’t really drive forty minutes to get ice cream together.
I still felt sort of shitty about making fun of my friends with Ryan. I mean, I hadn’t really made fun of them, but . . . The whole thing seemed stupid now. I got it: People in love were obnoxious. So I was driving the guys crazy right now by hanging all over Ryan, and everyone would get over it eventch.
Gould called during Dad’s and my attempt at small talk to ask if I was still friends with the woman who ran a bondage group called Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Rope-bots, and if I could put him in touch with her. I glanced over at my dad and said into the phone, “Yeah. I’ll text you the info.” I felt crappy enough about yesterday and desperate enough for distraction to try to engage Gould in a conversation, but he sounded like he was in a hurry.
“Hey,” I said finally. “I’m really sorry I haven’t been around lately. I seriously do miss you guys.”
“No worries.”
I’d been hoping for something like, Dave’s crazy, and we all love Ryan, and everything’s awesome. “We cool?”
“Yup. I gotta run. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
I hung up.
Dad glanced at me. “Was that your boyfriend?”
“Nah. Gould.”
Dad didn’t say anything for a moment. “He doing well?”
“Yeah. He’s had a rough time since Hal—like, worse than the rest of us, maybe. But he’s better now.”
I still didn’t think anyone knew this but me, but two weeks after Bill Henson’s trial ended, I’d gotten a call from Gould to come pick him up at the hospital. I’d gone to get him, freaked out as all fuck that he’d been in an accident or found out he had cancer or something. Except it hadn’t been an accident. He’d taken a whole bottle of pills, and then called 911, and he’d been in the hospital for two days under observation.
“You can’t tell the others. Please. It was a mistake.” Over and over. I’d been too shocked to focus on anything beyond the fact that he’d tried to fucking kill himself. And the fact that he’d called me.
That was usually how it worked. People acted like I couldn’t be trusted with serious issues, and yet when they had a real problem—or something they wanted to keep secret—a lot of times they came to me.
If you’re a good listener, people tell you shit.
If you pretend you’re dumber than you are, they tell you lots of shit.
I guess I believed him about it being a mistake, since he’d called his own ambulance. Plus the hospital should’ve kept him for a week at least, but they let him go after two days because the psychiatrist basically concluded he wasn’t at risk for another attempt. I’d made him swear on Hal’s memory he wouldn’t try it again. He kept going on about how I couldn’t tell the others—especially Dave. I’d refused to take him back to his place. Made him stay at my apartment for a week. Gave him my bed, and I took the couch. He mostly didn’t argue, and we actually had a pretty good week together, talking and shit. He’d said he hadn’t really wanted to die, he was just tired of missing Hal and feeling angry at Bill every single day, and he couldn’t think of a big enough way to let out all those feelings. When I finally let him go, I made him promise he’d call me if he ever needed me. But he didn’t call.
Like, where was the balance? If you had a group of friends, and you were used to being up each other’s butts all the time—not literally, although Dave and Gould, who knows?—and then you started to realize that even though you wanted to be there for them, you also wanted to have a life where maybe all their problems weren’t also your problems, what did you do? And I didn’t mean that as, like, I resented being there for Gould when he needed someone, because I would have done that a thousand times over. I just meant . . .
I didn’t know what I meant.
I tried to focus on Dad, who was talking about how some plaza we were passing had changed in the years since he’d lived here. He always reminded me a little of someone whose job it was to lure people into the circus back in the day. Everything he said kinda sounded like you were being told to step right up and see the bearded lady. “What an Old Navy! Three stories high. Tallest Old Navy I’ve ever seen!”
And he’d bark away about dumb stuff like that, but the second he tried to talk about anything remotely serious, he’d stammer and trail off every couple of words. If the bearded lady had come to him and been like, I have the clap; I need a few nights off, he’d have been all, Oh . . . um. I see. If you could just . . . Can you finish your shift, or . . . No? Well, of course . . .
He’d cheated on Mom when I was a kid, and I’d always felt bad because, like, I still loved h
im, but I was on her side, so I treated him pretty shitty. He was really supportive of me, though. He worked as a financial advisor and was plenty loaded, but he didn’t care that I loved being a cook at the Green Kitchen, or that my goals weren’t super lofty. He liked that I wanted to be a musician, and every year for Christmas, he got me something music-related, so that was cool. He said “follow your dreams” a lot, which was pretty cheesy, but it made me feel good.
I had a lot of dreams. For instance, I wanted to launch a fake review trend for an Amazon product. Like that hundred-thousand-dollar watch that everyone started sarcastically reviewing and saying it had saved a bus of school children and raving about the fifty-eight-thousand-dollar discount you got when you bought it on Amazon. Or the book How to Avoid Huge Ships, which had a whole bunch of reviews from people pretending they’d been smacking into huge ships for years before this book came along.
Also, I liked writing, even though I wasn’t great at it. I once wrote a comic called “Snow Wanderer,” about a homeless kid who wanders around during winter, surviving on the carrots from snowman noses. He finds some that have eyes made of zucchini slices too. I’d done the illustrations, which basically looked like that guy with the splattery paintings except with crayons, but hey.
I didn’t know if I was really stupid or not. My mom said I just saw the world differently, but that sounded like the kind of thing moms said when their kids were basically dimwads. I definitely cared more about my own life than world issues. Which was probably why I always kind of sucked at the Subs Club. Because I used it more as hanging-out time than a way to talk about Important Shit.
But I wasn’t, like, not interested in things besides me. For instance, I loved Stephen Hawking’s books. I didn’t understand everything in them, but I really was fascinated by his ideas. I’d watched like eight documentaries about him, and The Theory of Everything was pretty much my favorite movie. Except watching it for the first time was suspenseful, because I knew he was gonna come down with that disease, I just didn’t know when. It was like Ghost Dad, where you know Bill Cosby’s going to die, but they have all those red-herring almost-deaths to keep you on your toes.
“So the move went okay?” Dad asked.
“Yeah. Ryan and I love the place. We’ve been decorating like fiends.” I paused. “What’s chevron?”
“An oil company.”
“No, but, like, Dave called my new curtains chevron.”
Dad sped up to keep someone from passing us. “Uh . . . I don’t know. A color, maybe? Why didn’t you ask Dave?”
I shrugged. “I dunno.”
“So you like this guy?” he asked. “Ryan, I mean?”
I shot him a pretty world-class duh look. “I wouldn’t have moved in with him if I didn’t. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Literally.”
Dad moved his jaw back and forth for a second and glanced out his window. “And you’re still doing the—the stuff your mom does? At the clubs?”
“God! Don’t put it like that. We don’t do the same stuff. But, yeah, I still do BDSM.”
He nodded and didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he adjusted the AC and said, “I actually wanted to talk to you about that.”
I got really freaked then. A few months ago, Miles tried telling his mom he was into kink, and she didn’t approve at all. My mom’d had to give her a talking to, which had been supes awkward. What if my dad was about to tell me he thought I was fucked up or something?
Which would be weird, since he’d known since I was twenty-two. I’d told Mom, and she’d told him, and then she’d told me she’d told him, and said he was “coming to terms with it.”
He cleared his throat. “As you know, your mother and I separated for several reasons. One of them being her . . . needs, which at the time I didn’t understand very well.”
I’d been eight when they’d split up. When I was sixteen, I’d found Mom’s BDSM stuff in her closet when I was looking for a hat to borrow for a school project. We’d had a talk, and she’d explained what BDSM was and how it was totally normal but that a lot of people didn’t get it. I’d been too shocked to tell her I watched leather porn all the time. Then she’d told me about my grandma starting a leather group for women in San Francisco in the 1970s, which was awesome but crazy. And then I hadn’t been able to watch BDSM porn for like two months after that, because gross, my mom.
Anyway, she’d explained that Dad hadn’t shared her interests, and that was part of the reason for the separation. I’d gotten sort of pissed, because I thought that was a stupid reason to split. Then she’d reminded me cheating was the big reason, and I was like, Oh yeah.
“We, uh . . .” Dad trailed off awkwardly. “She tried to introduce me to some of the—the lifestyle . . . aspects . . . but . . .”
Oh man. This was stuff I didn’t need to hear.
“I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. At the time.” He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “You okay with all this?”
The government should probably give free cyanide capsules to everyone, just in case we ever get captured by terrorists or our parents start talking about sex in front of us. “Yeah. For sure.”
We passed a billboard for Abortion Is Murder.
“Over the past couple of years,” he went on, “I’ve realized that I do have a certain amount of the interest in me. I’ve done some experimenting. With Kim. You remember Kim?”
Kim had been the HR director at Dad’s firm. She’d left the company a few years ago to get back into horses. I knocked my head gently against the window. “Yeah.”
“I’ve also acquired a considerable amount of equipment.” He bobbed his head as road signs flashed by us.
Gross.
I sat up and checked the speedometer. “You’re going, like, eighty.”
He also had the wheel in a death grip. He slowed down. “Sorry. I just rarely talk about this out loud. Guess I’m nervous.”
I seriously had no idea what to say.
“I’ve been updating my living will. And I’d like you to be in charge of—when I . . . pass away—going to the house and . . .” He took a breath. “Clearing out all equipment of that nature.”
“What?” Fucking for real? I already had a mom who stepped on guys’ balls in high heels, and now I had a dad who was gonna make me throw away all his butt plugs when he died?
He shot me a glance. “I need someone to do it. And I’d rather it be someone who understands and is compassionate than . . . You can donate it, throw it out, keep it . . .”
“Why would I keep it?” This just kept getting worse.
“Well, throw it away, then.” He sounded vaguely annoyed. Which was unfair, given that he was the one crapbliterating all the standards of decent father-son conversation.
“Did you come all the way out here to tell me this?”
He sighed. “I came back in part to apologize in person to your mom for some of the things I said to her years ago. About her lifestyle. Particularly things I said when she told me you had come out about being . . . having the interest.”
Now I was curious. “What did you say to her?”
My dad took his hand off the wheel to rub the black fuzz around his bald spot. “At the time, I was worried about you. And I thought— I implied that maybe she’d encouraged you to believe you were like her.”
“You think she made me kinky?”
“I don’t think that anymore.” His voice was kind of clangy and jarring, like when you try to put a pen between the bars of a fan. “Anyway, I figured while I was out here—”
“That’s our exit.”
“Shit.” He swerved into the exit lane. “While I was out here, I thought I’d talk to you about the will. I wanted to visit you anyway, and this way I get a chance to talk to each of you face-to-face.”
He slowed as we came off the ramp. Got in the left lane at the light.
I watched the turn signal blink on the car in front of us. “Mom has a friend
who’s doing that for her. Clearing the weird stuff out of her house. Don’t you have friends?”
He laughed uncomfortably. “None I can talk to about this.”
I always forgot that other people didn’t have friends they could talk to about BDSM. I was lucky as shit.
We were silent until we reached the drive-in. We sat for a moment in the parking lot.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
A server was coming toward our car. I nodded. “All right. But you owe me.”
“Anything.”
Anything? Well, then . . . “When we go back to town, stop in the Twin Oaks Plaza. At the Bed Bath & Beyond. There’s something there I’ve been waiting for.”
I walked into the kitchen two hours later with our new juicer. “You’d better buy some carrots and kale, mothafucka,” I called to Ryan, setting the box on the counter. “’Cause we’re having fresh juice every goddamn morning.”
“What the hell?” Ryan padded in from the bedroom, wearing a flannel shirt and boxers. He touched the box. “Did you put it on a card?”
“Give your regards to Jimmy Willman.”
“Who?”
“My dad.” I slit the tape on the box with a steak knife. “He wanted to buy us something.”
“Why does he have a different last name than you?”
I ripped the box open. “I told you this. He wanted to keep his name. My mom wanted to keep hers. She gave me her last name.”
“I don’t think you told me that.”
“Pretty sure I did.” I pulled the juicer out and set it beside the box. “Hallelujah. How the . . . frizzles does this thing work?” I picked up the plastic-wrapped parts.
“But he’s your real dad?”
I tore open the plastic. “Of course.”
“That’s cool.” He came over and helped me unwrap the pieces. “Did you have a good time with him?”
I summed up my convo with Dad. Ryan’s eyes got wide. “So do you think kink really is genetic?”
“Well, I apparently got it from all freaking sides, so yeah.”
