Kids of Appetite (4 page)

I swallowed the knot down as she pulled me closer. I remembered. How could I forget? Lately she'd been going on about the importance of healing, of allowing ourselves time to wade in the grief pool, and of recognizing when the time came to get out and dry ourselves off.

Mom had been dry for a while, I guess.

I was sinking like a rock.

“Frank makes me happy, sweetheart,” she said. “Or at least,
not
sad. I'd like to feel more of that, you know? I'd like for you to feel it too. Maybe not toward Frank, but toward something, somebody.”

I imagined the knock on my bedroom door again.
Come in
, I would say. Frank the Boyfriend would open the door, poke his head full of hair inside.
Hey, Vic. You need anything?
I would nod.
Go jump off a bridge, Frank
.

Mom hugged me.

And it felt like a last meal. It felt like
thnx, luv
.

I tried to hug her back, but my arms hung like vines by my sides, awkward and too long for my body.

“He gave me dad's tumbler,” I said quietly.

“What?”

“Klint. When he came in here to get my Coke.” Suddenly the hug takes on a new sense of restraint, a hesitation that wasn't there seconds ago. “He switched out my glass and gave me Dad's. They're awful, Mom. They hate me.”

. . .

. . .

“They don't hate you. They just don't know you yet.”

Yet
.

For such a tiny word, it sure could flip a sentence on its ass.

“I'll talk to Frank about it,” she said. “Speaking of which, you owe him an apology.”

I nodded and Mom let go, stepping toward the door, toward the dining room, toward her new family, away from me.

“It's not true, you know,” I said, staring at the fallen strand of Christmas lights.

“What's not true?”

Just when I decided not to say it, the words came out. “You and Dad liked the same books.”

Watching her eyes water offered a strange sense of relief. He still mattered to her. What we had still mattered. Mom could flirt and smile and bake a billion pies, but in the end, her eyes were traitorous too. They told me all I needed to know. Whatever this was with Frank, even
she
knew it was nothing like what she had with Dad.

She blinked away tears, forced a smile, and opened the door to the dining room. “After you, honey.”

I stood frozen to the spot.

I stood staring into the dining room.

I am mighty aplombed
.

“Vic?” said Mom, turning to look through the door. “What's—”

In the dining room, Klint and Kory were standing in their chairs, each one with a guitar strapped around their shoulders. “
Two! Three! Four!
” yelled Klint, his voice even raspier than normal.

The Orchestra of Lost Soulz plunged into song with that special enthusiasm reserved for people who had no idea they couldn't sing. It was awkward and sweaty and uncomfortable for everyone. Frank sat in his chair, staring at Mom through the whole thing, his face strangely constricted. After the song came to a close, he said, “I realize this is sort of . . . well, not ideal timing.” His eyes shifted to me. “Vic, I hope you see this as proof of my love and commitment. To both you, and your mother.”

Before I could ask what
this
meant, Frank cleared his throat and scooted out of his chair. I waited for him to stand, but it never happened.

Frank the Boyfriend took a knee.

Frank the Boyfriend reached into his pocket.

Frank the Boyfriend pulled out a ring.

Frank the Boyfriend wanted to be Frank the Husband.

Frank the New Dad.

Mom covered her mouth with both hands as I helplessly watched the scene play out before me.

“Doris Jacoby,” said Frank.

I quietly observed the conspicuous absence of
Benucci
.

“. . . make me the happiest man alive.”

I quietly observed my mother, who, bizarrely, had yet to run screaming through the front door, racing down the street, pulling clumps of hair from her head, rending the clothes from her body, shrieking in havoc and mourning . . . or, at the very
least
, laughing, grabbing Dad's urn from its dark place of prominence in our hallway, shoving it in Frank's face, and saying,
I'm spoken for, bitch!

She had yet to do any of these things.

Bizarrely.

“Marry me,” said Frank.

Someone screamed.

Everyone looked at me.

The scream—which, in my estimation, had been the most sensible thing to happen in the last two or three minutes—had come from my own throat. Or gut. Or mouth. All of them, actually.

I did it again. It seemed the thing to do.

And again.

Yes, screaming at the highest of pitches was very sensible.

No words. Just animal screams as I exited my body.

From above, near the ceiling, I saw Vic run from the kitchen. In the hallway, he overcame his inability to touch his father's urn by simply picking it up. He felt the weight
of the urn in his hands, remarkably heavy.
I shouldn't be surprised,
he thought
. I am holding the whole of my father, the same bald heart-thinker who taught me to find beauty in asymmetry, led me to the Land of Nothingness, gave me the soaring sopranos. If anything, his ashes should be heavier!
Vic stuffed the urn into his backpack, slipped on his boots, threw on his coat, and bolted out the front door. He had to get his dad out of that place, away from all those disturbing
ding-dong-how-was-your-ding-dong-day
s, and the rest of the happy family voices. He needed to find a place where his father, the world's last and greatest Super Racehorse, might rest in peace.

He knew just the spot.

Being born on December 31 meant watching everyone in the world celebrate a thing on your birthday that wasn't you. Mom never saw it that way, though. She called me her New Year's darling, said I was special, meant for great things. I was a little younger than most in my class—Mom said this gave me an edge. I'd finish school sooner, discover the world first, and maybe find whatever great thing I was meant for.

I lit my cigarette and wished she were here now.

Drag
.

Blow
.

Calm
.

The snow kept falling, the wind from the river kept coming, and I stared at the submarine, pondering the intricacies of my past, but mostly, wondering about my future. Three weeks from now, happy New Year would be my happy
birthday, and the freedom of eighteen would be upon me with all the honors and benefits granted therein. One benefit was the legal opportunity to get myself, and Jamma, out from under the iron fist of Uncle Les. Sure, I could sneak off now for days at a time, and he either didn't notice or didn't care. But I had to go back. Even though Jamma rarely knew who I was anymore, I always went back. I'd been thinking a lot about love recently, and how it wasn't contingent on the person receiving it; it was contingent on the person giving it. Whether or not my grandmother recognized me didn't matter. I loved her too much to leave her stranded with Uncle Les.

Enter the freedom of eighteen, with all those pesky honors and benefits.

The problem was, eighteen or not, I had no idea where we should go or how we should get there. I couldn't choose a place too far away; the thought of being separated from Baz and Zuz and Coco was almost as difficult as the thought of losing Jamma.

Drag.

Blow.

Calm.

I often considered various situations as if they were sets of a Venn diagram. In this case, it was a supremely shitty Venn diagram where set A = {A Person Who Knows What Needs to Be Done}, and set B = {A Person Who Has No Idea
How to Do
What Needs to Be Done}, and the intersection = {Mad}.

I stomped out the last of the cigarette, pulled the edges of my knit cap over my ears, and blew warm air into my hands. There was something about sitting by the
Ling
at nighttime that helped me think, like the very heart and soul of the sub was here to keep me company. The black winter-water
rippled as thousands of snowflakes dissolved the second they hit the Hackensack River. And I couldn't help but wonder if it looked as beautiful in the daytime.

Just as I was about to stand and head back, I heard footsteps behind me.

The navy museum was currently closed, and though I'd never had trouble before, I wasn't entirely sure my being here after hours was allowed.

There, about twenty yards downriver, someone approached. I stayed low, watched as the figure walked up to the fence that separated land from water, laced one hand through the metal mesh. A second later he looked around, and in the snowy moonlight I saw a familiar, unforgettable face: the kid from Babushka's and Foodville.

Okay, look. I was no believer in a higher order of the cosmos. There was no evidence in my mind to suggest that fate interceded in our lives like some tragic demigod moving humans like pawns on a chessboard. So possibly it was the magic of the
Ling
that made me want to talk to this kid, or just the fact that I'd only seen him a total of maybe three times before today, and now three times today
alone
, or hell, maybe there was a tragic demigod moving me like a pawn, but whatever the case, I found myself approaching him.

The Madifesto dictates:
when the order of the cosmos sets the board, position yourself as Queen
.

I was feet away now, close enough to see white earbuds coiling up to his ears. He knelt on the ground and pulled something out of his backpack, a pot or a jar of some kind, then leaned over it.

“I hope you were right,” he whispered. “I hope there's beauty in my asymmetry.”

Okaaaaaaaaay
.

“You weren't a nuisance,” he continued, his words growing louder in the cold, snowy silence. “You were the Northern Dancer, sire of the century, the superest of all racehorses.”

Without a doubt this was one of the more bizarre one-sided conversations I'd ever heard, and that was saying something, considering I lived with Coco.

I watched him pull back a piece of tape and open the lid of the jar. His body deflated, as if everything leading to this point had been full of air, energy, expectation—and now . . . not.

I turned quickly, quietly, suddenly feeling I shouldn't be here. And then . . .

“Hey.”

Dead in my tracks.

I turned back around. “Hey.”

The kid stood clumsily from the snow. “What are you doing here?”

It struck me as an odd first question.
What are you doing here?
presupposed that the person asking it knew the
you
to begin with. As opposed to
Who are you?

“I like to come here at night,” I said. Because that wasn't creepy at all.

He let out an “Oh,” as if it really wasn't, then bent down, put the lid back on the jar, and stuffed it into his bag.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked, shivering.

The kid pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth. “I can't go home right now,” he said.

Me either
. I nodded, brushed my hair out of my face, and thought about what he'd said when he didn't know I was listening.
I hope there's beauty in my asymmetry
. Maybe that was it: a slight asymmetry, along with a complete frozenness of features. It wasn't ugly, or even unpleasant. Far from it,
actually. His face was just wholly unique. And I couldn't help being a little curious.

I pulled out my pack of cigarettes, offered one to him, but he declined. I lit up.

Drag
.

Blow
.

Warm
.

“I mean—I don't know where to go,” he said. “But I can't go home.”

“Okay.”

“It's a long story.”

“I have one of those too.”

Drag
.

Blow
.

Warm
.

I watched my smoke in the cold night air. “I may know a place, though.”

* * *

I should really be dead
.

The sentence basically lived on the tip of my tongue. Especially around strangers, which made sense, considering a person isn't invested in a stranger the way they are, say, in a family member or a close friend. Maybe that's why so many people ended up leaving their spouses for complete strangers they met online. It cost almost nothing to tell a stranger almost everything.

“So how about this,” I said, turning down Mercer. “I'm not going to ask you your name, and I'm not going to ask you why you can't go home tonight. I'm not even going to ask you what's in that jar.”

“Okay.”

“But I am going to ask you about Northern Dancer, and supreme racehorse and all that.”

“Super,” he said.

“Great.”

“Wait, what?”

“What, what?”

“No, I didn't mean”—he shook his head, pulled out his handkerchief again, and wiped his mouth—“I meant, it's not
supreme
racehorse. It's
Super
Racehorse.”

“Okay then.”

“My dad used to call himself an equestrian sport enthusiast. Basically, he was obsessed with horse racing. He didn't even bet on them, just loved the sport. At one point he got really interested in the actual horses and their lineage and stuff. Like, he could tell you all the fastest horses and who their sires and dams were.”

“Sires and dams?”

“Fathers and mothers. He took me to this farm once, like an hour away. What they do is they take horses that are too old to race, or injured, and they put them on this farm in hopes that they can, you know,
produce
an even better racehorse. Or—some places, um, harvest the sire's
goods
, and then, um, inject them into the . . . dam.”

“Gross.”

He nodded, shifted his backpack as we walked. “Dad would fix a leaky faucet, or win a board game, or get a
Jeopardy!
question right, and then call himself a Super Racehorse. Anyway, to answer your question, Northern Dancer sired some of the most successful racehorses ever.”

As we turned right on State Street, passing the police station on our left, I noted the use of past tense when he
referred to his dad. I said nothing, though. I didn't much feel like talking about my past tenses either.

“So how about this,” he said. “I'm not going to ask you your name, and I'm not going to ask you what you were doing alone by the river at night. I'm not even going to ask you about the other kids I always see you with. But I am going to ask you about your sire and dam.”

“I don't have any,” I said.

“I meant your parents.”

“I know what you meant.”

So much for not discussing past tenses.

“So the other kids you're always with . . .”

“You mean the ones you weren't going to ask about?” I smiled sideways at him. “It's fine, man. They're basically family. We're undesirables, so we desire each other.” We were only two or three minutes away now—it would've been easy to leave it at that. But I didn't. I blew into my hands to warm them up, then said, “All right, you told a story about your dad, I'll tell one about my mom. She used to have this framed poster full of pithy inspirational sayings, which she'd ordered off some equally pithy website and hung in our hallway. She made it, like, her personal manifesto.
Start doing things you love. All emotions are beautiful. When you eat, appreciate every last bite.
That kind of shit. I used to come home from school and find Mom standing in the hallway by herself, reading the thing out loud.” We crossed over Banta, one more block to Salem. “So I started reciting them too. Got to where I'd memorized them, so I could lie in bed at night and stare up at the ceiling and just go with it, you know? I figured if Mom believed in her manifesto that much, there must be something to it. Then one day, we're all in a car on our way to the mall when a drunk
driver hits us head on, killing both my parents. I should really be dead.” There it was—the line, in all its glory, officially packed up and moved out. “But I only got this.” I raised my hat above my ear, pointed to the scar on the side of my head. I kept that whole side shaved for just such occasions, to show I wasn't hiding it or ashamed of it, wasn't afraid of who I was or where I came from. My scar was a battle wound, my very life proof of the victory. “Anyway. Mom's manifesto was total bullshit.”

I stopped there, though that was hardly the end. I didn't tell him about my Madifesto, the antithesis of Mom's pithy poster, a banner I marched under proudly, one that called for independence, self-sufficiency, and the incessant pursuit of survival.

Stranger or no, those things were for me.

Between Banta and Salem, I veered into a little alleyway known throughout town as the Chute. Famous for drug busts and muggings, the Chute was a narrow stretch that connected Main and State Street, so named because of its lack of any windows whatsoever. It was as if the architects had simply forgotten to draw them into the plans. There were a few doors—exits for shops to dump trash and whatnot—but they were all locked from the inside. With no windows, and such little street visibility, it had become a veritable breeding ground for all sorts of criminals.

I walked up to one of the locked doors. “We're here.”