Missed Connections (24 page)

"You're not ready yet." Matthew tells him, like it's something he should know, then slams the door shut. Sand bites into his skin, rushes into the open spaces at the edges of his clothes. The summer sun is waking against his skin and as suddenly as Matthew arrived—Theo is alone.

He looks around and sees the ocean. All around his knees are fifty-eight quarters that spilled out of his pockets as he fell out of a doorway that's not even there anymore. Theo watches the waves and feels older than he's ever been.

*~*~*

Theo hasn't been home since he was eighteen. The day he woke up staring at the sun high overhead on a beach he shouldn't have been able to reach he decided never to go back. Now twenty-six he knows he isn't returning today, either. The old interstate road grows and shrinks around him. Cypress turn into pines, the flat roads wind into hills, and cities grow familiarly around him until they give way to countryside in the thrall of autumn. Theo remembers each bump with the dread of a child and it's more because of that that he's able to make it back without directions. For all that he always wanted to leave his aunt and uncle's when he was abandoned on their porch, some of his best memories rise and fall on the old farm house.

This time Theo isn't some errant package left on a doorstep. He parks in the driveway, scuffs his shoes on the stone path that has become half overgrown with weeds. Pansies litter the front yard, unevenly spaced with retiring white and purple faces that hang long-stemmed over faded orange pine needles. There's just the first hint of winter in the air, and Theo pretends that's why he stops on the first step. The old wood gives underfoot and with it, he names his feeling and hesitation
homecoming
instead of
fear.

He didn't call. He hasn't called in years. Theo knows there is no guarantee his aunt and uncle will let him past the door, much less let him stay the night. Just like every other visit to this place, it was impromptu and without reason except
want
. He takes solace that this time it is his own instead of his mother's.

When he knocks it's with the sun giving its last hurrah behind the tree line and his relief at Aunt Maudy's embrace that makes his knees weak. He'd fall, six again, but he's a good foot taller than her now and there's a frailty to her bones. The skin around her eyes puffs, turns into thick pillows. Her hands gentle along his shoulders. He would break her if he failed to be Atlas of his own world.

"It took you long enough to come back." There is no judgment in his tone, but Uncle Russ has turned from a mountain into a sloping hill when Theo wasn't looking. He's still tall—taller than Theo by at least a head—but there's a settling about his shoulders that wasn't there before. Theo tries to smile but it's tight and bright and he doesn't know if he's supposed to hug or shake hands.

When the door is shut behind them and Aunt Maudy is turning towards the kitchen with a "Why didn't you call?" Uncle Russ takes his hand and reels him in like a fish and Theo tries not to laugh—because of course he would be welcomed back. Of course.

Theo is sick with relief.

*~*~*

The kitchen is how Theo remembers it—though the walls have faded into a pale yellow and the window looks snowed in with a film of dust that has burrowed in along the edges. Everything is older and although Theo knew it would be, it all feels slightly
wrong
. It's as though this room and space should have stayed the same—encapsulated from time. He eats dinner with them, leftover meatloaf and mashed sweet potatoes, and Aunt Maudy fidgets with the knowledge it's leftovers and Theo is old enough to be a proper guest.

It's well past dessert and coffee when Uncle Russ and Aunt Maudy share a look from their rickety chairs. They've spoken about everything except why Theo is there and he tenses for the question—expecting them to ask why he ran away. Instead Uncle Russ relents under his wife's eye and asks, "It's a girl, isn't it?"

Theo doesn't have the heart to correct him."In a... manner of speaking."

"Marriage or break up?" Aunt Maudy butts in, her shoulders shifting as though setting in for a long story Theo isn't sure he has.

"What do you mean?" he asks instead.

"Well, it has to be one or the other of them if you've come here." She slides the side of her palm along her terrycloth placemat as though it's a map of their land and the surroundings.

Theo wants to ask,
is this what you really want to know? Not where I've been all this time?
But like before the words dry up and he tries not to choke on the fact it's his own fault if they have questions. "Break up." He says instead and it's not a lie. He
did
just break up with Brad.

"And you needed home then?" It seems so simple when she puts it like that but Theo isn't six anymore and knows it's anything but.

"I guess,” he hedges, uncertain. He feels like a thief and a liar but that's only because they both knew he came for something and not just for them. "I guess. That and... I had some questions."

Another shared look and Theo knows it's his own fault things seem so uncomfortable but he can't help but resent the quiet conversation that passes by him as though he's not tall enough to be trapped in the middle now. "What sort of questions?" Uncle Russ offers, tentative in a way he never had been before. "We might not have the answers."

Who am I?
seems too crass and misleading. Theo knows exactly who he is, who he's grown up to be. What he doesn't know is who made him and what that means. Blind devotion has faded and cracked into uncertainty.
You can't even see what you're doing
Brad told him and Theo thought he might have a point. "I want to know about Meredith and Dee."

There is slight resignation in Aunt Maudy's step as she stands to get the photo album. Her steps drag towards the swinging kitchen door. "I don't know what you expect to find knowing ancient history," she tells him but Uncle Russ gives him a knowing look and pours him a glass of cheap bourbon while her back is turned. They hide the alcohol in a second cup of coffee. If Aunt Maudy notices, she doesn't let on.

*~*~*

The rain rattles against the windowsill as Theo climbs out of bed with an exasperated hand in his hair and a mulish expression. His room is thick with heat. Maudy planted a heater in the guest room the moment he showed up even turning it off hadn’t cooled the room enough to be bearable. An hour of sleeplessness and exhausted paranoia tells him the walls and windows are colluding with the buzzing in his head to suffocate him. He has to get out.

Theo leaves without a jacket. The cold cuts into his lungs and rain slips the chill straight into his bones. By the time he hits the tree line Theo is bowed, hugging his arms and shuddering. The trees buffer the wind and the rain but only just. It rushes to tear at the leaves and grapples through holes. The path under Theo's feet has already turned to mud and it presses up and around his shoes.

Earlier Aunt Maudy had closed in on herself, her shoulders as low as her voice as she pointed out the photographs. Theo had only seen his aunt like that once before—whispering unsteadily about a neighbor like the woman was about to turn up without a moment's notice. There were no baby pictures of Meredith and several of Dee—smiling unsteady but proud at the camera for science fairs and at birthday parties. Theo had always assumed Meredith was Maudy's blood. Meredith and Maudy shared the same skin tone—or close enough. There was a similar cadence, though Maudy was calm where Meredith settled on tersely unpredictable.

Theo had been wrong.
Dee was adopted,
Maudy said.
He just brought Meredith home with him one day when he was sixteen.

It should have been obvious Theo decides as he stumbles on wet rocks and drags a branch to breaking in the attempt to stymie a fall. Mud bites into his knees, cloaks his jeans.
Meredith was always uneasy here.
Theo thinks but isn't entirely sure if that's true or just something he wants to believe he noticed before. She never stayed long. She only dropped Theo off. She only lingered to explain how long and why if she had to.

It's too dark to see anything. The stars and the moon have long since drowned in the storm. Theo tries to imagine he knows where he's going when he's doing little more than battling roots as he climbs from one tree to another. Water breaches his lips and branches lash out to slap him across the cheek. He tries not to feel too foolish.

There is no one to see him buffeted by the wind and rain so hard he sucks in water with gasps of air. No one else knows that Theo left with the half-cocked desire for air and stumbled into blind misery.

It's late when Theo finally manages to return to his aunt and uncle's house—later still when he finally manages to clean up the mud he tracked in. There was no escaping the rain and the water, no way to keep from making a mess. If Theo is disappointed he didn't stumble into a door, he swallows it down and pretends that hadn't been his original goal. After all, Matthew is a hallucination he doesn't need anymore.

*~*~*

Theo is up with the sun the next day. The night is etched on his face by folded fabric and his shoes groan with water that hasn't even begun to dry. Aunt Maudy tuts over him, reaches up to press her hands along his cheeks the way she would when he was a boy. "Too much thinking. Just like when you were little."

The touch burns, the chill in her hands contradicting the warmth of her face, and Theo almost flinches away. He isn't a child anymore, though, and there's no one waiting to replace her when he leaves. He smiles instead, puts his hands over hers, and hopes his warms them. "Maybe a little."

"You'll visit again?" Uncle Russ asks but seems to know the answer. Theo nods, hopes it's true, but imagines that he might not. Aunt Maudy's and Uncle Russ's might be as much of a home as Theo can claim, but there's a honed edge to visiting. There is only one end and Theo isn't sure he wants to see it. Visiting will make it worse, he thinks, and he still has things to do.

Aunt Maudy walks him to his car, picking out dry steps around the rush of autumn mud. "Call at least." She says, "You don't want to worry me, do you?"

That is something Theo can do so he nods. Inside there's a prickly feeling of being dried up and used. The long drive unearthed no secrets he truly needed to know. It leaves him feeling hollow.

*~*~*

It doesn't matter how Meredith dies. Theo gets the call three days too late to say goodbye. He's at lunch, sitting under a heated awning next to a zipped up plastic 'window' and wondering how life got to be so routine when it happens. Theo gets up in the morning, goes to work, has lunch, and goes home. It'd be boring if Theo wasn't convinced it kept him alive.

Even the call feels routine until there's no hint of pleasantries, "Your mom's dead." The voice sounds like dust and cigarettes drawn out—undeniably male but lacking other distinguishing features. Theo sputters, his lunch forgotten and dangling on his lip. "Who's this?"

"A friend of Meredith's." Like it could be anyone else—but Theo is almost surprised it's not someone who works in a morgue or a funeral parlor. Meredith never kept many close friends and although Theo hasn't,
hadn't
, spoken to her in almost twenty years, he can't imagine that changed.

"What happened?"

"Do you care?"

The question is so pointed Theo feels his lungs seize. The voice on the other end
hm
s a smug syllable and Theo feels color rise on his cheeks, "Of course I do." And he does, he realizes. Meredith couldn't be more than sixty, if that. Sixty seems too young to die and lunch settles heavy in his stomach.
Overdose?
It's as good of a theory as any and Theo doubts the mystery caller will tell him if he asks.

"Sure you do." This time there's laughter in the voice and Theo stands up, though the motion does nothing but draw the attention of other diners. Whoever is on the phone has to be three hours away at least and there's nothing Theo can do to command respect over a phone line.

If he had had grief it has long since been whittled away by time. What he has now is old made new by surprise.

"Now—"

"Service is on Saturday." The voice interrupts. "It's just a casket in the ground. I'll text you the location."

The person hangs up. Theo stands where he is, two feet from his table and phone to his ear, for longer than he'd care to admit. Meredith is dead. It doesn't feel real.

He decided he didn't care years ago.

*~*~*

Theo can't make himself attend the service. His car lurks in the parking lot of Little Green Cemetery, watching the grass fade from tepid autumn green to winter brown. From his car he can see the hole in the ground and the grand total of three people who have turned up for the lowering of the casket. It's a bitter twisted feeling. So close it's impossible to kick the knowledge that as her son he should be there.

It doesn't drive him out of the car, though, and he wishes he had grief enough to blame his inaction on that rather than the low bitterness of a childhood that should have been better. Instead of attending, he grips the steering wheel and tries to pick out the good memories from between the resentment. There were days she had him skip school for a movie and pizza; sometimes she'd realize he had had a bad test and wake him at 2:00 am with warm chocolate milk. They are bittersweet memories coupled with the feeling of never quite being enough, and the late nights wondering if she'd come home at all.

It was hell.
Theo knows he shouldn't think so. There's been enough years that he should be able to put the bad to bed but it's hard, he can't, and the inability makes his eyes burn.
I should have called.
It’s a thought he forces as is,
I would have called soon.
Both are better than the thing he calls truth:
it's her fault we didn't talk.

The casket sinks into the ground and Theo presses his forehead into the steering wheel. Theo can't remember the last funeral he went to and the knowledge of this finality catches him along the breastbone. His eyes burn anew and he tries to choke down the childish want,
you'll be home when I come back, won't you?