The Language of Silence (13 page)

Chapter
Twenty-Six

Ed:

About a year and a half ago, my father invited me to visit him. It wasn’t really anything to brag about. I had started getting holiday greetings of shame and guilt a few years back. When they arrived, my mom handed them to me with a shaky hand, her smile tight, a mixture of worry and hope. I knew it gutted her that I didn’t have a father. Part of me thought it was the reason behind her many men—she was hoping to find me one on the clearance rack of divorcees and men who realized too late that life had passed them by. I should have told her that she was all I needed, but in the darkest moments of the night, I knew telling her that would have been a lie. And she was the one person I would never lie to.

My father’s cards usually contained nothing more than a short
, generic blah-blah-wish-you-the-best-sorry-I-won’t-ever-be-there message, but last year’s was different. In the card, he included his address, a hundred dollar bill, and printed directions to his house. He wrote that he wanted to see me. Anytime that was good for me, he scribbled.

Hey
, Dad! How about when I was a kid and all I wanted in the world was one second where I felt like you cared?

I didn’t tell
Mom or even Tristan about what my father wrote in the card. I stashed the directions and money in a sock drawer, the same drawer my mother assumed I hid porn in, so I knew she wouldn’t find it. And I tried to forget about it.

But I couldn’t.
It haunted me like Casper the Friendly Ghost of Repressed Childhood Angst. For a week straight, I took the directions out of my drawer and sat on my bed staring at them, calculating in my head how long it would take me to get there, how I would do so without telling my mom, and how much of the hundred dollars I would have to spend on the trip.

A hundred dollars was a lot of money in our household. Despite my mom’s best attempts at hiding the envelopes with giant red marks of doom proclaiming our delinquent payments, I knew we were in trouble. So
after each staring contest with Ben Franklin, I would shove the money back in my drawer and promise myself that I would hand it over to my mom the next morning.

But I never did.

One night when my mom was out, I paced back and forth in my room. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what I would say to my father if I saw him. Growing up, I used to space out in class a lot. I wasn’t dreaming about escaping school or even girls. I was dreaming about my dad. When I was young, too young to know how much anger existed in the world or in myself, I would daydream about my father walking through the door and whisking me off to the zoo or to a baseball game. I would miss whole lessons, and when my teachers tried to get me to focus, I became disgruntled and defiant, desperate to hold onto my fantasies.

As I got older, the daydreaming turned less pleasant. My dreams of great adventures with
Pops turned into irate and irrational bouts of curses and accusations. But as I held the money and directions in my hand, I was ashamed to admit that I hoped for a mixture of both.

Could it be possible to want to hate some
one while hoping to love them as well?

With a grunt, I grabbed a hoodie and threw it over my head. I didn’t bother changing out of my pajama pants or even brushing my teet
h. If I thought about it for a second longer, I wouldn’t go. And I knew I had to. I took the steps two at a time, adrenaline coursing through me better than any drug kids tried to buy from me because they assumed I was a dealer.

My hand reached the doorknob when my
cell phone went off. I froze, letting the damn thing vibrate against my leg. It was only then that I realized my hand was shaking. I closed my eyes and tried to steady my uneven breath. I should have ignored the call, but there was only one person who called me this late—Tristan.

I pulled the phone from the
pocket of my cotton K-mart sweats and pressed it against my ear. “What’s up?” I managed to say without sounding like I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

“I’m really messed up
, man. I did something tonight. God, I’m fucked up,” Tristan half-mumbled, half-sobbed into the phone.

My stomach tightened. Tristan had always had his sullen, introspective moments, but this was the first time I had heard him like this. The first time. Not the last. “Are you drunk?” I asked, hoping to write his behavior off as merely the effects of one too many sips of moonshine.

“No…please…just come get me,” he stammered.

I thought of the directions and money in the pockets of my hoodie. I thought of the open road calling to me with a million different possibilities, a million different answers to questions that had plagued me all my life, leading me to a man that seemed finally ready to answer them.

“Please, Ed,” Tristan begged.

I swallowed and nodded my head. “Yeah. Ok
ay. Just tell me where you are, and I will come get you.”

“Thanks. And, um, Ed, do you have any money?”

I felt for the hundred dollars in my pocket, knowing that without it I wouldn’t be able to pay for the gas to see my father. But as I listened to my best friend sniffle on the other end of the line, I had no choice. “Yeah, I got some money.”

****

I found Tristan thirty minutes outside of town. Huddled under a streetlight in the parking lot of a deserted grocery store, the boy I thought I knew everything about offered a weak, lazy wave as I pulled into a spot. As my headlights cut across his face, I saw that he wasn’t alone. Standing behind him were two men. One was a lanky punk with longish, greasy blond hair covering his eyes and tickling his ears. The man next to him, on the other hand, looked like he stepped off of the football team or maybe an assembly line in a prison. Covered in muscles I didn’t even know were possible to have, the man tightened his hand around something as he saw me approach. As I narrowed my eyes, I saw that he was carrying a gun.

I
slammed my car door with as much force as I could muster, stupidly hoping I could intimidate the gun-wielding hulk with my door-slamming abilities. I stalked over to where the trio stood and tried, rather unsuccessfully, to scowl.

“You got the money?” the huge ass monster spat.

“You alright?” I asked Tristan. I wasn’t going to give anyone anything until I knew he was okay. Tristan’s eyes only met mine for the quickest of moments before he looked down at the ground, managing a quick nod. His face was pale and his brow was covered in sweat.

“The money, asshole.”

I shoved the hundred dollars into the beast’s face. “That’s all I got,” I growled. It was the oddest thing, but suddenly, I wasn’t scared anymore. I was pissed. I wanted a fight. I don’t know why, but I was praying for it. The adrenaline I felt rushing down the stairs to see my dad returned, and all I wanted was to hit something. Even if that thing hit back.

The man snatched the money from
my hand and gave it to the skinny Magoo slouching next to him. He reached out and grabbed Tristan by the collar. “I don’t ever want to see you around here again. Do you hear me?” he sneered.

Tristan was no weakling. He played varsity
football and his father made him work out every single day. But my best friend just sat there trembling. Scared out of his mind. I balled my hands into fists. “Get your hands off of him,” I yelled.

Hulk Jr
. looked me up and down, shoving Tristan away from him with so much force that he fell straight back on his ass. “Don’t be pissed at me your boyfriend came out to play. I’m just getting what’s mine.”

Boyfriend came out to play? I had no idea what the hell the guy was talking about. I leaned down and grabbed Tristan by the wrist, pulling him off the ground. I ge
ntly pushed him toward the car, turning my back on the hoodlums who now had my father’s hundred dollar bill in their hands.

It wasn’t till we were near town that Tristan decided to speak. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened
?” he said quietly, his voice almost lost in the lulling rhythm of wind blowing through the window and tires slapping against the payment.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?” I countered. He was the one to call me for help, and now that I had lost my father’s money, I was ashamed to admit I was feeling a bit bitter.

Tristan let free a sigh. The kind of sigh that shakes your whole body. The kind of sigh that alerts the world you know that its days are numbered. Existence itself would have to be redefined. “I paid him for…stuff.”

“Stuff? Drugs?” I asked, my voice hitching at the end with disbelief. “I thought we were doing everything in our power not to turn into a fucking high school cliché
. Isn’t that you and Brett’s personal mantra?”

Tristan fell silent, turning his head away to stare out the window.

I reached over and flicked him in the ear. “What stuff?” I asked.

“You know that annoys the shit out of me, right? Who flicks someone in the ear?” he mumbled without looking at me.

“That’s sort of why I do it, Tristan. The whole annoyance factor plays a big role,” I joked. But Tristan wasn’t in a joking mood. He wrapped his arms around himself and curled as much as he could into the passenger door. “Look, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, man. It’s looks like any second you’re going to open that door and jump.”

“That’s our problem. That’s always been our problem. We don’t talk about it.”

It was bad. Very bad. I turned on my blinker and pulled off to the side of the road. “Alright. I guess we want to talk about it. So, this stuff, what was it?”

Tristan ran a
trembling hand over his face, then reached up and pulled on his seatbelt. Pulled it tight and let it go. Pulled it tight and let it go. “It wasn’t so much a thing as an action,” he said after the longest silence I have ever sat through in my whole life. Longer than the silence they use on
American Idol
when announcing who was eliminated.

I nodded for him to continue. I nodded mostly because I didn’t know what to say. Someth
ing had changed. In the smallest of moments, the air in the car became stale and empty with unfilled promises. Disappointment.

“I’ve been having th
ese urges. Feelings. I don’t really know what to call them. I tried to force them away. I swear, Ed. I really tried. God, part of me thinks I’m sick. Like mentally fucking sick. God’s up there laughing at the broken thing he created. But, then, I think more about these things, and I know God had no part in making me.”

The words flew so fast from his mouth, a speeding train of
existentialism that I could barely keep up.

“So, I decided to give myself one night. Just one. I would do it once, and then I w
ould be done with it. I would have my whole life to fix it. I just needed to know what it felt like. You’d be surprised the kind of things people put in a Craigslist ad.”

I gulped. My hand moved to the back of my head and I began to scratch. I didn’t know what else to say or do. It felt like we were both stuck inside some indie teen movie except I didn’t know my lines or my blocking.

“I took a taxi to the meeting place and paid the boy to…do things…to me. I brought money, but then the other guy showed up demanding more. I would have used my debit card, but then my parents would see the charge, and I couldn’t bear any questions. I’ll pay you back, Ed,” he promised, his words slurring through the tears that now overtook him.

Tristan had paid a male
prostitute to pleasure him. That was the gist of it. The summary on our “My Life Sucks” movie poster. I was beyond shocked. Not because it disgusted me. I could give a flying fuck if he was gay. I just knew what it would mean for him. The pride of the Jensen household. People like the Jensens didn’t mind gays on their sitcoms, but they sure as hell wouldn’t want one in their family.

Tristan brought his hands to his face and sobb
ed harder into them. I placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. “So, did you like it?” I asked gently. Tristan merely nodded. I squeezed his shoulder again. “We’ll figure this out. I promise. You know I don’t give a shit, right?  I need you to know that.”

He lifted his head and ran a hand under his runny nose. “Why do you think I called you?”

Tristan stayed at my house that night. After he showered, he sat at my dining room table and just stared at the wall in front of him. I tried to give him his space, leave him alone, but I couldn’t. It didn’t feel right. I burrowed in my book bag for the novel my English teacher assigned me to read for class. It was a book on the eighth grade reading list, so, of course, I cussed her out silently in my head and stuffed it in my backpack when she gave it to me. Sensing my anger, the teacher explained that she merely assigned the book to me because she thought I would like it.

I spent ten
minutes sitting at the table with Tristan, silently reading
The Outsiders
. But as I read the story of Ponyboy, I realized I really did dig the book. It was about a group of boys who the world abandoned, a group of boys who would do anything for each other. I looked up at Tristan only to discover tears streaming down his cheeks. So, I began to read the book aloud.