Joe sighed. “You mom is going to be so wicked pissed when you call.”
“I’m not calling.”
Joe looked at his phone. “I have nineteen texts on here. How many do you want to bet are from your mom and how many are from mine?”
“Only way to know is to look,” I said.
He started scrolling through. “Most of them are my mom. Let’s see….”
Joe, call back immediately.
Joe, Jenny Connor says you’re not answering anyone about Trevor. Call.
Joe, I’m getting close to calling the police to help find you.
Joe, text me back so I know you’re alive.
Joe, we’re revoking the BMW.
Joe, we won’t pay for law school.
Oh, man.
As he recited it, Trevor shook his head in abject horror mixed with a certain kind of camaraderie. It was hard to understand, but it seemed as if these sorts of things from your parents were just part of their world. Damn. Mama didn’t care what I did as long as I didn’t get arrested. These mamas were treating them like twelve year olds. “Is this the way you live?” I asked.
Both men looked up, surprised. The streetlamp shone on them and there was a pinched fear, an anger, but also something more, like they didn’t understand my question or why I was asking it. Like I was the dumbass here.
“What do you mean?” Joe snapped.
“Your moms do this? They’re on you like this all the time?”
“It’s not like I generally have to drive six hundred miles to pick up Trevor,” Joe countered.
“Did you tell your mom that?”
Joe pulled back as if a bit struck. “No. I just told her I was hanging out with my friends.”
“OK. So you’re hanging out with your friends. She has no idea where you are but she knows you’re safe. You’ve been in contact with her, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why do you let her baby you like this?”
“I don’t let her do anything,” Joe argued.
“Sure you do. Just tell her you’re a twenty-two year old man and you can do whatever you want and that she needs to just get out of your business.”
Joe snorted. “Like that would go over real well.”
“What’s the problem here?” I asked. “Why don’t you try it? It’s not like the way she treats you now is what you want.”
He swallowed hard. I could see his Adam’s apple bobble a little and Trevor grinned at me, a crazy, madcap kind of grin.
“She’s right, Joe. Loosen up dude.”
“What? I’m supposed to eat a bag of peyote and end up naked on the side of the road? Is that what you want, Trev?”
“No, but look at you. You’ve become a lapdog and she’d threatening to take away your Beemer and your law school tuition because she hasn’t heard from you in a couple hours.”
“The only reason you’re not in the same position as me is because I’m your buffer.”
“And you let me turn you into my buffer.”
“Fuck you.”
Trevor
I watched as Joe frantically texted his mom back, trying to make sure that he could get her off of his back and hopefully keep her from calling the police. Everything Darla said made sense, which only pissed me off even more than I already was when it came to dealing with my parents.
Joe’s were worse – his mom really would call the police if he didn’t respond and, in fact, she may have already. My mom would just call every friend of mine and bitch until she got what she wanted. Although, I guess if I went truly missing for more than twenty-four hours, she’d call the authorities. That thought gave me comfort even if I resented it.
Something crackled in the air between the three of us. It was a tension, a push and a pull that didn’t make sense. It went beyond Darla and her keen observations about our parents, about the way that they ruled us, and about the way that they infantilized us. It made me feel small and – I hated to admit it to myself, but – weak.
When I was on stage I was strong. I was a badass motherfucker. I was using my voice as an instrument, something developed and polished and ridden hard by no one other than me and my own drive to succeed. Mom and Dad couldn’t co-opt that, no matter how hard they’d tried. It was me who pushed to learn to play guitar so I could play an instrument next to Rick, while he played the piano flawlessly, hours and hours on end practicing the same song. It was all me.
The first time I’d tried to touch the keys while he played, he’d hit me and thrown me across the room. I didn’t remember it but that’s what Mom told me. I did remember being four…five…six years old and trying, once again, to join in with him until finally when I was six Dad got me a little guitar and, like true Sudborough parents, they bought me lessons with a teacher.
Rick grinned, so happy that I’d joined his world when I played with him and it soothed him for me to sit in a chair next to his bench, for both of us to improvise and find new chords, new notes, new rhythm patterns. We even wrote songs together. I had a few recorded somewhere, burned onto a CD. It was probably one of the only things I got to share with him, a realm where Rick and I could meet and be conversant with each other using the language of melody, even when he couldn’t speak.
He was non-verbal, occasionally grunting and using a picture system on a computer to “talk.” He’d never been very good at it even though he was smart, and a brilliant prodigy, I now understood, at the piano. When he was thirteen and I was eight and they put him in the home where he’d lived until he was eighteen, he’d stopped playing piano for a very long time. I think he didn’t sit in front of a keyboard or a piano until I was back in college and he’d moved to a new halfway house.
In the intervening years, every Sunday we’d visit and Dad would urge me to bring my guitar. I would play and I could watch Rick’s body visibly relax, see his eyes clear, his brain attune better. When I’d stop and the music ended he’d point and grunt and smile. For some reason it bothered Mom. I could see on her face a torn look, though Dad got it. This was how we spoke to Rick – this was how I spoke to Rick. I was fluent in his language. I had found a little piece of him in the music that made him a little more whole.
Or was that me?
Maybe it was both of us.
Darla’s perfectly innocent suggestion about including Rick had caught me by surprise. No one ever talked about including Rick. When he came up, the conversation steered to therapies that would change him. Ways to created a self-contained world for him. How his behavior needed to change.
Having her recommend including him in my band left me reeling. What the fuck? How could someone I hadn’t known for two days be more in tune with how I felt about Rick than my own parents, or any of his support people?
Her idea was fucking brilliant. Brilliant. And compassionate and caring. Knowing so little about him, her first impulse had been to help me reach out to him. Who does that?
Darla does.
Joe continued texting furiously, his face bent over the glow of his screen and Darla turned to me, uncertain and a bit hesitant.
“What do we do?”
“Let’s wait until he’s done,” I said, shaking myself out of my own thoughts.
“You should probably text your mom,” she said.
I nodded. She was right.
So, I sent a simple text: Me and Joe are at a friend’s house. Be home later.
Within ten seconds of hitting ‘send’ my phone rang. Darla burst out laughing. My ringtone was an old Zappa song and my entire body went flush with a taut power that made me want her even more. That she knew enough to laugh at that particular ringtone, that she would even know who Frank Zappa was, seemed to be as close to a miracle as whatever divine power I did or didn’t believe in could offer.
“Fuck!” Joe shouted. “She is pissed as shit and now she’s taking away the car.”
Darla pointed to the BMW. “She’s going to take that away?”
“She will when I get it home.”
“Joe.” She reached over and put a hand on his shoulder, mimicking me. “Honey, there’s nothing you can do about it now. You’ll get home when you get home.”
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. We shouldn’t still be here,” Joe insisted. His face softened and some kind of look passed between the two of them that made me, once again, wonder what I was missing.
“You can freak yourself out about the way things should be or you can accept them as they are,” she explained.
Joe gave her a skeptical look. I knew he was biting back what he wanted to say, which was something like, Accepting things the way they are won’t ever get you anywhere.
It was our mantra. We’d had that drilled into us since the moment we were selected for the honors track in high school. It didn’t really apply in real life though, did it? Not the way we were indoctrinated.
If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you always got, was another one our coaches banged into us – and they were right. But what they didn’t want was for us to apply that to facing down authority, to questioning whether following what our parents always told us really was in our best interests. And who decided what our “best interests” were? Shouldn’t that be us, now that we were adults?
What if we took that philosophy and turned it on its head, telling our parents, “If we always do what you tell us to do then we’ll always get what you want.”
A text appeared on my phone. Get home now, it said. My fingers ached. So many things I wanted to text back like fuck off, or too bad, or simply, no. Instead, I typed quickly, hitting send before I could retract it: I’m committing a random act of crazy. I’m safe. No worries. Your young man, Trevor.
“I just bought myself some time,” Joe said. “I told Mom the car broke down at a friend’s house.”
“Where did you tell her you were?” I asked, skeptical that that was going to work.
“Up at Hampton Beach.”
Occasionally we went up there as a group. The rentals were cheap and it was a fun way to party.
“What did she say?”
“Her exact words were,” Joe peered at his phone. “Why waste your money when we have a perfectly good beach house in Truro?”
“What’s Truro?” Darla asked.
“A town on Cape Cod.”
“Oh.” She got quiet. “Let’s go to Jerry’s,” she said, “and make this all better.”
Chapter Nine
Joe
Jerry’s Place looked exactly like you would think a place named Jerry’s Place in the middle of the wastelands of America would look. The minute we opened the steel door, the scent of putrid beer, bleach, and cigarette smoke seeped into every spare fiber of my clothes and most of my nose and brain. It was the kind of stench that would be there for the next three days. I knew this because I’d been to enough dive bars in Boston to have the imprint of the place stuck, an olfactory sensation that pinged more regret than even the worst hangover.
Neon beer logo lights dotted the back wall behind the bar, among pennants from Cleveland and Ohio sports teams, their three points of felt curling horribly and the once-white strips at the flat, left hand sides yellowed by too many unfiltered Camels. The whole place had the feel of a neighborhood hangout for people too stupid to realize they were drinking away an enormous percentage of their net worth.