Ed looked at him with concern. “Hey man,” he said, doing his best to blunt a crisis with casual talk. “What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong? Michael didn’t know where to start. He was a thousand miles from everything that was familiar to him. He missed his mom. All of the Gordon rituals and inside jokes and easy familiarity made him feel even more alone. The girls didn’t know how good they had it with their two parents and two houses. He was jealous and angry. He didn’t understand how the cosmic scales could get so tipped. What’s wrong? He’d never been good at putting his feelings to words. He wanted to lash out when he felt like this.
“Speak your truth,” Ed said.
His truth? He wanted to be with them and he wanted to leave. He wanted to be them, or rather, he wanted to live the way they did, free of dents. But he couldn’t trust the happiness he felt with the family, couldn’t believe anything good could ever last.
The parking lot was packed full of cars. Michael looked at the little shack in the distance where a teenager in a red tank top checked for beach stickers. Beyond that was the road they’d taken to get here, lined with scrubby pine and oak trees. Michael thought about taking off. The problem was that he had no idea how to get back to their house.
“Michael,” Ed said. “Talk to me.”
“I think I left my Discman in the car,” Michael lied. He loved his Discman, and the KMD, Massive Attack, and Sonic Youth CDs that he listened to constantly. He could tell by the look on Ed’s face that he was suspicious. Teachers had built-in bullshit detectors. Michael opened the passenger-side door so he could pretend to look for his stuff while he thought about his next move. That’s when he saw Connie in the front seat with a burning joint between her fingers. She was startled when she saw him. He heard the pfft of the lit end being snuffed out in her can of Diet Rite.
“Forget something?” she asked, trying hard not to exhale in front of him.
“You guys are getting stoned?”
“Just a little,” Connie said. Smoke trickled out of her nose. “It’s relaxing.”
It seemed to Michael that she should be more embarrassed than she was. Teachers always expected kids to explain themselves, but when they got busted? No big deal.
Ed came over to him. “Did you find it?”
“The joint? No, Connie wasted it. She didn’t even offer to share.”
“Very funny.”
“Everything’s funny because you’re high too, right Ed? Everything’s a fucking blast.”
A young family walked by toting beach bags and an inflatable-giraffe inner tube. The mother hustled her kids past when she heard Michael swear.
He knew he should drop it, but Michael felt like picking a fight, even if it meant proving Mr. Frederickson right. Ed and Connie weren’t supposed to do this stuff. They were supposed to be perfect, wholesome, clean, boring.
“So, this is what you do. You act like you’re so good, but you’re…”
“We’re just people, Michael,” Ed said. “And this is the first day of our vacation after a long school year and a very long car ride.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Look, I can see why you’re upset, but this is purely recreational. We don’t have a problem.”
“You don’t have a problem like my mom? Is that what you mean? You think you’re so different from her, but you’re not. You’re all the same.”
Michael could feel people staring at them, all the perfect families with their beach bags and goggles and coolers full of food.
“I never said we weren’t screwed up in our own way.”
It hadn’t even occurred to Michael until that moment that the Gordon family could have problems or issues of their own. The idea that the Gordons could be screwed up floored Michael. He couldn’t even consider it.
Ed always talked about how important it was for Michael to express himself, face his pain and be real, but it was easy for Ed to say shit like that. Ed hadn’t choked on a bar of soap or heard the fliittt sound of a belt slicing the air, followed by the crack of the metal buckle against his collarbone. Ed hadn’t taken care of his dying mother in a hot apartment with one window and a broken fan, hadn’t been surprised by how much vomit and shit could come out of a person after they drank the city’s bad water, hadn’t seen the purple spots on the insides of her eyelids and the white spots on her tongue, hadn’t put damp washcloths on her clammy skin, felt the ridges of her bones as she shrank like a piece of dehydrated fruit, hadn’t held her bird claw of a hand, hadn’t heard the grating sound of her breath, hadn’t wanted someone, anyone to walk through the door to tell him they could help, they’d take care of her, she’d be fine, everything would be all right. Ed hadn’t pleaded with someone not to die, just don’t die. Stay here.
“Everything is going to be OK.” Ed’s voice was kind, but Ed didn’t know shit. He thought the whole world could get better with one big “Kumbaya”—or one long suck on a joint. What did Ed know about how it felt to have nobody, to be totally, utterly alone? What did Ed know about being real?
Michael wanted to throw a punch at him the way his father had taught him to land a right hook when he was a little boy; he wanted to feel something break inside Ed. He felt his fists ball up at his sides like knots and every muscle in his body grow tight. He wanted Ed to look at him in disbelief and ask, “Why’d you do that?” He wanted Ed to feel betrayed the way Michael had felt betrayed so many times. He wanted to challenge Ed’s supposed devotion and give him a painful, bloody reason to change his mind. He wanted Ed to reject him sooner rather than later.
Connie emerged from the car wearing her vintage cat-eye sunglasses and a yellow polka-dot bathing suit that had lost its elasticity and sagged around her chest, stomach, and waist. Ann and Poppy inherited Ed’s height, high cheekbones, and square chin, but their softness came from Connie. She was still youngish, still pretty in a puffy sort of way, but Connie didn’t care about her looks. She let her long hair turn white and wore it hanging to her waist. She was nice but distracted in the same way Poppy was.
“Jump!” she said.
That’s what Connie told him to do when he got angry: jump up and down, release it, move the energy in a different direction. Connie was super smart, which made it hard for Michael to accept her weird interests and beliefs. He didn’t understand where they came from until Poppy explained that Connie had lived in Nepal when she’d served in the Peace Corps. Poppy told him that Connie had a secret name that had been given to her by a shaman, and she’d witnessed the sacrifice of a black goat in a healing ceremony. She’d had to rub kerosene on the legs of her cot to keep the bedbugs from crawling into it. On her way back, she almost died when the landing gear on her small airplane from Kathmandu to the Delhi airport had failed. The wheels flopped up and down and wouldn’t lock in place. They flew back and forth over the tower for over an hour to lessen the fuel load before the emergency landing. “She’ll never fly again. She says Cape Cod is all the adventure she needs now,” Poppy said. “I wouldn’t let one bad experience in an airplane keep me from traveling. Someday, I’m going to go everywhere.” It was the one point on which mother and daughter differed, Michael noted. Otherwise they were two peas in a pod.