Beetle Boy (13 page)

It is early, the morning after the big visit, and Clara has come to my bed to wake me. She is excited about something, and I am having trouble waking up after a long night of tossing and turning.

“Rise and shine, Charlie,” she says. “Are you getting excited about where we're going today?” She pounds my chest and belly lightly, determined to get me moving.

“Stop it.”

“Are you forgetting you might get some good news today?”

“There is no good news in the forecast.”

“Charlie! Remember what today is?”

“Don't you have to go to work soon?”

“It's my day off, remember? I took today off because of your big doctor's appointment.”

She is right. This is why she is excited. It could possibly be the day they remove my cast and replace it with the walking boot. Remembering this, I feel a fluttering of excitement too at the prospect of no more cast and being able to walk without crutches. I smile at Clara hopefully, thankful that she kept track of my appointment, but she doesn't return my smile.

“Charlie, please tell me why you moved your boxes out of my closet.”

I hadn't thought she would notice—at least not right away. I had underestimated her yet again. I decide in a flash to give her an answer, albeit a dishonest one.

“I thought they might be taking up too much room.”

“Oh, really? Really, Charlie? Your few little boxes taking up too much room in my big old closet? How considerate of you. Where did you move them to, Charlie?”

I meet her eyes. I so completely do not want to tell her where I put the boxes that for a long moment, I can't speak at all. My tongue is paralyzed. I shake my head, trying to communicate wordlessly how impossible it is for me to tell her where the boxes are. She attacks from a new direction.

“Tell me more about that cousin who died.”

Oh God. The damn cousin who died. An old lie, coming back to bite my ass. I don't want to add to it. I take a deep breath. “Not my cousin,” I say. “Don't know why I said it was a cousin. Just a girl I knew. Someone. From a long time ago, nobody important.”

She is rightly bewildered. “So did the girl actually die?”

Another long pause. “No. She just … went away. Look, I don't know why I said she died. I felt embarrassed. I didn't want to have to explain why I still have her stupid picture.”

“Why
do
you still have her stupid picture?”

“There's no reason. There's nothing to tell. It meant something to me once. I guess I loved her. I don't know. She was my babysitter. I was like seven years old.” I add, pleadingly, “I had a really fucked-up childhood, okay? You've figured that much out, haven't you?”

She nods. “I feel so sad for you right now.”

“Don't say that. Please. Don't feel sad for me. Please. I can't stand having people feel sad for me.”

“But everything I learn about you is sad, Charlie. Every single thing.”

“That's not true. You just think that because you had a happy childhood. It's no big deal, Clara. Quit making it so hard. Lots of people are like me.”

Now a longer pause. Clara is recalculating her opinion of me. I can actually see it happening in her eyes. Finally, she speaks. Her voice is cold. “So I'm the one making things hard, is that it?”

“I didn't mean it the way it sounded.”

“Where did you put the boxes, Charlie?”

I swallow hard. “They're in the garage. Behind some old vases. Please, could you just leave them there for now?”

“We have to get ready to go to the doctor's. We should leave in about half an hour. But first, I want you to bring me that picture. The one I already saw. Of the little girl who didn't die.”

She is looking hard at me, harder than ever before. But I look back at her, and I am hard too. It feels like a standoff. It feels like something where one of us has to give in. Me. I ask, “If I do, will you promise to leave my boxes alone?”

It sounds so stupid!
Leave my boxes alone.
It sounds like we are in preschool! I could almost start laughing, it sounds so stupid. But I am completely serious. And so is she.

“I promise to leave your boxes alone if you bring me that picture.”

So I go out to the garage and move the vases and pull one of the boxes off the shelf and open it. I come back into the kitchen, where Clara is waiting, and I hand her the tiny, pathetic, ridiculous picture. She takes it from my hand, looks at it a moment, and then fastens Rita to the fridge with a magnet.

“Why are you putting her on the fridge?” I ask.

“Because it's something real about you.”

Something real about me. I guess that's true—Rita was real. She's not something I dreamed or invented or stole. “We better hurry,” I say. “I don't want to be late for my appointment.”

“We won't be late. I'll be ready in ten minutes. Just please don't lie to me about your childhood anymore.”

“Okay,” I say.

I went six years without going back to Mrs. M.'s house. Why? Was it because I was mad at her for being so concerned about Liam? Was it because I had to do three final author gigs without a costume? Did I blame her? Did I feel abandoned? I don't know. I just let it get away from me. I think, in some ways, I made this decision not to think any more about her. Not to need her. She became another woman I refused to need.

The first year, my first year in middle school, was a terrible time for me because even though there were basically no more author jobs, Dad was still moving full speed ahead with new Beetle Boy books—the final two. These books were, if it's even possible, the worst ones we had done. Sam Church was no longer interested in illustrating them, and it showed. He had never been paid for the previous two books, and some of the drawings looked like he had forgotten to finish them—Beetle Boy often appeared without antennae or missing his spots or his eyeballs. And unlike the first set, there was basically no background—they were just dead bugs on a blank page. I'm no artist, but even at age eleven, I could see that they were bad. But Dad was still operating on blind ambition, refusing to give up his dream of easy money on the author circuit, probably because he had no idea what he would do instead.

Ever since I burned the costume (I told him I lost it), he must have sensed that his days of manipulating me were numbered; I was building up the courage to defy him completely.

Everything came to a whimpering halt one afternoon at a school book fair in Nunica, where I was the featured guest author. There was no fee, so the gig depended entirely on book sales, a surefire disaster since the new books were so lame and I was surrounded by real books at lower prices. That day Dad was openly angry at me, a new and barely controlled anger that was obvious to everybody from the way he glared at me, dragged me by the elbow into the school library, pushed me into the book signing chair, and then stormed out of the room. In the car afterward, he threw several books at my head, one at a time.

Dad was losing it. He was losing his charm. He was losing his looks—getting bald, getting paunchy. He was way less successful with women. His dad still sent him a check from time to time, but he basically had no other income.

But there was one thing he still had—another son. A younger, cuter, smarter, and completely available son. Once he shifted his focus onto Liam, I was off the hook. Or, I should say, I was off the hook for author gigs. I was still hanging by my neck off a big meat hook of guilt, another reason I couldn't face Mrs. M.

I was now in seventh grade. Perhaps because I wasn't ugly or obnoxious, I was pretty much left alone by my peers. I was a loner. None of the teachers at the middle school knew I had ever been Beetle Boy—not that it would have impressed them. Nothing else about me stood out. I was quiet. I sat in the back. I was medium-sized with no physical presence. I got Bs and Cs, and nobody was checking my report card. I drifted from seventh grade to eighth grade to ninth grade in a lonely fog.

Dad started making Liam do the author visits. He did two or three of them a month, a fact I tried hard to ignore, since it was pretty obvious he hated doing it just as much as I had. Right around that time, Ruby started in as our babysitter. It was Liam who found Ruby; she lived with her grandmother in Green Grove No. 15. At first she ignored me and I ignored her—I thought I was way past caring about babysitters. She ignored Liam too. She had more mature tastes.

The months passed. The years passed. During those years I did not miss Mrs. M. because I could not imagine myself back in touch with her. I wasn't a child anymore. I couldn't approach her like a child; I knew better. Meanwhile, in our apartment, life was turning into a bad made-for-TV movie, and I was feeling more and more like I had to get away.

The lost years. Before I found within myself the initiative to make a deal with my old friend, the only person I knew who could get me out of my new hell.

We are at the Grandville Surgical Clinic and I have had an amazingly successful appointment and I am minus my cast and have been properly fitted for a walking boot and I am actually walking in it. We are both thrilled, and so there is no stopping Clara from approaching the billing and insurance station and taking on the issue of my surely astronomical and overdue medical bills, which I have been avoiding.

“Hello, I'm Clara and this is Charlie Porter and he is a patient here and we'd like to set up a payment plan for his medical bills.”

As if any sort of payment plan was remotely possible.

The medical receptionist is elderly and finds my file after a slow search and a lot of frowning. Then she squints past Clara, looking at me. “You are Charles Allen Porter?”

I nod, bracing for the news that I will be sent to debtor's prison.

“You're all paid up, Mr. Porter,” she says. “Nothing currently due.”

Clara and I exchange glances.

“But, ma'am, ma'am,” Clara sputters, “We haven't actually paid for anything yet. We never even got any bills.”

The receptionist glances at the page again. “Your balance was forwarded by request to a Mrs. Martha Manning in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Your grandmother.”

“His grandmother?”

“O-KAY!” I jump in, needing to quickly get us both out of the building. “Okay, keep us posted, thanks so much!”

I take Clara's arm and lead her away as best I can with my new, crutch-free gait, the walking boot clunking noisily on the tiled floors of the building. Clara is silent, scowling in deep thought, letting me pull her along, until we are out of the clinic and in the parking lot. Then she shakes her arm free. “Excuse me! EXCUSE me! You have a grandmother who pays your bills? And you never once mentioned it?”

“She's not my grandmother. Honestly, Clara, she's not.”

“Then who is Martha Manning?”

“She's a friend,” I say. “She's old and she was really sick and I didn't know … I didn't know … I thought she was dead.”

“Oh, here we go again. Somebody else conveniently dead.”

“No, seriously. Because she was really sick the last time I saw her. And then later I found out she was dying.”

“Well, apparently she's alive enough to be paying all your medical bills! Which is kinda strange, if you ask me. What is this all about?”

“I don't know. I don't know. It's … unbelievable!”

“Is she superrich, this Mrs. Manning? And how did she even know about your injury?”

“I have no clue! She moved to Iowa a year ago. To her sister's. Her sister was going to help her … you know … die.” I stop walking. I wrap my arms around my head. “But she didn't die,” I groan. “She's not dead.”

“Oh my God, are you upset? Oh, Charlie, you're really upset.”

Clara has never seen me cry. She is stunned, silent for the rest of the walk to the car, the rest of the drive to her apartment. When we are parked beside her house, she comes around to the passenger side to help me. “Can you get out of the car okay with the boot, Charlie? Do you need a crutch to lean on?”