Beetle Boy (2 page)

My answers to her questions about my parents have always been vague. Vague excuses for the early disappearance of my mother, vague explanations for the more recent disappearance of my father, vague references to how it affected me, bored expressions when I am talking about my dad, glassy expressions while I am talking about my mom. Clara especially wants to hear about Mom. Mom got depressed; Mom got sick; Mom needed a different climate for her asthma; Mom knew she wouldn't get custody—all of these things were true, but the real truth is, I had no satisfactory explanation for why Mom left us with Dad long ago. No matter what kind of shape she was in at the time. Not after the kind of mother she had been. How could she have lived without us? How could she spend even one day without seeing us? Playing hide-and-seek with us? Making our oatmeal? Telling us stories?

And knowing that we would be stuck with only Dad—how could she have left us, knowing that? She knew better than anyone that he would be a terrible parent. How could she have not stood outside the window of our crappy new bachelor apartment and just
howled
for us?

“It was a long time ago,” I finally tell Clara. “My memories are fuzzy.” I will myself to sound authoritative.

But I am on crutches in her apartment and I've lost fifteen pounds and I take pain meds all day and have nightmares all night. I am two and a half years younger than she is, and so she sees herself as more wise about family life. She isn't buying my excuses anymore. She gives me one of her we'll-talk-later looks. Then she is gone.

I am in the twin bed in Mrs. M.'s little basement room, and there is something very, very large moving its body around inside the closet where I keep my belongings. I hear scraping, dragging sounds against the cement walls of the closet. The door is shut, but the scraping sounds stop and shift to the door and then to the doorknob. Whatever is inside the closet is fumbling with the knob, trying to turn it, wanting to come out. I am frozen on the bed, unable to move, afraid to make a sound. Afraid to yell for Mrs. M. The knob on the closet door begins to creakily turn. The door opens a crack, the whirring sound pours out, the room darkens, the crack widens, and there it is, there it is—the black rod, the hairy leg, probing its way out of the closet and into my room. It is coming toward my bed. The claw opens and shuts as it nears me. I manage to sit up, and I find my voice and croak for Mrs. M. “Mrs. Emmmmmmm.”

My own voice wakes me. I am sitting upright on the sleeper sofa, covered in sweat. I made hardly any noise this time. There is no sound from Clara's bedroom. Good, there won't be any questions about Mrs. M., who she was, why I was calling
her
. I look at the clock—it's 3 a.m., and I see that beside the clock, Clara has left a single Percodan for easier access, next to the glass of water. Thank you, Clara. I take the pill.

But a memory comes to me before the meds pull me under. We are in the alley behind Mrs. M.'s house. We are burning my beetle costume in a metal trash can. We are laughing, making a racket. All of a sudden, Mrs. M. pulls her red wig off of her head and throws it right into the can—the wig is mostly plastic, and it makes a poof of black smoke before it melts into the flames.

Somebody was laughing in his sleep last night. That was a nice change.

So I woke her up after all. I am disappointed, but she is smiling, genuinely glad that I was having fun in my sleep. Her smile changes, becomes determined. She is going to pile on some questions now. I brace for them, keeping my expression blank.

Charlie, if your mom moved away before you wrote your books, does that mean she never got to see one of your Beetle Boy performances?

Never. Never. Never. She never even knew I was Beetle Boy. I wouldn't have wanted her to see me in that costume; I would have been so ashamed. She never saw what I did with her stories after she left; she didn't know. I don't tell Clara any of this. I say matter-of-factly, “Nah, she was long gone by then.”

Well … I think she would have been very proud of you, Charlie. I still remember that time you came to my school. Even then, I noticed how cute you were.

She is tickling me as she says this. She doesn't know that the school visits I did in my own hometown were by far the most excruciating. Just utterly humiliating. Five years. Five terrible years. I performed all over the greater Grand Rapids area as the World's Youngest Published Author—a gigantic storytelling bug. My dad routinely drove over the speed limit to get me from one school to the next, as many as we could manage in one day—sometimes four schools. At first the money poured in. We were flooded with personal checks with names I recognized—the parents of my friends, friends I didn't have anymore because I was too busy being the world's youngest published author. Dad would put the checks and the cash into lunch bags in the trunk of the car and take them to the bank once a week. He was the happy one then; he was on the upswing.

What's wrong, Charlie? You look sick all of a sudden. Is your leg bothering you?

I tell her no. My leg is not bothering me. I took a pill with breakfast; it will send me back to bed once she leaves for work. I will sleep long into the afternoon, hopefully with no dreams.

Now we are snuggled up on the sleeper sofa together, watching
The Daily Show
, and Clara is wearing one of my thin, faded T-shirts. It kills me when she wears my shirts. They fit her like a boxy dress because she's so tiny. They make it easy to reach her hips and her curvy butt. I slide my hand under the raggedy hem. She makes my kiss into something more, something she will need to pull away from if she really wants to watch Jon Stewart. She doesn't pull away.

Mmmm … are you my Beetle Boy?

I am the one who pulls away. My throat is suddenly dry as ash. “Don't call me that, Clara.”

Okay, okay, Grouchy. Come back here.

“No, seriously,” I tell her, for once not hiding my urgency. “Please, don't ever,
ever
call me that.”

(Big sigh) Sometimes I don't understand you, Charlie. You were a child prodigy. You wrote actual books! People bought them! You were famous before you were ten! If it was me, I'd be so proud of that.

I can't continue this conversation. I want her to know me better, but there is so much I can't reveal. So I kiss her again and hope that she'll remember not to call me what I have just asked her not to call me. If she does it again, I might have to kick her off my sleeper sofa. I might have to move out. I just might have to move out. Not that I would have anywhere else in the entire world to go.

The fact is that I am pinned like a bug in Clara's living room, caught fast in a cast to my knee. Clara adds to my claustrophobia because she quickly wants to know everything there is to know about me. She asks me question after question. She thinks of different ways to ask the same question. She studies me with scientific curiosity. She probably knows me better than anyone else alive in the world right now, but she doesn't know me at all.

Have I mentioned that I ruptured my Achilles tendon? A freak accident, and I do not use the term
freak
lightly. For three weeks I have been in this cast, walking on crutches, slowly recovering. Before that I lived in a downtown motel offering weekly rentals and no questions. Before that I lived with Mrs. M., but I had to move out when she left to go live with her sister. Before that I lived with Dad and Liam on Grove Street. I'm quite the nomad.

Clara's house is a one-story bungalow with a tiny attached garage; there are no stairs, very convenient for a cripple. Her parents own the house, and they charge her very low rent so that she can pay off her student loans from her associate's degree in pharmacy tech. So I am living off Clara's parents, which was never my plan, but oh well. I accepted Clara's rescue of me as I accepted Mrs. M.'s rescue of me, although with Mrs. M. it was my choice. Clara's rescue was more of a total surrender to my brokenness and to her own willingness to collect me.

So here I am. By day I am mostly sitting up on the sleeper sofa, watching Clara's TV. By night I sleep and wake up and sleep, always on my back. I can walk around the house a little bit on my crutches, but it's a bad tear and I am generally not supposed to put any weight on my right leg. When I move through the rooms, of which there are basically four besides the living room, it takes me forever. My life has slowed to a terrible crawl.

Clara is watching me eat dinner—soup and tuna melts—forming her next question. Please don't ask me anything about the books, Clara; don't make me go there, not the books, anything but the books. Don't make the titles come into my consciousness. Too late, too late!
Meet Beetle Boy. Beetle Boy Crawls Again. Beetle Boy and the Lonely Spider. Beetle Boy and the Mean Ladybug.
The titles appear in my mind, bright red and off-center, like a little kid scribbled them, because a little kid did scribble them. The title fonts are my own wimpy handwriting. I am suddenly gagging on my tuna melt.

Are you in pain? Is it time for a pill?

“No more pills. I think I need to go outside. Just for a few minutes.”

Charlie, the doctor said …

“I don't care what she said. I need some fresh air. Just get the crutches, okay? Please? The moon is out. Let's go outside, just for a minute.”

Hold on, Charlie, I'll get you a sweater too.

She is so helpful! Why isn't she sick of me? She never complains. Maybe she thinks I'm actually getting better. She doesn't know I'm cracking up. She asks me the most innocent questions: “Why won't you just call your brother? Why hasn't your mom tried to get in touch with you?”

It's a warm April night with a full moon. We walk around the block in the moonlight.

What happened to all those cute books you wrote, Charlie? You saved some of them, right?

I grimace, not so much because I am in pain but because I want her to see that all I can manage at the moment is walking.