Hero (37 page)

I quietly opened the stall door and froze when I heard the locker room door slam open. I stepped back in the stall, leaving the door slightly cracked. I pressed my back against the wall and saw my father through the slit in the door. He sat on the bench and rested his head in his hands.

I listened to the sound of my own breath, the sound of my own heart beating, and I prayed he wouldn't hear me. I tried to absorb the weight of my father's sacrifices for me, the idea that I'd misjudged him.

Dad changed out of his shit-stained uniform into a new one. I saw him pull a crisp foreman's uniform out of his locker, and he adjusted it on its hanger to make sure the pleats hung evenly. This would be the uniform he'd bring home, the one that he'd toss in the laundry to make me think it was business as usual, another day as shift manager down at the plant.

I waited for him to leave before I slipped out. That's the key. It had always worked for Dad, and now it worked for me.

Never get too close.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I ARRIVED HOME to no graffiti, no car in the driveway, no lights on inside. But I didn't feel I was alone. I was sure I saw movement near the bushes around the side of the house. I doubled back through the neighbor's backyard, picked up a baseball bat lying in the grass, and crept into my own backyard. If those graffiti artists and hatemongers were back, I was going to give them a surprise they would never forget.

I moved quietly, but I didn't see anyone. As I crossed the perimeter of the yard, I remembered the last message etched on the lawn. You're next. Maybe it wasn't hateful little bigots after all. Maybe I should have been more worried.

I turned when I saw the weeping willow swaying in the breeze. I squinted to see if someone was hiding behind it. I could have sworn I saw someone move the branches. I snuck up to the trunk of the tree, the baseball bat held high in my hand.

In the back of my mind I prepared myself for the possibility that this might be a fight to the end. I clutched the necklace my mother gave me, put my hand on the bark, and took a deep breath, ready to strike. Then I jumped around the trunk and swung the bat with all my might.

The swing didn't connect. In fact, I looked down at my hands to find the bat was missing. I turned around and saw it floating behind me.

"Hi, Mom."

"Thorn, listen to me, there isn't much time."

"I did everything you said." I felt the ring on the necklace resting on my chest. "I haven't even thought about it."

"That's my boy."

I heard a gulp, but I couldn't see her flask.

"There's something you should know, Thorn. You're the product of both me and your father. Now, I know you'll be doing the right thing, heroics and all that. You get that from him. But you are also the child of invisibility. It's very important you never forget that. The powers, Thom, they're a gift."

Yes, I knew that. "I'm learning more about how to use them every day. You'd be surprised by what I can do."

"No. I wouldn't. In fact, I'm counting on it. But powers are also a tremendous responsibility. There's a price to pay for using them. It's not good to hide behind them all the time, Thom. If you hide too much"—I saw the spark of a match light her cigarette—"you can lose yourself entirely. Remember how you never thought I could see you when you wrapped yourself up in your blanket as a little boy?"

"I'm not hiding anymore." I said it firmly and I meant it. I was through with hiding. That was her department now.

"These powers, they're just a part of you, Thom, but they're not all of you. Do you understand what I'm getting at?"

Not really. Was she drunk?

She patted my head.

"Don't worry," she said. "You will. You still have so much to learn about who you really are."

She flicked the cigarette in our neighbor's yard, and I reached out and gripped her forearm. I didn't let go.

"Mom, what's going to happen? Why did you say there isn't much time?"

I felt her jolt when I grabbed her. She was surprised I'd been able to measure where she was by her cigarette. In a second, she yanked away.

I turned around in the yard, looking for a sign of her. "Mom!"

A weeping willow branch whipped up into the air, and I took off after it. I was running blind, following an instinct, but I was determined to catch her.

When I neared the deck, I knew I was right behind her. I heard her footsteps race along the deck. I leaped over the rail and ran toward the door. The door swung open before I could get there. She was in the house, but which way had she turned? She was better at this than I was, but I was fed up, angry that she kept leaving, and that anger kept me going.

I thought about what my dad would do and inhaled deeply, smelling gardenia and liquor. I jumped over the couch in our modest living room to follow the scent. I knocked over our family pictures and heard the glass frames shatter on the floor. I swung to catch her, but she was one step ahead of me, and I stumbled.

I looked up and smelled the trail of the scent leading to the front door. No way. Not this time. I took off like an Olympic sprinter. I was going to stop her before she got to that door, before she disappeared into the night, before she could leave me again. I was going to find out what the hell she was talking about once and for all.

The front door tore open in front of me. I dove forward, my hands outstretched to stop her. I flew through the air.

And I landed on Goran.

I helped Goran up to his feet and apologized for knocking him over. I explained we'd been having a little trouble with vandals lately, the whole while straining my eyes to look for a sign of my mother. I sighed deeply, troubled that she was gone.

Goran had a sheepish look on his face. He picked up a mashed flower arrangement and held it against his hip, the same way he held a basketball. He cleared his throat. "I heard you lost your friend."

He looked down at the bouquet of flowers, not the cheap kind from the deli or drugstore, either; these were from a real florist. They must have set him back a lot, on his budget. I felt bad for landing on them.

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry," he said. "About everything."

My feelings for Goran were complicated. Tied up in a tangled network of impossibilities. I had never let myself fantasize about being with someone my own age, because it stopped being a fantasy at that point. It entered the realm of possibility, and that's where you can really get hurt.

I hadn't seen him since I'd closed the door on my emotions. I hadn't seen him since I'd wanted to hit him in the parking lot. Since he'd put my hands on his face.

"What do you want from me?" I asked.

He looked off to the side, into the darkness. "Can I come in?"

"Can you make this quick? I've got some other things going on right now." I looked up and down the empty street one last time before letting him in and closing the door.

He looked around the living room and asked if he could sit down. I swept the broken family pictures under the couch with my foot and stood. He laid the flowers on the coffee table and looked at them instead of me.

"I promised my mother and father that I would take care of my brother, and I'm afraid I haven't been doing a very good job."

What the hell was he talking about? He was the best big brother I'd ever met. It was one of the things I loved about him the most. I'd always dreamed of having a big brother like him, someone to look up to, someone tough and cool, not afraid to tell it like it is, and with the strength to back it up. My mind flashed to a picture of his little brother doing a high kick to the drink machine.

"You're crazy. That kid's great."

I pulled the curtain open to check the front yard. As far as I could tell, there was no one out there, but I didn't want to take my eyes off the darkness.

"What kind of a role model am I," Goran said, "if I'm a liar?"

"What are you talking about?"

He leaned forward on the sofa, rested his elbows on his knees, and interlocked his fingers. "When I was my brother's age, my parents decided that it was better to join the war as soldiers than to wait in our basement for someone to kill us. They made me promise to take care of my little brother if anything should happen to them, to do whatever I had to do to take him as far away from there as possible."

He pretended to study his hands, but his mind was somewhere else. "They would leave for days at a time, but they'd always come home. Then they were gone for three whole weeks, and I didn't know if they were going to come back. I was afraid to light candles at night—no one had electricity anymore, because someone would know where we were. I played games with my little brother, sang songs quietly to him until he fell asleep. Sang songs to keep my mind off the decision that faced me. Do I wait for them to return? Or do I honor their request to take my brother as far away as possible? We had almost run out of food, and I decided to let that make the decision for me. We would wait as long as we could make it through the last three cans of beets.

"We were down to the last quarter of the last can when my mother returned in the middle of the night."

I sank down into a chair and listened to him continue.

"She had fashioned together a crutch from two fence slats and a silk pillow and some cord. Her left leg was covered with bloody bandages. She wasn't alone. A group of soldiers was with her, some dressed in civilian clothes, but all with guns. My father was not there.

"My brother was crying, and I was trying to be brave. She said we must hurry. She handed me over to one of the men, and then she handed over my brother, and they loaded us into the back of a dented van, the sides fortified with metal sheeting.

"The van began to pull away, and my mother was not inside. My brother and I howled. What a cruel trick for her to come back, only for us to be separated again. I scrambled to the back of the van, put my hands up against the cold glass of the window, and saw my mother getting smaller and smaller in the distance. She climbed painfully into a small car with a sunroof.

"I heard the whistle of the mortar as it shrieked through the air. It hit our block and exploded. I held up my hands to shield myself from the blast, which blew out the back window of the van. I managed to grab hold of my brother as the van flipped over and over. When we came to a stop, I pulled him out of the car, and we saw our driver's mangled body crushed into the steering wheel. I turned to look back at our house, at the tiny car my mother had gotten into.

"There was nothing left."

He stopped speaking, and silence filled the air between us. I wanted to tell him that I knew a little about what it felt like to have your mother vanish, disappear without a trace. I thought maybe I could find a way to explain that to him later, but right then I wanted to let him know I was listening. "What did you do?"

Goran made eye contact with me without moving his head. He spoke slowly and surely, miles of subtext under his words.

"I did what I had to do to get us out of there."

That was it. I wasn't going to find out what it was he'd had to do. Those were his own ghosts, his own personal haunting, and he wasn't going to share that with me.

I walked over to the couch and did the only thing I knew to do at that moment. I sat down next him and didn't say a word.

"It is very difficult for me to continue," Goran said. "I do not have the same words as you to express how I feel."

I didn't question him. I just wanted to sit there beside him.

He leaned back into the safety of a shadow cast by the unlit lamp on the table beside him. He looked down at his feet.

"There's so much I want to tell you," he said in barely a whisper.

I turned on the lamp and looked into his eyes. There was something so intense boiling up inside him, and the more I stared into those eyes, the more I saw something familiar, something I understood.

"I can't lie to my brother anymore," he said. His jaw was clenched and the muscles in his neck rippled as he spoke.

"About what?"

I suddenly had to know. I would leave him some of his own personal ghosts, but not this one. He was silent.

"About what?" I said again. I wouldn't let him take his eyes off me.

I was fed up with waiting for people to tell me things, fed

up with being scared of what mightVome next. That was no way to live.

"About what?!"

I got up in his face and challenged him. He turned to look away, and I grabbed his chin and turned it back toward me so he had to face me. I felt the warmth of his jaw on my thumb and forefinger. He didn't pull away.

I wasn't going to let him off the hook. I felt he could read my thoughts.

He opened his mouth to speak.

And then the earth shook.

We ran outside and shielded our eyes from the skies. A sharp, bright light exploded from the city, and the ground reverberated beneath us. You could feel it all the way up through your feet to your stomach.

"Was it a nuclear bomb?" I asked.

Goran studied the sky. He was serious, detached again, the walls back up as strong as before.

"There's no cloud," he said.

Car and house alarms went off throughout the neighborhood, and the neighbors poured out into the street to see what the commotion was. Instinct took over, and both Goran and I broke into a sprint in the direction of the light. We had made it a couple of blocks when it became clear to both of us that the disaster was somewhere far off in the city, somewhere we couldn't get to on foot. We were embarrassed to look at each other. I couldn't tell if it was because we'd broken into a pointless sprint, or because we'd been so close to saying something that scared us.

We stopped by a pickup truck that had pulled over on the side of the road. The driver had opened the windows and turned the radio volume up, and a small crowd of motorists had gathered around to listen, people seeking safety in numbers.

A helicopter news report informed us that there had been a blast downtown. The reporter had no idea about the damage or the casualties, but the area under attack surprised us all.