One Door Closes (10 page)

It was the frantic work of a second, yanking the closet door open and shoving his arms fiercely in to upset anything behind the clothing hanging there. But there was nothing, no one. Calvin went to the next room, and the next, the emptiness of each compounding into a heavy buzz. He ended up at the head of the stairs, looking down into the gaping front hall. The clouds outside had deepened, sending the edges of the room into vague shapes.

Behind him, something...
thickened.
That was the only word for it. A subtle stir in the very air. Calvin turned slowly, listening to the whistle of wind, feeling as though there were eyes upon him.

The groan of the front door nearly stopped his heart, and he almost lost his balance at the top of the stairs. He clutched the banister and stared down mutely as Danny came inside, shaking the rain from his sleeves. He toed his boots off and turned, taking in Calvin on the landing.

Danny tugged the earbuds from his ears. “Oh, hey.”

The sound of Calvin’s own swallow was so loud that surely even Danny had heard it.

Danny’s brow wrinkled. “What’s up?”

“Were you just in here?”

Danny didn’t say anything immediately. He looked around the foyer as if he could find clarification for Calvin’s question there. “I just got here.”

Calvin glanced behind him again. The darkness of the hallway pushed him forward, and he came downstairs at a fast clip, goose bumps crawling up his arms.

“What’s up?” Danny said again as Calvin reached the ground floor.

“Nothing.” The kitchen had big bright lights, and held the heat the best out of any of the rooms. “Never mind.”

He could almost feel Danny’s shrug behind him. He heard his brother mount the stairs, and waited just outside the kitchen doorway for any sign of...something. But Danny just continued up, then down the hall overhead into his room.

At least the house no longer felt so empty.

Calvin went into the kitchen with no particular plan, just to find something to occupy his jittery hands, and ended up attacking the sink and stove with bleach and disinfectant. The kitchen wasn’t terribly dirty, but it was in worse shape than it had ever been under Audrey’s watch, and in a single scorching instant, Calvin was so unsettled, so furious, that he couldn’t let it go. He yanked the rags and bottles out from under the sink and scoured the top of the stove, then pulled it away from its niche to scrub down the sides. They were a mess of dust caked in oil residue, and he didn’t stop until every spot was removed.

Some part of him still stretched backward into the house, listening for footsteps he couldn’t account for, the whine of the wind through the corridors. But that was all gone. Something fundamental had shifted, the house again the home he recognized. Instead of soothing, however, the change only ticked at his composure anew, quickening the pace of his hands and his breathing.

At some point, the grumble of Devon’s motorcycle reached him, followed by the front door slamming as his other brother came home. He, too, headed upstairs, and Calvin tuned in to the task at hand. His ears hummed with constrained energy by the time he shoved the stove back into place. The sink was next, and while the basin soaked in bleach, he wiped the outside of the fridge from top to bottom.

It still only felt like a dent in a monstrous heap.

It was a shockingly long time before he registered the tap-tapping, like the sounds the house used to make when it settled on summer nights. But it was too early in the day for that, still twilight, and the season too cold. Calvin paused, pulse juddering, but the tapping came again and he slumped. Of course.

He jogged to the front door, rag still in hand, expecting the knocking to stop with each step, but it kept right on until he turned the knob.

On the porch, Glenna Stuart jerked her hand down to her side and clenched it there along the seam of her jeans. She stared at him openmouthed. For the first time since he’d met her, she looked more a boy than a girl, her hair swept flat under a beanie, the teenage blemishes of her face plain without their usual layer of foundation. Her jacket was shapeless, her shoes for running, no scarf in sight. Just a boy on a porch. The unhappiness on her face was obvious.

“Are you all right?” Calvin looked in vain for a place to set down the rag, then opened the door wider to step outside. But Glenna’s mouth twisted in such a way that he stopped.

“Can I talk to you?” Her voice wasn’t even close to feminine. It was cracked, naturally deep. Glenna didn’t look like she could be bothered to care.

“Of course. Glenna, are you okay?”

A flicker of the kid he knew shot out in the look she gave him. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

She didn’t have a bag or anything. In fact, there was nothing extra on her, not even her backpack. But he had to be sure.

“You’re not running away, are you?” He wondered what in God’s name he was going to do if she was.

This time she didn’t have a ready answer, and that was more worrisome than anything. She shuffled her feet once, and the words just spilled out, jumbled atop each other. “I don’t want to go home, and I don’t know what to do anymore, there’s nobody who knows anything about this in this stupid town, they just stare at me and I can’t—”

Her voice rose into a frenzy. Calvin raised his hands, trying to smother the flare as it gusted upward. “It’s okay. It’s okay, you can come here. Always.”

It wasn’t even placation. Calvin found as he spoke that he profoundly meant the words. Her cheeks rushed red. It was hard, at that moment, to see the girl she wanted to be, or the boy she was. Only the child, any child, rocking dangerously where Calvin might just be able to reach out, snag hold of a shoulder. Yank the body and mind attached back to safety.

She fidgeted and glanced past him inside. “Can I come in?”

His first reaction was to step back and let the house swing her up into its arms as it had done for so many kids in the past. But the weight over the place glommed down again like a descending darkness, and Calvin’s thoughts ratcheted painfully back to Eric Angus, the center of a whirlpool they couldn’t crawl out of. It wasn’t anywhere near group meeting time, not even properly daylight anymore, and here Glenna was. Calvin felt watched, eyes in corners he’d never had to consider before, and the last thing he needed was—

He wasn’t even going to go there in his mind.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said carefully, and the look in her eyes etched deeper. “Hey, I’m not turning you away. Okay? There are just, right now...”

She looked at him expectantly, a pain no one that young should have to deal with warring with the trust, and suddenly Calvin couldn’t make this about his own troubles.

The excuse to get out of the house again for any reason seared like sugary relief. He drew a smile up from somewhere and gave it to Glenna. “My brothers are home, and I think it’ll be more private outside.”

She sniffed and wiped at her jaw with the back of her hand. Her coat looked thick, and the temperature outside wasn’t low enough yet to make gloves necessary. Calvin glanced at the rag in his hand. “Stay here. I’ll get my coat and we’ll walk.”

She nodded.

Calvin went inside, flinging the rag onto the counter as he passed through the kitchen, and grabbed his heaviest jacket off the hook in the mudroom. He checked that his hat was still in the pocket, then ran back out and locked the door behind him. Glenna followed him down the steps in silence.

The yard was half red and half blue, shadows and rusty sunlight changing places as the sun went down. When Calvin looked back at the house, he found the lighted windows strangely warm again, a soothing countenance in place of the hollowness so recently in residence. The windows let him go, but also beckoned him back, a sure sanctuary waiting for the moment he was ready to return.

Glenna didn’t say anything all the way down the drive, nor once they stepped into the street. The road stretched long and empty save for a car in front of the next property. No one was out, not even under the glory of this sunset. They walked side by side, past the bordering property and the fenced-off lot on the opposite side of the street, before Glenna gave a little squirming motion. She began to talk, in a rush like before, but without the chaos this time.

“I can’t do this. I can’t be a girl, I don’t want to anymore. It’s all screwed up! It’s never going to be right, I don’t know what I’m going to do when high school’s over. I should just stay this way, at least I know what I am now and what to do with it.”

Calvin sorted through the words as best he could. “If you’re not happy with—”

But Glenna just groaned. She knocked a rock out of the road with a violent twist of her heel. Calvin was startled to find her eyes brimming with tears.

“Glenna?”

“What do I do with it?” The tears cracked her voice. “Would it even—if I was a girl, would I be able to...”

“To what?” She wasn’t a particularly masculine- or feminine-looking teen. He had no idea if that would change as she grew, but he didn’t think her appearance would cause her too much trouble from the less accepting of the population. If that was even what she was worried about. “Do with what?”

She struggled, hands moving without words, her face turning red. “To—you know.”

It came upon him so gradually, so
obviously
, that he couldn’t believe he’d been so slow. And then his brain tripped further, down the equally obvious path to its worst possible ends. He swallowed around his discomfort, a need for haste that was ugly in its ramifications. “Is there someone you’re interested in?”

“
No
, I just...” She yanked on her hat with both hands, a fit of pique younger than her fifteen years. “Thank God I’m not, I don’t know what I’d even do.”

Calvin’s tension bled away, and he sighed, glad that there was no immediacy to the physical issue. It was a good bet Glenna wasn’t sexually active yet, as a boy or a girl. Keeping her that way until she figured out more about herself was the smartest option he could think of. He sought for something that would be useful to her right now, something she could access easily. “I think you should talk to your sister. She’ll know things that I don’t.”

“I can’t talk to her!” Glenna sounded aghast. “She looks at me like—she’s one of those people who
look
at me, all sad, and it’s worse than the ones who look at me like I’m messed up.”

“Why is she sad?”

“She says it’s because I’m her little brother. And the idea makes her sad.”

He didn’t get it immediately, and then he thought he did. He imagined Danny coming to him, sure to the stones of the earth that he was meant to be a woman. He hadn’t even known Danny that long and already he was settled on the idea of him as a brother, if a distant one. The idea of suddenly having a sister in Danny’s place was jarring, and they had nowhere near the history that Glenna and her sister did.

“It would be an adjustment,” he said, thoughtful, but Glenna just grunted.

“I don’t care about her adjustment. There won’t be any adjustment anyway, because I can’t do this. I can’t do
that.
God, I don’t even know what that’s like, I’ve never—It’ll hurt, what if it just doesn’t even do anything? I don’t know what it would look like, I don’t know what it would feel like, I—how do I even explain to someone? Hey, I changed sex! I don’t—what happens? Does it work the same way? Do I need a stupid disclaimer every time I—”

“Glenna. It’s nobody’s business but yours.
No one’s.
Do you understand me? It doesn’t matter that they know or not, it doesn’t matter that they might feel entitled to know these things.
You
decide what you tell people. It’s your body, you tell them if you want them to know, if you think they deserve to know. Not because you feel like you owe them.”

Her wide eyes were his first clue to how heated he’d gotten. Calvin halted, embarrassed, but the light in her eyes had changed, from surprise to something like belief. It was...staggering. And as he stared at her...

Oh, hell. Maybe there was something he could talk to her about after all, without feeling like he was fumbling his way through the blackest cave.

“Listen.” He had to ease into this or he’d never get there. “Listen, I know I’m male. I know that’s what I’m meant to be. I’ve never had the kind of...situation you’re having to deal with. And I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman and—” He wanted to laugh, crazily, but he kept it in. “And facing sex for the first time. It’s kind of—it would be an invasion, any way you slice it. And it
is
sort of the same for me, being a guy who...likes guys. It’s your body and you’re letting someone inside it. That’s a big deal. It doesn’t have to be scary, but it’s a
big deal.
”

She nodded, her face clearing a little.

Calvin tried to meet her eyes for the next part and couldn’t hold it. “But I do understand what you’re going through, in one respect.” She wasn’t getting it, he could tell. Time to just say it, anyway. Maybe not everything that came with it, but this was enough to be juggling for tonight. “I haven’t done it either.”

Glenna reared back, a quick jerk that he didn’t blame her for even if it made him flush again. “You? But...” She shook her head. “But people say stuff.”

He frowned. “They say stuff about me?”

“No, about
it.
They all act like they’ve done it. They talk about it, I feel like I’m the only one who hasn’t. You’re almost, what, thirty?”

Calvin couldn’t help rolling his eyes. “Not all of us have the same priorities. You know?”

She shrugged. “Sorry.” More subdued.

“No, I didn’t mean to snap. I just hate the fact that you get judged for it. Like the world revolves around it. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it doesn’t.”

They were quiet for a little while, and Calvin took the opportunity to turn them around, head them in the other direction. They could walk up and down the road all night if she needed to, he didn’t care. But they were getting a ways out.

“Why haven’t you?” Glenna asked at last.

“A lot of reasons.” Things he didn’t want to get into right then, if ever. “At first because I wasn’t ready. And then because I was distracted.”