Rock N Soul (16 page)

“Hey, Chad,” I said, partly to be sociable and partly so that Chris would know we weren’t alone anymore. Chris sat back up and peered at Cousin Chad, clearly excited to get to see what the guy looked like up close.

“Hey, Tyler.” Chad rubbed the back of his neck, and when he spoke, it was the same as his walking gait—somehow both fast and slow at once, the words running together and slightly slurred. “Grandma says you need to come inside now. She’s setting the table and it’s almost time to eat.”

“Cool.” I ducked through the center of the tire swing and stood up. “Let’s go in.” We started walking, Chris trailing along behind us. “So how’ve you been, Chad?”

“My psychiatrist says I’m making progress,” he said, then frowned. “But he’s been saying that for years and I don’t feel any different.”

Ah, the awkward family gathering tradition of discussing one’s health in depth after someone asks a filler question like
How are you?
I suppressed a sigh. “Well, I guess he’d know, right? Or maybe you need to switch meds?”

He shook his head quickly. “There aren’t any other meds. You only get this one if nothing else works and after this, they just shake their heads at you and start talking about putting you in a padded cell and then you start telling them you’re better so they won’t commit you.”

Which wasn’t something I had a ready-to-go response for, so I laughed like it was a joke and changed the subject. “Do you know if Grandma made the cranberry sauce? Or is it just the canned kind?”

Chad shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably homemade.” He stopped and turned to face me. “How are
you
, Tyler?” he asked, weirdly earnest sounding.

Which was odd, implying that he didn’t want the “I’m fine” answer from me either. I shifted onto one foot. “Um, I’m fine.” It was worth a shot, anyway.

“Are you sure?” he asked, leaning forward. “You seem strange.”

“I seem . . . strange,” I repeated.
Don’t look at Chris, don’t look at Chris, don’t look at Chris.
“What do you mean?”

“Like you’re . . . distracted. Like you were sitting out here talking to someone.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Phone, man.”

“I didn’t see a phone.” He gave me a very suspicious gaze.

“I hung up when you came out the door.”

He watched me for a few more seconds, his eyes narrowed and his lips pursed, then sighed. “We should go inside.” He turned back around and fled into the house, leaving me standing just outside the door.

“That was weird,” Chris commented.

“Yeah, well, that’s Crazy Cousin Chad,” I said. “At least maybe you can tell he’s not a homicidal maniac. Just a normal maniac.”

“Has he always been like this?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “When we were little, he was a normal kid. And then all the sudden he, you know, wasn’t.”

“Sad,” Chris said. “I mean, I had my problems, but when I hallucinated I knew they were hallucinations. And I knew they were my own fault.”

“Forgive me if I’m not too sympathetic to you on that front,” I retorted. “I have to get inside.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. Let’s go.”

Once I got inside, I sat down at the table and took inventory of the family members who were present. Grandma and Aunt Greta and Chad, of course. Aunt Greta’s husband, Uncle Tim, who always seemed uncomfortable around his son, like he was genuinely afraid that Chad was going to flip the homicide switch and bludgeon him to death with a chair leg. Grandma’s sister Aunt Jane and her two sons and their wives and their four combined kids, ranging in age from two to about twelve. Uncle Tim’s adult daughter from his first marriage and her husband. It wasn’t the fullest Christmas we’d ever had, but it was crowded enough to have that Big Family Event feel to it. Chad sat in a chair across the table and diagonal from me.

Chris stood behind my chair, then leaned down and whispered, “Is your mom here?”

I shook my head very slightly.

“Is she coming?” he asked.

I tried to give a tiny shrug, but Uncle Tim saw it and gave me a strange look. I smiled at him. “Shoulders got stiff from sitting on the train.”

Unlike Chad, Uncle Tim just let it go. Train-related aches and pains apparently weren’t as suspicious as talking to unspecified people on invisible cell phones in bathrooms and backyards. I could understand.

Grandma called everyone to order and made us all bow our heads while she said grace over the meal. I opened one eye and turned my head so I could see Chris. He had his head bowed too, his eyes closed tightly, like he was actually listening to the words of the prayer. I closed my eye again—it seemed like I was intruding on his privacy and something in my conscience balked at that.

After the prayer, pandemonium broke out, with everybody half standing up from their seats to rake food onto their plates. I had scoped out the seat with the best access to Aunt Greta’s famous corn casserole, so I immediately spooned up as much as I could without angering the rest of the family with my greediness. Then I passed my plate to one of Aunt Jane’s sons so he could fill it up with turkey.

I glanced at Aunt Greta while I was waiting. She was surreptitiously sprinkling what had to be ground-up psych meds into Chad’s mashed potatoes. Our eyes met briefly, and I gave her the “I see what you did there but I’m not saying anything about it” look before turning back to get my plate. A few more passes to other family members for farther-away foods, and then I sat back down to eat.

Chris crouched and watched me eat every single bite. By now, this sort of thing wasn’t creepy. It had started to be a little unsettling how normal I found it, though, so maybe it would cycle back into creepy before too long. This time, though, I just let him watch and did my best not to let it distract me from my conversations with the nondead people at the table.

Aunt Greta motioned at my helping of corn casserole. “Is it as good as you always say it is, Ty-ty?”

Chris snorted. “She calls you
Ty-ty
?”

I didn’t answer him. Instead I just gave Aunt Greta a winning smile and assured her that it was delicious. I was lying a little bit, though, which was upsetting. Aunt Greta’s corn casserole was one of the things I looked forward to all year long, and this time it just tasted kind of off, like she’d gotten a bad batch of corn or something. Still, since she had noticed me eating it, I made a point to finish the helping I’d put on my plate.

By the time the feeding frenzy had slowed, I was deep in a debate with Uncle Tim about whether the Star Wars prequels were terrible or not (they were, obviously, but I was playing devil’s advocate to keep the conversation interesting) when I yawned, midsentence.

“Tired?” Uncle Tim asked.

I raised both eyebrows at myself. “I don’t know. I guess so. Sorry, the food’s just lulling me to sleep or something.”

Aunt Jane piped in then, talking about tryptophan and how turkey makes people sleepy, and I tried to listen but my eyelids were drooping a little. I made it through the meal, then muttered some excuses and went upstairs to my old bedroom.

When I closed the door behind myself, Chris stepped in front of me, concern in his dark-brown eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, making a huge effort to keep my eyes open. “I’m just hella sleepy, man.”

“You look drugged,” he said, frowning.

“You would know,” I snapped, then had the odd sensation that I should feel bad for saying that, except that I was too drowsy to care.

Chris frowned more deeply, but I walked straight through him toward my old bed. “I’m sorry, dude, I just need a nap and I’ll feel better.”

He said something back to me, but I didn’t catch it before I fell asleep.

The light outside was fading when I woke up. I sat up in bed and blinked, momentarily disoriented. Chris was sitting in an armchair beside the bed, staring at the floor. I yawned. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Four hours,” he replied without looking up. “You . . .” He stopped, visibly clamping his mouth shut.

“What?” I glanced down at my feet. “I didn’t even take off my shoes. Man, I was out like a freaking light.”

“You fucking scared me, man,” Chris said, his voice soft in volume but disturbingly hard in tone. “Don’t fucking do that.”

“Don’t do what?” I asked, starting to get annoyed. “Don’t have basic human needs like sleep? My bad, man, I’ll try to be more ghostlike in the future.”

“
That
,” he gestured at the bed, “was not a basic human need. That was your Aunt Greta putting drugs in your food.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Your Aunt Greta. She drugged you,” he said, still staring at the floorboards like they had personally offended him. “And when people take drugs they die, so I’m a little sensitive about the matter these days.”

“Did you . . . Did you
see
her put something in my food? I mean, I saw her slipping Chad some clozapine, but she didn’t even touch my plate.”

“No, I didn’t
see
it,” he snapped. “But she’s obviously not above drugging people if she does it to her own son and doesn’t give a shit.”

“It’s for his own good,” I said. “Because he won’t take it himself.”

“Yeah, whatever, I’m sure she thought
this
was for your own good too.” He scowled.

I took pity on him since he did seem genuinely upset. “I don’t think she drugged me,” I said. “She has no reason to drug me. But I’ll be careful from now on, okay?”

He looked up then, catching my eyes with his and not speaking for a moment before he sighed. “Okay.”

“Dude.” I kept my voice low so Chad wouldn’t hear it and come ask what was going on. “I’m fine. And besides, even if Aunt Greta
did
drug me, she wouldn’t have wanted to
hurt
me. So I’m fine. Promise.”

Chris just nodded. The silence stretched for a few seconds, then he cleared his throat and asked, “Is this your room?”

I glanced around even though I knew exactly how it looked. Grandma had tidied it up after I moved out, of course, and changed the curtains and the bedspread. But the room was essentially the same as it had been when I was living here. Framed pictures of me and my high school friends were still on the wall. There was still a black fake leather beanbag chair and my telephone shaped like the starship
Enterprise
. It was still my room, just not a sacred untouched shrine to my former self. I liked that about it.

“Yeah,” I said after I realized I hadn’t answered him. “This is where I grew up.”

“I’m guessing that’s your phone and not your grandma’s.” His voice was a bit uncertain, but it was gaining back his usual note of bravado. Slowly.

“Hey, you don’t know,” I said. “Grandma was a huge fan of Shatner-era
Trek
.”

“I’m sure she was,” he said with what was clearly an involuntary smile.

I swung my legs off of the side of the bed. “I guess I should go back downstairs.” I pushed myself to my feet and swayed just a little before finding my balance.

Chris stood and walked over to me. He touched his fingers to my forehead in a “let me see if you’re feverish” gesture, which was weird because of the total lack of tactile sensation that came along with it.

“Can you tell if I’m feverish?” I asked.

“No,” he said, frowning. “I’ll have to take your word that you’re not.”

“I don’t feel feverish,” I said. “But I promise to tell you if I start feeling sick.”

“Deal,” he said, then seemed to notice how close he was standing. He backed up, looking down at the floor again.

I started to say something (maybe his name? Hell if I know), even getting so far as to open my mouth, then decided against it and closed my lips again.

There was a quiet knock at the door. “Tyler?” It was Chad’s voice.

Chris snapped his eyes over to the door and glared at it.

“Yeah, come in,” I called.

Chad slowly opened the door, hesitated for a second, then shuffled inside and closed the door behind himself. He looked furtively around the room as if to make sure no one else was there, then took a few steps closer to me. “Did it help?” he whispered.

Chris let out a sound that was almost a growl, and I nearly turned to look at him before I caught myself. I smiled at Chad. “Did what help? I just took a nap.”