Selfie (32 page)

The wall bracketing the staircase was goldenrod yellow.

“Noah?” I felt like I had when I was five, and my parents had taken me to see my first Disney movie in the theater. My mom had been pregnant with my little sister and had gone to the bathroom about six times, but it didn’t matter. For an hour and a half, me and that redheaded hussy had dreamed about Prince Eric with the same heartrending passion, and I’d been the happiest boy in the world.

Vinnie had looked just like him.

“What?” Noah said distractedly as he pulled me along behind him.

“You live in the
Wonka
house!”

Noah stopped short and I ploughed into the back of him.

“I live
where
?”

“Like Willy Wonka’s factory?” I said, still in awe. “You know, ‘The Candy Man Can’?”

Noah closed his mouth with an effort. “You’re right,” he muttered. “Every family
is
a movie family. Dad! Gran! Get out here and meet Connor before panic kicks his brain right out the front door, okay?”

He pulled me past the staircase and into the living room just in time for a hobbit and a giant to approach.

I let out a choked sound of laughter, and he shook his head sternly.

“Connor, this is my father, Samuel—”

“Nice to meet you, son,” said the giant.

I smiled at him from my lowly height of five foot ten and wondered if the air was thinner up there. He was taller than
Noah
, which was saying something, and he was built like a farm truck to boot. His buzz-cut graying hair framed a square face with a long jaw, and his eyes were almond-shaped instead of Noah’s and Viv’s rounder versions—but there was no mistaking he had a hand in their genetic makeup.

Especially when he smiled sweetly, his eyebrows raised, like he was expecting any weirdness or psycho cows I might throw at him. It reassured me, like it was meant to.

“Nice to meet you, sir.” I smiled prettily. I wasn’t trying to flirt, I was just trying to
impress
this really big man who might or might not guess what his baby boy had been doing to me all night.

“Good to meet you—for the last month, you’re all we’ve heard about, isn’t that right Mom?”

The hobbit came forward, a tiny brown woman, pudgy in all the places, with gray hair cut straight at her shoulder and so many wrinkles around her eyes that I was surprised she could see.

“Oh, he
is
pretty, Noah,” she said in delight. “That was the first thing he mentioned—that you were as pretty in person as you were on the screen.”

I blushed. “Well, ma’am, a highly trained bunch of stylists put hours into that—I’ll be sure to compliment their work.”

I was trying to be charmingly self-deprecating, but nobody laughed.

“And the second thing he mentioned,” she continued, as though I hadn’t spoken, “was that you were even more beautiful on the inside.”

I had nothing for that one, no way to respond.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the next and smiled uncertainly. “Well, uh, that was really sweet,” I said, my voice losing its glib edge. “Noah has been exceedingly kind this last month. I . . . I would have been lost without him.”

“That’s good to hear,” Samuel said, that killer Noah-smile sort of blowing my mind in his wider, stronger, red-brown face. “It means he was raised right.”

I swallowed, hearing my father talking about how I had to be stronger so people would know I was raised right, and how I had to be less dreamy so he wouldn’t be ashamed of me.

“I’ve never heard that about kindness, sir,” I said, naked in front of these people in just a few words. “I think that’s really wonderful.”

Noah’s hand in the small of my back gave me strength and some vestiges of grace.

“Where’re the girls?” he asked. “All I’ve heard all week was how much they wanted to meet Connor—where’d they go?”

Samuel’s pleasant expression faded. “Their mother is with them upstairs,” he said darkly, and he met Noah’s eyes like Noah was a grown-up. “She brought makeup and such.”

Noah grunted. “I didn’t see an extra car outside—”

“She had some man in a truck drop her off.” Samuel sounded disgusted and skeptical. “She swore the guy would be back in two hours, so, by my count, she’s got an hour left.”

Both men shook their heads at the same time, and Viv crossed her arms in front of her and made a little
humph
sound. Well, whoever this woman was, and whatever her reason for leaving the family, it was clear she’d have her work cut out for her impressing the senior members.

“Is it okay if I take Connor out and around? Show him the copse of redwoods and the inlet and stuff?”

“Sure,” Samuel said, nodding. “Be back in the last fifteen minutes, and you can say you’ve done your bit. Viv, do you want to—”

“I’ll go with Noah and Connor, Dad,” she said quickly.

“Are you sure? And where’s Cheddar? We were looking forward to seeing—”

Viv burst into tears again, and Samuel groaned like a man who was used to dealing with young women in tears. “Okay,” he said, grabbing a tissue. “You and Noah and Connor go talk about that. Gran and I will finish lunch.”

“Let me give you cookies on your way out,” Gran insisted. She pinned me with a gimlet gaze from her tiny brown eyes. “You especially—you’re too skinny.”

“I won’t be if I stay here long,” I said, smiling.

She sniffed. “You’re still grieving the weight away,” she observed, blowing my mind. “Let go of the sadness; maybe you can keep some of the fat.”

I gaped and caught Noah’s eyes. He shrugged, and gestured me to follow her into the kitchen. There were at least five-dozen cookies cooling on two plates on the kitchen counter, and she pulled out a Ziploc bag and filled it.

“Make sure you eat your share.” She glared at me.

“Of course, ma’am,” I said, smiling at the thought. I’d just been
ordered
to eat
cookies
. How wonderful was that? She was tiny and plump and doll-like and . . . and human.

I’d forgotten what that was like, and I suddenly flashed to my own mother as I was leaving the house before the game that night.
Make sure you eat dinner!

Such a simple thing, caring. I wonder when she’d shut it off—or was it like grieving? Did she cry the next morning like I cried for Vinnie? Did she and the little kids miss me? Did they spend months not able to say my name? Did my money pay for my sisters’ college? That was nice to think about—I liked that idea.

“Hey,” Noah said, tugging me out the door.

“Yeah?” I surfaced from my last night as Connor Mazynsky. “What?”

“Where’d you go?” He pulled me sideways, and I realized there was a little path from the grassland leading toward a stand of trees—a miniforest, really—that extended to the west toward the edge of the sound.

I looked behind me and saw Viv wandering dispiritedly behind us, a stick in her hand that she used to swing at the grasses blowing across the path.

“Nowhere,” I lied, wishing I could make her pain better. What could I say? It would fade? Well, yes and no. It didn’t so much fade as become veiled with more life than just the pain. You just never knew when a veil would get torn away, and there it would be, bright as always.

“Connor?”

“What’s the last thing you remember about your mom?” I asked, because today was not supposed to be about me.

Noah didn’t even have to think about it. “Dad caught her cheating for the umpteenth time,” he said flatly. “He never yelled—she did that. He just suggested—every time—that she may want to simply find another life. She didn’t seem to like this one. I heard him those last couple of years—and it started to sink in, you know? She was good with the birthdays and the big things—she loved us—but Gran did the day-to-day watching and the checking the homework and the cooking the meals and cleaning. Dad was building his business—you might not have seen the lean-to in front of the carport, but it’s a treasure trove of tools of all sorts, and he’s got the skills to use those. Anyway, she just . . . just didn’t want the day-to-day. She wanted something different, something bigger. And it was like . . . every kid was her attempt to fit into this life, right here. So Dad caught her—I think just the usual stuff, coming home late with sex written everywhere—and I heard them talking the night before. And the next morning, before school, she was downstairs instead of sleeping. She kissed every one of us, and cried, and said she was going to live somewhere else, but she’d call us when she could.”

I blinked. “And that was it?”

“She did call for the first couple of years. But it’s hard to stay connected when you’re just a voice on the phone.” He held his hand out and caught the edges of the brush with his palm. “I mean, she tried—she wrote cards and stuff. But . . . I don’t know. We all pretty much knew who she was in our lives. There weren’t any surprises, right?”

Huh. “You’re not bitter?”

Noah thought about it. “I came out to Dad about two months after she left. It was sort of a test, right? To see if he’d reject me, to make sure me and the girls were safe, putting all our faith in him and Gran.”

I remembered that story. “He totally passed.”

“A-plus parent, yup. And Gran’s a little spacey, and she cooks with cheese and lard—”

“Oh God.”

“She’s making a salad just for you—I begged her. But yeah. A-plus Dad, B-plus Gran, I mean, that’s the honor roll in parenting right there. Just because Mom dropped out of the course, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking.”

I half laughed. “Oh
there’s
the philosophy major at work.”

“Yeah.” He
didn’t
laugh. “So where were you?”

“God, you’re tenacious.”

“Connor!”

We were drawing near the redwoods now, and they provided a break from the wind. As we stepped past the first tree, it was like we’d taken a step into . . . Well, we had giants and hobbit-gnomes and Noah.

The hero too good to be true.

“I’m in Middle-earth,” I said with a happy smile, and then I grabbed his hand and drew him further into the woods.

“You are not!” he protested—but he let himself be dragged.

“I am. Your family is magic, you live in a hobbit hole, and you’re too good to be—”

Noah pulled me into his arms and kissed me.

—
true!
I thought, opening for him, intoxicated by this family, by the beautiful home, by the wind coming off the ocean into the redwoods.

Then he broke off the kiss and held my chin. “Connor, what’s wrong?”

“Noah? Noah, if you guys are having sex against a tree or something, warn me, otherwise, I’m pretty much your shadow.”

I smiled brightly and kissed him on the cheek, and then turned to Viv. “C’mere, our beautiful Princess Vivienne—lead me through this magical land.”

She let out a long-suffering sigh. “Give me a goddamned cookie.” She glared at her brother. “Noah? Really? Of all the people you could have picked, you had to pick one just like—”

“I am
not
in love with my grandmother!” he snapped.

“Thank God!” I said, and Noah shoved a cookie in my mouth.

Oh my heavens—soft cinnamon sugar cookies are . . .

“I’m melthing,” I moaned, swallowing in little teeny increments, the better to savor the cookie.

“This is so not going how I pictured it,” Noah muttered.

I swallowed the rest of the first bite. “That’s because you’re not eating your cookie! Now someone take me for a walk or we’ll be here all day!”

Noah humored me—that’s really the best way you could put it. I just . . . I saw this family, troubles and all, and wanted their troubles to be mine. I wanted to belong to someone who would collect rainbow windmills and fill their yard with them. I wanted to belong to someone who would tell his gay son that he still loved him, and then prove it by not changing a damned thing about that kid’s life.

I wanted to be like Noah and Viv, who knew that a relationship—even a bad one—might not be forever, but who still didn’t have a concept of what the bad kind of forever might be.

It was like acting. For an afternoon, I got to have someone else’s TV-perfect life, and I wasn’t going to ruin that with fears of . . . well, everything.

So I got Noah and Viv to take me through their little forest and show me the ravine they used to swing across (before the youngest broke her leg—something I could tell Noah still felt bad about) and the little tributary that flowed down to the sound.

We walked the beach along the redwood stand, and they marked out the property by their line of sight. He pointed out Sharra’s house, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and I pictured him as a gangly child with outsized hands and feet, and wild hair, running through the woods with a little girl who—by his description—had been as dark-skinned as he was, with tightly bound braids tied at the end by rainbow-colored rubber bands.

Had she dreamed about an island? Was that why she’d gone swimming?

I didn’t ask.

I took the afternoon as a gift, and for the next hour and a half, it gave. At the end, Noah and I walked through the woods holding hands like real lovers, and Viv walked ahead moodily, lost in her own thoughts and hopefully some peace from whatever had gone down with her and Cheddar that morning.