Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (30 page)

But I force the bad feelings out because they have no place in my life this weekend.

It’s amazing how quickly we fall into a familiar groove. We order a large Hawaiian pizza, break out the cream soda, throw
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
into the Blu-ray player, and proceed to eat with all the restraint of starving coyotes. We talk the whole time, about important stuff and trivial stuff, his work stuff and my school stuff. He mentions in passing how his tavern trivia team is laying waste to all comers every Thursday at some bar on Main Street, and I almost shriek in delight to hear he’s actually going out and seeing people.

We avoid heavy subjects. There’s no talk of Mom or the divorce or her recent freaking out or her threats to move. We don’t say how much we’ve missed each other or wish aloud that things had turned out differently. We’re simply two cool people shooting the breeze and pigging out to classic Bond.

We finish the pizza and we keep talking.

The movie ends and we keep talking.

We kill the whole six-pack of soda and we keep talking.

It’s nearly midnight when the first yawn slips out and Dad suggests going to bed so I’m ready for a big day of cooking tomorrow. Is it lame that I’m so excited to spend a day in the kitchen?

No, it isn’t. Not for this.

Dad leads me upstairs, his arm around my shoulders, and says “Here we are” as if he were apologizing.

I realize why when I open the door to what used to be my room. When I left, this room was stripped down to nothing. I return to find a new paint job, a new bed, a small nightstand, and a matching dresser. It’s been transformed into a generic, inoffensive, allpurpose guest room. And I’m the first guest.

Sensing my shock, Dad takes my hand and gives it a gentle squeeze. I fumble for something to say, but all that comes out is, “See you in the morning.”

Dad kisses me on the head.

I pull the curtains, turn off the lights, and baptize the bed. The white noise of the ocean that is—
was
my back yard is comfortingly familiar, but that’s the only thing that is. The mattress is too firm, the sheets are so crisp and new they feel coarse against my skin, and the air tastes mildly of fresh paint. The room is pitch black but it can’t hide the blank walls from my imagination, which replaces every missing poster and picture and stick of furniture.

Feh. My own room in my own house with my dad sleeping right down the hall and I’m homesick beyond belief.

You know what’s pathetic? We moved to the Cape when I was four, five years old and lived in an apartment until I was twelve, yet here I am, mourning my bittersweet homecoming to a house I lived in for all of three years.

One sleepless hour later, I grab the pillow and blankets and head downstairs to crash on the couch.

“That,” Dad says, easing himself onto the couch with a satisfied grunt, “was an excellent Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You did a great job, honey,” he says, holding out an arm, an invitation to sit next to him. “You definitely inherited your mom’s talent for cooking.”

Or at least her recipes, along with all the little tricks and tips she uses to guarantee perfection. Make a little tinfoil tent for the turkey to brown the skin and keep the meat moist. Use low-sodium chicken broth instead of water in the bottom of the roasting pan. Use real butter in everything, not margarine. Steam the vegetables, don’t boil them, and always add the seasoning after cooking, not before or during. It’s as much science as art, which is ironic considering that I suck at science only slightly less than I suck at math.

“Good thing you take after her there,” Dad says. “I’ve learned the hard way I can barely boil water without detailed instructions.”

“Then hooray for tons of leftovers.”

“Hooray indeed. So,” he says, trying very hard to sound casual. “How is your mother doing? She still talking about moving?”

“Talking about it, no.”

“But it’s still on the table?”

“Yeah. She said if she makes a decision she’ll talk to me about it first...”

“...But?”

I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter. She’s already told me that it’s her decision and hers alone. She might as well go ahead and do it and tell me when it’s too late for me to say anything, like when you and Mom—”

I swear I can actually hear the gears in my brain lock up and come to a screeching halt.

“Like when we divorced,” Dad says, finishing my thought, although not quite accurately.

“Like when you told me I was going to live with Mom,” I say like it’s an accusation. Dad’s lips press into a tight line. The question I’ve always wanted to ask Mom and Dad but never could finally escapes. “Why didn’t you ask me what I wanted?”

He says nothing for a long time.

“We avoided talking about you until the very end, when we’d tied up every other loose thread and couldn’t put it off any longer, and when we did, the first thing we agreed on was that we wouldn’t talk to you. We told ourselves that we didn’t want to put you in such an awkward position, making you choose between your parents...but that’s not true.” He bows his head as though giving confession to a priest. “Truth is, I was terrified you’d choose your mother and she was terrified you’d choose me, so we made the decision on our own.”

I want to be angry at them for denying me an opportunity to speak my piece on the matter, but I un
derstand why they did what they did. I can say now, after the fact, who I would have chosen, but if they had offered me a choice, would I have made it? Or would I have looked into their faces and wussed out because I couldn’t bear to hurt either of them?

“How did you decide who got me?”

“It wasn’t a decision so much as your mother beat me to the punch,” Dad says. “She said ‘I want custody of Carrie’ and, well, you know how your mother can be. When she makes up her mind and digs in her heels, there’s no force in Heaven or on Earth that can move her.

“I wanted you, kiddo, I did.” He pulls me close and kisses me on the head. “But that would have meant fighting your mom in court, and that would have gotten real ugly real fast. As tough as the divorce was on us things never got nasty, but a custody fight would have made it nasty, and we—all three of us—might have walked away hating each other, and I didn’t want that.”

“So you let her win,” I say, my resentment toward Mom flaring up.

“It wasn’t a contest, honey. It was a lousy, lousy time in all our lives that nothing could fix and nothing could make better,” he says. “The best we could do was try to keep it from getting worse. And you’re the reason we tried.”

And with that, the anger I’ve felt toward my mother, the anger I’ve been holding on to for weeks—no, the anger I’ve been clinging to ever since the divorce, that I’ve allowed to take me over and rule my life, it slips away, drains out of me. It’s a very real, very physical sensation, one that steals away the last of my
energy and sends me into a deep, dreamless sleep in the cradle of my father’s arm.

Or I’m sliding into a food coma, but I’m feeling idealistic.

Either way, it’s early morning when I wake up. I’m still on the couch, still fully dressed, and wrapped up all nice and snug in a heavy quilt I don’t remember Dad pulling over me. Man, I conked out hard.

Dad wakes up soon after, and our Sunday can be summarized as follows: breakfast at this little restaurant down on Main Street we used to go to all the time, back to the house for classic Connery Bond movies through a light lunch, and gab gab gab gab gab throughout.

The talking stops when we realize it’s time for me to go. Our mutual silence creates a weak illusion that time is slowing down for us, letting us wring every bit of happiness out of a weekend neither of us wants to end. At the bus station we hug until the driver tells us he has to leave, but we still don’t say anything. We part without saying goodbye.

The bus ride home is a ninety-minute-long blur. My iPod stays in my bag so I can replay the memories of my weekend in peace.

Mom is waiting to greet me on the bus station platform. I’m happy to see her again.

I’m happy to see her.

Huh.

“Hey, stranger,” she says as I step onto the platform. “How was the weekend?”

“Good,” I say, understating things by a factor of a million or so. “We had a good time.”

“And how did dinner go? You do me proud?”

“I think it’s safe to say your culinary legacy will live on.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. I don’t know if I’m ready to challenge you for the title of Queen of the Kitchen, but everything was greeted with happy nomming noises.”

I toss my bag in the back of the car and off we go. “I’m glad you two had a good weekend,” Mom says. “I think it was good for you. You seem happier.”

“It was. I am. Mom,” I say, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a pain. I know my attitude has royally sucked lately, and I’m sorry.”

She smiles. “Thank you, honey.”

“That’s not to say I’m rolling over and giving up. I like it here. It’s finally starting to feel like home, and if you tell me we’re moving, fair warning, I’m going to fight it. You’ll have to drag me out of Kingsport kicking and screaming.”

“I told you I would talk to you if I—”

“You told me you’d give me a chance to say something, but you made it clear what I want ultimately doesn’t matter,” I say, my words free of anger, “and that’s not good enough. I want some control over my own life. Is that such an unreasonable request?”

The car turns onto Main Street. Few of the curbside parking spaces have cars in them and the first block of storefronts is dark, telling signs of the day and the hour, and the wintery turn of the weather is keeping pedestrians off the sidewalks.

“People don’t always get total control over their lives, Carrie,” Mom says. She’s not reprimanding me. This sounds more like a
Here’s a simple fact of life, kid
speech. “Things happen beyond your or anyone’s control, and the best you can do is roll with it, try to make the best of the situation.”

In other words, her previous statement stands: it’s her call, and I can like it or lump it.

We pass a row of stores at the corner of town hall square, near where we first encountered Archimedes—rather, the Thrasher suit he hijacked. Like all of the stores along Kingsport’s main drag, these are small mom-and-pop operations, locally owned businesses with no nationally recognizable names attached. A children’s bookstore sports a number of freshly patched holes stitching up its brick façade and a plate glass window so new they haven’t yet repainted the store’s name on it. The neighboring business, a skate-surf-and-ski shop, wasn’t as lucky; its windows are sealed with sheets of plywood, OUT OF BUSINESS THANK YOU KINGSPORT written on one in neon orange spraypaint. Farther down, a sign hangs in a tiny bistro announcing that it’s closed for repairs until its grand reopening. The date listed on the sign is last Saturday. It goes on for another dozen storefronts, scars that have yet to heal, some that never will.

All this damage, it causes my temper flare up again. These businesses are people’s livelihoods, their dreams made real. Some of them are dealing with setbacks from which they’ll recover, eventually, others have been dealt a fatal blow, but none of them asked for this to happen and none of them could have done anything to stop it, and it pisses me off.

...But it feels different this time. It’s not pointless anger at the unfairness of the world spilling out in every direction. It feels clear, focused.

It feels like purpose.

THIRTY

Monday arrives.

It’s not accurate to say I wake up to a bright, sunny day because that implies I slept. I’d say Sara looks like she had a similar night, but then, she always looks like a distant cousin of Gomez and Morticia Addams.

“I’m not ready for this,” Sara says.

“I don’t know what to be ready for,” I say, the many grim scenarios that deprived me of a good night’s sleep rerunning in my brain. All of them end with Stuart reducing Ronny Vick to a greasy smear. “I have a weird question.”

“What’s that?”

“I know you can read minds, but do you think you could control them?”

Sara purses her lips in thought. “I don’t know. Maybe? You mean like when I cleared out the school when Archimedes showed up?”

“I was thinking something more precise. Like, you tell someone to freeze and they freeze.”

“Why?” she asks more out of suspicion than curiosity.

“I’m worried Stuart’s going to totally lose it when he sees Ronny Vick,” I say, “and if he does, there’s not much any of us can do to stop him. I thought, maybe...”

“I could override his brain if he goes after Ronny, shut him down? I don’t know. Pushing people’s buttons is one thing, but actually getting them to do what I tell them to? I’ve never tried anything like that.”

Nuts. The only option I can think of and it’s shaky at best.

“I don’t think anything will happen,” Sara says with forced optimism. “Nothing like that, I mean. Stuart’s not that kind of person.”

“Normally. This isn’t a normal situation.”

“No,” Sara agrees.

All morning long I feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to drop. Every time I change classes I scan the faces in the hallway, expecting to see a hard-faced manchild covered in badly drawn prison tattoos stalking about like a serial killer in a teen slasher movie.

My imaginary Ronny Vick is nowhere close to reality.

We compare notes at lunch and none of us have seen Ronny or heard any rumors floating around in class. You’d think that the arrival of a kid convicted of manslaughter would be big news, but the grapevine has been (pardon my poor choice of words) dead quiet, and we wonder if the Vick family changed plans at the last minute when they realized their kid would be going to school with his victim’s big brother.

That hope is dashed as we file out of the cafeteria and, halfway up the school’s wide main staircase, Stuart stops and locks eyes with a boy making his way
downstairs. He’s unremarkable in every way possible, from his hair to his clothing down to his sneakers. Until now he was simply another face in the crowd, and not a memorable one, but now I know exactly who he is. Ronny Vick goes sheet-white and his fingers lock onto the wooden center handrail. It’s a deer-in-the-headlights moment and Stuart is the speeding car.