Bear, Otter, & the Kid 03 - The Art of Breathing (13 page)

I stare at her. For so fucking long. And all I can think is
Bear, Bear, Bear,
but he’s not
here
. He’s not
here
, and this is
my
life, my Greatest Hits, my Greatest Shits. And then? Oh, and
then
? I run. I run from her so quickly. I run and hide and don’t stop shaking until my brother holds me in his arms, until I know that she is nothing but a ghost from the past rising up and rearing her head because everything had been
fine
. Everything had been
swell
.

“Fuck you,” I whisper to those apartments even as my throat constricts. “Fuck you.”

We stop at a light. A Seafare Police Department cruiser pulls up next to us.
It’s going to be him,
I think.
It’s going to be him, and he’ll see me and I will split in half. I’ll just fucking break.
I hang my head as my breath rattles around in my throat.

Welcome home, Kid,
it chuckles.
Sure, you ran away once. But we all knew you’d come back eventually. Welcome the fuck home.

It’s not him. It doesn’t even look like him.

“Ty?” Corey asks me worriedly. “Tyson?”

“Stop,” I croak, though I should be so far beyond this. It’s not fucking fair. “Stop.”

“Kid?” Otter asks.

“Stop the car. Please.”

“Pull over,” Bear says. “Now.” He reaches back and squeezes my knee. “Breathe,” he tells me. “Just breathe. You got this, Kid. You know this. In and out. In and out.”

“I can’t,” I tell him. “It hurts.”

I claw at the door as soon as the car stops. I open it and am hit with a wave of sea air, salty and sharp. The rain has lessened—now more mist than anything else. But I can’t see, it’s like I’m blind. I push away from the car, and the only thing I hear aside from the ocean is Bear saying, “Stay here,” and then he’s lost to the waves.

No. I am not like this. I am
better
than this. I am
more
than this.

Panic disorder
, it says, sounding eerily like Eddie, my former therapist.
An anxiety disorder characterized by recurring severe panic attacks. In other words, you’re fucking crazy.

I stumble down a hill, clumps of sand sticking to my pants. Wind blows through the sea grass, a sound so familiar from my childhood that I almost scream.

I am better than this.

Think, Tyson. Think. You know this.

I can’t.

You can.

No. There’s an earthquake.

There is no earthquake.

The ocean. It’s here. It’s angry.

It’s not.

It is. It
is
.

It’s not. It’s calm. The tide is out. The waves are low. The saltwater brushes against your feet. Everything is right. The ground does not move.

It will shift apart. It will pull me down.

No, it won’t. It tugs on your toes, that’s it. You take in a deep breath. What do you smell?

Salt. Seaweed. Brine.

What do you hear?

Rain. Birds. Fucking seagulls.

That’s right. Fucking seagulls. What do you feel?

Rain. Sand. Water.

And me. Do you feel me?

“Yes,” I whisper. “Your arm.”

“Where?” Bear asks, his voice breaking through the haze.

“On my shoulder.”

“Because I’m here.”

“Yeah.”

“What do we do?”

“Breathe.”

“Can you do that for me?”

“Yeah.”

“Do it, then.”

I do. I take in a breath and my throat whistles and my lungs fill with Seafare, Oregon, a smell I promised myself I would never experience again. My lungs fill, and it’s like muscle memory. I can taste the air on my tongue, and all I remember is
Bear, Bear, Bear,
and
Kid, Kid, Kid.
I’m not the Kid anymore, though Bear and Otter still call me that. I’m beyond that. I’m Tyson. I’m Ty. I’m not some fucking Kid anymore.

It’s this place. It’s Seafare. The ocean.

My throat opens slightly, and I’m able to suck in a deeper breath.

“Good,” Bear says. “Hold it.”

I do.

“Let it out.”

I do.”

“Again.”

I do.

Eventually, my vision clears. I’m not surprised to see the stretch of beach we’re standing on is the one where Bear and Otter were married, where Mrs. P’s ashes were spread.

“S-she was thrown,” I say. “R-remember? Back into our f-f-faces.” I’m really cold.

“I remember,” Bear said. “Her last bit of fun, I think.”

“You think so? Y-you think that was her?”

Bear sighs. “I do. I don’t know why, but it just seems like something Mrs. Paquinn would have done, you know? To tell us to not be so sad over her.”

“Yeah.”

“Bear?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not… I’m not right. You know.”

His arm tightens around my shoulder. “You’re more right than you could possibly know, Ty.”

“I thought I was over this.”

“It has been a while, huh?”

“Months. At least.” That he knows of.

“It’s a lot, I know.”

“What?”

“Coming back here. For all the shit we’ve been through, I know it’s a lot.”

“I didn’t think it’d hit me this hard.”

“We can leave,” he says. “Say the word, Kid. Say the word and we get back in that car and I swear to you that you’ll never have to come here for as long as you live.”

I’m embarrassed now. God, what he’s had to put up with. On top of everything else he’s gone through. The late nights spent in the bathtub all the way up until only a couple of years ago. The behavior and cognitive therapy, which led to the diagnosis. Followed by the antidepressants that I didn’t want nor thought I needed and that only ended up making things worse. The antianxiety drugs that made me a drone. Benzodiazepines that I began to crave. The craving that turned into something so much more. All of which I finally dropped because I am Tyson Fucking Thompson. I have an IQ of 158. I became a member of MENSA at the age of thirteen. I graduated high school at fifteen. I don’t need this. I am not fucking crazy. I am better. I am bigger. I am stronger.

“No,” I say, trying to steady my voice. “No. I wanted to come back. I told you I did. I can do this. It was just… overwhelming.”

“Ty….”

“Bear.”

“You’ll tell me if it gets worse.” It’s not said as a request.

“Even if I don’t, you always know,” I mutter.

“Damn fucking right I do. I’ll be damned if I’ll let you slide backward, Kid. You need something, you ask me. You got me?”

“I got you.” Only because there’s no other choice.

“And you can stop now.”

“Stop what?” Even though we both know what he’s talking about.

“Thinking about if it’s going to hit again. It might. It might not. If it does, we’ll face it.”

Anticipatory attacks. A big part of panic disorder. After a panic attack, there’s times when my thoughts are completely occupied with when the next attack will hit. Sometimes, it goes on. And on. For days.

“Sometimes I think you know me way too well,” I tell him.

He laughs quietly. “You could say that. You need to talk to someone?”

“More therapy?” I groan. “I’m not crazy, Bear.”

“No one ever said you were. It might help. It helped me, you know.”

“That’s because you
were
crazy,” I assure him.

He waits.

I give in. Sort of. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Eddie’s still here.”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, because that’s a good idea.”

“He’s family.”

“We’re so weird.”

“That we are,” he agrees.

We’re quiet, for a time. Then, “Bear?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to fix this. My head.”

“It’s not broken, Kid. It just needs to right itself.”

“That’s absurdly profound.”

“I try.”

“Everyone’s probably waiting for us, huh?”

“At the Green Monstrosity? Probably. But they can wait as long as you need.”

I shake my head. “Nah. I’m okay.” The rolling panic has been pushed away.

For now
, it whispers.

Bear slides his arm off my shoulders, and I turn to head back up the beach. Corey and Otter stand at the top of the hill in the rain, watching us.

“Ty,” Bear says from behind me. I turn back. He’s watching the ocean.

“What?”

“You don’t have to see him while we’re here. You know that, right?”

Damn you, Bear.
“Oh?” I ask innocently. “He still lives here?” Like I didn’t know that already.

Bear’s not fooled, but he lets it slide. Say what you will about him, but he’s grown into something extraordinary. “Sure, Kid. Still lives here. Still a cop.”

“Good for him.” I walk away, back toward the car.

It doesn’t matter. I’ve moved on from something that was never there to begin with. That’s one of the dire things about escaping from childhood. Eventually you grow up and realize the things you wanted when you were young weren’t really yours to ask for.

I know that now.

The sun peeks through the clouds above as I reach the car, and for better or worse, I have come home.

Where Tyson Gives a History Lesson

I
KNOW
,
I know.

Tyson
, you’re thinking.
What in the blue fuck is going on? What’s with all the angst? The crazy voice in your head? The cliché standing in the rain on the beach and having a meltdown? Who do you think you are? Your
brother
?

The irony isn’t lost on me, trust me. As much as I told myself that things would be different for me, essentially I’ve turned into the former Bear McKenna.

Hysterical, I know. It’s like the people who say they’ll never be their parents and then wake up one morning thirty years later saddled with an upside-down mortgage, a rebellious teenager who alternates between hot and cold and says things like “You don’t know what it’s like to be
me
,” middle-aged, fat, and with thinning hair who wonder why there seem to be more and more empty wine bottles in the house because they didn’t drink
that
much wine with dinner last night, a cubicle job that is essentially a soul-sucking concubine thinly veiled as a necessary livelihood, and a sex life labeled as “do not resuscitate.”

I never thought it could get to be this bad. I never thought it would actually get this far. I don’t know how it happened. One minute I’m hearing Dom shout my name through the phone as my delusional, self-centered world comes crashing down around me, and the next, it’s four years later and I’m coming home for the first time. I haven’t spoken to Dom since, though not for his lack of trying. The daily phone calls went on for a time. He showed up in New Hampshire a few times, not that I ever saw him. He was always intercepted by Bear, who would come out with teeth and claws bared.

Therapy started up again shortly after that phone call. Getting an official diagnosis of panic disorder was both a relief and a disappointment. The relief stemmed from the idea that
finally
whatever was wrong with me had a name, because sure as shit it was something more than just panic attacks. The disappointment came from the fact that whatever was wrong with me actually
had
a name, that it wasn’t something I’d manufactured in my head or simply a product of my overactive imagination. No, I, Tyson James Thompson, am afflicted with
panic
disorder
, which explains the panic attacks themselves.

If you don’t have these attacks, then it’s kind of hard to explain them so you can understand what exactly happens to me when they hit. The best way I’ve heard of describing them is that essentially it feels like you’re drowning in a vast ocean, and you can see the surface but it’s too far away and so you just drown, drown, drown.

Again, the irony of my life is not lost on me.

But it’s also the earthquakes. Times a billion.

With the therapy came the drugs, and with the drugs came Drone Tyson, the one whose eyes were slightly dead, whose thoughts were muddled and murky. Drone Tyson didn’t have the panic attacks, at least not as many and nowhere near the intensity, but Drone Tyson didn’t have much else either. Those are a hazy six months that I don’t quite remember, to the point in which pills started disappearing at a rate faster than they should have, because the high I got was better than the encroaching panic. Part of me knew what was going on, knew I was drowning in an ocean just the same, but I could find little reason to care. I woke up, took a pill. Three hours later, I’d take another. And then another. And then another.

Sure, Doctor, I’d say during the therapy sessions. Let’s talk about my feelings. Let’s discuss how betrayed I feel, though it’s not my right. Let’s talk about how embarrassed I am about my actions. Let’s talk about how he belonged to me, though he never really did. Let’s talk about how smart I am, how I can solve almost every kind of mathematical equation put before me, how I can tell you the chemical formula for caesium acetate (C
2
H
3
CsO
2
). Let me tell you that one day, I want to find a definitive intervention for strokes so no one can ever be taken from the ones who love them the most ever again.

But honestly, Doc? Let’s
really
talk. Let’s talk about how naïve I really am. Let’s talk about how there was this guy, this boy I knew. This boy I’d met when I was nothing but a Kid, who I thought was going to be there
forever
, who I thought was going to be mine
forever.
Can we, Doc? Can we talk about how, other than Bear and Otter, Dominic was the only other thing I needed in my life? I love Anna. I love Creed. I love JJ. They are my family. But Bear is
mine
. Otter is
mine
. Dominic is…. well. Dominic isn’t.