Bear, Otter, & the Kid 03 - The Art of Breathing (47 page)

“I think so.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“No. I know. I have to.”

“There’s nothing for you there.” I know he’s trying to keep calm, keep his voice in check, but I hear the strain behind it.

“Probably. But I have to find out.”

“Why?”

“So I don’t ever wonder in the future what could have been.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“It’s for me. But it’s also for him.”

“Him? Who? You mean….” He sighs. “Him, huh? I wondered. If. When.”

“Yeah. But not like you think. It’s… I don’t know.” Understatement, that. One thing at a time, though.

“Come home,” he pleads. “Drop him off and pick me up. I’ll go with you. This isn’t something you have to do alone. We’ll do it together, like we always do. I’m begging you.”

“No,” I say. “I’m going to do it by myself, and then I’ll come home and we can laugh and we can talk and we can decide what to do with the future. And it will be good because everything bad will be behind us. Finally.”

“Can’t talk you out of this?” he asks. His voice is thick.

“No, Papa Bear. Not this time.”

“You little shit.”

“Yeah.”

“I love you, you know,” my brother says. “With everything I have. With everything I am.”

I almost break. “You too,” I manage to say. With everything I have. With everything I am.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

The phone is shuffled. “Ty,” Otter says. “We’ll be here. When it’s done. You call us so we know when you get there. You call us so we know it’s over. You call us, and I swear to you, if you need us, we’ll come running and we’ll take you home and remind you what real family is. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah, Otter. I understand.”

“And I love you too,” he says. “And we’re so very, very proud of the man you’ve become.”

“Back at you, big guy.” This man. My almost-father.

I hang up the phone, and for the first time in a very long time, I allow myself to cry.

T
HERE
’
S
STILL
an hour until we’re supposed to leave. Maybe I can get a bit of sleep.

I slide into the bed, careful not to wake Dom. But as soon as I lay my head on the pillow, a big arm wraps around my waist and pulls me across the bed. My back rests against his warm body, and he holds me tight. His breath is on my hair, and I never knew it could be like this.

“Not alone,” he rumbles at me.

“I know,” I tell him. “You’re here.” For how long, I don’t know. But I’ll take it while it lasts. I raise his hand and kiss his palm. Just once. I set it back down against me.

“No,” he says. “You’re not going alone. To Idaho. I’m going with you, and that’s final.”

“How did you…?”

“Light sleeper. Thin walls.” He presses his face into my hair and breathes deep. He scrapes his lips against my neck. Just once. I shiver. “If you’re doing this for me, then I’m doing it for you. It’s time you realize that.”

“Dom. I….” I don’t know what I’m trying to say. So many things still need to be said, and I can’t decide which is the most important.

“Later,” he says. “We’ll figure the rest out later. Now get some sleep. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

Friends until we’re old and gray. Beginning to end, day after day.
It’s this thought I have as sleep chases me.

And for the very first time, I fall asleep in his arms. It feels like coming home.

Where Tyson Hears the Inevitable

W
E
GET
a late start because Dom thought I needed to sleep more. He’s probably right, especially with what we’re driving toward. The plan is to drive straight through without stopping, taking turns driving while the other sleeps. It’s fifteen hundred miles and twenty-two hours, and I don’t want it to take any more time than it has to.

Dom’s told me not to worry about his job. He’s gotten a few more days extended to him. Apparently, people owe him some favors and will cover his shifts. I still worry, of course. He’s doing this because of me. I don’t want it to be for nothing.

“It’ll be fine,” he tells me as he puts our bags in the back of the SUV.

“So you say,” I grumble at him. “What about Ben?”

“They’re not due back for a couple more days,” he says. “I talked to Stacey while you were in the shower. She’s says Ben’s having fun, and he told me about how Goofy gave him a hug and how he went on a train. We should get back a day or so after them. It won’t mess with Ben’s schedule.”

There’re a least a billion more questions I need to ask, and I open my mouth to do just that (
Did you tell her anything else?
and
Was last night just a dream?
and
When did you decide you wanted me?
and
Can you kiss me again? Just once more
), but Kori and Sandy come out the front door and I swallow my questions back down. Hopefully, there will be time. Later.

Kori pulls me away from Dom and around the side of Sandy’s house. “Spill,” she says.

“I have no idea what you mean,” I say, looking everywhere but at her.

“You little liar. Did he suck your cock?”

My eyes bulge. “
What?
Of course not! He just kissed me!” Oh shit. I meant to keep that to myself for now.

“A
ha
!” she cries. “I
knew
something had happened! You were all brain-dead last night and now you and Dominic keep giving each other fuck-stares.”

“What’s a fuck-stare?”

“It’s that thing you do when you look at someone and wonder what they look like without their clothes on,” she explains.

“You kids today and your slang,” I say, shaking my head. “How crass.”

She rolls her eyes. “Uh-huh. Because that so matters.”

“He was fuck-staring me?” I ask, feeling strangely giddy at the thought.

“Total fuck-stare. I thought for sure you had at least rubbed one out with him. Just a kiss? How depressing.”

“It was a little bit more than depressing,” I reassure her.

She grins triumphantly. “I so called this.”

“You did not!” She totally did.

“I did too! I said to Sandy, ‘Put them in a room with condoms and lube and big dildos, and I guarantee by the end of the trip, they’ll be balling each other.’”

“That was
you
?” I say with a scowl.

“Well, yeah. Sandy doesn’t really have a bowl full of condoms and, like, sixty different kinds of lube sitting out normally.”

“The sex dungeon was staged?” I don’t know why I’m so outraged.

“Completely,” Kori says. “Sandy would never do that. A classy queen, that one is.”

“Oh, yeah. Nothing says classy like a two-foot rubber penis.”

“That’s not hers,” she says. “That’s Paul’s. All of them were.”

“You’re fucking with me.” Paul? Paul Auster has a dildo collection? Bullshit.

She shakes her head. “Apparently he has a box of them under his bed. Who knew, right? At least we know they work.”

“We didn’t use them!” Of course, I won’t ever be able to get the image of using them out of my head for the rest of my life. You know. Because I actually needed more psychological scarring and all.

“No, I forgot,” she says. “You just kissed. Leave it to you to turn something I wanted to be tawdry into something sickeningly sweet.” The smile fades from her face as her eyes grow serious. “You sure about this, Ty?”

“What? Dom? Going to Idaho? Tracking down my mother? Life in general?”

“Sure. Why not. All of the above.”

“I’ve never been less sure about anything in my entire life.”

“Well, as long as you’re not just half-assing it and all,” she says.

I rub my hands over my face. “Is it just me or is my life more than a little nuts?”

She laughs and kisses my cheek. “Honey, that’s what makes you
you
. You are so much bigger and stronger than you know. Anyone who has been through all that you have and can still stand on their own two feet is miraculous in itself. But to do what you’re about to do? Tyson, you’re amazing.”

I shake my head. “Or a glutton for punishment.”

“You’ll never know unless you try, right? And if it blows up in your face, you have all of us to make sure you can stand again. I promise.”

“I’m going to miss you,” I say, blinking away the tears. “Without you, I wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, hugging me tight. “You call me, day or night. And I’ll be up to visit Seafare, and you can come back down here and bring your big, sexy brute of a man. Best friends don’t say good-bye, Ty. Especially not you and me.”

“You going to be okay here?” On top of everything else, I’m worried about leaving her here. Corey hasn’t come out since before we left for Tucson.

She nods as she pulls away. “I think so. I hope so. I’ll stay with Sandy for now, until I figure things out.”

“You will,” I tell her.

She wipes her eyes. “Look at this,” she scolds me. “You’re ruining my makeup. If you ever tell anyone you made me cry, I’ll punch you in your taint.”

I laugh. “Yeah, I think you’ll fit in here just fine.”

“Ty?”

“Yeah?”

“No matter what your mother says, can you remember something for me?”

“Yeah.”

“You are loved,” Kori says. “No matter what happens, you are loved.”

I hug her again. We stay that way. For a time.

“Y
OU
READY
?”
Dom asks me, signaling to merge onto the freeway.

“I think so,” I say. Tucson begins to disappear behind us.

He reaches over and takes my hand in his. I marvel when he curls his fingers against mine. The weight and heat of his hand keep me tethered.

All I can do is breathe.

I
WAKE
and it’s dark, and for the briefest of moments, I can’t remember where I’m at or who I’m with, and I can still hear Mrs. P in my head, her voice echoing from the dream, and she’s telling me I’m going to be just fine. That I’m going to be okay, because I’ve been through too much shit to fall down now. I’ve come too far to ever go back to the way things used to be, and she
laughs
. She
laughs
in that way I remember her doing, and she sounds so alive that I’m sure there was a mistake all those years ago, that she didn’t die in the hospital, frail and old and pale. That I hadn’t sat on my brother’s lap and heard her take her last breath while I watched, sure that if she were to die like the doctors said she was, that she’d give me some kind of sign. Some way of saying good-bye, so long, see you later, alligator. But it was one breath in, and then one breath out, a long exhale that seemed to never end until it did with such finality. I waited and waited and
waited
for her chest to rise again, for the heart monitor to stop its incessant flatline tone, for everything to be like before. She would breathe and breathe and would open her eyes and look over at us and say,
Hi, guys. I’m so sorry I worried you. I’m so sorry you were scared. You don’t have to be anymore, because I’m here now. And I always will be
, and as she says this, it merges with her voice in my head and she says,
I always will be and you’ll be just fine. You’ll be okay now, because you know what to do. That’s all you’ve ever needed. You lost your way, but you’ve found it again. I knew you would, Ty. I—

“—always knew,” I whisper.

“You okay?” Dom asks me.

I look over at him. Lights from oncoming cars wash over his face, and I think I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful.

“Yeah,” I murmur. “Just a dream. Where are we?”

“About to cross into Idaho.”

“Already? How long was I out?”

He shakes his head. “Just the southern part. We still have to go up the whole state and cross into Montana before we hook back west and go into northern Idaho. We’ve still got a ways.”

“You want me to take over?”

“Rest stop in another thirty miles. We’ll stop then and switch. I need to sleep for a bit. My eyes hurt.”

“Sorry,” I say, feeling guilty. “I should have stayed awake with you.”

He grunts. “You needed sleep, Ty. It’s fine.”

The freeway ahead of us is empty, and there’s no one coming up behind us, not even a long-haul trucker or two. It’s like we’re the only people left in the world.

“What were you dreaming about?” he asks me.

“Mrs. Paquinn.”

“I thought as much. You said her name.”

“Yeah.”

He sighs. “I miss her too. It’s weird. Every now and then something completely random will remind me of her. About how she was completely convinced Bigfoot was real. Or that she was sure Elvis was still alive and living in West Virginia.”

I chuckle. “She loved that old black-and-white tabloid. What was it called? The one that said stuff about how a woman was pregnant with a yeti’s baby or that aliens had formed a colony in a Pennsylvania man’s backyard.”

“
Weekly World News
.”

“That’s it. I don’t think they even print it anymore. It went out of business a few years back, I think.”

“Oh man,” he says. “Could you imagine if she’d still been around when that happened? She would have flipped.”

“She would have made all of us participate in a letter campaign,” I say. “Writing letters to the publisher about why the tabloid should still be printed.”

“All the while discussing her own alien experiences,” Dom says. “Hers and Joseph’s.”

“God love him. Did you know she had a kid? A daughter, I think.”

“No.” He sounds surprised. “Where is she?”

“She died. A long time ago. Before we ever knew her. I don’t know how old she was or what happened. But I know she was young, and I think she got sick somehow. I never asked because I didn’t want to hurt her. I only asked her name.”

“What was it?”

“Arlene. Arlene Paquinn.”

Dom is quiet for a moment. Then, “That’s why she found you guys, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

He flexes his fingers on the steering wheel. Outside, shadowed trees roll by. We’re either in Utah or we’ve crossed into Idaho. I don’t know which. “She lost her family,” he says. “You and Bear had yours taken from you. You all fit together because you needed to. And then Creed and Anna came. And Otter. You made your own out of what you were given.”