Missed Connections (22 page)

"No!" The word is out before Theo realizes and his explanation follows it. "The door in the woods."

His aunt and uncle share what might have been a meaningful look except Theo can't read the meaning. "What door in the woods?" they ask instead of explaining and then his aunt adds, "Oh, it could be an old barn door?"

It's not an old barn door and Theo swallows air as he slumps, unsatisfied, against the rickety old dining chair. His aunt and uncle would have to be blind to not know about
the door
. Theo concludes that they just don't want to tell him about it.

*~*~*

Its 10:32 pm, and Theo can't sleep. There are bugs outside his window. He can hear the snuffling snort of his aunt and uncle sleeping in the room beside his and he's used to the sound of car alarms or late night television. It's both too quiet and too loud. He kicks off the blankets, pulls them back on. By eleven, Theo is up creeping along the hallway in the dark. The floorboards chide his feet when he waits, listening to see if his aunt and uncle wake up.

They don't.

Theo's jean jacket won't stand up to the late night chill so he slips into the coat closet and takes his uncle's big brown coat. It's so big he has to bunch the sleeves up to his elbows and they still cover most of his wrist; he's just shy of tripping over the hem. Theo feels like a tree—the outer husk is stiff and rough as bark but the inside is warm.

Without the sun, winter has kept spring at bay. Before Theo even reaches the door his cheeks are painful and red. The forest presses against his sides sinisterly with deep shadows and rustling sounds. Theo would have preferred the heart-dropping sound of a car backfiring too close or the glow of a cigarette from a late night patch of shadow.

Theo's almost decided he's gotten himself lost—that he's taken a wrong turn and he won't ever find his way back to the door
or
his aunt's house when he finds the door again. He might not have seen it at all except the crack is still there and there's light coming from it.

"Hello?" Theo starts from over five feet away, as if the door will open and swallow him whole. His voice comes out high and reedy and no one answers. He takes a step closer. "Hello?"

One step, two steps. Confidence builds when no one answers until Theo is pressed against the door with his lips where the crack is, saying "Hello?" again and again. When his voice dies Theo pulls away and squints into the crack. Closet, he thinks, and pulls away again to look around the other side of the door.

Woods. Still dark but now cut with the artificial light that seeps through the hole in the wood paneling.

"Hello?" Theo tries one more time, and doesn't expect the "Hello?" that returns to him.

Theo stiffens, holding onto the thin edge of the door somewhere between either side. He can see both doorknobs. "Is someone there?"

"Of course there is, is someone
there
?" The voice sounds young—at least not like the voice that came through the door earlier and Theo tries to regurgitate his heart. "What are you doing in my closet?"

"I'm
not
in your closet," Theo protests and gathers up his pride to face the door, and the voice, head on. "What is
your door
doing in the woods?"

There's an eyeball in the crack. It's the clear blue of his aunt's eyes—the color of thin ice over deep water. It would be unsettling if it wasn't so familiar. "It's not. It's in my room."

The person pulls himself from the crack, just enough to show he has a nose, a mop of dirty blond hair, and bitten lips. It's disappointing. Theo had begun to think that whatever was on the other side of the door was something remarkable—not some chubby-cheeked boy about his age. If it were any other situation, Theo would scowl and leave. The person on the other side of the door looks like he could be on a Valentine's Day card. If they were in school together, he wouldn't give Theo the time of day and Theo knows it.

"I'm Theo." It's his olive branch and he hears whoever it is sigh as they take it. "Matthew."

It doesn't really matter where the door is—or isn't. Theo drops onto the ground and slinks sideways so the lack of daylight and angle can obscure his own face and features. There's a shuffling sound on the other side of the door. Then silence.

"I heard an argument earlier," Theo spits out when the silence gets to be too much and there's another sigh.

"Yeah, my dad's home." Matthew says, like it explains everything. It does.

"Oh. I don't have a dad—not anymore, anyway." There's another uncomfortable pause. Theo curls his fingers into the folds of his pilfered jacket and thinks about his aunt's warm kitchen, the blankets he left in the guest bedroom. The more he talks the more this feels like a dream. "What cracked the door?"

"Donno." If it's a lie, Theo can't tell. "Why are you in the woods—it's late there, isn't it?"

"Donno," Theo says and hides a smile as his new friend makes a tsking sound with his teeth.

"It's your fault if the treeman gets you."

Theo sputters, "The treeman's not going to get me!" Even though he doesn't even know what the treeman is supposed to be.

Hours upon hours later, when the conversation has dried and settled into breathing, the sun rises and threads itself over Theo's chilled face. He's stopped counting his shivers and spent the past hour huddled into the front of his jacket so his breath bounces back against his cheeks.

"You're brown," Matthew says, surprised.

"Yeah," Theo looks to his hands, knows what it means and what it
doesn't
mean—though he doesn't have the words for either so, instead, he sticks his lip out as a first line of defense. "What other color could I be, stupid?"

"Blue. Like my door." Matthew says it like it's the most normal thing in the world. "All the best people in the world are blue."

"People can't be blue." Theo rolls his eyes. He's settled on his knees just inches from the crack in the door and on the other side he can tell Matthew is mimicking him. "And the door is green,2 not blue."

"No it's not."

"Is too."

"It's
my door
—I'd know." And while Theo can't exactly argue with that, the door he sees could never be blue.

It's going on seven am, and the late night and cold have run right through Theo's bones. He molds himself against the door, head turned so his cheek lies flat. "I just want to get home." He breathes, they breathe. The plywood shudders between them.

"I just want to leave home," Matthew replies and Theo tries not to think that he knows what that's like, too.

He tries the door but it remains stubbornly shut. There is no entering, no exiting—just a hole in the wood and two boys in two different places. Theo's stomach drops but from relief or disappointment he's not sure.

The next night, when Theo returns—this time with a shovel and a flashlight—the door is gone. He spends the rest of the week looking for it.

*~*~*

Being eighteen is the end of the world as far as Theo is concerned. He's grown enough that he's started to fill out the space his father left but his shoulders are too wide, his feet too big, and more often than not, he feels like it's too much. There are things he wants to be and things he's simply not and none of them seem set in stone.

Theo isn't going to college and not because of lack of work. He's just left high school and everything is unreal and unchanged. He still feels as though, come August, he'll be back in school.

But he's eighteen and that means Theo is legally an adult and can get away from home sometimes without anyone calling the police. Not that his mother is the calling-in type on the rare nights where he comes home later than she. Those nights she holds herself on the patchy rose printed couch in their living room like a wraith. She's always been a pale figure but at night her skin turns yellow with early age. Theo knows that she waits for him more because it's expected than because she's worried. Meredith is the adult, though she doesn't act it, and when Theo comes home reeking like the chicken shop or a party he did his best to blend into, she crosses the room to burn a path on his cheek with the back of her hand. Her knuckles are soft, her mouth a bitten edge of faux motherly concern. "You don't have to be like me."

Would it be so bad to be like you?
The familiar words get caught in the ridges of his esophagus the way they did at school when he wanted to have the best comeback. Theo has never had the words to wound and win on purpose. Four years of public high school didn't change his coltish nervousness. Worse ones slip out in their defense, however, and as accidental as they are, he might hate them more. "Who wants to be like you?"

"You do." A simple truth is more devastating than the lie and Meredith taught him that early and often. A mother makes and wounds in equal measure. Theo rides the edge of her words on the tide of wanting to be the world for her and wanting to wipe the reminder of his father from his face. But there is not enough skin bleach in the world for that. Meredith knows the places where his father hides and presses her palms against his cheeks. She marks the differences with a kiss on his forehead. "I don't know why you won't be yourself."

What she means is
why won't you be your father?
and Theo stuffs the words he wants to say down the back of his throat on purpose this time.
How could anyone be enough like this?
Theo wants to know. He feels adolescence in the creases of his knobby elbows, over the planes of his too-big hands and lingering on his rounded middle that stays soft no matter how much he runs.

His mother used to be something other than a black hole but he's never been anything but paint on a wall one shade too dark. Theo envies the light she had before the crushing darkness. Aunt Maudy showed him pictures once of a woman with laughter that rose from the photograph and Uncle Russ told him stories of death-defying practical jokes and the punishments that followed. In the back of his school binder, Theo taped one of the photos of his parents together. Meredith and Dee were always there to stare back at him, his father's serious face hiding the humor of the memories.

At twelve, he had snuck into the den late at night to steal it from the photo album. His hand had still been on top the book cover when the light from the kitchen alerted him to the fact that his aunt and uncle were still awake after a day of remembering. His aunt had said, "Both are long dead—but you wouldn't know it from the pictures." Theo still isn't sure he understands what she meant. It doesn't stop him from yearning to imprint some of that life onto himself.

Meredith would never understand. She watches his silence and says, "You are all I have left of him—why would you take that from me?"

"I'm not taking anything away from you!" The bluster is bitter and Theo pushes her hands away. Her nails catch his face; scrape along the edge of scraggly growth he had hoped to turn into a beard. "I don't have anything to take from you."

"
Liar
." The word is sharp. The warmth his mother displayed morphs into something cagey. The window behind her glows nicotine yellow as a long dead streetlight yawns to life. It gives her a stained halo and Theo can think of nothing more fitting. "You're a fucking liar."

He steps back, suddenly small under her disapproval although he grew into her height over a year ago. "I'm
not
." He wants it to be true.

She flicks a finger at the mirror stapled to the back of his bedroom door, "Then look and tell me who you are."

He looks only for a second. The shadows in the room carve pits in his eyes; the street light curdles his teeth into yellowed beacons. It might as well be the funhouse mirror monster his father never was, even if Meredith told him years ago his father walked through the door one day and never came back.

Theo looks and can think of nothing else to do but leave.

*~*~*

He stumbles into the parking lot with hunched shoulders. A vacuum silence of discontent chases him onto the asphalt. It's eleven-thirty at night but heat is still vibrating from the pavement as old clunkers settle against the sidewalks bridging the three buildings which make up West Alate Apartments. There are no stars to see here and it's an idle threat that makes Theo look to them and think,
I'm going to run to the fucking ocean.

The ocean is over a hundred miles away. Theo rests his hands on his head and knows that if he could just get there he would crumble into the sand and come up as someone new, someone better, someone his mother wouldn't confuse with his father. But the ocean is a hundred miles away, he only has forty bucks in his pocket that he's saved from skipping lunch at school, and Theo knows that, one building over, there's an apartment where he can buy a case of beer without getting carded.

"Your mom's a bitch." Kyle tells him as Theo settles on the edge of a coffee table. Kyle is twenty-two and just the type of guy Aunt Maudy wouldn't approve of, but Meredith
would
. Theo can see the ghost of his mother winding her arms around Kyle and chuckling in his ear,
Any of that beer for me?
It's an image of his mother that Theo has never wanted to be.

Before he left high school, Kyle had been a kid with a rattail and clothes three sizes too big. Now he wears cutoff jeans and tank tops bought from the money he makes charging double for a pack of beer. Theo wouldn't buy from him except Kyle's the only seller he's known since he was six, and Kyle told him once that the other sellers on the street cut the beers with other drugs.

Theo doesn't know that tainting beers is impossible unless the cans are opened. He's not the type to challenge the idea, anyway. Knowing and trusting Kyle is enough.

"She just doesn't understand."

Kyle jabs a finger towards Theo's nose. "No one's mom understands." His face is serious, the curve of his mouth chapped and flat. He holds the position a moment and Theo stares until Kyle pushes the beer over. Keylatch—a local brew that comes in thin blue aluminum. Kyle offers up six cans, though there are clearly at least six others that go with the case. Theo isn't sure if he's supposed to be insulted or not. He glances dubiously from the cans to Kyle's face, "You're cheating me."