THREE: A MOM AND DAD MEET THEIR SON

A WEEK AFTER CHARLIE and the bowling alley, I still can’t sleep. I lie there wide awake, hoping the whole goddamned thing is a nightmare, until I fall asleep and have actual nightmares that are really just my memories. And it fucking sucks.

We’re in the middle of Christmas break so I don’t have to deal with seeing all of my classmates and teachers yet, but life has taken a weird turn where break kind of resembles school: I wake up early, I don’t see my parents, and I go to bed earlier than normal. There’s weight attached to every conversation that I have with my parents, like we all know that there’s this massive, jagged canyon forming between us, and nobody knows how to address it.

Somewhere around one in the morning, I decide I want coffee in the middle of the night because I don’t want to sleep and deal with dreaming and if I’m going to be awake, then I want to be awake. But when I go downstairs, Mom and Dad are still up.

They don’t see me because the front of the couch faces away from the entrance to the living room and because our old wooden stairs are somehow almost entirely non-creaky, but I see them. They’re sitting on the couch, and he’s lying sideways with his head in her lap while she stares straight ahead and absently runs her fingers through his hair.

Dad clears his throat, and his breath comes out stuttered, and I realize he’s crying and Mom’s been crying, and the TV isn’t even on. They’re not pretending. They’re just sitting there together being wrecked.

I back up to the stairs, quiet, climbing up two or three steps, and fake a cough as I come back down, stepping on one of the creaky parts of the stairs, letting them hear me.

This time, when I go to cross the living room entrance, Mom is thumbing away any trace of tears under her eyes and Dad is already halfway across the other side of the room, headed for the bathroom.

“Hey, sweets,” she says, trying to smile. “What are you doing up?”

Lately, I don’t bother asking either one of them why they look like they’ve been crying.

“Can’t sleep. Gonna make some coffee.”

“Coffee,” she says, smirking. “Why are you such an old man?” She holds her hand out as she says it, an open-palmed gesture that says, “Come here. Come sit with me.”

So I do.

And I don’t expect to feel so far away.

I don’t expect to be so nebulously mad. I want to say, “You can cry around me. I know what happened. I was fucking there. You trying to hide it makes me feel like you’re crying because you’re ashamed of me. Which you probably should be.” But of course I don’t say anything.

And I know she senses something, because I know everything inside of me is tensed up and moms can read that sort of thing. Then Dad flushes the toilet to uphold the illusion that he was just in there peeing and steps into the room, and he looks just as tired and frustrated as I feel.

When I sit up, ready to just go and make coffee and be by myself, I see Mom’s eyes go hard and resolute. I see the moment where it clicks in her head that she’s figured out how to approach the situation and how to approach me.

Dad sees it too, because he’s staring at her and they’re having a silent conversation that amounts to him asking her if she’s sure this is what she wants to do.

Right there on the couch, my mother starts in on putting our pieces back together. “Our little firebug is up making coffee.” She looks at me and there’s love and thunder in her eyes. Eyes that dare the pain to even fucking try.

Dad’s shoulders drop just a little, and he swallows, and he says, “You are such an old man.”

And then we watch TV.