1987: Finn
By Colin A. McPhee
There were two earthquakes.
The first one happened on October 1 and coincided with the exact moment of his birth.
“Well,” the delivering doctor said, “that was interesting.”
His surgeon’s mask had gone askew and the stool he’d been sitting on had been knocked to the ground. Nurses buzzed around us—checking, measuring, snipping, stitching. One of them wiped clean Finn’s tiny body. She swaddled him in a blanket and handed him to Clare, who was propped up on her elbows, the bed’s pillows having been thrown to the corners of the room.
The maternity ward was on the first floor. Above us, I heard the frantic clack of feet running. Nervous, overcooked voices.
“Should we leave?” I asked. “I mean, should we evacuate?”
The doctor pulled the gloves from his hands. “What, because of a little tremor?” He rinsed his fingers in a sink and then reached down to pick up a roll of paper towels that’d fallen beneath a cabinet. He looked at Clare, at Finn. “Son,” he said, “you’re in for a lot more than that.”
I watched from the hospital’s window as Los Angeles tried to pull and patch itself back together. A car had run head-on into a fire hydrant, causing a steady stream of water to geyser twenty feet into the sky; the driver had turned on her windshield wipers. Newspaper stands turned over and spilled their printed contents out onto the sidewalks. People kicked through the separated pages, pulling them from their shins, their knees. They toed the curb wearily, with hesitation, verifying that the world had stopped its rollicking before they took their first steps. The next day, I’d read how the earthquake—it would come to be known as the Whittier Narrows—clocked in at a magnitude of 6.0. I’d read how, a few miles south in the city of Cypress, a ten-ton replica of Michelangelo’s David now lay supine in the grass. I’d read how a falling slab of concrete killed Lupe Elias-Exposito as she crossed the parking lot with her sister at the state university in Los Angeles.
Finn was crying. I knelt down beside Clare’s bed and looked into his puckered face as he gulped his first mouthfuls of air. Later, we’d speculate as to whether he was born because of the earthquake, if the ground’s trembling and splitting gave him the final push he needed, or if it was actually vice versa, that Finn’s eagerness to climb from his mother’s belly made the whole world shake.
Clare whispered shh, shh while she brushed thin wet strands of hair from his forehead. He reached his arms out, up, his tiny fingers grasping at nothing, at everything.
“Isn’t he so beautiful?” she asked.
I said, “Is he supposed to be that blue?”
• • •
For that first year, Finn was Clare’s purview. I had just begun to encounter the writer’s block that would come to characterize most of my adult life; just started to recognize its stern corners, its sharp edges, the perpetual shadows it threw. At that point, though, I was still convinced I could move it. I was still convinced that if I locked myself away for long enough, or if I let my eyes cross enough times while staring at the screen, I’d manage to burrow through the block’s center, eventually hitting light on the other side. And so, during those long, futile hours, Clare was always the one who fed Finn, who bathed him, who went to him when he’d cry at night. We’d hear his piercing scream, and I’d make a show of lifting myself from the sheet, but she’d press a hand against my chest, say, “No, I’ve got him.” I’d follow her sometimes. I’d creep down the hall behind her, past the office where I wrote, the shell-shaped nightlights along the wall throwing yellow against my toes. I’d watch through a crack in the nursery’s door as she held him, as she rocked him.
It wasn’t her, though, and we both knew it. Finn was growing too quickly, he was changing; the last thing a child provides is certainty, and certainty was the one thing she craved. So Clare—she was Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment, or Lana Turner in Cass Timberlane. She only took to mothering so much as those roles would allow her, and so I suppose I wasn’t surprised—not honestly, at least—when she told me on our son’s first birthday that she was planning on returning to acting. That she needed new sources of inspiration, new examples of life.
We were sitting in our kitchen with Finn, who was struggling to remove a paper party hat we’d fixed to his head.
“What do you mean you’re going back?” I said. “And to what career?”
She was cutting squares of white-frosted cake, and I watched as her grip tightened on the knife’s handle.
“What about staying here? What about raising your son?”
“Don’t be such a chauvinist.” She used the broad surface of the knife to scoop the slices onto red plastic plates. “I’m talking about some commercial work. A few auditions a week. And besides—he’s your son, too.”
“I’m sure Ron has found someone else to cast.”
“Oh, ha ha. A clever one, aren’t you.”
“But what will we do?”
“Jesus, Colin, it’s not like you’re dealing with E.T. here. He’s your son. You’ll feed him. Change his diaper when he craps. Maybe take him on a walk if you both get bored.”
She passed Finn a piece of cake and he promptly speared it with his thumb.
“No,” she told him. “Don’t do that.”
The first few days we did little more than stare at each other. I’d moved my computer to the living room so I could work in sight of Finn’s playpen—a subtly unnerving cage decorated with primary colors and eerie insects with Cheshire-cat grins. Two months earlier he’d taken his first step, and so his mornings were now spent standing, stepping, blinking, falling. Occasionally, he’d kick a discarded rattle, which would cause him to break into a gurgled liquid laugh. Whenever I left, it was only for a moment—to use the toilet, to fill a bowl of cereal—still, though, he’d cry instantly; I’d disappear behind the living room door, and right away the screams would start. Rushing back, I’d find him propped up against one of the playpen’s mesh walls, his chubby fingers pinching the nylon frame. Sometimes he’d silence immediately, and sometimes his wails would continue. He’d gaze at me for one quiet moment and then hurl his head back farther, stretching his mouth to an even wider, more anguished angle. He’d say, Oh, you. You’re not who I was asking for. Sometimes: I was expecting someone else. Specifically—her.
It was during one of these fits on the fourth day that I took him from the playpen. While his cries reverberated off the walls of the room, I brought him to my desk, to my computer, and bounced him lightly on my knee. My left arm was wrapped tightly around his fleshy midsection and I could feel his lungs fill with tiny bubbles of air. With my right hand I typed:
Shh.
Shhhhhhhhhhh.
I’m your father.
You’re my son.
There’s not a lot I can do to change that.
As I typed and as he bounced, his crying slowly began to stop: his wails decreased in volume till they dissolved into soft, wet vowels. He reached out to me and touched my face.
Those are my cheeks.
Those are my lips.
That is my heart.
Pick your own nose.
“How’d it go today?” Clare would ask when she returned home in the evening. I would have just bathed Finn and we would be sitting in the kitchen with the windows flung open, the salty Pacific air clinging to our tongues, our eyelashes.
“Fine,” I’d tell her. “Better.”
She’d be trying to get him to eat, but he was becoming more and more difficult with her. From his high chair he’d pitch handfuls of mushed-up peas and overcooked carrots. Shredded pieces of noodles would hang from Clare’s hair.
“Let me try,” I’d tell her, slipping an arm around her waist.
“No. No, I’ve got it.”
Finn would turn over a plate of sliced hot dogs, and the pink pieces would tumble down Clare’s loose shirt. She’d stand, frustrated.
“He’s being impossible.”
Again I’d say, “Let me try,” and he’d eat.
• • •
She started going on calls that were earlier in the morning and later in the evening; she’d leave us alone for vast stretches of the day and would rarely check in. When she did return home, I’d often be in bed, the blinds in our room drawn to keep out L.A.’s perpetual purple glow. In the dark I’d hear her undress—the dull thud of her shoes being kicked against the wall, the swoosh of a silk skirt floating down to her ankles. When she crawled into bed, she’d fold herself against my chest and I’d smell the smoke in her hair. I’d try to remember what I wrote in the fan letters I’d sent her, back when I was convincing her to love me, back when we weren’t competing for attention from ourselves.
“Traffic on the 10 was nuts,” she’d say.
“This late?” I’d keep my eyes closed.
“There was an accident at Pico.”
“You’re awful with directions.”
Most times, she’d already be asleep.
The next morning, I’d type to Finn:
What do you think it is today?
I’d guide his doughy hand to the keyboard and I’d let him pluck at random letters.
Rqndavt
You think? My bet’s a walk-on on some soap.
Xq436dn
You think she got it?
1ngr
Me neither.
When spring was tilting toward summer, we’d abandon the computer, our joint writing, and go on long, aimless walks along the Santa Monica boardwalk and pier. We’d watch surfers vanish into collapsing aqueous tunnels; we’d hold our breath until they’d reemerge from the wave’s foamy backwash. We’d feed potato chips to the gulls, laughing and cringing as they wrestled for the crumbs, as they beat their filthy wings into one another’s chests. If the sun wasn’t too strong, and the temperature not too hot, I’d let him bury his feet in the sand.
“That’s what you’ll build castles with,” I’d tell him.
He’d point out at the ocean, to the swimmers and the boats with their white stretched sails.
“That’s what you’ll swim across.”
A girl would trot by, her heels kicking up small explosions of sand, her legs smooth bronzy pillars.
“That’s what’ll break your heart.”
• • •
“You love him more than you love me.”
It was September 28, 1989—almost two years after the earthquake. Finn, who now spoke (but too quickly, much too quickly, and with an inability to pronounce rs) had just been put to bed, and Clare and I had opened a bottle of wine in the kitchen. Her back was pressed into the white tile counter; her face was too heavily made-up from a panty-hose commercial she’d shot that afternoon—her first job since returning to acting. Milky foundation an inch thick. Pink cheeks. Lips the color of overripe apples.
“That’s ridiculous.” And then, “I can’t take you seriously when you’re wearing all that stuff on your face.”
“I like it. I feel like myself in it.” I handed her a glass of wine, and when she drank from it she tattooed the rim with her painted mouth. “And it’s not ridiculous.”
“It is.”
She said, “But it’s still the truth.”
And it was, which I think is what made it so terrible. It was something that both she and I had come to realize, separately, over the past year: that without Clare I’d still exist as some version of myself, but that without Finn, without the opportunity to shape his world, an integral part of me would be lost. I’d sense her resentment of me, of him—the way her voice tightened whenever the three of us were in a room and the attention slipped away from her, the way she became frustrated with his speech problems, the way she’d tell him she didn’t understand him. And I understood it. I understood the frustration over watching something that had once been hers—ours—gradually become mine. Still, though, I didn’t know how to reverse it. Or, what’s more: I wasn’t willing to try.
“What would you have me do?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Love me a little more. Love him a little less.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
“Wash that shit off your face first. It’ll stain the pillows.”
She finished the wine in two large swallows.
• • •
When she left, it was with a letter that wasn’t even her own. She copied the note that actress-writer Jacqueline Susann wrote to her husband Irving Mansfield when he was drafted into World War II. She taped all four sides of the paper on which she wrote it to the surface of the kitchen table, as if she were afraid the thing would blow away and that she wanted to ensure, against all possible odds, that I’d find it. Which I did. After returning from a walk with Finn. I told him to empty the sand from his shoes while I read and then reread the note. She didn’t even edit the sentences to make them relevant.
“She left to be someone else.” I was saying it to no one, or maybe to myself, but Finn heard me anyway. I hadn’t heard him pad softly back in from the garage.
“You can do that?” He was four at this point. His speech was still muddled, but he’d learned to slow himself, to breathe between his sentences.
• • •
And now, the second earthquake: it struck in January of 1994 when Finn was six, and it was eighty times larger than the first. It split streets and crumbled freeways; it dug up giant trees by their roots and tossed them like toothpicks across power lines. The news aired footage of entire houses that had been shifted into neighboring properties. When the dust cleared and the sirens stopped, sixty people would be counted dead. Thousands more would be injured, and forty thousand buildings would be destroyed—including half our house.
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” I told Finn as we picked through the rubble. Toeing through broken chairs, collapsed plaster walls. Pieces of his old rattle that I’d saved.
“Why?”
“We’ve got insurance, and I’d been thinking it was time to move anyway. This place was starting to feel small.”
“There’s only just the two of us though.”
But it wasn’t just the two of us. I didn’t know how to explain to Finn that during the preceding years his mother had been appearing everywhere. Not her actual flesh and blood, per se (the last time I had seen her was two winters before, when I had caught the latter half of the pantyhose commercial she filmed at the end of our marriage; I’d heard rumors that she’d run off somewhere with someone, that she was in Chicago, or Seattle, but that was never confirmed), but the essence of her, the things that made her up. On the corner of Olympic and Western: a girl smoking a cigarette in the same lips-out fashion practiced by Clare outside the Avalon. At the intersection of San Vicente and Pico: a boy drinking a beer, grasping the bottle by the neck like the way she’d showed me how to drink. In a theater on Melrose: two kids kissing once the house lights had dimmed. Before, all these things seemed like such derivatives, actions Clare had copied and practiced after recording them in her book. But now, they seemed to stem from her as original, as just the way she was. She’d learned to live as everyone, and because of that I could never escape her. She’d be in the car next to me on a crowded freeway; she’d be the waitress at the diner where I took Finn for burgers. She’d be so universally present in L.A. that much of the time it seemed there existed really only three kinds of people: Finn, 9 million Clares, and me.
“Where are we going to move?”
“I was thinking north. San Francisco.”
“There are earthquakes there, too, Dad.”
I felt a shard of glass crunch beneath the heel of my sneaker. Above us, Los Angeles’ low-hanging sky was smogged over and grey.
• • •
We moved that June, once Finn had finished the first grade. I found us the house where I still live—the old Victorian on Vallejo Street in Cow Hollow. It was taller than it was wide—like a set of ill-fitting blocks stacked on top of one another, but not quite perfectly. From the bay windows, though, you could see the verdant hills of Tiburon, the way the fog pooled and clung to their broad wet bases. It’d been empty for years, the house, and during that time it’d fallen into a state of disgrace: coats of paint had been stripped away by the city’s dense marine layer, revealing cracks in the home’s wood paneling that formed strange shapes. I convinced myself that I’d make the repairs myself, and at first I took to the task with a cinematic sense of gusto. I’d nail, and sand, and saw each afternoon. I’d measure things when I already knew their lengths; I’d carry around odd wrenches and wear ridiculous belts.
But that faded. I got tired of the banging, the splinters, the gut knowledge that there’re only so many ways to fix something that’ll eventually fall apart again anyway. And so, over the course of that summer, we learned to dodge the house’s hazards—or, perhaps more aptly, we learned to suit them to our lives. We determined that the broken sink in the bathroom—the one that shot water up through a slit in the faucet—was ideal for washing your face. We used loose kitchen tiles as coasters. We placed plants and potted flowers beneath the leaks in the ceiling. We communicated through the open spaces in the floorboards; we’d have hour-long conversations from different rooms, different levels.
And then two months after we’d settled in, I received a call from a woman in New York. She told me that her name was Helen, and that she was the current manager of the Avalon. She said she wanted to inform me that the theater was closing.
I was folding clothes on Finn’s bed, in his new room. From a small window next to his closet I watched cars thread through the arches in the Golden Gate’s south tower.
“Oh, God,” I said, sitting, and the bed shifted. “That’s terrible.”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news.” In the background there was that familiar machine-gun crack of popcorn exploding.
“No, I’m glad you called. It’s better than reading about it in the papers or something.”
“Oh,” she laughed, but it was sad, quiet. “Oh, I doubt it’ll make the papers.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.”
I fingered a hole in one of Finn’s shirts, pushing through the frayed fabric.
I asked, “Why’s it closing?”
She sighed. “The same reason everyone else is closing—we just can’t keep up anymore.” The popping began to slow, the individual combustions more spaced out. “Two years ago they opened up that megaplex farther down on Saw Mill, the one with nine projectors. We were struggling before, but at least getting by. Breaking even, you could say, at least most weeks. The megaplex, though—that killed us. For about fourteen months we tried to switch it up with a bunch of independent and art-house films. But there are only so many people who can tolerate movies like that. My Life as a Geranium or something. The audience just wasn’t there.” There was a crunch, the sound of her eating, and I realized that she hadn’t prepared the popcorn for someone else, a customer, but had made it for herself. She added, “It’s the same thing that’s happening everywhere.”
I’d pushed my finger through so the shirt hung around my second knuckle. The hole stretched.
“Anyway,” she continued. “I wanted to let you know that there’s going to be a final showing this Friday night. Before we shut down for good. The Tender Trap—that’s what we’ll be screening. It’s the first movie the Avalon showed.”
“I know.”
“I’m going through all these records and trying to get hold of everyone who worked at the theater to let them know about it.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“It’s a lot harder than it sounds.”
“I think it sounds pretty difficult.”
“I started last Thursday, and today is Tuesday. So that means I’ve been at it for more than four days and I’ve still got about seventy-five people left to call.”
“I don’t envy you.”
“Which actually brings me to a question.”
“Yes?”
“You don’t happen to have the phone numbers of anyone you worked with, do you? Or maybe even the cities they’re living in? Some sort of lead?”
She began listing a series of names, people who’d slipped from my memory completely: the girl who worked four days a week in the box office; the guy who cleaned the bathrooms each weekend. No, I told her each time. I haven’t heard from them in years.
“All right.” She sighed again. “I mean, I figured as much. No one seems to know what happened to anyone else.” Then: “What about Clare Murkowski?”
I said, “Who?”
“Clare Murkowski? It says you worked every shift with her for more than two years?”
I stood. I walked to a Spiderman trash can in a corner of the room. I balled up the shirt and tossed it into the bin. I looked down at my bare toes spread on the uneven floor. “She passed away,” I said. Then, more forcefully, “She died.”
“Oh, that’s awful.” Helen stopped eating; the muffled chewing stopped.
“I heard it was a car accident on the Ventura Freeway.”
Quietly, I began to loathe myself, but still I couldn’t stop from spinning the story. “A seven-car pileup, with a sixteen-wheeler at the end. She was thrown through the back windshield of the car in front of her. It wasn’t instant. Thirty-six hours in the ICU. A lot of pain. That’s what I heard, anyway.”
“Jesus. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. I picked the shirt from the bin in which I’d thrown it. I found a hanger, hung it up instead. “I didn’t really know her anymore.”
I heard the front door creak three times, which meant it was opening, then creak once more, which meant it was shut. Finn’s heavy heels were percussions on the stairs.
• • •
We arrived at my childhood home at midnight on the next Thursday, and even though it was mid-August everywhere else, it was still winter in Sleepy Hollow. Frigid rain bounced off ankle-deep puddles on the sidewalk; the wind ripped leaves from branches and painted them against car windows. As we stood in the crowded entryway, we shook the water from our heads.
I tightened my bag across my shoulder; Finn dropped his pack to the floor.
“Look at what you’ve done to the sun!”
My father took my son’s face in his hands. He kissed each wet cheek, his cold forehead.
They’d met a handful of times, the last of which was a year earlier. My father had been breezing through Los Angeles during one of his drives, and Finn and I had traveled back down south to meet him for an afternoon at the Long Beach aquarium. I remember how I had walked a few paces behind the two of them, and how I’d watched as Finn reached up to take two of my father’s bony fingers. He led him through the mazes of tubes and tanks, past walls of alien creatures swirling in explosive reds, yellows, blues. In a separate room, giant hammerheads swam above them and around them, their sleek, muscled bodies throwing shadows that darkened our faces. Finn coaxed my father to the glass, and they both pressed their palms against it. A shark whipped its arrowed tail, and I slipped over to an adjoining exhibit on jellyfish.
I stood with my face pressed close to the tube’s wall and I watched a moon jellyfish sway in the current. As it bloomed, the surface light shined blue-white through its waxy membrane. It barely had control over its movements: as larger bodies passed it, it was carried along their course; when the current was at rest, so was it.
Jellyfish have no central nervous system. I read that on a green illustrated placard. Instead, their nerves are diffused—like a net—throughout their epidermal layer. There, sensors pick up certain stimuli—mostly touch, as I understand it—which is then translated to the rest of the net. But, again—there’s no brain. There’s no processing center. Stimuli aren’t gathered, analyzed, categorized, remembered.
I felt a drop of rain trickle down the grooves in my neck, across the bumps on my spine.
“Only one more show,” my father said, his hands still holding Finn’s head.
“Only one more show.”
“But the Avalon! What a run it’s had!”
“What a run.” I put my hands on my son’s shoulders and pulled him into me. “We should get to bed,” I said. “It’s late.”
By the next morning, the day of the showing, the storm had broken. The grass on the street’s ancient lawns still sagged, and the gutters still flooded, but the clouds had ruptured and the sun dazzled in prisms. I awoke early, when the rest of the house was quiet, still. I’d given up my childhood room to my son and had slept on a couch in the living room that my mother had purchased before she died. Since then, either it had outgrown me or I had outgrown it: Throughout the night I switched between feeling as if I were being swallowed or strangled by its cushions. The whole house had that feeling. I don’t know how much time had passed since I’d last been there, but in those years or decades, this place and I had become strangers to each other; we didn’t know how to fit.
So—I drank half a cup of coffee. I left a note that said Meet me at the theater. And as the dawn skated across the Hudson, I left.
The Avalon was closed when I got there, but I snuck in the same way that I did when I was a boy. I have forgotten so many things, and I’ve lied about so many others, but this I remember. There was an alley on the east side of the building that separated the theater from a tailor’s shop, which had since become a bank. I dragged a large steel trash can into the middle of the alley and then, bracing myself against the ancient brick walls, mounted it. There were a few precarious moments. I’d lost my childhood fearlessness, so each time my makeshift ladder wobbled or swayed I held my breath; I clenched my eyes shut and stiffened my spine, preparing for a fall. But then, somehow I’d steady myself. I’d press my palms against the wall harder, learning how to compensate for my age, my weight.
There was a small window on the theater’s second floor. It opened into a darkened corner of the lobby’s balcony where the staff occasionally stored old, forgotten movie posters that should’ve been thrown away years ago. When the Avalon was built, the latch that locked the window hadn’t been secured properly; the screws that held it in place were loose and threadbare, so that even the lightest shove could send it swinging open on its hinges. There’d always been talk of having it fixed—at least when I worked there. We’ve got to call someone, Earl would say. And this time, I mean it. No one ever did call someone, though. The window’s latch became a leaky faucet or a door that creaked; eventually, it was universally deemed easier just to accept the damn thing than to go through the minor trouble of having it repaired.
I landed on a 27-inch by 39-inch movie poster of True Lies. A pillar of blue light shone in from the open window, and in this half shadow I cursed my clumsiness and the blooming ache in my legs and then, when it began to subside, I stood and took stock of my surroundings.
Or, no—I didn’t take stock. Rather, I stood expectantly. I stood like a man anxious to be reunited with a lover from whom he’s been too long separated, whose face he’s memorized and drawn and redrawn from scratch. And if that was the case, which it was, imagine this man’s disappointment when—once his eyes had adjusted to the near dark—he found that his lover wasn’t his lover at all, but rather someone else entirely. Someone harder, and coarser, and generally more disappointed in life.
The crimson carpet, which was just starting to fray when I left, was now almost completely torn up. Large swaths of it were either stained or missing. As I walked down the lobby’s staircase, the carpet shifted beneath my feet, revealing the cold slabs of concrete beneath it. On the ground floor, I looked for the urn that I used to hide behind and watch the theater’s audiences flow in and out. It wasn’t there, though. There was a carved out ring in the floor where it once stood, but that was all.
So this was what had happened. The Avalon had fallen apart.
• • •
I’d wanted to sit in the balcony, but the doors were locked, so I selected a seat in the back row of the orchestra, and I stayed there all day. I counted how many tears there were on the screen’s heavy curtain; I read the names that had been carved into the seat back in front of me at least a hundred times. I folded my knees into my chest, like I used to do when I was a boy, and I kept them there, even when the muscles screamed and burned. At two o’clock in the afternoon, when the custodial staff began cleaning the house, I waited for them to tell me to move, to get out, but they didn’t. They nodded at me and as they swept beneath my lifted feet, they had conversations inches above my head. No one at the Avalon worried about who had snuck in anymore, because as of tomorrow there wouldn’t be anything to sneak in to.
The film was scheduled to start at seven, and so the audience began arriving at six thirty. I scanned the faces as they entered the theater: there was the brief cringe of disappointment when someone saw the shape of things, the confusion while another person thought, I remember it being so much bigger. When I saw my father and my son pushing through the crowds, I flagged them over.
“This place is a dump,” Finn said.
“Knock it off. It’s just been around a long time. Now, sit.”
I’d been sitting along the aisle, but I moved one seat in, expecting them to sit on either side of me. Instead, my father awkwardly slipped past my knees and Finn clambered over me. They sat next to each other and the seat to my left remained empty.
I asked, “Do either of you want anything to drink? Maybe some popcorn or something?”
“Sure,” Finn said. He pulled his knees up so he was folded in the same position that I’d been in for so many hours. Then he turned to my father. “Keep going, Granddad.”
My father tapped his chin. “Where was I?”
“The store was about to be knocked down, and you were inside in the house of records.”
“Oh Christ, Dad,” I said. “Don’t get him started on all those stories.” I stood and I shook my legs, charging blood back into their veins. “Or God forbid one of these days he actually starts believing you.”