JULIE
Julie led the noon staff meeting, suddenly conscious of the blue lights on every head in the room. She wondered if anyone was faking it, like David. If anyone else had gotten theirs taken out but still pretended to have it so that nobody could question their focus and commitment.
She checked off everything on her day’s to-do list and started on the next day’s list. On her way home she drove past the park: David’s car was there again.
Neither kid came home for dinner. Julie and Val watched two episodes of Co-Pilots, the mystery series where a young Piloted priest and a skeptical old-guard reporter investigated their town’s stratospheric body count. When Val announced she was going to bed, Julie said she wanted to stay up a little longer. She puttered for a while doing her usual paranoid searches. Sophie was online, just as Julie liked it. If she was online, she wasn’t off getting arrested or seizing somewhere.
David didn’t come home until after two a.m. Julie had sat on the couch with the view out the window, and from there she watched him glide the car to the curb, then sit another minute, two minutes, five. It was light in the room and dark outside, and her eyes followed the blue pinprick from the car to the door.
He turned his key quietly, closed the door quietly, paused to remove his shoes. The opposite of the Sophie whirlwind.
“Hey, Davey,” she said.
“Oh, hi! I didn’t think anyone would be awake.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” A little lie. The kind that didn’t matter. “Sit with me a sec?”
He came into the room and settled in the high-backed chair. She studied his face. He didn’t look stressed or aggrieved or anything other than tired.
“How was your day?” A carefully calibrated question. Not prying.
“It was okay.”
She tried another. “Do anything interesting?”
“Not much.”
She had to ask her real questions if she wanted real answers. “Did you notice my car behind yours the other day?”
“Huh? No. Where?”
She named the intersection.
“Oh. I didn’t see you. Guess I was distracted.”
“You were more than distracted, honey. Cars were pulling around you because you sat there for so long.”
“Huh.”
He looked uncomfortable. She knew it would be smarter to stop, but she couldn’t. “What’s going on with you, Davey? Talk to me. No judgment.”
“Nothing. I’m tired. It’s two in the morning.”
“It wasn’t two when I sat behind your car, and it wasn’t two when I saw you sitting in the park. What’s going on? For real.”
“Are you following me?” He frowned and rubbed his head. “None of this is any of your business.”
“It is, sweetie. You’re living in our house, and technically that’s our car you’re driving.” Wrong tack. She knew it. No good ever came of that kind of conversation, and she’d always tried hard to be a chill parent, at least to their faces. She tried to walk it back. “I don’t care about any of that, though. I just want to help. You were so distracted in the park, and the other day when you spilled your coffee . . . Is it your Pilot? Are you having problems since you had it turned off?”
David groaned. “You don’t know anything about my Pilot. You never have.”
Julie opened her mouth, but David kept talking. “And you know what? I don’t need you telling me that I’m living in your house and driving your car. I don’t need your car or your help.”
“Davey—don’t you, though? You’re not working.”
“I’ll be fine. I haven’t been trying. I can get a job tomorrow, or else I can reenlist.”
She froze. Not that; she’d never be able to go through that again. If she didn’t weigh what she said next, that would be the first thing he did in the morning, given how this conversation was going. What could she say that wouldn’t influence the outcome? “You’re right, David. I only want you to do what’s best for you. I’m sorry for prying. Let’s go to sleep and talk about this in the morning. It’s too late to argue. I just wanted to help.”
“Help. Huh. How could any of this help?” He was still upset, but she couldn’t tell which way the upset was directed. “Telling me I’m leeching off you? Telling me something is wrong with me, as if I don’t know that already?”
“I didn’t say you were leeching. I just want to help fix whatever’s bothering you.”
“Tell me how your Pilot feels.”
“What?” That wasn’t what she’d expected him to say.
“Tell me what your Pilot feels like.”
“I don’t know. I’m so used to it. That’s like asking me the mechanics of breathing, or reading.” She saw his frustration and fished for something more. “It’s—I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like a particular thing. If I think about what it’s like when it’s cycled down, or if I try to remember what it was like before? It’s exactly the same, just, like, the opposite of morning before I’ve had coffee, or the opposite of hungover or that thing where you have the flu and everything is underwater? It’s the opposite of that. That’s all.”
“No noise?”
The noise again. How many times had he said that, and they’d dismissed it? She’d assumed it had gotten better, because he hadn’t mentioned it in so long. He’d gone to work for BNL and talked about how it had saved him; she thought he’d learned to live with it.
“No noise, Davey, I’m sorry. Is that what this is about?”
“That’s what everything is always about. Nobody ever believes me, and nothing helps, so I don’t know how you expect to help.”
“I can try. I want to help, you have to believe that. I just don’t know what to do. We’ll talk to BNL again.”
“I don’t want to talk with them ever again.”
That was new. “How are you going to get this fixed if you can’t talk to the people who caused it? The VA?”
“No.”
“Okay, then. How about we start over with getting you a new job, then. And maybe someone else can address the noise? A psychologist?”
“Mom. Did you honestly just tell me I need my head checked? You said you want to help, that you want me to talk to you, then you suggest I’m imagining it?”
His face flushed. He was angry, and she didn’t want to be angry back, but she couldn’t help herself. It was late, and she was tired, and he misinterpreted everything she said. “I didn’t say you were imagining it, just that if it’s not the implant it must be something else. In the meantime, you need to deal with it, the same as you always have. Get a job. Maybe staying here has you thinking it’s not a priority? Pull yourself together, so you’re not scaring me by sitting at stop signs, and you’re not sitting in the park all day like some old man without better things to do.”
He fished in his pocket, then tossed his key chain on the floor. It had a small flashlight on the end, which switched on when it hit the ground. “I don’t need your car. I don’t need you to help me get a job. I don’t need a shrink. I need some quiet, and I can’t get it here.”
He was out of the house before she could say another word. Unlike Sophie, he didn’t slam the door; he left it open, so she could see him walk away, shoulders soldier-square, never looking back.
She watched him go, replaying the conversation in her head. Had she really said anything that bad? Was he already on edge and she’d hit a sore spot without realizing it? She shouldn’t have given him a hard time for living in the house or using the car they’d been about to junk in any case. Had she kicked him out? She’d told him to get a job. Had she told him to leave? She didn’t think so. She’d only been trying to help.
Val would be furious. All either of them wanted was to know the kids were safe, and now she’d driven Davey out in the middle of the night. Hopefully he’d go to Milo’s, or else he’d walk it off. Maybe she’d even said something he needed to hear, and catalyzed change. That was the optimistic view, anyway. She waited a few minutes to see if he’d come back, then left the door unlocked so he’d be able to return if he wanted to.
She slipped into bed beside Val, who stirred and shifted over. “Everything okay?”
She should tell, Julie thought. Instead, she spooned herself around her wife. “I love you. Go back to sleep.”
She’d tell in the morning. She’d find a way to frame it so she hadn’t driven their son out into the night, or she’d find the thing to say to bring him back before she had to tell. They always came back; they usually did. She played the argument over in her head again and again until the sun rose.
“Did the kids come home last night?” Val asked as she got out of bed.
“I don’t think so,” Julie lied. She realized why Val had lied that time years ago when she’d had her narwhal meltdown, and why sometimes lies embedded themselves before you could tell the truth. Some truths were too painful to look in the eye.