BRENDAN LEFT right after we finished dinner.
“Let me help with the cleanup,” he offered, starting to gather dirty plates from the dining room table.
“Absolutely not,” Ma said more firmly than ever. “You’ve done more than enough for us today, Brendan.”
“I don’t mind, Mrs. Copeland. Really.”
“Thanks, but no.” Ma got up and gently took the plates from his hands. “You’ve had a very long, very busy day. You must be exhausted after all that.”
Brendan shrugged. “I’m a little tired, yeah. But—”
“No buts. The biggest favor you can do this family now is to get yourself some rest.”
“Okay, if you say so. The chicken teriyaki was great. Thanks for dinner.”
“And thank you.” Pa moved around the table, counting out twenty-dollar bills as he walked over to Brendan. Brendan raised both hands and started to protest, but Pa shut him down with a big shake of his head and an even bigger smile. “At least let us pay you back what the trip cost you,” he said, placing the money in Brendan’s hand.
Brendan gave in reluctantly, nodding back at Pa as he stuffed the money into his pocket. “Well, good night, everybody.”
BJ walked Brendan through the living room to the door. I watched them carefully. After he opened the door, BJ held up a fist. Brendan bumped knuckles with him, gave me a goodbye wave, and was gone.
That was cool.
I went back to the table and started to gather dirty dishes. As she’d done with Brendan, Ma took the dishes from my hands.
“Let’s leave the dishes,” she said. “They can wait. I want everyone in the living room now. BJ, you wait right there.”
Arms out, she ushered Pa and me into the living room where BJ had already staked out a spot on the sofa. When the rest of us were seated, Ma said, “We’ve each of us experienced a tremendous upheaval in our lives lately, but we’ve never taken the time to sit down and talk about it. Well, that ends now, tonight.”
“Yes it does,” Pa said, taking over from Ma. “Your mother and I have been very worried about the two of you.”
I nodded. “I know, and I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what, Dwayne?” Pa replied.
“For leaving town the way I did, going back to Memphis.”
“That was only one of our worries. We’d very much like to know why you felt you had to leave.”
For a moment I was tongue-tied, unsure exactly what to say. I looked away from Pa, down at my lap. “There were… reasons, different reasons….”
“Tell us,” Ma urged.
There was a boiling mess of thoughts and emotions in me. I shrugged a shoulder.
“Are you unhappy here?” Ma asked.
“Sometimes. But not all the time. Just… sometimes.”
Ma reached over, tucked a finger under my chin, and lifted my face so that we were looking into each other’s eyes. “I know how much you miss your adoptive parents, your friends in Memphis, and I’m sorry. But we don’t expect you to cut yourself completely off from them. We can arrange for you to visit—”
“I know that, Ma.”
“Okay. What else makes you unhappy?” Ma put a hand to her chest. “Is it your dad and me? Are you angry with us for bringing you here?”
“No. No, I’m not.”
Pa pulled in his lips doubtfully for a moment. “I think maybe, on some level, you are,” he said. “And that’s completely understandable.”
Ma turned to my brother. “What about you, BJ?”
BJ looked surprised. “What do you mean, what about me?”
“You’ve been angry too. You were angry long before the FBI tracked Dwayne down, but you became outright hostile when we brought Dwayne home.”
“You cut me off from my friends.”
“Not completely,” Pa said, “and not permanently. And there’s more to it than that. As your mother said, this anger didn’t start just when Dwayne came home.”
“Can you tell us what you’ve been feeling, BJ?” Ma asked.
“You and Dad… whenever it came to anything about Dwayne, you completely ignored me. It’s like I didn’t matter. You stopped seeing me. You didn’t listen.”
Ma and Pa looked shocked, their mouths dropping open.
“Oh, BJ,” Ma gasped, reaching out to him, her hand quivering. “I didn’t… we didn’t realize….”
“Son, we didn’t mean to make you feel that way,” said Pa. “But looking back now, I can see how we did.”
“We’re so sorry, BJ,” Ma said. “We worried so about Dwayne… but you’re not an afterthought to us. You never were. It breaks my heart that we made you feel that way.”
“But we’re listening to you now, son. I promise. We see you.”
BJ nodded, He turned to me. “I hated that you were gone. I hated that you came back.”
His words stoked a pain in my chest. “So you hate me.”
“No!” BJ suddenly looked as hurt as I felt. “That’s not what I’m saying. I just… things were so screwed up without you here. They were screwed up after you came back.” He raised his hands and let them drop in his lap again, a helpless gesture. “You were right, Dwayne. I was an asshole, the way I treated you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of it. I don’t even know why I did it.”
“I think I do,” said Ma. “You’re angry about the kidnapping. I blame myself, but you hate the person who took Dwayne. We still don’t know who the kidnapper is. We may never know. I think that, without a focus for your anger, you turned it on Dwayne.”
BJ went quiet, his eyes taking on that faraway glaze that comes with inward looking. A few moments later, he sniffed and nodded; he knew Ma was right. He turned to me again. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“No, none of this is okay,” said Pa. “There’s a lot going on under the surface here, for all of us. I’ve also been angry and afraid all these years, angry at the police for not finding my missing son, afraid my little baby was dead.” He inhaled a shuddering breath and wiped a hand over his face. “I hid it so no one would see my pain, especially your mother and BJ. But it still eats at me even now.” In turn he looked each of us in the eye. “We can’t hold in our pain anymore. We have to start dealing with it.”
“That’s why your dad and I have made an appointment,” Ma added. “Two days from now, we’re meeting with a therapist as a family. Each of us will also have individual sessions in addition to the family sessions. Anything you don’t feel comfortable discussing here at home or in a family session, you can bring up when you’re with the therapist one-on-one.”
“So there’s no need to hold back,” Pa said, focusing on me. “Let’s bring everything into the open.”
The way Pa looked directly at me when he said that made me think maybe he somehow knew and understood every part of me, even the part that sometimes confused and scared me. Maybe I could tell him about being gay. Maybe I could tell my whole family, and it would be no big deal.
Or maybe it would. Who really knows about things like that? There were more urgent things to talk about.
But I wasn’t going to hide who I was from the people in my life, not forever. If there was one thing I’d learned from all the craziness I’d been through, it was that you can’t really hide from yourself.
We talked more that night. Not about the bad things haunting our hearts; we decided it was best to save that for our therapy sessions. We talked about taking a vacation together in August at the Grand Canyon, hiking, camping out, and visiting Native American reservations. And from there we’d take a trip to Las Vegas so I could meet my grandparents. We talked about how, after Ma and Pa returned to work and BJ and I started school again, we’d always make time together—movie night, game night, anything we wanted. We even started making plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Ma and Pa were going to invite my Memphis parents to Thanksgiving dinner, and they were going to let me spend my winter break, including Christmas, in Memphis.
As we talked, I kept looking from Ma to Pa to BJ. It was amazing because, for the first time, I actually liked that I saw and heard myself in them. BJ’s smile was my smile. Dad’s eyes were my eyes. Ma’s laugh was my laugh. I’d found new parts of my being and my history that I hadn’t even known were out there.
I’d found myself, and I was never running from that again.
My identity crisis wasn’t exactly settled, though. BJ’s unexpected change in attitude toward me was very welcome, but he also had one more surprise in the wings.
“Hey, Mom, Dad,” he said, raising both hands to get their attention. “Here’s one more thing you ought to know. This guy—” He paused midsentence as he reached over to pat my shoulder. “—this guy doesn’t really want to be called Dwayne. He’d rather everybody call him Zay.”
I think my eyes got as big as dinner plates. God, did he really just say that?
Ma and Pa both looked at me. “Is that true, son?” Pa asked.
If this situation had happened just a week ago, I probably wouldn’t have been able to answer because my tongue would have tied itself into a bow. Now I knew it was best to just put the truth out there. I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, Pa.”
Ma looked totally surprised. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“The judge ruled that my legal name is Dwayne. My Memphis mom said I had to accept that.”
“But you’ve been Zay all your life. That’s how you think of yourself, isn’t it?” Dad gave me this pained look. “I’m sorry. Your mother and I should have known that.”
“It’s not your fault,” I reassured him. “I never said anything, so how could you have known? And it’s okay. I accept that Dwayne is my legal name now.”
“But that doesn’t mean that you have to forget the life you’ve lived. We can change your name to Zavier Copeland,” Ma said. “It’s just a matter of filing a petition in court and updating your records again.”
I thought about that for a minute, how I was named after her father, someone she respected and loved. That meant something to her, and now it meant something to me. “No. I don’t want to have my name changed in court or anything.”
“Well, you can have a nickname,” said Ma. “If you want us to call you Zay, I think we can all do that.”
“So is that what you want?” Pa asked.
I nodded happily.
Ma laughed. “Well, Zay it is, then.”