GUS

“I’D GIVE MY left arm not to go in today.”

Dad’s blue eyes twinkle through time and glass. He offers no consolation.

I lower my voice to a manly timbre: “But that’s your good arm, Gus.”

The imitation makes me cough. I slur the words, too. Dad wouldn’t have. As far as I know, Dad didn’t have a speech disorder.

Dad twinkles on, unbothered. Eternal smile, eternal indifference.

I have looked at my father’s face every day since the day I was born, but I’ve never met him. Apart from the picture on my bookshelf, there’s one on Mom’s nightstand and a collage above the fireplace in the living room. A few summer camp photos are tacked to our refrigerator. The guest room contains dozens of pairs of his eternal eyes, trapped in the darkness of the shoe-boxes that hold his personal effects.

There’s a photo of Dad holding an enormous trout situated halfway up the staircase. This one is a real nuisance, because almost every time I trip on the steps, the frame rattles against the wall, slips off its nail, and clunks against the carpet. Every other day I am fumbling over that picture, trying to hang it back up before Mom can catch me.

One of these days the glass will crack, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I can’t complain about the stupid placement of the weird trout picture. If I do, Mom will want to talk about why it upsets me.

There are two ways that conversation can go:

1.Mom will assume I hate the picture because it’s a picture of my dead dad, not because it’s hanging in a stupid place. She’ll explain to me, again, that even if Dad is gone, she wants him to be a comforting presence in our lives. She’ll sit me down on the recliner and she’ll sit on the settee and she’ll ask me, again, eternally, how I feel about living with the ghost of my father.

2.Mom will realize the truth: the picture keeps falling because I keep tripping. The dead leg strikes again! So Mom’ll sit me down on the recliner and she’ll sit on the settee and ask me, again, why I don’t consider moving into the downstairs bedroom.

“It’s the guest room.” If I stare at the bottom of my bifocals, I won’t see her at all.

“We hardly ever have guests, and it’d be easier for you—”

When I lift my hands in exasperation, the right one won’t go all the way up; it never does. That will definitely catch her eye. “Mom. Let me keep my room.”

Or maybe the words won’t come out right. Maybe I’ll say something like, “Mom. Let me hold, I mean, um, keep my . . . ​ the . . . place?”

Because a conversation this uncomfortable might trigger my aphasia, and all the nouns in the world could abandon me. That’ll convince Mom that I must move downstairs.

Mom hates seeing other people uncomfortable. She’d wet herself to let a stranger cut her in a restroom line. Unluckily for Mom, discomfort is my default setting. I wonder if I feel like an itch she can’t scratch. She’ll never say so, and I’ll never ask.

Today I make my way down the stairs and Dad doesn’t fall. I wish some of his enthusiasm would infect me. I feel more like the trout in his arms, sucking empty air.

Mom stands when I enter the kitchen. I wish she wouldn’t. “Perfect timing!”

I look at the stacks of fried batter cooling on the table and know it’s not perfect timing at all. The chocolate syrup’s sunken through two layers of cakes. Mom’s ready for work but won’t even eat until she knows I’m going to make it downstairs.

I maybe hate that about her. I hate myself for maybe hating her for anything.

The Dads on the fridge don’t wink at me when I lower myself into the waiting chair. Mom makes sure I take a bite before digging a fork into her own soggy stack.

She rattles on about my class schedule, about sharing afternoon rides with Phil, about when I’ll be seeing Alicia, my speech therapist (“It’ll be Tuesdays and Fridays during lunch”). Mom makes me recite, between bites, the exact procedure I should go through in case of emergencies, followed by a memorized list of important phone numbers: hers, Tam’s, Dr. Petani’s, Mr. Wheeler’s. If my cheeks weren’t full of orange juice, this is one conversation I could have upside down with my eyes closed.

Without warning, Mom lifts up the left leg of my jeans. “Where’s your new AFO? The starry one?”

I cough up pancake debris. Wearing a cool, cosmic-patterned orthotic boot is only actually “cool” in middle school, and I’m a junior now.

Mom never pities me, but she does treat me like I’m perpetually seven. She’s only a decade wrong. In the grand scheme of the vast and unknowable universe, that shouldn’t feel as awful as it does.

I tap the plastic on the black AFO encasing my foot. “This one matches better.”

She can’t argue. My jeans are black, and so is my long-sleeved shirt. You might think I’m trying to mimic my idols.

The Gaggle, I call them. They’re this group of kids who’ve formed an artsy coven on Jefferson High’s campus. You can’t call them Goth, because they’ve evolved beyond that, and it’s really hard to commit to corsets and Tripp pants in this sweltering patch of southern Kentucky. These kids shy away from the sun, but they aren’t pretty enough to pass for vampires. But in this town of Wrangler jeans, the Gaggle is a local miracle.

Sure, they write poems about child funerals and sculpt inverted rib cages full of crows during art class. But they also fold colorful origami creatures and scatter them in the hallways. Their leader, a widow’s-peaked wonder named Garth Holden, composes goofy songs to raise STD/STI awareness. Who can forget his classic hit from freshman year, “See Ya, Gonorrhea!” or the heartfelt ballad that rang from his sable ukulele last spring, “STI, ST-Me, ST-You”?

The Gagglers laugh through their piercings and pastel hair spikes. One of the members wears floor-length black gowns with hot pink rocking horse shoes and dozens of decora hair clips. It’s like they fell right out of Harajuku.

The whole Gaggle might as well be there. I can’t get near them. They have something I’ll never have. It’s not fashion sense.

The Gaggle has carefreedom. Every day they dress to make an impression, or create something to make an impression, or sing to make an impression. They’ve got constant opportunities to define who they are in the eyes of other people.

Most people who meet me? I know how they’re going to describe me later. Commentary on my clothes or personality will never be anyone’s go-to. The moment I’m out of earshot, I’m not “Gus, that kid obsessed with Alexander McQueen.” Nope. I’m eternally “Gus, the disabled kid.”

Or sometimes I’m “Gus, the kid whose dad got murdered.”

I’m not wearing black to make a statement. I’m wearing black because it’ll get me the least amount of attention today. Some attention is inevitable during the first week. There’s not much in Samsboro apart from the Munch-O Mills cereal factory. People shift in and out of positions there, so every year I’m an object of curiosity to anyone unfortunate enough to have moved here over the summer.

I could cosplay as Björk and still be “the disabled kid” to newcomers.

“Not hungry?” I’ve been staring into the distance. Mom’s been staring into me.

My untouched pancakes are dissolving. “Sorry. Thinking.”

“How’s the abyss today, Gus?”

“It’s nothing.” We made up this awful joke years ago. “I’m just spacing out.”

I look to Fridge-Dad. He sits on a pontoon boat. I can’t see his eyes, so I silently address the water reflected in his sunglasses: Fine. I’ll give both arms not to go.

Dr. Petani says at this point there isn’t much more that splinting can do to undo the contractures in my right arm. Wearing an elbow brace might only “incur unnecessary muscle stress and pain.” Back in junior high, I went through a stubborn phase of refusing to wear my splints and orthotics. I’m still paying for it. My right arm’s a tightened spring that curls up against me like a question mark.

“If you didn’t like the space brace, you could have told us.”

“The space brace is great. It rhymes.” I smile at her. “I’ll wear it later.”

Mom raises an eyebrow. “No one will see it anyhow.”

That’s not the point, and she knows it. Sure, Mom works from home, but she doesn’t live in her pajamas. This morning she’s wearing a tasseled cardigan over a caramel-colored dress. Her earrings are porcelain roses. A floral headband straps down her frizzy gray hair. You’d think she was going to open a candle-selling shop. Instead, she’ll lock herself in her paper-strewn office to ghostwrite the autobiography of some soldier in a nursing home. Mom always dresses for work, even if she doesn’t leave the house. She says taking yourself seriously means dressing yourself seriously.

Why can’t she apply that logic to me?

“Well,” she concedes, “I can’t say I dislike a dark palette. But if you’re going to look like the night sky, I don’t see how it could hurt to add a few stars.”

“Adding new stars could speed up global warming.” I wipe my chin. “That would hurt a lot. Consider the polar bears.”

Tamara’s laugh enters before she does. She appears beyond the open kitchen window, popping up from below like a whack-a-mole.

“Special delivery!” She plops a heap of filthy carrots into the sink and leans on the sill. There’s soil all over her, as always, and she’s smiling, as often. “Honestly, Beth. You can’t force a guy to wear the cosmos.”

Mom’s on her feet, inspecting the shrunken carrots. “Not a very special delivery.”

“That’s because I haven’t delivered it yet.” Tamara leans forward. Mom stands on tiptoe to meet her.

A lot of people probably look away when their parents kiss. Maybe I’m a weirdo, because I hope I never will.

Before Tamara moved in, our house was a mausoleum. That wasn’t Dad’s fault. Dead or not, his teeth have always brightened the place up.

Our house was a mausoleum because Mom locked herself inside it. The windows were always closed, and incessant air-conditioning left the place frigid. Our world was white walls and white carpet. I used to wake up in my bedroom and panic, thinking I was back in the hospital again.

Tamara’s the only landscaper in town, so Mom commissioned her to install a therapeutic Zen garden in our backyard. Tamara showed up beaming with bags of stones under her arms. Mom suddenly thought of a dozen excuses to bring her back again. Tamara dug a small koi pond, lined our walkway with ribbon grass, trained ivy to grow up our porch pillars, planted hollyhocks and irises in curving flower beds. After a year, it looked like all the color that had drained out of our house had pooled on our lawn.

Early some mornings, second-grade me would hear Tamara’s laughter rattling our kitchen walls. I’d shuffle downstairs to hear its echo—Mom’s little chuckle in the aftermath—and find them swapping gossip and sipping coffee: Mom in her muted dresses, Tamara looking like a fashionista gone country in blue overalls and black boots, her bright yellow Peake Landscaping baseball cap on her head.

In third grade, after surgery landed me in a wheelchair, Tamara spent several August hours squatting on our front step, taking meticulous notes with the help of a tape measure. She must not have slept that night, because the next morning she was squatting on a brand-new wooden mobility ramp instead, painting it ivory to match the porch.

“I don’t like people feeling sorry for me,” I warned her.

Tamara snorted. “Hell if I feel sorry for you. You’re the most pampered kid I’ve ever met, and I’ve seen some real princes. Your mom dotes on you like no other.”

“Then . . . why are you here?”

Tamara cocked her head. “I’m hoping some of your mom’s doting might rub off on me, is all. You get me?”

Soon Tamara was giving me rides to school, and I was giving her tips on how to woo my hermit mother. I told her Mom loves Thai food and terrible piano ballads and Christmas puppet movies and pictures of my dead father.

“Yeah, what’s that all about?”

I remember shifting in the seat of her truck; I’d sat on a spade. “She wants him to be part of my life. Is it weird?”

Tamara shrugged. “He’s got a good face. Looks like a certain kid I really like. But who the hell hangs pictures halfway up a staircase?”

An unplanned laugh burst out of me. “Right?!”

I don’t know exactly when color started bleeding into the house. First it was potted hens and chicks on the kitchen windowsill, and then a vase full of snapdragons on our dining room table, and eventually daylilies on Mom’s nightstand.

For years now, Tamara’s trailed soil and blades of grass along the white carpets in jade strips of bright color. Every day, Tamara wakes up at dawn to check on the plants before work, but she leaves the heat on in her wake.

Now she winks at me from the window. “Morning. You ready to give ’em hell?”

“To be given it, at least.” A smile escapes me.

“Beth, wanna stop strangling your kid so he can go get given hell already?”

Mom’s suddenly hugging my head to her stomach. I don’t even know when she crossed the kitchen, but I’m buried under her heavy arms.

“Stop growing up.”

“I’ll, um, work on it.”

She lets me go. Maybe Mom treats me like I’m seven because she wants me to stay small enough to hold. But Mom’s broken out of the tomb. There’s room in our house for things besides me and my dead dad and my dead right side.

The truth is, I’m the one who wants to stop growing.

I’d give all my limbs to stay home today.

My pancakes have liquefied.