A low whistle came out of me. That bad? I wanted to ask, and quickly realized it was a good thing I had a one-second filter, because that would have been a shitty thing to ask. “Thirteen when he left?” I asked. “That means your parents tried really hard.”
That was the right thing to say, because he relaxed and turned on his side again. “They did. Rick was just too hard. It’s…well, I don’t want to go into detail right now. It was just hard. I hated my mom and dad for a long, long time. And Mom fell apart and went to a psych ward for a few weeks.”
“Ouch.” Mama was right. We all had our shit in life. Even preppy Boston boys.
“When she came home, she wasn’t the same. She was broken somehow. All her attention that had been on Rick for all those years came barreling at me. I had to be perfect, suddenly. The best student, the best athlete, the best musician – a perfect, shining example that she could have one kid who wasn’t…you know…”
I hugged him and he let me. “Is that why you took all that peyote? To stop having to be perfect?”
“No,” he laughed. “I took all that peyote because I am a dumbass.”
We both giggled, the sound seeming to travel across the vast field, up to the blue sky, the birds hearing our amused music. There was great comfort in our sharing and baring of naked souls. Maybe we’re all damaged. The question is: to what degree?
“You still see him?” I asked. The air was getting a chill to it so I sat up and he pulled me into his arms, my back leaning against his chest.
“Every week, like clockwork. He’s more stable now and in a group home with five other guys. Has a job and everything. He just – when he became violent and big, Mom and Dad couldn’t handle his aggression.” I could feel him shake his head. “At least, that’s how they described it. Mom tried all kinds of doctors and drugs and treatments. We owned this weird oxygen chamber for a while, and then he used to get all these IV drugs, and Mom took the whole family for genetics testing. No one had any answers.”
“Sometimes no one does,” I said simply. A bulge against my butt (and no, it wasn’t Trevor) started to hurt, so I sat up and pulled it out.
My phone. 3:21.
“Shit! Shit, shit, shit!” I shouted, throwing my shirt on, trying to connect my bra underneath, being stupid and peeling everything off and then pulling it all back on again in the right order. “I’m gonna be late for work.” The words came out sharper than I wanted them to and Trevor startled but got the message quickly, jumping up, pulling on his clothes. Those beautiful, tan curves a – shame to see covered in anything so mundane, so boring as clothing.
We looked like two people that had just had sex outside. I felt the back of my head…bedhead, except instead of rubbing my hair against the sheets my head had been rubbed against a big, giant pile of moss. I could feel it matted into my frizz and started batting at it like a small animal caught in a trap.
“What are you doing?” Trevor said, laughing.
“I’ve got moss and dirt in my hair and I can’t go to work like this.” Again, I thought. I’d never had a man out here before. This really was a sacred space for me but I’d certainly had a…well, my share of outdoor fun with a man. Not this much fun, mind you.
We trudged back through the field to get to my car where I knew no one else would be. I wanted to say something – thank you? I’m sorry? What do you say when someone confesses their secrets to you? Maybe I should say nothing, or wrap my arms around him and caress his hair, kiss his shoulder, like he did last night when I blurted out my business like a teenager on truth serum. It was one thing to tell him my secrets, but to have him turn out to have a pretty big family issue of his own had me reeling.
I didn’t have any siblings – Josie was seven years older and the closest thing I had to a sister – so I couldn’t imagine what Trevor’s life had been like, having a brother with autism and having that brother up and disappear when he was little. Disappearing loved ones I understood, sadly, though. Going on and seeing his brother every week, striving to have a relationship, using music as a bridge showed a kind of caring empathy that made me want to just be with Trevor.
Forever.
“Trevor?”
“Yes?”
“Why not include Rick in the band?”
He frowned, the look trying to cover up disappointment. I could tell. “He can’t. I mean…”
I waved my hand away; I’d clearly crossed a line, and now I felt like I’d intruded on some soft underbelly of his. “It’s a stupid thought. I’m sorry. I was just thinking that maybe if you had a song with a keyboard part you could teach it to him on piano and wire him in to a performance, or use him in a recording, or…” As the words poured out of my mouth like a faucet whose handle rusted off so bad it just went clunk and fell off, spraying an unregulated water source, I wanted to die right there.
Trevor cleared his throat, then cocked his head, mulling it over. “I’ll think about it. Thanks.” The closed-off answer was about the best I could ask for. On shaky ground again, I felt like I could breathe. But why? Touchy subject, it appeared.
A handful of people probably used this little nature trail and none of them would be out here at the beginning of May. Trevor stopped me as I marched over to the driver’s side door, intent on getting home and a quick shower to be on time for work. If I was late again…well, there wasn’t really any big penalty. It’s not like they were going to go fire me and find someone else to work. I’d been there for what – six years? But I still didn’t feel right going in late, even if it was a loss of five hours with Trevor.
Besides, I needed the pay.
“Hey,” he said, softly, closing his arms around me, cocooning us as a tiny white moth fluttered on past, nearly brushing our heads. “Thank you,” he said, capping his words with a nice kiss that was quieter and tamer but no less sensual than what we’d just shared.
I sighed and leaned against his chest, listening to his heart beat, the deep throbbing sound like the undertone of one of his songs. “Sing to me,” I said and he rumbled a chuckle in his ribs, the sound echoing and muted at once, somehow impossibly delicious.
“Here?” he asked.
“Yeah, here.” I pulled back, looked at him dead serious. “Sing me a song.”
His face reddened and he said, “My mind’s gone blank, you – you totally caught me off guard.”
“Tell you what,” I reached up on tiptoes and kissed him, enjoying the liberty to do so, the easy way that we had now between the two of us, like a privilege I didn’t know people could have. “Before you leave you have to promise me you’ll sing me a song.”
“What’s you favorite?” he asked and I shoved him back gently, motioning for him to get in the car.
“I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer,” I shouted.
He groaned. “That one?”
“Yeah, that one,” I said.
Our car doors slammed shut in unison and I revved the engine, pulling back. He seemed pensive for the half mile or so until we got back on the main roads. “That’s a hard one to do,” he said. “Especially without my band.”
“You’ve never tried it acoustic?”
“I wrote it acoustic, I just never recorded it or performed it acoustic,” he explained. His brow was furrowed, deep in thought, and it seemed I’d hit a nerve.
“Do it for me?” I asked. “I don’t ask for much.”
He laughed. “You don’t ask for anything, Darla. That’s what I like about you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t have all these rules that I’m supposed to follow, to give, give, and give some more to whatever your framework tells me I’m supposed to do to show that I’m a good soldier.”
“It doesn’t work that way, you know,” I made a hand motion between the two of us with my right hand, keeping my left firmly on the steering wheel.
“Oh, yes it does,” he said, mimicking my gesture. “The women I’ve been with,” he made a sour face, “the girls I’ve been with – that’s how it works. Give me this gift, give me this status symbol, take me to this place, do my bidding, let me show people that I’m dating a band guy, a singer, a whatever. You’re not like that.”
“I’m about as far from that as you can get,” I said. What did he mean? Of course I wanted him to give stuff to me but not…stuff, you know? I don’t need baubles, and jewelry, fancy trips or whatever it is in Trevor’s world twenty-two year olds do in a relationship.
I didn’t even feel like I had the right to take that word and use it to apply it to this. Was this a relationship? Or was this just a one day fuck? I had a feeling it was something in between but there was an awful lot of distance between one and the other, and on that continuum we were inching slowly away from one day fuck.
“Then give me a song, Trevor,” I asked. What I wanted to say was, stay, please stay and the next thing I wanted to say was take me with you but if I could get a song, an acoustic performance of my favorite song from Random Acts of Crazy – if he could give me that, I could give myself permission to ask for it.
“Tell you what,” he said as we pulled into the trailer park. “You find me a guitar and a stage, and I’ll sing whatever you want, Chippy Pete.”
I left Trevor with a quick kiss and watched him go into my little shed, the door clicking closed and then the sound of a body flopping onto the bed. I’d tuckered him out. A grin of victory pinched my lips as I walked carefully onto the porch and crouched down to enter the trailer. I was ripe and I needed a shower before I went into work.
What I didn’t need were a bunch of questions from Mama. How could I explain this? Trevor was still here, he wasn’t naked anymore and at least he had his own clothes. The hardest part would be giving her a coherent explanation for the brand new BMW, a car that cost more than probably three or four of our trailers combined. I needed to make sure that nobody stripped it or stole anything from it and so I did the only thing I could think to do – I threw an old, ratty tarp on it, hoping that as long as Mama’s eagle eye remained intact and as thorough as it had been for years, Joe’s car wouldn’t get hurt.
“Mama?” I asked. She looked up from her place in front of the cheap desktop that she’d used for years for her online gambling. When I say gambling I don’t mean poker, blackjack, or anything like that – I mean online sweepstakes. If you’re wondering what that means, let me tell you – there’s a whole world out there, on the Internet, that does things that you could never dream of. And I don’t mean porn.
Mama had discovered this online sweepstakes thing about five years ago when she bought some book off the internet for $19.95 that said she could find a way to make $1,000 a month from the ease of her home. Anything was bigger than her disability check and so Mama went for it and found a couple of sweepstakes forums. On these forums people traded tips and information about sweepstakes – you know, things like enter to win one of five garden baskets or enter this code from the top of your pop bottle and get a five dollar gift card to something.