“Happy Thanksgiving,” I say to Frank, the night doorman, on my way past his desk to the elevators. Before I can press the up button, I decide against it and walk back toward the front door.
“Did you forget something, Mrs. Becker?” Frank asks as I walk past his desk going the opposite direction. His honest mistake lands like a blow and I tamp down the urge to correct him that David and I aren’t married. Right now, we’re barely speaking.
Outside, I hang a right toward the West Side Highway. I have too much anxious energy to burn off, and I don’t particularly want to continue our conversation when David gets home. Maybe a walk will help clear my head.
Except by the time I get to Hudson River Park, I’m more mixed up than when I left our building. Maybe talking would help. I pull out my phone and press Finn’s name at the top of my favorites list.
nine
Finn
This year, November 22
For a few seconds after I wake up, I don’t know where I am. I blink at the navy blue wall in front of me. My apartment’s walls are white. I wanted to paint them, but I couldn’t. It says so in my lease. I glance down at the sheets. They’re covered in tiny cursive A’s, the Atlanta Braves logo.
Oh, right, I’m in my childhood bedroom. Now I remember.
I sit up to get a better look at the room. It was dark when I got in last night after an endless day of delays at JFK. Waiting suited me just fine—I had the final installment of the Throne of Glass series on my iPad and a bag of Combos from Hudson News. The longer the flight was delayed, the less time I’d have to spend with my family.
By the time a Lyft dropped me at my mother’s doorstep in Peachtree City, it was after midnight, and I barely had the fortitude to brush my teeth before falling into bed. Turning on the lights would only mean getting out of bed to turn them off again, so I used my phone’s flashlight to navigate to the bed and collapsed into a dreamless sleep without bothering to plug in my phone. The battery is at twelve percent, I need to find a charger.
The room is a time capsule. There’s a stack of paperback fantasy novels with cracked spines on the windowsill. My father hated those. “You’re too old for those sissy books,” he said. “Go outside with the other boys instead.” The only books he read were Jack Ryan novels. If something didn’t explode every twenty-five pages, by nature it was sissy. An ironic worldview for an accountant. But the allure of those “sissy” books was the hope that I might find a false back on an armoire or get a visit from an owl and find an escape hatch out of his house or, better yet, discover I was a changeling and not his son to begin with.
Instead of dealing with the unpleasant memories that are bubbling up, suppressed from the last time I was here, I take in the shrine to my younger self. On the walls are posters of Michael Johnson from the 1996 Olympics and the 1995 Braves World Series team. I was too young to remember either sporting event with any real clarity, but my father hyped both to near-mythic proportions to the point where his memories felt like my own. Later, Johnson was an inspiration, both the reason I tried out for the track team and the subject of many teen masturbatory fantasies.
The room hasn’t changed at all. But I’ve changed a lot. Except I still want to sleep with Michael Johnson. Well, maybe. I’ll have to Google him and see how he’s aged.
I feel sad for the boy who lived in this room. The boy who was desperately trying to win everyone’s approval, especially his father’s, and hide that he was gay, something he’d known with a fair degree of certainty since Ashley King’s twelfth birthday party when he spun the bottle and it landed on Billy Bradford. I leaned toward the center of the circle, counting my lucky stars. He was the cutest boy in our grade. Billy was less enthused. My classmates burst into peals of laughter at my gaffe. Boys weren’t supposed to kiss other boys. Everyone knew if it landed on a boy, you spun again.
Billy spent the rest of middle school telling anyone who would listen I was gayer than a fruitcake. Even if it was true, I wasn’t keen on another label to differentiate me from the mostly white student body in our affluent suburb.
When my father got wind of the rumors, he drove to Billy’s house to have a word with his father, man to man. The next day, Billy showed up at our door with an apology letter and a sheepish look on his face. He was so upset I almost apologized to him. I wanted to tell him he wasn’t wrong, but my dad was standing behind me in the foyer, supervising Billy’s apology.
I throw back the covers and cross the room to the dresser to find something to pull on over my boxer briefs. I wind up with a pair of Falcons pajama pants and am pleased they still fit, even if they’re snugger than I remember. I left my suitcase downstairs. Carrying it up felt like too much effort, plus I like knowing my packed bag is beside the door in case I need to make a quick getaway.
It’s strange being home. I never thought I’d be back here, let alone twice in two years. This isn’t home, I remind myself, this is the house I grew up in. My real home is a postage-stamp-sized apartment in the West Village above the third-best pizza place on the block, but not for long. I gave my landlord thirty days’ notice and have to be out by December 15. But I can only handle one panic spiral at a time, so I head downstairs.
* * *
? ? ?
?Aunt Carolyn is rolling out pie dough on the kitchen island. “Finn!” she announces with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, like a colonial sailor spotting land, when she spies me plodding down the stairs.
“Still not an early riser, I see” is my mother’s warm welcome. She looks different. Her hair is shorter and she’s wearing it natural in tightly coiled curls. I’ve never seen her without her hair pressed except in the grainy, yellowing photos of her childhood. She looks up from the enormous turkey she’s basting and gives me an indulgent smile as I shuffle over to the ancient Mr. Coffee machine in the corner.
I open the cabinet above the coffeemaker in search of one of my mugs. My mother never worked. This house was her work, always dusted within an inch of its life and redecorated every five years, like she was on high alert for a drop-in from Architectural Digest. Legos, Barbies, and anything plastic weren’t allowed outside our rooms. Her only concession to chaos was our family’s clashing collection of mugs amassed from sports teams and charity fundraisers. I flinch as I push aside a #1 dad mug （the irony!） to look in the deepest part of the cabinet for my favorite, a green mug from my senior year on the track team that says track: it’s better than playing with balls.
But there are no signs of any of my mugs. I pull down a purple mug from Amanda’s Girl Scout troop and pour myself a cup of coffee.
“Can I help with anything?” I ask.
“We’re all set in here,” my mother says, not looking up from her basting.
“Do you want me to peel the potatoes?” This was my job when I was younger.
“Already done,” Aunt Carolyn says, sounding pleased with their efficiency.
“Oh.” I marvel at how completely I’ve been erased from this family over the past ten years. I wonder if they took down the school pictures of me on the photo wall in the living room. I wouldn’t put it past my father.
“It’s hotter than the devil’s armpit in here. If you don’t need anything, why don’t you help Amanda polish the silverware,” my mom says, and I realize that maybe she doesn’t want to spend time with me any more than I do with her. Why did I even come?