Stick (20 page)

Bosten looked scared, sick.

“Hey,     Stick,” he said as he passed me, lugging his bag up the steps to the mudroom.

“What's—”

“Where's your father,     Stark?” Mrs. Buckley didn't look like herself. It scared me a little.

“He's fixing the pump in the wellhouse. Is something wrong?”

She didn't answer. She turned and walked toward our well, down the little path on the hill. I thought I should go with her out of politeness, but I stopped after one step and chased Bosten inside the house.

He'd left his suitcase and shoes in the mudroom. I heard him going down the stairs to the basement. I kicked my shoes off and went after him.

“Bosten?”

He didn't say anything. He went into my room and sat heavily on my bed, staring down at the floor in the space between his knees.

“What's wrong?”

“I'm in trouble.     Bad.”

“What happened?”

Bosten looked at me. I knew what he was going to say. He took a breath. “She—”

“You and Buck?”

He nodded. “She flipped out.  We thought no one was home.   She caught us together.”

“Oh.”

“At first,   nothing        happened. Everything was so            quiet and heavy, like after a bomb going off. We all just stayed there,        stupid     and embarrassed.”

“What did she do?”

“She started screaming and crying then. She called Paul's dad at the golf course and made him come straight home. And she started hitting Paul and breaking things. She said she was going to       call the police and have us arrested; that what she saw us doing was against the laws of the State of Washington and God, and we both deserved to be thrown in jail.

She flipped out.

Then she told me I needed to get the fuck out of their house.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Dad's    going to kill me.”

“We need to leave, Bosten. Let's get out of here before he comes in.”

“Where      can we go?”

“I don't know. Let's go to the Lohmans. They'll know what to do. At least we should go there until things cool off.”

That's when the front door slammed, and we could hear—feel—the vibrations of Dad, upstairs, storming through the house, knocking into things, screaming for my brother to come out.

“Bosten!”

“Let's go,” I whispered.

But Bosten just sat there, frozen.

Dad was on the stairs, coming down.

“Bosten!”

Lights came on in the basement.

Then he was standing in my doorway, heaving with rage.

I was so scared, I felt my throat closing up. Dad came over to the bed and grabbed Bosten by the collar and flung him toward the door.

“I should have known about you.        Get out of here!     Get upstairs, you goddamned faggot.”

He tried kicking him, but Bosten was too far away.

Then Dad went after him and grabbed the back of his shirt, but Bosten swiped Dad's hands away.

“Leave me alone! You're not      going to touch me          again!”

Bosten stumbled out of my room, and Dad was after him.

I got up, started after them, but Dad whirled around with his fist raised, and said, “You     don't move.     You come out of that room and I'll break your fucking neck.”

He slammed my door shut when he left.

*   *   *

All I could do was sit there
and listen to what went on upstairs.

I put things against the door.

I didn't want him coming for me.

What else could I do?

It was worse than anything I could ever imagine.

But that's how things were at our house.

They didn't just happen. They stayed that way.

I climbed onto my bed, wearing all my clothes, kept my light turned on.

I pressed my ear to the pipe.

The little golden rectangle was a black mirror to the outside night above me.

*   *   *

The first sounds

were things being broken.

Big things.

Things that nobody would ever fix.

It sounded

  like the house itself was coming apart.

I heard some words.

Goddamn

Faggot

Queer

And after the words more things were broken.

But I was never so scared in my life as when everything went silent and stayed that way.

Perfectly.

Until morning gray showed on the other side of my little window.

*   *   *

I never stayed inside my room
as late as ten in the morning before that day.

Sunday.

But I had to get out. I had to see if Bosten was going to be okay.

The night before, I had wedged a straight-backed chair below the knob on my door, and there was a dresser bracing it in place.

Dad never came down for me during the night.

Even after I had cleared the barricade away from my door, I waited with my ear pressed to the wood for several minutes.

I imagined being in one of those science fiction movies where the entire world has been destroyed, and I was the lone survivor who'd hidden away inside some lucky underground vault.

I checked for any sounds coming from the pipe. I even climbed up and looked through the window, across our lawn to the driveway and the little trail to the wellhouse where I last saw Mrs. Buckley the evening before.

Nothing.

I opened my door and crept upstairs to the house.

*   *   *

It was like
everything had been turned upside down. Dad's chair was tipped backwards, as though someone would sit in it just to stare at the ceiling. And everything that had been hanging, framed, had been knocked down or broken. There were fist-size holes in the wall, like empty eye sockets; and I had to be careful, as I tiptoed around, of the shattered glass that was everywhere.

The only thing that hadn't been knocked over was the narrow table where Dad's ashtray still sat, perfectly centered, full.

But there were no sounds at all.

I walked lightly down the hallway toward the stairs that led up to Mom and Dad's room.

The Saint Fillan room stood open, empty. Untouched.

I stepped across to Bosten's room. His door was shut. I waited in the hallway for a while, but I couldn't hear anything inside, so I quietly opened the door to my brother's room.

It was empty, too.

Everything in it was perfect.

*   *   *

Finally,
I worked up the nerve and floated, soundlessly, up the stairs to Mom and Dad's room. I kept my feet wedged against the side wall as I moved, so the planks on the staircase wouldn't creak.

The door was open.

I saw Dad inside, twisted up in the covers of his bed, sleeping.

He must have felt that I was looking at him. Dad rolled over and sat up straight. He still had all his clothes on. He just looked at me. Neither of us said anything for the longest time.

“What do         you want?”

“Where's Bosten?”

Dad lay back down.

“He left.  Who knows?       Maybe he's off with his fag friend.”

I went back down to my room.

*   *   *

I was alone in the house now.

Bosten was gone.

 

LAST:

bosten

EMILY

Both cars sat in the same worn spots
they always occupied. Water dripped from the bumpers and wheel wells where the dew had collected and run down during the night.

Everything looked the same from the outside.

But things were different.

I tried to make a plan, but it was like standing in a road that didn't just fork—it writhed like the snakes on Medusa's head—and every one of those twisted choices in front of me was terrifying. No matter what Bosten believed, I knew I wasn't brave.

I felt like Dad was looking out from the upstairs window, so I never turned back one time. Not even a little. I followed the path down to the highway and crossed it. I ducked through the barbed wire that ringed the cow pasture on the Lohman property.

Once I had squeezed through the wires, I stood, watching for something—anything—across the highway, the tilted mailboxes, the driveway that led to my house that was now obscured behind a row of pines.

I screamed.

I screamed as loud as I could. It felt like the flesh in my throat would tear open. The same word, over and over, so that it went in there and stayed in my head forever.

Bosten

Bosten

Bosten

*   *   *

I didn't go to their house.

Emily came looking for me because I missed breakfast, and I'd promised to be there. It was nearly noon when she found me. I was still standing at the barbwire fence, looking out across the highway, waiting for my brother to come.

“Stark McClellan.”

It was like she woke me up. Emily stood, her hands on her hips, in the pasture behind me. I guess she'd been watching me for a while.

“Something happened.”

“What?”

“Bosten's gone.”

“What do you mean,
gone
? Where?”

That was the first time I ever really thought about it. I mean, I couldn't get it out of my head that my brother was gone, but thinking about the
where
made everything that much more uncertain; and scarier, too.

I glanced out across the road. Emily came up and put her hand on my shoulder, but it was almost like I couldn't feel it anymore.

“You need to tell me  what happened, Stick.”

“I know.”

*   *   *

I told Emily everything.

I tried to be brave.

I told her about Bosten and Paul Buckley first. I carefully watched her eyes to see if she'd show any sign that maybe she thought Bosten was sick, or bad or something—or maybe even if she'd look at me and wonder if I was gay, too. And maybe she did think that, anyway. After all, we'd taken baths together. She'd seen me naked more than once, and I know she felt how I pressed against her when we lay in bed holding on to each other; but I never tried anything beyond those couple French kisses we shared just two days before; and those kisses weren't about sex, anyway, they were about something else.

I know that now.

Then I told her about my dad, and how he'd beat us, usually every week or so. I told her about the Saint Fillan room. And I told her about the time Dad came home drunk and found me there; and how he'd thought I was Bosten and he started grabbing me.

Touching me.

Emily just watched me while I talked. She didn't say anything but kept her eyes on me, like she was letting me know it was okay for me to say whatever I needed to tell her. And it began to feel like I was letting all this poison out once and for all.

Like all the words could finally come out of my head.

“So, I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure my dad's been doing bad things to Bosten. Worse than just beating us up once in a while. Bosten started to tell me once, but I didn't want to hear it.”

I thought about the night we stole away and drove to Bremerton and ate hamburgers at a diner called Nico's.

And I didn't even notice it until after I'd finally said that one telling thing about my dad and me and Bosten; but Emily was crying.

“Please don't cry, Em.”

I put my hands up and wiped her face with my thumbs. Then we held on to each other and stood there by the fence.

Two cars drove by on the highway.

We didn't say anything.

We just held on.

“Um. I love you, Emily. Do you know that?” I wasn't ashamed or afraid to say it. “So please don't cry, okay?”

“Of course I know you love me. Do you think I'm dumb?”

“No. I don't.”

“Well, I love you, Stark McClellan.”

“I know.”

And then I said, “You want to try to ride your stupid cows?”

And for some reason, Emily started crying really hard when I said that.

I didn't understand.

But just like that, everything became a big deal for her.

Just like that, I guess.

*   *   *

We walked through the woods
toward the beach. Emily and I sat down on the bank, holding hands near the same spot where we'd shared our first kiss.

“If he doesn't come back, I'm going to have to do something,” I said. “I can't live there alone.”

“What are you going to do?”

“If Bosten doesn't come back home by Tuesday, I'm going to go look for him.”

“Where   would he go?”

“I think I know.”

“Well, I'm going with you then.”

“We'll both get in trouble. I don't want your mom and dad to get mad at me.”

“Then I'll ask them to let me.”

Emily was always like that.

“No. Don't say anything. Please?”

“Maybe you   should try calling Paul Buckley from my house.”

I thought about how Mrs. Buckley looked the last time I saw her; how Bosten told me she said for him to get the fuck out of their house.

“Maybe I could try that.”

But I was already making my plan. I had to decide which snake to follow if Bosten didn't come home. I still had his wallet and driver's license, packed in the suitcase under my bed, from the time he made me drive for Mexican food with Evan and Kim. And we had long before paid Mr. Lohman the ninety-nine cents he charged us at his little store to grind a spare key for the Toyota. Bosten kept that key in his wallet, too.

Now it was mine.

I'd give him two more days. Then I'd have to do something.

So I needed to get ready, because, deep down, I knew Bosten was never coming back home again.