FICTION: Just Like Us

Just Like Us

“I wouldn’t want to mess up my clothes in that wet grass,” my brother whispers.  Across the street, our neighbor, Mr. Mike, uses his hands and forearms to pull himself across his yard. His hips rock back and forth as he drags his withered legs behind him.

“You dumbass,” I whisper, horrified.

Mr. Mike’s wife, Kay, is crouched along the curb, examining a patch of dead grass that’s been troubling her. When she sees my parents come out, she waves hello and starts across the street.

My mother, under her breath, says to my father, “oh, look, a new gardening outfit.”

“Mike!” my father calls out, pulling away from my mother. 

Mr. Mike, who’s sitting in the damp earth near the spigot rolling up a hose, waves to my dad.

“I have something really spooky for you kids this Halloween,” Kay says. My parents walk down the driveway to greet her.

Mr. Mike drags himself back across the yard, toward the open garage door, where he disappears inside. I imagine him returning with his forearm crutches and lumbering across the street to join us. I wish my parents would hurry.

“Did you hear that Ms. Kay has a Halloween surprise for you?” my father asks. 

I look over to find Kay smiling at me, patiently (something my mother would never do). Her eyes are bright with excitement.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.  “That’s great, thank you.”

I’m too old for Halloween, but my brother isn’t. 

“Is it something really gross?” he asks, excited. Last year she gave us a preserved mole rat in a jar.  My brother kept it on a shelf in his room until I made my Mom hide it.

“It’s a surprise!” Kay sings playfully.   

My brother smiles.  “You’re fun, Ms. Kay.”

She touches her chest tenderly, and looks like she might cry.

I watch the garage door, but Mr. Mike does not reappear. 

“We better go, or we’ll be late,” I say, tugging on the door again. It’s still locked.

My father gives me a look that says I’m being rude, but he puts his hand in his pocket, and the doors quietly unlock.

He assures Kay that all of us will come by on Halloween before “the young people” go out trick- or-treating.

--

Mr. Mike’s glass is filled with an amber liquid and one large ice cube.  His eyes are wet, and he’s smiling like a man with the world at his feet.

My parents sit together on a loveseat across from Mr. Mike, just like they do every year.  Kay returns with a drink for my father, who takes a polite sip and nods approvingly. 

My mother has a tea glass half filled with ice and some kind of white wine that she brought with her from across the street.  

“Are you sure there’s nothing I can get for you, Celia?” Kay asks.

“I have everything I need, Kay, thank you.  Please, join us.” My mother smiles.  Kay never sits still, and my mother knows this, because I’ve heard her say it to my father.

“I will, I will,” Kay laughs, waving off the invitation.  

“Ok, then. Who’s ready to see your Halloween surprise?” she asks.  My brother jumps up to follow her.  I stay seated.  Kay seems to hesitate for a moment, but she doesn’t say anything. I don’t look at her.

She and my brother quietly slip away, and moments later we can hear their shared shrieks of delighted horror.  She must have really gone all out this year.

“Whatever that is, it’s not coming to our house,” I call without really thinking about it.  My mother gives me a look. I stare back at her.

Mr. Mike and Kay hang pictures on their walls, just like us. There are a few pictures of my brother and me on their wall—which seems weird—and a few of the nephew they always talk about. Most of the pictures show Mr. Mike and Kay in exotic places. There’s one of them high atop a mountain. And another in which they’re perched in a rainforest canopy, wet and muddy in helmets and harnesses, as if they just stopped swinging through the treetops to snap a photo.

The doorbell rings, and I can hear a gaggle of giggling children outside the front door calling out “trick-or-treat!”

Mr. Mike waves them off while he takes another long pull from his drink.  “Trick!” he yells toward the door. My father, who has somehow finished his drink since I last looked, laughs in a way I don’t hear him laugh very often.

I can tell my mother wants to get up and answer the door, but Kay calls from the back room, “There’s a bowl of candy out there in the zombie’s lap!”

Mr. Mike leans over and yells again, “there’s candy in the zombie’s lamp.” The children outside quiet a little as they fill their bags, then I hear them shuffle away excitedly.

“Alex is writing a report on plastics in the ocean,” my father says, forcing me into their conversation.  He’s been telling me to ask Mr. Mike about my report for weeks (because Mr. Mike is some kind of environmental engineer), but I told him that I didn’t need any help, and I still don’t.

“Uh-huh,” I confirm.

Mr. Mike is slightly reclined in a large, almost normal looking chair that has controls discreetly hidden on its side. It looks as though he could just push a button to spring forward, or shoot across the room to snatch something out of his reach.

“Oh, I loved school,” Mr. Mike says.  He sets his drink aside and sits forward a little.  

“My dad used to sit with me for a few minutes every night before I went to bed, and make me tell him everything I had learned at school that day.  He quit school and started working when he was very young. When I was excited and wanted to share, he was eager to talk. He and I loved history the most, and civics, because those are classes about who we are, and where we come from, and what we should avoid in the future.”

I don’t like the way he keeps saying “we”.

“Well, we’d better do something about our ocean environment or there won’t be any we to worry about.”

Mr. Mike frowns.  “That’s true,” he says after a long pause.

He smiles sorrowfully at my father, as if one of them has done something that requires an apology.

“Mom, you have to see this!” my brother yells from the back room.

My mother looks up from her phone, smiles at all of us as if she’s been away and is sorry she must leave again. She stands and slips her phone into the pocket of her jacket. My father stands, too, but hesitates before following her out of the room.  “May I use your bathroom, Mike?” he asks.

Mr. Mike smiles warmly. “Of course, you know where it is.”

Mr. Mike and I are alone.  He retrieves his drink and finishes it off.

I want to say something to make up for being a brat, but I’m not sure what to say.

Finally, I blurt out the only thing that comes to mind. “Do you and your Dad talk about your work?”

Mr. Mike looks at me again, but the warmth has left his eyes.  He tone is so reserved that I could be a stranger who just walked in off the street.

“I’m sorry?”

“When you were little, you and your dad talked about school. What do you talk about now?”

“Nothing,” Mr. Mike replies matter-of-factly. “He’s dead.”

I want to leave right now.  I want to leave so bad, but I don’t know how, and I don’t know how to make it stop.

“I’m sorry,” I say, panicked, and I can see that my response is upsetting him.

“I’m sorry, that was a weird way to say that,” he stammers. I can see that he’s going to tell me more, and the anticipation is terrible.   

“I was home from university for the summer,” he continues, as if he is looking for the right words, as if there’s a way to make it ok for me.

“I’d just been home a few days, and I was in my room after lunch, napping, and I heard him shout, “Why are you in my house?” He sounded angry, like he used to get when my sister and I were kids. For just a moment, I was terrified, like I was eleven again and I had done something wrong.

“And then right when I realized that I was a grown man with nothing to worry about, that my father must just be yelling like other crazy old men, there was a gunshot. I knew what it was without a doubt.  I could smell it, and my ears were ringing. I was frozen.”

I can’t breathe. I don’t want to hear more, but I don’t have the power to get away.

Mr. Mike stops suddenly and sits back. He is looking right at me, as if he has just realized that I am about to scream. 

He looks away and takes a deep breath.

“14 days later I woke up in the hospital, and my father was gone.”

He shrugs, as if so say, what can I do about it.

And then my father returns. He has two drinks in his hands—one of which he passes to Mr. Mike.

“Your wife is seriously twisted,” my father says with a laugh as he retakes his seat. “Did you see that bird thing she got for the kids?” he asks.

Mr. Mike sets the drink aside and nods earnestly.  “Yes, she is. In just the right way for me.”

I scoot closer to my father’s feet. He reaches out and gently rubs my head.

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