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Title: Comes To Lay
Title: Comes To Lay
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: Jackass RPF (Power Generation)
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Notes: Thanksgiving 1985,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
powergeneration style – for those not in the know, it's a collective AU where some people develop powers in their twenties (‘starters’) and others are born with strange bodies (‘physicals’), and PJ Clapp, stage name Johnny Knoxville, is a physical with unusual physiology. Set before Gross Anatomy. Title from the song It’s Morning Again In America by Sorry About Dresden. Thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lasergirl and akire_yta for consultations.
She didn’t expect – no, she didn’t plan on what she’d find when she came home, six months away and two hours late to arrive at the airport. She expected plenty, hellos and hugs and kisses and got them just as soon as she got off the plane, her mother right there waiting for her and apologizing for the delay, insisting it wasn’t something to be worried over. Six months away, gone since last June, and not even coming back for a day to see her brother when he got home from the hospital. She’d wanted to be – her mother had told her over and over that it was better she stay in her apartment and go to work when she’d just gotten her new job in May, to not take time away from her new career, that her brother was doing fine.
Home looked just the same, pictures over the piano where they were supposed to be and a few extra on the bureau, all the trees in the backyard still intact and Dad at work and her room smelling musty and the plush Snoopy on her bed right where he was supposed to be. This might be the year he came to her apartment, and she couldn’t expect or plan that until it was time for her to leave. She dropped her bag on the rug where she always dropped it, took a look out the window down at the empty November streets – it all seemed so small now.
Her little brother got home thirty minutes after she did, tromping into the kitchen in his beat-up sneakers when she was in the living room with a mug of fresh hot lemon tea. She jumped up all ready to say hello, ready to wrap her arms around him tight like she always did when she got home and ready to have him wrap his arms around her right back. When she crowed, “Hey there, PJ!” he smiled big and happy, glad to see her. But he stood where he was like he didn’t know her good enough to come over and give her a hug, and even after she’d hugged him he still stood there like he didn’t know her good enough to hug her back – and then shivered a bit, like he came back into himself, like how one of her friends at school did sometimes when he didn’t take his meds, and finally hugged her back nice and deep like she knew he would. He was too big to be her little brother now, at least four inches taller since the last time she’d seen him, but he was still her baby brother, and when she said that he laughed like she expected him to, clenched fist coming up right away to hide his teeth how Mom and Dad always reminded him to do.
Mom said she’d make him some tea to drink with them, but he shrugged the offer away and went right to his room.
“Is he okay?” She asked when he was up the stairs.
Their mother shook her head and sighed. “He’s fourteen. He’ll grow out of it.”
“Is that why he won’t talk on the phone?”
“Well, I’d think so.” Right around when he got back from the hospital last summer, around the beginning of July, he’d stopped talking to her, and every time Mom called her or she called home he’d never come to the phone. Mom and Dad had to yell across the house and up the stairs to get a little bit out of him, or they’d just repeat what he told them when he was close enough for her to hear him over the line. All the information she had about him now was secondhand at best. She remembered being fourteen and how she never told her parents everything if she could help it, and maybe it was just something that happened at that age, something she could plan on him growing out of just like she had. But she couldn’t anticipate that happening today or tomorrow or anytime soon, just like she could expect him to tell her things he wouldn’t tell Mom and Dad.
She didn’t bother to knock on his door almost an hour later after finally catching up with Dad. PJ was curled up on his bed, sneakers and sweatshirt still on, reading something from the library. “What’ya got there?”
“The Subterraneans. It’s by Jack Kerouac.”
She sat down near his bent knees, and he didn’t look at her, just kept his eyes on the page. “What’s it about?”
“Some people out in San Francisco.”
“Sounds pretty good.”
He turned a page and kept reading. “Yeah. It’s okay.”
“Too good to talk to your sister? Come on, talk to me. How’s things?” He made a face and flipped in the cover as a bookmark, tossed it onto the floor and propped his head up on his arm when she lay down. “I hear you’re in sports now. That’s new.”
“Yeah. Football, basketball.”
“Big man on campus.” That got his smile up and told her he liked hearing that. “Win any games?”
“A few.”
“Mom says you get to travel for games.” Mom and Dad both said it, both of them happy to talk about the normal and regular things he did. She already knew everything but still wanted to hear it from him.
“Sometimes.”
“Do you like that? C’mon, gimme something here.”
He pressed his lips into a closed smile, “It’s better going with the team than Mom.”
That got her to laugh out, “Okay, yeah, gotcha. So what else?”
He pushed up against the pillows to sit up, “That’s all, just school, some sports. What about you?”
“Well, the job’s going fine, some nice people in the office, but there’s nothing special about it. Come on, I want to hear about you, how are you these days? My baby brother and I don’t know how he’s doing. Won’t even talk to me on the phone.”
“I told you, I’m –”
She didn’t give him a moment to finish saying what he was or wasn’t, lunged to pushed herself up and over and rolled around to wrap her arms around his chest and hold him down against the bed. He was taller but still younger and he’d always be young enough for her to do this, he’d always be shaking and laughing along with her, “Lemme up, come on.”
“No way, not ’till you start talking.”
“I mean it,” and this wasn’t what he used to do when she did this, he didn’t stop laughing, he’d stay giggling long after she let him up, “Let me go.”
“PJ, come on, that’s so old.”
“Please,” he wasn’t moving under her, frozen still, “Let go of me.”
“No way, buddy.” He started struggling, moving hard under her, and she fought to keep her arms around him – he was so much taller and stronger than she remembered. Maybe she shouldn’t have laughed but she hadn’t expected him to freak out since it wasn’t like him to do that, she’d never known to him to do anything like that.
“Let go!” That was a yell, a real yell, “I mean it, stop!” and his elbow came up to smack on her chin and that broke her hold and he kicking his way away from her and scrambled across the bed to fall off the other side and she saw him fall to the floor with a big flat thump. He stood up shaking, eyes big and a hand over his mouth again in reflex, and she didn’t do anything but rub her jaw and stare as he said, “I’m sorry.” The face she made must’ve been good since he shook his head and went on, “Sorry. I didn’t mean that, I didn’t, don’t – would you please leave?” He gestured to the door. “Just leave.”
“PJ –”
“Please.” He didn’t move until she was almost at the door and even then he stayed in his room until she was out of there and he closed the door without looking. She rubbed her chin and went to her room and tried reading to calm down, but it didn’t help her stop trying to puzzle that out. She hadn’t expected or anticipated anything like that, even from a fourteen-year-old boy, even from a power with a license. He wouldn’t suddenly start acting like that and maybe six months was all-of-a-sudden but maybe he might with a reason, especially if it was a reason she didn’t know.
He seemed okay at dinner, joking with Dad and smiling with Mom and didn’t seem to have a problem with her being around. So it might just be the teenage thing. It could have been something she could put out of her mind as a puberty thing but when she got up to use the restroom that night and had to walk past his open door a second time to get back to bed she thought she heard something. Nothing she could make out but definitely something when she stayed quiet because it came up again maybe a minute later. Something vague and soft she couldn’t quite get and tried to put out of her head but could only save for later.
It took forever to warm up on Thanksgiving day and still wasn’t pleasant by noon. She and Dad drank coffee on the back porch when Mom was doing her best to finish up the dinner, and her older sister arrived around one, so for the next two hours it was just the two of them catching up on what they’d missed saying since last week, everything else out of her mind. Everyone else started arriving by three o’clock, and everyone was home by four-thirty.
The later she’d wanted came when just about everyone was watching some parade on TV and her mom had her hand inside the turkey pulling out the last bits of stuffing and all the women that were helping were bustling around enough she could speak quietly enough for the topic to stay private. “Mom?”
“Yep?”
She crossed her elbows and leaned against the counter, “Uh, I wanted to ask about PJ.”
“What about him?”
“Is he doing okay?”
The last bits of stuffing came out easy, filled the rest of the bowl and went back into the oven to stay warm. She didn’t meet her eyes. “He’s fine. Why are you asking?”
“He seems kind of – withdrawn, I think.”
She didn’t look away from washing her hands. “He’s fourteen. He’ll grow out of it.”
“I don’t know if that’s it.”
“He’s fine.” She wiped her hands off and turned to look her right in the eye, “Everything’s fine,” right in the eye for just a moment before plunging her hands back into the suds to get some last dishes and things washed and put away. “All his doctors said they got everything as normal as they could and it’s all coming along nicely.”
Something in Mom’s voice made her realize she’d just repeated the words, hadn’t said what she was really thinking. “I, there’s just this –”
“He’s doing fine. The surgery went fine, it’s all okay now.” She looked out the window and took a deep breath. “Maybe he talks in his sleep more, but he’s doing great. That’s what all his doctors are saying.”
“He talks in his sleep?” So she hadn’t imagined it.
“He always has but –” And that was all Mom had to say before Dad came into the kitchen and she had to find something to say about how the food was coming since everyone was more than ready to sit down.
PJ seemed like he was doing okay at dinner, passing the food around and laughing with everyone and automatically hiding his smile, but she knew she’d heard him talking in his sleep last night and that he hadn’t come up to hug her. She hadn’t planned on that. He’d always loved spending time with his cool big sister like he’d always said she was even when she’d had to babysit him, and he’d always rushed up to hug her when she came home after being away when she was in college. She really didn’t know. He’d gone to doctors all his life for all sorts of things and some of them were normal but most of them weren’t. Mom and Dad had first brought him home from the hospital with a little card and he’d shown her the first license he got when he was five before Mom told him to never show it to anyone. They hadn’t planned on bringing someone like him home, and she remembered how they hadn’t really sat down and explained to her what was different about him until he was eight and she was sixteen.
One of her friends at school had a boyfriend who’d never learned to keep his hands off. They’d gotten the police on him and that’d gotten him away from her, but not until after he’d done things good men shouldn’t do to good women. Her friend still went to classes and joked like always but she started spooking easily and never let anyone touch her. It wasn’t something anybody talked about in polite conversation but everyone knew, and when their cousin clapped him on the shoulder PJ startled the exact same way her friend had.
He went to his room as soon as he could, right when dinner was done, the minute he finished dessert, and nobody went up to get him to come down. Mom made a joke about teenagers and everyone laughed. It was the sort of joke everyone knew they were expected to laugh at so they did to keep everyone’s story the same. She knew she could expect Mom to make that joke to explain away everything no matter what it was.
Mom and Dad always said his surgery – his big one, the major one, the one he needed to be old enough for – would fix everything for him. They’d expected it, planned it, anticipated it. She’d heard them talk about it when she’d still lived at home the way she’d heard them talk about all the things they’d learned they could do to make PJ’s life easier and more normal, by hiding and hoping they didn’t catch her listening. Neither of them really talked about it to her so she never learned what those things were unless PJ told her himself, like when he was ten and showed her the four spots in his mouth where they’d pulled his fangs, spots that stayed empty until those teeth grew back six weeks later. Things she didn’t learn until she got curious enough to look up words like reconstruction and genitals in the dictionary.
She knew she couldn’t look forward to a moment when she could ask someone right out about what the doctors had done this time. Almost all she knew was that it was something big and formal and Mom had driven him to Nashville four or five times for appointments just to plan out what would happen when they cut him so he’d look normal. Something to fix what they could for what was wrong with him since they couldn’t crack him open and take out one of his two hearts.
She waited by PJ’s room again that night and listened hard for almost ten minutes, timed it by the clock on his wall. She got a clear murmur – “Mom, mom, please” – then it was gone and she slipped out to her room before it could come back. Everyone knew not to wake up people if they were sleepwalking but she didn’t know if she shouldn’t talk to people that talked in their sleep. Maybe they’d wake up or maybe they’d keep talking or maybe they’d start a conversation and answer her questions.
The day after Thanksgiving was always a huge let-down, with nothing to do and nowhere to go and her flight back wasn’t until Sunday. The trees were already empty and it wasn’t cold enough for snow yet, just the promise of days of gray cool damp skies with nothing bright or fresh to come along. PJ came downstairs already dressed and wearing his sneakers and sweatshirt even though it was warm in the house. She drank her coffee as he poured himself a bowl of cereal like nothing was at all wrong. If there was she barely knew. “Good morning.”
“Hey.” He sat across the table from her and started eating.
“Did you finish your book yet?”
“What? Oh, yeah, no, not yet.”
She nodded. “Um, look,” and she leaned in to show she was serious, “We haven’t had a chance to catch up yet, and I’m here until Sunday, and if you wanted, maybe we could catch a movie tomorrow.” She stopped to let him think about the idea, “I know you love going to the movies – let’s go.” She slapped her hand down on the table. “Tomorrow. We could, I could take you out to lunch and we could really catch up.”
He didn’t look like he’d say yes at first, looking down out of the corners of his eyes, then snapping his head up to smile a real smile without hiding his fangs at all, “Yeah, okay, let’s go to the movies.”
“Okay.”
Mom took her and her sister out for the day – tea and sandwiches and shopping for smart office dresses the moment the prices got marked down for the holiday shopping season – so she didn’t know what PJ was up to. Probably riding his bike around instead of staying at the house or hiding in his room to read some more. She didn’t ask when she got home.
When Saturday came around and it was time for them to leave, their mother stopped them at the door to make sure he had his license and inhaler before letting them go, smiling at his protest that he always had his license.
She waited until she’d started the car to ask him, “Does she always ask you that?”
“I always know where my license is.” He had his foot up pressed against the dash, hand tapping against his bent knee, “It’s not a joke! I gotta know where it is.”
“What happens if someone asks to see it and you don’t have it with you?” She glanced at him, and he kept staring out the window at the houses flitting past.
“I’d have it with me,” he sighed.
“But what if you didn’t?”
He glanced at her, mouth twisted in obvious confusion. “What? I’d have it with me. You just have it with you.”
“You always have it with you?”
“Yeah. You’re supposed to. Everyone does.”
She nodded carefully, took a moment to consider what to say. “I guess I’ve never had to need to think about a license –”
“It’s okay, most people don’t.” He went back to looking out the window.
The movie they ended up seeing wasn’t great or even good, too many chases and gunfights and not enough of anything else, but it didn’t last very long and gave them something to talk about until lunch came. As soon as the waiter had whisked off with their orders, she leaned in and asked, “Did you finish your book yet?”
“Yeah, last night,” he nodded, “It was really great, you might like it.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. What’d you like about it?”
“Just – mostly the stuff about San Francisco, how people go to these clubs and listen to music, these scenes where everyone was dancing.”
She nodded. “Sounds really nice.”
“Yeah.” He smiled and looked down away from her, looking more like her brother than he had all week. “I think it’d be pretty nice to head out there, maybe, I dunno, maybe I’ll go there for college.”
“Where, San Francisco?”
“Maybe. Just California.”
There was something in his voice – a weird softness to it when he said ‘California’ that made her stop a moment, not sure where she should go from there. “You wanna do that? Go all the way out there?”
He looked back up to shrug. “Sure. Why not?”
“I don’t know, I just think it’s a long way from home, that’s all.”
“So?” There was that same face he’d made in the car when she’d asked about his license, the face that asked why she was even asking the question.
She took a deep breath before starting without knowing where she’d go. “I mean – you haven’t traveled much, and it’s a few years away, so maybe by then…it’d be a big change, so maybe you’d want to stay closer to home, it’d be a lot to.” She couldn’t figure out the right thing to say as she talked, and stopped before she made anything worse, his face getting darker and angrier by the second, glaring at her like she shouldn’t even be talking.
“I know it’d be a lot,” he snarled. “That’s why I wanna go. You think of that?” He wasn’t yelling and that made his quiet anger even worse. “How come you think you know what I wanna do or what, how I’m feeling, you never ask me.” He kept glaring, kept his voice down low, sounding more and more like a baby brother as his voice started shaking, “Why do people keep think they know what a good idea would be for me? Why does everyone always try to help me? Nobody ever asks what would help or what I want or what’s going on and they just think they know and that’s enough for them because they never ask, they just keep helping and they don’t know.” He bit his lip, turned away, looked down at the table, hissed, “No one ever asks.”
All she could do was blink at the outburst. She knew it wouldn’t do him any good to say anything right away, so she picked over what she could say and waited until their food arrived and he’d eaten half his lunch in three bites to say, “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t look at her. “It’s okay.”
“No, I’m –” She took a breath, ran through the words again before saying them. “I’m sorry for saying that. We don’t talk very much, and I shouldn’t have just guessed how you’re doing. So I’d like to apologize for guessing.”
He nodded, not looking up, then said “Thanks” even more quietly than before, without anything behind it but a bit of air. She was about to go back to her food when she heard him mutter – maybe “Mom wouldn’t ever” or “Mom would never”.
“What was that?”
“Nothin’,” he said it fast, hard, in a regular tone of voice. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Okay.”
They still had some time to hang around and do nothing until they needed to be home for dinner, and it was too cold out for ice cream but the right time of year for hot chocolate, and he somehow got her to get him a coffee instead. They sat by the window with their drinks and watched people pass back and forth along the street, wind pulling at hair and coats and clouds threatening rain.
“You can call me, you know.” He blinked at the offer, at the break in the quiet between them. “And you can talk to me if I call home. I want to know how you’re doing. I’d like to hear it from you, not from Mom and Dad.”
PJ laughed. “Mom and Dad don’t ask me how I’m doing.”
“They don’t?”
“Nah, they just ask the doctors.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He took another long sip, like it wasn’t anything new or interesting, just something that happened like Thanksgiving and winter.
“Which is, um. Which is all the more reason I want to hear it right from you! News about my baby brother should come from my baby brother!” He was smiling now, really smiling, and she went on, “Promise me you’ll say hello next time I call.”
“Promise.”
“Really promise?”
“Really.”
When it was time to take her to the airport, he surprised Dad by asking to come along, which got him that – probably just because Dad hadn’t expected it. At the gate, right before she got on, she gave Dad a huge hug and got a kiss on the cheek in return. PJ still didn’t hug her right away, but he still hugged her back, and she said she’d call home as soon as she got to her apartment.
“I’ll see you at Christmas,” she said, still in his arms.
“The Subterraneans,” he said right back instead of a ‘good-bye.’
She found a copy a week later in a used bookstore and finished it in two nights, staying up late to get to the next chapter, then the next and next, falling into the dance-halls and jazz – not the way she knew PJ had, but still falling. The very next day she called home, not quite hoping or planning to talk about it with her brother – but when he took the phone when Mom asked him if he wanted to talk to his sister, she knew she hadn’t expected to hear anything quite as good as that first little, quiet “Hello.”
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: Jackass RPF (Power Generation)
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Notes: Thanksgiving 1985,
powergeneration style – for those not in the know, it's a collective AU where some people develop powers in their twenties (‘starters’) and others are born with strange bodies (‘physicals’), and PJ Clapp, stage name Johnny Knoxville, is a physical with unusual physiology. Set before Gross Anatomy. Title from the song It’s Morning Again In America by Sorry About Dresden. Thanks to lasergirl and akire_yta for consultations.She didn’t expect – no, she didn’t plan on what she’d find when she came home, six months away and two hours late to arrive at the airport. She expected plenty, hellos and hugs and kisses and got them just as soon as she got off the plane, her mother right there waiting for her and apologizing for the delay, insisting it wasn’t something to be worried over. Six months away, gone since last June, and not even coming back for a day to see her brother when he got home from the hospital. She’d wanted to be – her mother had told her over and over that it was better she stay in her apartment and go to work when she’d just gotten her new job in May, to not take time away from her new career, that her brother was doing fine.
Home looked just the same, pictures over the piano where they were supposed to be and a few extra on the bureau, all the trees in the backyard still intact and Dad at work and her room smelling musty and the plush Snoopy on her bed right where he was supposed to be. This might be the year he came to her apartment, and she couldn’t expect or plan that until it was time for her to leave. She dropped her bag on the rug where she always dropped it, took a look out the window down at the empty November streets – it all seemed so small now.
Her little brother got home thirty minutes after she did, tromping into the kitchen in his beat-up sneakers when she was in the living room with a mug of fresh hot lemon tea. She jumped up all ready to say hello, ready to wrap her arms around him tight like she always did when she got home and ready to have him wrap his arms around her right back. When she crowed, “Hey there, PJ!” he smiled big and happy, glad to see her. But he stood where he was like he didn’t know her good enough to come over and give her a hug, and even after she’d hugged him he still stood there like he didn’t know her good enough to hug her back – and then shivered a bit, like he came back into himself, like how one of her friends at school did sometimes when he didn’t take his meds, and finally hugged her back nice and deep like she knew he would. He was too big to be her little brother now, at least four inches taller since the last time she’d seen him, but he was still her baby brother, and when she said that he laughed like she expected him to, clenched fist coming up right away to hide his teeth how Mom and Dad always reminded him to do.
Mom said she’d make him some tea to drink with them, but he shrugged the offer away and went right to his room.
“Is he okay?” She asked when he was up the stairs.
Their mother shook her head and sighed. “He’s fourteen. He’ll grow out of it.”
“Is that why he won’t talk on the phone?”
“Well, I’d think so.” Right around when he got back from the hospital last summer, around the beginning of July, he’d stopped talking to her, and every time Mom called her or she called home he’d never come to the phone. Mom and Dad had to yell across the house and up the stairs to get a little bit out of him, or they’d just repeat what he told them when he was close enough for her to hear him over the line. All the information she had about him now was secondhand at best. She remembered being fourteen and how she never told her parents everything if she could help it, and maybe it was just something that happened at that age, something she could plan on him growing out of just like she had. But she couldn’t anticipate that happening today or tomorrow or anytime soon, just like she could expect him to tell her things he wouldn’t tell Mom and Dad.
She didn’t bother to knock on his door almost an hour later after finally catching up with Dad. PJ was curled up on his bed, sneakers and sweatshirt still on, reading something from the library. “What’ya got there?”
“The Subterraneans. It’s by Jack Kerouac.”
She sat down near his bent knees, and he didn’t look at her, just kept his eyes on the page. “What’s it about?”
“Some people out in San Francisco.”
“Sounds pretty good.”
He turned a page and kept reading. “Yeah. It’s okay.”
“Too good to talk to your sister? Come on, talk to me. How’s things?” He made a face and flipped in the cover as a bookmark, tossed it onto the floor and propped his head up on his arm when she lay down. “I hear you’re in sports now. That’s new.”
“Yeah. Football, basketball.”
“Big man on campus.” That got his smile up and told her he liked hearing that. “Win any games?”
“A few.”
“Mom says you get to travel for games.” Mom and Dad both said it, both of them happy to talk about the normal and regular things he did. She already knew everything but still wanted to hear it from him.
“Sometimes.”
“Do you like that? C’mon, gimme something here.”
He pressed his lips into a closed smile, “It’s better going with the team than Mom.”
That got her to laugh out, “Okay, yeah, gotcha. So what else?”
He pushed up against the pillows to sit up, “That’s all, just school, some sports. What about you?”
“Well, the job’s going fine, some nice people in the office, but there’s nothing special about it. Come on, I want to hear about you, how are you these days? My baby brother and I don’t know how he’s doing. Won’t even talk to me on the phone.”
“I told you, I’m –”
She didn’t give him a moment to finish saying what he was or wasn’t, lunged to pushed herself up and over and rolled around to wrap her arms around his chest and hold him down against the bed. He was taller but still younger and he’d always be young enough for her to do this, he’d always be shaking and laughing along with her, “Lemme up, come on.”
“No way, not ’till you start talking.”
“I mean it,” and this wasn’t what he used to do when she did this, he didn’t stop laughing, he’d stay giggling long after she let him up, “Let me go.”
“PJ, come on, that’s so old.”
“Please,” he wasn’t moving under her, frozen still, “Let go of me.”
“No way, buddy.” He started struggling, moving hard under her, and she fought to keep her arms around him – he was so much taller and stronger than she remembered. Maybe she shouldn’t have laughed but she hadn’t expected him to freak out since it wasn’t like him to do that, she’d never known to him to do anything like that.
“Let go!” That was a yell, a real yell, “I mean it, stop!” and his elbow came up to smack on her chin and that broke her hold and he kicking his way away from her and scrambled across the bed to fall off the other side and she saw him fall to the floor with a big flat thump. He stood up shaking, eyes big and a hand over his mouth again in reflex, and she didn’t do anything but rub her jaw and stare as he said, “I’m sorry.” The face she made must’ve been good since he shook his head and went on, “Sorry. I didn’t mean that, I didn’t, don’t – would you please leave?” He gestured to the door. “Just leave.”
“PJ –”
“Please.” He didn’t move until she was almost at the door and even then he stayed in his room until she was out of there and he closed the door without looking. She rubbed her chin and went to her room and tried reading to calm down, but it didn’t help her stop trying to puzzle that out. She hadn’t expected or anticipated anything like that, even from a fourteen-year-old boy, even from a power with a license. He wouldn’t suddenly start acting like that and maybe six months was all-of-a-sudden but maybe he might with a reason, especially if it was a reason she didn’t know.
He seemed okay at dinner, joking with Dad and smiling with Mom and didn’t seem to have a problem with her being around. So it might just be the teenage thing. It could have been something she could put out of her mind as a puberty thing but when she got up to use the restroom that night and had to walk past his open door a second time to get back to bed she thought she heard something. Nothing she could make out but definitely something when she stayed quiet because it came up again maybe a minute later. Something vague and soft she couldn’t quite get and tried to put out of her head but could only save for later.
It took forever to warm up on Thanksgiving day and still wasn’t pleasant by noon. She and Dad drank coffee on the back porch when Mom was doing her best to finish up the dinner, and her older sister arrived around one, so for the next two hours it was just the two of them catching up on what they’d missed saying since last week, everything else out of her mind. Everyone else started arriving by three o’clock, and everyone was home by four-thirty.
The later she’d wanted came when just about everyone was watching some parade on TV and her mom had her hand inside the turkey pulling out the last bits of stuffing and all the women that were helping were bustling around enough she could speak quietly enough for the topic to stay private. “Mom?”
“Yep?”
She crossed her elbows and leaned against the counter, “Uh, I wanted to ask about PJ.”
“What about him?”
“Is he doing okay?”
The last bits of stuffing came out easy, filled the rest of the bowl and went back into the oven to stay warm. She didn’t meet her eyes. “He’s fine. Why are you asking?”
“He seems kind of – withdrawn, I think.”
She didn’t look away from washing her hands. “He’s fourteen. He’ll grow out of it.”
“I don’t know if that’s it.”
“He’s fine.” She wiped her hands off and turned to look her right in the eye, “Everything’s fine,” right in the eye for just a moment before plunging her hands back into the suds to get some last dishes and things washed and put away. “All his doctors said they got everything as normal as they could and it’s all coming along nicely.”
Something in Mom’s voice made her realize she’d just repeated the words, hadn’t said what she was really thinking. “I, there’s just this –”
“He’s doing fine. The surgery went fine, it’s all okay now.” She looked out the window and took a deep breath. “Maybe he talks in his sleep more, but he’s doing great. That’s what all his doctors are saying.”
“He talks in his sleep?” So she hadn’t imagined it.
“He always has but –” And that was all Mom had to say before Dad came into the kitchen and she had to find something to say about how the food was coming since everyone was more than ready to sit down.
PJ seemed like he was doing okay at dinner, passing the food around and laughing with everyone and automatically hiding his smile, but she knew she’d heard him talking in his sleep last night and that he hadn’t come up to hug her. She hadn’t planned on that. He’d always loved spending time with his cool big sister like he’d always said she was even when she’d had to babysit him, and he’d always rushed up to hug her when she came home after being away when she was in college. She really didn’t know. He’d gone to doctors all his life for all sorts of things and some of them were normal but most of them weren’t. Mom and Dad had first brought him home from the hospital with a little card and he’d shown her the first license he got when he was five before Mom told him to never show it to anyone. They hadn’t planned on bringing someone like him home, and she remembered how they hadn’t really sat down and explained to her what was different about him until he was eight and she was sixteen.
One of her friends at school had a boyfriend who’d never learned to keep his hands off. They’d gotten the police on him and that’d gotten him away from her, but not until after he’d done things good men shouldn’t do to good women. Her friend still went to classes and joked like always but she started spooking easily and never let anyone touch her. It wasn’t something anybody talked about in polite conversation but everyone knew, and when their cousin clapped him on the shoulder PJ startled the exact same way her friend had.
He went to his room as soon as he could, right when dinner was done, the minute he finished dessert, and nobody went up to get him to come down. Mom made a joke about teenagers and everyone laughed. It was the sort of joke everyone knew they were expected to laugh at so they did to keep everyone’s story the same. She knew she could expect Mom to make that joke to explain away everything no matter what it was.
Mom and Dad always said his surgery – his big one, the major one, the one he needed to be old enough for – would fix everything for him. They’d expected it, planned it, anticipated it. She’d heard them talk about it when she’d still lived at home the way she’d heard them talk about all the things they’d learned they could do to make PJ’s life easier and more normal, by hiding and hoping they didn’t catch her listening. Neither of them really talked about it to her so she never learned what those things were unless PJ told her himself, like when he was ten and showed her the four spots in his mouth where they’d pulled his fangs, spots that stayed empty until those teeth grew back six weeks later. Things she didn’t learn until she got curious enough to look up words like reconstruction and genitals in the dictionary.
She knew she couldn’t look forward to a moment when she could ask someone right out about what the doctors had done this time. Almost all she knew was that it was something big and formal and Mom had driven him to Nashville four or five times for appointments just to plan out what would happen when they cut him so he’d look normal. Something to fix what they could for what was wrong with him since they couldn’t crack him open and take out one of his two hearts.
She waited by PJ’s room again that night and listened hard for almost ten minutes, timed it by the clock on his wall. She got a clear murmur – “Mom, mom, please” – then it was gone and she slipped out to her room before it could come back. Everyone knew not to wake up people if they were sleepwalking but she didn’t know if she shouldn’t talk to people that talked in their sleep. Maybe they’d wake up or maybe they’d keep talking or maybe they’d start a conversation and answer her questions.
The day after Thanksgiving was always a huge let-down, with nothing to do and nowhere to go and her flight back wasn’t until Sunday. The trees were already empty and it wasn’t cold enough for snow yet, just the promise of days of gray cool damp skies with nothing bright or fresh to come along. PJ came downstairs already dressed and wearing his sneakers and sweatshirt even though it was warm in the house. She drank her coffee as he poured himself a bowl of cereal like nothing was at all wrong. If there was she barely knew. “Good morning.”
“Hey.” He sat across the table from her and started eating.
“Did you finish your book yet?”
“What? Oh, yeah, no, not yet.”
She nodded. “Um, look,” and she leaned in to show she was serious, “We haven’t had a chance to catch up yet, and I’m here until Sunday, and if you wanted, maybe we could catch a movie tomorrow.” She stopped to let him think about the idea, “I know you love going to the movies – let’s go.” She slapped her hand down on the table. “Tomorrow. We could, I could take you out to lunch and we could really catch up.”
He didn’t look like he’d say yes at first, looking down out of the corners of his eyes, then snapping his head up to smile a real smile without hiding his fangs at all, “Yeah, okay, let’s go to the movies.”
“Okay.”
Mom took her and her sister out for the day – tea and sandwiches and shopping for smart office dresses the moment the prices got marked down for the holiday shopping season – so she didn’t know what PJ was up to. Probably riding his bike around instead of staying at the house or hiding in his room to read some more. She didn’t ask when she got home.
When Saturday came around and it was time for them to leave, their mother stopped them at the door to make sure he had his license and inhaler before letting them go, smiling at his protest that he always had his license.
She waited until she’d started the car to ask him, “Does she always ask you that?”
“I always know where my license is.” He had his foot up pressed against the dash, hand tapping against his bent knee, “It’s not a joke! I gotta know where it is.”
“What happens if someone asks to see it and you don’t have it with you?” She glanced at him, and he kept staring out the window at the houses flitting past.
“I’d have it with me,” he sighed.
“But what if you didn’t?”
He glanced at her, mouth twisted in obvious confusion. “What? I’d have it with me. You just have it with you.”
“You always have it with you?”
“Yeah. You’re supposed to. Everyone does.”
She nodded carefully, took a moment to consider what to say. “I guess I’ve never had to need to think about a license –”
“It’s okay, most people don’t.” He went back to looking out the window.
The movie they ended up seeing wasn’t great or even good, too many chases and gunfights and not enough of anything else, but it didn’t last very long and gave them something to talk about until lunch came. As soon as the waiter had whisked off with their orders, she leaned in and asked, “Did you finish your book yet?”
“Yeah, last night,” he nodded, “It was really great, you might like it.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. What’d you like about it?”
“Just – mostly the stuff about San Francisco, how people go to these clubs and listen to music, these scenes where everyone was dancing.”
She nodded. “Sounds really nice.”
“Yeah.” He smiled and looked down away from her, looking more like her brother than he had all week. “I think it’d be pretty nice to head out there, maybe, I dunno, maybe I’ll go there for college.”
“Where, San Francisco?”
“Maybe. Just California.”
There was something in his voice – a weird softness to it when he said ‘California’ that made her stop a moment, not sure where she should go from there. “You wanna do that? Go all the way out there?”
He looked back up to shrug. “Sure. Why not?”
“I don’t know, I just think it’s a long way from home, that’s all.”
“So?” There was that same face he’d made in the car when she’d asked about his license, the face that asked why she was even asking the question.
She took a deep breath before starting without knowing where she’d go. “I mean – you haven’t traveled much, and it’s a few years away, so maybe by then…it’d be a big change, so maybe you’d want to stay closer to home, it’d be a lot to.” She couldn’t figure out the right thing to say as she talked, and stopped before she made anything worse, his face getting darker and angrier by the second, glaring at her like she shouldn’t even be talking.
“I know it’d be a lot,” he snarled. “That’s why I wanna go. You think of that?” He wasn’t yelling and that made his quiet anger even worse. “How come you think you know what I wanna do or what, how I’m feeling, you never ask me.” He kept glaring, kept his voice down low, sounding more and more like a baby brother as his voice started shaking, “Why do people keep think they know what a good idea would be for me? Why does everyone always try to help me? Nobody ever asks what would help or what I want or what’s going on and they just think they know and that’s enough for them because they never ask, they just keep helping and they don’t know.” He bit his lip, turned away, looked down at the table, hissed, “No one ever asks.”
All she could do was blink at the outburst. She knew it wouldn’t do him any good to say anything right away, so she picked over what she could say and waited until their food arrived and he’d eaten half his lunch in three bites to say, “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t look at her. “It’s okay.”
“No, I’m –” She took a breath, ran through the words again before saying them. “I’m sorry for saying that. We don’t talk very much, and I shouldn’t have just guessed how you’re doing. So I’d like to apologize for guessing.”
He nodded, not looking up, then said “Thanks” even more quietly than before, without anything behind it but a bit of air. She was about to go back to her food when she heard him mutter – maybe “Mom wouldn’t ever” or “Mom would never”.
“What was that?”
“Nothin’,” he said it fast, hard, in a regular tone of voice. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Okay.”
They still had some time to hang around and do nothing until they needed to be home for dinner, and it was too cold out for ice cream but the right time of year for hot chocolate, and he somehow got her to get him a coffee instead. They sat by the window with their drinks and watched people pass back and forth along the street, wind pulling at hair and coats and clouds threatening rain.
“You can call me, you know.” He blinked at the offer, at the break in the quiet between them. “And you can talk to me if I call home. I want to know how you’re doing. I’d like to hear it from you, not from Mom and Dad.”
PJ laughed. “Mom and Dad don’t ask me how I’m doing.”
“They don’t?”
“Nah, they just ask the doctors.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He took another long sip, like it wasn’t anything new or interesting, just something that happened like Thanksgiving and winter.
“Which is, um. Which is all the more reason I want to hear it right from you! News about my baby brother should come from my baby brother!” He was smiling now, really smiling, and she went on, “Promise me you’ll say hello next time I call.”
“Promise.”
“Really promise?”
“Really.”
When it was time to take her to the airport, he surprised Dad by asking to come along, which got him that – probably just because Dad hadn’t expected it. At the gate, right before she got on, she gave Dad a huge hug and got a kiss on the cheek in return. PJ still didn’t hug her right away, but he still hugged her back, and she said she’d call home as soon as she got to her apartment.
“I’ll see you at Christmas,” she said, still in his arms.
“The Subterraneans,” he said right back instead of a ‘good-bye.’
She found a copy a week later in a used bookstore and finished it in two nights, staying up late to get to the next chapter, then the next and next, falling into the dance-halls and jazz – not the way she knew PJ had, but still falling. The very next day she called home, not quite hoping or planning to talk about it with her brother – but when he took the phone when Mom asked him if he wanted to talk to his sister, she knew she hadn’t expected to hear anything quite as good as that first little, quiet “Hello.”