Part 16
Sean rested against me for a long stretch of emptiness which was broken up whenever we snaked towards the light of a major freeway. I looked through Allison’s books despite the dim, overhead lights. I looked over the ticket Sean had bought me for the return trip. We’d almost forgotten it.
I set it on the nearest counter in case the conductor asked for it. I thought about what Sean had said about Uncle Nolan. It wasn’t a bad idea. I could figure out a reason to stay with him until after the weekend and it would eliminate the need to explain things to Clayton and Malcolm. I wrapped my thoughts around the idea but ultimately rejected it. The two of them were going to find out eventually. No more deception and hiding.
Sooner than I expected, we rolled into our last stop at the local station. Despite the fact the entrée I’d had earlier didn’t seem that spicy, I arrived with a torrent of gurgling and cramping which made me thoroughly regret supper. Thankfully, Allison had some dried ginger and papaya for me to chew, which really helped. Still, I’d probably need something else later. Allison promised to brew her best herbal tea.
Lissa exchanged hugs before getting in her car. She promised to call…which got a twin wary look from Sean and me…then reiterated, “I will absolutely call.”
Sean took care of driving back and I had a rare opportunity to settle into the rear of Allison’s car with our cargo. The legroom wasn’t as nice as upfront but it was still nice. I was relaxed and smiled as Allison put a sweet, romantic song on the radio and flashed waves of amorous gazes at us.
The nervousness came when we pulled into the drive and I could tell that the guys were home. Hopefully in their rooms but they could be watching a movie. Allison and other Sean went in first and I stayed in the car a while. Eventually, Allison popped out of the door and waved me in.
They were both watching a movie. We quickly walked past as Allison showed off her books and plushie. Apparently (according to what Allison told me later) Clayton noticed and rubbed at his eyes before downing his drink and Malcolm didn’t even notice or at least didn't give any sign that he did. He and Clayton split what food Allison had left from the trip.
The sleeping situation was quickly remedied because Sean’s bed had used to be a bunk set but the top section was stored away in one of the spare rooms. Allison just cleaned it off and lifted it into place. I eagerly took the top bunk and leaned back against my pillow. Allison stretched up to give me a kiss then crouched to give one to Sean as well. She winked and told us, “I’ll be up a bit longer if either of you would like to stop by…”
I still wasn’t very tired but I could definitely go for a shower. I went first. I considered the device and the pulsate settings but wound up taking a shower as I was. We did get a few looks from the living room when it seemed that I was taking two showers but we got no comments.
While Sean showered with the device on, I used the computer for a while. I considered writing a few things down I hadn’t said yet, to preserve them. Of what I had left, there was one bit which still stuck firmly in my memory. I should’ve said it before, but I wasn’t sure if it would even make a difference.
When Sean returned with a towel around his head as cute anime Corlie, I resolved to tell him. As with everything, there was no good place to start.
“You should know that there’s a reverse to the thing which the Daemonrae call the Ae. It has no name but…” I sighed and paused.
He listened closely as I continued, “…In the same way the Ae is the source of all good things, this is where all the bad things originate. Destruction, darkness, and suffering. It can get into living things and it can exist as them….”
He let go of a sharp breath and questioned, “Are you suggesting this is why our parents are the way they are?”
I could only shrug. “I don’t know as much about this as the Ae but I have enough to wonder. I mean we’ve known for a long while mom is nuts despite Uncle Nolan’s sympathy for her. We’ve felt she’s evil with something fundamentally wrong with her. If one of those good spirits the Daemonrae revere has been around us in the past…it could be that terrible things found us before that.”
I wasn’t sure how much I bought into all this. It felt so mystical but I was hardly one to talk as the copy of someone standing in front of me.
Sean gave a slow nod and said, “If mom is infected with something evil or is something evil then that would make sense. Like some real, actual demon thing inside her. But I also have to wonder…what if she's a fundamentally-sane person who chose to cause suffering? Not connected to some dark force but doing what she does because she wishes to? Nothing pushing her that way. I dunno which is scarier…”
He had a point. I hugged the chair and swiveled slowly. We discussed a bit about yin and yang but neither of us knew enough about the idea for me to say if the Ae and this unnamed dark force were comparable to that human idea.
Eventually, we let it go. We didn’t worry that we’d have to deal with mom and dad. We just let the present moment exist. We played a two-player game on the computer. We discussed random memories of Uncle Nolan. We considered a late call. We wondered if we should disguise me or have me use the device and pretend to be a friend of Sean’s. The answer was decided as Malcolm knocked on the door and I had no place to hide.
We invited him in and he stared between the two of us. He only asked, “So….busy day?”
Sean remarked, “You could say that.”
Malcolm sighed and, after asking for confirmation whether we found out if the device was safe to use or not, asked for it and the controller because, “It was one of those days for me.”
After that, we pretty much stopped hiding and brought on only the briefest of confused looks from Clayton before he was jotting down an idea on a scrap of paper. I could only imagine some sort of duplicator or teleporter had slipped into his mind. Malcolm emerged later as the young girl of the other day and made hanging out with Clayton much more interesting.
We didn’t resolve the name situation. I was still Sean, despite everything. But I agreed to use Corlie as a nickname if it made things easier for others. Malcolm used it constantly. I had to think of a girlish name for him. Malissa? Nah.
Before long, the house situation was back to something approaching our normal sort of strangeness. I was accepted as a unique consequence of the device for Sean (which was technically correct). So far as other details, neither of them looked particularly interested in the long explanation at the moment since Malcolm was delighting in just being a shy, young-looking girl and Clayton just looked bewildered at everything around him.
I returned to the room later and found out that Sean had given them the short version of events with Allison’s help. It didn’t change anything for me. Although I did get a comment from Malcolm wondering why a girl would want to turn herself into a boy. I teased him by suggesting his girlfriend try boyhood out while he was an anime girl. He didn’t reject the possibility quite as quickly as I expected.
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Sean went to bed a little while later. I learned quite well how badly he…I snored as I glared down at him and settled back against the bed. The bunk wasn’t bad and it afforded me a nice view of the dimly-lit posters on the walls. Not even halfway through class and how I saw them had changed so drastically and, I assumed, how Sean did too. I didn’t have to go back to class but class had changed everything about my life, just not in the way the professor probably intended. I had changed myself. We had.
I rested at some point but felt relieved the night was dreamless. I felt good when I woke up despite just a few hours of sleep and a groggy Sean. I hopped up to help Allison with her breakfast prep work. I peeled and skinned and broke and stirred. I don’t know if I did it with the same energy that Allison somehow possessed at such an early hour but I did it to the best of my ability as Sean. The others soon made their foot-dragging arrivals. Malcolm was back to ‘normal’.
They couldn’t distinguish which parts I had made compared with what Allison had made. I felt a little flash of pride about that. Breakfast wandered into the regular routines except for me and Sean. Allison offered to come with us but we felt we had to do this alone. She let us borrow her car for the day though and hitched a ride with Malcolm, who looked to be coming off some sort of anime girl high.
Black Willow County was just north of the park we’d visited, further into the desert where the flat emptiness was only broken by distant hills and random buttes. It was enough of a drive that we’d owe Allison a couple of gallons in the tank on the way back. And it was long enough to give us time between searching for what stations worked on the radio to ponder what to say. We knew we had to do this. Tessa and the Daemonrae knew we had to do this but we only had the vaguest inkling of what we were supposed to do. The last time hadn’t been very pleasant.
But it was too late to turn back. The North Brookville Hospice was in the same isolated medical complex funded by the county along with the mental facility and a minimum-security prison. The walls around the complex went for what felt like a mile. The medical area was wrapped in more trees than probably covered ten square miles in all directions. The parking lot was only about half-full, with plenty of spots near the front. The building itself was stark, colored like the rest of the desert, etched in straight lines, and what Uncle Nolan always called “East German architecture”. The glass windows were pitted badly and a gale burst through as we entered the squeaking, sliding door.
First would be a visit with dad. I wouldn’t need to show my ID. They just needed my name. I gave it as “Corlie Kurtz” to the tall, scruffy security guard at the front desk and both liked and regretted the alliterative sound of it.
Dad was up on two at the end of a long, desolate hallway. Most of the other patients were in long-term hospice care as well. We announced ourselves to the nurse and she looked us over. I wondered if she remembered Sean and was going to ask the obvious question. While my clothes weren’t the strange combination they’d been yesterday, Sean and I had both chosen similar colors.
She gave a quick chuckle and noted, “Haven’t seen many twins lately. Alright. He’s still in 222.”
We thanked her and made our way down to his room. It had a flatscreen TV in the corner and an old couch Uncle Nolan had donated along with a plant and some other touches by the staff to make it feel more friendly. Dad lay in the bed with his head and legs tilted up and surrounded by bulkheads of pillows and sheets. His right hand was clenched and behind his head, while his other hand shook slowly like he was trying to play an invisible guitar. His face was scruffy today.
None of his bitter scowls or twisting anger showed on his face. He wore an expression that looked halfway between confusion and worry. We took up a pair of chairs on the side his head was turned and watched him. He still had the crease of the scar from the bullet.
We looked at one another. I could tell Sean didn’t want to start but neither did I. Dad moaned a little. We had no idea if he did that because we were there. Eventually, I spoke a thought aloud.
“You were an asshole, dad,” I spoke without emotion. Sean picked up my words and added, “In some ways, you were worse than mom because there were days we had hope that you might treat us like your child rather than something that never worked right for you.”
Naturally, he gave no answer. I breathlessly recounted events, times where I was angrier than I showed. I recounted how I felt. I recounted what I wanted to scream so many times my head felt like it would explode. I growled about a childhood lost, a childhood that wasn’t even mine but which I felt so deeply. Sean touched my hand and he took his turn.
The times when I actually sided with him against mom. But mom was the mountain insurmountable. You could never be right. You could never get anywhere. You could never exist but within her orbit and that was just on the normal days.
The poison, the pain, the fear they’d fed us. We both wanted to raise our voices but this was a hospital. We didn’t dwell on his infidelity but we both told him how we hated him for hurting Uncle Nolan and wished he’d been put in prison for that (although that would’ve left us with mom).
There were other things. So many things. A lifetime of angry voices and intolerance and hate. Our best efforts were only fuel for the fire. There were things we’d forgotten or locked away. There were big things and little things. We tried to unseal as many as we could but, despite both our minds, some of those events were lost to a dark mire of hopelessness and pain.
When we were down to the marrow, we stopped. Dad puzzled at us like we were some new plant. Everything just felt raw inside, like punching a nauseated stomach and expecting to vomit away our problems.
We sat there without anything else to spew. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to choke him almost as much as mom. But, seeing him there, it felt so pitiful. He was a shell. He was nothing. All the rage that defined him was gone. All the sharp bitterness which saw everyone as his opponent. It was a slumping figure of flesh. I leaned forward and said the one thing I never thought I would say to that face.
“I forgive you, dad.”
Sean jerked his head towards me. I wasn’t sure I meant it. They were just words but there was no point in building the hatred, in elevating the past. As I told Sean, mom and dad were both a bitter, painful remnant of our past. Maybe that’s what the Daemonrae wanted us to do, to forgive the past and let go of it? Their advice had been vague but I figured some sort of reconciliation was what they were going for.
Saying that statement didn’t feel revelatory or calming in the least. Dad didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. He just stared and drooled.
Sean clenched his lips and said, “You destroyed whatever parts of my life I had which mom hadn’t touched. You stole years of my life. I should hate you forever. But I don’t want to waste that effort on you because it takes away even more of my time. So yeah, I forgive you too, dad. Not out of kindness or understanding but because I need to let go of that emptiness.”