Beetle Boy (4 page)

I wrote as best I could in my scribbly handwriting. I probably misspelled every other word, but I put my heart into it for Dad. He was unloading the groceries onto the kitchen counter as I wrote.

“Keep writing, Charlie-boy,” he said. “I'll go get us some ice to keep the food cold till tomorrow.” He put his coat back on, whistling. Before he left, he checked on Liam, who had cried himself to sleep on a bare mattress in our soon-to-be new bedroom. This seemed like a hopeful sign to me—Dad was still our dad. He would handle the situation.

I had successfully revived him.

I got it into my head that Mom's story had saved him and, by saving him, saved me. That was incorrect. That was an early big mistake.

I am in the little corner grocery store where I used to buy cereal, milk, and junk food whenever Dad left money for us in the food jar. I am at the checkout counter, getting ready to pay for a box of frozen waffles, when I hear Liam yelling my name from outside the store. I leave my waffles on the counter and go back to the glass door, where I see that four-year-old Liam has followed me from our apartment, and he is standing naked in the middle of the parking lot. Behind a parked car, very near my naked brother, I see several hairy black legs showing; something is crouched behind the car, hiding. I rush back to the counter to pay for my food so I can save my brother, but all I have in my pockets are ripped-out pages from assorted Beetle Boy books. No money! The clerk says I have to put all the food back, which takes forever. When I finally make it back out to the parking lot, Liam is gone. Where is he? Where is the beetle? Behind the car—no beetle, no Liam—nothing but a pile of bones and more torn-out pages. Liam! Liam!

Charlie! Charlie! Stop rolling around! You're going to hurt yourself!

“Oh … what? Oh, okay. Okay. I'll just go back to sleep.

You were calling for your brother again. Why were you doing that? What was going on in your dream?

“I told you, you can't ask me to explain my dreams. I promise I'll sleep now, okay? Thanks for checking on me.”

I turn away from her and thump my pillow. Make a big show of returning to peaceful sleep. She sits at the side of the mattress for a long time.

Her parents want to meet me, which is only fair, since I have been camping out in their daughter's living room for weeks, the same daughter who waits on me hand and foot whenever she's home. “Tell me what they know,” I say. “So I can prepare.”

Well … they do know that you're my boyfriend, Charlie.

“Oh God.”

No, they're glad I have a new boyfriend! They didn't like my old boyfriend. And they totally get that somebody has to help you recover from your accident. I mean … since your parents can't. So it makes sense to them that you're staying here.

“Do they know you've seen me naked?”

Well … that's pretty obvious, isn't it?

“Do they know that I've seen
you
naked?”

(Laughs) We didn't discuss it! They probably think you can't do anything because of your broken leg.

Which is only partly true. Every few days we try to have sex, but so far, it is the worst combination of pain and pleasure you can possibly imagine. Where afterward you are trying for like five minutes not to scream. Then, a few days later, it starts seeming like a good idea again.

These efforts only happen in Clara's bed. Somehow the sofa—my recovery station and the site of my nightmares—seems a terrible place to be romantic or even energetic. Not that Clara's bed is the greatest place for sex. Sometimes it seems like we are having sex at a party in the room of some little kid. But she uses the headboard to brace herself gently on top of me. I have to lie on my back, naturally. It's very limiting, but it has its rewards.

I find the fact that Clara is an older woman exciting, although neither of us knew much of anything about sex when we met. Apparently, her previous boyfriend was very conflicted about having sex before marriage; they only tried it a few times. So we were not virgins, but we were morons. Actually, before I tore out my Achilles, we had sex twice—once in her car,
very
moronic, and once on the beach in the moonlight, romantically moronic. I am sure it would have been just as traumatic and humiliating as the few sexcapades from my senior year of high school if it hadn't been for Clara acting like it was perfectly okay for us to be awkward at sex—like maybe it was even better than being experienced—because it was going to be so much fun to improve. Why did she think that? Why was she so optimistic about everything? Is it because she's pretty? She tells me I'm handsome! Sometimes after she says it, I want to run and look into a full-length mirror, to see if something about me has radically changed. I don't know what it would feel like to ever believe in my own handsomeness.

Who besides Clara has ever expressed pleasure about my appearance?

And knowing that she is attracted to me—it's like a super-power, the ability to become worthy of her attention. It's just that right now her attention is so confusingly inescapable! She keeps trying to dissect me! And now—God help me—the parents are coming! I am fucking terrified to meet Clara's parents. I'm not good with parents—parents bring only disaster, humiliation, and pain.

Ugh, I know I have to do it. I have to meet Don and Susan. To earn my spot on the sleeper sofa and keep Clara close to me, helping me, fetching my crutches, rubbing my aching back, bringing me food.

One month after the three amigos moved into the bachelor apartment, Dad took the first two of the beetle stories to the public library and typed them on a computer. He corrected all the spelling and transcribed my sentences into complete, grammatically correct sentences. Probably a librarian helped him.

After that he contacted his old friend Sam Church, the only person he knew personally who was any sort of artist. Dad offered him half of our eventual book sales if he would illustrate the books. Sam said yes. The next week Sam brought over a used computer and a scanner that had been in a closet where he worked at a downtown copy store. I was home when he arrived, and I watched him come into the living room, grinning ear to ear and making a big fuss about how nice the apartment was.
Are you blind?
I was thinking.

“You did it, Danny-boy,” Sam said. He had long hair to his shoulders and a full beard and a raspy laugh. “It sure is good to see you happy again, like the old days.”

Even at age six, I knew this was a dig at Mom and I didn't like it. But seeing Dad laughing and popping open beer cans with his friend was surprisingly heartening. Sam was even letting Liam sit on his lap, something Dad never did. And Sam had read both of the first two beetle books, and he was treating me like they were going to change the world. “Oh, you have a rare gift, son,” he said to me. “You and your pop are really onto something now.”

Can he be right?
I wondered.

I looked at Dad. He was beaming proudly, happy to include his friend in our soon-to-be success. I looked at Liam, playing with Sam's beard, singing a little song to himself. I looked around the apartment. Maybe it wasn't so bad. Maybe we were really onto something. Maybe it would be easy and involve no further suffering.

All this time, I was going to a new school, doing my homework, playing with a few new friends from the apartment complex, and taking care of Liam, who was in pre-K and quickly becoming the kindergartner from hell. His teacher kept asking me to have my mother call her, and I kept telling her I would. At one point, she asked me why no one ever answered my home phone. I happened to know that we no longer had a home phone, only Dad's cell phone, whose number I was not supposed to give out. I said, very calmly, “My mom has two jobs so nobody is ever at our house during the day.” I was starting to lie routinely.

“Oh really?” Mrs. Dahlia's eyebrows shot up. “Then who takes care of you boys?”

“Our grandmother,” I said. “We go to her house after school.”

“Do you think your grandmother would be willing to talk to me about Liam's behavior?”

My mind raced for an answer. “She doesn't speak English, ma'am. She's from Spain.”

Liam's teacher made a face of bewilderment. “Your father is Spanish?”

“Right,” I said. I grabbed Liam's hand and hurried away. When Dad came home, carrying a pizza, I brought up Mrs. Dahlia. “She wants to talk to you about Liam.”

“No way. I have no time for wacko teachers.”

“She's nice, Dad,” I insisted. “Pretty too.”

“Pretty?” Dad perked up. “How old would you say?”

“Younger than you. But here's something you should know. I told her you were Spanish.”

“Why in the world—”

“She was asking me about Mom. I told her my grandmother took care of us. My Spanish grandmother.”

This made him laugh—a rare accomplishment. “That's a good one, Charlie-boy. Ha-ha. Leave it to me. I'll take care of it.” He laughed again and chucked me under the chin. “Qué pasa, Charlie?”

The next morning Dad called the school, speaking with a slight Spanish accent, while Liam and I snickered behind our hands. The office put him straight through to Mrs. Dahlia, and Dad spoke with a combination of Hispanic charm and fatherly concern and it was a home run with Mrs. Dahlia. He offered to come in that same night and hear her thoughts on Liam. When he hung up, he winked at Liam and said, “You're one lucky amigo, hanging around with Senorita Dahlia.”

Liam said, “I hate her.”

This surprised even Dad. “Whoa, little amigo, you don't want to talk that way about your first teacher.”

“All she ever does is yell at me.”

“I'll talk some sense into her,” he promised.

Talk some sense into her.
It was something he used to say regularly about Mom, and so I wasn't optimistic about Mrs. Dahlia. I looked across the table at Liam. He looked unusually happy, apparently thrilled that Dad was going to talk some sense into his teacher. The strangest things made him happy. I would die before I'd want Dad to visit my teacher.

“Move it, boys, get yourselves ready for school,” Dad said. It was Wednesday, his day to meet Sam and critique the latest illustrations. According to Dad, the drawings were “phenomenal,” his new favorite word. I had overheard him telling several people on the phone that I was a phenomenal writer. I knew perfectly well that I wasn't a phenomenal writer, but I was hoping against hope that the illustrations would take the book to a new level. And somehow make them seem less stolen.

“When do I get to see the illustrations?” I asked Dad while I threw together two lunches.

“Soon,” he promised. “Maybe this weekend. Prepare to be blown away.”