Beetle Boy Read online

  “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.”

  Clara has been on a cleaning and organizing rampage ever since her parents agreed to come over and have lunch with us and meet me, the invalid moocher boyfriend. I am watching a sitcom after a pizza when I hear Clara poking around in the closet of her bedroom, where I have recently stored my ridiculously small cache of personal belongings. I grab my crutches and hobble into the bedroom, calling her name. “Clara? Clara? What are you doing?”

  Just rearranging, Charlie.

  She is standing on a stool, moving things around on the topmost shelf of her closet. One of her outstretched hands is touching my boxes. I stand behind her and struggle not to knock the stool out from under her feet with my crutch.

  “Could you just leave those alone?” I say.

  But Clara has tipped the closest box with her outstretched hand, and it falls from the shelf into her open arms. She pops down from the stool and turns to me, holding it, a cardboard box. A box I kept after Mrs. M. bought me a laptop for high school graduation. The box was heavy and nondescript and had a folding lid. Clara rattles it, her eyes bright with curiosity.

  What’s in it, Charlie? Anything you might need?

  Anything I might need? Yes, a few odd things that I need, although I could never in a million years have explained why. Why do I need photos of people I am unrelated to? Why do I need a gaudy, fake-diamond encrusted pen? Why do I need a card from my only birthday with Mrs. M.—why did I keep that card? Why do I still have a flyer from the first author conference, the day that I met her?

  “Could you just put it back for now? Please? And we’ll go through it sometime when I’m not so tired?”

  She is miffed. She turns her back to me, lifts the box up, reaching mightily and shoving the box back onto the top shelf of her closet. But not before a single wallet-sized photo makes its way under the lid and flutters to the floor. I know whose photo it is without needing to see it—Rita Marie Dean, pretty in a fierce, beady-eyed way, the answer to a desperate six-year-old’s prayers.

  It’s a school photo of a little girl! With red hair. Who is she, Charlie?

  My answer is an unimaginative lie. “A cousin who died.”

  Clara’s face droops with concern. Another sad story. I distract her from the closet by asking her if there is anything good in the kitchen for dessert. She follows me into the kitchen to make me something, something to cheer us both after my tragic revelation.

  Ice cream? A waffle with chocolate syrup? And you can tell me more about your cousin, okay?

  I embellish the lie for half an hour, making up people, places, and events. We have waffles with ice cream, with chocolate syrup and M&M’s on top. Clara is trying to help me gain weight. The pain pills have killed my appetite. Clara is quiet, saddened by my fake memories.

  You should hear the real ones, I think. I make a mental note to get the box out of her closet and hide it somewhere else ASAP.

  FIVE

  After the first few terrible months at Green Grove Apartments, I asked Dad to please, please find us a babysitter. He said no way could he afford one, but I happened to know that his father in Jamaica—Grampa Ned—had sent him a big check. A letter had arrived in one of those thin blue envelopes that you can see through with foreign stamps all over it, and when I held it up to the light, I saw that there was a check in it. Then I just had to know how much, so I did this thing I saw Mom do a couple of times, open letters with steam from the teakettle and then close them back up again with a little glue, except Mom would stand at the stove and cry. Me, I was pretty happy. Grampa
Ned’s check was for $10,000.

  “Dad, if you hire somebody young, you hardly have to pay her anything. And with a babysitter, you would be totally free twenty-four-seven to work with Sam on my books.”

  I wasn’t thinking only of Liam. The girl I had already chosen to be our sitter lived in the same apartment building as us. I had decided that I loved her madly. Rita had red braids so tight that she had a bright white part down the back of her head. She was an older woman—almost twelve. I wanted her to be in the same room with me as much as possible. I wanted to impress her with my budding career. I wanted her to sit beside me on our ratty sofa. I wanted to watch her eating day-old pizza at our dirty kitchen table. You get the picture.

  Rita became our first post-Mom babysitter. Dad hired her to work from three until six on school days and just about every Friday and Saturday night for the next three months, freeing him up for whatever dates he could arrange in his new bachelor life. He paid her five dollars an hour—what a cheapskate—but I guess she was okay with it.

  I worshipped her. Did she like me? Maybe. As much as a twelve-year-old girl can like a geeky six-year-old who talks incessantly about himself. Every so often, she would squeeze her eyes shut and cover her ears and tell me to pleeeeeassse shut up! It was adorable.

  Unfortunately, she couldn’t stand Liam. She ignored his lame attempts to also get her attention, despite that he was a pretty cute kid, much cuter than me—he had inherited Dad’s blond good looks, but I surpassed him in charm and sophistication. I knew better than to gurgle and spit milk across the kitchen table or climb to the top of the fridge and sit up there like the Cheshire cat or march out of the bathroom with no pants on, waving his dick. Anything to get her to pay attention to him.

  “Watch me dance, Rita!” he would crow. Then he would fling himself around the room, whirling his arms, wearing a cape made from a dish towel. Or he would break into song for no reason, singing whatever ridiculous song he had learned at pre-kindergarten that day in a piping voice, with his face way too close to her face. She would push him away, asking, “What is wrong with you?”

  “Seriously, what is wrong with your brother?” she asked me. She had locked him in the bedroom for a time-out while the two of us watched TV in the living room at maximum volume to drown out his hollering.

  “Wrong how?” I asked back.

  “Is there something about your brother that your dad didn’t tell me?”

  This gave me pause. “There’s nothing wrong with him,” I insisted. “He’s just a creepy kid.”

  “He is creepy,” she agreed. I had snuck my hand onto her closest arm, and she shook it away. “Stop hanging on me! God! I can’t stand that!”

  But she was more impatient than angry. She never really got mad at me like she got mad at Liam. I knew the difference. It meant the world to me.

  After that conversation, I would sometimes deliberately imitate Liam—his shrill voice, his constant jittery movements. The way he would sometimes run in place while he was speaking. I would do it to make Rita laugh. And she did laugh. We bonded over our contempt for Liam. Did he know? Was he too little to notice? Did it register that I was mocking him to score points with Rita?

  Liam. Little Brother. I am so sorry. No wonder you hate me.

  It would have been so much easier to meet Clara’s parents at a chain restaurant—the four of us in our places at a square table, the awkward silences filled by restaurant clatter. But my broken leg prevented this—our meeting had to be in Clara’s house, the place where Clara tended to all my needs. Clara had prepared everything, including putting away my pills and folding up the sleeper sofa so that the room looked less like an invalid’s hovel.

  “How are you, dear?” Clara’s mom asks, settling herself beside me on the sofa, a move that makes me feel instantly panicky. But her tone is kind. It is obvious from the first few minutes of the visit that Susan and Don are going to go easy on me. They are nice people—big surprise—but I can tell that they are confused about what to make of Clara’s new boyfriend.

  “Much better than last week,” I say. I am wearing real clothes for the occasion, shorts and my only shirt with a collar. I am already tired.

  “How long before you can get out of that cast?” she asks, pointing to it.

  I tell her a couple of weeks.

  “What will you do then?”

  Clara interrupts, tells them about the big plastic boot that is coming next.

  “Did you get a leave of absence from your job?” Susan asks.

  I tell her yes, although the last thing I care about these days is my stupid job at the bike shop. “I’ll go back as soon as I can. I should have a better idea of when after my next doctor’s appointment.” I am making an effort to sound like I have everything figured out. Susan and Don seem to be buying it. I finish warmly, “I don’t know what I would have done without Clara.”

  “She’s a jewel,” Susan agrees.

  “Clara says you have no family in the area,” Don says. “That can’t be easy.”

  This throws me momentarily because Clara knows that I have a mom and a brother living in nearby Grand Rapids, a rather recent development. She pokes her head back into the living room just long enough to give me a private warning look. She probably didn’t want to explain the extent of my estrangement from my family. Not to a set of parents who are as involved and adoring as hers are.

  “No, it’s not easy,” I agree, going along with Clara’s story. “You think you can make it on your own, and then something like this happens.”

  Clara—the jewel—comes back into the living room with a tray of cheese and crackers.

  While passing it around, she tells her parents that my father lives in Jamaica. I had actually told her this, although it is more of a suspicion than a fact. I was pretty sure he had headed south to hit up his dad permanently, taking his soon-to-be second wife with him. Although it was hard for me to picture him still married after a whole year. But who cares?

  “You’ll be back on your feet in no time, Charlie,” Susan says. “Let us know if there’s any way Don or I can help. We’re only an hour away, and we’re happy to lend a hand—doctor’s appointments, groceries, whatever.”

  Don chimes in: “I’d like to take both of you out for dinner once you’re a little more mobile.”

  “Great,” I say. “That sounds great, Mr. Morrison. We’ll be sure to keep you posted.”

  Clara and her mom disappear again into the kitchen, leaving me alone with Don. There is suddenly a thick silence between us, and I flounder in it, trapped. I am afraid to look directly at him. It freaks me out to be alone with a father, anyone’s father. I am suddenly soaked in sweat. I wonder if he can smell my fear.

  Clara comes back into the room after an eternity with a platter of sandwiches, announcing that we are going to eat lunch in the living room because that’s easier for me.

  “Fine with me,” Don says agreeably.

  “Good thinking, sweetie!” exclaims Susan.

  Then we are eating the sandwiches, Clara’s parents treating her like she is a total genius for having the idea to eat in the living room. It is easy to see why Clara is so positive. Her parents are in awe of her. They must be wondering as they eat what right I have to be under the same roof as her.

  Still, they were trying. They leave an hour later, Susan insisting that they don’t want to tire me out too much. Like it matters. Like there might be some other project that I will soon begin. When, actually, I am finished for the day.

  Clara gives me a big hug when they have driven away.

  My mom told me she thinks you’re adorable.

  “I need a nap,” I say, hiding the fact that I am on the verge of total collapse.

  Shall I open the sleeper?

  But I had already settled myself on the sofa and tipped sideways, sprawling lengthwise end to end. I am seconds from sleep. The minute I let go, my brain helpfully provides me with this:

  I know that the beetle has climbed into my father
’s double bed in the Grove Street apartment; I hear the mattress rustling from my own bedroom. I hear its wings crackle and scrape together as it settles itself down. I am afraid of what will happen when my dad comes home from his date. I know I have to warn him, but I am afraid to leave my room, afraid the beetle will scuttle off Dad’s bed and attack me. But I have to try.

  So I move fearfully in the dark and find myself at the door of the apartment, where I hear that someone is outside, about to come in. A key turns in the door, and there is Dad—or is it Dad? It is Dad, but he has two beetle claws instead of hands, and in one claw he’s holding an open can of Bud and there is lipstick all over his face, and through my fear I manage to warn him in a strangled whisper that there is a big beetle waiting for him in his bed.

  “It’s not in my bed,” Dad says, chuckling. “It’s right there behind you, Charlie-boy.”

  He laughs harder, and the whirring starts up and I cover my eyes, afraid to turn around. Something pokes me, hard, on the back of my right leg. I want to scream, but I don’t—I keep the scream silent so that Dad won’t hear it. He comes inside, unafraid, and I run past him, out the door into the darkness. I stumble blindly down the metal stairs, leaving him to fend for himself with the beetle that wants his bed.

  SIX

  Dad never got anywhere with Liam’s kindergarten teacher. Apparently, she was a newlywed. She appreciated Dad’s willingness to meet her after school, but he came back to the apartment from his meeting telling us that she had “a bone up her ass” and was “too strict,” “too picky,” and even “prejudiced against boys.”

  “Did you talk some sense into her?” Liam asked hopefully.

  “Try not to piss her off for a few days,” Dad instructed. “I don’t want to talk to her again. She gave me a headache with all her whining. She did admit that you’re smart, Leemster. We both know who you get that from.”