A Symphony of Cicadas

Ten



Sam never did come home that night. I left John alone in the apartment and found Sam huddled in the poor lighting of a pier a dozen blocks from the apartment. He sat at the edge, tossing tiny rocks one by one into the still water below. They lay gathered in a pile near his crossed legs, collected on his walk towards the bay. It was a fascination he had carried with him from his childhood, gathering rocks in moments of his life, one for each experience to hold onto the memory a little longer. There were rocks in his room that looked to be just ordinary pebbles to the unknowing eye, but held secrets that only he knew every time he looked at them. He could tell where each rock was from and what he was doing in the moment, even years after collecting the insignificant pebble.

He never felt younger than he did as he sat alone on the pier away from his depressing home. In that moment he was five years old, lost and needing some guidance in the confusing reality of being fifteen. Trying to let go of the hurts that tore at him, he watched as each pebble dropped from his hand, taking its memory into the blackness of the water and disappearing. I was surprised to see my face among the images he included in his tally of life’s unfairness. But at the front of the list was his father, John’s likeness making numerous appearances as the list grew longer and longer until everything disappeared except for him.

“I don’t even care,” Sam said out loud to no one, trying to convince himself that this was how he felt. He couldn’t fool himself, however, and swiped at the tears that kept spilling from his eyes. He held onto one of the larger rocks and looked behind him to see if his dad was searching for him. No one was there, and the cell phone in his pocket remained unlit. He added that hurt to his rock and dropped it in. “He doesn’t care enough to try and find me,” he whispered as the water accepted the small stone. He picked up another one and thought about the past couple of months.

He had fended for himself when his dad went under the dark hood of depression. At first he kept up the cleaning, trying to help out his dad because John was so sad.

“He didn’t even notice,” he whispered as he dropped in another rock.

He made his own meals and always made sure there were leftovers for his dad to pick at. When his dad did eat from the food Sam prepared, he never thanked him, didn’t even acknowledge how the food got there.

Another rock fell in.

He had to remind his dad when to go shopping, making lists so they had enough food. His schoolwork was growing in difficulty, and he was falling behind in several of his classes. His birthday came and went, and all John could muster in celebration was a card with fifty dollars in it, a gift that was gone before the weekend was over when Sam spent it on some experimental weed instead of the videogame he had been trying to save for. The housework was getting to be too much for him to keep up with. So he ceased helping out around the house, testing to see if his father would notice all Sam had been doing, or even start doing something on his own. Neither happened, and the house began to fall apart. A few more rocks tumbled from Sam’s shaking hand.

And then my face showed up. He tried to push against it, but it became clear that he missed me. He wouldn’t say it aloud, but I could hear it as if he were whispering it to me in my ear.

With just a simple thought, I saw the part of Sam he kept hidden from me.

When I was alive and first began to know Sam, he did everything he could to push me away. I was the intruder to a life he and his dad shared that, to him, didn’t need fixing. Sam could come and go as he pleased, and never had to worry about spending too much time behind locked doors. He could do what he wanted and was never questioned. It didn’t even occur to John to pry a little bit more into Sam’s life. That had always been Wendy’s department when they were married. But Sam stopped spending as much time at his mom’s house soon after the divorce, limiting his time with her to only a couple days a month and spending the rest of his time in his real home with his dad. He was angry that she even left, giving up without even a fight. But more than that, he knew he had more independence in his dad’s house than under the watchful eye of his mother.

When I came into the picture before the body of the broken marriage was even cold, Sam was angry. I stood in the way of his mom ever coming back home. With the anger he held against his mother, the conflicting hope for his parents to get back together confused him. But he didn’t argue against it. He only knew he didn’t want me around.

For the next several years Sam was wary around Joey and me, keeping himself closed off in the bedroom and ignoring my insistence to get to know him better. And then I moved in and wrecked everything all over again. I brought with me this other kid who now had to share his bathroom, his food, his space, and his dad’s attention that was already overwhelmed by me. But even when Sam was at his most brilliant in teenage defiance, I never wavered.

When I was around, he wasn’t invisible.

Neither one of us could pinpoint the exact moment when the change took place, when Sam accepted the fact that I was there to stay, that even a defiant teenage boy wouldn’t change that. It took me longer to realize that Sam actually didn’t mind that I was there. However, he still took the time to test me, checking to see if I, too, would get up and walk away like his mom did. He got away with less while I was around, but he stopped caring. In truth, he appreciated that I cared enough to notice, even if it limited his comings and goings.

****

“Where have you been?” I demanded of Sam one evening when he showed up long after dinner was over. I faced him in his bedroom, demanding an answer and getting nowhere as he remained silent, his expression blank.

Earlier in the evening, Sam’s plate lay untouched as we ate our dinner. John had shrugged it off, though he called his son’s cell phone several times to remind him that dinner was getting cold. I was angry that the meal I cooked lay untouched on Sam’s plate at the table. I announced to John and Joey that someone who couldn’t bother to make it home on time for dinner didn’t deserve to eat, tossing the food down the garbage disposal. When the door slammed and heavy footsteps bounded the stairs, I looked at John.

“I’ll talk with him,” John said. I could hear them upstairs, Sam’s voice loud against John’s calm reasoning.

“I’m not even hungry!” I heard Sam yell, and the door slammed. John came down soon after, his face a mixture of fury and frustration.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said in defeat. “If I’m easy on him, he walks all over me. But when I come down hard, he’s impossible. There’s no winning with him!” He helped Joey clear the table, looking at me as if I knew what to say. I didn’t. Joey hadn’t yet reached an age of rebellion, finding it easier to just go along with the flow rather than fight against it. I liked to think that it was because I had raised him a certain way or that he was just a mellower child, but I knew it was more probable he just hadn’t hit the years of testing boundaries and exercising the ability to go against society.

“I’ll give him a few moments, and then I’ll try my hand with him,” I told him, cooling the urge to knock down his door and give him a piece of my mind in favor of being the anchor to John’s mounting chagrin. John smiled at me in both apology and relief.

“I hate to have you do it. He’s my kid, I should know how to handle him.”

“He’s my stepson,” I told him. “And this is our family.”

He raised his eyebrows at me, but didn’t have to say anything for me to know what he was thinking.

When I had first moved in, I didn’t even know what to say to Sam. I was terrified of the kid, sensing his anger over his parents’ divorce and assuming he was placing the bulk of the blame on me for how messed up his world had become. I was the stranger in the equation, I was the easy target.

But I didn’t actually know how Sam felt. While the kid would move sideways when we all moved up and down, he never directed his disdain at me. He’d yell at his dad, slam doors, and leave his belongings all over the place. But when it came to me, my newness to his world caused him to tread with careful steps.

It didn’t occur to me until later that, in actuality, I had—and should have—authority over him. In the newness of the order of command, I gave him way more leeway than a then-fourteen year old boy should have. As a result, we both ended up moving around each other in an awkward dance of never quite saying what we meant and of choosing words with care.

I regretted telling John I’d try to get through to him that evening. In the moment I felt like anything was possible. But as the closed door came into view I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never done this before, and just the act of knocking on his door felt daunting. I raised my hand in hesitation, holding it frozen in front of the door for a few moments as I rehearsed what I was going to say.

You need to call if you’re going to be late.

We thought you were dead when we couldn’t reach you.

Do you have any idea how you’re killing your father?

Why can’t you just stop being difficult and start joining this family?

What the hell is wrong with you?

“What’s wrong with you?” Joey asked as he rounded the corner. I dropped my hand from the door, my face reddening as I realized how much weight I was putting into Sam’s reaction. “I don’t get what the big deal is, Mom. He’s being an a*shole. Just knock on the door.” And with that he banged on Sam’s door and then slipped past me, closing the door of his own room before I could grab him.

“Joey!” I shouted in frustration, angry that I was now stuck. Sure enough, Sam opened his door and looked at me. His face changed in an instant from contempt to surprise, settling to his mask that hid anything he might be thinking.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Can I come in?” I requested of him, all the demands I’d rehearsed leaving through the open window of his room. He moved aside and allowed me to walk past him. I cleared a spot on his bed among the clothes and piles of books that took residence along with the tangle of sheets and blankets. I sat down at the same time he did in a chair across the room, and we both looked at each other in this foreign act of socializing. I realized that, despite my fear, I needed to act more like a parent and less like a scared stranger.

“Where have you been?” I demanded. And that’s when I saw. His eyes were rimmed with red, the whites of his eyes an unnatural pink that contrasted with his tan skin and blue irises. “Have you been smoking pot?” I asked him. He looked away in embarrassment, but didn’t answer. “Seriously, Sam? You’re fourteen years old! Why are you messing with drugs? What would your dad say?” I blurted out the last sentence without even thinking about it, giving away the fact that I didn’t want to tell John. Sam relaxed when he realized this at the same time I did. He looked at me and shrugged. That’s when I saw there was more to the story. While his eyes carried the giveaway-hue of rosiness, the reddened rims of his eyes were from something else. “Have you been crying?” I asked, this time with concern.

“No,” he said, breaking his silence. But he swiped at his eyes to catch the small amount of moisture that still existed at the edges.

“What’s going on?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?” he answered with his own question to evade the actual issue. I realized we were stuck back in the Sam game, going round and round instead of getting straight to the point. But I had my own theories about what was up. I decided that instead of trying to win an unbeatable game, I’d just run with what I figured was going on.

“Sam, I know you’re upset about your mom being gone, and that I’m here instead of her. I promise you, I’m not here to take the place of your mom. But I know it’s rough when you don’t see her as much as you used to. And if you ever want to talk about it, I’m a great listener. But sweetie, the pot has to go.” He tensed up across the room. I could see him struggling with his demeanor, trying to challenge me while also tiptoeing through a respectful stance.

“It’s not like pot is bad,” he argued with me in his fourteen-year-old logic. “It’s only considered bad because the government wants you to think that. And it isn’t any worse than you drinking a glass of wine,” he countered.

“But it’s illegal,” I said, my tone weak as I tried to wrap my mind around a sound argument against marijuana. “I don’t want it around you or Joey, and I definitely don’t want it in this house.”

“But you have wine in the house, and you drink that around us,” he said with a smug air.

I was struggling in the moment, ill-prepared to give a talk on the war on drugs. If I had prepared I would have researched facts on the effects weed had on a young mind and the laziness it encourages at a time when he needed to be at his most ambitious. But all I could think of were the many times in my own youth when I had enjoyed getting high in the privacy of my bedroom before slipping on a pair of headphones and drowning in the music. The intense experience of having every note go straight through me as I sank into the bed I was laying on was a delicious feeling I never experienced any other way. And now in my thirties, I was neither dumb nor worse for having smoked out in my teens. But I had also grown past it; my last joint years ago with Joey’s father in a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.

To argue against something I enjoyed in my own youth felt hypocritical. But more than that, I felt like I’d be a bad parent if I gave in, and worse if I condoned this. If Sam were my own son, I’d have a much clearer argument against drugs in his system, and I’d be confiscating the pot by now. I realized that even though he wasn’t my son by blood, I still owed him the duty of being a parent to him. I needed to treat him as if he were my own son.

“Look, when you’re out of this house and supporting yourself after eighteen, you are free to do what you want. But while in this house, you go by our rules. That includes not bringing drugs into our home. So hand it over.” I held out my hand and waited.

“What? No! I’m not giving it to you!” he said, his voice raising. I could hear John starting to ascend the steps.

“Look,” I whispered. “I don’t want to get your dad involved, but I will if I have to. Either hand it over or I’ll have your dad come in here and get it from you.”

In that moment, we both knew I had won. But I couldn’t help feeling like a tyrant when he groaned, stuffing the plastic bag of weed in my hand; I pocketed it just as John poked his head in the room.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

Sam looked at the floor, and nodded in silence. I looked at John and gave him a smile.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. I realized that I hadn’t even addressed his lateness for dinner, but decided we’d covered enough ground for one night. “Sam understands that he needs to be a little better about letting us know where he’s at if he’s going to be out, and that he’ll be home by six o’clock for dinner unless he tells us otherwise. Right, Sam?” I caught the faintest glimpse of a smile before he buried it in a blank stare at the floor and nodded in reluctant agreement. “Great. Are you hungry? The food’s totally cold, and it’s a crapshoot if there’s enough left to make a full dinner plate. But there are a few leftovers if you want them.”

“Thanks. I’ll come down soon,” he said.

****

Of course, I’d been wrong about what was bugging him. Sam smoothed his hand over another rock, ready to drop it into the water. On that day, he’d been rejected by the girl he liked. Worse, he’d seen the girl kissing one of his friends. It made him feel as if he were a loser, as if no one would ever think a pudgy kid like him could be cool. So he took off with a few other friends and smoked out. It wasn’t his first time, as I had believed in the moment, but more like his third. He thought the weed would help him escape from the pain of rejection, but the pain only intensified as he sank under the weight of his own mind, grabbing onto the last thought he’d had before he went under to keep from falling too deep. That was the image of his friend and this girl. And it made him question the loyalty of the guys who now sat around him, his paranoia doing double time as they sat chattering and laughing while waiting for their turn with the joint. Soon he just slipped away, his absence unnoticed as he started walking home, letting the tears fall free as he felt friendless, weird, and ugly.

But when I had talked to him about his mom, it reminded him of another sadness he’d been stuffing deep down, and he added it to his list of faults and failures. In a strange sense, he was glad to add it to the pile of hurts. He was in a space of mourning and wasn’t ready to leave it. And while his dad made careful efforts not to mention the fact that his mom wasn’t calling so much and never even fought for him to stay with her, I had been bold in my acknowledgment. He didn’t even mind that I called him out on his possession of weed, appreciating that I cared enough to set boundaries, despite how he argued with me.

Sam picked up the rocks that lay at his feet, holding the final pebbles in the palm of his hand and closing his fist over them. He missed me, wondering if anyone else would ever see through his defenses again. He even missed Joey, the little brother he felt like he never got to know. He ached over his dad, seeing him slip even further into being an absent parent than he was before he met me, despite the fact that they lived in the same house. He missed his mom, the way she used to smooth his hair on his head before kissing the top of it, and the pancakes she used to make every Saturday morning in celebration of another week successfully survived. He missed the mom she used to be before things got bad and she moved out, before she became too busy with life to care about a teenage boy who needed her to break through the barriers he put up.

And in one swift movement, he lifted his arm and flung the rest of the rocks out into the water with all of his force, hearing the satisfying sounds they made as they disturbed the smooth surface.

Except, not one of those rocks took away the pain he was carrying.