The end of the world begins with rain.
September washes away, then October. By November, even Dad can’t stay on top of it, which means it’s pretty much raining inside as well as outside the house. There are pans and pots and buckets everywhere. “Who knew we needed a new roof?” Dad mumbles to himself again and again like a mantra.
(PORTRAIT: Dad Balancing the House on His Head)
This, after a lifetime of replacing batteries before flashlights conk out, lightbulbs before they go dark: Can’t be too prepared, son.
However, after much observation, I’ve concluded that it’s not raining on Mom. I find her on the deck smoking (she’s not a smoker) as if under an invisible umbrella, always with the phone to her ear, not saying anything, just swaying and smiling like someone’s playing her music on the other end. I find her humming (she’s not a hummer) and jingling (she’s not a jingler) through the house, down the street, up the bluff in her new circus clothes and bangles, her own private sunbeam enclosing her while the rest of us grip the walls and furniture so we don’t wash away.
I find her at her computer where’s she’s supposed to be writing a book but instead is staring up at the ceiling like it’s full of stars.
I find her and find her and find her but I can’t find her.
I have to say her name three times before she hears it. I have to bang on the wall with my fist when I walk into her office or kick a chair across the kitchen before she even notices someone’s joined her in the room.
It occurs to me with rising concern that a blow-in can also blow away.
The only way I can snap her out of it is to talk about my CSA portfolio, but because she and I have already chosen the five drawings I’m painting in oils with Mr. Grady, there’s not much to discuss until the great unveiling and I’m not ready. I don’t want her to see them until they’re done. They’re close. I’ve worked on them every single day at lunch and after school all fall long. There’s no interview or anything, getting in is based pretty much only on your artwork. But after seeing that sculptor sketch, my eyes got swapped again. Sometimes now, I swear I can see sound, the dark green howling wind, the crimson crush of rain—all these sound-colors swirling around my room while I lie on my bed thinking about Brian. His name, when I say it aloud: azul.
In other news, I’ve grown over three inches since the summer. If anyone still messed with me, I could kick them off the planet. No problem. And my voice has dropped so low most humans can’t register it. I hardly use it, except occasionally with Heather. She and me, we’re sort of getting along again now that she likes some other boy. A couple times, I even went running with her and her runner friends. It was okay. No one cares if you don’t talk much when you’re running.
I’ve turned into a very quiet King Kong.
Today, a very worried, very quiet King Kong. I’m trudging up the hill from school in torrential rain with one thing on my mind: What am I going to do when Brian comes back for Christmas break and he’s with Jude?
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Drinking the Dark out of My Own Cupped Hands)
When I get home, I see no one’s here, as usual. Jude’s hardly ever home for very long these days—she’s taken to surfing in the rain after school with the diehard surftards—and when she is home she’s on the computer chatting with Brian aka Spaceboy. I saw a couple more of their exchanges. In one he talked about the movie—the one we were watching when he grabbed my hand under the armrest! I almost threw up on the spot.
Sometimes at night, I sit on the other side of the wall wanting to pull off my ears so I don’t hear the ding of yet another message from him over the hum of her stupid sewing machine.
(PORTRAIT: Sister in the Guillotine)
I drip through the house, a raincloud, dutifully kicking over a bucket by Jude’s bedroom so the dirty water soaks into her fluffy white carpet and hopefully mildews it, then enter my room, where I’m surprised to find Dad sitting on my bed.
I don’t cringe or anything. For some reason, he doesn’t bug me so much lately. It’s like he drank a potion, or maybe I did. Or maybe it’s because I’m taller. Or maybe it’s because we’re both all messed up. I don’t think he can find Mom either.
“Storm catch you?” he asks. “I’ve never seen anything like this rain. Time for you to build that ark, eh?”
This is a popular joke at school too. I don’t mind. I love Bible Noah. He was nearly 950 years old when he died. He got to leave with the animals. He started the whole world over: blank canvas and endless tubes of paint. Freaking the coolest.
“Totally got me,” I say, grabbing a towel off my desk chair. I start drying my head, waiting for the inevitable comment about the length of my hair, but it doesn’t come.
What comes is this: “You’re going to be bigger than me.”
“You think?” The idea’s an instant mood-lifter. I’m going to take up more space in a room than my father.
(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Hops from Continent to Continent with Dad on Shoulders)
He nods, raises both eyebrows. “At the rate you’re going lately, sure seems like it.” He surveys the room as if taking inventory, museum print to print—they pretty much cover every inch of wall and ceiling—then he looks back at me and slaps his hands on his thighs. “So, I thought we could get some dinner. Have some father-son time.”
He must register the horror on my face. “No”—he makes fingers quotes—“talks. Promise. Just some grub. I need some mano a mano.”
“With me?” I ask.
“Who else?” He smiles and there’s absolutely no asshat anywhere in his face. “You’re my son.”
He gets up and walks to the door. I’m reeling from the way he said: You’re my son. It makes me feel like his son.
“I’m going to wear a jacket,” he says, meaning a suit jacket, I guess. “Want to?”
“If you want me to,” I say, bewildered.
Who knew the first date of my life would be with my father?
Only I realize as I put on my one jacket—I last wore it at Grandma Sweetwine’s funeral—that the sleeves come closer to my elbows than my wrists. Holy Jesus, I really am King Kong! I walk to Mom and Dad’s bedroom with the evidence of my gigantism still on my back.
“Ah,” Dad says, grinning. He opens his closet and pulls out a dark blue blazer. “This should do it, just a little snug on me.” He taps his non-existent belly.
I take off my jacket and slip his on. It fits perfectly. I can’t stop smiling.
“Told you,” he says. “Wouldn’t even think of wrestling you now, tough guy.”
Tough guy.
On my way out the door, I ask, “Where’s Mom?”
“Got me.”
Dad and I go to a restaurant on the water and sit by the window. The rain makes rivulets, distorting the view. My fingers twitch to draw it. We eat steaks. He orders a scotch, then another, and lets me have sips. We both get dessert. He doesn’t talk about sports or bad movies or loading the dishwasher properly or weird jazz. He talks about me. The whole time. He tells me that Mom showed him some of my sketchpads, he hoped that was all right, and he was blown away. He tells me he’s so excited I’m applying to CSA and that they’d be idiots not to take me. He said he can’t believe his one and only son is so talented and that he can’t wait to see my final portfolio. He said he’s so proud of me.
I’m not lying about any of this.
“Your mother thinks you’re both shoo-ins.”
I nod, wondering if I heard wrong. Last I knew, Jude wasn’t applying. I must’ve heard wrong. What would she even submit?
“You’re really lucky,” he says. “Your mom has so much passion for art. It’s contagious, isn’t it?” He smiles, but I can see his inside face and it isn’t smiling at all. “Ready to switch?”
I reluctantly lift my chocolate decadence to trade for his tiramisu.
“Nah, forget it,” he says. “Let’s get two more. How often do we do this?”
Over our second dessert, I gear up to say that the parasites and bacteria and viruses he studies are as cool as the art Mom studies, but then decide it’ll sound lame and phony, so I motor through the cake instead. I start to imagine people around us thinking to themselves, “Look at that father and son having dinner together, isn’t that nice?” It blows me up with pride. Dad and me. Buddies now. Chums. Bros. Oh, I’m feeling supernaturally good for once—it’s been so long—so good I start blabbing like I haven’t since Brian left. I tell Dad about these basilisk lizards I just found out about that can move so fast across the surface of water, they can go sixty-five feet without sinking. So Jesus isn’t the only one after all.
He tells me how the peregrine falcon hits speeds of 200 miles per hour in a dive. I raise my eyebrows in a wow to be polite, but hello, who doesn’t know that?
I tell him how giraffes eat up to seventy-five pounds of food a day, sleep for only thirty minutes a day, are not only the tallest animal on earth, but have the longest tail of any land mammal and tongues that are twenty inches long.
He tells me about these tiny microscopic water bears they’re thinking about sending into space because they can survive temperatures ranging from minus-328 Fahrenheit to 303 Fahrenheit, can cope with 1,000 times the radiation it would take to kill a human, and can be revived after being dried out for ten years.
For a moment, I want to kick the table over because I can’t tell Brian about the water bears in space, but then I climb right out of it by making Dad guess what the most deadly animal is to humans and totally stumping him after he goes for all the usual suspects: hippos, lions, crocs, etc. It’s the malaria-carrying mosquito.
We go back and forth exchanging facts about animals until the bill comes. It’s the most fun we’ve ever had together.
When he’s paying the check, I blurt out, “I didn’t know you like animal shows!”
“What do you mean? Why do you think you like them? That’s all you and I did together when you were little. Don’t you remember?”
I. Don’t. Remember.
I remember, It’s a sink-or-swim world, Noah. I remember, Act tough and you are tough. I remember every heart-stomping look of disappointment, of embarrassment, of bewilderment from him. I remember: If your twin sister wasn’t my spitting image I’d swear you came about from parthenogenesis. I remember the 49ers, the Miami Heat, the Giants, the World Cup. I do not remember Animal Planet.
When he pulls into the garage, I see Mom’s car’s still not there. He sighs. I sigh too. Like I’m catching him now.
“I had this dream last night,” he says, turning off the engine. He makes no move to get out of the car. I settle into my seat. We are so totally buddies now! “Your mother was walking through the house, and as she did, everything fell off the shelves and from the walls: books, pictures, knickknacks, everything. All I could do was follow her around the house trying to put everything back in its place.”
“Did you?” I ask. He looks at me, confused. I clarify, “Did you get everything back where it belonged.”
“Don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “Woke up.” He glides a finger around the steering wheel. “Sometimes you think you know things, know things very deeply, only to realize you don’t know a damn thing.”
“I totally get what you mean, Dad,” I say, thinking about what happened with Brian.
“You do? Already?”
I nod.
“Guess we have lots of catching up to do.”
I feel a springing in my chest. Could Dad and I be close? Like a real father and son? Like it could’ve been all along if I’d flown off his shoulder that day like Jude did? If I’d swum instead of sunk?
“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” we hear and both laugh a little. Then he surprises me by saying, “You think we’ll ever find out where the hell Ralph is, kid?”
“I hope so,” I say.
“Me too.” A comfortable silence follows and I’m marveling at how supernaturally cool Dad’s being when he says, “So, you still seeing that Heather?” He nudges me. “Cute girl.” He gives my shoulder a squeeze of approval.
This sucks.
“Kind of,” I say, then add with more conviction because I have no choice, “Yeah, she’s my girlfriend.”
He gives me that dumb you-sly-dog expression. “We’re going to have to have a little talk, me and you, aren’t we, son? Fourteen years old.” He cuffs me on the head just like that sculptor did his students. And that gesture, plus the word son again, the way he keeps saying it: Yeah, I had no choice about Heather.
Once inside, I go to my room, noting that Jude knocked over a water bucket on my floor in retaliation. Whatever. I throw a towel down on the puddle and as I do, glance at the clock on my desk, which has the date as well as the time.
Oh.
Later, I find Dad sunk into the couch in front of a college football game. I went through all my sketchpads and couldn’t find one drawing of him with his head still on, so I took out my best pastels and did a new one of the two of us on the back of a blue wildebeest. On the bottom, I wrote, Happy Birthday.
He looks right in my eyes. “Thanks.” The word comes out all scrunched up like it was hard to get out. No one remembered. Not even Mom. What’s her problem? How could she not remember Dad’s birthday? Maybe she’s not a blow-in after all.
“She forgot the turkey on Thanksgiving too,” I say, trying to make him feel better, only realizing after I say it how lame it is to compare him to a turkey.
He laughs though, which is something. “Is that a blue wildebeest?” he asks, pointing to the drawing.
When we’re done with the world’s longest conversation on the blue wildebeest, he pats the couch and I sit down next to him. He puts his hand on my shoulder, leaves it there like it fits, and we watch the rest of the game together. It’s pretty boring, but the athletes, well, you know.
The lie I told him about Heather is a stone in my belly.
I ignore it.