Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [9]
All criminals leave behind evidence, and my evidence is my pedigree. That, they couldn’t remove. My instinctive appreciation for all things shiny. My fondness for gold. The fact that I am not intimidated by fine works of art but instead want to place my tongue on them and taste them. And, of course, my belief that everything I see is mine or was designed with me in mind.
“No,” I spat at my father when he insisted it was time to leave The Breakers. “I’m staying,” I said, arms folded across my chest.
He lowered his voice. “We are leaving now son, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
I scanned the room for a butler. “Don’t call me that: I’m not your son.” I wanted to call out for someone to take him away. Perhaps my aging aunt, who lived upstairs in the attic and watched the tourists on a secret surveillance camera, perhaps she would recognize me. I angled my face up to catch the light from the thousand-foot-high windows that adorned the wall of The Great Room, a room formally known as The Amadeus Play Room.
My father—clearly not for the first time in my life—grabbed my arm and pulled. Oh no you don’t, I thought. Not again. I yanked my arm away from his grip and concentrated hard on making my feet extremely heavy. I would not make this easy for him. I felt certain an alarm would sound at any moment. Somehow, this time, an alarm would sound, and people in authority would appear from unseen rooms and they would tackle my father, while I would be quickly whisked away for a de-brainwashing.
He grabbed my arm again and pulled. Stiffly, I slid across the marble floor, the rubber soles of my Kmart sneakers making a screeching noise, a sort of sneaker scream. My mother vicegripped my other arm, and together they yanked me from the house, as they had done so many years before.
“What’s gotten into you?” my father asked when we were back in the station wagon. “If you can’t behave, we’re going to turn around and go straight home.”
Why had no alarm gone off? How could they have done this to me a second time? I felt stunned that these people were not this very moment being shackled together in the back of a blue police car.
“Why did you do it?” I demanded of them, my new grown-up teeth clenched tight, ten years of displacement oozing out of me.
“Do what? What are you talking about? What did we do to you?” my mother asked, turning to look at me.
“You’re not my real parents,” I told them. “You took me when I was little. I’m a Vanderbilt. You stole me, and I want to go back.”
At first they laughed. They laughed until I screamed, “It’s not funny! It’s criminal. I hate you both. You’re monsters.” I kicked the rear of their bench seat with my feet. “I hate you I hate you I hate you.”
My mother lit a cigarette and sighed. “I can’t deal with this hysterics.” She turned to my father. “Why don’t you let me out, and I’ll take the bus home and you can deal with him?”
My father glared at her. “No, you’re not going to take a damn bus home.”
“Don’t you try and control me you son of a bitch.”
My father’s fists tightened on the steering wheel, and he looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Where did you get this from, hmmm? We didn’t raise you to behave like this, concocting these wild fantasies. What’s the matter with you? Are you mad because you didn’t get your apple pie at McDonald’s?”
I sat as close to the door as possible, not caring if it flew open and I fell out onto the highway. Better to be a paralyzed ward of the state than live with these people.
My mother tossed her cigarette out the window and immediately lit another. She reached into her bag and pulled out a stack of papers—a portion of a manuscript she was working on—and began reading silently to herself, her lips moving.
My father settled in and drove, wordlessly. For the remainder of the drive home, nobody said anything, not even the radio. The only sound was the occasional small intake of air from my mother as she read her own work.
By the time we got home, it was dark. My parents went into the kitchen,