Slide - Kyle Beachy [12]
three
the house, my family's ever-expanding house designed expressly with comfort in mind, remained, for me, a place devoid of comfort. When my father wasn't away on business I made rigorous efforts to avoid being at home with both parents at once. It was when we were three that everything became tightly cautious and liminal: a house caught in that momentary silence between inhale and ex. I was perhaps losing weight, a result of my unwillingness to sit down with them to dinner. Of course they said nothing of this. Unlike Audrey's family, where incidental guilts were traded among siblings and parents like some base form of currency, the more valuable wrongdoings hoarded and treated as investments, our little home's guilt resources had been so thoroughly exhausted by the loss of Freddy that we seemed, perhaps, above it?
Yet there was still the comfort issue. So in an effort to redefine my relationship with the house, I had begun contributing a few basic, menial chores to its upkeep. Each morning I smoothed and realigned the sheets I'd lashed at during the night. I went from room to room, emptying trash baskets into one large bag I placed into a squirrel-proofed metal can in a corner of the garage. I moved among framed photographs with a spray bottle of Windex and a roll of high-quality paper towels. I switched off lights not in use.
And still I could not sleep.
Television was supposed to help. I spread myself out across the couch and searched for some sputtering drama to lull me into unconsciousness. Here were multiracial children discussing breakfast cereal. Here was a demonically gorgeous model molesting a can of light beer. And here was aerial flyby footage of a nexus of buildings surrounded by expansive parking lots. A deep man voice was echoed by a feminine whisper.
MAN: Prepare yourself for the arrival of the New West County.
WOMAN: Prepared yet?
MAN: The Missouri Valley's premier hub of entertainment and emporia, where all shopping unites beneath one luxurious roof.
WOMAN: A beautiful beautiful roof.
Fish-eye shots of fountains spewing from the ground floor toward the ceiling, computer renderings of a crowded food court, all sleek-lined and reflective. Towering palms sprouting from huge clay pots.
MAN: You have to be there to believe it.
WOMAN: Be there.
MAN: Believe it.
WOMAN: September first. Will you be there?
Upstairs in bed, I listened to things I couldn't see. Air conditioner. Branches against windows. Squirrels in the attic. Soon I heard my mother in the kitchen and recalled that she had her own trouble sleeping when my father was away, and this seemed a nice kind of family tie. I went to the bathroom and drank a glass of water, another, then went back to bed and tried to fall asleep.
At 2:46 I developed an erection, one of these that materialize out of thin air, reversing the natural order of erectile cause and effect—that generate, rather than signify, arousal. Boredom boner. Math class boner. The animal sounds skittered above me and I rolled onto my side.
Two unfamiliar naked bodies zipped into a shared sleeping bag, growing rapidly acquainted. Everyone else could have been on Jupiter. Audrey was from Portland—Oregon, she said, not Maine. I admitted being unaware there even was a Portland, Maine, and in return she admitted she probably couldn't pick Missouri out of a crowd of two. This was honesty, bedrock. She was the baby, with an older brother and sister who shielded her like a secret. An extremely tight family, she said, friendship and safety, yes, very tight indeed. I milked details and hung on words and committed names to memory: brother Brandon in med school and sister Caroline in business school. Obstetrician father Doug and cardiologist mother Marilynne. Audrey couldn't imagine what it must have been like growing up an only child.
“It was … What was it? Lonely sometimes. But at the same time you always feel special, like you're the point of everything.”
“Ooh. Dangerous,” she said, then laughed, and the sound of it I also committed to memory, fearing