Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 8

ump way back to the last time I ever went home to see my parents. It was my last birthday before the accident. What with Shane still being dead, I wasn’t expecting presents. I’m not expecting a cake. This last time, I go home just to see them, my folks. This is when I still have a mouth, so I’m not so stymied by the idea of blowing out candles.

The house, the brown living room sofa and reclining chairs, everything is the same except my father’s put big X’s of duct tape across the inside of all the windows. Mom’s car isn’t in the driveway where they usually park it. The car’s locked in the garage. There’s a big deadbolt I don’t remember being on the front door. On the front gate is a big “Beware of Dog” sign and a smaller sign for a home security system.

When I first get home, Mom waves me inside fast and says, “Stay back from the windows, Bump. Hate crimes are up sixty-seven percent this year over last year.”

She says, “After it gets dark at night, try and not let your shadow fall across the blinds so it can be seen from outside.”

She cooks dinner by flashlight. When I open the oven or the fridge, she panics fast, body blocking me to one side and closing whatever I open.

“It’s the bright light inside,” she says. “Anti-gay violence is up over one hundred percent in the last five years.”

My father comes home and parks his car a half block away. His keys rattle against the outside of the new deadbolt while Mom stands frozen in the kitchen doorway, holding me back. The keys stop, and my father knocks, three fast knocks, then two slow ones.

“That’s his knock,” Mom says, “but look through the peephole, anyway.”

My father comes in, looking back over his shoulder to the dark street, watching. A car passes, and he says, “Romeo Tango Foxtrot six seven four. Quick, write it down.”

My mother writes this on the pad by the phone. “Make?” she says. “Model?”

“Mercury, blue,” my father says. “Sable.”

Mom says, “It’s on the record.”

I say maybe they’re overreacting some.

And my father says, “Don’t marginalize our oppression.”

Jump to what a big mistake this was, coming home. Jump to how Shane should see this, how weird our folks are being. My father turns off the lamp I turned on in the living room. The drapes on the picture window are shut and pinned together in the middle. They know all the furniture in the dark, but me, I stumble against every chair and end table. I knock a candy dish to the floor, smash, and my mother screams and drops to the kitchen linoleum.

My father comes up from where he’s crouched behind the sofa and says, “You’ll have to cut your mother some slack. We’re expecting to get hate-crimed any day soon.”

From the kitchen, Mom yells, “Was it a rock? Is anything on fire?”

And my father yells, “Don’t press the panic button, Leslie. The next false alarm, and we have to start paying for them.”

Now I know why they put a headlight on some kinds of vacuum cleaners. First, I’m picking up broken glass in the pitch-dark. Then I’m asking my father for bandages. I just stand in one place, keeping my cut hand raised above my heart, and wait. My father comes out of the dark with alcohol and bandages.

“This is a war we’re fighting,” he says, “all of us in pee-flag.”

PFLAG. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. I know. I know. I know. Thank you, Shane.

I say, “You shouldn’t even be in PFLAG. Your gay son is dead, so he doesn’t count anymore.” This sounds pretty hurtful, but I’m bleeding here. I say, “Sorry.”

The bandages are tight and the alcohol stings in the dark, and my father says, “The Wilsons put a PFLAG sign in their yard. Two nights later, someone drove right through their lawn, ruined everything.”

My folks don’t have any PFLAG signs.

“We took ours down,” my father says. “Your mother has a PFLAG bumper sticker, so we keep her car in the garage. Us taking pride in your brother has put us right on the front lines.”

Out of the dark, my mother says, “Don’t forget the Bradfords. They got a burning bag of dog feces on their front porch. It could’ve burned their whole house down with them sleeping in bed, all because they hung a rainbow PFLAG wind sock in their backyard.” Mom says, “Not even their front yard, in their backyard.”

“Hate,” my father says, “is all around us, Bump. Do you know that?”

My mom says, “Come on, troops. It’s chow time.”

Dinner is some casserole from the PFLAG cookbook. It’s good, but God only knows what it looks like. Twice, I knock over my glass in the dark. I sprinkle salt in my lap. Anytime I say a word, my folks shush me. My mom says, “Did you hear something? Did that come from outside?”

In a whisper, I ask if they remember what tomorrow is. Just to see if they remember, what with all the tension. It’s not as if I’m expecting a cake with candles and a present.

“Tomorrow,” my dad says. “Of course we know. That’s why we’re nervous as cats.”

“We wanted to talk to you about tomorrow,” my mom says. “We know how upset you are about your brother still, and we think it would be good for you if you’d march with our group in the parade.”

Jump to another weird sick disappointment just coming over the horizon.

Jump to me getting swept up in their big compensation, their big penance for, all those years ago, my father yelling, “We don’t know what kind of filthy diseases you’re bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep tonight.”

They called this tough love.

This is the same dinner table where Mom told Shane, “Dr. Peterson’s office called today.” To me she said, “You can go to your room and read, young lady.”

I could’ve gone to the moon and still heard all the yelling.

Shane and my folks were in the dining room, me, I was behind my bedroom door. My clothes, most of my school clothes were outside on the clothesline. Inside, my father said, “It’s not strep throat you’ve got, mister, and we’d like to know where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to.”

“Drugs,” my mom said, “we could deal with.”

Shane never said a word. His face still shiny and creased with scars.

“Teenage pregnancy,” my mom said, “we could deal with.”

Not one word.

“Dr. Peterson,” she said. “He said there’s just about only one way you could get the disease the way you have it, but I told him, no, not our child, not you, Shane.”

My father said, “We called Coach Ludlow, and he said you dropped basketball two months ago.”

“You’ll need to go down to the county health department tomorrow,” my mom said.

“Tonight,” my father said, “we want you out of here.”

Our father.

These same people being so good and kind and caring and involved, these same people finding identity and personal fulfillment in the fight on the front lines for equality and personal dignity and equal rights for their dead son, these are the same people I hear yelling through my bedroom door.

“We don’t know what kind of filthy diseases you’re bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep tonight.”

I remember I wanted to go out and get my clothes, iron them, fold them, and put them away.

Give me any sense of control.

Flash.

I remember how the front door just opened and shut, it didn’t slam. With the light on in my room, all I could see was myself reflected in my bedroom window. When I turned out the light, there was Shane, standing just outside the window, looking in at me, his face all monster-movie hacked and distorted, dark and hard from the hairspray blowup.

Give me terror.

Flash.

He didn’t ever smoke that I knew about, but he lit a match and put it to a cigarette in his mouth. He knocked on the window.

He said, “Hey, let me in.”

Give me denial.

He said, “Hey, it’s cold.”

Give me ignorance.

I turned on the bedroom light so I could only see myself in the window. Then I shut the curtains. I never saw Shane again.

Tonight, with the lights off, with the curtains shut and the front door locked, with Shane gone except for the ghost of him, I ask, “What parade?”

My mom says, “It’s the Gay Pride Parade.”

My dad says, “We’re marching with PFLAG.”

And they’d like me to march with them. They’d like me to sit here in the dark and pretend it’s the outside world we’re hiding from. It’s some hateful stranger that’s going to come get us in the night. It’s some alien fatal sex disease. They’d like to think it’s some bigoted homophobe they’re terrified of. It’s not any of it their fault. They’d like me to think I have something to make up for.

I did not throw away that can of hairspray. All I did was turn out the bedroom lights. Then there were the fire engines coming in the distance. There was orange flashing across the outside of my curtains, and when I got out of bed to look, there were my school clothes on fire. Hanging dry on the clothesline and layered with air. Dresses and jumpers and pants and blouses, all of them blazing and coming apart in the breeze. In a few seconds, everything I loved, gone.

Flash.

Jump ahead a few years to me being grown up and moving out. Give me a new start.

Jump to one night, somebody calling from a pay phone to ask my folks, were they the parents of Shane McFarland? My parents saying, maybe. The caller won’t say where, but he says Shane is dead.

A voice behind the caller saying, Tell them the rest.

Another voice behind the caller saying, Tell them Miss Shane hated their hateful guts and her last words were: This isn’t over yet, not by a long shot. Then somebody laughing.

Jump to us alone here in the dark with a casserole.

My father says, “So, honey, will you march with your mother and me?”

My mom says, “It would mean so much for gay rights.”

Give me courage.

Flash.

Give me tolerance.

Flash.

Give me wisdom.

Flash.

Jump to the truth. And I say:

“No.”