Page 18 of Of Heathens & Havoc

The smell of smoke and meat greets us at the same time as deep, ferocious barking and the rattling of the chain-link fence as Beast throws himself against the gate. I swing it open, and he leaps into my arms, nearly knocking me off my feet ashe slathers my face with kisses. I scratch behind his ears for a minute while Angel closes the gate and ambles over to the grill.

“Hey, Gramps,” he calls, lifting a hand in greeting as he goes.

I let Beast down and follow, sniffing my way to the selection sizzling over the coals. “Good to see you heathens,” Dad says, slapping my back and dragging me in for a hug after he’s done greeting Angel. He’s the one who gave me that nickname, before my earliest memory. It’s always been part of me, since I was a baby. It’s cool that he includes my friends in it when they’re here, like we’re all extensions of each other.

“Where’s Mom?” I ask.

“Probably just caught in traffic,” Dad says. “You know how it is between here and Little Rock this time of night. We can start without her. Grab some plates, would you?”

I head inside when he goes back to turning the meat. He always makes excuses for Mom, for how much she works. Guess it’s better than the alternative, but I can’t help but wonder how many nights he eats alone because she’s working late, throwing herself into reporting about other kids disappearing like it can bring back her own. But there’s no use digging into it. They survive it every day, which is more than some couples who lose a kid get to do.

I set four plates out on the table Dad built on the small, screened-in back porch, toss a stack of napkins into the middle, and set a cup of utensils beside it. Angel opens a beer and hands it to Dad before getting one of his own. They knock their cans together and stand there watching the burgers sizzle and the smoke curl up into the stagnant air. The buzz of crickets is interrupted by the sound of tires on the gravel in the carport as Mom pulls in. Beast starts up again, running around the side of the house to jump on the fence and announce his joy that she’s home to the whole world.

Or maybe the poor guy just runs to the gate every time because he’s hoping that one day, it’ll be Eternity pulling up. “I’m with you there, bud,” I mutter to myself, stepping through the back door to greet Mom when she comes through the front.

“Heath,” she cries, rushing to wrap her arms around me.

We stand there for a minute, our arms heavy around each other, weighed down with all the questions and guilt that a thousand reassurances can’t quite dispel. Does she wish it was me they pulled out of the river after the longest two weeks of our lives, headless and bloated with decay? Does she blame me the way I blame myself, a seed of resentment planted in some dark recess of her mind that she’d never admit even to her therapist?

Does she wonder if I blame her?

“Love you, Mom,” I say, planting a kiss on top of her head that smells like newly dyed hair and the product she puts in it to make sure she always looks perfect on camera.

“I love you too, baby,” she says, drawing away at last, like she’s reluctant to let me out of her grip in case I slip away for good this time too. “Y’all eat yet?”

“We were just about to.”

“Let me go wash off my face and change out of these clothes,” she says, gesturing at her work attire and the makeup she wears for her segment on the local news. “Don’t wait for me. It’s late, y’all must be starved.”

She’s already halfway down the hall, pausing to pull her heels off as she goes.

I stand there for a minute after their bedroom door closes, the hallway lit only by the recessed bulb Dad put in during one of his renovation projects between jobs. Mom’s career has taken off and Dad never lacks work as a handyman, so they could move to a bigger place if they wanted. But it’s always improve, never move. Maybe another one of those seeds buried in their subconscious is waiting for her to come back the sameway Beast is, and how could she find them if they weren’t waiting right where she left them?

“Burgers are on,” Angel yells from the back door.

“Coming,” I call back.

But I stand there another minute, letting my eyes sweep down the march of memories along the hallway, from a collage frame with pictures of both my parents as kids, including one of my dad holding my mom as a baby—weird—and then to pictures of them at unknown places after they left this town because their relationship wasn’t welcome here.

There’s one I always stared at as a kid, trying to picture my mother that way, as a teenager in a pair of pink, high-waisted short shorts, a crop top, and hot pink go-go boots in the sand, laughing and leaning back against Dad’s shoulder while he has an arm around her, hiding her bare midriff. She’s got a plastic cup of beer in one hand and firelight reflected in her eyes, or maybe it’s the flash of a cheap camera, the only one they had on the beach that night, before everyone carried phones and they would have deleted that picture because it’s slightly out of focus and her eyes are glowing yellow.

Somehow, the fact that it was good enough to save anyway because it was the only proof that night happened makes it even more precious than the ones that come after, professional wedding photos that are backed up to CDs in the storage closet, carefully curated pictures of a tow-headed, red-faced baby with his mouth wide open as he howled in fury, a little girl in pigtails shrieking with laughter on the swing, all perfectly in focus and chosen from dozens of similar candid shots, now backed up to the cloud.

I turn and head for the back porch before I reach the last one of Eternity, the place where she stops, frozen in time on a watermelon floatie in Angel’s pool, and the rest of us continue,dragged onward by the relentless hand of the clock and the tap of Mom’s thumb on the camera button.

Eternity is in all the other pictures too, though. Her absence is just as big as her presence, her ghost in the space between Mom and Dad here, at an empty place at the Thanksgiving table there, in the incomplete lineup of our family at the church picnic. She’s reflected back in the forced nature of my own smile, the sadness that wasn’t in Mom’s glowing eyes at the beach party, and in the sudden shift of Dad’s hair to entirely grey over the course of a season. She’ll never be gone from any of our lives except her own.

On the back porch, I scoot in at the table next to Angel and grab a burger. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Yeah, thanks Grampa,” Angel says, squirting mustard onto his bun.

“Thanks for paying your old man a visit,” Dad says. “How’s junior year starting out?”

I glance at Angel and then turn my attention to assembling my burger. “Remember Mercy Soules?”

Dad doesn’t have to answer. How could he forget?

“What about her?” he asks.

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