Page 34 of Zeppelin
“He… not really.”
I shove the bacon around in the pan for a few more seconds before I scoop it out onto a plate with paper towel to dab the grease off.
“There’s not much to tell. We were a typical trailer trash family. No dad in the picture. Our mom wasn’t really a junkie. She did sometimes have a job, but she liked getting strung out. Always had some dumb fuck of a boyfriend around. Sometimes, she’d disappear for days. She did make an attempt, when we were young, to get clean. A few people from the trailer court, old people, would drop in and check that we were okay. Sometimes we’d go over to their place. She made an effort to get us to school and make sure we went, but after we were ten, it all just went to shit,” he pauses. I give him the space and keep my focus on the eggs.
He continues, “She got back into drinking and drugs because she got back into the dumb fucks who liked to give it to her. We were old enough to get our own asses to school. The main motivating factor wasn’t education. The place had a breakfast program, so we were guaranteed one meal for sure. We had a few friends who’d share their lunches with us. Even early on, we were real good at sports, so people liked us. We fit in. Honestly though, we didn’t give a shit if we were liked or not,and I think that’s why people did. We were our own world, me and Jack.”
I wait until he pauses again before I bring his plate to the table. Four eggs. A mound of bacon. Three pieces of toast. Hopefully that’s enough. I have an egg on my plate, and a slice of toast that I’m going to force myself to eat because I need the calories. Hopefully it sticks.
I sit across from him, focusing on my plate since I’m still not sure where to look. Already, I can sort of tell where this is going. It makes me hurt for a child who wasn’t loved properly and who never got the protection he deserved. It’s even worse knowing that the one person in his life who ever showed him affection is gone forever. It makes me want to go back in time and find him as a boy and hug him hard.
I want to hug him right now. Is there an emptiness inside of him that won’t ever close up?
“There was a storm one night. We’d just turned twelve. We lived in this shit singlewide, and it was basically a tin can. No cellar. Our mom wasn’t home. We were old enough by then that people didn’t have to come check up on us anymore. She hadn’t been home in days. She was off on some bender. The place just blew in. Collapsed, that’s how strong those winds were. Big hail, thunder, the sky was sulfur yellow. Jack said we had better get in the tub. We dragged a mattress in there over us. He was right about that. We got banged up, but we were okay.”
I get up slowly, so he can tell that I’m not trying to cut him off and I’m still listening. I fill up the kettle and set it on the stove to boil. I used to love coffee in the morning. It’s not a problem giving it up. At the moment, the thought of drinking even a sip makes me want to retch.
“After the storm,” I ask him, running my finger over a groove in the old farmhouse tabletop. I have a love for old furniture. I chose what spoke to me, not because I thought it would fit with the house’s vibe. I appreciate that it’s not just books that can tell a story. “What happened? Someone must have known something wasn’t right. Or where did you go?”
The coffee is strong and black, and still very hot. The steam curdles off the top of the mug as soon as Zeppelin pours.
“Social services got involved. It was a shit show. Our mom somehow convinced them that she had her life together. She moved us in with her boyfriend at the time, into this dumpy little house on the other side of town. It was disgusting, but the people coming and going were worse. That was our life for a few years. A body can only take so much and our mom’s finally gave out. When our mom overdosed, at least Caesar—that’s what her asshole boyfriend called himself—paid for the cheapest burial. We knew it was coming. We were sad, but she’d ceased to really be a mom or anything like it to us a long time before that. We were almost fifteen then.”
I nibble away at the cold piece of toast, listening intently to every word he’s saying. I know that when people have truly done that for me in the past, it makes me feelheardandseen. Bronte and my mom can both make a person feel like they’re the only one who exists in the world for that moment. I want to be that for Zeppelin. I want to know that there is one person in the world he can still come to.
It’simportantto me.
I don’t tell him that I’m sorry. It’s so trite. I want to hold him. I want to give him space. I don’t know what I want to do. Like his losing his brother, there’s nothing in the world I cando to change that, and there’s precious little I can do to make it seem better.
“We’d been talking about leaving for a long time.” He takes a minute to eat, head bowed. “We finally did it. Just got on a bus with some money we’d saved from doing odd jobs around town and left. We went to Edmonton, found work—the kind of job where no one asks your name or age, we slept rough, crashed on floors, and finally got a shitty apartment. All our money went into saving up for some bikes. There was this guy who used to come to my mom’s boyfriend’s house. He rode a Harley. It was just an old thing, but to us, it stood for something. Freedom. He was just another fuckup who came there to get high and drunk, but that didn’t matter. We were in awe of that bike.”
He stuffs a few more bites into his mouth. He doesn’t look up, but I have the impression that he’s embarrassed about admitting something like that. I find it sweet. It’s sohim. “I don’t know if Jack was sold on the idea, but I worked on him. I wanted to buy two bikes and ride them all the way from Edmonton down into California and then onto Latin America. See the world. See how people lived. We didn’t have a proper sense of danger. Not just because we were young and thought we were invincible, but because of how we’d grown up. I guess I did have a hunger for learning. Just not from books. I wanted toexperienceit. Taste it. Memorize it. Have it running through my blood. That was the only high I ever wanted to chase.”
“How did you end up in Hart?”
He snorts, but it turns into a sharp bark of laughter with real humor in it. “After all this time, I can laugh at how fate or life or whatever it is out there, decides for us,” he explains. “Our bikes broke down there. We had to find a shop. It was owned by Satan’s Angels. Long story short, we got our introduction tothe club that way. We were looking for freedom, but underneath all that, we were looking for a place to call home, I guess. Hart was as good as anything else. Riding with a club, I figured we’d see our fair share of the world anyway. We were twenty by then. We’d saved for years for those bikes and to put enough money aside to take years off to ride. I don’t know that Jack was sold on the idea of the club either, but he could see that I was. I always had a best friend with me. I was never alone. Me and Jack, we looked after each other.”
I watch him carefully. I force myself to eat the last of the toast, but I keep my focus on him as I chew. He’s losing control. I should tear my eyes away, but it’s hard to look anywhere else. His husky voice is just the first warning. I refuse to let him think that emotions are a weakness or that they’re not masculine. I was taught that it’s okay for anyone and everyone tofeel. To grieve, to laugh, to need to vent, to be crushed, to pick yourself up. What was Zeppelin ever taught past survival?
“You know what I think?” I fold my hands in front of my plate. “That you enjoy pushing people’s buttons. I thought at first that it was just a way to shield yourself. Shelter in place. Some of it is a protective mechanism, but you’re also naturally good at making people uncomfortable.” I keep my voice gentle. I’m making a statement, not an accusation, and there’s room for me to be wrong. I’m worried he’ll take it the wrong way, but he smiles wryly.
“I do push people past what they can usually handle, I’ll admit. I like thatyoucan explain tomewhy I do it.”
“People might not like being outside of that zone, but that’s where all the real thinking happens. It’s where change comes from. If everyone is too afraid of doing or saying thewrong thing, they’ll never do anything and they’ll always be silent.”
He shakes his head, eyes crinkling at the corners. There were no lines there despite the early morning and rude wrenching from bed. I’m not sure that he believes me, but at least he’s giving me that ghost of a smile as he concentrates and processes.
He scoops up the last piece of bacon then refills his mug with the last of the coffee from the press. “Can I tell you something?”
“You can,” I say as I lean forward over the table, the tension is his voice cutting through me. This isn’t going to be something funny. The intensity of his gaze has banished all humor. He’s stripped this truth down and he’s about to give it to be unvarnished.
“When Jack died… when I first heard he was gone, I- it wasn’t just disbelief that took root in me. It was something worse. Far blacker. A ledge that I wanted to step off of so I could go with him. He promised that he’d never leave me behind. Hepromised. But here I am, without a clue how I’m supposed to justget on with it.”
His admission doesn’t scare me or even surprise me, except that it’s so inflamed as a wound, and deeper than I was prepared for. “Honestly, Zep, I think that’s natural. If you were just okay after losing your brother, that would be the most alarming part. It’s natural to question why we’re here, and when our world gets rocked, what we’re going to do. You don’t have to heal from loss immediately. You don’t have to heal ever. The best we can be in this world is kind, and the most we can do is try our best. Life will hurt us, chip away at us, and leave scars. You don’thave to pretend to be anything you’re not. Not- not with me, you don’t.”
His stare started off blank and controlled, but gradually, he dropped that. I don’t think it was his choice to. It just happened because he couldn’t keep the shields up any longer. I don’t want him to have to respond to that. It wasn’t about getting a response. It was about reassurance. He probably hasn’t ever told anyone about this. He chose to open up to me. That trust is monumental. It rocks me. How is it possible to know someone for such a short amount of time and already feel as though I can come just as I am?
There are people I’ve known since school that I consider friends, as well as my good friends from college. Honestly? I’m not that close with any of them. I wouldn’t trust them with those parts of me.
