Romeo Falling, page 2
“What happened to your cape?” I panted.
He didn’t stop. “Wolf attack.”
“Wolf attack?”
This time, he slowed and turned toward me. He glanced down at Buddy, eyes sparkling, and said, “Yeah. It was bad. For a while there, I wasn’t sure I’d make it. The lone wolf of Alabaster got me.” His cape flapped in the breeze as he turned to take off again, and that time, Buddy snapped at it, catching it between his teeth and pulling back. It hardly slowed Romeo. “To the Dark Forest!”
I followed incredulously, my interest piqued well beyond anything I’d felt all summer.
“What are we doing?” I asked when we arrived at the five straggly trees that made up the entirety of the Dark Forest.
“Foraging for food,” he said as if it were obvious.
We collected dried leaves, small stones, bark, and as many acorns as we could carry. We piled them high and made repeated trips back to the fountain, running the faucet until a mud river meandered around us. We filled our water bottles and poured the contents onto the roots of the oak trees, digging up dirt with bare hands and enthusiastic assistance from a lone wolf. We molded the dirt into rounds, called them cakes, and adorned them with acorns and leaves.
Romeo’s eyes flashed again. I realized the first time it happened had only been a hint. The second time, he did it with meaning.
“Would you like me to tell you a story?” he asked. And there, in my local park, on a late summer’s afternoon, in the shade of a wizened white oak tree, reality faded and make-believe came to life around us.
Romeo painted with words, pictures so clear and vivid I can still see them sometimes when I’m caught in the quiet place between sleep and wakefulness. He told tales of magical creatures on crazy adventures. Mythical beasts and unlikely heroes. He wrote himself and Buddy into the story, and after a while, he wrote me in too. He found long sticks for us to use as blades and short ones as guards. He untied my laces and used them to fashion our swords. We defended our bounty and found hidden treasure, and when we were done, we set off again.
“Where to?” I cried, sword held high in one hand, a mud cake balancing precariously in the other.
Romeo cast his eye to the side of the park farthest from my house, slowing his pace and speaking in a somber, hushed tone. “To the dragon, of course.”
The boulder that had always been a big, inconveniently placed rock morphed before my eyes, growing scales and a gargantuan pair of wings. “Inferno,” Romeo called it. We offered the dragon the cakes we’d made—it liked them so much it almost lit Buddy on fire by accident. Once its hunger was sated, Inferno allowed us to mount it.
“Careful,” warned Romeo as we clambered onto the rock, “dragons are wild. Only the brave can ride them.”
Turns out, that day, we were the brave. We must have been because we rode that dragon until the sun hung low and the sky turned orange and pink.
“Home time,” said my mom for the fifth time. This time, despite a chorus of complaints from Romeo and me, our mothers held firm.
“We have to go now, hon. I haven’t started dinner yet and Dad will be home soon,” said Romeo’s mom. “We can meet up tomorrow though. We’re practically neighbors.” Romeo’s house was directly across the park from mine. “I have Carol’s number. We’ll arrange something, I promise.”
“Hey, Tiger,” said Romeo, turning back as his mom led him home by the hand. It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. We’d played for hours, but I’d somehow forgotten to tell him my name, and he hadn’t asked. I was wearing my favorite T-shirt that day, the green one with a big orange tiger and the word Roarrrr on the front. I loved that shirt so much that I was in a bad mood on the days it was in the laundry. By that late stage of the summer, my mom had taken to washing and drying it over night to avoid having to deal with me about it. “We ride at dawn.”
His face was splattered with mud on one side and his hair was disheveled. His cape was a little more tattered than when I met him. It was twisted around his neck and hung askew, slightly lower on one side than the other.
He was a mess, that was certain. But he was heroic.
“Well, no,” said his mom as they walked toward their house. “Not at dawn, Romeo. You can ride at noon or a little later. Actually, late afternoon is probably best because it’s cooler then, but not at daw—”
“No one rides at noon, Mom. It doesn’t happen. Everyone knows that. Who have you ever heard of riding at…?” Their voices faded as they moved out of earshot.
“Goodness,” said my mom, guiding me home as best she could without getting her hands covered in mud. “What a lot of fun you’ve had.”
She took me around to the side of the house and hosed me off before letting me inside. She made me take everything but my undies off and threw my clothes into the machine along with my shoes before we went upstairs.
Lexi stood at the landing and looked down in horror, bolting to her room and slamming the door shut as I approached.
My mom drew a bath for me and helped me wash my hair, scraping her nails gently across my scalp to dislodge the dirt and dried leaves. “Goodness,” she said again as the jug of water she poured over my head ran brown.
I talked the entire time, a steady stream of “Romeo this” and “Romeo that.” She nodded and smiled as I spoke, and when I told her Romeo said that if we closed our eyes and lay under the trees, the leaves would sing us a song, she said, “Ah, I see,” and hummed softly, “Romeo is a dreamer.”
My mom was right. Romeo was a dreamer. He spun words and worlds like no one I’d ever met. We played together every day for the rest of the summer. At first, we met in the park and then at his house or mine. His pool became Neptune or lava or an underwater forest, depending on the day. Our basement was a fortress or a maze or a cave or a safe place where no one could find us.
Days dragged out and flew by. Even though I was wired and denied being tired with my last breath, for the rest of that summer, sleep dragged me under the second my head hit the pillow.
I’d never had so much fun in all my life.
My mom and I met Romeo and his mom at the gate on the first day of school. Sally, Romeo’s mom, had asked for us to be put in the same class and we were all happy the principal had agreed. Despite being in the same class, that day, Romeo had the same big eyes he’d had the day I first met him, wide and wild, and his mom kept adjusting his backpack and telling him how lovely everything was going to be.
Romeo looked different at school. He had no cape for one thing, and for another, he’d gotten a haircut that was a lot more than a trim. The bushy mane of summer was gone. His shorts and T-shirt were neat and new, and he stood very straight.
“Okay, honey,” said Sally, kissing Romeo’s cheek and quickly wiping her lipstick off as he made a face and tried to squirm out of her grip. Her voice sounded funny, and my mom put a hand on her shoulder. “Off you go. You’ll have an lovely day, you’ll see.”
I could feel the tension in Romeo as we walked. His arms and legs were stiff and he hung back, falling into my shadow and making himself smaller until I stopped moving and turned to him. When our eyes met, I leaned my head close to his and whispered something into his ear. A message, a code I knew he’d understand. A reminder that even though we were at school and things were different, I knew who he was.
“Roarrrr!”
A slow smile crept up his face, and though he was still very straight and upright, he knew who I was too. His eyes twinkled, and he replied, “Easy, Tiger.”
From that day onward, a precedent was set. Wherever one of us was, the other was too. My friends Dan, Ollie, and Lewis included Romeo right from the start. They seemed to innately sense there wasn’t a choice in the matter. They seemed to understand Romeo and I came as a pair.
Looking back now, I can see that while I shared my friends with Romeo, I didn’t share him with my friends. Not really. Not all of him. I didn’t tell them he was magic. Or heroic.
I could have. At that time of our lives, they would’ve believed me, but I didn’t.
Maybe even then, in the second year of elementary school, there was a part of me that thought of Romeo as mine and mine only.
Sally was right. Romeo was shy and took a while to warm up to others. He was different at school—quieter, more reserved. Big groups of people weren’t easy for him. They made him uncomfortable and anxious. I’m an extrovert, so I spoke for both of us when he went quiet. I stayed close and made sure he always knew where I was. I made sure he never had to look up in class and wonder who he’d work with when a teacher told us to pair up.
It was never a question.
It was me. Always me.
At home, in the park, and in the pool, he commanded leagues and lone wolves. He created the worlds we lived in. At school, I led and he followed.
Romeo was clever. He did well academically without really trying. In truth, I think most of what we learned bored him to tears. Sally was one of those people who didn’t talk to kids like they were kids. She had big discussions about important things with Romeo. She taught him things some might have thought were beyond his years, but they weren’t. Not at all. Not for him. As a result, he spent a lot of time looking out the window at school, eyes vague and unfocused as daydreams whispered his name.
Now and again, teachers would bring him back to reality with a loud, “Romeo! Eyes on me!”
It startled him and made him turn pink all the way to his ears. It wrenched him out of his own world and brought him crashing down to ours. I hated it. It made my blood boil right from the very first time it happened. I couldn’t see why teachers needed to rouse him roughly like that when a soft, whispered “Romeo” or a light hand on his shoulder did the job just as well.
I felt so strongly about it, in fact, that by the third grade, I decided to make it my business to school our homeroom teacher on how best to handle Romeo.
After a particularly loud “Romeo!” I waited in her class while the rest of my classmates filed out to the playground for recess. “Ms. Patton, you shouldn’t yell ‘Romeo!’ like that. It’s not nice, and Romeo doesn’t like it.”
“Well,” said Ms. Patton, clearly taken aback by the strength of my tone, “if Romeo doesn’t like it, then he should come and talk to me about it.”
“He doesn’t need to because he has me.”
Ms. Patton’s eyes widened, but her expression softened. “Okay, Jude, let me have it. What do you think I should do when Romeo isn’t paying attention?”
“Don’t stand far away and yell at him. It scares him. Come close and say his name quietly.”
Ms. Patton folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head to the side to get a better vantage of me. “I suppose I could try that,” she said after a while.
“And, and, also, you should try thinking about whether Romeo really needs to focus or whether you’re teaching him something he already knows because a lot of the time…”
“All right, all right, that’s quite enough. Thank you, Jude. You better head out to the playground, or you won’t have time to eat your snack.”
Buoyed by my initial success, I dispensed advice on how best to handle Romeo freely for the rest of elementary school. Sometimes it was well received, and sometimes it wasn’t. When it wasn’t, I tended to find myself in detention on account of an alleged attitude problem. On those occasions, I would, without fail, look up to see Romeo sliding into the seat beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I’d hiss. “You didn’t get detention.”
His answer was always the same. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
3
“The face of heaven so fine”
Now
The house feels strange. The kitchen, living room, and bedrooms are almost the same as they were. Ours, but it doesn’t smell like us anymore. Most of our furniture is still here, but all the photographs have been taken down. The posters that covered the entire wall behind my headboard are gone. The wall has been patched up and painted a cheery light blue. Everything is bright and clean and far neater than when we lived here. The massive, moth-eaten navy-blue sofas that permanently bore the imprint of my sprawled-out form during my teen years are gone, replaced by a beige pair that are more upright and stern than the old ones were.
My mom was right, the kitchen and bathrooms are showing signs of wear and tear. With everything else looking better, they look notably worse than they used to.
That’s why I’m here. A dutiful son returning to his hometown to oversee a remodel. My presence here wasn’t part of the plan. Believe me, I’d never have agreed to it in a million years if my gran hadn’t taken a fall off a ladder late last week and broken her hip.
A ladder. She’s eighty-two, for God’s sake. What the hell was she doing climbing a ladder?
Thankfully, she’ll be all right, but she’s in pain and needs help taking care of herself, so my parents are staying with her while she recovers. They’re supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be happily cosseted in my Manhattan apartment. I’m supposed to be in the office this week and visiting my parents in Florida for the next two. That was my plan for the summer. A plan I was happy with. One I consented to and was looking forward to. It was exactly the same as my plan for summer last year. And the year before. And the year before that.
My parents moving to Pensacola Beach was an inadvertent blessing. When they first told me they were thinking about it, I was aghast. Us, leaving Alabaster? I thought they’d lost their minds. I couldn’t think of anything that made less sense than us not living here. As it turns out, it worked out just fine. My parents leaving town was a perfect, reasonable reason for me not to come back. I haven’t needed to. Our house has been rented out as an Airbnb since a couple of months after Romeo and I graduated from college.
It’s late. Well, after midnight. It’s been almost seven hours since I got here. Almost seven hours since I saw Romeo. My pericardium feels bruised, a tight, fibrous sac that’s squeezing my heart too hard.
I didn’t touch the bread or ham. I couldn’t face them, but I ate an entire block of cheese and smashed one of the bottles of Cabernet in under an hour.
I don’t feel well.
I’m what my dad calls “wine awake.” Overstimulated. Tired but not sleepy. My head spins from booze, my stomach deeply unhappy with my food choices and letting me know all about it.
I get ready for bed, brushing my teeth, spitting in the sink, and rinsing it out meticulously. In my stupor, I look up, half expecting my mom to pop into view in the vanity mirror and say, “Good boy, Jude.”
God. I’m drunk.
I should probably have eaten something other than cheese.
I’m home, and I’m drunk.
I’m home, and I saw Romeo, and he’s exactly as terrible as he was the last time I saw him.
He might even be worse.
I bump my way to my room without turning the lights on and throw open the sash window facing the street. I overestimate the force it requires and send it up so hard I almost crack the glass.
“Shh,” I say to myself.
A thick fog of midsummer night air wafts in and causes the mood in the room to thicken. The park across the street is empty and quiet. Deserted. Dark except for the light of a single streetlight that causes long, eerie shadows to fan out from the swings. I take out my phone and manage to open my camera on the second attempt. I take a photograph despite the fact it feels even more stupid than usual to do so, and I save it to an unnamed folder. A folder that now holds one thousand six hundred and eighteen similar photographs.
I try not to feel anything about the size of that number.
Moira, a therapist I saw a while back, said it was okay that I do this. She said rituals are good for us and known to be healthy. Apparently, they can give us a beat. A pause. A second to catch our breath. She said rituals help bring order to chaos.
She was dead serious too. She didn’t mean it as a joke, but I found it funny as hell. I still do.
Jesus. What bullshit.
If you think anything about this little shit show is healthy, there isn’t a damn thing you won’t believe.
I slide the window down carefully and turn the lock, despite the fact there wasn’t a single home invasion or even a serious robbery in the twenty-one years I lived in Alabaster. I’m about to turn in when something catches my eye. A disturbance. A movement. A slow, smooth arc. The swing. The one on the left, near the Dogwood tree. It sways gently back and forth, the movement a careless relic left by someone dismounting before it came to a standstill.
I search the park for signs of life but find nothing.
The person I’m looking for isn’t there.
He’s closer.
Much closer. So close, he steals my breath for the second time today.
He’s on my front lawn, and he’s heaven and hell. Silver and blue, washed in moonlight. He’s wearing a white tank under a white shirt. The shirt is unbuttoned and hangs open, billowing out behind him as he moves. A black dog orbits slowly around him.
Buddy?
Buddy!
For a second, my heart lurches so hard that I almost call out.
It’s madness. It’s madness and booze. That’s what it is. Buddy was sixteen when I left. He’s been gone for years. Of course it’s not Buddy.
I step back into the shadows and stop breathing, hiding, taking cover without taking my eyes off Romeo.
I can see him. He can’t see me.
Moonlight glints off his face. He’s the same as my house and the rest of the town. The same but different. Mouth. Nose. Jaw. All the same. Full lips quick to quirk but slow to smile. An ever so slightly Romanesque nose that brings something regal to the rest of his features. A jawline so cutting and sharp it calls into question things I know as fact.
But his eyes? Unrecognizable.
Glass-bottle blue. Pale from the moon. Hard. Glinting like fine shards of metal.
