The Animators(43)

And he would. Teddy was patient, a weird enough quality on its own. He would listen to me jabber for an hour entire about Looney Tunes or Harriet the Spy or how much I hated my sister and say maybe two sentences throughout. But he clearly paid attention, his eyes on me, soft, bright intelligence behind them. He was the only person in my life who actually listened to me. Once, when I skinned my knee, Teddy slowly and carefully drew out the bits of gravel caught within using my mother’s tweezers. I cried, and it hurt, but I trusted him.

—

“I loved that video.” Mel shifts in her chair, ashing her cigarette. “One of mom’s boyfriends, this guy Kurt, really liked me because I liked Tool. He gave me a Tool tape for my birthday. He would have made a cool stepdad.”

I marvel silently. This isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. In all my anxiety, I somehow forgot that it was Mel to whom I would be talking. Mel who would have questions, who would smoke and down Diet Cokes and tell me about peeing in some girl’s closet. “What happened?” I say.

“Pretty sure Mom stole from him. Big shock. So, Teddy was like you. He was a weird kid.”

“Well, he wasn’t weird so much as just—” I get a mental image. Teddy, eating lunch one day that summer at my house. PBJ and Doritos. His skinny shoulders pulled slightly back, concentrating on his sandwich. When my mother had given it to him, he whispered a thank you before polishing it off like it was the world’s most savory T-bone.

“I don’t know,” I say.

Mel turned her body toward me, cupping her chin in her hand, looking slightly away. “I’m glad you had someone,” she says. “Thinking of you back then. With no one. It’s sad.”

This makes me laugh.

I can see her smiling. “Are you laughing at my empathy pains? Fuck you, Sharon.”

“No no. That’s really nice. You’re a retroactive pal.”

Mel shifts, sighs, lifts her eyebrows. “So.” She flicks her Camel hard pack open, chooses a cigarette. “Tell me. When does it all hit the fan?”

—

I suspected something out of the ordinary was going on with Teddy. It was in the way he picked through the world, watching everything like it might come down on top of him. He tapped on doors. He looked in the windows before entering his own house. He washed his hands over and over until they were nasty, waxy-clean. He bit at the chapped parts of his lips until they bled. This was a kid who operated on the basis of caution, like he had learned things that made him watch out. I wondered, in quiet moments, what was wrong with him.

I thought maybe his house was to blame. Teddy’s house was openly filthy; the carpet hadn’t been vacuumed in years, was sticky with ashes, pop spills, and in some places crisp, fragmented dog poop, courtesy of Teddy’s mother’s Pekingese, Coco, with whom she had left and not returned the year prior. But there was something else in there, something strange I could feel on my skin, a muffled line of electricity that prickled my arm hairs whenever I was alone with it. My house wasn’t exactly good—it was a fighting house I came from—but Teddy’s house scared the shit out of me.

Even when it was just the two of us, I wouldn’t go into any room without him. I made him come into the bathroom and turn around while I peed.

The only other person I’d seen there since Teddy’s mom left was Teddy’s dad, Honus Caudill. Honus Caudill was big and red-faced and I could hear him when he breathed. His work boots were crumpled by the door, dark at the instep. The length of his shoe was three times mine.

Sometimes I would hear low noises coming from deep within the house. I asked Teddy about it once. His mouth fell into a straight line and he said, “That’s my dad,” and that was all.

Honus Caudill scared the shit out of me, too, but if asked, I wouldn’t be able to explain why. Yet another thing that refused to exist, because I didn’t know the words to prove that it did.

Once, we saw him cleaning out the van he drove, a rusting, silver Dodge Caravan I could see limping up the side of the mountain when he came home. It was so old, its rear opened with two doors splaying out instead of a hatch rising skyward. Teddy walked slightly in front of me, head down as we passed his father sitting there, the van interior dark, cleaning solution and a roll of paper towels at his feet.

This all happened the summer before sixth grade.

We went to Teddy’s after my sister tried to lock us in a closet. We had settled on the living room rug to play Scrabble when I noticed a small, gummy spot near the floorboard. Unlike the rest of the spills, it looked like someone had tried to rub it clean.

“That’s where Daddy came last night,” Teddy whispered.

I didn’t know what he meant. So I pointed to a dog poop stain nearby and said, “And that’s where he went. Hah hah.”

Teddy was quiet.

I confessed sheepishly, “I don’t know what that means.”

“You don’t know what coming is?”

“No.”

“It’s when a man watches dirty stuff,” he says, eyes still on the stain, “and his wiener gets all hard, and he rubs it against something or he slaps it against his hand, and then white stuff like shampoo comes out of it. That’s splooge. That’s where my dad splooged last night.”

I had no idea what to make of this. It sounded like a lie. Way too far out there to be something people actually did. But Teddy didn’t lie. That, I did know. He wasn’t the kind of kid who lied because he thought it was funny, or because he was bored. Teddy’s dad wasn’t at home that afternoon. The house was still. No one had turned on the TV yet.