Chris Lynch - Kill Switch

“Maybe, when you get to college,” he says, “you can check out and see, maybe they need a caretaker. Then we can be a team again.”

The boy and his relentless unfathomable heart does make me smile.

“They might need a caretaker, but probably not as much as you surely do.”

“Then there’s that. Either way, I see the team reunited.”

The team. Unfathomable.

I do wonder if there is such a thing as juvenile dementia. Maybe that’s the team we’re on, really.

“Come here,” I say, and pull him close to me. I drape my new thick burgundy Suffolk sweatshirt around his shoulders. I feel they are death-bony shoulders. “Try and keep warm, at least,” I say.

He pulls the thing on, wrapping himself into it and grinning like I gave him mink.

“You defy all the laws of human nature,” I say.

“Well, then, you defy all the other ones,” he says, trapping me in a spindly, unexpected kind of creepy hug that feels like the best thing I can remember feeling.

Until it brings on the trembling in me again and I have to shove him away.

“Just go to work, will ya,” I shout, turning away as he goes up into the tub of a vessel.

The boat eventually pulls away, as it does a couple of times a day. It goes straight to the Big Island, which by all accounts is pretty small, and then another boat gig takes Jarrod away, farther, from here, from stuff, from me, from old difficulties and almost certainly to a whole bunch of new ones.

He is waving at me, waving madly from the rail of the boat like one of the doomed idiots launching on the Titanic . But in this case, he is the only idiot waving, the other passengers and crew showing no interest in the port they are leaving behind or the people they are leaving to it.

I wave at him a little less nuttily, but nuttily enough.

My waving only makes him wave with ever more gusto, and broadening grin.

An utter, unfathomable nut job.

This is why love is for chumps.

Independence, solitude, silence, are all great things.

But hitchhiking, ultimately, is for chumps. It is little wonder hitchhiking is so identified with mass murder. Ten minutes after you have been picked up by one of these jamokes, you want to kill them. Every one of them.

I make it just under halfway before I break down and call my sister to come and bring me home.

She is great for doing it. But I don’t feel chatty.

“Is that it?” Lucy says, finally exasperated with me after about a half hour of the clam show. “Nothing? You got nothing for me after all that?”

“Sorry,” I say, staring out at the trees I know individually by now. “Thanks for getting me.”

“Well, I don’t get you, but that’s another story. So, you just… left him? Just like that?”

“That’s what he wanted.”

“Hnnn,” she says. “What he wanted, huh? Fine, then. I’m cool with that. Nice work.”

“Thanks.”

We indulge in some more silence until we reach her limit again.

“Did you hear about Zeke?”

Now I turn away from the trees. I feel my face flush just like when I didn’t know an answer in school. But I hope she is not paying that close attention to my details. She looks over.

“Watch the road, jeez,” I snap.

She watches the road.

“No,” I say. “What about him?”

“Dead. Yeah, just like that. They just found him a few hours ago. A mess, apparently. They say he was hill walking, way up there in the jaggedy foothills up north. Fell, apparently, a long way down a cliff face and into a flooded quarry. Very pretty, they say.”

I look back to my trees.

“Huh,” I say. “Wow. How’s Mom and Dad anyway?”

I find out how they are when I meet them on the front porch. It feels like I have been away a year. I would love to get reacquainted with my cozy room and my lovely bed right now.

That won’t be happening.

“What’s this?” I ask, pointing at what is too obviously my suitcase on the top step. My mother is giving me a strange and tentative hug as I ask.

My father has never been big on answering stupid questions, so he lets that one lie there. I extend my hand to shake his but instead he hands me this plastic file box sort of a thing. I look at him and wait.

“You should have everything you need in there. There is money. Bank records, paperwork.”

I open the box and there is all kinds of blah-blah-blah a person needs when a person has to be running his own life. Some of it I recognize, some I don’t.

“Some of this is Da’s,” I say.

“D. Cameron. If it is D. Cameron, it is for you. There are notes to that effect, which you can read at your leisure. If you need anything else, you know how to reach us.”

“I’m not sure I do, actually,” I say. Little joke there. Goes over well.

“Call me, Dan,” Lucy says. “Okay?”

“Of course,” I say.

We stand there, me, my parents, my sister, my belongings, playing out the grand mal seizure of awkward silences. The weight of it all threatens to pull the porch right underground.

“Dad, college doesn’t start for another-”

“Best of luck, son.”

Pretty unambiguous there, my dad. I pick up my suitcase. Lucy rushes up and breathlessly squeezes me in the hug that I have been seeking, missing, dying for, and I feel myself well up at just the moment when I need to be made of much tougher stuff than that.

This is why love is for chumps.

I suck up my tears the way a little kid sniffles up snot. That’s that.

I walk backward down the front steps of my house.

“Is this because I released the old man, Dad?” I ask, in motion.

He nods. “And because I suspect he has released you. I know what he was, Daniel. I won’t live with it again.”

I stop dead in my backward tracks.

This does not please them. My parents turn and go into their home. Lucy stands there, quivering, waving, blowing me kisses, and staying planted right where she is until I am gone.

“You look like a man who could use a lift,” comes a voice from the car that is crawling alongside me.

“I never liked you,” I say to Da’s old workmate Largs.

“Fair enough, and mutual, Young Man.”

“That is not my name.”

“Hop in, Daniel. I will drop you where you are going.”

“It’s just up ahead,” I say, “about twelve hundred miles.”

“I was thinking more bus station.”

I get in, and he goes quiet for a bit, tooling along the streets toward the bus terminal. When he has given me enough adjustment time, he talks.

“Horrible shame, about old Zeke,” he says.

“Horrible,” I say crisply.

“But that’s old men for you. They fall down and die. Happens all the time, they fall down and they die.”

“You’re not that much younger.”

“Ouch.” He laughs, a laugh that sounds like train wheels squealing on a bend of track. “I guess I’d better be careful, then, huh? But that’s what retirement villages are for, huh? So they can be safe and not hurt themselves or anybody else. Right?”

“I suppose.”

“That is a nice one you found for your grandfather. Perfect, I think.”

I snap my head in his direction and all his chummy nonsense bleeds right out.

“You are good, Daniel. But you are not that good. Don’t get all worked up, anyway. I meant what I said. It is a perfect retirement village for him. He’s safe there, I think. You did damn well there. He’s safe and god knows we don’t need any more old men falling down and hurting themselves right now. That doesn’t do anybody any good, does it?”