In the middle of our living room was a blob of bright green goo. Not oozing, but not entirely still either, piled in a sloppy mound the size of your average dog. I was standing in the doorway, key still in the lock.
My brother leapt halfway down the stairs and peered through the railing.
“What is what?” he repeated.
“That!” I screamed, gestured.
He jumped the final steps and followed my pointer finger.
“What on…”
“Adam—what is it?!” I said.
“I swear, I have no idea!”
Our living room was like the boring section of the museum with furniture from colonial times. I got low and stared into the blob. Next to our rug and the dark oak of our father’s polished chairs, it seemed to glow. A dog barked from another house. Adam was pacing. I heard heavy breathing, and it took a moment to realize it was me. The blob smelled like an old rag.
Adam hit the back of the couch and cussed. He was still in the navy corduroy jacket he’d begun wearing to school, a vintage NASA mission patch appearing on the sleeves every time one arrived in the mail. I was a year older; he grew fast and I grew slow. Before I left for middle school, people thought we were twins. We cussed back and forth, trading swears like a frisbee, until he grunted an “Ugh!” and flailed his arms, the flailing of someone unathletic with no background in theater.
I looked up, as if the ceiling might have a tube for dispensing otherworldly goo, but all I could see were the imperfections in the paint. I scanned the room for clues, past photos of my father with presidential candidates, past the wicker baskets full of Golf and Boat magazines. Our couch faced the television, which I remember as large but would likely now strike me as unusably small. It was off. Our father’s beloved Poseidon clock ticked away loudly on the mantle.
“Maybe you put it there.” Adam’s hands shook as he gripped the back of the couch.
“I literally just walked in the door!”
“I’ve literally been upstairs!”
More cussing.
I set my backpack in a chair, which squelched against the plastic covering. I studied my brother. I knew from movies how to tell if someone was lying: they would stutter, hide their mouth with their hands, avoid eye contact.
But Adam wasn’t doing those things. His jacket was a size too big, so the sleeves looked like fake muscles atop his chicken legs. He kept looking between the goo and me with wide eyes. It was hard to believe he was lying when I still didn’t even know what it was.
“What do we do?” he asked.
“Call the car phone?” I said, deciding to believe him.
“And tell him what? We got home and there’s a bunch of goo in the living room?” he said, gesturing to the blob. As if the blob needed to be highlighted. The smell grew worse the longer we lingered.
“He’s going to be so pissed,” Adam whispered.
“We didn’t do anything!” I stomped my foot, and the blob jiggled.
“You expect him to believe that?”
I did not. We had entered a phase, first me, then a year later, Adam, of mild mischief making. Ramps were erected. Outlets fried. Exploits from television reenacted. Tools would disappear, reappear months later in a lean-to in the woods. Leave us alone at a restaurant while feeding the meter, and we were liable to mix every available condiment in a glass and dare each other to drink it.
Threats were levied. Boarding school was a real possibility if the damn grades didn’t improve and the foolishness wasn’t eliminated. I’ve got the money and the motivation, he’d growl over dinner, slurping a chunky stew. Try me.
I used the new hallway phone to call the new carphone. I could see Adam through the doorway, staring at the blob in a trance. The carphone rang and rang with no machine to catch it, ten or fifteen rings. I felt then as if I might actually throw up, and wondered if the four grilled cheeses from lunch would come out the same color and consistency as the blob.
~
Our father and stepmother came home at 6:30pm. He maneuvered his body in the front door like a semi-truck, pulling forward, then turning slowly as our stepmother hooked the coat off his arm. She was wearing a knee-length coat my father bought for our mom at a department store in New York. He continued to rotate, getting the deadbolt as he turned past the door. He stepped out of his loafers, turned, and without hesitation screamed, What in the ever-loving fuck?
~
Dinner was hypothetically ready. Our stepmother had the leftovers back in the oven on low heat. She stood in the nook where the counters met, staring at her hands as if something should be in them. Adam and I sat across from our father at the dining room table.
It smells like an Italian paper mill in here.
“I agree, sir,” said Adam, having never been near a paper mill, much less an Italian one.
Shut it.
“Yessir.” Adam tucked his chin to his chest.
I don’t want any guff. Tell me why there’s a pile of green goo in the living room.
I knew not to look at Adam the way two prisoners would.
“It must have been here when I came home.” Adam said.
It was here when I came home, what?
“It was here when I came home, sir.”
Corey?
“Same, sir.”
My father eyed us suspiciously, smoking. The interrogation felt noirish, except for the way he held his cigarette, weakly between his thumb and ring finger, like a stranger had asked him to hold it for a second.
Margot, he said, causing our stepmother to spin. Get some shovels.
~
In the twilight, the goo lit up the room, the color of Mountain Dew or late-infection snot. When I thrust a shovel into it, it wiggled. Our stepmother had outfitted us with elbow length kitchen gloves, and hairnets for some reason. She hadn’t spoken all evening, whizzing around the house fulfilling the commands of our father, trying to anticipate them, occasionally succeeding.
We shoveled the blob into black contractor bags. Our father stood back, using a chair as a shield. I could tell he was searching for weakness in our partnership. Adam shoveled lefty, and I shoveled righty, each into separate bags. The first loads were easy, but soon only clumpy nuggets remained. I turned to my father, silently searching for our next instruction. He walked out of the room. I carried the surprisingly heavy bag until I cleared the house, then dragged it from the door to the edge of the yard.
There at the tree line, before the land slumped to the creek, my father had begun digging a grave. I imagined him pushing us in, burying us as a permanent solution to the malarky.
Dusk in our yard always made me uncomfortable, the blue-black of the eastern sky giving way to dense forest. It felt like the time and place where all things wooded could happen. Wolves, bears. Sequence killers. Bag and all, bag and all. I had tied it as best I could, but some of the blob spilled into the dirt. I wondered if what we were doing was wrong; not schoolyard wrong, but unethical. Was it safe in the ground, near the water?
Adam schlumped his bag in after mine. The physics of the black bag in the fading light made no sense to my brain. Our father threw all our shovels in the hole, and with a fourth shovel began to fill everything back in. The grass was patchy in this section of the yard; I figured that’s why he picked it. I wondered why we had so many shovels.
When we got back inside, my stepmother was moving chairs and footstools off the fiercely stained rug. My father was the last one back in the house.
Adam. Go to your Room.
“But!”
Adam!
“Yessir.” I watched my brother occlude our family photos one at a time until he disappeared upstairs.
My father rolled the carpet, squat and sweaty in a low football stance. I didn’t ask if he wanted help. He rolled it over and over and over until the rug looked like a large taquito.
Without looking at me, he walked up the stairs, and I understood he wanted me to follow. He walked down the hall, opened the door to my bedroom, and stood aside. I still had my shoes on and knew I was tracking dirt in the hall, normally a sin, but my father’s hiking books were still on his triple-wide feet.
I sat on the bed. My father came in slowly, and I had the odd sensation that I had never been here before. I looked at my Mike Piazza posters and wondered where they came from. My long jump ribbon from field day and taekwondo trophies. Who won them? My father pulled up the closest chair, one so low to the ground even I didn’t use it anymore. Mashing himself into the tiny wood frame, he looked like a giant visiting the regular world.
Corey. Don’t lie to me. What did your brother do?
It was more likely that Adam was responsible than the blob just appearing from nowhere. But each possibility made less sense. Was it a prank gone wrong? Had he meant to make Jello? He had looked so scared. My father cracked his neck to the side.
“It was there when we got home.”
If you lie to me, I will punish you both equally.
“I’m not lying.”
All I care about is the truth.
For the first time in our conversation, I looked him in the eye. “Why aren’t you listening to me?”
I know it was Adam, son.
“He didn’t do it.”
So, it was you.
He sat with his elbows on his knees. I knew to pick one eye, or stick to the brow, but not dance between them.
“No. It was there when we got home.”
I was born at night, but not last night.
“We tried calling you on the car phone, but it didn’t pick up.”
Car phone didn’t ring.
“Check the phone bill.”
My father stood up, emitting an involuntary grumble. I wish you’d made a different choice.
“Dad!”
He shut my door and lumbered down the hall. I stayed on the bed until I heard him close Adam’s door, then I knelt, inching along the carpet until I could hear their voices slipping under the door like a flier.
Where did Corey get the slime?
“What is it, Dad? Is it dangerous?
Just tell me the truth.
“Are we going to be okay?”
If you lie to me, I will punish you both equally.
“I touched it a little, a little when we were shoveling…”
I heard a few creaks, but knew it was just my father shifting his weight. I pictured Adam sitting on his sheets with every baseball logo on them, including the new Tampa team. The walls bare and forest green, newly painted by our stepmother. I pictured him shaking, looking up at our father for comfort. I imagined my father, his face beet red from hours of threats, looming over my brother.
I can’t believe I’ve raised such liars.
I could tell it was a closer, so I reversed back to the bed. I tried to crawl like how a spider might, using more legs than I had to disperse my weight evenly. I rolled onto the bed and sat with poor posture, as if I’d been sagging there under the weight of wrongdoing the whole time. I was used to him playing us off each other. My father opened the door, shook his head, made something halfway between a sigh and a grunt, and left. Hearing Adam plead for comfort, I could not understand how little my father seemed to care.
~
The next night at dinner, silent except for the mush of mash potatoes, my father finally spoke.
Corey. Adam. When you’re done with dinner, go to your room. Don’t talk. You will do homework. When you’re done, you will get in bed. No television. No games.
Watching him cut through his pork chop with grubby satisfaction, I saw his anger as the defenses of a dim-witted man. I couldn’t have put it that way, but I understood it. I had mistaken his certainty for knowledge, his confidence for strength. Shoveling green beans into his mouth, trying with every angry chew to show how much he meant business, he changed for me. Fury grew in my belly. Adam was innocent to me, because my father was wrong.
~
The first week passed in monk-like silence. Doing homework alone in my room, I could hear my father stalking the hallway, leaning an ear to the door. I expected to eventually learn what the blob was or where it came from, but no answers took shape in the hush.
One night, I finished my homework well before bedtime. I looked around the room for a way to distract myself. Anything entertaining had been impounded by my father: comics, my Gameboy, the hoop on the back of my door. I dug through the layers of cast-off clothes at the bottom of my closet and found a handful of summer reading books I had tolerated. I started flipping through one on the floor, then moved to the bed.
It was fun, actually. More fun than I remembered. I found myself finishing homework earlier and earlier so I could read until lights out. When the story got particularly good, I would read by flashlight under the comforter, angled away from the door so no light would spill into the hall. I saw myself in every protagonist, no matter how tenuous the connection, locked in a struggle against a fearsome adversary.
~
It was nearly summer break, and home was a taut place. The living room was rugless and mopped, and even the chairs that were nowhere near the blob had been replaced and sold for cash. For final projects, I made poster boards, got good at gluing. I discovered if I just used the scissors with more care, I could cut straighter, and my work would look neater. My father stopped hosting friends for dinner, a favorite pastime of his, a prime opportunity to smoke cigars on the porch and laugh at other men’s jokes.
One Friday evening, he came into my room and sat in the same chair as the night we found the blob. I noticed how weary he seemed. His elbows were rashy, and the whiskers from his mustache intruded on his upper lip. I was engrossed in a section of my biology book about cell walls. It was amazing, the way they could let some things pass, hold others at bay. I decided to let him break the silence.
I was doing better in school than ever before. I’d always liked learning, but never connected that to school. But now we were learning about the World Wars in history, about how quickly authoritarianism took hold. The extra books I checked out from the library were by turns thrilling and horrifying. Inspired by Winesburg, Ohio, I began writing little stories of my own. DNA replication was fascinating enough to inspire sketches in a notebook. I still didn’t love math, but I’d discovered that if I paid enough attention and followed the instructions, I could figure it out.
Corey.
I had friends at school, and I made the most out of those hours, meeting Daniel for three-point contests before first period. I missed the cut for JV baseball, something my father failed to notice, so I spent afternoons at the House of Pizza with anyone who was free. I told people I couldn’t come over because my father was sick. I had begun to master my emotions, applying awareness to one feeling until it changed states and emerged as a new one.
Corey.
I missed Adam. I only really saw him at dinner, exchanging looks behind our father’s back. I wondered how he spent all the time, alone in his room. I wondered if he was going to be okay.
Corey!
“Yes, sir?” I kept highlighting my textbook.
Corey, look at me when I’m talking to you.
I swiveled around in my chair.
All I want is the truth from you, son.
“I’ve told you the truth.”
WHAM. He slammed his hands on the tiny armrests.
Do not lie to me.
I steepled my fingers, studying him.
“I am not.”
I see. The air in the room tightened. I observed him as one might a lackluster painting. His threats meant nothing to me now; boarding school would be a dream. His punishment had backfired.
I came up here to talk about summer. You’re scheduled to go to camp. But I won’t let either of you go without the truth.
Adam adored camp. He’d spent all year talking about how he would pass the senior sailing test, maybe be allowed to do the overnight hiking trip this year. Personally, I liked camp and I intended to go.
“I’ve told you the truth, but you haven’t accepted it. If you want me to lie, I’ll do it.”
Don’t be smart…
I could just barely hear the Poseidon clock downstairs. I wondered if there was a way to get a camera under the ice in the pond during winter; what the fish would look like, if they slowed down in the cold water to conserve energy, or if they swam around like normal. I wondered how the cell wall recognized exactly which things to let through.
“I piled the goo.”
My father froze. Why?
“It all came spilling out, and I panicked.”
Something like victory spread over his face. I could tell he was trying to control himself, but he didn’t have the tools.
Where did you get it?
“I bought it at a store.”
What store?
“The Dollar Store.” It didn’t make sense, but my father nodded greedily.
Yes, of course, of course.
“Can we go to camp now?”
He let his supposed power linger like a fart before pushing up on his knees to leave.
Yes.
I said nothing. He left, and I started my algebra homework. Balancing different sides of an equation was simply a more complex version of operations I could already do. Applying a familiar concept to something new.
I knew my father would be going into Adam’s room, but I didn’t get on my knees to listen. I knew he would tell him I’d told the truth. I wondered if my father would lead him with enough details to match my story, but I didn’t wonder enough to listen; more like how I wondered what happens inside of a chrysalis, or if there are whole parts of the universe traveling away from us at the speed of light that we can never see, even if we try.
At the end of the school year, my punishment was lifted. I went to Adam, tip-toeing into his room one of those first summer evenings where it’s still light outside. I started to explain, but before I could even wind into it, he said, “Our dad…” before trailing off and looking around his room. I saw that he’d decorated the walls in the intervening months. It was all stuff he’d drawn, mostly tracings of different photos, but a few appeared to be original. I gave him a hug and thought about our mom, as I often did, trying to remember how she smelled, trying to imagine what the house might sound like with her in it, trying to imagine it was her hugging Adam instead of me.
~
A few years ago, my wife came with me to a biomedical engineering conference. These are surprisingly fun. You hear at least one eye-opening talk, rub elbows with some tremendously smart people, then get drunk on the company dime.
She knew that I grew up nearby, so the last afternoon she asked for a walk down memory lane. I was also curious to see what remained of the town. I knew Penguin Video would be gone, but perhaps my school would still be there. Maybe House of Pizza, too.
We parked in a metered spot to walk around town. She knows just the right questions to get me talking. I’m shy; she’s persistent in a kind way, like how a therapist might be, knowing the discomfort is for your own benefit. She had me describe some old friends, fond memories on the sports fields, my strangest teachers. I told her about wandering by the train tracks, about building lean-tos with Adam.
We drove by my childhood home, and parked in the cul-de-sac. The paint was new enough, and someone was clearly still paying to have the lawn taken care of, but the house felt turned off. I assumed it was in the process of being sold. My father passed when I was in college, and my stepmother moved out shortly after. My wife and I looked up at the house from the front yard. It was smaller than I remember, as these things are. It felt like I knew things about the house that didn’t seem possible to know, like that the wood floors would creak extra because nobody had walked on them in a week. Knew what it would smell like if I opened the mailbox, and it did smell familiar, something full and earthy, like the only mail we’d ever gotten was spuds.
I’ve never told her about it. The blob. Know somehow that I never will. Adam and his wife live fifteen minutes away from us, and they bring my long-haired nephews over most weekends. Since he’s never brought it up either, I suspect he feels the same.
“Miss—may I look around?” I said. She giggled—we have a running joke where I pretend she’s the manager of wherever we are; an Applebee’s, the Acela. “Can we have a booth?” I’ll ask her. “Excuse me, ma’am—do you know if the dining car is open?”
She made a professional gesture, and I started walking around the side of the house. I wanted to see the land where we’d buried it. The grass, the ferns, the trees. If the blob had been malignant, the earth might be dead. Every now and then I wonder what it was; wonder if I have a rare cancer unfolding slowly inside me. Maybe whatever happened to the land would be a preview for what’s coming for me.
But when I walked around back, the fence stopped short. Another row of houses had been built where the creek used to be. They must have routed the water underground, and I could tell that beyond the houses was another cul-de-sac just like the one we’d parked in.
I remembered then my stepmother Margot, how she had baked both times new families moved in next door; how she pinned up her auburn hair and wore an apron like it was old tv. A woman I never saw sleeping. Awake after our bedtime, up before we rose, with perfect posture, already flitting around our house. It was a punch to the gut to register that I’d never given her much consideration at all. When I was young, I thought her hobbies were cleaning and cooking, that her diligence in those activities must be due to interest rather than obligation to me and Adam, or a fear of my father’s looming presence, or both. I had no idea where she lived now, or if she was even still alive.
I leaned on the fence and thought about how if heaven is reliving life with all your acquired knowledge, I’d give Margot a real shot. Form a relationship, something closer to mother. Maybe each time you die, you get to go back knowing even more, having seen it play out again and again like a video game, learning where the bad guys are, where to pick up items.
My wife came up behind me, and I think she could tell I was sad. She probably thought I found it depressing that our woods were gone. She wrapped her arm around my waist and dug her thumb under the waistband of my jeans.
I’ve always liked when she does that, but I’d never said so, and I decided there in the yard that I should tell her.
“I love when you do that,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Tuck your little thumb in there.”
I leaned in and kissed her, and we turned back towards the house. I pointed out the window to my room, and we stared at it for a bit. I could see a decal on one of the panes; one of those stickers that was impossible to ever get off no matter how much you scraped. Some long-retired slugger, mid-swing, cranking out a homerun that would land somewhere in the new neighborhood, were he a real player and not just a guy stuck to a window.
Before long we were back in the car, and not long after that we were back at the hotel. Then back to our city, back to our lives. Back to our jobs and our hobbies and making our home; making ourselves, and the rest of it from there.
