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Let me start from the beginning.
Dear Mom,
I am writing to you because I want to connect—to try and bring back this lost thing. I want to bring back when I last saw you, when you drove me up to the lakes and you looked out at the algae green. You said that this lake looked old. I am writing to you because I miss the dryness in your voice, your knuckles on the steering wheel. When the green of the algae reflected through the light and cast your face in green, you stared at it and said, “It looks old. But it’s alive. More alive than it has ever been before.”
I think about that lake now. And how you didn’t think it was living while there were fish in it, how only when algae bloomed at the top of the lake, you thought of it as a belly for life. A reservoir. Only when it didn’t reflect the image of you, only then was its own. You told me, “See the way the water can’t reflect anymore, Todd? This is how we know we are alive. When we don’t reflect, when everything that surfaces is just who we are.”
It’s not good to start sentences with conjunctions, with prepositions. But I am starting nothing. I am writing to save something, to bring something back. And you know this, I told you. But, through these words, I want to stand in front of you and ask: do you miss me? You never learned to read in cursive, I’m writing in cursive. Will you look close at the letters, Mom? Will you ask my brother what they mean?
Spring. Today, over Vermont, there will be a colony of butterflies letting the wind carry in their wings. Like birds, they have a migration pattern that makes them move to somewhere hotter in the winter months (typically Mexico), and they come back in the spring. It’s as if they have some innate desire in their thin-stick bodies to go home. Maybe, Neil Perry supposes, the idea of homesickness exists in everything.
They spread out across their front yard. On blades of grass, on the hood of their Ford Thunderbird. And for a minute, Neil stands so still that a butterfly finds purchase on his jacket sleeves. To them, he belongs, he is a part of this house. And maybe for a minute, he is.
“Take your luggage upstairs. I’ll meet you there when you’re done, I want to talk to you.” Neil’s father says to him. Pats him on the back before he disappears into the house.
Neil blinks, slow. Then, he follows suit.
Neil hates the way luggage sounds on the floor. It’s rattly, like the wood’s hollow. As the wheels bump and spin in this jovial way behind him, Neil makes his way to the staircase. He sighs, pushes the handle of it down, and carries it up to his room.
The suitcase falls onto his bed with an unceremonious, muffled thud. There isn’t much inside of it. Three days’ worth of clothes. The playbill of Pygmalion that he stole from the Henley Hall’s s prop room. (He’s yet to understand why it was there.) A copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, courtesy of Todd Anderson. A pencil case, inside of it is a pack of Marlboro.
He picks up the book, holds it like it’s water in his hands. He thinks of Todd. Thinks of the curve in his hair, the shy type of sweet in his smile. Even though the way he thinks of Todd is sacred, holy almost, Neil will never realize how much he loves him, how they were never really just friends.
Two knocks. Heavy and filled with this sophisticated type of bitterness. Neil calls, “You can come in, sir.”
The door opens. “Thank you, Neil.” A slight frown appears on his father’s face. “You didn’t pack much.”
“No, I didn’t feel like I needed to, sir.”
“I wanted to congratulate you. For getting that scholarship. I’m proud of you, Neil.”
Neil’s jaw feels slack. His whole body feels slack, like he’s pushed his way out of his body and is watching this from the outside. “Thank you, sir.”
“You know, as a reward, I’m giving you something. Hold out your hand.”
Neil does what he is told. His eyes, maybe from a familiar type of dread, squeeze shut. He feels a waxy type of paper on his fingers. Neil opens his eyes and sees it, a brochure. He squints at it and makes out the last words of the title: Summer Camp! He’s full of questions now. I spent hours studying for a scholarship program and you’re making me to go to a fucking summer camp? Was a car too much to ask for?
He doesn’t voice any of his questions. He knows better. Instead, he gives his father a weak smile and says, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate this.”
“I’ll allow you to bring a friend if you’d like.”
“Thank you again, sir. I’ll ask.”
“Of course, Neil.”
Do you remember when I went to that summer camp? When the phone rang, and you made a hushed comment to me about “fucking telemarketers”? I remember the way your jaw went loose, your eyebrows raised when he called you, when he asked for me. Something in the way you saw me changed. You realized that I was someone new, someone friendly.
“Todd,” you said and you sounded so vacant, “There’s a boy on the line named Neil. He’d like to speak with you.”
Neil Perry. This name is foreign in your mouth, familiar in mine. I would have introduced you to him, Mom. You would have liked him. He’s tall and he smiles wide. Refers to every adult as sir or ma’am, he’s raised well. The American boy you wished I was when I was growing up.
I like him for different reasons. His skinny-twist fingers, his cupid’s bow mouth. I sing hymns in the curve of his nose. Mom, have you ever felt this way? Where you meet someone and the way they smile brings sense to the way you live? Did you ever fall in love and lose pieces of yourself in the skin of them? Tell me this isn’t all there is. Tell me there’s more.
“I’m surprised my parents let me go.” Todd says as Neil closes the trunk of his father’s Ford Thunderbird.
“Why’s that?” Neil asks. He wipes his hands on his cargo shorts.
“I don’t know. It’s just like, I never get to do things like this.”
“Camping?”
“Yeah. I’ve never been. My parents were always weird about it, saying stuff about how our family’s been bad with bug bites.”
Neil laughs. Todd wishes it was something tangible, something that could be saved. Something that could be bottled up.
Todd lies in bed. He isn’t quite sleeping. The room is cold. The wood of the floor died a long time ago, he can tell from how aged the cold is on his feet. He’s glad he took his brother’s winter clothes, he thinks of the leg warmers he wears. The peeling layers of thin jacket over thin jacket. He breathes into his hands, and if he breathes hard enough, he can see it, his own breathing. This recycling of air, this simple process of living. He wonders if Neil has been in this room before. If he’s breathed the air here. If, by inhaling, he is breathing the same bit of air he is. This distant kiss.
His gaze shifts from the door to his left, to this lonely wall. Pristine, no thumb-tack scars, no barely chipped off glue. He sees it then. Unmistakable, the bright-ugly yellow of its body. A wasp, scaling the length of the wall. They make eye contact, him and the bug. Todd wonders for a moment if it can think, what it thinks. Some terrible kneading in his stomach tells him that it can’t. And it doesn’t to dream sweet, this wasp knows you with the intimacy that only you have with yourself.
It's lunch. Neil and Todd sit on wet-dark wood benches and eat together.
Neil asks him through a mouthful of sandwich. “Do you wanna go swimming?”
Todd frowns. “Don’t eat with your mouth full.”
Neil nods as if to say sorry. They sit in an almost silence until Todd continues. “Yeah. We can go. Is anyone else coming?”
Neil swallows, grabs for his water bottle and shakes his head. He takes a lengthy sip. “No. Just us.”
“Alright.”
“You should eat.” Neil glances at Todd’s untouched sandwich.
“Isn’t it bad to swim after you eat? Besides, I don’t really like olives.” Todd catches the pieces of not-lettuce green that stick out his sandwich. His lip curls.
“You don’t like olives?”
“That’s what you’re worried about? Not the fact that we might get cramps and drown?”
“Well obviously we’re gonna wait. There, problem solved. Now, you don’t like olives. Why? They’re so good.”
“They’re bitter.”
“What olives are you eating? If it bothers you that much, pick them out. I’ll eat them.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Give them to me.” Neil smiles and Todd finds himself yearning for tangibility, for holding again.
Todd picks out the olives. Drops them onto his plate in an unceremonious way. Neil reaches for the olives and pops them into his mouth. Neil glances at Todd’s plate again. “You should eat. Please.”
Todd smiles. Rolls his eyes and takes a bite of his sandwich.
I kissed him, Mom. I had my first kiss with him at the living lake. At the Palisades. I’m not being entirely truthful when I say this. I didn’t kiss him at first, he kissed me. He threaded his fingers into my shoulder blade, the scapula, and he nudged his jaw into mine. I felt like I had fallen into him, he feels like a soft earth and coffee powder. This was a cosmic phenomenon, Mom, two souls sewing themselves together. A mesh of bodies kicking at the water in the lake.
Are you ashamed? There is a wasp there that reminds me of the house, of father, maybe of you. It stung me once, twice, three times. It stung Neil seven. I remember running my fingers in his hair as he sobbed into his hands, telling me it hurts. We washed the sting off, I cupped water in my hands and ran it across his face.
I love him, Mom. You told me not to use strong words like that for anyone—love, hate. You said that I am only seventeen and that I do not know how to love. And I whispered into his neck that I loved him when he kissed me in the Palisades. When his hands slid from my shoulders to my back. And I would say it now. I am twenty-five and I still love him. The memory of him, anyhow.
They’re going out into the nearest city. Neil has a driver’s license, they rent out a Jeep Cherokee.
Neil puts the car into ignition and kisses Todd’s mouth. They’ve been in this practice for days, lips finding solace with each other. A love that neither of them should want, a love that both of them burn for.
Todd holds Neil’s face gentle, like water in his hands. “How long will it take?”
Neil’s eyes flicker from Todd’s gaze to his lips. Back up to meet Todd’s eyes again. “Thirty minutes. Will you let me kiss you again?”
Todd nods. Neil holds onto his shirt-sleeve, fabric-thin. There’s a firmness in his kiss, this emphasized sort of wanting that lives in his mouth. This is it, that boyishness. The remnants of easy-quip anger. Neil’s right hand holds onto his sleeve, his left travels lower to the hem of Todd’s shirt. He doesn’t touch the skin underneath, his left hand grips onto the hem of Todd’s shirt like a lifeline.
Neil pulls away and realizes he’s half out of the driver’s seat. He doesn’t care. Instead, he mumbles into his ear, “I can’t stop thinking about you. I don’t think I ever will.” Neil slips back into the driver’s seat. Takes hold of his seatbelt.
Todd knows that asking is stupid but in him is a need to know. “Do I make you happy?”
“Do you make me happy? Todd, fuck, happiness doesn’t even begin to describe it.”
Then, for the only time at this camp, the butterflies come home. Flock around the Jeep, around them. Neil thinks that the butterflies have found a home here. That he and Todd have made this Jeep Cherokee, the Palisades, a home as well.
And you know how this story goes. You remember when I find him. When they called the ambulance, gave me a week off of school. He’s gone. I know. But it doesn’t feel like he’s gone entirely. Sometimes I feed into a lie and tell myself that he’s run away.
And I still love him. I told you this earlier. But that story has ended. Do you still love me? I know I am a mistake. Can you embrace me? Will you? I’m not asking for you to write me back. If you can’t fish it out of you, don’t. Burn this letter. Rip my name out of the phonebook, tell my cousins that I died in a car accident. I want you to trust me. To love me beyond my mistakes, if you think that what I do is a mistake. For now, I am your son, Mom. I’m still waiting.
Let’s end this story here. Please take me home.
All my love,
Todd Anderson