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Adam paces the living room, gesturing flamboyantly with the baton Michael manifested for him. Watching him, it feels impossible that Michael once believed he wasn’t built to love.
“Phase one,” Adam says, and raps on the whiteboard. He’s drawn an incomprehensible diagram in permanent marker; the only thing Michael can make out, even with his superior intelligence, is MOM HEIST. “Michael,” Adam points to a particular X, “will form a protective bubble around us so that Heaven’s force fields don’t evaporate Ghoul’s non-soul. Phase two, Michael sneaks us through Heaven’s backdoor, taking out anyone who stands in our way.”
Michael raises his hand, knowing from their first five planning sessions—which generated five distinct and needlessly convoluted plans—that Adam will refuse to acknowledge him otherwise.
Adam beams and points. “Yes, Michael?”
“Who would try to stop us?” Every other time they’ve visited Heaven, Jack has cheerfully welcomed them in. His Heaven is an unnervingly friendly place, one Michael can’t recognize as his old home.
“Fools. Next question?” Adam points at Ghoul, whose hand is half-up, half-down.
“Yeah, um. Could I really get evaporated?”
“No, ‘cause you’ll be in the bubble. Keep up, dude.”
“Right, but could the bubble fail? Or like, if Michael let it drop?”
Ordinarily Adam would notice and immediately begin to soothe Ghoul’s nerves, but right now he’s radiating a nervous energy of his own, and he says, already focused on the board again, “You think Michael can’t hold up a simple bubble? He’s like, the archangel. Has he not mentioned that?”
“Only about a million times,” Ghoul mutters. He slumps back against the couch wearing a defeated expression that makes Michael’s grace twinge; he’s sure it’s only because the creature persists in wearing the face of someone he cherishes.
Still, it is true that’s he’s said—repeatedly—that he would gladly leave Ghoul to the whims of Adam’s barbaric brothers, so he says now, “I won’t drop the bubble.” He does not point out that Jack knows they’re coming, nor that, as much as it chafes to admit, there is no protection he can maintain without Jack’s permission.
Adam looks between them, and when Ghoul doesn’t respond, he says, “Right. Anyway, in phase three—” He gestures to a series of abstract shapes surrounding a crudely-drawn house. “I, the brains of the operation, lead us on the harrowing journey to my mother’s heaven.”
Michael personally believes this responsibility would be better assigned to him like most other parts of the plan, but Adam is sensitive about his mother; he needs to feel like he’s doing something.
“Phase four.” He gestures to two vaguely humanoid shapes, one with outsized wings and the other with sharp teeth dripping with an unidentified substance. “You both wait outside while I talk to her because she does not like you. You do not come inside for any reason. Even if it takes me hours. Don’t knock, don’t look in the windows. Just let me handle it.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m growing on her,” Ghoul says. He’s sprawled out across a full two-thirds of the couch, and even with Michael sitting perfectly straight in his corner, Ghoul’s feet keep tapping against his thigh.
Adam fixes Ghoul with a flat, unimpressed look. “You ate her.”
“That was like. Eighty percent the big sis, actually.”
Adam rolls his eyes extravagantly. “We are not having this argument again. No matter who ate who—“
“Whom,” Michael hears himself interject.
“I’m gonna kill you, dude,” Adam says, then, perhaps realizing this is a bit harsh, he blows Michael a kiss, which Ghoul intercepts by diving across the couch and snatching it from the air. “The point is, she thinks you’re both a symptom of my Stockholm Syndrome.”
“I never even held you captive though! We killed you practically right away. I mean there was some taunting, obviously, but it wasn’t like, a kidnapping. Michael kidnapped you though, that’s true.”
Michael feels his grace tense, and he knows Adam can feel it too from the warning glance shot his way. He can’t stand how casual Ghoul is about what he did to Adam. Adam insists that it’s a facade, that Ghoul really does care about the harm he’s caused, but Michael doesn’t know if he believes it.
“Anyway,” Adam says firmly. “I’ll go in, remind her it’s my birthday ‘cause they don’t have calendars in Heaven, invite her to the party, hit her with the puppy dog eyes, then—“ He flips the whiteboard with a flourish so that they can both see that the other side reads “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.” The A is a conical party hat like the ones already set out on the entryway table for Adam’s guests.
Michael doesn’t understand Adam’s fixation on his birthday, and he knows Ghoul doesn’t either. The last time Adam went to visit Kate, leaving Michael alone in his body, Ghoul glanced at him across the kitchen table and said, quiet like Adam might overhear, “This whole thing is sort of silly, right?” Michael just barely resisted the urge to nod fervently.
Adam refused to observe his birthday in the Cage, first because his mom wasn’t there to celebrate with him, and later, as the memory of her faded, because he wasn’t really aging and couldn’t see the point. This party is about more than a birthday; it’s a celebration of his family and his future. Still, Michael is ageless and inhuman, and he can’t help that the whole thing strikes him as juvenile.
He said, “Not at all,” very firmly, and Ghoul rolled his eyes and called him a kiss-ass, but then, avoiding eye contact, he’d mumbled that he even if he did think this kind of thing mattered, he didn’t know when his birthday was. He’d consumed too many other lives too young, without his father around to bring him back, and parts of his original self had been lost.
“Oh,” Michael said, “March 26th.” It was so easy for him that the desperate gratitude on Ghoul’s face left him off-balance.
“Do you remember your assignments?” Adam asks, pulling him back to the present.
Ghoul raises his hand again. “Do I actually have an assignment? ‘ Cause it kind of seems like I’m just eye candy.”
Adam pauses, flips the board back over, and scans it for nearly a full minute. “Huh, yeah, I guess we don’t really need you for this.” Ghoul wilts against the couch for a moment before Adam says, “But we want you there.”
“We?” Michael repeats, just below the threshold of human hearing. Adam shoots him a scolding look anyway.
———
Adam is right; Kate does not like them. As she leaves her house in Heaven—an exact match for the Windom house on the outside, a “soulless minimalist hellscape” on the inside, per Adam—the smile melts off her face when she sees Michael and Ghoul waiting on her lawn.
Adam sighs. “Mom, I told you they were going to be here. That was the whole point, and you promised to be nice.”
“I promised to be civil,” Kate says through gritted teeth, “and I am being perfectly civil.”
“Mom,” Adam whines. “It’s my birthday.”
Michael tries for a smile, the one Adam uses when he’s charming customers after giving them the wrong orders. “I don’t blame your mother for not liking us, Adam.”
“Oh, don’t think you can get in my good graces by being reasonable,” Kate scoffs.
“I know you think this is a mistake—“ Adam starts.
“Worse than a mistake—“
“And that they’re going to hurt me—“
“Already have hurt you—“
“But I am asking you to be nice,” Adam says, the whine gone. His voice isn’t cold like hers, but it’s far from warm. “This is my first birthday in a thousand years, and I want to spend it with the people I care about. Please.”
“People,” Kate mutters, but when Adam glares at her, she says, “Fine,” and goes up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. “For you.”
Which is how Michael ends up standing in his own kitchen with a paper plate bowing under the weight of birthday cake—Adam’s, which Michael has been holding for “just a sec” for well over an hour—while Kate stands next to him with her own plate of crumbs and frosting smears. She was convincingly enthusiastic about Adam’s tour of the house, but once his other guests started to arrive, she clammed up and drifted toward the kitchen. Michael is keeping her company, something only Adam thinks is a good idea.
The party is huge; Adam’s claim that he wanted to spend his birthday with the people he cared about was perhaps a bit of an oversimplification. He’s had seven different jobs since getting out of the Cage, leaving all of them—with what he assures Michael is the proper two weeks’ notice—the second they get boring. He’s on good terms with almost all of his former coworkers, with the exception of a waitress who told him how closely he resembled a young man she saw on a true crime special who she was certain had murdered his mother before disappearing with two handsome older drifters.
There are, therefore, four baristas, nine bartenders, and five waiters milling around, all of whom are marveling over Adam’s ability to pop up in three places at once. Michael would have thought the presence of so many ordinary people would be comforting, but Kate hasn’t even tried to socialize.
“My son has a kind heart,” Kate says, the first time either of them has spoken in fifteen minutes. “He always has. He let his father in, too, even though he didn’t deserve it.”
“You’re right that we don’t deserve his forgiveness.” It galls Michael, sometimes, to be in the position of apologizing to this human woman, to know she holds some portion of his happiness hostage, but he understands that he owes her a sign of contrition. He’s grateful, in truth, that Adam has someone who won’t forgive him, who retains a full, human sense of the harm that’s been done to him. “We certainly don’t deserve his affection.”
“But you have no problem taking it, do you?”
There’s no defense to this—Michael is small and selfish and taking love from someone he’s hurt unforgivably—so he doesn’t bother offering one.
Kate watches him, her face a mask of anger. “Do you know that the worst part of dying was knowing that Adam was going to be home soon? I was lying there bleeding out on my bedroom floor knowing I was dead, that I had no chance, and all I could think about was how I wouldn’t be able to protect him. That’s a parent’s most important job, and I’d failed him. And now you all want me to just accept—“ The plate in her hands shakes along with her voice, and after a moment’s hesitation, Michael takes it from her hand. She turns away, her arms crossed. “There’s this whole new world out there I can’t protect him from, and I’m just supposed to be fine with it.”
“You shouldn’t be. I don’t expect you to forgive us.”
“Adam does.”
“Adam,” Michael pauses, weighing his words. The paper plates, adorned with some hideous cartoon Adam remembers from his childhood, is grounding, reminding him that he’s chosen this semi-human life for himself. “Adam and I were alone together for centuries. He held onto his anger toward me for a long time. Even after we started to bond, he carried it until he couldn’t anymore, until he had to let it go for the sake of his sanity. He forgave me because he had to, because it was too difficult to be angry with the only other person he had. It was so long ago now that he’s forgotten how difficult it was, and that it wasn’t done out of love.”
Kate looks at him, her gaze intense and piercing and just like her son’s. “You know that, all of that, and you stick around anyway?”
“I love him, and he wants me here. The first part will never change, but if the second ever does, I’ll leave him in peace. I’ve made sure he knows that, but it’s not my place to decide what he can forgive.” He hesitates, then adds, “And it isn’t yours, either. For better or worse, he’s been making his own decisions for a long time.”
Kate stares up at him, an unreadable expression on her face. She opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, Adam appears in the doorway, party hat perched on his head, probably saving Michael from an explosion of righteous maternal anger. He and Michael and Ghoul really aren’t supposed to be in the same room together since the majority of his guests have no idea there are three people walking around with his face. He’s been remarkably careless about maintaining even this thin veneer of normality, and Michael has already had to delicately wipe several memories.
“Mom!” Adam says. He’s been drinking, and Michael scrubs as much alcohol from his bloodstream as he thinks he can get away with. “Michael!” For a moment, Michael thinks he’s been caught before he recognizes it as a greeting. “Are you guys being nice?”
Kate manages a smile that almost looks sincere. “Of course we are. Come here.” She reaches out and straightens his hat, then tugs on the strap and lets it snap against his chin. He sticks his tongue out at her. “We’re fine. Go have fun.”
“Okay.” He leans in and lowers his voice. “You really do have to be nice. Michael is sensitive.”
“Okay, sweetheart.”
“And I get that you think it’s stupid, but I love him, okay? So please try.”
Kate seems to deflate slightly. “I know you do.”
Someone shouts Adam’s name, and he disappears before Michael can try to defend himself and reclaim some portion of his his angelic mystique.
Kate turns back to Michael. Whatever moment they were having has been thoroughly and decisively broken. She mouths, “Sensitive,” seemingly to herself.
“Grab me a beer, would you?”
Michael crosses the room and pulls a bottle from the refrigerator. It’s been made clear to him that he shouldn’t demonstrate his abilities in front of Kate, but he allows himself a very small indulgence and opens the bottle without the encumbrance of clumsy human hands. Her frown doesn’t get any worse when he passes it to her, so he figures he’s gotten away with it. She takes a drink that drains half the bottle and sets it down with a clunk.
“My heaven was just a few perfect days. Maybe four, on an endless rotation. It sounds like hell, now that I think about it, but it was nice while I was in it, when I didn’t know any better. There was this little park I used to take Adam to on my days off. Sometimes, when I had the time and the energy, I’d pack us a picnic. Nothing special, but he liked it. I remember one day—I’d promised him we’d go early, but I’d come off a double the night before, and I was exhausted. When I finally made it out of bed, he was at the kitchen counter making sandwiches. He was standing on a dictionary to reach the counter, one of those huge ones I didn’t know we even owned, and he just looked so serious, so focused. I wonder sometimes why that was one of my perfect memories, because it hurt. I was standing there watching him and realizing he was getting old enough to see all the things I couldn’t give him. But I was so proud of him, too, this little person I could only take some of the credit for.” She takes another drink and hands Michael the empty bottle. “And while I was up there in a fantasy world, he was growing up without me.”
Michael wasn’t directly involved—he wouldn’t have gotten his hands dirty with something like that—but he knows how easy Adam was to manipulate once he was offered the chance to see his mother. He wants to tell Kate that Adam will never grow into someone who doesn’t need her, not because he can’t but because he doesn’t want to.
“It means a lot to him that you came,” he says instead, and Kate’s expression softens.
Adam reappears in the kitchen with his arm slung around Ghoul’s shoulders. “—you want Michael to make you a cake?”
“Why am I making a second cake?” Michael asks, unable to totally keep the fondness from his voice.
“Michael!” Adam cries, as if he wasn’t in the kitchen less than ten minutes prior. He pulls Michael into his arms without letting go of Ghoul, nearly slamming their heads together. “Did you know we just missed Ghoul’s half-birthday?”
This is the first time Michael’s heard the phrase “half-birthday,” but he’s never been good at admitting to ignorance, so he doesn’t respond. This turns out to be fine, as Adam continues, “Yeah, so we’re sharing the party now. Ghoul didn’t actually get to invite anyone, but that’s cool because he doesn’t really have friends, I think.”
“Hey!”
“The only thing is we need you to make a second cake. Also like eight people saw us both playing darts so if you could just wipe the last few minutes from everyone’s memories? Also do you know how old Ghoul is?”
Michael accommodates the first two requests without a second’s effort, then adds, “Thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two…” Adam repeats. Kate looks mutinous. “Wow. You’re a total cougar, babe.”