Chapter Text
The day before mom's funeral, Gus's grandmother, his fama, flies in from Sweden. She and fafa, who died last year, had moved back to their home country before Gus was born, and he can count on one hand the number of times he's ever met her.
She’s an old, sturdy woman with ash-blonde hair and crow's feet framing her blue eyes. At the front door of their house she gathers Gus in a hug, and he smells her perfume and Davidoff cigarettes and something distinctly metallic that he never does identify as chemotherapy. Her smile is kind, and when she speaks, her accent rolls and pitches in a striking song.
She is nice, but nothing like his mom was.
“What a sweet little baby,” she says. They're in the living room, still immaculate from mom’s frantic cleaning fit the day before she went into labor. The pink couch dips as she sits beside Gus, holding his little brother, who is barely a week old, in her arms. “It is important, Gus, that you are never mad at your brother for the loss of your mother. He did not take her away. God gives life and God takes life when it is time. That is the way of things.”
Gus is almost exactly seven and a half. He stares at the little pink creature wrapped in the blue blanket he had watched his mom crochet. His little head is as fragile as a bird's egg. Gus could smash that head, if he wanted to. If it would bring her back, he thinks he would.
But it won't. Nothing will bring her back. The baby lived. Mom died. Nothing will bring her back, and it's the last time he's angry at his little brother for killing his mom.
Fama is right. It makes more sense to be angry at God.
“Lars. A good, strong name,” his grandmother says, smiling at the bundle in her arms.
Gus thinks it's the ugliest name he's ever heard.
Crying:
For the first few months, their dad dutifully cares for his infant son. He wakes up in the night and bottle feeds him, changes him, rocks him when he cries. Gus watches his dad moving like a man lost in a thick fog, or a white out snow storm - slowly, uncertain of his direction. It insulates him, this fog, keeps Gus from seeing the terrifying cracks that he knows must be there.
Gus wishes that he had a fog too.
Instead, he is left out in the open. He cries. He cries at home, he cries at school. His classmates murmur to each other, and his teachers give him pitying looks that he hates, but he can't stop. Sometimes it feels like the tears and the sobs and the agony of missing her are all that make him up now.
School lets out, and still Gus cries.
Lars cries too, the soft, weak wails of a newborn strengthening into a siren howl that was apt to start at any time, day or night. It wakes Gus sometimes, has him staring at the no longer glowing glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling as he listens for his father's footsteps in the hall.
It becomes the new music of the house, a shrieking infant and a sobbing seven year old.
One afternoon that summer, Lars gets to crying. Dad changes him, gives him a bottle. Lars eats it, and resumes his wail. Dad stares at his red-faced son, nonplussed, and Gus fixes his father with a sideways eye. This isn't the way this is supposed to go. The baby gets a bottle, and the baby stops crying, that's how it should go. But the baby is still crying.
Mom would know what to do, Gus thinks, and it sets him off again. He starts to whimper, and then sob, his face scrunched up, his steccato breathing and high whines joining his brother’s in a symphony.
Dad looks helpless, glancing back and forth between his screaming baby and his distraught boy. For a second, his own face starts to crumple. Then he shuts his eyes tight, fixes his mouth in a hard line, stands up, and thrusts the baby into Gus's arms.
“Here,” he says tightly, “you try,” and he walks out of the room with his fingers laced in his hair, grasping and pulling.
The sudden weight in his arms startles Gus out of his tears. Lars's voice fills his ears, takes center stage in the room, drowning out all of Gus's thoughts and feelings. Hesitantly, numbly, he holds the baby over his shoulder, patting his back. No burp comes, just more tears. Gus cradles him. Rocks him. Makes a funny face at him. Nothing works.
The expected flame of frustration never flares to life in Gus's chest. Instead, it becomes like a game. What does Lars need? Gus checks his diaper, even though he had just been changed, just in case. Dry. He tries the bottle again. Maybe he hadn't had enough to eat? Absolutely not.
Finally, in an effort to just try something new, Gus lays Lars belly-down across his lap. Baby Lars goes still, then tenses his little body up … and burps and farts and quiets down, falling asleep where he is.
Gus snorts. Well, that was easy. He had won the game, had stopped the noise that was driving his father crazy, and in the meantime had stopped his own tears, had forgotten that he was sad. It’s useful, distraction.
Little by little, he stops crying in public. If he feels the press of tears behind his eyelids, or a tightening in the back of his throat, he quickly finds something to do. He counts cars and multiplies by four to see how many wheels are touching the street. He races nobody to the end of the block. He blows a raspberry on Lars's belly. He pretends that everything is normal.
If everything is normal, then he must be okay.
Something in him starts to scab over. The pain eases day to day. Not entirely. Never entirely.
Potty Training:
Years pass, and Gus learns that the father he once knew as his rock of safety is as shifting and temperamental as sand in a hurricane.
Gus is never completely sure which dad is going to come home. Sometimes his dad is pure contagious energy, coming in carrying armfuls of kitchenware to start his new career as a chef, or art supplies to try his hand at sculpting. He revisits the rudimentary woodworking he learned in high school and gives up halfway through turning a lopsided table leg that was supposed to, eventually, become a coffee table to replace the glass one he’d accidentally smashed when he dropped their Halloween pumpkin through the middle of it. He throws himself into everything with wild abandon. None of his experiments ever come to pass.
Sometimes, Gus is greeted by a robot. His father would go to the store and pick up sandwich meat, or maybe get a pizza, and everybody eats, and everyone is taken care of, and it's fine. Everything is fine, this is normal. The woman running the in-home daycare that takes Lars during the day doesn't make concerned faces when they pick him up. The house isn't too messy, and no one really talks, and this is the new normal.
Sometimes, Gus comes home from school to a ghost.
It's during a week in late April, just after Lars turns three, that his father falls into such a state. At the end of the hall, his bedroom door may as well be a brick wall for all that Gus can reach him. He doesn't seem to go to work, not really, and he definitely doesn't go to the store. He doesn't take Lars to daycare, and doesn't drive Gus to school, so he doesn't go. Instead, Gus wanders around the house, unsure of what to do. They have some groceries, a frozen lasagna that they can both eat for a few meals. A box of Eggos. Bread and peanut butter and jelly. Cheerios. Half a container of milk.
They're low on diapers. There's maybe a quarter of a pack, enough to last them til tomorrow by Gus's estimation. He glances over at his toddler brother, who is currently in nothing but a soft shirt and an already sagging pamper that needs changing.
Dad's wallet is in his bedroom, behind the brick wall. Gus can't even go to the store by himself.
A sort of panic-spiral seizes him. What does he do if his brother runs out of diapers? Go to the neighbors? Maybe. But … Lars is three now. Shouldn't he be potty trained? He remembers seeing on TV that kids got potty trained when they're two. What would the neighbors think if he asked for help getting diapers for his three year old brother?
That they weren't normal?
Oh God.
Somehow, he fends off the reflexive panic-breathing that wants to bloom in his chest and pull him under. Instead he changes his brother and makes a decision. He goes to the kitchen, chugs two glasses of water, and waits.
It takes just under twenty minutes. “Hey Lars, come with me. I'm gonna show you something.”
In the bathroom, Gus stands in front of the toilet and loosens his pants. “When you need to pee, you go in here,” he says, and does just that. “That's what big boys do, okay?” Lars watches him with solemn eyes and says nothing. He doesn't really talk yet either.
Gus has started to piece together that Lars isn’t normal.
Still, he shows Lars several more times that day, drinking water until his stomach is sloshy. He can't tell if it's working until that evening, when Lars suddenly fidgets and grabs the hem of Gus's shirt. Gus follows him into the bathroom and stands in the doorway watching his little brother pull off his pants and pee in the toilet.
Gus grins at him, relieved and trying to ignore how weird it is that he's relieved. “Hey, good job being a big boy!” he says. Lars beams back up at him.
It's not fullproof. There are a few accidents, a few times where Lars wanders up to him with wet pants and a sad frown, but Gus doesn't mind so much. That's normal, isn't it? Besides which, Gus can handle the laundry, and Lars hasn't left the house all week, so it isn't embarrassing. When it happens, Gus pats him on the head and says, it's okay, just pay attention next time, and helps him into clean, dry clothes.
They continue to follow one another into the bathroom for the rest of the week, until the school finally calls the house and asks after Gus. The call seems to wake his dad up. He gets out of bed, showers, brushes his teeth. He goes to the store and gets groceries, comes home with a full pack of diapers.
“He doesn't need these anymore,” Gus says, picking up the plastic wrapped pack. “He's potty trained.”
His father blinks at him. “Since when?”
“Since Tuesday.”
“Who taught him?”
“I did,” Gus says. His father's expression falls flat. He looks away. “Buy him some underwear, okay?” Gus adds.
He's got this. They're okay. They're normal.
Astronaut:
The thing is, there are good times.
It's mostly good, mostly happy. Dad takes up painting and gets sober for a long stretch of time. Lars turns four and dad doesn't fall apart, and even gets his young son a birthday gift, a little neon green bike with training wheels. Lars tries to ride it a few times, but doesn't like the wobble. It scares him. A lot of things scare his little brother, Gus notes.
One morning that June, his dad suddenly herds them into the car and drives them six hours south to Lake Minnewashta for a weekend vacation. Gus reminds dad that neither of them have swimsuits, and they stop at a Walmart along the way.
They get there a little after lunch time. The day is warm and sky blue with a smattering of little white clouds, sailing along like ships on the sea. Gus coaxes Lars into the cold water and teaches him how to swim. Like many things, Lars doesn't like it much. “Water in my nose!” he whines.
“Stop being a pussy,” Gus cheerfully tells his little brother. “You gotta learn how to swim, it's important!”
That was one of his favorite new phrases, overheard at school. All the guys said that to each other when they wanted to encourage bravery. Stop being a pussy, Lars. Sputtering lake water, Lars does as he's told and dog-paddles a few feet from Gus.
They swim for a while, Gus careful not to splash water in Lars's face, until Lars has had enough and retreats to the shore to read his picture book. In the past few months, Lars had taught himself to read. His little four year old brother, who could barely speak a year ago, was reading a picture book, and not one of the littlest ones. It was a thin book about kittens with wings flying to the countryside, looking for a human home, and was just long enough to be divided up into a few chapters. Gus was impressed, and had told him so.
It doesn't make up for the fact that Lars can't manage to say hello back when someone greets him in public, nor the way he would rock back and forth any chance that he got, but it is something to show off, something to cling to.
Gus leaves his family on the beach, and begins swimming out. He goes out further than he means to, past the buoys that mark the borders of the boating area. It's dangerous, and it gives him a thrill to know how out of reach he is, how alone and unburdened. He could die out here and no one could do anything about it.
He's unsure how deep the water is, but he imagines that it's hundreds of feet deep, nothing below him but cold empty darkness. He floats in it, ducks beneath the surface and does a summersault. He's an astronaut in open space.
When he comes up again, he looks back to the shore. It's far enough away to be blurry- he can make out where his family is sitting, but not the people themselves, so he imagines she's there. He'll come back to the beach and she'll wrap him up in a towel, laughing when he complains that he's too old for that.
As long as he stays away, the fantasy plays easily behind his eyes. He doesn't want to come in.
But eventually, inevitably, he must. He's growing tired, and half-swims, half-floats to the shore.
The scene on the beach is strange. His dad's mouth is a tight, tense line. His little brother is red-eyed and sniffling. Something has transpired in his absence, but no one says what. He doesn't ask. “I'm hungry,” is what he says instead. His father nods.
They go to a restaurant that does a fish fry. Lars doesn't like fish, but they have chicken strips so it's okay. Late that night when they get back to the motel, he and Lars share a bed. His baby brother falls asleep clinging to his back like a little jetpack. Worn out and something like happy, Gus falls asleep too. He dreams he's in space.