On the road, his hands twitched at the wheel. Adam caught a glimpse of
his eyes in the rear view mirror. A dark muddy center, the whites speckled
with red. He hadn’t been sleeping much, kept waking in the middle of the
night muttering about polar bears. They were there in his head when he
dreamed, with their lumbering gaits, their feet slapping against the ground
like oversized oven mitts. Their noses were black dark, just like their eyes.
Adam looked in the rear view mirror, caught sight of his own black dark
eyes, and his arms pimpled into goosebumps.
For the most part, Denny looked more like his mother. They both were
long and lean, and they shared a nest of straw-colored hair, unlike Adam’s
head of brown. His eyes though were like Adam’s. Cloudy and churning
with unease. When Denny closed his eyes, to yawn or in frustration or if
sleeping, Adam could breathe better, could feel again like the world had
been kept safe from the storm that was his son.
He headed towards the park where Denny liked to hang out and smoke
pot. Denny didn’t know that Adam knew what he did there every day
afterschool, when he should have been holding down that part-time job
at the hardware store or studying for the SATs. But Adam could smell it
on Denny when he walked through the door. He knew, but he didn’t say
a thing because he had other things to say, because he wanted to know
why Denny spoke to him as if he were trying to move his lips as little as
possible, he wanted to know how he could transform his face so fully into
something unrecognizable in that moment right before he slammed his
bedroom door.
When he got to the park, the sky had grown all pink. Autumn was ending,
but a few young kids still ran wildly across the soccer field, parents
standing guard on the sidelines. The swing-sets were empty and seeing
them sway in the breeze made Adam think they looked like bones picked
clean of their meat. He headed towards the back of the park, near where
the skateboarders flew down ramps in a whirl. That was where Denny and
his friends liked to hang out, bunched in lazy clumps. Adam had followed
him once, when he heard the back door clap closed in the middle of the
night, when he knew his son would never forgive him if he were to be
caught, when he knew he would be unable to sleep, not just that night but
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