It did get worse. Jeremy the surly boy grew up into a surly teenager, quick to anger, quick to violence. At the age of fourteen, he’d punched Rodney in the chest, knocking him into the table, hands raised like he was going to do it again. Don had almost called the police, but didn’t. This was the nineties, after all. The police were just as homophobic as anyone else. He didn’t want to take the chance that a cop would see their home—see two men raising a child—and run the risk of Jeremy being taken from them. Unlikely? Maybe, but maybe not.
Jeremy had calmed down enough by then, and Rodney only had a bruise on his chest. With that, another trip to the doctors, another increase in his medication.
He hated the pills, Jeremy did. He hated how they made him feel, like he was muted. He argued with them ferociously over them, made threats, saying he’d run away and they’d never see him again. Having heard such things from him before, Rodney had nodded toward the front door and said, “You know how to leave.”
Instead, Jeremy had gone to his room, slamming the door so hard, the house shook.
Good days. Bad days. Worse days.
There were the best days, too, days where they were on the road in a rental car. Days and weeks when Jeremy’s mind was clear or, at thevery least, at rest. He wanted to see everything, and so they did their best to make that happen. Oh, the places they went: To Montana and waters so clear, the deep lakebeds looked within arm’s reach. To Arizona, standing before the Grand Canyon, the rock burnt red, the air sizzling hot. To the Appalachian Trail, hiking a good eight miles before calling it quits. To Wyoming, the Grand Tetons rising in all their majesty. To Utah, the petrified forest, rocks in impossible hues. To Tennessee and the Great Smoky Mountains, trying to reach the top of Mount Le Conte.
Those were the days when things felt as perfect as they could be. No one talked about pills or school. They turned up the radio, singing along at the tops of their lungs, windows rolled down, hands hanging out in the wind. They took hundreds of pictures—thousands—of Jeremy, of Jeremy and Don, of Jeremy and Rodney, of all three of them with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, mugging for the camera. Jeremy had grown—a skinny boy shooting up like a weed—and by the time he was fifteen, he was as tall as Don, almost as tall as Rodney.
Nights spent in tents or roadside motels telling stories or watching bad television at midnight, even though they all had to be up and back on the road by six in the morning. In Arizona, they bought tamales being sold out of the back of the truck on the side of the road. In South Dakota, they’d gone to the Corn Palace. In Wyoming, they got snowed into their hotel room during a late-April blizzard.
A good life, albeit a difficult one. As Jeremy’s graduation neared, Don and Rodney spent many nights in bed talking. About what Jeremy would do. What he’d become. If he would get better. If he wouldstaybetter. One thing never discussed? Regrets, because they had none. Even when Jeremy was at his worst—his brain aflame, his anger palpable—they loved him completely and fully.
Then Jeremy started stealing from them. Little things goingmissing. Items around the house, small at first, then getting bigger and bigger. Money. Pills from their bathroom, old narcotics from when Rodney had thrown out his back. When confronted, he lied to them, telling them he didn’t touch their shit, and goddamn, why did they always blame him for everything? Another hole in the wall, this time by a fist. Rodney made Jeremy fix it himself.
Jeremy graduated, toward the lower end of his class, but still. Hegraduated. They went to the event, dressed to the nines. They yelled and hollered when his name was called. They found him with a group of boys in the bathroom, stoned out of their minds.
He moved out during the summer after graduation. Got a small, shitty apartment with two other boys. Got a job working fast food, and Don and Rodney thought, okay, it’s a start. He came home a couple of times a week. When he left, they’d search to see if anything had been taken. They hated themselves for doing it, for not trusting him, but more often than not, something would be missing, usually something expensive.
Jeremy didn’t go to doctor’s appointments. He was eighteen, he told them. A legal adult. He didn’t have to do jack shit. Besides, he didn’t like doctors. Always poking and prodding and asking questions he didn’t feel like answering. And it didn’t matter, he said. He’d stopped taking his pills. He didn’t like the way they muddled his thoughts, made him feel like he was drowning.
It was one of the few times Don had ever lost his patience. He was fed up, done with excuses. Pacing in the living room, he snapped at his son: “And you think that’s a smart decision? To stop taking the medicine that’s meant to help you? What are you going to do when you’re out in public, and you lose your cool? What are you going to do if you hurt someone when you don’t mean to?”
“That’s what you think of me?” Jeremy retorted. “That I want to hurt people?”
“No,” Don snapped. “I don’t think that. But you do, Jeremy. Youhavehurt people.”
It didn’t work. Tough love, the thing they had relied upon as Jeremy grew older, no longer mattered to him. He wasn’t a child. He wasn’t a little kid. He could think for himself. Fuck them if they couldn’t see that. Maybe they shouldn’t have adopted him. He’d be better off if he’d never met them. “Do you know how hard it is?” he yelled at them. “It was already bullshit for me, but then I get two queers as parents?Everyoneknows. And they talk shit behind your backs. You don’t see that.Ido.Couple of queers,that’s what they call you. You’re nothing more thanqueerswho—”
Rodney’s hand flashed out. Slapped Jeremy across the face, his head jerking to the side. Not a hard slap, but loud in the deathly quiet that followed. With bright, watery eyes, Jeremy brought his hand up to his cheek.
“I warned you,” Rodney said in a dull voice. “I warned you about those words.”
“You hit me,” Jeremy whispered, a tear falling onto his cheek.
“And I hate myself for it,” Rodney said. “But I willnotallow you to speak to your father that way.”
Jeremy stood, chair scraping against the floor. He looked at Don. “You aren’t my real father.” He turned to Rodney. “And neither are you.”
He left, the front door banging open.
Rodney sat at the table with his face in his hands.
They didn’t hear from Jeremy for over a month after that. Don would drive by his apartment almost every day, hoping for a glimpse. Calls went unreturned. Friends didn’t seem to know much about what he was doing, or so they said. Rodney went to his job at the fast-food place, only to be told Jeremy had quit two months before.
He finally called five weeks later. He told them he was inMontana, camping on his own. He didn’t know how long he’d be. He’d met some people. He wanted to travel with them. He sounded manic.
“Please come home,” Don said, gripping the phone, Rodney leaning his head in to listen. “We miss you.”
Jeremy laughed. “You do? Why?”
“Because we love you.”
“I was near a lake this morning,” he said. “I heard voices in the water. On the other side of the lake, I saw shadows standing, watching me. No one else could see them. I can’t ever tell if they’re real or not.”