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“I said no such thing.”
Patrick could have screamed. Laughed. Punched himself in the face. His father appeared to have gotten hold of the same complex contraption Penny Haven had used to tear a hole in space-time and was now living in a parallel universe where the events of his childhood had unfolded in an entirely different manner. Which made sense, he figured. Nobody wanted to cast themselves as the villain of the story.
“I just wish it was easier for me to talk to you guys about things,” he said. “I mean, look at Mom. She legged it the minute I brought up Will.” As if conjured by the mere mention of his name, Patrick heard Will’s voice in his head. Legged it? You’ve gone native, mate.
“Now, I won’t have that in this house,” his father said, standing. “I won’t hear a word said against your mother. How dare you!”
“I’m not talking bad about Mom, I p-promise.” Patrick’s cheeks grew hot, and he felt that awful, familiar shortness of breath. This was how interactions with his dad always devolved. He became that scared, stammering kid again. “I just. I don’t know,” he forced himself to carry on. “I…I…I was hurting, and I just wanted to come home, and I’m realizing now maybe I shouldn’t have.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Patrick paused for a moment, to let his father know that the next words out of his mouth weren’t being said in anger. He reminded himself of Mr. Banks’s advice, to know when to breathe and when to speak. Those hours spent in his room pacing and reciting. This above all; to thine own self be true. Polonius had been right about that. Even if he ended up dead.
“It means…It means…”
“What? It means what?” his father asked, that familiar impatience all over his face.
“It means I’m a f-…I’m a fag, Dad,” he said. His father flinched. “And just so you know, I’m the o-o-only person in this room who can use that word.”
“Hey now.” His dad prodded thin air with his finger. “I won’t be told what I can and can’t do in my own house, Patrick. You’re not in LA now!”
“You’re right, I’m not. But I really should be. In fact, I think I’m g-g-g-gonna get going right now.” He stood up and walked toward the front door. “See you at Christmas, Mom!” he yelled down toward the kitchen, then turned back to his father.
Breathe in. Hold. And release.
“Enjoy your house that your fag son paid for,” he said.
When Patrick got into the rental car outside, he turned on the ignition and then almost immediately turned it off, too angry to drive. He flicked on the stereo, dialed the volume all the way up, and screamed into his open palm.
Captain Kismet had, in total, six different origin stories. They all included the same basic ingredients: the test flight, the wormhole, the princess of a far-off planet. But each version differed in key ways. Sometimes Kismet was stoic and stern; other times he fell instantly in love with Sura. She was both a pulpy, anatomically improbable collection of scantily clad curves and a sensibly attired general. The brutality of the conflict varied wildly.
Retcons were a fact of life in comics; stories were rebooted time and time again, the lore of previous tales overwritten and imagined anew. The next time Patrick Lake spoke to either of his parents, all memory of this unpleasant conversation would have been purged. Previously, that thought might have been a comfort; there would be no consequences for speaking to his father so bluntly.
But now, Patrick found himself wishing for consequences. If he could tell the truth and it was never spoken of again, how could it mean anything?
He shouldn’t have come here. He felt so stupid now, wasn’t even sure what he had hoped to find, but knew that it had been a mistake to look for it in his parents.
Patrick dialed Simone as he bore left onto the turnpike. She answered after just one ring.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“On my way to Newark,” he told her. “I’m coming home.”
Simone said she would have her assistant arrange his flight back to Los Angeles and email him the details. He would be in his own bed that night.
He rolled down all of the windows and hit the gas until the sounds of the wind and engine roared in his ears, drowning everything else out.
“I’m a fucking fag!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
The only response he got was the honk of a horn as he veered into a different lane.
Chapter 29
When Will showed up at Margo’s house the day after Patrick left, with a bag in each hand and one under each eye, she didn’t ask any questions. He got the impression she had heard about what happened one way or the other and knew better than to press him for more information, and she had left him to see himself up to the spare bedroom alone.
Will dropped his things just inside the door, kicked off his shoes, and got into bed, pulling the covers over his face and breathing in the scent of clean linen. He wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, leaving only to attend to urgent bodily functions, just that at some point the sheets were no longer quite so fragrant. At first Margo would bring up cups of tea and plates of sandwiches; then she began to send Dylan to make the deliveries. Will would drink the tea but found that even a few small bites were all he could manage, resulting in the sandwiches he’d leave on the landing outside his door looking like a family of mice had nibbled them. Every day Margo would march in and noisily gather the collection of mugs that had accumulated around the bed like votive offerings, huffing and clanking them together, occasionally yanking back the curtains to let in a few harsh streaks of daylight, and Will would pretend to sleep through it.
He knew he couldn’t stay like this forever. Knew his sister’s patience was wearing thin. Knew that at some point April would be unable to keep covering for him at the bookshop, that Faye would need him at the library, that his life couldn’t stop just because yet another man had decided he was too much trouble. He knew all of this practically, consciously, rationally. But the thought of showering and putting on clean clothes and going to work filled him with a bone-deep sense of fatigue. He felt like he had been stricken by some terrible virus that sapped him of all energy, rendering him as helpless as one of those bed-bound invalids featured in Victorian novels. That’s what he was, he decided. An emotional hemophiliac. A consumptive downer whose sensitive disposition had been stricken by ill humors.
