Page 35

Jonah

JANUARY

On his first night back in his childhood bed, Jonah didn’t sleep at all.

The room had been largely untouched, kept like an exhibit in a museum—a living memorial for a boy who died young, his youth frozen in time inside four walls, a cautionary tale of a life derailed.

That night, as he stared at the ceiling above his twin bed, he was overcome by the gruesome mental image of thick, black sludge oozing from his pores. Spreading across the bed, the walls, the carpet—every move he made another blot he couldn’t scrub out. Jonah had dragged his baggage back home from Chicago, like bringing a plague into a clean, quarantined space. His very presence was an insult to the person who used to live there.

He hadn’t slept much in the nights that followed, either .

Jonah lost time, those first couple of weeks. Large pockets of it, chunks lasting several hours, would disappear from under his nose. He would close his eyes to the darkness of his bedroom ceiling and open them at lunch the next day, sitting across from his little brother, forcing a laugh at some joke that Jonah hadn’t really heard. He would lose himself in the middle of a one-sided conversation with his sister, nodding along to the blur of words until he snapped into a new present several minutes later.

Something was building. Jonah could feel it in the back of his skull at all times, like a ticking clock inching toward the end of an invisible countdown.

During the days, he moved through the house like a ghost, caught behind some invisible haze that separated him from the rest of the world. He ate when food was placed in front of him. He pretended to watch whatever played on the television in the living room. But Jonah didn’t really exist.

Nightly, during whatever wisps of sleep he managed, Jonah dreamed of gold wedding bands and tortoise shell glasses on hotel nightstands, wood-rot beams on a basement ceiling, and hands around his throat. He dreamed of clothes being pulled from his body and hands that didn’t stop there, pawing and peeling at layers of skin until he was all blood-red muscle and sinew, raw and exposed. No longer human, just a human-shaped thing.

On the worst nights, he was plagued by the awful feeling of being watched during these violations. He would turn his head and see someone in the room with him, witnessing each horror in real time. Sometimes it was Liam. Sometimes his mom, his siblings. Once, he turned to find the distinct outline of his father’s silhouette hovering in the doorway. In that dream, Jonah cried out for him. To help him, to do something. He would wake with a scream jammed tight in his throat and a hollow feeling that would follow him well into the daylight.

Often, when the nights were at their worst, he called Liam.

Jonah’s mother had helped him reactivate one of his old, out-of-date phones from high school, stuffed in the back of their electronics drawer. The first thing he did was program Liam’s number from memory.

Since then, they messaged every day, though Jonah knew his own conversational skills were lacking. It was hard to put his numbness into words, and even harder to put those words on a screen for someone else to decode, even though Liam never seemed to mind. But their phone calls were a reprieve.

Whenever Jonah called him, panicked and disoriented from a nightmare, Liam would stay up with him, no matter the hour. He would talk to him like he used to on Jonah’s bad nights, chattering about whatever came to mind until Jonah was back in his body. Sometimes, they would spend an hour in silence, the only noise on the line their soft breathing as one or both of them drifted back to sleep.

He missed him .

Jonah made a point not to lean too heavily on him, even from a distance. Sometimes he would stop himself halfway through dialing his number and force himself to put down the phone.

He’d meant what he said to Liam on the rooftop their last night in Chicago: he didn’t want to be Liam’s burden anymore. He needed to learn to stand on his own.

And yet, as the days dragged on, Jonah found himself wondering if he had made the wrong choice in leaving.

It happened by complete accident.

His brother’s car was in the shop for a repair and their mom was staying late at her new job, so neither one of them was able to make the Friday night custody drop-off at his dad’s. Jonah just so happened to have stepped into the garage to find a spare bulb for his bedside lamp when the sound of tires coming up the drive startled him.

He brought a hand up to shield his eyes against the headlights, unable to make out the shape of the car beyond the glare. Then the engine cut out and the driver’s door swung open.

“Hey, Matty, I got a call from the mechanic. He—”

Jonah went rigid as his father came to a stop in the mouth of the garage.

All his life, everyone had told Jonah how much he looked like his dad. He wondered if they looked identical now, sharing twin deer-in-headlights gazes across the empty space .

They had spent so much time in this garage together, once upon a time. Jonah’s first baseball glove was somewhere on the wooden shelf just left of his shoulder, the same shelf he had helped his dad install when he was thirteen years old. Any of the grease stains along the ground could have been the very ones he’d made when his father had taught him how to change the oil on his first car. The room was a graveyard for the bond they once shared, and his father was a ghost standing before him in the flesh, coming to haunt him one last time.

“Jonah.” He cleared his throat, pulling his shoulders back into the confident, collected pose Jonah had watched him assume so many times. “You... Wow, kiddo, you look so much like your brother. I can hardly tell you apart.” He punctuated the end of his sentence with a weak chuckle.

Jonah bit down on the tip of his tongue and wondered if his father had even noticed that he’d said it backward. That Matthew was the one who looked like him , because Jonah was here first, no matter how hard his father might have tried to forget about his eldest son’s existence.

Jonah didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything at all. He couldn’t.

“You look...” His father seemed to be grasping for words. “You look good, Jo. Your mother said you weren’t... Well, you know, at first. But now...” He cleared his throat again, dropping his gaze. It occurred to Jonah that his father had yet to look him directly in the eye. “You look well, is all I’m trying to say. ”

It wasn’t even true. Jonah knew it wasn’t true.

He didn’t know what was happening. His jaw was locked up, his tongue so dry it stuck to the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t have formed words even if he had the slightest clue what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t run either. The ground beneath him seemed to have grown invisible roots around his legs, binding him in place.

“Hey,” his dad said. “Listen, I know things were tense the way we left them, but I’m glad you made it home alright.”

The words echoed inside his head like cannon fire.

Things were tense.

I’m glad you made it home alright.

Alright , he had said. Jonah was the farthest fucking thing from alright.

He was a shell of a person who couldn’t keep down a full meal or get a night of sleep or have a real relationship with someone he loved. He was a gaunt figure in every passing mirror, a lifeless imitation of the person who used to wear his skin. But somehow, in his father’s eyes, he was alright.

At least Jonah wasn’t dead. That was what he meant.

At least his father didn’t have to bear that on his conscience.

Jonah’s anger was hot enough to melt through muscle and bone, atrophying his legs to keep him immobilized in the face of this assault. A swell of silence overtook the garage. His father had been given every opportunity to take even the smallest step toward making things right, and he had let them all pass by .

Jonah couldn’t handle this. With every bit of strength he had in him, he forced his leg to move, testing his weight as he took a step back.

“I’ll tell Matthew and Leah you’re here,” was the last thing Jonah said to his father.

Once he was moving, he couldn’t stop. He might have heard his dad call after him, or maybe it was wishful thinking. Regardless, he didn’t slow his pace until he had reached the top of the staircase.

“Jonah?” Matthew stuck his head out the door of his room. “Jonah!”

It wasn’t until Matthew grabbed his wrist and turned over a bloody palm that he realized the lightbulb he was holding had shattered.