Page 42 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human

Thirty

Crane’s mother does not recognize him. She drags her heavy boots through the snowfall toward them and takes a baffled glance from Crane’s belly to his face, trying to make sense of it, before Crane’s next pathetic sound of pain knocks her out of her confusion.

Her hair has gone gray. That’s what Crane focuses on.

She finally allowed her hair to go gray.

She’d been dyeing her hair since he was in middle school, and he remembers the distinct, thick smell of the chemicals permeating the entire upstairs.

He remembers her pinning up her waves in the bathroom mirror to swipe the brush across her temples, the stained towel thrown around her shoulders, the old blanket draped across the couch as she watched the Saturday morning news and let the color take.

He remembers being fifteen and admitting over breakfast that she looked good gray.

It made her look regal. She should keep it.

She’d laughed and said that HR professionals don’t need to look regal.

Crane remembers a lot of things. Sitting on the edge of the tub while Mom explained how makeup worked, how she always put on her foundation with her fingers and never used black eyeliner because it was too bold—“we don’t have bold faces,” she’d say, and Crane thought about it every time he picked up the black tube from the drug store.

Then there was the time they went to the Humane Society to pick up a cat, and how Sophie probably wouldn’t have agreed to follow the swarm if Cici hadn’t died the year before.

Mom would always insist on splitting a donut when she took Sophie to the grocery store, and Sophie crawled into bed with her when he had a nightmare until she was twelve, and god, Crane remembers his mother beaming during high school graduation, so happy and so proud, with no idea her daughter was planning to set herself on fire that night.

There’s no way to sum up nearly eighteen years of closeness like that. Annual shopping sprees the week before school started, reading quietly beside Mom’s desk at city hall, scoffing at newspaper articles together, always forcing a smile when Mom asked if Sophie was okay.

Mom turns to the man by the pumps. Crane’s father. Crane tries to make out the details: the tight haircut and well-worn clothes, doing that thing where he sticks out his lip in annoyance.

Whatever emotions Crane’s feeling about this haven’t hit yet. He’s not sure what they are. It’s like dumping a dozen different paints into a pan and watching it turn into a muddy, thick color, impossible to name.

“Dear!” Mom hisses across the lot. Both Jess and Crane wince in unison. Jess’s attention snaps nervously to the back door of the gas station. “Get the blanket out of the trunk.”

“What?” Dad says.

“Just do it.” Mom turns back to Crane and Jess, her soft face gone tense. “Is everything alright?”

“We’re going to the hospital,” Jess says. She shows Levi’s key. Her smile has too many teeth, warning this strange woman away. “Just trying to wait everything out. The longer you’re there, the more expensive it is, you know? We’re fine.”

“I’m sorry,” Mom says to Jess, “do I know you? It’s just. You look so familiar—my daughter would have been your age.”

As the contraction shows mercy, disappears again like the tide, Crane realizes that above everything, above the confusion of seeing them again and the flood of memories and the pain, he does not want his parents to recognize him.

He can’t do that to them. It’d be just one more awful thing he’s done, one more knife in the back, for them to see him like this.

They deserve to remember Sophie as she left them.

Smart and witty and ambitious. The deadpan-funny overachiever who slept on the bathroom floor to comfort foster kittens and designed Easter egg hunts for city hall.

He built that mask for his parents and gave them something to be proud of.

It wasn’t him, but they were good parents. It’s what they deserved.

Fuck. Crane never believed in God. Not for a moment.

But yeah, he used to pray that his parents would wake up one day and see right through it all.

He would get out of bed in the middle of the night and stand outside their bedroom door in tears, trying to work up the courage to tell them but never able to get it past the tongue.

Maybe if they noticed the shadow of his feet under the door, they’d gather him up and ask him what was wrong and he would shatter and everything would spill out at once.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I can’t do this anymore, I’m so tired and I’m so scared and I’m so sorry.

“You must have the wrong person,” Jess says.

Dad tromps up with an old blanket—a blanket that’s moved between three cars, a blanket that’s probably as old as Crane is—and settles it over Crane’s shoulders. Jess stares at this strange man too. She grips the truck key harder.

“I promise we’re fine,” she says again, pulling Crane closer. Her dark hair sticks to his pain-sweaty face.

Dad’s gone still, though. He’s stopped, his deep-set eyes narrowed. He hasn’t shaved in a while, and apparently he hasn’t bought a new coat in four years.

And Crane remembers. Sitting on the back porch on a warm summer night, waiting for the blink of a single firefly as Dad talked about the swarms of them he used to chase as a boy in Pennsylvania.

Falling asleep on the couch as a World War II documentary murmured on TV, the back of Sophie’s head bumping Dad’s knee.

Sweeping the sidewalk as Dad mowed the lawn, and playfully squabbling over leftover brownie batter, and sending each other news articles detailing the cruel aftershocks of yet another Supreme Court decision, frustrated but resigned to their fate.

Dad watches him, mouth slightly open, drinking in everything. Crane’s hair. His eyes. His tattoos, his scalded face.

Dad says, expression distorting with a thunderclap of pity and fear and heartbreak, “Oh god.”

And he begins to cry.

“It’s you,” he whimpers, putting his hands so softly against Levi’s coat. “Nicole, look. Our baby. It’s our baby.”

Who the fuck knows what Jess must be thinking in this moment: a random couple deciding that a deity has answered their twisted prayers and this silent, pregnant freak is delivering the baby just for them.

An episode out of a sex-crime TV show. Even Mom’s face screws up for a moment as if she’s got no idea what her husband’s on about.

They lost their daughter years ago; has the weight of grief finally shattered him?

Sure, these strangers look so oddly like Sophie, but—

Crane wonders what does it for her. What Mom sees in Crane that makes her get it. Is it the exact color of his eyes? The slightly crooked tooth that slid right back into place after thousands of dollars of orthodontics?

She says, dazed, “Oh.”

“Crane,” Jess says. “Do you know these people?”

He considers lying. Shaking his head, begging her to take him inside and away from them. Let his parents think for the rest of their lives that they were mistaken, that they ran into a ghost wearing their daughter’s face.

But he can’t. The pain of labor, the sting of the cold, everything about the past, what, eight and a half months—it’s worn him down.

He wants his mom and dad.

He clumsily slumps from Jess’s embrace, clutching the blanket tight.

His eyes burn and maybe it’s the biting wind, but clouds of stuttering condensation betray the hitching of his lungs.

Yes, he knows them. He would know them anywhere.

He’s sorry he left. He’s sorry for wasting the money they spent on all those college applications, and he’s sorry he didn’t say goodbye.

“You’re—” Dad attempts, avoiding the obvious horror of the scald. “You have tattoos.” His fingers press into the crook of Crane’s jaw, finding the tattoo nestled behind his ear. “You’re having a baby. You cut your hair.”

“Did you think you couldn’t tell us?” Mom whispers.

You weren’t bad parents , Crane wants to tell them. You were perfect.

So why did he leave? Because they didn’t read his mind? Because they believed their daughter when she said she was okay? Because they trusted her?

Let’s rewind.

Let’s say the swarm never came, but Sophie didn’t manage to set herself on fire, either.

She chickened out of the flames like she was always going to.

She sat there in the back seat of the car with all her supplies, sobbing and gasping for air, and she wouldn’t trust herself to drive home; not this emotionally compromised, not with all the graduation parties happening in the neighborhood.

It would be two in the morning and she’d call her parents to pick her up, and her parents would come up because they’re good parents and they love her.

At home, the three of them would sit on the couch, lights turned down low, a cup of water in Sophie’s hands, and she would tell them everything.

She would tell them about the fire drill in middle school.

Her obsession with hurting herself. She’d explain how tired she was all the time, how she’s terrified of college and doesn’t think she can do it, how she’s not really as smart as everyone believes she is.

That she’s fooled everyone into thinking that she’s a good person.

And maybe she’d even talk about the boys in the locker room.

Maybe she’d talk about the dog and every awful thing she’d prayed for.

Clutching a snotty tissue in her fist, staring at the wall above the fireplace, Sophie would say she wished she was a boy. She’d say she never wants to speak again, because never once has it been worth it, and she thinks there is something very, very wrong.

Sophie’s parents would look at each other over her head and have that telepathy moment.

Dad would say, “I’m so sorry we never noticed,” and Mom would say, “Thank you for telling us.”