My Baby Boy
Laine Hissett-Bonard
I’ve been watching my son very closely lately. No, I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with him, necessarily, although some might disagree with me there. After all, this is the boy who is at his happiest when he’s hurting himself, whether by scraping his knees and elbows on countless football or baseball fields, play-wrestling with his friends, flipping ATVs, or following any other meaningless and self-destructive whim that might possess him. I don’t, however, think that there is anything exactly wrong with him... he’s just different. And if what I suspect is true, then maybe “different” isn’t the word some might use.
Queer, maybe.
But that’s not a word I’d want to use. No matter what choices my little boy makes, I’ll never deprecate him like that. The only thing that matters to me, aside from Cole’s safety -- which, evidently, is too much to ask -- is his happiness, and to be honest, I’ve never in his entire eighteen years seen him as happy as he has been for the past several months. He may never admit to me the reason for his frequent, dreamy smiles and the ever-present sparkle in his baby blues, but I’m his mother, for goodness’ sake, and I know him well enough to see what’s going on here.
My baby boy is in love.
It wasn’t until I mistakenly opened his phone bill that I finally got an inkling for what is really going on, though. Now, we get two phone bills since Cole had his own line installed when we moved into the new house -- well, not really that new anymore; we’ve been here since last summer -- and really, Cole should be paying both of them, because his friends use our phone more than Paul and I do. I hardly ever call anybody out of state, and most of our family, including us, lives within a twenty-mile radius of Pittsburgh.
Anyway, the point is, I accidentally opened Cole’s phone bill one afternoon. It was mixed in with the rest of the mail, stuffed between a Pottery Barn catalog and a Yankee Candle flyer -- both mine, of course -- so, not even looking at the name beneath the plastic window, I slit open the envelope and unfolded the bill, my mouth dropping open at the figure marked “Balance Due.”
“Five hundred sixty seven dollars?” I screeched, turning the bill face down on the kitchen counter, rubbing my eyes with my free hand, and picking up the sheaf of papers again. Yes, I was right the first time. Five hundred sixty seven dollars and forty four cents, in fact.
“Dammit, Jason, you better not have been calling those nine-hundred-number Playstation hotlines again,” I muttered, flipping through the sheets of paper to the long distance section, sure I would find the culprit there... and I did. Blinking, I examined the pattern that unfolded before my eyes. Toronto... Toronto... Toronto... Toronto...
“What’s five hundred sixty seven dollars?” my husband asked, meandering into the kitchen and placing a steadying arm around my waist. Apparently, my voice tends to carry.
Turning to him, I waved the phone bill in the air, growing animated. “Paul, look at this phone bill! Those boys have been calling God knows who --”
“Let me see that,” Paul said in his most soothing voice, and I subsided, silently handing over the papers, folding my arms over my chest and staring at him as he examined the bill.
“All of these calls are to Canada,” he finally reported, and I rolled my eyes.
“Yeah, I got that far,” I snapped, but he held up a hand to silence me.
“They’re all to the same number,” Paul continued, frowning lightly. “It looks like at least every other day, all after midnight... what the hell do you think they’re doing?”
“They’re all to the same number?” I mused, chewing my lip and accepting the bill that Paul handed back to me. He was right. So which of the boys was calling Canada every day or so, and who was he calling?
“Amy,” Paul said softly, tapping his chubby finger on the top of the first page. “That’s not our bill.”
“What?” I exclaimed, my eyes snapping to the address portion of the bill. He was also right about that. The bill was addressed to Cole B. Magliaro... better known as my younger son. This was his phone bill... he was the one calling someone in Toronto every couple of nights, and, apparently, spending a couple of hours at a time on the phone, judging by the duration of the calls. One hour and thirty six minutes here... two hours and fourteen minutes here... two hours and twenty one minutes here. “What the...?”
“So if it’s Cole’s bill, it doesn’t really matter who he’s calling, and why,” Paul said, plucking the bill from my fingers, folding it up, and stuffing it carefully back into its envelope.
“What are you doing?” I cried, grabbing for the envelope, but he held it out of my reach.
“It’s his money, Ame,” Paul said gently. “And it’s his life, so whatever he’s doing is none of our business. If he saw you poking your nose into his stuff like this...”
“Oh, he’d throw a fit,” I agreed, rolling my eyes again and snatching the envelope back. “But it was an accident.”
“What was an accident?”
I jumped at the sound of Cole’s voice, turning on my heel to face him where he stood in the kitchen doorway, a skateboard under one arm. “Hi, honey,” I said brightly, smiling my best Mom-does-no-wrong smile, but, of course, he saw right through it.
“What did you do?” he asked suspiciously, leaning his skateboard against the kitchen cabinet and approaching me. “Did you back into my car again or something?”
Paul chuckled, shaking his head as he left the kitchen, mumbling, “I’ll leave you two alone.”
“Fink!” I called after him, and then Cole was standing in front of me, his hands on his hips, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown.
“Ma, what did you do?” he repeated grimly, so, rather than stalling him any further, I decided it was best to just come clean.
“I’m sorry -- I accidentally opened your phone bill instead of mine,” I replied sheepishly, handing over the torn envelope, which he immediately snatched from my hand.
“Did you look at it?” he asked, his face turning inexplicably red, although he didn’t appear angry, exactly.
“No,” I fibbed. “Well, when I saw the balance, I looked at the name because I knew it couldn’t be mine.”
“Oh.” Cole bit his lip, stuffing the phone bill in the pocket of his jeans, his curly, dark hair hanging in his eyes. “What are you making for dinner?”
“Um... I was thinking about cooking on the grill,” I replied, relieved that he had let the matter go so easily.
“Okay.” With that, Cole picked up his skateboard, hanging it behind his shoulder, and left the room. I heard him pounding down the stairs to his room a few seconds later, and I paused for a moment, gathering my thoughts. He’s acting very weird, I thought, my brow creased in contemplation. The crudely-drawn band logo on the bottom of his skateboard had spurred a train of thought that had never really occurred to me, but now that it had, it seemed all too plausible. I turned quickly and began to dig through my desk drawer, and when I turned up the address book, I flipped quickly to the tab marked “UVW.”
“Oh my God,” I murmured, my eyes wide. Yes... it was Billy Varney’s number printed all over Cole’s phone bill. It was Billy with whom my son was spending inordinate amounts of time on the telephone late at night when everyone else was asleep. As I stood there in the middle of the kitchen, late afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows, my eyes flickered to a photo magneted to the refrigerator door, and I took the picture down, placing it on the open page of the address book. It was a picture of Cole and Billy, standing chummily close, Billy holding a cigarette to his lips with one hand, his other arm wrapped possessively around my son’s neck, the broken heart tattoo on Billy’s wrist exposed... the heart that identically matches the one Cole has tattooed on his own forearm.
So that was it. It made perfect sense, now that I thought about it. The Street Creatures paraphernalia everywhere was more than just a silly obsession with the Canadian indie band. The photos and pulp magazine cutouts all over Cole’s room depicting Billy, usually shirtless and pouting into the camera in that sultry way of his, were more than just decoration. The reason Cole talked about the Street Creatures -- and about Billy -- all the time was not simply because he loved the music and idolized the singer, or because they’d been friends since Cole spent the summer with his grandparents in Toronto two years ago. Oh, God, and the reason Cole didn’t show up until nearly dinnertime the day after his eighteenth birthday was not because he and Billy, who was visiting for the weekend, went off and got drunk that night and needed the day to recuperate, as they had claimed... he was with Billy, all right, but I suddenly realized that alcohol had nothing to do with it. Their eyes had been too bright and clear, their color too high and their smiles too wide, for their absence to be explained away by hangovers.
My son was in love with another man.
The pieces to a puzzle I had never known I was trying to put together suddenly fell into place, and I abruptly found that I had to sit down. Cole’s best friend, Nick, found me that way, crumpled in a chair with my forehead in my hand and my hair hanging in my eyes.
“Amy? You okay?” he asked, approaching me warily, and I glanced up immediately.
“Oh, hi, Nicky,” I said, forcing a smile.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his eyes flickering to my address book, where Billy’s telephone number and address were printed in my own neat script at the top of the page and the photo of Cole and Billy lay exposed next to it.
I quickly snapped the book closed. I might have guessed the truth behind Cole’s recently heightened spirits, but I at least owed him the respect of keeping it to myself. I opened my mouth to respond -- something about writing letters to old friends -- but the expression in Nick’s eyes stopped me cold. He knows something, too, I suddenly realized, shocked. Nick’s wary gaze remained trained on me as I fumbled for a response, any response at this point, something to cut this tension that hung in the air between me and the young man I sometimes referred to as my third son. “I was...”
“Does he know you know?” Nick whispered, and I swallowed hard, feeling my hands begin to tremble. So it was true.
“I don’t know anything,” I replied briskly, rising to my feet and tucking my address book back into the drawer from where it came. “All I know is that I’m going to throw on some burgers and steaks. Can you light the barbecue for me, Nicky?”
Nick blinked at me for a second, then nodded slowly. “Yeah... no problem.”
So that’s how I discovered that my son is -- what is he, exactly? I’m not even sure right now. Are he and Billy dating? Are they “seeing each other,” whatever that means these days? Are they just sleeping together? I wonder if I’ll ever know. Cole’s not exactly the most forthright guy when it comes to matters of the heart. God, I didn’t even know he and Jaime, his girlfriend of two years, had broken up until three months after the fact, and if he’s that close-lipped about a breakup, imagine how he acts about a full-fledged relationship... and one with another boy, no less. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve always liked Billy. He’s only a year older than Cole, and he’s intelligent, soft-spoken, and well-mannered; he’s a very talented singer, too, and of course, he’s extremely good-looking. The perfect package; the kind of guy you might not mind your daughter bringing home. But... your son? It’s going to take some getting used to, but as I said, the most important thing to me when it comes to my children is their happiness, and it’s quite apparent to me that whatever it is they’re doing, however they might define their relationship, Billy Varney makes my baby boy very happy... and what more can I ask?
