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Xavier hasn’t seen his parents in the same room since a very tense Christmas when he was 13. His dad had been home for once when she came to pick him up for her half of winter break to spend it at his grandparents house with her.
Xavier didn’t really have parents anymore. He had an idea of a father and a motherly face on the screen.
Sometimes talking to his mother is worse than his dad’s radio silence. Her laugh makes him want to cry. Every smile and ‘I love you’ feels like the last one he’d got before she’d lost custody. Visitation rights on the holidays. His dad’s final shot across the bow at both her and Xavier by proxy.
She always tries to be there to answer when he calls. Day or Night, no matter what’s going on in her life, she tries to be there for him. Even when he can tell she’s miserable and hurting she finds a way to be loving for him. To be his mother. Some times the way she says his name it’s like he’s the only good thing in her world. The only reason she bothers getting up. It’s awful and amazing. He hates his father for making it like that.
She was only two years older than he is right now when she got pregnant with him. He can’t imagine going through something that huge that young. He can comprehend that his dad who was nearly in his 30s then, shouldn’t have ever touched her.
Do you regret having me?
He’s so scared to ask it but it sits there in his throat when he looks at her over FaceTime. She lost her entire twenties to a failed marriage and divorce. He knows that it was her choice to live in the van (“I’m traveling all over for work. Why would I waste money on rent for an apartment I’m never really in?”) but he can’t help but feel that his father put her there. She never stood a chance against him in divorce court. Still she made it last for 3 years. 7 to 10. He lost his mother when he was 10. His father who’s more of a ghost than a real person put her behind a wall of legal restrictions and he lost her. Holidays only. He doesn’t even hate the van is the thing. He gets his creativity from her. She might not be an artist but she can tear things down and make better things out of them. She’d bought the kind of van electricians and stuff have and turned the back into like a mini-camper or something. There’s even a little kitchen. He’d rather live there with her than in the mausoleum of post-modern modern minimalist contemporary glossy photoshoot mansion his father pretends to live in.
His mom claims not to be an artist but she knows how much art means to him and she tries. She learns terms and art movements and artists names. She takes pictures of everywhere she goes for him. She sends him cool art she finds at markets and art she made herself. (“Just trying to keep up with my brilliant son”). She wears a tank top and he can see the sleeves of tattoos that grace her arms from fingertip to shoulder to neck. Some of those are even his designs. He’s never been more proud of anything he’s ever made. He got to see them get done. He’s considering getting into tattooing.
Her voice is warm and rough over the phone. How much does she scream for it to be rough like that all the time? Her hair is lighter than his but almost the same cut (she laughs “well one of us is gonna have to change!”). Her sadness is in his face too. He’s so scared to ask the question. Do you regret having me? He finds it hard to consider meeting Vincent Thorpe had been a good thing for her. He’d taken everything in the end. The tabloids had ripped her apart. Gold digger. Crazy bitch. Both better off without her. She stayed for him. He knows that. She stayed so long for her son. Might’ve even stayed longer just for him. Selfishly he wishes she did. Regrets having not asked her one more time to just stay and not fight with dad and give up on her own life so she could be here. So he could see her more than a handful of times a year.
He’s scared to ask the question but he needs to know. He’s in his studio shed, the safest place he has and mom is on speaker. He’s sketching to focus on anything but his fear as he asks questions around the question, circling it as close as he can.
“How did you and dad meet I mean—“
She laughs. “Yeah I know it’s a little like ‘what?’ But we met on a job.”
“You were already working then?”
“Nah. He’d been hired with a bunch of other big time names to try and solve this demon issue for the dad of this girl I went to school with. He was this rich guy— obviously and she was pretty popular. She’d asked me to like, hang out at her house and stuff since everyone at school knew I was Like That. And while I like, totally didn’t give a shit about her as a person I couldn’t say no on principle. I knew what she was going through from experience. My whole childhood was just a montage of this kinda shit so how was I gonna say no? Anyway turned out me and your dad were the only legitimate people there— or the only legit ones with spines at least. So we ended up tag teaming it.”
“That’s actually really cool.”
She laughed. “Thank you. Not to brag but I did most of the heavy lifting. But that’s just cause it’s more my thing. He’s a psychic knower so I dunno, the whole confrontation thing is different. Since I just dealt with fighting stuff my whole life I was more geared for it. Also I’m fucking insane.” She laughed again. “I basically told it to come at me — which you should never do — and just took the bull by the horns. I couldn’t have handled it without him though. Basically I tanked and he DPS’d.”
“And he was so impressed he took you under his wing only to immediately start dating you?”
“Xavier. The thing with me and you dad— it’s complicated but I wanted it too. It’s hard to explain what I see in him, you kinda had to be there to get it. But I mean for one— Handsome. But also he respected me. Took him a hot sec there sure but I spent a lot of my life till then being pitied, worried about, considered crazy blah blah blah. It was nice to just be seen as a person and also respected for the fact I had survived all this shit. And he was cool — not in like a ‘oooo Vincent you’re so dreamy’ kinda way— but like a ‘oh hey, you don’t suck!’ Kinda way. Ironic in hindsight.”
His brain couldn’t stop hanging on this one thing. It stuck out like a nail. “What you see in him? Present tense?”
“Yeah. Like well one— still think he’s handsome obviously. But like, I don’t hate him. Hate’s a really strong thing. I don’t really think I ever could honestly. I was angry with him and I still am a lot of the time but I did marry him for a reason you know. We didn’t do a whole shotgun wedding thing because I was having you. And fuck— I dunno I’m a sappy bitch. I see him on tv or on some fucking magazine in the gas station and I just think ’that man gave me my son’. You’re my favorite person in the whole world and 50% of you is from him and I can’t unsee that. Kinda quells some of the fury you know?”
He sat up in his seat and dropped his head back. He didn’t want to get tears on the paper. A weight was off him. He was full of shattered glass and it ripped him apart with every breath. He was wanted. She loved him so much it made dad look good by association. She only got holidays.
“I love you mom.” It choked him so bad. He wanted her to be here. He wanted her to be stroking his hair. They should be having this conversation on the couch facing each other and then she would reach over and hold him and rest his head on her shoulder and run her hand through his hair and complain about how big he was now and tell him about how she used to carry him around and be his mom.
Calls with his father are a lesson in awkwardness and disappointment. They’re strangers. His dad is a picture on a magazine and an army of assistants his voice comes through like speakers.
There are a million things he wants to ask his father but there is nowhere to put them. No van parked at a motel 6 in New Mexico he can clutter with his need to know him. There’s no point in them. An exercise in futility. His father’s voice is low and smooth and cool over the static of the phone. If he spoke a human language it would be so soothing. He speaks in schedules, in bookings, in public relations, in names and connections. He speaks the future like a language. It’s one Xavier can only barely understand. His dreams only give him the most base knowledge of it, barely enough to try and speak it. His dad can read minds but he can’t look into Xavier’s eyes and know he wants his mom and dad back.
He can’t accurately remember the last time he looked his dad in the eye so maybe that’s why. There is no point in talking to his dad. There’s nothing there an assistant couldn’t say. Yet he still tries. Still waits like a peasant begging for an audience with the king. Still always so desperate to hear that smooth, cool voice let him down one more time. Do you even want me? It’s another question that sticks in his throat but it’s one he doesn’t even look for a way to ask without asking. His father is a literal creature. Getting him to talk in anything other that facts is like pulling teeth. Did he ever love his mother? He’s not sure if Vincent Thorpe is capable of that. He supposes he has to be— he’s still technically human and mom wouldn’t have settled for less but he can’t picture it.
He has his father’s coloring, his build. He sees his own sandy brown hair and muddy green eyes on glossy magazine covers. Sees where they overlap when he realizes with a start that he’s tall enough now to fit in his father’s clothes. Alone, bored and trapped in that tomb of a house he had entered his father’s room acted like a child. Playing dress up. There was nothing better to do. He wanted to feel closer to someone. Anyone. He’s his father with his mother’s face. His mother is right. He would have had to have been there to understand what she saw in his dad.
Vincent Thorpe isn’t a man, he’s an idea. He’s a thousand pixels on a screen. Millions of pictures being rapidly shown one after another to trick you into thinking he’s more than just the pictures. He’s a cool voice over a speaker.
He and his father never FaceTime. He doesn’t know if that hurts or if he’s glad for it. He can’t imagine how that conversation would go. How he would feel when he saw his father’s face as he let him down again for the millionth time. They’re easier to take when he’s just a voice. Does he really want to see the places his dad would rather be than with his kid? He doesn’t think he does.
But he still wants his dad. He still calls. Still waits for assistants to tell him he called and for his dad to deem to squeeze out 5 minutes in his schedule to speak a lot of words at him but say nothing to him.
“I saw your mother at a convention I was speaking at recently. She looks good.”
“Oh yeah? That’s great.”
“Yeah. Someone had managed to convince her to do a panel. I know you worry about her so I thought you might like to know.”
He didn’t worry about mom— not like that— not usually. But now he was. His dad didn’t know who he was. What he did and didn’t worry about. They never talked about that kind of stuff. He had never actually met Xavier Thorpe. Not since he was a kid. The Xavier Thorpe in his head was his reflection in a mirror. Better yet, in a window. Even less substantial. His dad was worried about his mom and put that on Xavier. He remembered roughly the fights he wasn’t supposed to hear when he was small about how what mom wanted to do was too dangerous. How his dad wouldn’t allow it— as if he could actually tell her what do and that saying that wouldn’t just make her do it harder. He’d thought the divorce had killed all the good will there. His dad had certainly ruined her life enough with the whole thing to make it seem like he didn’t give a shit if she lived or died anymore.
“Yeah. It’s good to hear she’s okay. Thanks.”
The silence is strained and awkward. There’s no natural way for them to talk. No repertoire of topics for them to discuss. No comfortable companionship that makes even the silence feel warm.
He falls back on a basic.
“Weems asked me to do a mural in the Quad. I’m excited about it. I’m thinking of doing something with ravens. Seems kinda fitting you know— Nevermore, Poe, ravens. Fits the whole vibe.”
“Good. That’s great Xavier. I’m sure it’ll be great. You’re so talented. Send me a picture when it’s done alright?”
He thinks he hears smile in his dad’s voice. That smooth, radio show river water voice. God he needs it to be there. You’re so talented. He feeds on that like a dying man in the desert. Clutches to it like it’s all he has because it is. He gets so few acknowledgements let alone compliments from him. The good thing about being into art is it’s solid. Tangible. There’s measures of quality even out of touch people can use to see it and be impressed. His dad can’t deny or overlook how good he is at art because it’s visible and easily measured.
“Yeah. Of course.”
The call doesn’t last long after that. His dad always has a reason to cut it short. Xavier hates it but he’s used to it. He lets himself be buoyed by the one off hand compliment he got but it’s hampered by the worry and questions. He still wants to ask. Why do you care about mom? Is there something to be worried about? But he knows there’s no point. His dad won’t talk to him about it. He never does— not really. He’ll say some things but it always comes down to “it’s an issue between me and your mother Xavier” or some variation on that. As though Xavier’s still fucking 5. As if if something happened to mom it wouldn’t hurt Xavier a million times more than it would his dad. His dad who stuck them both on a shelf in a tomb of a house and left them there to rot so often that his mom had to ruin her own life just to get out and live again. Kinbott would have a field day with this. He wonders if she reports all this kind of shit he says to his dad. He doesn’t know if his dad would even mention it or care if she did.
Mom couldn’t fully explain it and dad refuses to explain it. He doesn’t really know why he lost them. He remembers times when he was really little when he was in his dad’s lap — he seemed like a fucking giant then now he’s just 3 inches taller — and mom would be tucked into his side. Dad’s arms around them both while his mom fawned over his little self. The good memories with his dad always stick out so much because there are so few so they became a huge deal. Dad’s home let’s do all this great shit together as a family. It makes everything worse because he knows what he’s missing. He’s Tantalus doomed to starve forever with food and water forever just out of reach. When his dad is there —really there, really present— it’s kinda fucking awesome. He feels like his whole world lights up. Maybe that’s what mom had seen? He could get it then he guessed.
Guess they both got duped by that then.
He stares at his phone absently for a minute after the call is over. The screen is dark and offers him nothing. His room is dark save for his desk lamp and empty at the moment. Part of why Xavier hadn’t minded getting sent to Nevermore was at least there’d be people around all the time. He didn’t think he could take coming home to the mausoleum every day after school. But every time after a call with his dad without fail it did not matter how teeming with life Nevermore was. For him it was empty and cold. The hole where the absence was dull and chill in his chest. Was he just too clingy? Asking for too much? Was it bratty to want his dad to drop everything and just care about him? Take a week off and just be with him?
The black screen of his phone and that mixed face of their in it held no answered.
He was alone. Very, very alone.