Everything Changes

we’re all reveling, and it occurs to me that it’s something we’ve all been missing for some time now. We’ll all sleep in the beds of our youth tonight, except for Norm, who refuses an offer to bunk with me, choosing instead to sleep on the sofa bed in the basement, and I intuit from the way he avoids looking at the stairs leading up that he’s unwilling to get that close to the epicenter of his former life, the scene of the crime that led to our dissolution.
    When we finally get up from the couches to go to sleep, Matt forgets himself, wearily pulling off the Elton John wig, and upon seeing his bald head, Lela’s eyes fill with tears, and her hand goes to her mouth to stifle a sob. “Shit, Mom, I’m sorry,” Matt says. “I forgot.”
    “It’s okay,” she says, wiping away her tears with the back of her wrist. “I don’t even know why it makes me so sad.”
    “I can put it back on.”
    “No,” she says, walking over to him and gingerly tracing the lines of his skull with her fingers. “You were my baby,” she says, and then turns to look at Pete and me. “You’re all my babies. And sometimes I just miss it so much, taking care of you.”
    “You take care of me,” Pete says, alarmed by her tears.
    She smiles at him. “I know, pumpkin. And you take care of me. God sent you so that I’d never feel worthless.”
    Being the oldest, I had my own room, while Matt and Peter shared. I don’t remember it ever being a sore point. The linens on my bed are the same ones I slept in when I lived here, and it’s as if Lela wanted to keep everything exactly as it was, so that it would all feel right to me in the unlikely event I ever came back. Climbing into bed, I take in the familiar scents of the house, the cone-shaped shadow on the ceiling cast by the streetlight outside, absently running the back of my hand along the textured wallpaper, which is how I used to lull myself to sleep as a kid. I nod off briefly, and then wake up with a start to find Lela sitting on the edge of the bed, the light from the hallway illuminating her in her nightgown as she gently rubs my legs through the blanket. “Mom,” I say.
    “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
    “Why aren’t you sleeping?” I roll onto my back to look at her.
    “I just like having you here,” she says. “I can’t remember the last time everyone was home, sleeping in their beds. The house feels alive again.”
    I nod, yawning as I stretch my arms. The evening’s earlier debacle cannot penetrate the protective walls of my childhood bedroom, and I feel myself at a calming distance from the fiasco of my real life. “It’s good to be here,” I say.
    She smiles tenderly at me, and I notice that the wrinkles around her eyes are starting to deepen, and beneath her jawline hang discreet pockets of looser flesh, the crumbling chin of an elderly woman. I feel a raw panic in my throat, a visceral sense of the inevitable mutability of everything, the wasted time and the losses to come, and I want to be a little boy again, safe in her uncomplicated embrace, with no notion of the future. “It’s going to be okay, Zack—you know that, right?”
    “I’ve got my doubts.”
    She nods. “Well, whatever it is that happened tonight—and God knows I don’t know what it was—you have to believe it happened for a reason.”
    “The reason,” I say, “is that I’m an idiot.”
    She laughs softly and leans forward to kiss my forehead. “You get some sleep, and we’ll talk in the morning, okay?”
    I grab her arm. “Thanks, Mom,” I say. “For getting me out of there, and for bringing me here.”
    “You’re welcome,” she says softly. “That’s your bed, Zack, and as far as I’m concerned, it always will be. And we are your family and you will always have us”—she grins—“no matter what kind of idiot you are.”
    She kisses me again, letting her lips linger on my cheek for an extra beat. “Get some sleep, baby.”
    But after she leaves, I roll around, unable to get comfortable. The clock radio on my dresser tells me it’s past two in the morning, and even though my eyes are burning with acid fatigue, my heart pounds out a hip-hop beat, fast and insistent in my chest, my limbs pulsing with nervous energy. The first prickly hints of my incoming hangover are flitting about like insects in the front of my skull, looking for a nice, warm spot to land and dig in for the long haul. I roll out of bed and pad down the hall