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One spring, many years ago, Jefferson drove his whole family down to the coastline: Rio, a vision in her wide-brimmed hat and white sundress; Miles, sunscreened into oblivion and small enough to be washed away by the tide.
They set up camp along the beach, far back from the water, their beach towels pinned down into the sand with discarded sandals and tote bags. Miles made a beeline to the surf, his face bright with delight, and Rio chased after him, skirt hiked above her knees.
Jefferson stayed back to guard their things and watched the birds circle overhead, their wide wings and sharp beaks flashing in the sun.
He’d watched a documentary on albatrosses the night before, he and Rio pressed shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee on their three-seater couch. They lay one egg every year, the narrator had proclaimed solemnly, if they are lucky. The fluffy chick on screen looked like a little muppet, silly and ungainly and with tiny dark eyes like raisins. It chirped and shivered in the wind, cowering without the warmth of a nestmate, and Jefferson, bewildered by his own reaction, had felt his heart shoot straight up out of his ribs and into his throat.
Later in the afternoon, during a break for ice cream, he told Miles about the single baby albatross in its grassy knoll of a nest. Said, more to himself than to anyone else, “Doesn’t that sound lonely?”
“Mm-hmm,” said Miles. He hadn’t been listening, obviously, because he was five, busy excavating the chunks of fudgy cookie dough from his proportionately enormous waffle cone, and an only child, besides—he didn’t know what it was like to have a sibling, and this, in Jefferson’s opinion, was just as well. He wouldn’t have to know what it was like to lose one.
(Lose one. He saw Aaron maybe a few days a year, and each time it felt like they weren’t even standing in the same room.)
“Very lonely,” Jefferson repeated, watching his little son pry off the very edge of the crumbling cone with his teeth. “When the baby reaches three weeks old, its mommy and daddy leave it alone for as long as a week at a time. And then one day, when the baby is big and strong, it sets off across the sea all by itself, and it leaves its family behind.”
“Okay,” said Miles, in a distinctly chocolate-stained way.
Jefferson turned his gaze to the lapping edge of the water. He dug his toes into the wet sand, as deep as they would go, rooting himself in the ground like a tree. “You better not go flying off now, Miles.”
“I can’t fly, Daddy,” Miles pointed out seriously. A very pertinent piece of information, for sure. “I don’t have wings.”
That made Jefferson smile. His son was smart and straight to the point. Took after him. “You know what, little man? You’re right—”
“—but I can run!”
Then Miles took off down the beach, little legs going as fast as he could without dropping his treat, and Jefferson had no choice but to follow. The ice cream was, inevitably, dropped. Miles puffed out his cheeks and said (wetly) that he wasn’t crying, nuh-uh, and Jefferson bought him another cone—toffee, this time—and marveled quietly, gratefully, at his beautiful corner of the world.
On the thirty-sixth hour of Miles’ disappearance, Jefferson finds himself pacing a groove into their already well worn living room carpet.
“I take it all back,” he says, turning on his heel where the saxony borders hardwood. “He doesn’t need to spread his wings. This is too much wing, actually. When he gets his ass back here, he’s gonna be grounded for—”
“Five months, yes,” Rio replies. She’s sinking, syrup-slow, into the crack between two couch cushions. Her nails are worried down to stubs.
“I was actually going to say a year.”
“Jeff, sit down. You’re making me dizzy.”
Jefferson turns again, retraces his steps. Thinks of standing above the shattered remains of Alchemax, the clear construction tarp spread out over the concrete-metal hostility, the way it made waves in the wind and mirrored the blue sky above it. Says again, “This is too much.”
What does Spiderman know, anyway?
Miles comes back with some new, mysterious uneasiness shimmering just below the surface and a propensity to cling to hugs for a little longer than usual. Jefferson is relieved, then upset, then angry, and when, a week later, Miles sits them down for a long talk, he expects the worst. Mom, Dad, I’m caught up in some unsavory business. Real nasty stuff, the type you’d never expect an outstanding young man like me to get involved with.
(Miles wouldn’t say it like that, of course. But Jefferson imagines it in his head, all the same. He’s been through this once before.)
But the truth, when it comes, is—well. Jefferson’s just glad that he’s already on the couch, because otherwise his knees would’ve buckled right under him.
“Spiderman?” he croaks out, when he finds his voice from whatever horrified depths it had retreated to. “You’re Spiderman?” His chest hurts. All too quickly, it comes together in his head and starts to make perfect, horrible sense: the macho, faux-deep voice. The weird posturing. The overt familiarity.
He remembers, with sharp, sudden clarity, the feeling of an approximately son-sized warmth in his arms the night Kingpin was taken down.
“I’m an idiot,” he breathes, staring at Miles, who returns his look with wide-eyed apprehension. “Oh my god. You’ve been right there this whole time.”
“I’m sorry,” Miles apologizes, head dipping. “I didn’t want to keep it from you like this. It’s just been—it’s so complicated. I didn’t really know who to tell.”
“Oh, mijo,” Rio whispers by his side. “Is this what you’ve been so worried about telling us?” For the first time, Jefferson feels out of sync with her. At the party for his promotion, they’d worked as a single unit, pressing Miles for answers that he’d been reluctant to give. He doesn’t know what’s changed since then; he doesn’t know why she’s looking at Miles like that, like she already understands.
Miles’ eyes dart to her. His hands are knitted together tightly in his lap, fingers twisting. “Yeah. It—yeah. I swear, I wasn’t trying to lie. I just didn’t want to scare you.”
If Jefferson had been paying attention, he would’ve noticed the way Miles leaned toward her understanding expression like a sunflower. But he’s too busy panicking.
“Scare me? Miles, you—you—” The pain in his chest turns into queasiness. He has to take a deep breath before he can speak again. “You could get yourself seriously hurt!”
(If he hasn’t already. Jefferson is already flipping through his mental photobook of all his encounters with New York’s newest protector. Last week, Spiderman was launched through the windshield of a streetside Buick, and the noise that it had made could only have been described as bone-crushing.)
Miles bristles. “I’ve been doing this for a while, dad. I can hold my own.”
Jefferson’s head spins again. A year. He thinks he’s going to be sick. “When holding your own means getting thrown through a wall every other week, I really don’t think it counts for much! You’re a smart kid, Miles. You’re my kid. I don’t want to see you throwing your life around like it’s nothing when you have so much to lose—what about all that you said about physics at Princeton? You have big things coming—”
Miles stands up. “Being Spiderman is a big thing!”
“You’re fifteen, Miles. You should be hanging out with your friends and—and playing basketball, not being a vigilante!”
“What else can I do? Stand aside and watch? I gotta do this—I want to do this. My powers—”
Jefferson gapes at him in disbelief. “You gotta? You gotta? Don’t give me all that. I didn’t spend all this time raising a fool who’d go off and get himself killed like—”
“Dad.”
The silence settles around them. He’s always been a study in motion, Jefferson’s son: tapping his foot, drumming his hands against his legs, jumping and weaving and dancing along his life with teenaged energy and the almost supernatural grace that he’d gained seemingly overnight—which, in retrospect, was another bright flag planted in the sand, one that Jefferson had failed to see. Brooklyn’s best guardian, always on the move.
Now, Miles holds himself very, very still, staring down at Jefferson with wide, wet eyes. His jaw works before he opens his mouth to speak.
“Uncle Aaron saw it in me,” he says finally. His voice, quiet and defeated, breaks on his uncle’s name. “Even at the very end, he understood. Why can’t you?”
And Jefferson realizes—too late, as always—that he’s made the wrong choice again.
In the dark, Rio suctions herself to his back like an octopus.
“Jeff.” Her hand is soft against his skin. She strokes down the ridge of his neck, slow and smooth over the rise and fall of each vertebrae. “He’s always wanted to make you proud, you know.”
He can smell her citrus shampoo when he flips himself around to face her. “I know,” he whispers back. “I know. But this is…”
The sheets rustle: Rio, moving closer. “A lot. It’s a lot, isn’t it.”
Jefferson tries to bury his head in the pillow. “I—I worry. Who’s looking out for him? What can I do but stand by when he’s fighting against a—a horde of evil radiation zombies, or a mutant fish monster from the Bronx, or—”
“Oh, I’ve heard of an evil alien slime man,” she suggests, very unhelpfully.
“Rio.”
“Sorry. Look, Jeff, I know you’re afraid he’ll get hurt. But he can’t be our little boy forever, can he? And he’s proud of what he does. You’ve got to let him take his own path.”
Selfishly—horribly—he wants to say, why? Why does it have to be him? Of all the people in New York City, why does it have to be Miles? He thinks of May Parker, her life packed up away to Florida, away from her home of so many years. The person she shared that home with—her only son—lying cold in the ground. He wonders if she ever felt like he was flying out of her reach, too.
“I know,” he says instead. “I’ll talk to him in the morning.”
The morning goes like this: Miles, sullen. Jefferson, awkward.
After five minutes of excruciatingly painful silence overlaid only by the clinking of utensils on ceramic, Jefferson clears his throat. He’d planned out an emotional, eloquent speech on how he still didn’t like the idea of Miles putting himself in harm’s way every night, but would always support and love him no matter what. He’d even rehearsed it in the mirror while brushing his teeth before breakfast.
What comes out instead is: “I…am okay with it.”
Miles scoffs when he rises from the table. “Wow. Don’t force yourself too much, Dad. I’m gonna walk today, so no need to drop me off. Bye.”
He leaves. Rio’s neck swivels slowly, owl-like, so she can pin her husband with a stare of disbelief.
Jefferson’s forehead, when it hits the table, makes a hollow thunk like a ripe melon.
On Tuesday, Jefferson spends an entire afternoon turning his phone around in his palm like a worry stone, picking at the raised bump of the power button with his nail. He pulls up Miles’ contact picture three times just to look at it—the young roundness of his cheeks, the mischief in his eyes. All three times, he lets his finger hover over the call button before powering his phone down again.
He leaves work feeling like a coward.
On Wednesday, Andreyev catches him in the bullpen with a styrofoam cup of breakroom coffee.
“Looks like that pain in our ass is back in action,” she sighs.
Jefferson’s mind is scattered after a night of tossing and turning. It takes a few seconds for the wheels in his head to creak to life. “Who?”
Andreyev points a short finger at the old, boxy monitors on her desk. “Spiderman’s back. Patrol from the 35th precinct just found a couple felons webbed to a brick wall. Man, after a week of peace, I thought that pain in—”
The wave of indignation rises up swiftly, and Jefferson’s words are out of his mouth before he can even think. “I wouldn’t call him that, actually.”
Andreyev pauses, sparse brows scrunching together. “Those were your exact words before. Pain in the ass. Remember?”
Yeah, but that’s before I realized that I used to tuck him into bed every night.
Not for the first time, Jefferson curses his inability to maintain a good poker face. “A man can’t change his mind?” he tries, as nonchalantly as possible. “He…helps where he can. I think he’s probably a good kid. Even if he does make our jobs harder sometimes.”
Andreyev gives him a weird look. “Sure. Whatever you say.”
“Yup.” Jefferson winces once Andreyev turns to head back to her desk and takes a sip of the coffee to cover it up.
It’s just as watery as he expected. Great.
On Thursday, feeling inexplicably like he’s doing something wrong, he ensconces himself in the privacy of their home office and searches New Spiderman up on youtube, just to check out the top video.
Then he clicks the next one.
Then the next.
In shaky phone recordings and official news reports alike, Miles glides over the crowded streets in great arcs, a black and red pendulum at the end of a sticky web string. He moves through the sky like he was born flying, attracting eyes and pointed fingers and shouts of admiration, and despite himself Jefferson feels a rush of pride.
In a good number of those videos, Miles has company. Sometimes, whooping and laughing along with him, a spider-person with teal chucks and a giggle that sounds just a touch too familiar. Sometimes, one with great hair. One with lots of spikes. One with—is that a baby sling?
Jefferson gets distracted. He reads the comments. All of them. The good ones: I saw him on my way home from work once and he complimented my hair. The bad ones: this guy sucks, the old one was better (he clicks the thumbs-down for more than a few of these, reports some for good measure). Then there are the ones that he can’t even begin to describe: if it weren’t for Spiderman, I wouldn’t be alive today. You saved my life. You gave me the strength to go on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Further down the rabbit hole—the hours passing without his notice, the room already stretching with evening shadows around him—he finds a recording from the day they captured Kingpin.
(This is not really how he thinks of that day. To him, it will always be The Day That Aaron Left. But no one would ever want to talk to him about that, so he boxes it away. Turns the personal into the professional. Miles was probably right about all that stuff about men of his generation. Miles was probably right about a lot more than that, too.)
Jefferson presses play and watches dutifully. He gets halfway through it—the alarmed cries of pedestrians when the city began to shake, the bizarre sprouting of avant garde car-streetlamp-bicycle mashups, the wash of acidic colors buzzing across the sky—before he realizes that, really, he doesn’t need to watch it at all. With his own eyes, stinging with dust and fear and the realization that his reality was practically tearing apart around him, he’d watched his own son save the entire city. He’d watched him get hit and get up, again and again, braver and more tenacious than anyone.
The evidence had been right in front of his nose, all along. He had just never bothered to look for it.
Jefferson, alone in the dark, thinks to himself: I’ve raised a hero.
Friday—technically.
The clock, blinking red, tells him that it’s 12:17 AM. Jefferson’s back is screaming from the creaky office chair, and his legs are halfway numb, and his eyes feel dry and achy from staring at the computer for so long, but he doesn’t get up and move to the bathroom to get ready to bed.
He fishes his phone out from his pants pocket. He calls Miles, who picks up after three rings, even though he really should be asleep at this hour.
He says, “I’m sorry.”
He says, “I just didn’t want to lose you, too. I couldn’t bear that.”
He says, “I understand. I hope you know that. I understand, and I’ll always support you.”
And when Miles says, tremulous, “Can you pick me up from school tomorrow?” Jefferson finally lets out the breath that he didn’t even realize he had been holding.
Miles always forgets about the creaky floorboard in front of his room. It squeaks under his weight, and Jefferson, used to this routine, turns around on the couch to tell him to quit it with the midnight snacks, I don’t care that you don’t have school tomorrow, it’s bad for your digestion—only to stop short at the glimmer of tears in his eyes.
“Dad,” Miles whispers. “Can I talk to you and Mami?”
They gather at the kitchen table, warm stovetop light reflecting in the half-covered window. Miles, hands folded almost desperately around a mug of warm tea, tells them about Earth-42 in a slow, halting voice.
When their son is finally soothed and tucked back into bed, Rio watches silently as Jefferson gets on his hands and knees to dig through the cabinet under their TV and emerges with a dusty VHS tape. He inserts it into their old player—kept around just in case— and sits prone, back ramrod-straight, to rewatch that old nature documentary, the one about the albatrosses.
The narrator’s voice is soothing, low and smooth like a lullaby. It must lull Jefferson into some sort of a trance, because suddenly he is wondering if the parent albatross, its long flight across the sea playing out on the screen in front of him, remembers being a baby itself. If, by some twist of nature, there had been two eggs in its childhood nest; if one day it had simply shoved its sibling out of the nest, the way he remembered being shoved off the couch when squabbling over the remote after school—if it had done so because it was sick of rubbing wings with another hungry mouth, or if it had known somewhere deep down inside its silly muppet head that this grassy little life was meant for a single egg; that in the open blue world, there could only ever be one of them.
It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. In the end, they still would’ve been alone, taking their solitary paths over the water and away from each other after so many days in the same nest—after half a lifetime in silent companionship, cleaved to the delicate shells of their eggs.
Two bodies in a shadowed alley. A brother-failure and a brother failed. Jefferson, aware of how spectacularly out of hand his metaphor is becoming, turns away from the screen.
Rio’s strong, warm hands find their way to his back and hold him as tightly as anything.
If Jefferson could have it his way, Miles would forever be small and safe and happy, eating his favorite ice cream on a warm, sunny beach. Nothing would touch him. He’d be preserved in amber like a cherub in the murals on a vaulting cathedral ceiling.
As it is, his only son is currently clambering up a twenty-story tower of super-sized s’mores, upon which some sort of dark-robed sorceress is dangling a screaming toddler. Fifteen stories up, a slab of chocolate gives way under his feet, and Jefferson—stuck on the ground with only a pair of binoculars—winces as he watches Miles scramble to regain his footing.
His radio crackles. “Officer Morales, update on the…situation?”
Eyes pinned on the tiny black and red figure above him, Jefferson responds. “Suspect has not responded to attempts to negotiate. Spiderman is in pursuit.”
From the top of the s’mores tower, Miles’ voice drifts down to him. “C’mon, lady, the kid has nothing to do with this!”
The sorceress shrieks in rage. “Don’t call me lady! I am the Graham Reaper!”
Jefferson pinches his brow and squints harder against the sun. Miles has somehow gotten his foot stuck in one of the big, fluffy marshmallows. Jesus. “Well, you see something new everyday. Someone get over here with a blowtorch or something, I need backup now.”
But he’s spoken too soon. Just as his neck begins to cramp from looking upward for so long, an orange portal sparks to life in the sky, right next to where the Graham Reaper is teetering on her kingdom of sweets. Three figures shoot out, like bullets from a gun—three figures that Jefferson’s already seen before, on his late-night journey down the internet rabbit hole.
As far away as he may be, Jefferson can still see Miles perk up. “Hey, guys! Just in time!”
In just two minutes, the Graham Reaper is down on the ground, hands and feet bound with spiderwebs, and the pacified toddler—chubby hands occupied by a chunk of graham cracker rubble, sprinkled generously with chocolate and marshmallow—has been returned to his terrified mother.
Jefferson, fists planted on his hips, now finds himself saddled with the job of cleaning up a building-sized pile of s’mores. He finds himself inclined to wait for backup to arrive before even trying to get rid of the sticky mess littering the streets.
“Psst! Hey! Officer Morales!” Miles waves at him from the cover of a nearby alley. “Over here!”
Playing along, Jefferson makes his way over. “What is it, Spiderman?” he asks.
In the safety of the shadows, Miles tugs him deeper into the alley and pulls his mask off with a gasp. “Oh my goddd,” he groans, fanning his face with a gloved hand. “Graham Reaper? These villains are getting weirder and weirder every week.”
Jefferson stifles a smile. “I’m getting used to it, actually. Did you—wait. When’d you get that?”
“Hm?” Miles swats at Jefferson’s attempts to pat at his face and checks his face in his phone camera. He touches the scratch on his cheek with one gentle fingertip. “Oh, huh. Maybe I got scratched up by a cracker? But it’s—oh my god, Dad, no.”
Jefferson, undeterred, starts unpeeling the band-aid from its wrapping. “Nope. C’mere.”
“Dad,” Miles groans. “I have accelerated healing.”
“And I am your Dad. Accelerated healing doesn’t protect you against bacteria, you know. There’s all sorts of nasty stuff in the city. Do you know how many germs there are on the sidewalk alone? And here you are, touching walls and rooftops and god knows what else—”
“Okay, okay, I got it.” Miles offers up his face and scrunches up his nose when Jefferson sticks the band-aid on his cheek, but he smiles, too—just a little one when he pulls back, like he’s trying to hide it. “Um, anyway, I was gonna say that I might be late for dinner tonight. Gwen, Hobie, and Pav are visiting, and I kinda wanted to show them around more.”
In his peripheral vision, Jefferson catches movement farther down the alley. Three teens melt out of the shadows, and two of them wave.
“Hey, Officer Morales!”
“Hi, Jeff! So nice to see you!”
“Officer.”
Jefferson gives them a nod, a little wave. “Those your little spider-friends?” he asks Miles. He may not be the biggest fan of his son hanging out with other super-powered kids—trouble magnets that they are—but it’s nice to know that he has other friends who, even more than Jefferson himself, understand innately what Miles is going through. It puts his mind at ease.
Miles squirms, makes a flicking motion behind his back that he probably thinks Jefferson can’t see. His friends titter behind him. “Yeah. So…?”
“Well…” Jefferson frowns, scratches at his head, tips his head back to peer at the beautiful sky beyond the fire escapes above their heads—it’s a nice day, like the summers so long ago, when he and Aaron used to sneak out to tag buildings together. Something small and young aches deep inside him. “Don’t you have some work to catch up on?”
“Aw, Dad…”
Jefferson drops the act immediately when he sees Miles wilt a little. “I’m kidding. Go have fun with your buddies, but be safe, alright?”
Miles lights up, does a little fist-pump. “Great, okay. I’ll be back before midnight?”
“Back before ten-thirty, Miles. Alright. Get outta here, I have backup coming.”
Miles is already walking backwards, bouncing on his heels a little, and Jefferson resists the urge to tell him to cut it out before he trips. “Ten-thirty it is! Tell Mami that everyone says hi, and I’ll be safe!” Just before he turns all the way around, he pauses. Gives Jefferson a big smile, teeth and gums and all, and shoots little finger-guns with his hands, one-two. “I love you, Officer!”
Jefferson's heart warms. He smiles. “I love you, Spiderman.”
Then he settles back on his heels and watches Miles rejoin his friends: his only baby bird, spreading his wings—and not so alone, after all.