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A morning in February, and Casey wanted pancakes for breakfast.
Zeke didn’t have anything in the trailer to make pancakes, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he did because Casey wanted McDonald’s pancakes, the ones that came on the styrofoam plate with the little plastic box of Kraft syrup on the side. And for Christ’s sake, as if they hadn’t eaten enough McDonald’s breakfasts, and now when they didn’t have to, that was what Casey wanted. Zeke could have said no but he wasn’t in the mood to deal with an all-day Casey sulk and the weather was good—10 degrees below zero but brilliantly sunny and the landlord had come through and plowed their road a few days before, so they got in the car and drove to LaPlatte so Casey could have his McDonald’s pancakes.
McDonald’s was filled with good, breakfasty smells—fresh coffee the strongest of them. No matter where they’d been or what had been happening, there had always been something reassuring about stopping for breakfast, sometimes after a long, sleepless night of driving, and being greeted by the smell of fresh, hot coffee. Zeke had learned to take his comforts where he could, and God bless America, you could always get a good cup of coffee somewhere.
Casey got pancakes and Zeke got coffee and eggs and they sat at one of the molded plastic tables beside the window. The LaPlatte McDonald’s looked out over the interstate and at this hour on a Sunday morning there was almost no one on it. The plains stretched out on either side of the road, unbroken expanses of white sparkling under the winter sun.
Zeke drank his coffee and looked out the window. He glanced at Casey and saw that he was fully absorbed in coating each pancake with butter.
“You want some pancakes with your butter, Casey?” he asked. Casey muttered some assent, not getting the joke, and Zeke went back to looking out the window. The snowy landscape with the black ribbon of interstate bisecting it reminded him of something, but it took a minute for the memory to click.
_____
It was New Hampshire, not Minnesota, and Zeke was having breakfast with his father after getting kicked out of his first prep school. His father had driven up from Boston to collect him and they stopped for breakfast in a McDonald’s off I-95. It was a winter morning, bitterly cold and brilliantly white, and Zeke listlessly watched cars go past on the interstate while his father sermonized about responsibility and maturity and thinking about his future.
That was the first of many lectures, and the first of many such collections from schools whose names Zeke wouldn’t even remember. His parents finally gave up and dumped him at Herrington High, which Zeke supposed was meant as a punishment. The joke was on them because Zeke loved Herrington at first sight. He loved the utilitarian griminess of it and the bored fatalism of the teachers and the noisy rabble of students who were there because they had to be there, not because they wanted to be, not because they knew they were America’s best and brightest on their way to becoming young entrepreneurs and leaders of society. For the first time in his life, Zeke felt he was where he belonged.
Zeke’s father called him after his first week at Herrington to ask him how it was going. Zeke knew it was no casual question. He knew his father wanted him to say that it was horrible, that the school was a real piece of shit and that if he could have just one more chance at a real school, he’d buckle down and work hard and be the person his parents wanted him to be.
Even if Zeke had felt that way, he wouldn’t have given his father the satisfaction of admitting as much. As it was, Zeke answered truthfully.
“No place I’d rather be, Dad.”
His father was quiet after that. He exchanged a few more stilted words with Zeke before hanging up, and he did not call again.
The last time Zeke spoke to his father was at the Marion County Jail, right after the sentencing. His father was trying to talk him into appealing, into working out some sort of first offender-community service deal. Zeke told him not to bother and his father stared at him in cold silence.
“Are you just going to be a loser your whole life, Zeke?” he finally asked, his jaw tight with anger.
Zeke looked at his father, but suddenly it was Miss Burke he thought of, Miss Burke on that last day of school before everything had gone to hell. You asshole, she’d called him, along with some other choice phrases, and it hadn’t made much of an impression then, not with all the batshit stuff that had happened later, but Zeke found himself wondering if it had been the alien crazies talking or if that had been what Miss Burke, frumpy old Elizabeth Burke, had always thought of him anyway. For the first time, Zeke wondered if maybe his attitude wasn’t an attitude at all, wasn’t carefully studied insouciance or adolescent rebellion or just plain apathy; maybe he really was those things — a punk, an asshole, a loser.
But then there was just his father in front of him, his father in a pristine Brooks Brothers suit, his buffed fingernails resting on the dull steel of the jailhouse table.
“That’s the plan, Dad,” Zeke drawled, and his father stood up and walked out, never to be seen again.
_____
Casey had finished off the butter and moved on to the syrup part of his pancake production. Zeke watched him as he often did, with a sort of bewildered amusement. Casey in his quieter moments was a bigger mystery to Zeke than when he was angry or frightened; he didn’t understand where Casey was in his mind when he was like this. Zeke only understood that this was Casey, that although he often separated the Caseys he knew by their behaviors and moods, they were all Casey.
A few months after he’d taken Casey, when things were very, very bad, Zeke lost his temper during one of Casey’s furious tantrums. He grabbed Casey by the shoulders and shook him hard enough to make his teeth clack together.
“Goddamnit, why can’t you fight it?” he shouted in Casey’s face. “I know you’re in there, Casey, why can’t you fucking fight it?”
Casey screamed obscenities at Zeke, pounding him with tight fists until Zeke let him go with something like disgust. Casey crawled into the corner, muttering and gnawing on his fingers. Fed up, Zeke went to bed.
He was woken up a few hours later by the sound of Casey being sick in the bathroom. He unwillingly got up to check on him, pushing open the bathroom door to find Casey splayed out beside the toilet, his head hanging over the bowl and his arms shaking as he held himself up.
Jesus Christ, Zeke thought wearily. Casey turned around to look at him then, his eyes drooping with exhaustion and illness, and Zeke suddenly understood.
He is fighting it, Zeke realized. All of it, all of Casey’s tantrums and fits, his nightmares and phobias and bouts of sickness and the brief, rare moments of happiness or humor, they were all the ways Casey fought, every minute of the day, awake or asleep. Zeke suddenly loathed himself with a sharp, bitter ferocity. You asshole, Miss Burke had said; loser, his father had said, and they had both been right.
Zeke went to Casey and sat with him until he finished being sick. He washed Casey’s face and helped him into bed. Casey curled up in a tiny space at the edge of the mattress, his back to Zeke.
“I’m sorry,” Casey mumbled.
Zeke sat looking at Casey’s rounded back. He could see the bumps of Casey’s spine through the t-shirt.
No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Casey, he wanted to say, but knew Casey wouldn’t understand.
Zeke turned off the light and lay down, staring at the ceiling. He felt a faint tremor in the mattress and realized Casey was crying. Zeke stared at the ceiling for another minute or two, then rolled over and put an arm around Casey.
“Come on, buddy,” he said quietly. “Don’t cry, okay? It’s not your fault. It’s okay.”
Zeke drew Casey away from the edge of the mattress and held him, letting him cry it out and offering whatever comfort he could.
_____
Is he even going to eat that, or what? Zeke wondered, and realized he didn’t care. Casey was absorbed and happy for the moment; whether he actually ate the pancakes they’d driven out for was irrelevant.
Casey had been happy in Minnesota and the closest to well that Zeke had ever seen him. There had been those few days in January when Casey had been so lucid that Zeke had begun to hope that he had turned a corner and was actually getting better. It had been a false hope and Zeke had been living with the child Casey for weeks now. This was the Casey that Zeke knew best, a person with constantly shifting moods and fears who was yet capable of such intense happiness and affection that he amazed Zeke. No less amazing to Zeke was the depth of his attachment to Casey, which he had only become aware of in Minnesota. It was far different from storm of outrage that had made him take Casey in the first place, and of all the things that had happened, Zeke had expected this the least.
Every night, Casey sat up with Zeke and watched TV, but he usually fell asleep after an hour or two. When Zeke was ready to go to bed himself he’d wake Casey, but sometimes a particularly loud or bright thing on the television would wake Casey up before then and he’d wander off to bed by himself. Zeke liked to sit up late, and he always knew what he would find when he finally went to bed two or three hours later—Casey, fast asleep, right smack in the middle of the bed. That Casey was even able to go to sleep without Zeke beside him was a sign of how much better he was doing; so was the way he’d react when Zeke would gently push or roll him over so that he could get in bed. For a long time, disrupting Casey’s sleep had meant he would wake up startled and frightened, usually lashing out with fists and feet. But on these nights, if Casey even woke up at all when Zeke came to bed, he would just blink drowsily and go back to sleep, or mutter a groggy, disjointed question: “Did it snow?” or “Is the TV off?” Zeke would give some answer and then lie down, knowing that it would take Casey about three seconds to roll back to where he’d been and curl himself up against Zeke. Zeke was surprised by how much he liked this, just liked it. He liked the silence and the peace, he liked knowing that they were safe and that Casey was all right. But most of all, he liked Casey’s simple, unquestioning trust, something no one had ever had in him. It was extraordinary to be trusted like that, and sometimes before Zeke fell asleep, he’d listen to Casey breathing beside him and enjoy the weight of Casey’s arm across him and think that while he may have saved Casey, Casey had also, strangely enough, saved him.
_____
Casey had divided his stack of pancakes into precise quarters He picked up one syrup-dripping quarter with his knife and fork and deposited it delicately on Zeke’s napkin before returning to his plate.
Zeke looked at it for a minute, then at Casey.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
Casey didn’t look up; he was busy rearranging his remaining pancake quarters into a neat triangle. He sucked syrup off his thumb, then shrugged.
“Because I love you,” he said. He glanced up at Zeke and smiled.
“Ah,” Zeke said. “Okay.” He reached up and flicked hair out of Casey’s eyes. “Thanks, buddy.”
Casey’s smile widened into a grin. He went back to his pancakes.
“No place I’d rather be,” Zeke said softly, and smiled. He ate Casey’s gift, watching cars go by on the snowy highway.