Running for Home - 69. March 30, 2021

March 30, 2021

So we did end up going to New York, after all. We explained to Liam that we wanted to do something fun to get to spend time together and get to know one another better, so we were going to go on a vacation to New York City. Liam was excited to take his first real vacation. He had no idea what New York was like, other than what he’d seen in a couple of kids’ movies that his mother had allowed him to watch. But he really wanted to see Central Park and the Statue of Liberty.

We drove into Manhattan early in the afternoon of the 28th. I had to let Daniel down, cancelling some plans I had made to go driving with him and Connor again that evening. I felt bad, but getting Liam comfortable with us had to be a priority right now. I told Daniel we’d go twice next week to make up for it, which satisfied him. He asked me how I was doing, suddenly having to take care of a little kid. I told him I was worried about doing a good job, but I would try my best. He reassured me that I would do great. He got this wistful look on his face and admitted that he wished sometimes that I was his dad. I fucking choked up and pulled him into a hug. I told him I’d be the luckiest guy in the world if I had a kid like him. Daniel had tears in his eyes when we parted. He asked me if Bobby and I could take him and Connor into New York with us sometime, too. They wanted to check out this club in the Village that had an all-ages night on Fridays. They wanted to know what it was like to be able to hold hands, kiss, dance, and just be together without any of the pressure and strange looks they got from some of their classmates. I told him I’d talk to Bobby about it and see what we could do.

As we drove into the city, Liam was looking at everything with wide-eyed wonder. He’d never seen so many tall buildings in one place before. He’d never seen so many people in one place before. When we arrived at the condo, Liam couldn’t believe that we had a place in a building that was so big. He was astounded by the fact that we were going to be staying on the 34th floor. The instant we got into the condo, he wanted to run out onto the balcony and check out the view. He thought it was so cool that across the river in Hoboken it was New Jersey, an entirely different state! His enthusiasm was infectious. Liam asked us why we had a condo in New York City when we lived at the School, and Bobby told him about how his other job was being an accountant, and until just this fall he had been working here in New York. Liam asked me if I had another job too, so I told him about being a journalist and author, writing opinion pieces for the media and novels for the public. He told us that he wanted to be a fireman when he grew up and started talking about all the awesome things that firemen get to do and how they are his heroes. Apparently his class last year had gone on a field trip to the fire station in his small Idaho town and that was when Liam decided he wanted to be a fireman. Bobby looked at me and told me he knew the perfect place to take Liam tomorrow.

We just walked around a bit in the West Village and Greenwich Village neighbourhoods near Bobby’s apartment to kill some time in the late afternoon, including some time along the High Line. The more touristy stuff could wait for the next day. Liam liked the rainbow flags he kept seeing in different places and asked us what they meant. We told Liam that not everyone thought that people like Bobby and I should be able to be together, able to show our love. We told him how it used to be a crime for two men to be in love, and there had been riots starting not too far from here at the Stonewall Inn in the 60s to protest the harassment and denigration of the LGBTQ community by the police and society at large. The flags were symbols of the diversity of people, the diversity of ways that you can be and can love, and showed that this was a safe place for us to just be ourselves. Liam, with the innocence of a child, was confused as to why anyone would think loving someone should be a crime, but accepted things at face value.

We had a dinner of pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s Delicatessen, and then we went to a movie at a cinema not too far from the condo. It was some flick for kids, another one of those Toy Story films. I was a little annoyed when it got me a little bit emotional near the end. After the movie, Liam was tired, so Bobby put him up on his shoulders as we walked home. We tucked him into bed and then went to bed ourselves. We had another not entirely unexpected visit from him in the middle of the night, and let him curl up between us again.

Yesterday, we had a bit of a juggling act to do because I had an appointment with Dr. Sofen to attend in the middle of all our touristy outings. We went to the Natural History Museum in the morning. Liam was fascinated by the dinosaur skeletons, especially the Tyrannosaurus rex. We ate lunch in the museum cafeteria and then left Liam and Bobby there and headed to my appointment. We would catch up with each other later, at the secret surprise Bobby had been getting Liam excited about all morning.

Dr. Sofen was as surprised by the Liam development as I felt. Of course, she wondered if there was any way other relatives could take care of him, at least while I convalesced from my kidnapping, but she backed off when I told her Liam was a mutant and would be best served by being at the School anyway. She was intrigued by how insistent I was that Bobby and I were fully capable of taking care of him. She immediately zeroed in on the fact that it was a whole lot of bluster on my part - of course, I have strong doubts about my own capabilities, especially with all the poor parenting examples I was given by my own parents. But after looking after Liam for the last few days, I was starting to feel a little more confident. It was heartening that he seemed to be adjusting to living with us, and we seemed to be able to manage his dips in mood and his fears so far. However, Bobby and I hadn’t encountered any of the big potential problems that were on the horizon yet, so maybe it was false confidence. If and when there was a realization that his mom wasn’t coming back, we would have something difficult to deal with on our hands.

Dr. Sofen told me it was more important than ever that I be fastidious in monitoring my own mental health. I was making good progress, but caring for a child could be draining on my personal resources. It behooved me to continue our appointments on a regular basis going forward. She told me that she was willing to sometimes do appointments over video chat if I couldn’t always get away from the School, but she would still like to see me in person when Bobby and I could make it work because she felt that her patients were more transparent with her when meeting in person. I told her I would take the possibility of remote meetings into consideration, but I likewise wanted to continue to see her in person as much as possible. I figured that between Bobby and our support network at the School, Liam would be more than taken care of any time I was absent.

We discussed how Bobby and I were going to approach Joanna’s disappearance and possibly her death with Liam. And then suddenly Dr. Sofen moved things into much more intimate territory and we were discussing how I dealt with the loss of my parents in the aftermath of the beating, my move into foster care, and then on to Xavier’s. Well, I didn’t really deal with it - the fallout of what they did to me. The State sent me to psychologists while I was in foster care, of course, but I wasn’t very cooperative as a kid. Xavier had asked me about my relationship with my parents a few times as well during some early counselling sessions, but after my first couple years there he had left it alone, mostly.

I told Dr. Sofen how deeply I had grown to resent what they had done to me, how they had allowed themselves to fail, how they turned to alcohol and tobacco, how they had taken their frustrations out on me. I resented how the rest of my father’s family abandoned me to foster care. I told her about how all those negative feelings contributed to the resentment I developed for normal humans, how Magneto used it to manipulate me into hating them enough to become a terrorist for his Cause. I told her how, after everything that I went through in the Brotherhood and in Freedom Force and my life with Dom afterwards, how I started to see that my parents were just trying to cope with the shit hand they were dealt, how it maybe wasn’t entirely their fault. I told Dr. Sofen about how, over the last few years, there had even grown some room for forgiveness in my heart.

Dr. Sofen asked me if I had ever considered reaching out to them. I told her I hadn’t. They probably could have gotten into contact with me again while I was in jail, but they never tried. It said enough - I was an unforgivable criminal and I was dead to them. They hadn’t even tried to get me back when I was a kid, back before I became a terrorist, so why should I bother now? It was probably for the best, anyway. I didn’t want to see how far they had fallen. I didn’t want to see them wallowing in their own filth in that goddamned trailer park. Dr. Sofen asked me if I was being too harsh - that maybe it would be better to know, even if I didn’t like what I saw. What if my suspicions weren’t correct? What if it was just more of my cynical brain catastrophizing about the worst of possibilities? I shook my head. I had to be realistic. The chances of them ever changing were nil.

After that, we briefly talked about the lower frequency of my nightmares. She didn’t make any changes to my medication, satisfied we were in a good place there. I was pretty satisfied as well. I don’t know if it was just being distracted by work, by Bobby and by Liam, but I wasn’t feeling the paranoia and anxiety anymore. Well, I felt some anxiety, but it had more to do with my worries about my inadequacy as a parental figure than anything else.

I messaged Bobby as I was leaving to say I was on my way back to meet up with them. Bobby says that he and Liam were on schedule for the surprise and that they would meet me out front. I took off walking, glad to be done with that appointment. Talking about the Liam situation hadn’t been difficult, but the moment we started talking about my parents I just started to feel drained. I needed to get my energy up before I met up with Bobby and Liam for the surprise. I stopped in at an independent coffee shop and got a large to-go cup of a delicious Ethiopian Yirgacheffe blend. It really hit the spot.

Soon, I arrived in Hudson Square and walked up to the New York City Fire Museum. It was in a beautiful Beaux-Art building. I hung around out front, and about five minutes later Bobby and Liam arrived. When Liam saw what the surprise was - a museum about firefighters and fire trucks and fire safety - he was absolutely stoked. We spent the rest of the afternoon there, Liam’s energy at an all-time high. We got him a book about fire trucks over the years and a toy fire truck to take home.

We headed back up Varick Street to a Mexican joint for dinner. Liam couldn’t stop talking about the Fire Museum and all the cool stuff he’d seen there. Bobby and I shared a look, just before the food came - we both knew we’d scored a big win taking Liam there. Liam’s excitement was infectious, really. But then Liam asked me why I wasn’t a fireman, since I could control fires with my powers. That was a hard question to answer, for some reason. I mean, as a teenager and young adult my powers were just a way to work out my rage and nihilistic feelings and besides that I always had Bobby to put shit out if I really got out of control. After that, I was in the Brotherhood and Freedom Force, and destruction was my job. But putting out fires as a fireman? For some reason, that had never entered my thoughts as something I could do, even after getting out of Freedom Force. I mean, what fire department in their right minds would have hired a former terrorist, anyway?

But writing, that had always spoken to me.

I explained to Liam that, yes, I could have been a fireman, but even when I was a little kid I really liked writing and that’s why I became a journalist and an author. I thought it was important that people learn things through the news and through the stories I tell. Liam said he liked my bedtime stories. He asked me if he could read one of my books. I told him he probably wouldn’t like them until he was older - gothic romance was definitely not appropriate for kids, especially the more explicit passages I threw into my novels.

We ordered a build-your-own-tacos feast with a few different kinds of meat - tinga, al pastor, carnitas, barbacoa - and a few interesting sides. Liam thought the nopales tasted like green beans, and then was worried he’d get a thorn stuck in his tongue after we told him that nopales were made from a cactus. Liam had never had real Mexican food before, just the crappy taco and fajita kits that you can buy in the grocery store. He said this stuff was way better than the tacos his mommy made. Well, that fucking brought on a dip in mood. Liam got really quiet after that, and stayed that way until we got back to the condo. We decided we’d had enough excitement for the day, so we just turned to Nickolodeon on the television and let Liam be distracted with some cartoons while he absently played with his fire truck.

Bobby and I were exhausted after we finally got Liam to sleep. We took turns in the shower, and then got into bed. We talked a little bit about my appointment with Dr. Sofen, but I avoided talking about the discussion surrounding my parents. It’s not that I didn’t want Bobby to know about it, I just didn’t have the energy to go into the feelings it brought up. Bobby was pleased that Dr. Sofen had offered to do some of our appointments remotely - he had been wondering how things would play out for our schedules now that Liam was a part of things. He agreed that it was a good idea to keep going in person as much as possible, but he was glad we had some flexibility there. It wasn’t long before the two of us fell asleep, Bobby spooning me from behind.

Liam woke us up around midnight wanting to join us, but Bobby and I looked at each other and we decided to try to get him back to sleep in the other room. I told Liam another bedtime story, this time about a fireman who saved a family’s puppy from a fire, and he fell back asleep. We thought that would be the end of things, but he came tearing into our bedroom again at 3am having woken from a nightmare about his mommy leaving him at the School. It took us a good hour to get him calmed down before he fell back asleep in the bed with us.

Today we slept in a bit. Bobby and I both felt tired from the interrupted sleep. It was going to be another cold day so we bundled up well and then headed out for brunch. We decided it would be too much to try and see both Central Park and the Statue of Liberty today, so we gave Liam the choice. He decided on the Statue, so we headed down to the ferry docks. We had a good time, but something was a bit off for all of us. Liam’s energy was down. We were pretty sure he had gotten enough sleep, even if it was in three chunks. Bobby was pretty sure he was still preoccupied with thinking about his mother, and Liam confirmed that when he wondered out loud what Joanna would have thought of the statue when we were taking the ferry back to Manhattan.

So where are we at today?

I can’t help but feel like Liam’s nightmare is only the beginning. Bobby and I are going to have to do some deep reading about childhood grief and abandonment issues, that is certain. I just hope we can get those emotions and issues under control before Liam’s powers start to manifest. That will just open another can of worms entirely.