Catch & Release

David stares out the window at the spatters of rain hitting the pavement. The pane is cracked open and the sound of it rushes in like a chorus of whispered relief after the heat wave they’ve been having. He’s spent the majority of his vacation holed up in his room with the AC on blast, bent over his laptop. As far as his mother is concerned, he’s been playing video games. It’s not a lie, not entirely. It’s just that this summer, the last that David has before he goes off to college, he has a little more than beating Diablo III on his mind.

When do you leave? The three rippling dots on his screen transform into words.

This afternoon...or tomorrow morning, if he can't get work off early, he types. He looks at the corner of the room where his bag sits, packed and ready to go, then stares back at the window. The rain is coming down more intensely now, the warm smell of ozone drifting in to where he sits on his bed, one leg up under his chin. David pictures his father's truck showing up right that moment, cresting the top of the hill and coming down the long black tongue of the driveway through the rain.

He looks back at his screen, where a new question has appeared.

Are you going to tell him?

.

In his mind, he hears the door open downstairs, the stilted conversation of his parents before heavy footsteps make their way to the base of the stairs.

"Come on, bud! Fish ain't gonna come to us!"

His father will clap him on the back as he comes downstairs, and he'll smell the distinct scent of his aftershave, the smoky residue of the cigarettes he's had on the way over. He'll walk right past David's mother on the way out while David says goodbye, and when he comes out, he'll already be waiting in the truck, lighting up again.

"We gotta make a stop to gas up," he'll inform David when he climbs into the passenger side. "You had anything to eat yet?"

David will buckle up while his Dad backs expertly down the driveway, and they'll stop at the usual gas station on the way. His dad will hand David his card and have him fill up the truck while he goes inside for night crawlers and a couple cardboard carryout boxes spotted with grease. When David's finished fueling he takes his from the center console. The scent of cinnamon and glaze will fill his senses and am impossibly deep pit in his stomach will open up where he'd sworn there was nothing before. His dad, finished with his own cinnamon bun, will peruse the parking lot, getting situated in the driver's seat again. Inevitably, he'll gesture to some girl approximating David's age.

"She's cute, huh?" he'll say.

David will freeze, the cinnamon bun suddenly feeling like lead in his stomach.

"Yeah," he'll say, or 'who?' and his father will point again, say, "She was looking at you too, saw her checking you out while you were filling up."

When David only says 'hmm', he'll feel his father's eyes on him, and in him something will wriggle, longing to be free.

Finally, the tension will break as his father pulls away. "Probably got five girlfriends already, huh?" he'll say, rolling down the window and reaching for another cigarette.

The rest of the drive will be taken mostly in silence, Creedence Clearwater Revival playing softly on the car radio, punctuated occasionally by his father pitching him some generic question about school and his grades (excellent) and then whether his mother is still a crazy bitch (she's not, and never has been). Almost always, on these long drives over increasingly more rural roads up the coast of Maine, he will wonder what it is in him that keeps this relationship alive, struggling to stand on its one leg.

When David was only five, his father cut and ran for another family, two kids with another woman in some town on the opposite side of the state (in Maine, that's a chasm of hours). For years, he didn't hear from him at all. Occasionally, there'd be a call on the phone and his mother, mouth tight, would say "no, he doesn't want to talk." These calls came infrequently, and as he aged David realized they were almost always on his birthday. When he was old enough, going through a surly pre-teen phase, he'd gotten into a rare fight with his mother, in which he'd accused her of keeping his father from him. To his surprise, she'd relented.

"Maybe you're right," she said. "You're old enough to decide yourself whether you want a relationship with him.”

It was only after he'd gotten to know the man that he understood she was probably only trying to protect him.

David's father was a man of few words and even fewer interests. One of these interests was fishing, and it was over this pastime that he and his father bonded. Every summer since middle school, they would drive up the coast together for a weekend, set up camp at Moss Lake, and spend the time hunting for aquatic trophies off of an old, rented speedboat.

Each year, it always started the same, this awkward gap between between them on the ride over, the limited conversation. David will steal looks over at his dad and wonder if he's any different with his other family, his newer, improved family. Is he less rigid, more full of life with the people he left them for? It seems impossible to imagine at first.

But something happened on that lake, with its overcast, muggy days and still waters. While they're out, casting their lines into the water, watching the ripples spread, a thawing creeps into the space between them. It's not that there's more conversation, but that the silence grows more comfortable. Every once in a while, one of them gets a bite, or a tease from the fish swarming beneath them, and they'll turn to one another, grinning. "That's it!" his father will say, his muddy brown eyes coming alive. "Reel her in, David!"

This summer, like the others, they will take the boat out all day Saturday, and then the early morning hours Sunday before heading back home. That last morning they will sit with steaming hot aluminum jugs of instant coffee between them. David will watch his father hook a worm, fat and wriggling onto his hook with his callused fingers, and the urge that's been stirring in him all weekend, the need, will become unbearable. To share himself. To close the gap. In the relaxed stillness, he can believe in a happy ending.

"Dad," he will say, "I...I met someone."

His father will turn, a smile coming over his face. "Really, now? What's she like then?"

David will shut his eyes for a moment, adjust his clammy hands on the pole.

"It's a he," he'll say.

In the silence that falls between them, he will be able to hear the water lapping at the bottom of their boat. A weight will shift from his chest even before knowing what comes next. What is done can't be undone, or unsaid, and there is a certain comfort in that.

"Well," his father will say at last, setting his pole down and picking up his giant thermos of coffee in both hands. "What is he like?"

.

.

This is not how it happens.

.

.

Are you going to tell him?

David stares at the words on his screen before typing, I think so.

Pause. Then, Will you be safe?

David's father is the type of man to use the f slur with abandon. He's the kind with very clear ideas of what a boy, a man, should do- and be. David has known he is not those things for a while, but it was only the beginning of his senior year at Birchmount High that he started talking to Adam. Adam lives in Canada but they are going to the same college next year. They haven't met yet, not officially, though David feels like he's known Adam forever somehow.

Yeah, I'll be safe, he types now. What he means is, he won't hurt me. But safety, he reflects now, can sometimes be more than physical, just like silence can sometimes feel like a lie.

Good luck, Adam says, and just as the words appear across his screen, the door slams downstairs. Even before he hears his father's footsteps on the stairs, he thinks: he knows.

A pit opens up in David's stomach as his father bangs on his door, throwing it open without waiting for an answer. His face is rigid, jaw clenched.

"What..." he grinds out, "Is this?" He flings his own phone down on the bed; it's open to Instagram. The picture is a 'thirst trap' David took a couple days ago, standing shirtless in the bathroom mirror. Below it, under a smattering of likes, there is a single comment:

Adam488: <3 so hot

and then, David's reply. He doesn't need to look to remember what he said.

Gamr_Davd: thanks babe; ur not so bad urself ;)

His father is almost never online. David should know; the friend request he sent him on Instagram, hoping to creep on pictures of his father's other, better family, must be months old. Old enough, anyway, that he forgot he sent it in the first place.

"Dad," he says now, but his father clenches his hand into a fist and moves forward. David flinches, falling back across the bed, but his father only takes the phone back and pockets it.

"I knew it," he said. "I should have known. This is what comes of leaving you with that crazy bitch. My only son." He shakes his head, then repeats it, louder. "My only son."

"Dad, I was-"

"Forget it," his father says, turning. "I don't know why I bothered."

.

After he hears the front door slam, David lies on his bed and lets the tears fall down his face onto the linens. His mother finds him there.

"He's not worth it," she says. She sits beside him on the bed and runs a hand through his hair like she used to do to comfort him when he was very young.

"He hates me," David finally says, voice wooden.

"No," his mother answers. "He's just too afraid to love something he doesn't understand."

David thinks about this, tears ebbing as he listens to the rain flick against the half-open window.

"I think I want to be alone," he says after pulling himself up into a sitting position, embracing his mom.

"Okay," she says. When she reaches the door, she looks back at him, mouth poised like she wants to say something more.

"What?"

She shakes her head. "Nothing. It's just...you ought to close that. At least for now." David follows her gaze to the half-open window. When he looks back, she's gone, shutting his door gently behind her.

He goes to the window and stands before it a moment, gaping open, the cool air coming in. The temperature has gone down in the past hour, making him shiver. For a while he stands there, looking as far down the driveway as he can. For a moment he thinks he sees taillights creeping away through the silver sheets of rain- or are they headlights, coming closer? But as he wipes his blurry eyes, the illusion disappears and he shuts the window with a decisive snap, twisting the lock for good measure.

When David wakes up his laptop there is a new message from Adam across the screen.

David? You still there?

He sits down, the sight of the words making his heart come unmoored, like his father's fishing boat in the stillness of early morning, rocking back and forth on the gentle waves.

Cast off now, his father's voice says in his ear, the ghosts of his hands releasing David's on the pole. That's it.

Draw back, draw back and let it go.