Free You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon Page B

“Cool.” He sits there for a moment, staring slackly at the television as the superheroes and supervillains fight one another. He feels muffled, sluggish, fairly hungover. The long night comes back to him slowly—a party at the tavern where he works as a bartender, the honky-tonk music from the jukebox and the smoke that still clung to his clothes, sitting there drinking with his cousin Ray and some people Ray had just met, a girl from Denver who Troy had kind of liked, who kept covering her mouth with her hand; he remembers spritzing himself with Refreshing Citrus air freshener, trying to disguise the smell of alcohol and marijuana from the teenaged baby-sitter when he came in. He hoped he wasn’t too wobbly. He was two hours later than he’d said he’d be, and he knew she was a little irritated as he counted money into her hand—he remembers that much, and then he’d been sitting on the couch after the baby-sitter had left, drinking one last beer and watching a late-night movie,
Vertigo
. He must have simply fallen asleep. He tries to remember. Had Little Man been screaming in the middle of the night? Things have begun to blur together lately: the days, the nightmares, and it takes a moment for the facts of his life to arrange themselves. It is the day after his thirtieth birthday. He is a father, a grown man with responsibilities. His bladder is full, and after a moment he stops casting about for solidifying thoughts and gets up, pads crookedly toward the bathroom.
    ——
    He feels a little more oriented after he’s patted some water onto his face, though he’s still a little unnerved. There is something about the dream that lingers. It was as if the dream had been going on for hours before he woke, and it weighs heavily on him, a feeling of grief that weaves its way through his insides as he stares at himself in the mirror. In the dream he had been looking for Little Man, calling for the child through long hallways and rooms full of ominous hums and flutterings, catching glimpses of running shapes. He remembers that in the dream he had stumbled out into the open air. It was the backyard of the house.
    This is what Troy recalls most vividly: the small backyard of the house, with its patch of grass, a curled garden hose, a child’s shoe near the trunk of the old elm tree. There was a yawning roar of an airplane, a shadow pulling across the ground, and when Troy looked up, startled, he saw that Little Man was sitting at the very top of the old elm tree, perched in the netting of bare boughs. Little Man was crouched on his haunches with his arms around his knees, his feet resting on a thin, quivering branch barely strong enough for a bird. Yet somehow Little Man balanced on it. Somehow, impossibly, it held Little Man’s weight, and the child’s silhouette hung precariously balanced at the top of the tree. He would fall, Troy knew. Troy could sense that Little Man was already falling even as he tried to run, holding his arms out. Little Man was already plunging through the air, the thin branches snapping and whipping as his son plummeted. There was that awful sound that Little Man was making, a high, fading wail, a falling-scream, a death-scream, which now Troy has in his head and can’t shake.
    “Shit,” Troy says. He gathers up some of the dirty laundry that is spilling out of the overflowing hamper behind the bathroom door and tries to stuff it in. Too full. He puts his foot inside the hamper and steps down hard, compressing, packing it in tighter, so there is enough room to close the lid. He stands there, frowning at it, and his face feels pale and cold with sweat.
    ——
    He would like to think that things have been going well. He wants to be a good father, that’s the thing, even though he doesn’t always succeed. Little Man has been living with him for about three months now, and Troy tries not to think of the potential mistakes he’s making. It’s mostly good, he tells himself. It’s mostly