Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

“Oh god,” I said, and I realized I was saying it out loud. My daughter was banging away. I felt dizzy. There was a pizza in the oven. My husband was finally fixing the latch on a window in our bedroom, which we’d been meaning to fix for four solid months. Our life, which was so boring and normal, was still happening. Right at this moment, as everything was changing, it was like my life didn’t know it yet. It didn’t know to just stop, to freeze, because nothing was going to be the same. Let the pizza burn. Forget about that stupid, shitty latch on the window. Pack up your stuff. Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s burn down the house and start over. For a split second, I thought maybe just I could get out of here and start over.

The triplets, my brothers, were perfect for the greased watermelon contest, because they were eighteen and already giant. They were nearly feral, possessing a kind of strength that wasn’t just physical but a psychosis that made them impervious to pain, which they tested out on each other all the time. But they didn’t take part, either, because they used this time while everyone else was hypnotized by the watermelon to steal money and snacks from unattended bags.

And then I wrote. The edge is a shantytown—and I took another deep breath, realized I hadn’t been breathing that whole time. My vision got all fuzzy. Zeke touched my shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked, but I was already writing more—filled with gold seekers. Zeke looked over my shoulder at the paper. “That’s . . . okay, that’s kind of cool,” he said. “I like that.” The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, I wrote. There was this little voice in my head, and it was telling me what to write down. And I knew that this little voice, this tiny, insistent voice, was not God and it wasn’t some muse and it wasn’t anyone in the world except for me. This voice was my voice. This voice was my voice and no one else’s voice, and I could hear it so clearly. And it wasn’t finished. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. And then the voice was gone. It went way, way back inside me. And I didn’t know if it would ever come back. And I finally read what was on the paper. “We are fugitives,” I said to Zeke, smiling. I was starting to laugh, a little hiccup of a laugh. “We are fugitives?” I asked him.

“My mouth tastes like blood,” I admitted. “It’s okay,” he told me. So I let him kiss me. And even then, in that very moment, I knew that this was important. I knew that I would trace my whole life back to this moment, my finger bleeding, this boy’s beautiful and messed-up mouth on mine, a work of art between us. I knew it would probably fuck me up. And that was fine. Once our mouths started hurting, we went back inside the house and got some bandages from the bathroom to fix me up as best we could.

MOM SHOWED UP WITH FOUR LARGE PIZZAS FROM TWINS, A rare treat, and I could see that she was trying to impress Zeke. I didn’t want to tell her that Zeke was from Memphis, a real city, and pizza wouldn’t impress him. But, honestly, Zeke looked pretty goddamned psyched to eat pizza.

Hobart was a guy who worked at the local newspaper. My mom pretended that he was only a friend, but we all knew that they’d been dating in secret, off and on for the last four months. My mom would feel overwhelmed or worry they were getting too close, say they couldn’t see each other, and then they’d end up at Gilly’s Bar and Grill, dancing to the J. Geils Band on the jukebox. They had known each other in high school, though they hadn’t been romantic, but I think my mom needed someone who wasn’t my dad, like maybe the complete opposite. Hobart had this scruffy, unkempt beard and wore Hawaiian shirts and talked about the movie Billy Jack all the time. He was like if Lester Bangs wrote about Fourth of July cake contests instead of the Stooges. And I was happy that there was a guy, even if he was a little embarrassing to me, that my mom could look at and think, Maybe you’ll be better than the last guy. Hobart seemed like a good dude to start with. And now he was going to write about our poster.

A HEAT WAVE HAD ROLLED IN, AND I WAS SWEATING CONSTANTLY, from, well, obviously, the actual heat, but also from the wild feeling that things were quickly moving beyond my control. I

It was like this for me with books. After I’d read every single Nancy Drew book twice, I found The Chocolate War in the school library, and I told the librarian that I liked it and so she gave me The Outsiders. And then my mom gave me Flannery O’Connor, and I started grabbing anything I could find and I had no idea what other people thought was good or what was important. And so I almost never told anyone what I liked because I was terrified that they would tell me how stupid it was. Every single thing that you loved became a source of both intense obsession and possible shame. Everything was a secret.

“In ten years,” she said, “when you’re out of Coalfield and you’re successful and happy, you won’t even remember this summer, sweetie.” “I think I will,” I told her. “Well, you’ll remember it,” she said, “but it won’t be as important as it seems right now.”

She showed it to Hobart, who also loved it, and it made me feel, for the first time, that maybe it was dumb to be embarrassed about weird things if you were really good at them. Or not good. If they made you happy.

And then we dated off and on, and each time it was off, I was thinking, I am so glad I didn’t tell him. I am so glad I did not show him the poster, and then when it was on, I was thinking, Just in case he forgets your birthday and instead goes to a comic book convention for a second time, don’t show him that poster, and then I was dancing with him at our wedding, and my mom was watching us and crying, and I knew that I couldn’t spin away from him and then spin back and tell him that there was a boy, Zeke, and there was nothing romantic about it, that it wasn’t like that, but I would never stop thinking about him and he was partially responsible for the trajectory of my entire life, and also, I was a fugitive and the law was skinny with hunger for me, all while Patsy Cline was singing “You Belong to Me” and someone was videotaping us.

“My brothers?” I said, snorting involuntarily with laughter. “Not my brothers, no way.” I thought about my brothers. The triplets had dropped out of college and then worked in kitchens for years and now co-owned a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, one that made modern twists on southern dishes, and it had appeared in tons of magazines, on the Food Network, and it kept them so busy that I almost never saw them. None of them had married, no children, just three feral boys constantly beating each other up and dating all manner of hip women with tattoos and getting drunk in between appearances on the Today show making saltine cracker toffee or Cheerwine barbecue sauce. They were really into jujitsu now, woodworking, dipping a little into doomsday prep. It was like they made a world unto themselves and they were stunned whenever they saw me, the one who was and wasn’t a part of them.

Blush invited me to meet with him in his office, where he proceeded to tell me that he thought the book was really quite good. “Subversive!” he kept saying. “So strangely subversive, you understand? It was intentional, right?” and I proclaimed that it was entirely intentional, hoping he wouldn’t keep pressing me on it. He admitted that he had read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novels to his eight children, and he had a fondness for them but also an intense irritation with how good everyone in them was. “It’s unnatural for two brothers to not, at some point, beat the absolute shit out of each other over some ridiculous slight, don’t you think?” he asked me, and I guess it would have been nice to see Frank throw Joe off a balcony over a broken microscope.

more than twenty years ago, but okay.” “And, she’s talking to me, because I was the one who did it,” I said. I needed to just say it. After Aaron, who thought his mom was dead, I realized I needed to be pretty forthright about this thing. “Frankie?” she said, looking at me, her eyes watering. “I made the poster,” I told her. “I wrote those words. I made it up.” “Oh, sweetie,” she said, and she looked so sad for me, like she was in pain to see me in pain, and then she said, “I knew that already.” “What now?” I said. She wasn’t in pain, I realized. She was embarrassed for me. “Frankie? I know. I knew then. I’ve always known. Well, I mean, not always, not at the beginning, but I’ve known for a really long time.” “But you didn’t know,” I said. “You had no idea. You thought it was the triplets.”