Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

When I get home, Andrew is waiting for me in my bedroom. He’s lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. My tall, beautiful man hidden in flowered blankets.

“I thought you were leaving,” I say.

He turns and looks at me. His eyes are mourning.

“That was for show.”

I notice the suitcase, zipped at his feet.


“Your bags still packed.”

“I got that movie. I’ll say no if you want me to.”


“No, go. Go.” I’m not sure if I mean it. “When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What time?” My heart is beating and it makes such an Almighty sound I know that he can hear it.

“First thing.”

“Well, it’s late. Let’s go to bed.”

Thank God, we’ll just miss each other at the airport.

I press my face against his chest.

“I’m leaving tomorrow, too. I have to go to L.A. to just...tie up some loose ends.”

“What?”


“I booked the ticket last night, drunk. I thought about what you said. You were right.”

That’s half true. I guess if I learned one thing from my father it was to shade your lies with truth.

“Are you drunk now?”

I nod.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving at breakfast?” he asks.

“Because I hadn’t really decided if I wanted to go.”

“Why do you have to go so soon?”

“It’s not a big trip. I just want to pack more clothes, tell my agents what’s happened in person. I’ll probably be here for awhile again.”

I can’t look at his eyes.

He nods. “I understand,” he says. He doesn’t though.

“Is it wrong if I ask you what’s happening with us?”
 he whispers minutes later.

“No.”

“So what’s happening with us?”

“I’m just really fucked up right now.”

“Are we breaking up?”


“No.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t think so. I just need some time to figure everything out.”

He turns on his side and puts his hand on my hip, awkwardly, beautifully. I kiss his chest and I tell him that I love him but he doesn’t notice. He’s too busy trying to wipe his tears.

I take off my dress, leaving me naked, vulnerable.

We don’t make love.

He leaves the next morning. I drop him off at Pearson International, and six hours later, when he has landed in Nova Scotia, I am back at Pearson, boarding a plane to Belfast.

Put your dreams away for now. I won’t see you for some time. I am lost in my mind.

I am lost in my mind.

Over the Atlantic, I drift in and out of sleep, twisted like a Chinese contortionist.

It helps that I stole some of my Mom's tranquilizers.

Black Sheep

"Shit, Marl, I’m sorry. Should I have told you when you suggested we meet here?”

“No. It’s okay. I knew he came here a lot...what’d he have to say?”

“Well, I asked him about you. I realized afterwards maybe I shouldn’t have. I just wasn’t sure what else to talk to him about, you know? He was pretty funny. He cracked a couple jokes. It was a pretty short conversation. I just asked him to get you to call me and then I felt really stupid for saying that after.”

“What’d he say when you brought me up?”


“Nothing really. That he would get you to call me. I thought maybe he didn’t know that I knew. He didn’t seem angry or anything.”

“How did he seem?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“Sad.”

“Sad how?”

“Alone.”

I am getting the shit kicked out of me.

“Can we not talk about my father anymore?”


“Okay. I’m sorry. What do you want to talk about? What do you want to do? We can do anything you want.”

...

“Look, you can pretend that you’re not totally fucked by the fact that Dad died and things were left between you how they were but I know the truth.”

“How is this different for me? He was horrible to you, too.”

“I know that, but I made my peace with him. We...were okay when he died. In our own fractured way.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me right now.”

“Doing what?”

“Attacking me. I’m drunk all the time? Fuck you, Matt. You’re a fucking drug addict.”

He grabs me by the shoulders.

“Marla, listen to me. You can insult me all you want but you are fucked right now and you aren’t going to get better anytime soon. You can’t duck this.”

“I’m not ducking it.”

“No, but you’re trying.”

I can feel my eyes getting wet. Not now, not tonight, when things are light-hearted.

“Its just...why could you two work things out? Why didn’t he want to with me?”

“Well, we never worked them out, not really.”

“You know what I mean. ”

He nods. He stands before me, strong, silent. He looks exactly like my father did to me before I got lost in his malformed soul.

“How am I supposed to deal with this, Matt? I always somewhere thought if I got married, or if I had a kid... one day out of the blue, things would just work themselves out. That can never happen now. Things ended how they were. Broken. That was the end of our story.”

“I know.”

“No, no, I don’t think you do. When Dad was terrible to you, it pretty was one-sided.”

“I wasn’t easy.”

“No, but you were...”

“I was sick, you can say it.”

I swallow. I don’t want him to feel ridiculed. I don’t think I’m better than him.

“I let it happen like this, I had a hand in it. I ruined my relationship with Dad, too. Do you understand that guilt?”

Matt takes me by the arm.

“You’re not guilty.”

“I fucked everything up in a spectacular way.”

We stand in silence for awhile. He takes a smoke out, his hands shaking. Halfway through he looks back at me.

“Hey, Marla?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m here, you know. You need me and I’m here.”

I nod.

I sit on the concrete for the next fifteen minutes and slowly finish my drinks. I tell myself that I have to believe what my father always told me.

The belly of every black thing is white.

“What are we going to find out next? That he was a secret agent?” he asks.

I don’t have it in me to laugh.

“I just feel ripped off, you know?” I hear the sounds of weeping, heart beating, heartbroken, heartbreaking, my voice cracking. “Why didn’t he tell me he was married in Belfast? I would have understood how angry he was. Things could have been different.”

Matt hugs me.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m crying.”

“I won’t.”

“Are you crying over Dad?”

"Over it all.”

My brother stays with me for a few more minutes and I watch him as he walks back into the bar. The shock of his face reverberates off the sidewalk and hurts me, so I decide to leave, too.

Black Sheep

Isn't it conceivable that maybe my father loved too much?

Felt too much, lost too much, knew too much? That he couldn't continue? That he had no choice but to leave? That he was truly tenderhearted until life kicked it out of him?

Who am I to say I wouldn't have given up, too? Who's to say I won't?

Tonight, I promise him I am grieving his loss without hatred, violence, confusion and a simple, more ordinary sadness. I wear his red sweater to sleep and write B.F.F. in black permanent marker on the sleeve.

It stains my sheets but I don't care.

I decide, in a way that can't be undone, I am my father's friend even and especially after death.

Is it a sea he hears inside me, or echoes of himself? Lately, everywhere is mirrors. In him, in me, in the darkness of the room, the brightness of the day. Patterns of sound, the syncopation of change. Shifts in feeling, depth perception, things shattered and reconstructed.

Twist me like a kaleidoscope. No. Twist me like a kaleidoscope.

It isn't always easy to recognize God's grace.

"I don't know what happened with your father."

But she was young and in love once.

"You'll make the right decision. Whatever you decide, I'll stand behind you."

I guess he was young and in love once, too.

Through all their lies, everything I worry about never happens anyway.

Black Sheep

The night was black, lost.

His mother was sitting in his apartment, faded into the dark oak and heavy furniture, stuck in the chair. When Frank closed his eyes and opened them again she had become unstuck. No longer solid, moving like wisps of smoke. No one had ever appeared to him like that before; a movie ghost, see-through and saint-like.

“This is no place for a woman.” Her voice was fainter than it’d been even just two weeks before.

“Ma, I can’t hear you. Can you speak up?”

She shook her head. Frank felt his heart race but he wasn’t sure why. Everything became too small. He wanted to move and he couldn’t.

“I need you to find a woman.”

“What?”

“Its time. I watch this woman Laura. I watch her often. I want you with her.”

There was a silence between his lungs, no steady beats.

“You want to be with her, too.” Her voice wheezed.

“Ma, why are you so quiet?”

She smiled; slight, sad, scared. Frank sensed something was changing. He said a silent prayer that this was not goodbye.

“Please. Go to Laura.”

His mother moved backwards. The lines in her face danced and she faded into the walls. Frank could feel her disappearing.

“Don’t go.”

“I love you, my terror.”

“Say you’ll be back.”

She smiled once more and put her hand to her heart.

“Don’t go. I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done. Don't go,” he said.

She turned around. Frank closed his eyes, hoping that if he glued them shut this moment would have no end. When he opened them, she was gone.

Goodbyes are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin. They never heal because there was never enough material.

Black Sheep

In the end we only have pieces of the puzzle, and no matter how we put them together, gaps remain.

Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounds them, what surrounds you, what you try to fit there. Rooms in your head get dim, clocks on walls tick on, people die. The past and the present try to meet up and make a deal, but what if they can’t? Does a piece of the puzzle you fought really hard for get taken away? Do you get left behind?

I looked out and saw my father, alone but not alone, in the hazy twilight of the night.

Sometimes wandering is better than a place.

I sat on the road waiting for day to break so we could go.

My little brother sat next to me. The gravel stuck in our legs. We had dirty hands and scraped up knees. The country air was cool and sweet and damp and in that moment, we were all we had. He was young and I was sick.

“It just feels really special with him,” I said.

“You’re just like me,” he said. “You think everything’s special. You sleep with someone, it’s special. You lie in bed with someone, it’s special. I’m a big special guy. I think everything’s so fucking special.”

“Well, maybe some things are special.”

"Its an easy way out, man."

"What do you mean?"

He was the only person on earth who held the keys to my most unfettered and fundamental self. I don't believe an accident of birth made us brother and sister.

“Things aren’t special if they treat you like shit.”

As day came, he jumped through fields screaming, "Lord, have mercy on my rough and rowdy ways!"

The morning moved slowly with nothing in front of us but a lot to be left behind.