Wider Smile With Invisalign
Stories similar to this that you might like too.
My mom’s face is red, and I have no idea why. Her eyes are open wide, but they’re staring at the wall instead of me. I’m about to ask her if she needs water or wants a cookie when my dad walks in with a smile wider than anyone else’s in the world. He says he got a new job, and we’ll be moving soon.
The house isn’t much, but it has a lot of lands for our garden so we can make our own food. Mom beams at him as if he could give us all ice cream sundaes every night of the week. We pack up some things into boxes, then load them into Dad’s car, which is parked out front.
My mom goes outside to help him put away the groceries. She comes back inside and looks around. “What do you think? Do you like this place?”
I shrug. I don’t care where we live as long as there is space for a garden. If she thinks that’s selfish, well… it was always easier not to care what other people thought.
“Come on, now,” my father tells me. “You haven’t been here in five years. You need to say something.”
We sit down in the living room, side by side on the couch, looking out through the window at the trees beyond the lawn. A few birds fly past.
My mother smiles to herself and leans against Dad’s arm. “This is home, sweetie.”
The next morning, after breakfast, we drive out onto the highway toward the city. The air conditioning blows hot air over the windows. We pass billboards for restaurants and hotels: “Welcome to California! Your gateway to America!”
After a few hours on the road, we arrive. We take the elevator to the second floor and walk along corridors that have been empty for five years. Finally, we step outside onto the sidewalk. I look up at my parents, both tall, their hair dark and shiny in the sun.
They look happy like they’ve finally found a way out from under the thumb of this place. I wonder if maybe we should stay, get a place on the other side of town where we won’t be so visible.
Dad shakes his head. “It’ll probably go better with your mom in a job,” he tells me.
Mom nods. “He’s right, sweetie.”
A taxi pulls up and a man steps out. His hair is gray. I know I must be mistaken because it’s only two weeks ago he shaved off half his beard, but he’s even more disheveled now than before. He takes a moment to check the address. He’s wearing khaki pants and a light brown shirt—a uniform for someone who works in administration, but he doesn’t look official.
My mom opens the door and holds it open for him. He turns to her with an expression somewhere between surprise and gratitude. I want to yell at them, tell them that we’re not going to run anymore. That this is just another place to hide like the others.
But my mouth stays shut. I watch them talk, and suddenly I realize how close he is to her. Close enough to kiss. When they part, she turns to me and asks, “Would you like to come with us, dear?”
I shake my head. This is the only life I remember, and it’s better than any dream ever dreamed of.
“Okay then.”
She pats me on the cheek, and together we walk down the hall until we reach the stairs. She stops at the top and looks back one last time. I see how her skin gleams in the sunlight. Then she turns around and disappears down the corridor.
***
Larger Than Life
When I turn ten years old, I decide it was high time to learn something new, so I ask my mother if I can take art lessons. It’s the first thing I’ve asked her about since the move, and now it seems like it’s all she can talk about.
“Why?” she asks me, sitting on the couch beside me. I try to explain it’s something I really want, and that it would be so good for me and for her, too, if we could both spend a little less time with my father. She sits quietly for a few minutes and then nods, saying nothing.
“Can we go today?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “But we’ll have to hurry. We need to get you ready.”
So I take the bus and meet my teacher, who has a name that sounds like something made up. Her hair is dark and curly; mine is straight and blond. She tells me she had a stroke, though none of her symptoms are obvious unless you stare directly into her eyes for too long. I don’t mind. In fact, I like that her hands are shaking when she holds my pencil. That’s the whole point.
I draw for a while, and the woman walks around behind me. When she reaches my shoulder, she touches me there gently. It makes me feel as if I were floating. My drawing comes alive. Suddenly I’m not thinking of anything but lines.
Then I notice that she’s gone. I turn around and catch sight of her walking along a wall, disappearing through a doorway, her hair moving in a breeze no one else sees. When I walk toward the door, she’s already gone, but she leaves me an image, an impression—a sense of being drawn, not to a single place, but everywhere, every place, always—as if I were one of those images that show a hand reaching out to another one. As if my fingers could touch the world.
***
I wake up in the night in a panic, certain I’ve missed the bus, though I’m sure I saw it pull away only yesterday. I stand at the window in my underwear and look down across the street. The car is still there.
A man is asleep inside it, his head resting against the glass, his hair spilling over the seat. When I hear his breath slow and then grow deeper, I start to cry. I don’t understand why anyone would choose to sleep on their own. It must be some kind of madness.
I go into the kitchen to make myself something warm. It smells good cooking downstairs, and for a minute I forget all about the car, the driver, or where I am or what I was doing up here. The smell brings me back to myself, and suddenly the kitchen seems so small, and the cupboards seem bare. I turn on the radio and let it sing in my head.
The man sleeps on.
***
For my birthday, Mom buys me a guitar. There’s only one problem: I’ve never held a real instrument before. I hold the strings in front of me and strum them with all my might. I keep trying, until suddenly the guitar feels like it’s coming to life under my hands. I play a song called “Away from Me,” which means “Leave Me Alone.” It goes, “You’re hurting me, oh, baby, baby…”
I don’t know how much my mother understands, but she smiles and claps anyway, saying, “Oh, darling! You’re such a wonderful son!”
It’s strange how easily these things happen, like a spell cast by a fairy godmother in the woods. I think of the way that woman touched me when we were standing at the sink. I imagine that this is what it would be like if magic could really exist. Maybe I’d find out someday if it did because I’m sure I’m meant for something great.
My mother gives me a present, too: an electric guitar. It doesn’t have the same ring as the acoustic, but it’s more powerful, and that seems important somehow.
That night I lie awake in bed with my guitar. The moon casts its light over the room and I listen to the music playing in my head, which has been waiting for me all these years.
“Hey,” I call out.
No one answers.
When they come home and open the door to find me lying in their bed with my guitar, my mother looks shocked, though her face soon changes to anger, and after a short pause of silence she screams.
***
I’ve got this dream, I tell my shrink, sitting cross-legged on his couch. It’s about the man who’s driving the car. He’s following me. Every night he drives past in his car and tries to run me down with it. But he doesn’t do a very good job. So I keep running away, always farther from him.
After a moment, the shrink says, “Are you making fun of me?”
“Of course, I’m not!” I say quickly. “I mean, I am making fun of my dreams, but this wasn’t one of them.”
He shakes his head slowly and stares at me, his glasses hanging halfway down his nose. He’s a tall man with thick black hair. I’ve seen him before, but never like this. As if my words have woken something inside him that’s been sleeping. As if he’s seeing me for the first time. His eyes are deep and dark. I remember his name: Dr. Hensley.
Suddenly I see that everything is different. It’s as if the whole world had been made up of little boxes, each containing the next box in line. And suddenly these boxes are collapsing, shattering into nothing.
“Do you want to talk about the other things?” Dr. Hensley asks quietly.
His voice makes me shiver; I’ve forgotten how nice it can sound, even when it’s quiet. “There’s no reason to talk about anything else, right? Because it’s just all a part—”
“Yes,” he says. “I think so. I agree that you should probably stop thinking about those people. Not because they’re bad, or dangerous, or because I told you to, but because you deserve better than this. They’ve given you nothing but pain.”
My throat gets tight. I’ve heard all this before: how they hurt me, how they tried to steal me away from my parents. That I didn’t understand why anyone would ever love someone like me. How they took advantage of me. My mother cried and begged and prayed. She said she loved me more than life itself.
Dr. Hensley takes my hand. It feels so cold, so solid. He holds it gently between both of his, and the way his fingers look—all sharp corners—reminds me that he’s not really a human being. He’s like some kind of robot. He’s just pretending he’s a human, because he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s trying to make it easier for me.
But he’s wrong.
Because my father isn’t real, either. Or maybe he is, and this is his house, and it’s all just some elaborate joke. If it was a joke, he would have found some way to explain things. But there’s always been darkness about him. A sadness. Something terrible was hidden within me.
As the doctor continues speaking, his voice fades until all that remains is the rhythm of his speech, a monotone drone. Then I hear the click of the door closing behind him. There are only the faint sounds of breathing in the next room.
And then it comes to me: the truth! The awful truth! That I’m dead!
The last thing I remember is walking through the woods with my friends, the wind blowing past us. We laughed and talked about what we were going to do when we grew up, what we hoped our lives would be. I knew my parents would never leave me alone.
Now I’ve gone somewhere far beyond where they’ll ever follow.
I sit up, and the whole room spins, and my head hurts like hell. When I look at myself, I see the image of a boy wearing a red raincoat, staring straight ahead, looking lost.
It’s so strange, this idea of death. The idea that I might not be here anymore, and that everything will be different now.
If I go outside, the sky seems brighter to me. The leaves on the trees seem like they shine somehow. I know what I need to do, and what I have to try. It’s almost too easy. All the pieces fit together, except for one. Just one thing left to do…
When I get downstairs, my mother and father aren’t waiting for me in the kitchen or sitting at the table reading the newspaper like usual, drinking coffee. They’re not anywhere I expect to find them. No matter how hard I search, they don’t turn up.
“Hello?” I call out, but my parents don’t answer. “Hello?”
Then I notice something odd: the light coming from the living room is different. In the daytime, it was filtered by curtains and the window glass, but now I can see right in, even though the shades are drawn. As I step inside, I’m blinded by sunlight pouring down into the room from the big picture windows overlooking the backyard.
In front of me are two old women, bent over a couch. Their heads shake slowly from side to side, eyes wide open and staring at me with a mix of terror and recognition. I freeze up. I’ve seen these ladies before, at another house, years ago. They were waiting there while my family was sleeping upstairs.
One woman looks like my mother, dressed all in white, her hair pulled back tightly behind her head. The other has gray-white hair and looks like an older version of my grandmother. I feel a sudden sense of déjà vu as if I’ve been here before.
These are the ones who took me away from my family. Who did horrible things to me?
I start to run toward them, but then a shadow passes over the couch, and my mother stands beside me, staring at the woman with the same vacant expression she had when I walked downstairs earlier that day. She reaches out and touches me, lightly caresses my arm—as if she can’t quite believe that I’m real.
She’s wearing a white gown. Her hands are clean, and her arms are thin—not at all like the frail, weak thing, I saw yesterday. Now she’s stronger than I am. Maybe my mother really has come back to life, or maybe she’s just playing along to protect me. Either way, I decided to stay very quiet until I understand more.
My mother says nothing, just stares at them in silence, and they continue their slow motion, side-to-side jerks, and their eyes blink and stare at me. Then I see a man standing behind them, leaning forward. He has my father’s face—the same dark, serious brow; the same deep-set eyes.
But he’s older, maybe thirty years younger. And his hair is long and black and shining like silk. His skin is darker, with age lines and wrinkles. But he wears a smile, and he’s holding my father’s hand.
A flash of memory hits me and I see that this man is not my father. He looks like him, but he’s a stranger to me, just as my mother is a stranger to me now. These people have never been my family. They’ve done terrible things to me…
I try to speak but only manage a whisper. My mother turns to me, frowning. She doesn’t understand. “What do you want? What do you want?” I ask again.
“We brought you home,” says my mother, turning back to her sisters and touching them once again, the way she had touched me before. “You can stay with us now.”
The three of them stand up and walk across the room, leaving me with my mother, who still clutches my arm and keeps staring at me.
Something is wrong with her. Something important. If I could talk to her more, get to know her better… maybe I could understand what happened to me when I woke up in this house. Or why I didn’t recognize my parents in the kitchen…
But they’re all moving closer. My mother follows, her fingers digging into my flesh, her nails scraping. They reach out to touch her, but then they stop suddenly and move back to let us pass. As we get closer to the door, I notice something odd.
There’s a new man standing on the other side of the door. A tall guy with brown hair and a beard. His eyes seem too large for his face, and he smiles as soon as he sees me.
“Hey,” he says in a friendly voice. “Did you miss us?”
He seems familiar. And yet, he’s not. It’s like I’ve met him before. Maybe we played football together? That must be it. Only, I haven’t seen him for years. I can barely remember him at all.
My mother steps around me and reaches into a pocket of her nightgown, producing some keys. When she turns back to the man behind her, he puts the keys into the lock and starts turning, then pulls the handle and pushes the door open.
It’s like watching someone else perform a magic trick, and I have no idea how she’s doing it. My heart thuds harder against my chest as if it wants to escape from where it’s trapped inside. The man walks ahead, smiling brightly as if he’s waiting for me to say something, but I don’t dare call out to him, even if I understood the joke.
They’re all walking past me now, going down the hall, talking together. I follow behind them with my mother, trying to keep up as best I can. I can still feel her fingernails digging into my skin, pulling me through the house as she moves.
And then I’m standing outside on the lawn. I look around for a moment and realize that I know the place so well I should have known exactly which street corner I was standing at when I first woke up here.
A few cars are parked in front of our house, one of them mine, another old-fashioned yellow car with a red convertible top. But that isn’t why I look up at the sky.
Because the sun is shining—shining bright with heat—and there’s a warm breeze blowing across my face. The air smells like rain, and I can hear the distant roar of it as the thunder rolls and flashes over the horizon.
This is not where I grew up, but my memories of it seem real enough to me right now. Everything about this city feels real to me, because I’m sure that these are the things I would remember if I ever got to leave this house.
The streets and the houses, the shops and restaurants, and the school and the people… everything I’ve come to know and love. This is the world I thought I’d left behind when I walked out of my parents’ house and onto my own doorstep.
Except I’ve only been gone a little while.
If my parents were here, if they’d stayed with me until I learned their names and faces and what they did for a living and what they wanted from me… then they wouldn’t have disappeared from my life like they have. My father would never have given me up. He’s dead now, so that part is true, but he wasn’t that kind of man.
He must have tried to fight for me, though. To protect me from his family.
Maybe that’s why they took him away from me. Because they couldn’t stand being beaten by their rivals any longer. Maybe he tried to get out of line for too long and lost his position as heir to the throne.
Perhaps that’s what finally drove them out of my life forever. Perhaps this time they meant it when they said they didn’t want to see me again.
I don’t know. I just can’t tell the truth from lies anymore.
“Let’s go,” the man says to me. It’s the same voice that called to me through my dreams. I’ve heard it before. In the dream, he told me to follow him, that there was something special he wanted me to do, but he was never quite clear on what that might be.
My head is spinning, trying to process it all. What am I supposed to do now? Who’s the strange guy who’s calling me? Does he mean me harm, or does he have my best interests at heart?
I don’t know what to do.
We’re heading for one of those little yellow cars. It has three doors and a trunk that’s bigger than my bedroom, and it looks fast and loud, but also old-fashioned and safe.
As we move toward the driver’s seat, I notice the woman who used to live in that house with us—the one with dark hair and a sad smile. She stares at me like she wants to say something important, but the man keeps moving forward.
She doesn’t seem angry at being abandoned, or afraid of anything, really. It’s as if she sees me coming and understands everything. Or perhaps she knows that she won’t last much longer after I’m gone.
The End