"There was no lightning storm in your house that night. It was your brain helping a scared little boy accept what he saw...For once in your life, see things as they are."
The day Barry left Central City he was in Chicago. He was on his way back home from college for an extra long weekend, back to Iris and Joe. He'd wanted to pay for the trip on his own—had argued with Joe over it, had avoided the conversation entirely with Iris—and so instead of taking a plane, like Joe wanted, he was on a 2-day bus ride through the West and Midwest. After he'd told Joe that if he wouldn't let him pay then he wouldn't come at all, there'd been a long silence, and then Joe had sighed and said that he and Iris would be waiting for him at the station. "Be safe, I'll see you soon," he'd said. Since he'd been away at college Barry had ended most all his calls to Joe with "I miss you, too," or, "I can't wait to see you." But that night he'd said "Ok. Bye," and hung up.
The morning of his departure he got a text from Iris: I cannot believe you're taking a bus from California! :/ Do you realize how much time you're cutting out of your visit? He didn't answer. A few minutes passed, and then I just miss you so much. You're coming late and leaving early, and I wanted to spend that time with you. An hour passed, and then Iris began texting him awful puns, her effort to keep him from getting bored during his ride. He read every one of them, but he didn't answer.
On the second day of his trip, when the bus stopped at a Big Belly in downtown Chicago, he got off with all the other passengers. He asked the bus driver to open the baggage compartment for him, gave him an apologetic look because he was the only one who was taking out his luggage.
"We're not in Central yet, you know," the driver said with annoyance. "Still got a few hours."
"I know," Barry said, "I just—I just want my stuff."
"It's perfectly safe under the bus. The door's hard to open, and anyway, you can see the bus from the window."
"I know," Barry said again, "but I just want it with me."
"Are you getting off right now? Cause you'll just have to put it back when we leave, and we're only staying here an hour."
Instead of answering Barry went to the side of the bus and opened the underside compartment himself. He took out his suitcase and duffel bag and made his way into the Big Belly, calling "Thanks" over his shoulder to the driver as he passed him.
He wasn't planning on getting off right then. He just wanted a double cheese and a Dr. Pepper, and after paying he shoved his luggage in a booth and slid in after it. The rest of the passengers filled up the seats around him. Some were travelling alone, like him, and some were in pairs, but there was one family. It was two mothers, one of them pregnant, and two kids, a boy and girl. He'd been sitting in the row behind them on the bus. They'd taken up a row by themselves. The mothers had each sat in a window seat and placed their children in the aisle ones so that they could play with each other more easily, reaching over to exchange their shared tablet or a book. The night before he'd heard the mom on his side of the aisle sing her son to sleep, some old folk song about love and hardship that he'd thought was much too old for the boy, but it had worked. He'd fallen asleep with his head on his mom's lap and his feet dangling in the aisle, just a few inches away from his sister's. Throughout the night, whenever someone in front of them had to go to the restroom, they would lift their legs high to step over the children's feet and nod at the mothers, who would smile their apologies and thanks. Barry watched them now, how the kids fought over the toys that came with their meals, how the mothers exchanged small intimacies, touching each other's hands across the table, shushing their kids at the same time and brushing their hair from their eyes. He watched as the kids dutifully threw their garbage out, watched one mother help the other up from her seat. He watched them reboard the bus, the kids first and their moms after them, nudging them along.
From his window Barry watched as the bus left its parking space, and he thought of the last time he'd run away from home. He'd been angry with Joe for years after he'd taken him in, had been angry with him even as he'd needed him, even as he'd loved him. Years of anger, but it had only taken him a few months to go from calling him "Mr. West" to "Joe." He'd been fifteen and no longer angry at him, just upset that for Father's Day he'd had to spend only the hour allowed for visitation with his dad while Joe and Iris sat waiting for him outside in the car. Iris had given Joe her present and card for him that morning, and Barry had stood in the room behind her, hands in pockets and eyes on the floor. Joe had pulled both him and Iris in for a hug, even though he hadn't gotten him anything. It's ok, he'd told himself, because Iris had an extra surprise planned for her dad, and she'd invited him to help with it. They were going to cook him dinner—fish tacos, his favorite. But when they'd gotten home from the prison Barry had gone into his room and closed the door behind him, then climbed out his window and dangled from the rain gutter onto the lawn. It'd been four hours before Iris came and found him in the parking lot of the 7/11 near their school. Too late for them to make dinner. She'd been furious with him, so mad that she'd made him walk behind her the whole way as she rode her bike back home. What was almost worse was the look on Joe's face when they came back. His mouth had been set in a grim line, but it hadn't been one of anger. It'd been of hurt. That was the first time Barry had realized that he could do that to Joe, that he could make him look the way he did whenever Iris said some longing thing about her mother. Had he looked at him like that when he'd run away before? And if so, why had he only noticed it then? There'd been a plate of food on the kitchen table for him; not fish tacos, but the meatloaf from the night before. He'd eaten it while looking at Joe's back as he washed the dishes, shoving one forkful into his mouth after another even though he hadn't been hungry, and he'd promised himself he would never run away again.
Walking through Chicago streets was hard with the suitcase he had to drag behind him, especially because the map on his phone was so small, and he had no destination in mind. Every few blocks he stopped to look into windows as if he were interested in what was inside, but he was only looking at his reflection. His eyes, the planes of his cheeks, his hair, they had something of his father in them. But the rest he thought maybe belonged to his mother. He looked closely in each of the windows, tried to find traces of his mother in the reflection there. To keep warm he kept stopping to buy decaf in small delis. It wasn't even November yet, but as the sun went down the chill cut through the sweater he was wearing more easily and made him shiver. He'd left his winter coat back in his dorm because it took up so much space. He had another one, at home, at Iris and Joe's, but he wouldn't be able to get it now.
His mother had gone to Europe in the fall. She'd taken advantage of the travel abroad program at the university she attended. She'd gone to Spain, started out in Madrid, then made her way to Seville and Granada. The only person who could tell him much about her was his dad. Joe had gotten uncomfortable the one time he'd asked him what he remembered of her. But each time he visited his dad he would tell him a story about his mom. In the first years of his imprisonment they would trade the stories. They'd say "Remember when…" to one another, and smile and cry over what they could share. But then it became his father telling him about her, and him listening. He told him about how they met, back when her name was Nora Thompson, before she was his mother. He told him about how, after Granada and the Alhambra, she'd ditched her classmates and made her way up the coast to France, then Germany and the UK. She'd spent a year away from home, but she hadn't been running away from anything, as far as Barry could make out from what he heard. In the pictures he had of her from then her hair was cut short and she wore dangling earrings.
His dad always seemed to think it was important for him to remember his mother, a concern Barry didn't develop until he was well into high school because it seemed so preposterous to him that he could do anything but remember her. How could he forget the way her lips felt on his forehead when she kissed him goodnight, or how when she was cooking she would put a clip on her bangs to keep them from sticking to her forehead? How could he forget the last sound he heard from her, the scream, her hair flying about her face as her arm reached out from whatever whirlwind enveloped her? The time did come, though, when he realized that one day he would have spent more of his life without her than with her, and a feeling began to creep in on him that maybe the image he had of his mother in his mind resembled the photographs Joe had made sure to place in his room when he'd first come to live with him and Iris, and less like a person he knew from his own life. The time came when what he remembered most vividly about his mother, what stayed with him at nights when he tried to recall her, was her murder.
The summer before college, on a night when she snuck into his room to find him covered in a cold sweat, he'd asked Iris what she remembered of his mother, if anything. She'd told him something that had made him frown, because he didn't remember that about her at all. He'd asked why she thought she'd dropped out of school for a year, spent so much time far away from home and family. Iris had looked at him the way she did when she wanted to tell him something without hurting him, with her eyes wide and her head lowered. She'd told him that sometimes people needed to get away, so they could know who they were outside of everyone who knew them. That had been the first time he'd thought of his mom as someone who could have had another story, one that didn't end the way hers had. Iris did that, sometimes, widened things, made them bigger and made him see other possibilities. He didn't know if he liked it. After that night he started to try calling his mom as his dad sometimes did, "Nora," instead of how he always thought of her, as the person who used to tuck him into bed at night. He repeated things to himself that his dad had told him about her. She liked blueberries. She knew how to drive stick. She'd loved him more than anything in the world, but she'd also loved old Italian movies and walking barefoot in the grass. He tried to fit descriptions to photographs to reanimate the person who was slipping away from him, day by day. He wondered how she must have felt, travelling through Europe by herself. Had she felt like a foreigner? She'd gone before there were cellphones to help her translate whatever she needed to say. Had she called her parents regularly? And who was she, away from her family? Who could she have been before she'd met Henry Allen, before she'd met a man who would one day be accused of killing her? His dad could tell him what she'd done and where she'd gone, but he couldn't tell him anything else.
Iris had lost her mother long before he ever had. When people used that word with him, "lost," he always looked away, because it fit the truth of what had happened so awkwardly. There were other words to use: "taken," if you were being generous, "killed," if you were being honest. But lost was the word he always thought of when it came to Iris's mother. The only pictures of her in the house were in Iris's room, and he'd never had the courage to ask either her or Joe why, though he could guess the reason, from the way Joe would rub his wedding ring in a circle around his finger after any argument he had with Iris. He barely remembered Iris's mother, but he remembered how all of Iris's silences were laced with her. The loss she left behind her was amorphous and indistinct, so that it came up on you at the most unexpected moments.
There was an album Joe kept in the living room. It had all the school pictures Iris had ever taken. In her second grade class picture Iris had ribbons and barrettes all over her hair. In her third grade class picture, and in all the ones after until her sophomore year in high school, she had her hair pulled back into a bushy, bouncy ponytail. On his own mother's birthday Joe and Iris would drive him out to the cemetery where she was buried. He could tell Iris every single route they could take to get to his mother's grave, but Iris couldn't do the same for her mother.
Before he'd gone to live with her, Iris was the one who had always come over to his house. She would get in the back seat of his mother's minivan with him, and his mom would hand them both a snack before driving home, where Iris would stay until her dad came to get her. He'd always caught Iris staring at his mother back then, and he'd been too young to think anything of it, but he'd still take her hand and lead her over to his mother. Iris had been much quieter in those days. She'd hidden behind him sometimes, too shy to say anything to his mom, even though he always told her, "She's really nice, Iris, and she likes you. She told me so herself."
He'd hidden from Joe, too, in the first weeks after he'd come to live with him. He'd known he had something to do with why his father was in jail. He'd told him, again and again, that his father hadn't done it, that there'd been another man in his house that night, but that hadn't seemed to matter. It hadn't mattered to Joe, it hadn't mattered to the man who talked for his father in the courtroom, and it hadn't seemed to matter much to the doctor Joe had sent him to, either.
Before his own room just down the hall from Iris, he'd shared a room with three other boys in a building with a blank facade and metal doors at the front. He hadn't trusted Joe, because he knew he'd left him in that flat-faced building. "You left me there. You forgot about me," he'd told him once. He hadn't been able to look him in the eye when he said those words, there'd been a twisting in his gut because some part of him told him he had no right to the acid recrimination in his tone, that he had his own father, a real one, and so there was no reason to feel something so strong for Joe. But Joe had gotten down on one knee so that he was level with him and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. He'd said, "I didn't forget about you, Bare," and Barry had looked up at him then, sharply, because that was Iris's name for him, no one else had ever called him that before. Joe'd told him, "I would never forget you. Iris asks me for you every day." Joe had pulled him into a hug then, and he'd been grateful because he'd started to cry, and Joe had told him, "It was just paperwork, Bare. We just had to get through the paperwork before they would let me bring you home."
In those first weeks every gentle gesture from Joe had felt like some kind of betrayal on his own part, as if when he needed Joe to sit by his bed at night, or hold his hand while walking up to the door of his doctor's office, he was reaffirming what Joe said about his father. When Iris hugged him it was warm and quieting and he never wanted to let go. But when Joe hugged him, even when he wanted that hug, even when he needed it because Joe was bigger than Iris and he knew how to keep them both safe, he felt as though he was giving in to some weakness within him. And it was the weakness in him that was the truth, and that truth was that he didn't have a mother because his father had murdered her.
The truth, the real truth that he was hardly ever able to admit to anyone other than himself, was that the impossible always seemed more than just a little out of reach. It seemed like the rectangle he and Iris had made one night during a storm and power outage. They'd both been scared but hadn't wanted to show it. Then Iris had taken out a piece of chalk and crawled under the kitchen table. Joe had a sheet on it that came down around them, with edges that whispered across the floor. The table at his old home had been bare. With the chalk Iris had drawn lines between each of the legs of the table, and then she'd handed the chalk to him so he could do the same. "You make another line," she'd said, "Making a double line will make it stronger." She'd said, "If we stay on the inside then nothing can get us," and when her dad had come back up from the basement with candles and batteries for their flashlights, she'd grabbed at his pant leg and tugged him under the table with them. She'd made him draw a line, too. Barry had told him, "This way you can be safe, too." They'd spent the night under there, had fallen asleep together there. That was what the impossible was to him, those three lines that had kept them safe that night, a space where no one he loved could hurt or cause hurt.
In college it was harder to speak to his dad. He watched his roommate for weeks to recognize the patterns of his schedule, the better to be able to give his father a time at which he could call him. His father sounded different over the phone than when he was facing him. He sounded old, too old for his age, and with so much distance between them Barry could hear all the things his father didn't tell him. Tightly held memories of his mother and affirmations of his pride in him, but no stories of his own life. Barry could never ask him how his day had been. Over the phone his father's voice gained even more of that quality that made Barry wish he could do more than be a good son, made him wish that he could actually do something of consequence for him, something that could save his life. His father had a way of speaking with a ruefulness, as if he'd seen all the ironies life could come up with, and there was nothing left that could surprise him. He liked giving Barry advice, and Barry welcomed it, partly because he wanted to hear it from him, but also because he knew his father needed to do the things a father did, needed to be someone other than a convict. Sometimes his father would tell him something he'd already heard from Joe, and Barry would say, "Thanks, Dad." Iris had visited his father with him, sometimes. Once, after they'd left the prison and were waiting for the bus back into the city, she'd started to pet him like she sometimes did, fixing his collar, patting lint from his shoulder, and she'd told him his dad looked like he started missing him even before they'd left.
His dad loved Iris, said she had "gumption." He laughed more when she came with him for a visit, and always asked after her when he came alone. He rarely asked after Joe, and Barry never brought him up. He didn't think his dad hated Joe, he was just too kind a person for that, but he knew that they'd been friends before, and that they hadn't spoken since the last time Joe had interrogated him. In the days when he'd still been mad at Joe his father had told him, "I want you to listen to Joe, all right, son? Listen to him, he's the one taking care of you now, ok?" He didn't tell his father when Joe made detective, or how Joe taught him how to shave, or both him and Iris how to drive. He tried to find a way to share his life with his dad, to let him know that he was whole and happy, without making him feel like he was forgotten, like his wholeness existed outside of him, despite him.
Barry never once doubted that his father was innocent. He knew what he'd seen that night, even if he didn't yet have the words to explain it, to make it so others could understand, and he knew it was true, even if the only other person who believed him was Iris. But sometimes he thought about how scared his mother must have been when she was being killed, how alone she'd been, and he felt such an awe that in those moments, through her fear and through her pain, she'd been able to reach out to him and think of him. It made him quake, like he was standing in front of some giant gaping mouth that wanted to swallow him whole. And he sometimes wondered what value the truth had if it couldn't stand on its own, if it needed proof to have any material effect. What kind of flaw must be inherent in it, for it to need a buttress? He knew his dad was innocent, but his life was still orange jumpsuits and a sentence appropriate for an act he had never committed. He never doubted his father's innocence, but sometimes he doubted whether or not the truth mattered. In those moments he thought of how Iris believed him, of how she'd held his hand his first day back at school, of how she never once laughed at his story of the man in lightning, and he held on to the truth in her belief, because that had held him up, even when that other truth hadn't.