Demon
Chapter 17

January 2002

Gabe

We stayed up super late last night. Mom and Dad said that we could stay awake until midnight to celebrate the New Year in our new house. I mean, they called it our new house, even though it’s the same old house Dad has always lived in. But since we just spent the last week over at Mom’s clearing out all our stuff, so that we can move in here permanently, they said that we should treat New Year’s Eve like the first night in our new house. It’ll be weird not to stay over at Mom’s ever again, but this is nice. I like it here.

So to celebrate, last night we rented a couple of movies from Blockbuster to watch, and Mom set up snacks in the family room, and we spent the whole night munching and watching. It was super cool. Then we counted down to midnight, and yelled Happy New Year, and ate some more snacks before Mom finally made us go to bed.

I’m still laying in bed, half asleep, when I hear my door open. “Gabe?” Natalie asks.

“Mmmmm?”

“Um, are you ever getting up? It’s, like, after nine o’clock.”

“Mmmmmm.”

“Come on, don’t you want to go over to Jonathan’s?”

Fine. I open one eye and look at her. She’s already dressed, her usual leggings and a sweater she got for Christmas, standing next to my bed and bouncing on her toes. How on earth does she look so perky after being up so late last night? I close my eye again.

…

“Gabe. Don’t go back to sleep!”

Pfsh. “Okay, okay. Just because you somehow managed to get enough sleep doesn’t mean we all did. Give me a minute.”

She sits down on my chair and waits, kicking her legs and staring at me.

Sigh. It’s no use arguing, she has that we-need-to-do-something-right-now expression on her face, and I have realized that once she decides something needs to happen, you’d better just agree. It’s going to happen.

So I sit up. She starts to say something, and I tell her “Hold on,” and get up and go down the hall to the bathroom.

When I get back in a couple of minutes, feeling more awake, she’s still sitting there on my chair. I sit back on my bed, but when she gives me a warning look I resist laying back down.

“Okay, Nat, what is it? I can tell you have a plan. Let’s hear it.”

She smiles, apparently glad that I’m starting to figure things out. “I think that when we go to Jonathan’s today, we need to ask him what he remembers about the day Demon disappeared. We’ve avoided talking about it this whole time, but I think we need to do it.”

“Aren’t you worried he isn’t ready?”

“Angel says that his soul is getting better every day, even though we spent the last few days not seeing him very much. But every time we brought a load of stuff over here in the car, when we popped by to see him and I touched him, Angel said he could see ‘substantial improvement’.” She puts her fingers up in air quotes whenever she wants me to know that she is using Angel’s exact words. “You’ve seen it yourself - he’s talking more, and doing more things. I think he might be ready for us to tell him about what is really happening. To have the conversation that we were trying to have that day on the jungle gym.”

“Really?” I ask. “Are you sure? I mean, he’s talking more and stuff, but he still doesn’t seem like himself at all. And he hasn’t ever said anything about that day.”

“I know,” she says. Then she looks to the side for a minute. “Angel says he thinks that Jonathan is recovered enough that he should be able to have a discussion about what occurred. And besides, I think it might be a lot easier to tell him now, than it was when Demon was around making him all angry and violent. I mean, won’t it be nicer to try again to tell him about guardians without thinking he’s about to start punching you?”

“Well, do you really think he needs to know now? I mean, since Demon is gone, he isn’t being mean to anyone. That was the whole reason that you wanted to tell him about guardians, so that he could try to resist when Demon wanted to make him do stuff. Now that Demon isn’t even here, he’s perfectly nice. So he doesn’t need to know about it or resist anything, does he?”

“I know,” she says, “but I think now is our chance. While Demon is gone. Angel thinks he is going to come back. There was already that one time where Demon tried to come back, just for a second. I think it is going to happen again. And Angel says that the stronger Jonathan’s soul gets, the sooner it will happen. I think we should tell him before then, so that when it does, he can be ready for it. And I think we definitely should try before school starts again.”

I am really not sure about this. Jonathan seems kind of damaged. He’s still quieter than normal, and the way that he doesn’t object to Natalie touching him all the time is honestly kind of weird. He never would have put up with that before. I don’t know how he will take this news. It might be super confusing, or upsetting. Learning about guardians was hard for me, and I wasn’t missing mine. “Well,” I tell her, “take it slow though, okay? Maybe just tell him a little bit, not the whole thing?”

She listens to Angel. “Angel says that you are probably correct, that we will ‘evaluate Jonathan’s status as we proceed,’ so that we can tell him as much as he can handle, but not too much. We’ll just have to start, and see how it goes.”

I let out a deep breath. “All right. Let me get dressed.”

Ron

Man, this combining households project is way more effort than even I anticipated, and I thought I was the only one being realistic about it. There has been so much to do. Packing and moving boxes from Brenda’s, then making room here to fit everything in. We’ve had to help the kids go over everything in both houses, and decide what to keep, what to throw away, and what to donate. I don’t think either one of us has kept up very well on keeping their clothes and toys current, because it was flabbergasting how many bags of outgrown stuff we were able to haul away.

Gabe was going to donate his big collection of toy dinosaurs, but Natalie suggested that Timothy might want to keep them. She reminded us how much Timothy used to love dinosaurs, way back in the day when they first moved in. I don’t know how excited Michael and Laura were about having a giant box of dinosaurs come into their house, but Timothy certainly seemed pleased to have them.

Brenda decided to set the good baby clothes and toys aside for Brad and Stefanie to go through, figuring they might appreciate some hand-me-downs. So there are a bunch of big black plastic bags full of that stuff in my garage waiting to be sorted out.

I think we’ve gotten the personal possessions mostly finished, after a few days of intense effort. The next decision Brenda is going to have to make is about kitchen items and furniture. Although, now that I think about it, I wonder if we could rent it out furnished? That’d save us a lot of effort trying to get the big things hauled away, and maybe there are renters who don’t have their own furniture. I’ll have to talk to Brenda about that.

For now, though, we are taking the day off, back at my house. I mean, our house. The house. As they used to call it in the divorce papers, the community residence.

Gah. Perish the thought. I feel like I need to wash my brain out with soap for bringing up that memory.

Our house. It’s New Year’s Day. We spent last night here after several nights at Brenda’s while we were busy packing. We rang in the New Year together, appropriately in the place where our new life will happen going forward. Now, we’re just relaxing. Tomorrow the kids go back to school. It’ll be the first time back for Gabe since he broke his ankle. And the first time for the kids leaving for school from here.

So far, they both seem to be adapting just fine to this entire thing. Of course, they’ve lived here part time for years, so I know they are already comfortable here. But even the process of packing wasn’t too bad. Although, Gabe had to be encouraged to leave more behind, and Natalie had to be encouraged to bring more with her.

I laugh and shake my head, remembering her standing in front of her boxes full of nothing but books, holding that tattered old Beanie Baby, and insisting that was all she needed. Brenda had to go in and retrieve a lot of the clothes and some of her other stuff that really should be kept.

Gabe and Natalie come pounding down the stairs. “We’re going over to Jonathan’s,” Gabe tells me. He ducks into the kitchen and grabs an apple, clearly figuring that will be his breakfast on the road.

“Okay, that’s fine. See you later.”

It’s been almost a month since Gabe and Jonathan had that fight, and as far as I can tell that was a one-time thing. We never really did understand what happened on the playground a couple of days later, but none of the kids seemed to want to talk about it, and considering everything that happened, I didn’t want to press them. I was worried about them spending time with Jonathan after the fight, especially worried that Natalie might get hurt again, but they’ve all been as thick as thieves for weeks now. I guess they got whatever it was causing their dispute out of their systems.