Free to a Good Home

Short Story Written and Narrated by: Lisa Vega
Model, Creative Direction and Video by: Catie Menke

TRIGGER WARNING: This post contains themes of suicide and panic attacks which may be upsetting to some readers.

If you or anyone you know needs help finding support or crisis resources, please go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org for more information.

Free to a Good Home by Lisa Vega

I was pissed at them both, but more at Kay for her self-indulgence. She knew my triggers and in the moment, chose to carry on about the suicide rates of LGBTQ+ teens. Her father, in turn, asked pointed questions, spurring debate in an exercise only the two of them found enjoyable.

As far as I was concerned, they were both in a castle on a hill; Kay’s parents had always loved her as she was. I didn’t want to say it, so I abandoned my chair on the patio to go sit by the pool. Slipping off my sneakers and socks, I dipped my feet into the cool water and turned my head away from the offending discussion.

I used to sit out here like this when we were younger, when I practically lived at their house but still the socializing would get too much. I would hum softly to the bees and soothe myself in the process. Kay’s parents took great care of their yard, focusing on things like balance and the colors of flowers. My dad’s lawn was overgrown with weeds turned to shrubs, and the plastic chairs overturned from the last monsoon were never righted.

When I was certain their conversation had died down, I returned to Kay and her father, who were now setting the iron table with paper plates and plasticware. Scott was not an unkind man, just unaware in the way people are when they aren’t taught to find hidden meaning in every eye roll or heavy sigh. I envied him greatly.

An awkward silence now thickened the air, so I granted him and Kay the mercy of offering to fetch the potato salad from the kitchen. Inside the house, Sarah, Kay’s mother, was arranging ears of corn in a glass dish.

“I’ll come back for it,” I replied, scooping up the bowl of potato salad from the kitchen island. She flashed me my favorite smile, bittersweetness around the eyes. Like she could see all the pain you carried and was proud of you for carrying it well.

Outside, Kay also smiled at me and reached for my hand, but I pulled away. My heart pounded, but I didn’t want to plummet into that dark hole again, not here. So, I focused on my breathing, repeating silently, I’m okay.

Kay and I were 16 the morning her parents found out we weren’t merely friends. As usual, I had secretly stayed the night and woken up to the sounds of her mom pattering around in the kitchen. Wide-eyed, I didn’t even bother to fully dress, just pulled on my shorts and gathered up my tee shirt as Kay popped the screen off her bedroom window—loudly. I had one leg over the sill when Sarah stepped out front to investigate the noise.

And that’s how she found us out, staring blankly at me straddling Kay’s window in my bra. There was no point in leaving at all after that. I cowered in Kay’s room. Her mom chewed her out in the hallway but spared me.

The new, unfamiliar terror I felt in that moment would continue to grow, long after I realized I wasn’t banished. After Kay shuffled back into the room only to tell me with a smile that I was welcome to stay that day. And come back the next, and the next.

Sarah would tell us later in life she truly didn’t remember getting mad. “Was I shouting?” she asked when we retold the story of Kay’s “coming out” after our union ceremony.

“Oh, you were pissed,” Kay responded, adding, “mostly about your window screen though. And how I hadn’t been honest with you.” She raised her glass and others followed. “You told me that day that you didn’t ever want me to be too scared to tell you something. You said that you and Dad would always love me, and that you loved Dina.” She glanced sidelong at me. “And that you wanted us to be completely and utterly happy together… after we turned 18.” Laughter and applause.

“Thank you both,” she continued, “for your guidance and support, without which I could never have deserved such an amazing partner.” Kay hugged me around my neck, and the guests clinked their glasses in toast. It was a moment as full as any I’d ever had the fortune to live. And though one seat had remained empty that day, not once did I feel a single thing was missing.

My own coming out went both better and far worse than I had imagined. Kay and I officially been “together” for eight whole months. Encouraged by Sarah’s and Scott’s acceptance, I came home one night a devout believer in the power of honesty.

Dad was hunched over the breakfast table over a stack of mail he’d been letting grow, and I took the seat opposite him.

“Heyyyy,” he trailed. He didn’t look up, just continued to tear envelopes and skim letters. Sort the mail into piles.

“Can—can we talk?” The wind was already out of my sails; the air in the room felt wrong, but my teenage brain was not yet trained to take so subtle a hint. And it didn’t want to. It knew that a part of a parent’s job was to listen, and it rode on the inertia of that optimism right into the mouth of the beast. Dad sighed audibly and set the mail aside.

“I’m really tired right now, Deen, but what’s up?”

The air was getting worse, more wrong. The backs of my eyes stung prematurely. And I blinked to keep them dry.

“Oh, here we go.” He stood.

“Well, what is it, Dina? I’m exhausted and I’m busy. I just worked a 10-hour day, while you go off doing God knows what, and you come in here at a ten—” He held his hand up on an invisible scale to demonstrate. “—and get all weepy when I’m not in the mood. What do you want from me, huh?”

I was fury. I was disbelief. I didn’t understand what he was trying so hard to avoid, what he hoped to gain from escalating the conversation into something hostile. I wanted to dig. I wished I could wield my words to burrow into that fragile center he had built walls up to protect.

But as these things go, ineloquence won out. With too much to say, you end up saying not much of anything.

“You know what, just forget it.” I didn’t want to forget it, but I couldn’t salvage it either. So, I drove the knife in further. “You obviously have no interest in being a father, so I’ll save you the trouble.”

I should have known that Dad was never one to give up ground. “Well, you know, if that’s how you feel, then maybe it’s time you get your own place.”

I had nothing more to say to that. I was 17. Not yet out of high school and no job. The mere notion of moving out was ridiculous, and that was the point. Like tic-tac-toe, there was no winning once both players had the game figured out. Only stalemates. I knew too young that I would never reach him, and never again would I ask him to come to me.

“That it?” he asked. Yeah, that was it. I locked myself in my room and cried without really knowing why. I should have been relieved. We didn’t talk about it again, and a few days later, he brought me home some street tacos—an olive branch.

“It’s Taco Tuesday,” he said, chipper. He didn’t care I was gay. He didn’t care about anything. And in that way, it went better than expected.

Kay’s older sister Jen and her husband Caleb arrived five minutes late to dinner. Little things like punctuality were a struggle now with the new baby, but no one minded. If anything, it was nice to have everyone already there, so their entrance could be that much more of a production. First, the sound of the side gate opening and shutting. Then delighted cries as Duke came bounding around the side of the house and into the backyard, leash dragging behind him, earning happy pats on the head and slobbery chin scratches as he greeted each of us.

Caleb and Jen would round the corner next, one lugging the diaper bag and the other cradling little Avery. The three of them lit up faces wherever they went. Some would say it was the contagious joy of a young family, but I thought they just had that quality about them.

We crowded around for long hugs, cooing over Avery and small talking about their plans with Caleb’s folks the following day. Then we settled into our places at the patio table before the food got too cold. I tried my best to snap a photo of the entire spread: cheeseburgers, potato salad, corn on the cob, beans and freshly baked honey rolls.

Always the non-traditional Thanksgiving meal at this house, and that was perfect.

Back when my mom was alive, before the breast cancer had reduced her to a wisp and then nothing at all, and before my older brother fled to the military, we would do a typical family Thanksgiving with turkey and the whole shebang. I hated it. The cooking was never right, and we would always join hands first as my mother said a long grace. The mushy potatoes and wet stuffing would grow lukewarm on our plates.

“Family,” my mom would say.

“Food,” said Dad.

“Farts,” my brother would snicker, and he and I would lose it until some reproval—Dad’s booming, Mom’s shrill—quashed our laughter.

“I don’t know,” I would say when I couldn’t think of anything. Worse than giving a joke answer because dinner would come to a halt. Everyone would wait, arms crossed, and we wouldn’t be allowed to continue eating until I was thankful for something.

I always hated Thanksgiving growing up, and so I was thankful the year Dad and I decided to stop celebrating it.

Something wasn’t quite right during the summer after I finished grad school. Life had been particularly hard in those final months. Even with the stresses of working and going to school finally behind me, the vague feeling of a task unfinished lingered. It didn’t take long at all for things to unravel completely.

I’d left work early and was dripping with sweat as I pulled into the garage. Kay wouldn’t be home for a couple more hours. Would it take a couple hours?

All I really had to do was nothing. With the garage door shut behind me, I just left the engine running. I took a deep breath. And another. There was a hitch in the next, and those that followed came in strangled. Until I was sucking air through my teeth and choking on my own spit.

Logic told me I was nonessential. I’d simply been dropped on their doorstep in a box labeled free to a good home. An outsider in their tidy ecosystem, I had thrown off its delicate balance. If I were gone, what would change for the worse?

I pictured the days, months, years following my death. Kay and her family would be devastated. But they would rally around each other for comfort and eventually be all right. Kay would carry on as she always had, despite the hole in her chest. She’d follow her daily routine: brush her teeth in the shower, dress, have breakfast, take a walk, go to work, lunch, work, gym, home.

But for a time, at least, there would be a new step added at the beginning. Every morning, she would wake up and remind herself that I was gone. I knew this because I had done the same once upon a time, even as Dad pretended nothing had happened and my brother withdrew more and more until no one could reach him.

I pictured those gray days over and over as my knuckles went white around the steering wheel. I was trying to talk myself out of it.

How many minutes now? My top clung to my back, and I pulled away from the seat to let it breathe, leaning forward until my forehead came to rest over the horn. I wished that I could fall asleep like this, drift into the dark and never come out of it. Instead, I made desperate animal sounds. My heart threw itself at the bars of its cage, and I beat at my temples with the heels of my hands to quiet the noise of it all.

It went on like this until I was panting, throat raw, slumped against the driver’s window. How many minutes? I fought to keep my resolve, but my eyes kept darting to the key in ignition and my hand hovered nearby. It was shaking. All I needed to do was nothing. Nothing but wait for that brief, panicked moment when I realized I wasn’t breathing air, and for that which came after to take the pressure of the choice away from me—

—I turned the key. The engine stopped. I peeled myself from the seat, exited the car, and dragged myself into the empty house. I had lived, but I wasn’t proud. I felt like someone who had managed to put out a fire they themselves started.

I told Kay when she got home, and she cried. Her shoulders shook so violently I could barely hold her. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

I would later read that death by carbon monoxide wasn’t much of a thing with newer cars, in countries with strict regulations on emissions, and so I swore the next time I tried, I would use a shotgun.

It was a New Year’s Eve party, following in the wake of my incident during the summer. Jen and Caleb had recently gotten done decorating their new house, and it was stunning. And they were stunning, her sparkling in sequins and him theatrical as ever in a top hat and curly mustache. And the guests were all sporting their best black and gold and silver.

My mind was hazy even before I started drinking. I matched names to familiar faces like it was an exercise. Hugs and handshakes. I was handed a glass of something. I filled a plate up with snacks.

It wasn’t long before I was being pulled by the arm toward a garage full of drunken shouting. “Come on,” Jen said. “You’re on my flip cup team.”

“Looks like I’m on her flip cup team,” I called back to Kay, left chuckling at the dining table. The garage was crowded. My knees trembled, even as I managed a grin across the white folding table. I am not well, I tried not to think. I drank, I flipped. Cup fell. Back on the table. Flip again. I focused on the task in front of me like I could make the people disappear by doing so. Just me and the cup. Me and the cup.

Success, cup flipped. I exhaled the breath I’d been holding, and the people and their voices faded back into the foreground. The alcohol cast a milky veil over the frightened animal in my mind, and I thought for a fleeting moment that maybe I was having fun.

I stole away for a break and a hit on Kay’s pen. Poor Jen had begged me to join her for the beer pong tournament, but no, my legs were already giving way. My teeth were chattering though I wasn’t cold. I felt the urgent need to hide. I knew she’d have no trouble recruiting another.

The panic found me as I watched Kay play a card game. All those bodies packed into the living room, the kitchen, the dining room. There was no escaping them. My own pulse drummed so loudly in my ears that I swore they could hear it too. Suddenly every breath was an effort. My chest burned, and I clutched at it with one hand.

“What’s wrong?” asked Kay. Concern darkened her features, and I looked down to see my other hand gripping her forearm tightly.

So much, I thought. So much was wrong, but topping the list was that I was at a party and expected to play drinking games and chat with minor acquaintances about what I’d been up to since the last time we spoke, but who can open a conversation with, “I wish I was dead?”

But most of my words had already left me, like they’d left me the night I came out to my dad, and I didn’t have enough of them to explain it to her.

By the time I could manage to say, “help,” she was dragging me by the arm toward Caleb’s office. I pulled my shoulders in, willing myself small. I didn’t dare look for fear of finding others watching. Kay sat me down on a chair and closed the door partway to obscure us. She kept the lights off.

“You’re okay.” She said it again and again. You’re okay, you’re okay. And breathe, breathe. Two mantras, and Kay’s gentle petting. They became my whole existence.

After some time, she said, “I need to go get Jen and Caleb, let them know what’s going on.”

“No!” I protested, and I held onto her hands to stop her from leaving.

“I have to. Don’t worry, they’ll help. I promise. Just stay here, okay?”

I didn’t say it was okay, but I let her go. She shut the door behind her, enclosing me in darkness. When the door opened once more, it was Caleb who appeared.

“Jen is distracting everyone, masterfully,” he boasted, kneeling before me. “Kay’s getting your stuff together, and then you can leave right out the front door.”

“I can’t,” I said. My face was sticky with tears and snot, and with more on the way, I felt no larger than a child.

“Everyone knows!” I reasoned. “Everyone saw.”

“Nope, no one knows; no one saw. They’re all drunk, and they think you’re lying down drunk too. You’re good.”

I gave him a look, hoping my eyes could convey what I could not.

“You’re good,” he repeated. “There’s nothing wrong with you; you’re just having a difficult time. It happens to just about everyone. It happens.”

Kay reappeared in the doorway, holding both our bags. “Ready?” she asked. The question was directed at us both. Caleb would have to be my voice for the time being.

“Yeah,” he said. I allowed myself to be hoisted up. As we exited the office and made for the door, I ventured a look around the house. Mostly empty. Everyone had been ushered into the backyard over some spectacle, though a few stragglers were still mingling in the kitchen around the beer cheese and miniature sandwiches. No one was paying attention.

“You guys gonna be okay?” Caleb asked, holding open the front door.

“I think so,” Kay responded. “I’ll text you when we get home.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Tell Jen thanks.”

“’S what family’s for.” And he waved us off.

There were other episodes that followed, each perhaps less intense than the last. No one who’s human heals overnight, after all, and rarely without help.

It gets better, I thought, as I shoveled down potato salad.

“Can you pass me that butter?” Jen asked from across the table. I handed her a saucer holding a half-stick of butter, which she slathered generously onto some corn. Kay used the distraction to sneak unwanted pickle slices from her burger onto my plate. And I was no longer mad. I pinched one between my thumb and forefinger and popped it into my mouth, winking. She rested her head on my shoulder. I let myself believe that I had found a good home.