April 24th, 2019

Good old Jake Addison

A standard question for writers is “which of your characters is your favourite?” and a standard answer is “that would be like choosing my favourite child.” Largely, I stand by the standard answer, but there are characters I come back to again and again, finding an ease with writing about them that I don’t find with others. Jake Addision appeared in stories in my first two books, a number of uncollected stories including my most recent published fiction from December 2017. He’ll also be in the new book if I ever finish it, which is iffy. I’ve written Jake at a number of ages but I come back to him again and again at six years old, the year his parents separate and his toddler sister is diagnosed with a serious vision impairment. A crystallizing year, maybe? Or just an interesting one?

He’s a kid who sees everything and he has seen a lot. He’s got a tonne of energy and parents who want him to be confident in himself, but who keep shaking his confidence in the world around him, and in the parents themselves. He is loving but his love takes the form of action–he is always trying to do something with those he loves. He also often the only kid his age around, one of first kids born in his parents’ group of friends, and that makes him doubly unable to sink into the background and “go play” because he’d have to play alone. When Jake is in the story, Jake is IN the story. And frankly, I hate fiction where there’s little kids around but they get ignored for hours at a time and are fine with it. I’ve never spent more than 20 minutes in a home with a conscious little kid and not realized it.

I’m wasting a lot of time with this project, writing unusable but fun bits-. I seriously doubt I’m going to get to keep this chunk below, but it’s one of my fave things I’ve written in a while. Jake is obviously an amalgam of some of my favourite real-life kids, but he is also definitely his own unique being, and I like to write him partly just to see what he’ll say next. This is him talking to his aunt Bella after a long day (Rae is his mom):

Jake tells her repeatedly she’s loading the dishwasher wrong, and finally she just lets him do it. It doesn’t look to her like he’s doing a better job, and he too has sauce in his hair somehow, green flecks among the dark curls, but Rae didn’t offer any instructions, and the boy is tired and loud. 

            “An’ see, you gotta, you gotta, like you see, you PUT it in, like you see?” He glares at Bella, so she nods, though she just sees Jake jamming a sauce-smeared plate beside the others. She doesn’t have a great view peering over the kitchen island so she comes around to where he has a heap of dirty forks and spoons on the floor and is sticking them into the basket one at a time. It’s still light out, not even 7 yet, but it feels late, probably because the kid so tired that he keeps rubbing his eyes with his sticky hands. After Rae told him thirty times to eat two more bites of pasta, he finally got the doughnut and now has powder sugar all over his t-shirt. 

            Bella sits down beside him on the floor. It’s nice and cool. “Hey, Jake, who’s that dog on your shirt?”

            Jake looks down as if he’s surprised to find the shirt there. “It’s not a dog, it’s a pup. Ruble. He builds stuff.”

            “A pup is a kind of dog. Like a kid is a kind of person.”

            “Ok.” He misses the basket with a jammy fork and it splatters on the floor. Who eats jam with a fork?

            “Do you want to go up and see if your mom is ready to help you get to bed? I can do this for you.”

            His eyes go huge and he stares through her eyes into the back her skull. “But this is my chore.”

            “But I’m your friend. And sometimes friends help each other out. Once in a while.”

            “Um, ok.” He presses the fork into her bare foot for some reason. “Thank you, Bella.”

            “You’re welcome. Go find your mom now.” She hopes this is ok with Rae, but she doesn’t know what else to do with him and she’s worried about him being crouched over the knives sticking up from the basket, gross and glinting.”

            “I love you, Bella.”

            “I love you, too, Jake.” And she does.

            “Are you gonna live at our house now?”

            “No, I’ll go home to my house to sleep. I’m just visiting you.”

            “Oh, ok. I have two houses.”

            “Yes.”

            “This house and my old house, with Daddy.” 

            “How do you fe-”

            “Daddy is your brother.”

            “Yes.”

            “Your big brother, just like I’m Marley’s big brother.”

            “Well, actually, I’m bigger—older. But only by a year.”

            This is the thing that startles him out of his conversational pose. “Really? Sisters can be the big ones?”

            “Sure. It’s whoever gets born first. Can I have a good-night hug?”

            Kids are so good at hugging.