Daybreak

[It] helped me feel small. I wasn’t ready to be bigger yet. - TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

#

AJ stared across the room at the door that stood ajar against the far wall. This one was never open. Daddy always made sure to keep it locked. She asked him once what he kept inside it, and whether she could go inside.

“Oh, I don’t think you’d want to go in there,” he had said. “You probably wouldn’t think it was all that interesting. It’s just storage.”

That confused her. Why would he think that she didn’t want to go inside? Of course she wanted to go inside. This was her house, after all, and she needed to know every inch of it inside and out.

What was inside had to be interesting, because you didn’t put boring stuff behind doors with locks. You put boring stuff in dusty rooms where the couches had plastic and everything smelled like soup.

Today the door was open. Just a crack, but open nonetheless. She hadn’t noticed when she went downstairs to get Comrade Bear from her playroom. It was only when she was about to go back upstairs that she’d realized a thin shadow was cutting into the hall, and the sight rooted her to the spot.

She could feel her eyes open wide and a small gasp escaped her lips. Some kids might be scared of a dark room in the basement, but not her. She wasn’t afraid of anything.

AJ studied the door for a moment, and then turned towards the stairs. When she reached the first riser, she set Comrade Bear down gently and patted his head.

“You’re on guard duty,” she said. “You have to let me know if anyone is coming, okay?”

“Okay,” the bear said, but the voice was her own.

“Growl once for Daddy and twice for Mommy. Do you understand?”

She skipped to the door and tried to peer inside, wondering what wonders lurked just beyond the threshold. AJ raised a tiny hand, letting the tips of her fingers brush against the doorknob, and wondered what would happen the moment she pulled it open.

A moment later, she found a purple mask with silver trim that had a crowned raspberry in the center. AJ had only just found out how to put it on when she found the big plastic box hiding a bright blue cape lined with gold and inlaid with navy stitching that looked like blueberries.

A moment after that, she was being led up the stairs by her hand.

#

I was nineteen when I heard my father's stories for the first time.

"I've been waiting for this," he said, and then he told me that he had spent the last few years of his career making a kind of audio diary, so that when I was old enough - when I was curious enough - that I could hear his story in his own words. He warned me that what I would hear might shock me, because professional wrestling is a violent sport.

"And when it's over," he continued, "I'll answer any question you have. I promise."

Then I learned just how violent it can be.

I learned how it won't just break your body, but also your spirit and your will. How it can take away the person you were, and replace that space with a nothingness that eats everything around it.

I learned about a man named Frank, and the value of forgiveness.

I heard the story of how Mom and Dad met and fell in love. In his own words I heard him confess that he had been in love with my mother since they first met, and how he carried that torch for almost twenty years before finally being able to set it down forever.

But there was only one thing I wanted to know.

I thought back of the first glimpse I had into why my parents were; who they really were. I had been curious ever since the day that I found their old costumes in the basement and made up my mind that my parents spent their lives as honest-to-god superheroes.

To seven-year-old me it made perfect sense! I had seen The Incredibles enough to know all the signs of a super-powered family. I'd just found a mask, a cape, and learned that my mother and father were basically leading double lives. We were a family of heroes, and one day I’d have a costume of my own.

"Tell me about the blueberry."

#

“We need to talk about your daughter,” Mommy said.

“Why, what did she do?”

“Well, it’s not so much what she did, but rather what someone else forgot to do.”

Daddy’s expression changed, and AJ sensed that he was about to be in so much trouble. But maybe not. Mommy didn’t sound like she was mad, and she hadn’t sighed yet, so that was a good sign. She was leaning against the doorway and her arms were folded across her chest, so if she was going to put her hands on her hips and shake her head then she would need to move first.

And her voice. She sounded like she was getting ready to tell a joke.

But Daddy didn’t realize that he wasn’t in trouble. His face was turning red, and his eyes were moving back and forth like they always did when he was thinking.

“What, uhh, what did I forget to do?” he said.

“Well, it would seem that you forgot to lock the basement door. You know - the basement door.”

AJ looked at Comrade Bear as he dangled by the paw from her hand and whispered, “Traitor. You were supposed to keep watch.”

“Da ha ha!” she whispered back in the bear’s voice.

“No way.” Daddy started to protest, and while he was speaking Mommy lifted one hand slightly and called AJ into the room with a wiggle of her finger. “I always lock the-”

His words died when AJ bounded into the room, still wearing the purple mask and dragging the length of the cape behind her.

“Oh.”

“Somebody found our old costumes,” Mommy said with a grin.

“I did!” said, and the words fell out like a waterfall. “The door was open and I went inside, but before I did that I asked Comrade Bear if he would watch. He said he would, but then he betrayed me, and then Mommy found me and said we had to go upstairs, but I had already put on the mask and the cape and she said that I should keep them on so you could see. But now I know why you kept the door closed and said I couldn’t go in. It’s because you guys didn’t want me to know your secret.”

“Our secret?” Daddy said. He lifted his eyebrows and looked over AJ at her mother, who shrugged a ‘no idea’ from her perch just inside the room.

AJ’s eyes gleamed behind her mother’s mask.

“Mm-hmm.” And even though they were the only three souls in the house, she leaned in and dropped her voice to a whisper just in case. “You’re superheroes!”

#

“I had basically run myself out of the business,” Dad said to me. “Nobody wanted to take a chance on a guy who had basically become a walking cloud of nonsense. It got to the point where it was actually rare to have a conversation that didn’t start with the words ‘After careful consideration.’ It was like every promoter in the country only knew how to say one thing, and that thing was ‘we’ve decided to go in a different direction.’”

He started looking outside the country and built a suit of armor around himself that he called King Blueberry. That’s how he ended up spending the next few years in Japan.

“It wasn’t just a suit of armor around me,” my father once told me. “It was also a suit of armor for the people who took a chance and hired me. They could tell anyone who asked that they didn’t know Jared Sykes, but if they want to talk to King Blueberry they would be happy to make an introduction.

He talked about it like a safety blanket. Something that he could go back to for protection whenever things got hard.

That was a conversation I wasn’t going to make him have. Because I listened to all of his recordings, I knew every minute detail about the worst days of his life. I wasn’t going to make him relieve those, not with me. 

The apprehension on his face was palpable, though he tried to hide it. He had promised that he would answer any question I asked, no matter how difficult, but there was trepidation about what I might ask and what he would have to admit.

I think he would have put the mask on right then and there, if he had one to wear.

I let him bring up the events that led to his encounter with Paxton Ray on his own, when he was comfortable. What he had to say is not what I expected.

“The thing that everyone gets wrong about that time is actually the mask. It was getting absolutely beat to hell over the course of that year, and every week there was a new tear, a new rip. The stitching had started to come apart over the summer, and it just went from there.

“Eveyone I talk to thinks I took it off because I didn’t have any other choice, but even though the thing was barely holding together the truth is that they all have it backwards.

“I could have repaired it when the first tear showed up. Most wrestling isn’t seen up close, so unless there was a camera aimed right at my face no one would have known. I could have kept doing that with every bit of wear and tear that it suffered. Hell, I could have just had a new one made by the same designer.

“But I didn’t want it any more. It had served its purpose. I could have been King Blueberry every other week for the rest of my life, and I think there are some people who expected that to happen, but I was ready to just be Jared again.

“Every time I’ve worn it, it’s like the volume on the world gets turned down a little bit. Everything gets a little quieter. All the colors get a little muted. It’s like the end of the day, when the sun has just set but the sky is still holding on to those last bits of blue. I didn’t want that anymore.

“I wanted the sunrise.”

#

What followed was, in AJ’s opinion, the lamest excuses she had ever heard. Sure she was only seven years old, but she was pretty sure that her parents were trying their hardest to tell the biggest fib from the off. Trying, and failing.

“They’re just costumes,” Mommy said. “We would wear them sometimes when we went to work.”

Went to work fighting crime, no doubt.

“I mean, they’re not just costumes,” Daddy said in turn. “The mask doesn’t make you a superhero, but it does give you powers. It turns you into the person you need to be so that you can become the person you want to be.”

AJ listened as they explained what professional wrestling was, but everything they said sounded like a fancy way of saying “be superheroes”. There were bright costumes. Everyone had great big muscles and could run, and jump, and fly all over the place. Some people even had made-up names, and she thought that sounded an awful lot like the kind of the thing a good guy would do to protect their secret identity.

“You’re like Spider-man,” she said at one point. “In real life you’re Daddy, but then at night you were the Blueberry Man.”

He had no answer to this. AJ found herself standing with her arms folded and her head tilted to the side, the same as Mommy every time she said something that Daddy didn’t have a response for.

Her father finally relented. “When you say it that way it’s really hard to argue.”

“I know,” AJ said. Just like her mother indeed. “So where’s your mask now? Is it downstairs in your secret lair?”

“It’s not a lair,” Mommy laughed. “It’s just a room that we use to keep this stuff.”

“Why? Are you going to fight bad guys again?”

“Fighting bad guys isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Daddy said. There was something in his expression that AJ didn’t quite understand. It was like the face that she made when she fell on the playground, when it only hurt enough to stop her from playing, but not so bad as to ask the nurse for a Band-aid. “I haven’t done that in years, and I don’t think I could do it now even if I wanted to.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she protested. “Where is your mask, Daddy?”

“I don’t have them anymore.”

“Them?”

“Them.”

“You had more than one?”

“There were four total. One for every time I needed to be that person. But I gave them all away. The only thing I have now that’s close to it is one that the mother of an old friend made for me as a gift.”

“You gave them away?!”

And so he told her. Over the next several minutes AJ sat in rapt attention and learned the first real secrets that her father ever shared with her. He told her of the first mask, and how it lives in Wisconsin on the desk of an old friend. Someone who makes her own costumes that are so much bigger and more creative than anything he wore.

He told her about the Strawberry man, and how he took the second Blueberry mask with him when he went to Heaven, so that each would have a part of the other until they met again in forever.

AJ didn’t say it, but she wondered why Daddy didn’t know that strawberries weren’t real berries. They had seeds on the outside, and you can’t be a real berry if you have seeds on the outside. Some berries were special, like pineapples because they’re made from a bunch of flowers, but strawberries still don’t count. Miss Parsons taught her that in school.

She learned about the third mask, sent to an old man in Indiana who once helped her father realize the kind of man he was, albeit in his own “special” way.

He told her about the fourth mask, which he thought would be the last one he ever wore, and how it was his safety blanket when he was at his most scared. That mask, he said, now belongs to a man in Mexico who gave him one of the greatest honors a wrestler can have.

“That wasn’t the last one?” she said during a pause in her father’s story. “You said there were five, but that’s only four.”

“Your dad had that one made special for someone else.” Mommy had been listening quietly until this point. “Someone who he thought needed it more than him.”

“I made it for a friend named Bryan,” Daddy said. “I gave it to him a few years ago. It happened not long after you learned to walk.”

“Who’s Bryan?” she said. “Why is he special?”

#

Dad had met Bryan Dawkins during one of his down periods. He had only been back working in the United States for a few months when he had a falling out with a promoter in Las Vegas, and even though he had just taken the mask off that fiasco meant it went right back on when he tried to find his footing.

He told me about a fight they had, one that sounded a little surreal given that it involved a bucket of tomatoes, and how they reconnected years later.

By that point, Dad was getting ready to put it all behind him so that he could be my dad.

“I thought I was done being a berry forever. It did what I needed it to, and allowed me to get where I wanted to be, so I figured it was behind me. It’s funny sometimes how the universe works.

“Of the four of us - me, your mom, Seymour, and Coral - I was never going to be the standout, I was never going to be ‘The Guy.” That spot was reserved for Seymour. For Jason. That spot was set aside for Coral. But I was the first. All of this crawled out of my head. And somehow I knew I was always going to end up being the last as well.”

He told me how Bryan had lost his family, and had to fight through hell in order to get them back and make sure they were safe. He told me how if something ever happened to Mom, my sister, or I that he would find that same strength for us.

“He’d reconciled with his family and then took on an entire army as a point of pride, because it was the right thing to do. But he still didn’t get it,” my dad told me.

My father spent his entire career listening to people tell him that he brought too much chaos to the table; too much nonsense. They said he specialized in things that no one cared about, and that only made everything around him worse.

And at the same time, they said that he wasn’t enough when it came to what mattered. That’s why he created the blueberry, I think. That was his safety blanket against the people who told him he didn’t matter, regardless of what he tried to do.

So he made another mask, his final one, because it was what Bryan Dawkins needed.

“We stood across from each other after the bell rang. It blows my mind, but he still thought that I was just King Blueberry.”

“What did you do?” I said.

“I took that mask off for the last time. Oh god, AJ, you should have seen the look on his face. I can still see it as clear as day. I took that mask off and then I offered it to him.

“It might not make sense, but the only reason I could be Jared Sykes is because I was King Blueberry. Without that I might not be married to your mom. And then I wouldn’t have you and your sister. I got to be the best version of myself, because I was that other thing. Do you understand?

“I offered that mask not because I wanted him to wear it, but because I hoped that he would understand. I hope that he would finally just get to be Bryan.

“Because being Bryan is the best thing he could be.”

#

She replayed her father’s answer in her head.

“The mask doesn’t make you a superhero”, he had said, “but it does give you powers. It turns you into the person you need to be so that you can become the person you want to be.”

Who did she want to be?

She tugged at the cape to make sure it was nice and secure. The color was all wrong. It was still blue and gold, when it should be yellow and green. The mask too would need updating.

AJ wondered if Mommy and Daddy would tell her who made their costumes, and then maybe that person would make one for her, too. This way she wouldn’t need to change them, so Mommy and Daddy could still wear their own costumes when they wanted to. Maybe the three of them could be superheroes together.

A grin grew across the face of Princess Pineapple, the youngest and newest berry. She wondered if that was okay. After all, weren’t superheroes supposed to look serious so that the bad guys get scared and run away? It would be a lot easier that way. She wouldn’t have to use her powers, and no one would get hurt. Comrade Bear, the Spicy Spy, and Doctor Salamander weren’t very nice, but that didn’t mean they should be beat up.

She thought about this for a moment, eventually coming to the conclusion that Daddy smiled all the time, and he was a superhero, so that meant it was okay for her to do it, too.

She liked that idea much, much more.

She nodded once and set her feet. The grass felt soft under her sneakers.

By the time AJ started to run, the grin had bloomed into a joyful smile.

The little girl began to build speed, and the cape she held tight in both hands snapped behind her and grew taught.

“Here I come,” she said. “The best me I can be!”

AJ raced towards the horizon, closed her eyes, and took flight.