Bear, Otter, & the Kid 03 - The Art of Breathing (48 page)

“And you.” Because his family had been taken from him in the most horrible way. We folded him in like it was nothing. Like he was supposed to be there. It’s hard to remember a time when he wasn’t.

“And me,” he says. “Yeah. You made me a part of this.”

“Those ants.”

“Helmholtz Watson.” A small smile.

“I was scared of you,” I say, “when I first saw you.”

“Were you?” He sounds bemused.

“You were so big.”

“And you were just a little guy.”

“You had stars on your shoes. Little stars you’d drawn on them, and I thought they were the coolest thing I’d ever seen.”

“You talked,” he says. “And talked. And talked. I wondered just how someone so little could talk so much. But that was okay, because I didn’t talk that much at all… to anyone.”

“I’d never had a friend before,” I confess. “Not really. Not someone I could call just
my
friend. I was so worried.”

“About what?”

“That you were going to think I was this little kid who wasn’t cool and knew too much about the dumbest things. Who wanted you to be a vegetarian just because I was. Who still had to get into a bathtub when there were earthquakes. Who acted far more mature than his age just to hide how scared he was.”

“I know,” Dom says.

“You did?”

“Maybe I didn’t at the time. I learned it. After a while.”

“And you didn’t run screaming?” I tease.

“No, Ty, I didn’t. Because I was the big kid who wasn’t cool who knew too little about the dumbest things. Who wanted to be a vegetarian just because you were. Who wanted to make sure you never needed the bathtub again. Who acted far tougher than his age just to hide how scared he was. And I
was
scared, Ty. Because everything I’d ever known had been taken from me, and I couldn’t stand it if the same happened to you.”

“Dom?” My heart hurts.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. For leaving.”

“I know, Ty. You’ve said it already. It’s done.”

“Is it?” I ask nervously.

“That part? Yes. It is.”

“And the next part?”

He says nothing, and I think I’ve pushed him too far. I hear how pathetic I sound, like a little kid begging for something that isn’t his to begin with. God, could I be any more ridiculous? Here he is, saying these nice things, and I’m saying
now, now, now
, and
more, more, more
. It’s not fair to him. Especially since he’s already driving with me to Idaho on a fool’s errand toward something that can only cause more hurt. He shouldn’t be here. He should be at home with the life he’s had over the past four years. The life he made for himself after I walked away with only thoughts of myself.

But then he speaks. Oh God, how he speaks.

“I woke up,” he says, “because I’d heard something shatter, and I was sure someone was breaking into the house. At least, that’s what I thought when I was still half-asleep. But then I heard the little scream my mother gave and the sound of my father striking her, speaking to her in that way he did when he was drunk and pissed off. You’d be surprised how it sounded. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t shouting. It was almost conversational, like he was asking you about your day. He’d say things like, ‘You know what you did,’ and, ‘This is all your fault,’ and, ‘It’ll be over before you know it.’

“He was a big man, my father. And he might have done great things with his life. He might have learned gentleness. But he fell into drink like
his
dad did and found a woman who wouldn’t walk away, no matter how hard he hit her. They exist, as hard as it is to believe. People like him. People like her. I’ve seen it since, and I’m sure I’ll see it again. I thought maybe I could help stop it, but there’s always going to be someone who likes to hit. There’s always going to be someone who walks back into getting hit.

“There was a dish. It’d broken on the kitchen floor. That was the first thing I saw. Pieces of it were all over the floor. Some near my bare foot. The rest of it was sitting in red paint. At least that’s what I told myself. That she’d spilled red paint when the dish had broken. But then I heard my father say, ‘It’ll be over before you know it,’ and he started hitting her. She was lying on the floor covered in red paint and he was
hitting
her over and over again in the face. Again and again and I knew it wasn’t red paint. I knew it wasn’t. It was her. It was my mom all over the floor. My mom, who had told me once to be a better man than my father. Who had told me to grow up and be better than him, and she was lying on the floor and she wasn’t moving aside from her head knocking to the side every time he hit her in the face.

“I screamed at him to stop. He ignored me. I tried hitting him on the back. On the head. Even though I was supposed to be a better man, I still hit him, even though I told myself I would never hit anyone like he hit her. Like he hit me.”

“Dom—”

“Listen.”

I do.

H
E
THOUGHT
his mother was already dead, and it was the first grown-up thought he could ever remember having. There was something cold about it, something strangely clinical, and it crossed his mind the moment his father had knocked him down to the floor, telling him and his mother that it’d be over before they knew it.

He doesn’t remember much about what happened next. Little flashes, maybe. Pieces, like the plate broken on the floor, and for this I’m thankful. It’s like his mind wanted to protect him from the horror. There were scissors in one of the drawers. His mother used them for the scrapbooks she used to make. He remembers grabbing them, pleading with his father to stop. His father did not stop.

He was told later he stabbed his father in the side seven times. Surely it stopped the savage beating. Surely it saved his own life, because his father could have come after him next. Surely he was a hero. This is what he was told.

He was also told it was too late to save her. This, of course, came much later.

It came much later because after he’d stabbed his own father, a thing he cannot remember, he was sticky. He knows he was sticky and it was on his hands and his face. His arms. His feet. Especially his feet. He tried to step, but it was like his feet were stuck to the floor. He tried again, and his foot came up, but it was
sticky
.

He looked down. There was so much red paint. It was everywhere.

It covered his father too. And the floor. And it covered the thing on the floor dressed in his mother’s clothes, but which no longer looked like his mother. She was painted too.

And it hit him then. His mind then tried to protect itself in the best way it knew how, by making him
believe
he was dreaming, that it was all a dream, and he should just go back to bed, and in the morning he would wake up and everything would be okay again, and he would remember this as nothing but an awful nightmare that would fade with the hours, and soon, he’d forget it ever happened.

It almost worked. Except when he turned to go back to bed, he slipped in the paint, and he went down on one knee and a little broken piece of plate cut the palm of his hand he used to catch himself. It hurt, the pain sharp. And he wasn’t a stupid boy. He knew he couldn’t feel pain in a dream.

If it wasn’t a dream, then it was real.

And if it was real, then that was his father lying before him.

And if that was his father, then the thing dressed like his mother could only
be
his mother.

He screamed, then. He screamed.

He screamed even when other people came to his house. He screamed when they picked him up. He screamed when they took him away. He screamed when they drove him to the hospital and put him in a room with smiling zoo animals painted on the walls. He screamed when they tried to hold him. He screamed when they tried to quiet him. He screamed when they injected something in his arm.

He only stopped screaming when he felt something shatter in his throat. Shatter, like a plate on the floor.

He didn’t talk for a long time after that. Not because he didn’t want to or because it hurt to, but because he didn’t have anything to say. His world had changed, the shape unrecognizable, and he watched it warily, waiting for it to be drenched in red paint.

One day he asked his social worker, Georgia, for the ketchup, only because he didn’t have any, not because of any dire need. But she’d smiled at him so wide that he thought maybe he should try talking more. At least with her.

And he did.

He still spent much of his life mute. It was easier. If you didn’t speak, people left you alone. Yeah, they thought he was weird, and it probably didn’t help that he was the son of that guy who had murdered his wife. It definitely didn’t help that he was so big. But it didn’t matter. He had nothing to say to anyone.

That changed one day. He was outside, wandering the neighborhood of his current foster home. He didn’t think that it was anything more than it was. Patty and Bert were good, as far as fosters went, but they were fosters, and he thought Bert did it for the money. But they didn’t raise hand or voice to him, and they were just fine without him talking, so it was as good as it’d been.

But everything changed.

Because of Helmholtz Watson. And the little boy with all the words. The little boy demanding friendship and promising books about brave new worlds and a brother named Bear and a partner named Otter in a place known as the Green Monstrosity.

And for the first time since his mother had been covered in paint on the floor, he found himself curious. He found himself talking. He found himself answering questions.

He found himself hopeful.

And it grew. It grew and grew until he had a family once again, and one day, he sat in an audience and watched the boy who had become his brother announce to the world that he was gay and proud to be, and didn’t it start then? Didn’t something tickle in the back of his mind as his jaw dropped, as he heard his family around him gasp? Didn’t he think it was inevitable? That from the beginning, it was all so inevitable?

He did. Though
what
was inevitable he pushed away because it wasn’t something someone his age should be thinking about someone else so very young.

Then there was a party. To say good-bye. It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do in his life. Every part of him wanted to scream,
Stay, please stay, don’t ever leave me
, but that wasn’t fair. That wasn’t who he was. But he thought it.

He thought it with his whole heart.

I
LOOK
away and out the window into the dark as he clears his throat and sighs. “I remember it,” I tell him. “The party.” The smile he gave her. That pretty little laugh of hers. His hand in her hair. I know it’s not the same, but it’s all jumbled in my head. I can’t think straight.

“That’s when I knew for sure.”

“Knew what?”

“This. You and me. That’s when I knew you were more than my brother.”

“How?” I ask weakly.

“The look you gave me,” he says quietly. He sounds so sad. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone look at me like that before. That anger. That betrayal. You were fifteen years old and so impossibly young, but the look you gave me was the same look you got when you talked about your mother. The look someone your age should never have. Of seeing something that so completely breaks your heart that you don’t know if you can ever put it back together again. Or if it’s even possible. You looked at me that way, and I understood so much more than I’d ever thought.”

“I couldn’t breathe,” I tell him quietly. “I thought I was breaking.”

“I know,” he says.

“It wasn’t fair.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “It wasn’t fair that I did that to you. I was just some kid—hell,
the
Kid—nursing a crush. I was hurt and this stupid thing wouldn’t let me breathe. This stupid thing in my head, and then the earthquake hit, and I couldn’t breathe and I had to run. I didn’t know it then, not completely, but I had to run. I wanted you to ask me to stay, and what happened convinced me to go.”

The rest stop is ahead. He signals and pulls in. Semitrucks, dark and hulking, line the parking spots. He parks away from them all and turns off the car. The only other sound I hear is the thunderous beat of my heart.

“I never wanted you to leave,” he rumbles at me. “I wanted for you to stay so bad.”

“But you knew I had to go.”

He nods. “There would have been nothing for you here.”

“Except for you. I would have stayed for you.”

He looks pained. “That wasn’t a good enough reason. You deserved more. You still do.”

“You knew then?”

He nods. “For sure. When you were in the bathtub. I knew I had to be strong for you. To do the right thing. Nothing could have happened then, anyway. You were too young. I never would have done that to you.”

“No matter how much I wanted it?”

He snorts. “Even if I didn’t have a decent sense of morality, I had a good sense of mortality. Bear and Otter would have killed me. But I did. And I still do. I knew then I’d never look at you the same. And that you had to get out while you still could.”

“I felt it longer,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “I can see that now.”

“That’s why it killed me when… when the mail came….”

“That wasn’t meant to happen,” he says quietly. “None of that. It spiraled out of control.”

“I know.” And I do. That doesn’t mean it still didn’t hurt like a bitch.

“I love her,” he says. “Stacey. And don’t make that face. I don’t mean like that. She’s part of my family, Ty, and she always will be. I love her because of the person she is and what she gave me.”

“Ben.”

“Ben,” he agrees. “And he’ll always come first. He has to. If I had to do it all over again to have him the way that I do, I would. I know that probably hurts to hear, but he’s kept me sane. And honest. Having kids tends to do that to you.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask him. “Your parents. Stacey. Ben. Why?”