Sympathy between humans (4 page)

 

 

His body, viewed from above, was even more slender up close, and his hair looked a little too blond to be true. When he looked up from my running shoes to my face, that suspicion was confirmed: his features were clearly Asian. Hmong possibly, or Vietnamese.

 

 

I saw something else, too. He wasn’t just under 21; he was clearly under 18.

 

 

“Are you all right?â€

 

 

Marlinchen Hennessy was her father’s little girl;
she was bright and verbal, and her father loved to read to her and teach her new words and listen to what she was learning in school. No sound had been sweeter to her own ears than the nickname of “Marliâ€

 

 

“You were a child,â€

 

 

It did not come as a surprise
that Marlinchen wasn’t asleep when Aidan and I returned. She came out to wrap her arms around Aidan’s neck and embrace him for a long moment, until I had to turn away from the intimacy of their reunion.

 

 

She fixed him a meal in the kitchen, two warm tuna sandwiches with melted cheddar cheese and an oversized glass of milk, and made up a bed for him on the sofa, where he fell into an exhausted sleep. Only when he was asleep did she turn her attention to me.

 

 

“Thank you,â€

 

 

For the next few days,
I stayed close to the Hennessy kids, spending nights at their home. What surprised me was how easily they accepted my presence. I’d forgotten what it was like to be a teenager, how easily any adult in your life becomes Authority. Parents, teachers, principals, coaches: kids so easily ceded their privacy to them, and apparently, to the Hennessy kids, I was one such figure.

 

 

They went about their lives, and in what seemed good spirits, too. A week from Friday was the last day of school outright for Donal; Colm, Liam, and Marlinchen had one more week of final exams after that at their high school. In their activity, their chatter in the mornings before school, I heard both their anxiety about impending tests and their exhilaration at the prospect of freedom to come.

 

 

It was Aidan, though, whom I paid closest attention to. After his first night back, exhausted and disheveled from the road, he’d metamorphosed into someone who looked strikingly different. Once washed, his hair was as gold as Marlinchen’s, and hung perfectly straight in a ponytail. In fact, if I’d been seeing him for the first time, that’s what I would have noticed about him, the clean straight lines, like a kinetic sculpture, from the blond hair to the long legs. I never saw him without his hair pulled back in a ponytail, or without his necklace of tigereyes on a leather cord riding against the collar of his T-shirt.

 

 

The oldest Hennessy did nothing that troubled me; he also did nothing that particularly reassured me. He was unusually quiet for a teenage boy of his size; I rarely heard him enter a room, or leave it. He sneaked cigarettes sometimes behind the freestanding garage; other times I’d see him smoking under the magnolia tree. Once or twice I saw him looking at me, but what he was thinking, I couldn’t tell. The second time I said, “What?â€

 

 

“I talked to Gray Diaz,â€

 

 

Marlinchen surprised me
when I came home that night by suggesting a glass of wine out under the magnolia tree. I was about to tell her that I didn’t think it wise that she made a habit of wine at the end of the day, but she must have seen it coming, because she corrected me. “I meant wine for you, and I’d have a ginger ale or something,â€

 

 

When I left Minnesota at 18,
to claim a basketball scholarship at UNLV, I hadn’t seen a future as a cop ahead of me. I wasn’t looking too far ahead: just to more basketball and more schooling, in that order of importance. One thing I did feel fairly sure of was that I wouldn’t live in Minnesota again. I’d grown up in New Mexico and thought myself a Westerner; going to school in Las Vegas was like going home, I’d told myself.

 

 

It wasn’t. Vegas was sprawling and vivid and exciting, all in ways that couldn’t involve an 18-year-old with little money and no car, who knew no one. Nor, that year, did I see much time in basketball games. I’d expected that, but still it made me restless. I went to my classes, trying and failing to be interested in the general-education, Western-civilization courses that make up a freshman’s schedule. I didn’t feel like a student. I didn’t feel like an athlete. I didn’t have any sense of a life coming together.

 

 

That was when I realized something I hadn’t planned on: I was homesick for the Range. The shivering birches and white pines, the green grass and mine-scarred red dirt, the pit lakes as blue-green as semiprecious stones: somehow, when I hadn’t been paying attention, it had gotten into my blood.

 

 

When my aunt Ginny had her stroke and died, that summer, it destabilized me more than I realized at the time. In the fall I went back to school as normal, but nothing there made sense to me anymore. Within two weeks of the start of instruction, I wrote a letter to the coach and caught a Greyhound back to Minnesota, earnings from my summer job rolled up as traveler’s checks in my duffel bag. I didn’t know what I needed so badly, but somehow I was certain it lay back in Minnesota.

 

 

Drinking a cold, sweet Pepsi in a coffee shop across from the bus station in Duluth, I scanned the want ads. A taconite-mining company based in a small town was looking for a cleaning-and-maintenance trainee in their shop; it was one of the few entry-level positions in that kind of operation. On the opposite page from the job ads were “housing to shareâ€

 

 

“I don’t see a case here,â€