All My Exes Live in Texas

by Aimee Gilchrist

  I gave a small laugh. If there had ever been anyone like me in my school years, I certainly hadn't known them, but Aodhagan was talking about a singular kind of different. The kind of different that came with extraordinary genius. The kind of genius that led to him graduating from high school before the real onset of puberty. The Einstein, Oppenheimer, Newton kind of genius. The kind that would have made anyone feel isolated.

  I couldn't imagine the remoteness of a place like Birdwell, where everyone struggled with the lowest levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, focused only on survival. Aodhagan would have seemed like an alien to them, and he had probably felt like one too.

  I grieved for him and was annoyed at myself for feeling so hard for something I had no capability to fix. It was pointless, but I couldn't help it, and I wasn't a fan of pointless emotion. "I'm sorry."

  He shook his head. "I tried to be what people wanted or what they expected, oh my Lord I tried, but I just couldn't quite grasp what I was supposed to be. By ten, I was deeply depressed. My dad is a good dad, but he's just…he's different than me. He's from the 'walk it off' school of dealing with pain. He just didn't get why I couldn't do that. He didn't understand that I didn't know there was anyone else like me in the entire world. That I felt alone, the kind of alone that has no resolution. My mom, she thought everything I did was art, and she couldn't figure out why I didn't feel the same about myself. To the point that she simply ignored the existence of my depression."

  I closed my eyes, listening to his heartbeat, ridiculously thankful that somehow he'd gotten past all of that. The Aodhagan I knew was confident and strong. He hadn't gotten that way by accident. It had probably taken years of work and likely some kind of help. Just clearly not from his parents.

  "Eventually, Penny saw what was happening to me, even when my family couldn't, or wouldn't, see it. She realized that I was a suicide risk. I had everything planned out. I was just waiting for the best statistical chance to accomplish what I wanted to do without being caught. I didn't want to be saved by accident. So I was biding my time."

  The words terrified me, even though he was clearly here, perfectly okay. I ached to go back in time and give little Aodhagan the love and support he'd so desperately needed.

  I had known Penny Cadgell nearly all my life. She'd made a deep impression on me. However, Penny had made an impression on a lot of lives before being murdered, not just mine. She was that kind of presence. When he was a child, she'd considered Aodhagan like a son. And I knew he'd loved her too. As an adult, they'd butted heads a bit, but he'd still loved her, despite it all. Probably because he couldn't forget what she'd been to him in the years when it had really mattered. I'd felt the same. Penny gave me love, unadulterated and without strings, when it had been available from no one else who should have been there for me. I grieved her still, even though I hadn't seen her for years before her murder.

  "She fixed it for me because I couldn't fix it myself."

  "How?" I glanced up at him, taking in the prickles of his five o'clock shadow in the low light from the fireplace, the curve of his mouth, the motion of his Adam's apple when he swallowed. I drew a hard breath.

  "Victor." There was a wealth of information in that single word. I had no idea how to read it though.

  "Victor?" For all I knew, Victor could have been a border collie. I had no idea what it had taken to pull Aodhagan from his funk.

  "Victor Hudley."

  I frowned, feeling I should have been able to connect the name with someone I'd met. "Junior's dad?"

  Aodhagan shook his head. "His uncle. Victor was another Birdwell anomaly. He'd fled at the earliest available opportunity, just as I eventually did, given the first opportunity. He worked in New Mexico. At a secret government lab. When I met him, he was an unmarried man in his forties, using his brain like the weapon it was. As soon as Penny brought me into the café and I saw him, it was so clear he was just like me. It wasn't even something I had to discover through conversation. It was just there for me to see. The awkward movements, the untoward humor." His mouth curved slightly. "The notebook full of mathematical equations that he was carrying with him and had open on the table."

  I swallowed hard. "Penny brought him here, just to meet you?" Penny, despite her many faults, had been an extraordinarily understanding person. A person who had deeply touched so many people in desperate need of being touched.

  He nodded. "It was such a revelation. We sat at that table and talked to one another for six hours. Literally. Without pause. And he had a life. He told me all about it. He told me about his coworkers and friends. The other people like him. There were other people like him. He told me about the satisfaction with his job. About his happiness with his life."

  He went back to stroking my hair, though this time, it seemed absent. "There were other people like him, which meant there were other people like me. And I wasn't completely alone. I was just…in the wrong place."

  "I'm glad Penny brought him." They were inadequate words to express how happy I was that she'd made that choice. The world without Aodhagan was not something I wanted to contemplate. I had no idea what all of this had to do with his obsessive need to fix Birdwell, but I knew it would all make sense eventually.

  "You can't begin to imagine the difference it made. Victor made me feel human, when every interaction with others had led me to believe I was completely alien. He started showing up every third Saturday without fail. He brought me notebooks full of equations for me to solve." Another smile ghosted his mouth. "If I solved them, he congratulated me. If I couldn't solve them, I congratulated him for coming up with something so challenging. He was…he was my first friend, and he was thirty years older than me. But it didn't matter to me. I loved all that he was and stood for."

  "So did he come the whole year before you went to college?" Aodhagan was the only person I'd ever met who'd gone away to college at an age most kids weren't even in middle school yet.

  Aodhagan nodded. "And he gave me money for college and a letter of recommendation for Harvard. But it wasn't even that stuff. It was just how he made me feel like my skin was okay to be in. I never forgot that. No matter how long passed. I was finally on a path to my own self-confidence and comfort in my own mind and body. Every third Saturday, all through Harvard and then Johns Hopkins, he called me on the phone. I eventually started sending him problems too. We delighted in trying to outsmart each other."

  "He's dead." I realized it suddenly, and when I saw Aodhagan's flinch, I wished I'd found a way to say it with a bit more tact.

  "He died three years ago." He didn't bother trying to conceal the pain in his voice. Maybe he couldn't even try.

  "I'm sorry."

  He gave me a small smile. "Thanks. But it was my fault."

  "Aodhagan, you think everything is your fault."

  I was serious, but that elicited a low laugh. "Maybe that's true. I didn't start out that way. It wasn't until three years ago…" He shook his head. "In this case, it truly was my fault."

  "Tell me why you think so, and I'll tell you why you're wrong."

  He laughed. "I love that about you. In this case, though, truly it was my fault. It was a combination of issues. I didn't hold a gun to his head. But I could have stopped it."

  "How?"

  He laid his head against mine, rubbing his prickly cheek against my hair. "About five years ago, Victor decided to return to Birdwell to retire. I told him he was crazy, but he was excited to get back to the basics. Around the same time…my mom called. Told me that Doc Holiday was too old. That he couldn't, or wouldn't, keep up with the people who needed help. I blew her off. Told her she was worrying for no reason. She told me that people were going to die if I didn't return to take his place."

  I didn't tell him what I thought about her commentary. Guilting your kid into returning to the underarm of Texas when he was clearly destined for far better didn't put Mama MacFarley into the running for mother of the year in my book. Actually, I couldn't hold my tongue. />
  "That wasn't fair," I pointed out.

  He laughed slightly. "Life isn't fair, honey. She and her committee had spent over a year trying to hire another doctor before she called me. The only applicant who responded was on parole for drinking and driving resulting in vehicular manslaughter and wanted to be paid under the table for whatever reason. Wisely, they declined. Then a woman almost died from an infection that Doc Holliday could have given her antibiotics to fix. He just…didn't."

  "I take it you didn't come."

  He shook his head. "Had I come, Victor would be alive today. I was just…I was busy. I didn't practice by that point. I'd made a lot of money through investments and real estate, and I could afford to take almost no pay to do underfunded research. I was on a team doing research on DIPG. Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. It's a pediatric brain cancer that no patient has ever survived. Not even one. The treatment hasn't changed since the sixties. It needed research, and we were really close to making breakthroughs. Not close enough to help the kids who already had a glioma but close enough that we could change future cases. I told myself I was justified in making the choice to stay in Maryland. That they needed me."

  "That's important work." I knew he was just going to argue with me, but it was true. To whatever child eventually benefited from what Aodhagan had been doing, it would mean the difference between life and death.

  "You're right. It is. But I was only one of a team of researchers. I'm not so fantastic that there aren't two other scientists dying to step in and take my place. It wasn't just arrogance and passion for the work that kept me there. The truth is, I just didn't want to come. I did love what I was doing and it is important, but if I'd been working menial labor, it wouldn't have mattered. I hated Birdwell. There was no motivation in the world that I believed was enough to bring me back to this place."

  But there had been one. He simply hadn't realized it at the time. It took death to bring him back here, but that had clearly been what happened.

  "She asked again. I said no again. She said people were going to die again. I ignored her again. Then one day, Victor woke up and he wasn't feeling too good. He had some shoulder and arm pain, a stomachache. Sweats and anxiety. He went to Holiday, who told him he was just stressed. Maybe catching a cold. He ought to go home and go to sleep. Victor went home and died three hours later on his kitchen floor from a massive heart attack that could have been treated at Tallatahola General had Holiday responded to even one of the multiple signs that Victor was on the verge of cardiovascular collapse."

  I licked my lips. "I'm sorry." The words weren't adequate, but they were all I had.

  "He saved my life, literally. And I repaid him for that by not saving his when I could have had the chance, because of arrogance and disdain. I was too good for Birdwell, even though they were never too good for me. Even though they thought I was a freak, they rallied for me. Victor gave me my life, but I couldn't be bothered to give him his."

  "I'm sorry," I said again.

  He shook his head. "My mom called me at work. I went home in the middle of the day, something I'd never done before in my life. I spent the next forty-seven hours staring at a wall in my bedroom, and then I got in my car and drove to Birdwell and that was that."

  I wasn't a psychologist, though my father was. I'd grown up listening to his million-dollar psychobabble. It was what paid for my boarding school education, horses, braces, and personal driver. It was ridiculous, trite nonsense for the most part, but it had bankrolled my life of ease growing up. I'd extensively studied abnormal psychology for my true crime books. And I'd bankrolled half the private schools in Manhattan by paying for my own therapists as an adult. There was a little bit that I knew about the human mind—or specifically about the way it malfunctioned. If I looked at Aodhagan's story of his behavior before Victor's death and then looked at the evidence of his behavior after Victor's death in the six months I'd been in Birdwell, a pretty clear pattern emerged.

  I was fairly certain Aodhagan suffered from some form of PTSD. Maybe survivor's guilt. He'd allowed a single incident to define the course of his life in a way that he would not have allowed prior to that event. It wasn't even that it had changed his soul and now this was where he wanted to be. He was here because he couldn't live with himself unless he was.

  I took a chance. I knew he would never strike out at me, but he might very well retreat into himself in that way he had. "Being here and being miserable won't bring Victor back," I pointed out gently.

  He lowered his head. "I know that. But it will stop anyone else from dying when there's no reason. Not everyone will come to me. The committee has asked me to respect that ass Holiday and the people in town who continue to see him. Not to try to push him out. So I keep a low profile. I don't advertise or announce that I'm here to treat them. But if I am in charge of their care, another Birdwell resident will never die pointlessly on my watch."

  There was nothing I could say. There might never be a point where Aodhagan would feel he had redeemed himself for his "selfish" choices. He might live and die in this nowhere hole because he had allowed someone else to do the same. And there was nothing I could say to change that.

  "I don't know how anyone can trust me, but these people do, and I will never take advantage of that."

  I snuggled in closer. "I trust you, Aodhagan." I whispered an admission that I would never have revealed to another person, perhaps an appropriate sign of the truth of my statement. He was the only person I could ever remember trusting. "With my life."

  He drew in a hard breath. I could feel it against my cheek. Hear the acceleration of his heartbeat. I chanced a glance up at him, and his eyes were closed, his expression tight. I had pained him somehow, when I'd only been trying to help. Not a huge surprise. But still. There was no way he could understand how much that truth meant to me.

  I'd never felt I could trust anyone before. My parents manipulated me when they could and ignored me when they couldn't. I couldn't trust a single motivation behind a single one of their behaviors. My New York friends weren't good friends. My fiancés lied and cheated. I didn't trust anyone in the world. Except Aodhagan MacFarley. I exhaled quietly, closing my eyes and listening to the sound of driving rain against the tin roof.

  Finally, his stiffness faded, and he pulled me in closer as we borrowed each other's warmth in the frigid living room. "Thank you," he whispered back at last.

  I woke with a start, blinking against the murky light coming in through the paper-thin blinds. It was morning and we'd spent the entire night sleeping on a couch. In true Danny Glover fashion, I was too old for this crap. My body was aching as I stood, trying to get my back to stop seeking revenge for my choices. Aodhagan opened his eyes and smiled at me. It was sweet and absent, like he wasn't completely with it yet, but he was still happy to see me. Affection was another momentary punch in the gut. He was just so dangerous to my resolve. If only he hadn't kissed me. Or maybe if only I had more determination. Actually, if only I had made better choices before. If I had, I might be able to discern whether or not I just had terrible taste or if it was me who made men into utter steaming piles of crap. Because I just couldn't be sure, and I couldn't do that to Aodhagan if it were me who made decent guys into douchebags.

  I moved far away from him, not sure what to do with myself. Aodhagan would make breakfast because that's what he did. I decided the safest thing for me to do was get clean. I could tell from the kitchen light I could see through the doorway that the power had been restored. "I'm going to hit the shower," I told him, like we were some kind of bizarre teammates and pretty soon I was going to slap him on the butt on my way out.

  "Okay," he mumbled, and I got the definite impression he wasn't with it yet.

  Good. He wouldn't remember this mess. I grabbed my bag and took it upstairs with me, dodging Lucky, who was on his way down in search of breakfast or simply trying to kill me and make it look like an accident. He was probably pissed we'd taken away his access to my pond he viewed
as a sushi bar. If we were in a cartoon, I would have been left spinning as Lucky ran through my legs and down the stairs. As it was, I just grabbed the railing and teetered for a few precarious seconds.

  I did have my obsession with statistics about danger. Roughly 136,000 people died a year in accidents. Specifically, the stats for falling deaths were something like 16,000. Accidental deaths were the fourth most common cause of death. Lucky was trying to murder me. No question. And yet, I just kept feeding him. There was probably some kind of pathology involved in that.

  I took a very long, hot shower, washing off the events of the previous day. If only it were that easy to get rid of the Crowe family in general or the specter of a murder accusation hanging over Aodhagan. Whatever we needed to do to get Connie and the Crowe crew out of Birdwell, I was all for doing it as soon as possible. That meant we were going to have to figure out who killed Carl and why. Because otherwise, who knew how long it would take the state police to wrap this whole thing up. Nobody had time for that.

  I dressed and fixed my hair, fishing my contacts out of the solution I'd left them in only long enough clean up. It wasn't enough, but I'd fallen asleep wearing them, so what else could I do? Fresh clothes and being clean made me feel better anyway, even if nothing was solved.

  Downstairs, Aodhagan handed me an omelet, chock-full of probably my day's supply of vegetable servings, before heading up to his own bathroom. If it were a normal morning, I knew he'd be off to run, but I guessed he wouldn't today, given the situation. I was just eating my last bite when the doorbell rang. Sighing, I headed for the door. It wasn't my house, but Aodhagan would want me to let the visitor in. Actually, if it were my house, I definitely wouldn't have answered. I would have gone to my office and pretended I didn't hear anything.