A Charm of Finches

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Normal means ordinary, right?” Stef said. “So what’s the opposite of ordinary?”

  Geno thought a moment. “I don’t know. Special?”

  Stef nodded. “Or extraordinary.”

  “Or bizarre.”

  “Does bizarre ring true?”

  Geno said nothing.

  “Think about it,” Stef said. “It’s true nothing about your life will be normal. But it doesn’t mean you’ve been branded a freak.”

  “Just a victim,” Geno said.

  “Or a survivor.”

  Not for the first time, Geno thought about the numbers on Micah Kalo’s arm. Surviving on the illusion of his own spit. The extraordinary lengths gone to survive. “I guess.”

  “It also means whomever you choose to love or be with in the future is going to be an extraordinary person as well.”

  Geno snorted. “To deal with my shit.”

  “To earn your trust and have the privilege of dealing with your legitimate shit.”

  “How do you always keep your glass half-full?”

  “It’s easier than leaving it half-empty.”

  Geno exhaled heavily. “I can’t just… La de da, I was raped but life is beautiful.”

  “No. You were raped and parts of your beautiful life were taken away from you. You were raped and your life is different now. But it doesn’t mean your life is diminished or disqualified. It doesn’t make you any less deserving of a beautiful life.” Stef leaned forward a little. “Does it?”

  Geno’s eyes burned and his throat squeezed around the answer.

  “It sounds like an obvious question,” Stef said. “But it’s valid. Do you deserve it?”

  The tears dripped down Geno’s face.

  “Do you deserve a beautiful life?” Stef said.

  Geno nodded.

  “You didn’t deserve what happened to you and you do deserve a beautiful life. You deserve an extraordinary person whom you can trust with your heart and your soul and your body. And trust with everything that hurts and scares you, too. Do you believe it?”

  “Yeah,” Geno said, thinking, Right now, that person is you.

  The art therapists at CCT were constantly trying new things, mixing and matching techniques and philosophies. No box could contain their creative thinking as they tried to channel debilitating internal pain into liberating external expression.

  You never knew what would wake a client up. One week Stef set zen gardens on each of the art tables. Large trays with sand, smooth polished rocks, and a small wooden rake. Geno, typically ambivalent to projects, played with it his entire session, raking patterns around the rocks then smoothing the sand out. Rearranging the rocks and starting over, talking the whole while.

  “My brother and I got suspended freshman year,” he said.

  Stef raised his eyebrows.

  “We had all the same classes and teachers, but different schedules. One day we had both an English test and a math test.” He looked over at Stef. “Can you guess where this is going?”

  “I have a pretty good idea.”

  As he spoke, Geno took all the stones out of the tray and ran a flat palm over the sand, obliterating the squiggled lines. “I was better at math. He was straight As in English. Teachers were constantly mixing us up anyway. So we swapped places. I took the math test for both of us, he took care of the English.”

  “How’d you get busted?”

  Geno’s finger flicked every stray grain of sand from the edge of the tray. “Identical tests. Identical mistakes. And when I wrote his name on his test, I put Carlito by mistake. He didn’t use that name in school. It was a family thing.”

  “Oops.”

  “They called us into the office. Our parents showed up.” The memory must have been visceral, because Geno’s entire body winced as he placed a single stone in the center of the tray. “God, it sucked.”

  “Yeah, that’s one you eat for a long time.”

  The rake dragged around the perimeter of the stone. A painstaking effort to match up the lines as the circle closed. Geno made a second ring of lines around the first. He pulled the wooden teeth from the rings out to the edge of the tray, a snaking line.

  “I don’t have much more to tell,” he said. “Just free-styling my feels. As one does.”

  Stef was pleased with the session. At the next one, he tried Geno at the sand table.

  Geno snorted at the setup, but soon he was scooping up a fistful of sand and letting it tumble through his fingers. He poured from one palm to the other. Buried a hand beneath the surface and slowly watched it emerge.

  “I always loved the beach,” he said, mesmerized by the film of sand on the back of his hand.

  “Did you go often?”

  “Mm. We had a house in Mantaloking. We spent every summer there, ever since I can remember. Dad always took a picture of me and Carlito at this same place on the boardwalk…”

  His body slid sideways, his cheek coming to rest on his knuckles, propped on an elbow while his other hand dug into the past. “The summer I was fifteen was hard. My mom was dying. She died around Halloween and that summer at the beach…we knew it was her last one. I didn’t think we’d go the following year but we did. Dad said she’d want us to.”

  His stillness was magical. “Mom loved to collect sea glass. She loved the blue pieces, the real deep cobalt ones. They were like her holy grail. The first summer after she was gone, Carlito and I must’ve found twenty pieces. We weren’t even trying. We just kept glancing down and seeing bits of blue while we were swimming or surfing. Or we’d be walking along and a piece would be sitting there in the sand. Waiting for us. Hey, boys. It’s me.”

  His chest expanded and contracted in long even breaths. He’d gone somewhere else. Somewhere peaceful, full of wistful memory more sweet than bitter. Stef let him be, knowing serene moments were few and far between.

  “Where are you right now?” he finally asked, softly, not wanting to break the spell.

  “On the beach.”

  “Who are you with?”

  His mouth poised around unspoken words, Geno’s eyes looked around the room, then his head swiveled left and right. “Just me,” he said, looking puzzled. “Weird, I was feeling really young, like eight or nine. But I was walking by myself.”

  “You looked peaceful.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded even more puzzled. He blinked a few times and sat up. He reached for water and poured it into the center of the sand bin, stirring it around with his fingers to make a thin mud.

  “So, I was thinking,” he said. “Something we talked about last time. My brother and I feeling the same thing together and not able to pass it off?” A muscle quivered in Geno’s jaw. Both hands clenched in the wet sand now. It oozed through his fingers. “I feel like I’m holding all of it now,” he said.

  “Tell me.” Two words Stef said eighty times a day.

  “Carlito killed himself because it was too much to hold. Some days, I don’t give a shit. Other days, I feel like I’m carrying both of us. Some days I hate his fucking guts. Other days I’d…” Geno turned his head to wipe his face on his sleeve. “I’d do anything to see him again. Because he’s the only one who understands.”

  Stef rubbed the back of his head, really wanting to rub and scratch at his face. If the kid could only see the howling frustration going on behind the professional mask. This was one of the toughest, most complex cases he’d ever worked. He didn’t expect every session to accomplish something but he struggled hard to corral these issues into place. It was like trying to juggle wet bars of soap.

  “He could tell you why he did it,” he said.

  “Killed himself?”

  “No. Brought you into Anthony’s house.”

  “I literally do not want to know that reason,” Geno said. “Ever. No reason could make me feel better.
The reason is pointless. Useless. No justification exists for what my brother did to me.”

  He opened his hands and regarded the oblongs of sand, molded and creased to fit his palms. He exhaled a tremendous sigh, slumping in the chair. “I’m really scared that I’m just fucked up for life.”

  Stef nodded. “That’s a really legit fear.”

  “A lot of times, I’m even kind of glad my father’s dead and he can’t see me like this.” A tear snaked its way down the boy’s face. “It would’ve killed him.”

  “You know,” Stef said. “I have a dozen ways to explore that statement. But right now I’m going to isolate your concern for your father’s well-being and say something I said before.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They didn’t get the best of you.”

  Geno’s face twisted, his chin dropping toward his chest.

  “You still have the best parts of you,” Stef said. “I don’t think they’re lost. I think you put them away somewhere really, really deep inside, where no one can ever touch or hurt or betray or fuck them again.”

  “I don’t know where I am,” Geno said, fingers moving through the sand.

  “The good parts of you are still there. The best parts of you. You parents are gone but you’re still a good son. Your brother betrayed you, betrayed Nos, yet you still feel one of his stars. These are signs of a decent, compassionate human being, not a fuck-up.”

  “Everything hurts so much. I just want it to stop. I can’t get away from it. It follows me everywhere and won’t leave me alone. All day, every day, all I think is that I want to die, and I’m afraid I won’t.”

  “You’re afraid you won’t die.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can we talk about that?”

  The boy’s shoulders flicked up and down.

  “How often do you think about suicide?”

  “Every day.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  The head shook slowly side to side.

  “So it’s an ideation of suicide but you don’t have any methods lined up.”

  “No.” Now the red-rimmed, blurry eyes found Stef’s gaze. “That’s good, right?”

  Stef nodded. “Suicide is often a metaphor for stopping the pain. You want the pain to die while keeping yourself. You have ideas, but no plans. But when suicidal thoughts are accompanied by stockpiling pills or knowing where you can get your hands on a gun or planning which bridge you’ll jump from... That’s different.”

  “I want to die,” Geno said. “But I don’t think I want to…kill myself. I mean, you’d think I would’ve done it by now, right?”

  “I do,” Stef said. “But if your ideas start making plans, do you think you could tell me? Or Dr. Stein? Or anyone you have a shred of trust for?”

  The breath Geno drew in trembled. As if this were the scariest thing he could be thinking. “Yeah,” he said. “I could tell you.”

  Days stacked up into weeks, each day following a pattern of sleep, meds, meals, activities, appointments. Group therapy, shifts in the kitchen and time in the art room.

  Geno spent about a third of his sessions talking, then Stef came up with some kind of exercise. Sometimes Geno could see the connection to what they’d been discussing, other assignments seemed totally random. Either way, he tried his best. Laughing a little too heartily at his pathetic attempts to be artistic, even as something in his gut blinked at Stef with hopeful eyes, wanting to please.

  “You don’t suck as bad as you think,” Stef said.

  “Don’t sweet talk me.”

  “I’m not. You got a raw talent. Maybe you don’t have technique. You don’t understand perspective and you shade things ass-backward. But the way you see is special. When you get out of your own way, your subconscious and your imagination come up with some really cool stuff.”

  Stef’s finger ran along the edge of Geno’s self-portrait. It was a close-up of his face. The features were all out of proportion and he’d stuck to a safe palette of neutral colors. He spent a lot of time on the eyes, consulting magazine photos and books he found on the art room shelves. In each dilated pupil was the reflection of a twin bed. In the left eye, a figure lay in the bed, hands cuffed to the iron headboard. In the right eye, the bed was empty, the cuffs dangling unused from a rail.

  For the assignment of an abstract self-portrait, Geno did little more than lay down a black background, then dump a mess of brown, grey and yellow on the paper, swirling it together in clouds of gloom. Nervousness squeezed him as Stef looked it over.

  “No adjectives,” Geno said, poking at the damp paper with the tips of scissors, gouging holes in it. “It’s just how I feel.”

  Stef had an ocean wave tattooed on the side of his neck, a single bird flying above its crest. Now, as he nodded, the tendons in his throat flexed, making the bird come alive.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s pretty much how I imagine you’d feel.” His fingertip moved along a sharp delineation between the black background and the sickly clouds. “This right here is…”

  “What?” Geno said.

  “I don’t know. Something like a sandstorm moving across the desert at night. How it would obscure the stars.”

  Stef took the paper over to the window. Geno thought he was setting it on the sill to dry. Instead, Stef leaned the paper against the panes, reaching long for a roll of scotch tape to fasten down the corners. He stood back, arms crossed and staring a moment, then looked over his shoulder at Geno.

  “Look how the sunlight comes through the holes,” he said. “Like the stars are still there.”

  Geno’s next assignment was harder. Another abstract self-expression, but Stef said it had to not only be before the rape, but before his mother died.

  “Why then?” Geno asked.

  “Because you’ve often said it was the last time in your life you remember being completely happy.”

  I say too fucking much in here, Geno thought.

  “Try to draw that happiness.” Stef said, setting down the blank paper. “Show who you were when you were fourteen. Or even before your mother got sick for the first time. When was that, eleven?”

  Eleven, Jesus.

  This was the hardest fucking thing to do. It took Geno a good twenty minutes to work through the frustration of not remembering, then the frustration of not being able to express what he did remember. Then of course, he wanted it to look good, which further frustrated him.

  He was fidgeting with the star of David on his chain, cursing under his breath. When all at once the bit of gold took on weight in his fingers. It seemed bigger. Louder.

  He remembered talking with Jav once, asking him how he came up with ideas for stories. Jav shrugged and called it The Thing. When a portal to some elusive and eternal source of creativity opened inside Jav’s head. His fingertips went all itchy, his eyes stared through particles of oxygen and he started mumbling under his breath.

  “I have no idea where it comes from,” he said. “Maybe The Thing happens to all of us, but only some of us listen to it?”

  Lips faintly moving as The Thing whispered in his ear, Geno picked up a pencil and drew a six-pointed star in the exact center of the paper. He drew a circle around it. Curved around the top, he lettered Natan ben Heironim. Beneath, he wrote Gallinero. He enclosed the lettering in a circle, then made music notes radiate out like petals. More rings. Thick, thin, patterned and plain.

  “It’s a mandala,” Stef said.

  The circles grew bigger, rippling out from the star of David. A ring of little hens, another of hunchbacked Quasimodos. Hearts. Houses. Kitchen knives. Radios. His own tattoo designs, symbols and signs. When he blanked out, he lettered his name round and round. Geronimo Gallinero Caan Geronimo Gallinero Caan Geronimo Gallinero Caan…

  With a fine-tipped Sharpie, he inked over all the penciled marks, then took
a week adding color. When he was done, a church’s stained glass window filled the paper, dazzling and dizzying.

  “Now watch.” Stef took the sandstorm-desert self-portrait and laid it on top of the mandala, lining up the edges. Now holding Then hostage.

  “Well, there you have it,” Geno said. “I can’t find the old me.”

  “Sure you can,” Stef said.

  “Can I?”

  “Think about it. You’ve already started.”

  “You mean therapy?”

  “No. Think more literal than that.”

  Geno stared at the sickly grey and dun clouds. Slowly he realized Stef meant the holes. He reached and started to widen a few of them. Tearing them open. Showing the color beneath.

  “There you are,” Stef said.

  The days began to orient themselves around Geno’s sessions with Stef. More often than not, Geno left them feeling better. Stef could always reach into the junk heap of Geno’s soul and extract one tiny piece of gold. Some little piece of truth that sustained him until the next time.

  Stef began to show up in his dreams. Geno would be climbing a mountain or trekking down a long road. Stef gave a boost, threw a rope or directed the route.

  Hold on, let me check first. No, don’t go that way. It’s not safe. Come this way. Follow me.

  In dreams Stef stayed close by. Tough and tattooed and immutable, but soft with compassion. Firm, but gentle. Like a father.

  Or a big brother.

  Sometimes Geno woke from the dreams alarmed. Am I crushing on him?

  He reviewed the imagery carefully. No, I’m just trusting him.

  Everyone trusts him. He’s good at what he does.

  Geno watched Stef work with Juan one day. Clearly unearthing some painful insight because Juan broke down. Geno could tell it wasn’t a clean, cathartic cry but one of those jags that made you feel you were utterly losing your grip on the world. This one would kill you. You were done. Defeated. You couldn’t go on anymore.

  Stef got him to walk. He did this a lot with residents having a breakdown. To attach gross motor movement to the experience. To be present in the moment so you could remember later (if you were alive) you survived. To show that you could carry the fuck on even as you were being shredded into pieces.