Uncommon Passion

by Anne Calhoun

  “Disney World, remember? I love you, Jonathan. Ben’s here. Take him,” he said to Ben. Between the two of them they pried the screaming child from the man’s arms. Then he kissed Jonathan on the top of his head and sprinted for a car parked in the street.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jonathan’s heartbreaking wails were the soundtrack to Ben’s voiceless dreams. The year they were five. The year they were sixteen.

  The driver hit the siren as the bus bumped over the curb, startling him into the now. It wasn’t supposed to be Sam who got hurt. It was supposed to be Ben. Stupid, adrenaline-junkie Ben, walking into robberies in progress, tackling a tweaking dealer. Not Sam, gentle, loving Sam who’d been through so much.

  Ben couldn’t hear himself think over the crying, let alone figure out how to stop it. Sam was gone. Chris was gone. As the first responders packed up, going through the routine they all used to distance themselves from the job, the EMTs, firefighters, and cops were watching with a mixture of sympathy and that oddly blank look he recognized. The only way to deal with what they faced was to block it out. Newer first responders still showed some expression, those and the truly empathetic.

  Rachel’s face showed neither. She stood in the middle of his brother’s front lawn, his car keys in her hand, and he couldn’t read her eyes. Dark hair, golden eyes, pale skin, a body he knew as well as he knew his own, but she was absolutely opaque to him.

  For a moment neither of them moved, then he felt a warm wetness spread down his hip. Rachel figured it out before he did, hurrying past him and up the stairs to the front door. When Jonathan’s cries shifted from anguish to shame, he got it.

  “Christ,” he muttered, and took the steps two at a time, Jonathan still wailing away. Rachel had the door open. Most of the interior lights were on. He brushed past her and headed upstairs, into the white tiled bathroom. Jonathan was sobbing brokenly now, tears wetting his shirt as he clung to him so tightly Ben couldn’t break the hold to get his wet shorts and underpants off. He also couldn’t find the distance that came so easily on the job.

  Because this wasn’t the job. He shut the toilet lid and sat down on it, shifting Jonathan on his lap.

  “How can I help?” Rachel asked quietly from the doorway.

  At the sound of her voice, Jonathan hid his face in the crook of Ben’s neck. He warmed up to strangers slowly at best, often navigating the crowd in the house wearing a superhero cape and mask on his way to the tree house to deflect attention or comments. Sam and Chris prepped visitors by telling them Jonathan was invisible, but pretending didn’t make it so, and deep down, Jonathan knew that.

  “You can’t help,” Ben said. “Take my truck and go home. I’ll have someone drive me out tomorrow to get it.”

  She gave him a level look, then turned and disappeared. Ben heard drawers opening in Jonathan’s room, then she reappeared with a dry pair of Superman underpants and cotton sleep shorts. She set them on the sink. Then her flat shoes clapped down the stairs, and the front door closed.

  “Come on, buddy,” Ben said. “Let’s get you changed.”

  Jonathan kept on sobbing. The kid’s shoulder blades stuck out like bird wings from his skinny back. Ben could count every vertebra in his spine, see the knobs of his hips through the soft shorts and his ankle bones where his long legs dangled on either side of Ben’s. He was basically skin and bones, his breaths wracking his body from shoulders to toes. Urine trickled down his leg and Ben’s, and he showed no sign of moving, let alone wanting to get cleaned up and into dry clothes.

  “I want Sam,” he sobbed. “I want Sam.”

  “Sam will be back soon,” Ben said, lying through his teeth.

  “When?” Jonathan sobbed, his tone escalating. “When will he come back?”

  Based on Chris’s admittedly hysterical description of Sam’s tumble from the top rung of the ladder to the cement garage floor, it was entirely possible Sam wouldn’t come back at all. Hemorrhage, swelling on the brain, concussion, blot clots, the shock to his heart and nervous system—all the possibilities danced in Ben’s mind. Not to mention the possibility that he lived, but in some vastly reduced mental capacity. All of that assumed no damage to his spine in the fall.

  Ben’s eyes burned. His throat tightened, and for a long moment his heart seemed to halt midbeat.

  He’d waited too long to answer Jonathan. Crying, the kid shoved off Ben’s lap and huddled in against the wall, emptying his soul into a void Ben knew didn’t answer back, didn’t give a damn that your world was coming apart around you. He was sweating, Jonathan was sweating, the room stank of urine, and the screams slashed like razors at Ben’s eardrums. In the early days when Jonathan had come to live with them, Sam told Ben about the night terrors, the seemingly random screaming fits that happened anywhere from the backyard to the supermarket to the park, about how the only thing to do was to sit with him until he settled down.

  It sounded easier than it was. He sat down next to the kid, but by the time Jonathan went limp against him they were both sweat-soaked, their clothes damp with urine, tears, and snot. “You ready to take a shower?” Ben said.

  A sniff, then Jonathan nodded. “Don’t leave.”

  “I won’t,” Ben promised. That he could promise. He wouldn’t leave. He didn’t leave.

  To give Jonathan some privacy, he busied himself shaking out the fresh clothes while the boy shoved his wet shorts into the laundry hamper. Then he stepped into the shower, but the curtain slid open thirty seconds later.

  “Use soap everywhere,” Ben said without thinking, echoing what his mother used to say.

  The curtain closed again. This time when it opened suds were dripping from the kid’s ear, so Ben assumed he’d made at least a cursory effort to get clean. He held open the shark towel embroidered with Jonathan, and the kid dried himself off. As kids, they’d never had anything with their names embroidered on it. Sam and Chris were trying so hard.

  Ben opened the door to head down the hall, into Sam and Chris’s bedroom in search of a dry pair of shorts for himself.

  “Where are you going?” Jonathan demanded.

  “I’m going to go into Sam’s room and get some dry clothes,” he said.

  “I wet my pants,” Jonathan whispered, tears welling up in his eyes.

  “It happens,” Ben said matter-of-factly.

  Still wrapped in the shark towel, Jonathan blinked then followed him, sitting down on the floor behind the bed to pull on his underpants and shorts while Ben rummaged through Sam’s dresser. Jonathan scrambled to his feet to follow Ben back into the bathroom.

  “Wait out here, buddy,” he said.

  The boy’s enormous, red-rimmed eyes got bigger. “Don’t close the door,” he whispered. His breath clogged in his chest, no wonder given that he’d been bawling flat out for nearly half an hour.

  “I won’t,” Ben said.

  He stripped to his skin, took a thirty-second shower, then pulled on Sam’s shorts and a T-shirt. When he was dressed he found Jonathan sitting on the floor outside the door, his attention focused on the stairs. Ben heard the rustling of plastic sacks.

  “Somebody’s here,” he said.

  He knew who was down there, but he said, “Let’s go see.”

  Rachel stood behind the butcher block island, unpacking a plastic sack from the grocery store. Chocolate chips. Vanilla. Brown sugar.

  “I told you to go home,” Ben said roughly as Jonathan hid his face in Ben’s side.

  “Bear told me to make cookies,” she said, then nodded at the bear, sitting at the kitchen table.

  Ben and Jonathan both looked at the bear, like stuffing and fur were going to explain what the hell that meant, then Ben transferred his gaze to the clock set into the rooster’s abdomen. “It’s almost midnight,” he said.

  “Bears don’t care what time it i
s when they want cookies,” she told him evenly.

  “What kind does he want?” Jonathan asked, his face still buried in Ben’s borrowed shirt.

  “He likes chocolate chip,” she said. She wasn’t looking at Jonathan, Ben noticed. “What kind does Sam make?”

  Jonathan looked at her like she’d fallen out of the sky. “Sam doesn’t make cookies,” he said. “Chris makes cookies.”

  Rachel still wasn’t looking at Ben, or Jonathan. “Okay, so what kind of cookies does Chris make?”

  “M&M’s,” Jonathan said.

  “Is that what Chris likes?”

  “That’s what me and Sam like. Chris likes oatmeal chocolate chip.”

  Rachel seemed to consider this. “Bear likes M&M’s,” she said. “We could make the oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and put M&M’s in some of them.”

  Jonathan didn’t say anything, and Rachel went ahead, opening cupboard doors for mixing bowls, drawers for measuring cups, the pantry for ingredients. “Can you show me where Chris keeps his recipes?”

  A beat passed, then Jonathan slid out of Ben’s arms and went to the shelf that held the cookbooks to remove a three-ring binder. He and Rachel paged through it while Ben pulled a chair back from the kitchen table and settled into it. An unexpected emotion surfaced through Ben’s turmoil: gratitude. Her slow, calm movements caught Jonathan’s eye but weren’t frantic or even upbeat. She was doing something routine, giving the boy something that would anchor him in the present and distract him from what happened earlier.

  She was doing what Ben couldn’t. She was comforting Jonathan. Humming quietly under her breath she studied the recipe. “Want to help?”

  He nodded. Together they measured out flour, sugar, salt. Rachel opened the bag of chips and sprinkled four or five into the batter.

  “Bear wants more,” Jonathan said.

  Her eyebrows rose. “He does? Want to measure them for me?”

  He nodded, found his stool, and carefully poured a cup of chips, then the bag collapsed and a bunch extra fell onto the counter. “Oops,” Rachel said matter-of-factly. “Dump in what you poured out.”

  Jonathan did, then looked at Rachel. She sectioned off most of the spillage, swept them into her cupped palm, and added them to the batter. “The rest are for us,” she said, and popped one into her mouth.

  The silence had an odd note to it, as if the night’s terrifying events took everyone somewhere they didn’t want to go. Ben, Jonathan, even Rachel. “Who taught you how to make cookies?” Ben asked. That wasn’t what he meant. He meant, Who taught you to make cookies for terrified children at midnight?

  “My mama taught me,” she said, talking to Jonathan. “But my daddy used to make them with me when I woke up with bad dreams.”

  Bad dreams. He thought about the Pleasure Pier and kinky sex and standing her up. Shame crawled up his spine.

  “I have bad dreams,” Jonathan said.

  Rachel nodded. “What do Sam and Chris do?”

  “We talk about it. Sam sings, sometimes.”

  Ben looked up at that. But Rachel just continued mixing the cookie dough. The little boy’s chin trembled.

  “What if I have bad dreams tonight?” he whispered.

  Rachel flicked Ben a glance that read, Do you sing?

  Not since I was sixteen.

  He shook his head. “We’ll deal with it if it happens, buddy,” he said. Jonathan swiped at his eyes and went to sit with Bear, not Ben. Rachel dropped spoonfuls of dough onto the cookie sheet she found in the drawer under the oven. In just a few minutes the smell of baking cookies permeated the air. She stayed next to the oven, busying herself with tidying up. Wiping counters. Folding dishtowels and aligning them neatly on the oven door handle. Putting everything away, except the half-eaten bag of M&M’s she’d found in the cupboard.

  When the timer beeped she pulled the first batch of cookies from the oven, slid three onto individual plates, and topped one with M&M’s. She poured Jonathan a glass of milk, and sat down across from them. Jonathan sat up and reached for the cookie.

  “It’s gonna be hot, sweetheart,” Rachel said.

  Jonathan waited, then bit into the cookie carefully. He ate it like it was the only thing keeping him from a horrible black void he faced far too often, slowly, carefully, staving off God only knew what. Terror, probably. Bedtime, for sure. The kid’s eyelids were drooping even as he ate.

  “Can I have another one?”

  Rachel’s eyes met Ben’s. He shrugged. She looked back at Jonathan. “Not tonight,” she said gently. “But you can have three more M&M’s.”

  “Five?”

  “Deal.”

  He ate those as slowly as the cookie, but when Ben stood he didn’t protest at all. Ben carried him upstairs and laid him in his bed, surrounded by the kinds of soft things little kids loved. “Will you sit with me?” Jonathan whispered.

  It had to be bad if not-Sam was an acceptable substitute, so he stayed while Jonathan wriggled his way into a comfortable position. Light picked out the bumps of his fragile spine, and after a minute, Ben stroked the smooth skin of his back, once. Again. Jonathan’s eyelids drooped, then closed. Ben kept his hand between his shoulder blades until he twitched.

  Back downstairs, Rachel was sitting on the sofa. She looked up when Ben dropped into the chair opposite her. “Why didn’t you tell me about them?”

  “Same reason you didn’t tell me you were a virgin. We don’t have a talk-about-family kind of relationship,” he said, too strung out to filter to his words.

  “You assumed I’d judge your brother for being gay,” she said.

  Fine, they’d go there. “I’m careful who I bring into my brother’s home.”

  She looked around, at the house decorated like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog. “It’s a beautiful home, but that’s not what you’re careful about letting someone into,” she said quietly. “You assume I’m quite the hypocrite if I’ll sleep with you in place of going to church and at the same time judge your family.”

  Ben just shrugged. “Good old-fashioned heterosexual sex with a cop on Sundays is totally normal. None of this is normal.”

  “I grew up at Elysian Fields, so I don’t know much about normal,” she said. “But I know love and compassion when I see it.”

  “Your dad made cookies when you had nightmares? Sounds like something a mom would do.”

  “My mother’s death caused the nightmares,” she said, still calm. “I’d wake up screaming for her, and when I got older I started dreaming that the cancer that killed her was inside me, eating me like it ate her. At the end she smelled like something rotting, and the smell was in my dreams. I was terrified to sleep. My dad made me cookies because the smell reminded me of better times with her, and after we baked, I could go back to sleep.”

  The words were a slap across the face. They spawned a hundred questions he had no right to ask and tilted his perception of Rachel’s previous life entirely on its head. Because dads who made cookies for their scared daughters weren’t the kinds of Bible-thumping repressive monsters daughters left behind easily. She hadn’t walked away from unilaterally horrible. She’d walked away from people who loved her, people she loved.

  He was in too deep, she was too deep for a man like him, and he didn’t have anything left inside to give her. The way she studied him, the way her golden eyes peered right through him made him feel naked.

  “Take my truck and go home,” Ben said. “I don’t know when I’ll be out to get it.”

  Rachel considered this. “I’ll drive it back into town when the Truck Garden comes tomorrow and catch a ride home with them.”

  With Katy out of town for who knew how long, he didn’t argue with her. “Just tell me where you leave it,” he said.

  “I’ll stay if you want me to,” she
said quietly. “If you don’t want to be alone.”

  “Right now all I want is to be alone,” he said just as quietly.

  It should have been him. He should have been hurt. Not Sam. Never Sam.

  He didn’t mean it. She took him at his word, and left.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Spring sunshine winked off Ben’s black truck, hulking over Rachel’s Focus and Jess’s VW Bug. Coffee cups in hand, Jess and Rachel stood on the front porch, contemplating this new addition to the apprentice parking lot.

  “Why did you drive his truck home?”

  “He had a family emergency,” Rachel said, fairly sure that Ben Harris wouldn’t want his family issues trumpeted to all and sundry. He’d been vibrating so hard she expected him to shatter at any minute. Probably she should have left the first time he told her to, but there was no way she was leaving that terrified child without trying to help him.

  His screams took her back to a place no child should ever have to go and no adult ever wanted to revisit, and Ben’s obvious heartbreak in the face of Jonathan’s fear and grief nearly broke her heart. Doing the only thing she knew how to do to comfort someone wasn’t an impulse. It was a need, a way to reconnect with the father who considered her dead, a way to help in the face of overpowering anguish. The grocery store was five minutes away. Sam and Chris must bake quite a bit because the list on the fridge included vanilla and chocolate chips. She picked up the milk and orange juice and whole-wheat tortillas because she was going, and she might as well.

  Flinging her childhood terrors at him like scalding oil on what had to be one of the most difficult nights of his life wasn’t in the plan, either.

  Still eyeing the big black truck, Jess said, “Is he compensating?”

  Yes, in a hundred different ways, but weren’t we all? “For what?” she asked as she set her cup on the railing and picked up a covered casserole dish.

  “You know. Big truck. Small dick.”

  “No,” she said distractedly as another piece fell into place. Ben would drive the truck because it could handle anything. Nothing would stop him from getting to someone who needed help. The truck, the attitude, the muscles, the job . . . all of it fit together seamlessly to form the shell of Ben the Indestructible Protector.