When Aiden walked into the house, Milo was back on the couch in the TV room. Hunched over himself. Hugging his own knees and crying.
Aiden stood over the boy, who withdrew further into himself.
This little missing person, someone said in his head.
It was something he remembered. Someone had said it, sometime. But he couldn’t remember when or who. But it was a thing. A real thing, that he knew. Like a belonging he had misplaced years ago and hadn’t thought about since, but recognized immediately when he saw it again.
He heard a noise behind him, and turned to see that Elizabeth had followed him into the room. He looked into her face and she smiled sadly and looked away.
“Lock us in here,” he said. “Please.”
She looked up at him again but said nothing.
Meanwhile Milo cried harder, and with more force. “No!” the boy shrieked. “Don’t leave me with him, Lizzie!”
“I won’t hurt him. I promise. I just need to know he’s going to stay in this room with me.”
“But if you’re right here with him . . .” She trailed off.
“But if he gets up and walks out, what am I supposed to do? I can’t physically stop him without setting him off.”
“Oh. Right.”
Meanwhile Milo cried into his own knees and said nothing.
“How do I lock you in?” she asked, peering at the outside of the door. “There’s no lock.”
“Get one of the chairs from the kitchen table and wedge it under the knob. Can you untack the pony and put her away by yourself?”
“I think so. Where do I put her?”
“You can put her in an empty stall in the barn for now. And give Buddy some reassurance. Please. I’ll take care of that rope burn as soon as I get out. Come knock every once in a while, okay? In case one of us needs to go to the bathroom or something. Otherwise we’ll stay right here until your mother gets back.”
Elizabeth nodded mutely. Then she stepped out and closed the door. A minute later Aiden heard the scrape of the chair being wedged under the knob.
“No!” Milo screamed, startling Aiden and hurting his ears. “No, don’t leave me with him, Lizzie!”
“I won’t hurt him,” Aiden called to her through the door.
“He will! I know he will! He’s going to kill me!”
“I’m not going to kill him,” Aiden said as calmly as possible. “I’m not even going to touch him. I just need to know where he is.” A long silence. Then Aiden said, looking right at Milo but loud enough for Elizabeth to hear, “If I was going to hurt him, it would have been out there. I’ve had time to cool off now.”
“I know you won’t,” Elizabeth said through the door. Barely audible.
Milo’s only answer was to scoot off the couch and run behind an upholstered chair, where he crouched on the floor, back up against a corner, skinny legs and sneakered feet sticking out.
Time stretched out from that moment into something so slow as to be nearly impossible to bear.
The idea, as far as Aiden could tell, had been to spend this time talking to the boy. Even though he knew the chances of talking with him were close to none. But Aiden could still say what he wanted Milo to know. He just had to give up on the idea that he would know how his words were being received.
But Aiden felt so entirely overwhelmed by the otherness, the “missingness,” of the boy in his care, that it played out as several painfully long hours of neither of them speaking any words to the other at all.
It wasn’t until they had sat there together—in a very loose sense of the word—for the better part of an hour that Aiden realized his hands were shaking. Had been shaking for some while. He figured they would stop within a reasonable space of time.
He was wrong.
Aiden could not have guessed how much time had passed before he heard the chair scrape away from the knob again. The door opened, and Gwen leaned her head into the room.
She looked at Milo’s feet sticking out from behind the chair, then at Aiden, then back to Milo again.
Aiden had not properly spent the afternoon considering what he would say to Gwen. How he would explain their horrible day.
As it turned out, not much explanation was required. The look that passed between them said all Aiden had planned to communicate, along with quite a few things he would have preferred to keep to himself.
Chapter Eleven
The Unearthing
“But you didn’t,” Hannah said, pulling Aiden’s gaze away from the downtown Bakersfield skyline. “You stopped yourself in time. I think you get credit for that. Don’t you?”
“That’s pretty much what Elizabeth said, too.”
“Smart girl.”
“She’s amazing,” Aiden said. He could feel the wonder that filled his voice when he spoke about her, along with the lifting of the dark cloud left by Milo. “She’s such a great kid. She makes me feel . . .” But then he realized he had no ending to that sentence. If the thought had concluding words, he didn’t know them. Yet.
“What? She makes you feel what?”
“Like . . .”—and then there it was. Just like that—“a father. Like I could be a father. It’s really nice.”
“So you’re saying she makes it easy to love her.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“And Milo makes it hard to love him. But he still needs you to.”
“I don’t think Milo even wants me to love him.”
“He wants somebody to.”
“His mother loves him.”
“Good. Then there’s hope. Elizabeth was right. You don’t have to pay for what you didn’t do. What did Gwen say about the whole incident?”
“The same. That I didn’t hurt him and that’s what matters.”
“Did you know your hands are shaking?”
“Oh,” Aiden said. “Yeah.”
He pressed his palms together and wedged them between his thighs. That didn’t stop them from shaking. But at least it put them out of sight.
“How long has that been going on?”
“Since that incident I was just telling you about.”
“This whole time?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to get us off track. We were talking about Elizabeth.”
“Oh, right. She said something else interesting. I said I wanted Milo to know how it felt. What he did to that poor dog. You know. The fear. She said, ‘He knows.’”
“Again . . . smart girl.”
Aiden thought once more of Elizabeth’s quick forgiveness of him. Standing at the corner of the house, holding the reins of her pony, saying the same sort of things Hannah said for a living. The cloud returned.
“I don’t see why I should get credit for the fact that I didn’t, though. Tighten the rope, I mean. I don’t think it’s fair to let me off the hook. I could have done it.”
He spoke with his gaze trained out the window. He hadn’t met her eyes once since coming through the door.
“Okay. Here’s why. Because I don’t want to live in a world where we have to punish ourselves for things that we could have done but didn’t. And I’m guessing you don’t either, if you really stopped to think about it.”
“I just . . . ,” Aiden began. Then he ran out of steam. Out of words. Out of ideas from which to form words. He braved a quick glance into her eyes. Then he looked away again. The words volunteered their services. “I don’t want to be someone who’s capable of violence.”
“But you are,” Hannah said. “You are capable of violence.”
Aiden felt a flare of anger that surprised him. Ambushed him, in fact. He could have said many things—he even knew what some of them were—but he refused to speak until the wave of rage had passed. He felt his face flush red. He stared out the window again until the heat of the emotion drained away and left him feeling more tired and defeated than anything else.
“I don’t know where you get off saying that to me,” Aiden said in
a strangely quiet and calm voice. “You barely know me. How do you know?”
“Because you’re a human being and you’re alive. Everybody is capable of violence. Just most people never commit it. Look. I know what’s troubling you. I really do. It’s a turning-point moment in people’s lives, when you look yourself in the face like that and realize that who you are, and who you become, and what you do seem to rely on a combination of factors that are partly out of your control. It’s not whether a person could ever commit a violent act that’s a reasonable question, but more how far you would have to push that person to bring it out. Be glad you passed the test this time. But I get it. It scared you. Plus it opened up some other unfortunate cans of worms.”
Aiden chewed that over for a moment or two. Then he hit a wall in his head. He realized he had no idea what other cans of worms it opened. He didn’t know what she meant.
“Like what, for example?”
“Well. Now that you know you could be pushed over the edge, in which case you would have been a decent person doing a terrible thing, you need to consider whether you can see Milo in the light of that same humanity.”
“No. I can’t. And I won’t. Because he didn’t stop himself.”
“Right, no. He didn’t. But he’s not you. He may have been through some things you haven’t. So you have to ask yourself if you’re absolutely sure you could go through the experiences he’s been through in his short life and not act out with violence. I’m not saying it’s an impossible thing to do, or that everyone would react the same way. Some people can absorb a lot of abuse without outer-directing their anger. They turn it in on themselves, usually, instead. So here’s another thought to blow your poor mind, and I’m sure you won’t feel ready for it, but here goes. Milo’s abusive father probably suffered a great deal in his life and reacted to it by outer-directing his rage. If we’d somehow seen him as a young boy being abused, we’d feel terribly sorry for him. We’d properly see that younger version of him as an innocent victim. But now he’s all grown up and acting out the shape he’s been twisted into being, and we have nothing for him but our hatred.”
Aiden tried to take a step in the direction of that thought, but he had to stop and back away from it again. In fact, it was hard not to resent Hannah for asking him to try to approach such a thing.
“How do you know the kid’s not just mean?” But even as he asked, Aiden remembered what Gwen had told him. What a sweet boy Milo had been before the trouble with his dad. How all this acting out had been more recent.
“I’ve never met anybody who was mean for no reason,” Hannah said. “I’ve met some people who were mean for reasons I may never know. But I never met anyone who I think was born that way. I’ve never met a mean baby. Have you?”
“I’ve completely lost track of how this relates to my situation,” he said.
It was only partly true. It was mostly a way of deflecting the more troublesome aspects of the conversation and sending things off in a better direction. Or an easier direction, in any case.
“Okay. We’ll pull back a bit. If you can’t see Milo with his full humanity now, that’s okay. I’d rather you be honest about it. It’s something you can sit with. Think over. Maybe you’ll make your peace with it over time and maybe not. But a caution: Until you get it that’s he’s only what his experience has shaped him to be, you’re seeing him as subhuman. As ‘other’ somehow. And the danger in the meantime is that he’ll see that. He’ll know how you view him. When you see a child as ‘less than,’ it’s not long before self-fulfilling prophecy comes into play.”
“Right,” Aiden said. “Got it.”
And, unfortunately, he did.
They listened to the ticking of the clock in silence for a few moments.
“Tell me what you think of this,” Aiden said. “Elizabeth told me something strange about him. She said he used to shoot birds with his BB gun. And then he would give the birds these little funerals. Wrap them in silk handkerchiefs and put them in boxes in the ground and play a tune over them on a flute. What do you make of a thing like that?”
He watched her scribble notes on her pad for a few seconds. Then she set her pen down and sighed.
“Without seeing him and talking to him, it’s hard to know. Could be he has a morbid fascination with death and dying. Could be he feels guilty afterward and wants to do something to make it up to his victims. Also, the two are not mutually exclusive. Could be both. If you want to know what’s going on with him, I suggest you bring him in here.”
“Bring him in here?”
Aiden only stared at her for a few seconds. He could feel that he was blinking too much. Too fast.
“Has he had any counseling, ever?”
“I . . . you know, I don’t know. I never felt right asking. I wasn’t sure it was any of my business. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get him in here if he doesn’t want to go. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to go.”
Hannah sighed again.
“Theoretically, it’s not that hard to compel a child to come to a place like this. The problem is that when you get him here, we can’t compel him to open up to us. But it still might be better than nothing. He’ll hear what we say, even if he never opens his mouth. I might gather a little information just by watching his reactions. He might sit here for a year and do nothing but resist, and then we might get a crack in his shell. I’ve seen it happen.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Aiden wanted to glance at the clock, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. What if their session was nearly over? Then he would have to get up and walk out of this room and go back to handling his life for himself. He would have to be the grown-up who knew what to do.
In his head, he tried the mantle of humanity on Milo like a costume on a mannequin. It fell away again. As if it had never belonged there and refused to stay. As if humanity and Milo were two opposing magnetic poles.
“I just don’t know how to get through to that boy,” he said.
Then he froze, stopped talking, and just listened. Listened to those words echo around the room. Bounce around in his head. They had not felt like his own words. He had heard them somewhere. He was repeating something he had heard. He wasn’t sure how he knew. But he knew.
“Hmm,” he said. “That’s interesting.”
Hannah didn’t ask him what was interesting. She waited. She trusted him to say.
“That’s the second time that’s happened to me in just a handful of days. The first time it was a thought. An internal thought. This time it came out of my mouth. But both times, it was something familiar. Something I’d heard somewhere. But I don’t know where.”
“What was the first one?”
“‘This little missing person.’ I think my mother said that. But I might be wrong.”
“And this second one? ‘I just don’t know how to get through to that boy.’ Do you know who said that?”
“My stepfather.”
“About you?”
“Must have been. I was the only boy around. So he must have been exasperated with me. But I have no idea why. What could I have done that was so terrible?”
“I don’t know. But it opens up another interesting can of worms. Your stepfather was exasperated with you. Made the same statement about being unable to deal with you that you just made about Milo. Hard not to see a parallel there.”
“I wasn’t nearly as bad as Milo,” Aiden said.
But then he had to wonder how he could know. How he could feel as sure as he definitely felt. If he didn’t remember.
“I’m guessing that’s true,” Hannah said. “Most kids aren’t. But I don’t think it’s about the degree. I think you can understand the frustration with a stepchild without negating the insight on the grounds that the severity of the problem is not equal. I hope you know what I mean by that.”
He did. But his brain had already moved off in a different direction.
“I had another thing happen not too long ago. I just thoug
ht of it again. When Gwen came to the door with her kids, I had this image of my stepfather the first time I met him. But that was when I was six. I never remember back that far. I mean, all my life up until just recently I couldn’t. So does this mean I’m starting to remember things? Things from that time before I thought I could remember?”
“Looks that way,” Hannah said.
“But I never could before.”
“You could never feel your empathy before, either. Everything changes. You should be getting that, right about now.”
PART FOUR
AIDEN DELACORTE AS A CHILD
MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS EARLIER
Chapter Twelve
Aiden at Age Four
He woke in a darkened room, sitting up in bed. His heart was calm, in spite of the dream. It did not hammer as it often did in his waking life. And yet it had been horrid, the dream. All-encompassing and dreadful.
He padded barefoot down the hall to his parents’ room.
It was tricky, crawling into bed with his parents. He could talk to his mother. Tell her he’d had a bad dream. If his dad stayed asleep, it would be as easy as that. If not, if his dad woke up, he would have to help his mom get around the man and his opinions, working in ways he didn’t fully understand with his thinking mind. It was a little like moving through a darkened room. It was something you did one step at a time, working purely by feel.
The door creaked when he opened it.
Both his parents raised their heads and blinked at him in the mostly dark.
He froze a moment, teetering in the doorway.
Then his father put his head back down and closed his eyes. Maybe he was too sleepy to deal with what was happening. Aiden hoped so.
He crossed the cold wooden floorboards to his mother’s side of the big bed.
Her eyes were closed. As if she’d gone back to sleep. But her arms reached out and gathered him closer. He stood, his bare feet cold and tingly, feeling the front of himself pressed up against the side of the mattress, and allowed her to wrap him in warmth.
“You have a bad dream, honey?”
Aiden only nodded. He wasn’t sure where his voice had gone, or how to go about finding it.
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