Abandoned

“Almost never.” I put a hand under her chin, angle her face up to mine. “That thing you did with the cat? That’s the kind of thing that puts the light out, honey. You understand?”

She nods. I let her chin go, and she snuggles back into my embrace. “So what do I do?”

“You learn to balance. Look, honey, regular people, they know how to enjoy life. It’s more natural for them to look for the good stuff than the bad. It’s harder for people like us. We have to force ourselves to engage in the good stuff. Even when we don’t want to. The thing is, even if you have to force yourself in the beginning, somewhere along the way you’ll find yourself having a good time.”

“But how does that work for me?” she asks, and I’m pleased to hear the impatience mixed with the pleading. I cracked her, but I didn’t break her. Thank God.

“Well, let’s see. Balance and Bonnie. Okay, here’s an example. You told me you wanted me to take you to the shooting range, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, fine. I’ll agree to do that every other week. On the weeks off, you have to find an extracurricular activity at school to take part in. I don’t care what it is. Band or track—I don’t care. Just something any other thirteen-year-old would do.”

“Sounds boring.”

“It might be, at first. But you’ll be surprised. There’s an old acting trick. If you make yourself start laughing, at first it’s just going through the motions. It’ll feel silly, sound silly. But you almost always end up laughing for real. This is like that. Besides, it’s really a part of your current goal, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

What do I mean, exactly? I can feel the idea swarming within me. It’s something I understand innately but have never had to put words to.

“Our biggest advantage over the monsters isn’t that we know how they think, honey. That’s not so hard. It’s that they can never understand how we think.” I kiss the top of her head and whisper again into her hair. “They can’t understand how we can love each other so much, and they know it. That’s what they hate us for the most. Love is the light.”

Bonnie is finally asleep. I’d lain in bed with her as she tried. She kept waking, checking to make sure I was still there. I waited until her sleep was certain, and then I disentangled myself and crept back to my own bed.

I remove my clothes, which smell of salt: the sweat from Bonnie’s troubled forehead and the wet from her tears. I crawl into bed next to Tommy, naked, and reach for him.

“She okay?” he asks.

“She will be.”

“You okay?”

I shake my head, realize he can’t see that in the dark. “Not really. Can you make me okay?”

He pulls me to him and kisses away my tears, then his lips find my lips and later we come together in that sweetest way. Afterward, I am lying with my head on his chest, listening to the gentle thump thump of his heart and the slow, even sound of his restful breathing. He’s fallen asleep after sex, the man way. I’m headed in that direction but take a last moment to look at the moon and whisper some words to the God I’m not sure I’ll ever really reconcile with.

Thank you for showing me how to reach her, I think, my eyes beginning to flutter. Keep doing things like that, and we might have a truce.

It’s probably my imagination, but the moon seems to disappear behind a cloud at that exact moment, and I imagine it’s Him, the Him I doubt more than I believe in, saying, You’re welcome.

CHAPTER NINE

His father sat him down on the living room couch one year. He patted the seat next to him.

“Move closer, Son. I have something I want to show you.”

The Boy complied, sitting on the old couch, with its faded plaid print. Everything in the home was the same: serviceable, not tattered but faded by use and by age. They were neither poor nor rich, but his father had known the harshest kind of poverty, so they kept things until they died.

His father picked up a large book from the coffee table and placed it on his knees. There was a photograph on the front. A bunch of melting clock faces.

“Read what it says on the front aloud,” his father instructed him.

“The life and works of Salvador Dali,” the Boy said, mispronouncing it as Dahl-eye. His father corrected him, and made him say it again.

“Dali was a painter. Some think he was nuts; many think he was brilliant. I think he was brilliant.”

The Boy knitted his brows, looking for the lesson in this.

“You mean he was smart?”

“Smart is knowing your multiplication tables. Brilliant is casting a different light on the world.”

The Boy frowned, struggling with the concept. “I don’t get it,” he admitted.

“Some people look out at the world and they see it differently from other people, Son. They try to share that sight with us, through paintings, or poetry, or the classical music we listen to sometimes.”

“Like Beethoven? Like the Ninth?”

He loved the Ninth. In his plodding and single-minded life, it was light through a prison window. It made his blood move faster. “Yes, exactly like that.”

The Boy looked at the Dali book with new interest.

“And you’re saying this man does the same thing with his paintings?”

“I’m saying he does the same thing for me with his paintings. You might not feel that way.”

Confusion set in hard. In his world, Father was always right.

“That doesn’t make any sense, sir. How can I see something differently from you?”

“I’m raising you to be strong, Son. There’s a world out there full of ways to be weak. It’s true, the road of strength is simple, single, and narrow, so in most things I teach you, there’s just one way. You follow?”

“Of course.”

“But when it comes to this,” he gestured at the book, “or to the music or poetry, it’s not as clear-cut. And that’s okay.” His father rubbed a hand across the book, a loving gesture that the Boy had never seen and rarely felt. “Dali’s paintings talk to me. They may not talk to you. The point, though, what I’m trying to tell you, is that you need to find the ones that do.”

The Boy pondered this, struggled with it, could come up with only one question.

“Why?”

His father turned to him, his gaze serious. “The basic key to survival isn’t toughness, Son, it’s speed. Thinking and doing and killing faster than others. You’ll never be as fast as you can be unless you’ve found the ones that talk to you. I don’t know why it’s so, but it’s so.”

Why didn’t you say that in the first place? is what the Boy thought but didn’t say. “Find the one that talks to you, Son, because it’ll make you quicker. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it proves anything. It’s an x- factor, like a vitamin that works but we don’t know why. We read the poems, and we listen to the music, and they make us faster, but neither one is evidence of the soul.” He leaned forward, like a dark tower, overwhelming the boy with his presence and his blackness. “There is no soul, Son. There’s only meat. Never forget it.”

“Yes, sir.”

And he never did.

CHAPTER TEN

I wake up exhausted but not unhappy. It’s the wrung-out but comfortable feeling of satisfaction that comes