Ask Him Why (16 page)

“You’re missing the point again, Aubrey.”

“Oh. Sorry. What’s the point?”

“The point is that it’s you being destroyed by your hate. Not him. This is what the Buddha called picking up a hot coal to hurl at your enemy.”

“Well, I would do that,” I said. “If I got him a good shot. Hit him in the eye or something. And it hurt him. Then it would be worth burning my hand.”

I thought I heard Luanne sigh. But I was never entirely sure.

“Let me put it another way, and this is also not original. Let’s say there’s a rat in your house. So you go out and get some rat poison. And you eat a bunch of it. And then you sit there, watching the rat. Waiting for it to die.”

“Well, that would just be stupid,” I said.

“Finally we agree on something.”

“I’m not going to stop hating him.”

“Are you willing to at least be open to the possibility that at some point in the future you’ll want to leave your hatred behind?”

I breathed for a moment. The wind was tossing my hair into my eyes. I pulled it back away with one hand. Because I had the goldfish in the other. I held the phone between my shoulder and my ear. Hoping I didn’t drop it fifty feet off a cliff.

The honest answer? Not a chance.

The answer I gave her?

“Sure. I’ll try.”

Because I thought she might be right on the edge of not wanting to see me anymore. And I felt like I needed her. Like I was an old steam boiler. I could explode at any moment. And she was the valve that let a little pressure off my lines.

So I just lied.

For the rest of the session she took me through a bunch of relaxation exercises. She wanted me to do them on my own. Every day. I didn’t. I didn’t even do them right then, in the session. I went through the motions with her. But I didn’t relax. I didn’t even try.

I didn’t want to relax. I wanted to stoke my resentment into a glowing fire. Something had to keep me warm.

Chapter Thirteen: Ruth

“Is it after three?” I asked Hamish MacCallum, still halfway thinking about Aubrey and getting him in there. “Or even after ten to three?”

We were sitting out on his back patio, on his porch swing, facing the ocean, but it was nothing like our porch swing at home. It was hung from the patio roof with chains, not suspended from its own frame, and it wasn’t freshly painted or blinding white, yet for some reason, I liked his better.

He peered closely at his watch, wrapped loosely on one age-spotted wrist.

“No. Only two thirty. Why? You have to go?”

The wind had come up stronger, and it kept blowing strands of hair into my eyes and mouth. I knew my hair was getting tangles, but I didn’t care. I liked the wind. It made me feel alive. I loved the feeling of the fullness in my stomach. All of a sudden, it felt good to be me for a change, and it had been away so long, that feeling. Or maybe it had never felt good to be me. Not like that, anyway.

“I just wanted to see if I could get Aubrey in here.”

“Aubrey’s here?”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t really get a choice. He had to come along for the ride. But he didn’t want to come in. He doesn’t want to talk about Joseph. He doesn’t even want to talk to anybody who knows him. He’s trying to pretend Joseph doesn’t even exist.”

“Since when?”

“Since he found out Joseph won’t see us.”

“Ah,” he said. “I see. So why do you think you can only change his mind if it’s ten to three?”

“He has a phone appointment with his therapist.”

“I just hope it’s a good one they’ve got him seeing. That can be a good thing if you do it right. But the people at that hospital where they sent Joseph . . . I think it can make things worse if done poorly.”

“I think she’s good. Because he seems to want to be there. I just wish he would’ve come in with me and met you and eaten. He needs that. We’re all worried about him. I think he’s the one who really needs saving.”

“I think you both do,” he said. “I think the only difference between you and Aubrey is that he needs saving at a louder volume, so’s more people notice.”

I looked at him, but he was looking off toward the sea. I looked past his face to watch gulls wheeling. They had that strange cry that sounded almost human. I wondered what they were calling for and what they wanted.

So this was what he meant about being seen. I’d told him Aubrey was worse off than me, and he didn’t believe me. He looked right through those words. And he was right. I wondered if I’d be one of those people who latched onto being seen and wanted more, or the ones who get their eyes burned and run. Both, I decided. I’d come back and get burned again. I just knew it.

“Once my brother gets his mind stuck on something, he’s really stubborn. But I just know he’d feel better if he met you. I just can’t figure out how to change his mind.”

“You can’t.”

“Right. I just said that.”

“No, I don’t mean you can’t figure it out. I mean you can’t change his mind. You can’t change anybody’s mind. No matter what you say to them. The sooner you figure that out, the happier your life will be.”

“But you change people’s minds all the time. They come here to jump, and you talk them out of it.”

“No. I never tell them not to jump. I never tell anybody what to do. I just say, before you jump, how about a hearty breakfast?”

I laughed out loud, but I wasn’t sure if he’d meant it as a joke or not. “But you don’t think they’re going to come in and have breakfast and then go back out and jump, do you?”

“Well, I hope not. And no one ever has. But I’m still not trying to talk them into or out of anything. I’m trying to give them an experience they need. They’ll either change their own mind as a result of it or they won’t.”

“But it always works.”

“So far. Because it’s based on what people need. When people come here, everything in their life is bad, but that’s not the problem. The problem is, they think it always will be. They can’t see anything new and different down the road. People can bear almost any amount of pain if they think there’s an end to it. So suddenly something happens that they never could have imagined: a daft old man invites them in for a nice hearty meal. It’s not the man or the meal that convinces them. It’s that they forgot how at any moment something can always happen that you never expected. Something better. Once they remember that, it’s a whole new ball game.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but I had no idea what I was about to say. My phone buzzed in my shirt pocket.

“I should see if that’s my aunt,” I said. “She might be saying we need to go.”

I pulled the phone out of my pocket. It wasn’t Aunt Sheila.

It was Sean.

Seeing his number come up was like getting punched in the stomach by something icy cold.

I didn’t answer.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Hamish MacCallum said.

“Something like that. It’s this guy who I thought was my boyfriend. Or was going to be my boyfriend. And then after this thing happened with Joseph, his parents said he could never see me or talk to me again.”

“Well, then why’s he calling?”

“Good question. I’ll find out.”

Just then I heard the tone telling me there was a new voice mail. I was glad Hamish MacCallum had asked the question, because it would have driven me crazy not to listen to the message. But I wouldn’t have listened to it in front of him, because I would have considered it rude.

I played the message.

Sean’s voice made my face feel red.

“Ruth,” he said. “It’s me. I still feel so bad about what happened. I know I shouldn’t be calling. I mean, my parents think I shouldn’t. They’d kill me if they knew. But I want to talk to you. So call me on my cell, okay? I mean, if you’re still speaking to me. You never answered that note I put in your locker. So I don’t know. But I’m trying again. Give me another chance. Please. Nobody needs to know. Where are you? I asked a couple people and they said you went out of town. Call me. Just . . . you know . . . just so my parents don’t find out.”

I clicked the message off, saving it instead of erasing it, but I’m not really sure why, because I didn’t like it well enough to listen to it again—it made my stomach feel funny, and not in a good way.

“He says he wants to talk to me but keep it a secret.”

“Ah,” Hamish MacCallum said. “Can’t imagine you’d enjoy that.”

“Right. I wouldn’t.” Then I wondered if I’d known I wouldn’t. “Why wouldn’t I again?”

“Well, I could be wrong. As I said before, I never try to talk anybody into or out of anything. But I wouldn’t want to be anybody’s little secret, so I figured you wouldn’t, either. If he’s a good young man, he’ll stand up and tell his parents you’re not your brother and you didn’t do a thing wrong.”

“It’s not that, exactly. It’s not that they think I’m guilty of anything. It’s that the reporters wouldn’t leave them alone.”

“The reporters will get bored and wander off in time. And chances are so will the young man. But if he doesn’t, then you’ll know you’ve got something worth keeping there.”

I took a big deep breath, and the wind stole the exhale and blew it away. It had never occurred to me that there was even a remote chance of Sean still in my future. And I liked Hamish MacCallum’s plan, to wait and let time tell me if he deserved to be there. Somehow, when I was sitting next to that old man, I felt like everything was going to work out, which is an amazing talent when you think about it. No wonder nobody jumped.

I thought he knew everything, so I asked a big question.

“Do you think Joseph will get the death penalty?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so,” he said. “I certainly hope not. No, that I think would only be for doing purposeful harm to the war effort and then lying to cover up his tracks. There was no deception. There was no attempt to hurt anybody else. I don’t think they’ll let him off with a slap on the wrist, either, sorry to say. I think they’ll make an example of him. Put him in jail for quite a time. But nothing as drastic as all that, I don’t think.”

And I believed him, because he was Hamish MacCallum, and he made you feel like everything was going to be all right.

I was holding the passenger door open and talking to my brother Aubrey, and he was still refusing to look at me. He had a bag full of water with a bunch of goldfish in it sitting on his lap, and all he was doing was staring at the fish. And the fact that he had them all of a sudden—when he hadn’t had fish a few hours ago when I’d stepped out of the car—was so weird and out of place that I couldn’t even stop to process it. I couldn’t find room for that in my brain.

“Seriously, Aubrey,” I said for about the third time. “You’ve got to meet this guy. He’s amazing.”

No answer.

I looked up to Aunt Sheila in the driver’s seat and caught her eye. She shook her head.

“Everybody’s tried,” she said. “No go.”

“Have you eaten?” I asked him.

Still no answer.

“We drove back to town and got lunch,” Aunt Sheila said. “But Aubrey barely touched his.”

“See, this is what I’ve just been finding out. I had this great big gigantic breakfast, and it’s the one he fixes for people who are about to jump, and it makes everything so much better.”

He looked away from his fish for the first time.

“We had breakfast already. This morning. It’s the middle of the afternoon, stupid.”

“So? We had breakfast for lunch. What difference does it make? Whatever time of day people come, he makes them this big hearty breakfast.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the one meal he’s good at. And it’s sort of magic. After you eat, you feel better. Like nothing is different, but you feel like you can manage.”

“Ruth,” he said, like my name was some kind of excrement or fatal disease. “I eat food every day of my life. If it fixed anything, don’t you think I’d know it?”

He glanced up at me for a fraction of a second, and what I saw in his eyes only made me more determined to drag him up to Hamish MacCallum to be healed. Then he looked back at his fish again.

“The breakfast is only part of it. It’s the fact that he fixes it for you. It makes you feel seen.”

“I don’t want to feel seen,” he said. “I already missed that stupid breakfast for lunch and I’m not hungry anyway and I don’t want to be seen.”

I realized then that I needed to leave him alone. Because he was one of the other kind. The ones whose photos would never be on the mantelpiece. Because if he was seen, like sunlight burning his eyes, he would run away and never come back again. He was one thing and I was the other.

And you can’t change anybody’s mind. The sooner I learned that, the happier my life would be, and now I felt like a happy life was a goal again for the first time in a long time.

And besides, all the bad things in the world start with people trying to see the world as simpler than it is. Trying to change the way life is and failing—like me thinking I could save my little brother, whether he wanted saving or not, instead of just saving me.

“Why do you have fish?” I asked him.

My voice came out soft, but as soon as I heard it, I was afraid it sounded more sympathetic than he would accept.

I put a hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off violently.

“Stop it! Because I like fish. Why shouldn’t I have them?”

I looked at Aunt Sheila again, but she didn’t meet my eyes.

“Well. Okay. I have to go back and say good-bye,” I said, dreading the second long, breathless walk up the hill.

“Fine,” he said. “Go. But hurry up this time. Don’t take hours again. Some of us want to go home.”

“I’m in no hurry at all,” Aunt Sheila said. “Take all the time you need.”

And with that, my little brother face-palmed into his own non-fish-holding hand.