Sometimes, I think my whole life has just been a process
of getting me to slow down: running around like crazy when I
was a kid, that first hitch in my step during first grade, my
first wheelchair the middle of second grade. But now, rolling
into the waiting room of the physical therapists' office, it
was like I'd plugged my brain into a wall socket.
It only took two seconds to grab the door handle, pull it
open, and slide from the hallway into the office, but in those
two seconds, well, you know how they talk about your life
flashing before your eyes when you're about to die?
And OK, sure, it wasn't like that--I mean, yes,
part of me expected Deena's father to rear back and punch me
in the nose, but it wasn't a very big or serious part. It was
more that I'd been slow for so long, had lived for ten years
in the same rooms at Chrysalis House, had talked to the same
people, had eaten the same food, had worn two little tire
tracks around and around this same eight or ten block
neighborhood till I might as well be a ghost or a wind-up toy.
Slow and steady: that was me.
But meeting Deena? A bolt of lightning. And maybe it
was all in my imagination, but just the barest hint of the
thought that she wouldn't be like every other woman I'd
yearned unrequitedly over the past five or six years, that she
might actually turn out to be someone I could at least talk to
regularly, someone who knew what it was like to peer at life
from the other side of the normality fence, someone who'd been
blasted through the fastest of fast lanes till she was trying
with all her might to slow down--
Wow. Lost control of that sentence!
But see? Thinking about her just started everything
swirling and speeding around in my skull!
Then add to that the way I was heading into the exact
same room where I'd last seen my own father a decade ago, not
a sound anywhere in the whole office but the scratch of the
ballpoint pen as he'd committed me to Chrysalis House--
Though 'committed' seems like the wrong word.
'Consigning me to the care of,' maybe? 'Foisting me off
onto'?
El Brujo spoke up from my lap as if she'd been reading my
mind: "Deena's father isn't your father, August: if anything's
been made abundantly clear by now, it's that."
I just nodded, hoped it was true, and by then I was
passing through the doorway, gliding into the room, a swish
and a click telling me the door had closed after me. Mr.
Schwarber looked over, his hands clasped behind him,
straightened up from where he was standing peering at a
diploma or something framed and mounted on the wall.
That he didn't immediately belt me I took as a positive
sign. "Gus," he said.
It took a couple nods to get my throat loose enough to
form human words, but of all the things spinning around in my
brain, all I could get out was, "Mr. Schwarber."
He looked at me like he expected me to go on, but when
several long, long seconds ticked by and I didn't, he blinked,
brushed absently at his sleeves, and settled into one of the
blue cushioned chairs that lined the walls of the waiting
room. "You seem like a good guy, Gus."
"I try to be," I blurted, the blockage suddenly melting
like a spring thaw. "And I didn't mean to surprise Deena the
way I did! It wasn't--! I just--!" Not that I could grab
enough of whatever it was gushing past to form a
comprehensible sentence. "I didn't--!"
"It's OK." He gave a tight smile. "Deena..." His voice
trailed off, his face suddenly looking like mine does on the
morning after those nights when I can't quite manage to get to
sleep. "She's been under a lot of stress lately."
I swallowed. "And I'm so sorry I added to it. If I'd
been thinking at all, I never would've had Jefe--"
"Either stop now, August," El Brujo said, her hind claws
digging slightly into my waist, "or say 'perform his trick.'"
"--perform his trick," I said.
Mr. Schwarber blinked at me. "Trick?" he asked.
And whether it was the way my mind was still spinning
like a troop of dancing mice or just that I'd been hanging
around El Brujo long enough to know what she means when she
says something cryptic like that, but the whole story snapped
into place like we'd planned it beforehand. "I train them!"
I tried not to shout it, but I'm not sure I succeeded. "The
animals! To do tricks! With my free time! 'Cause it's my
hobby!"
"Well, yes." His tight smile loosened a bit. "I mean,
after the things you had that squirrel doing, I kind of
figured that."
Which took the wind out of my sails, I hafta say. All my
fretting, and it turned out my big break-through idea was
something he'd already been assuming...
Wrinkles furrowed his brow. "But you think it was some
trick you did that upset Deena?"
I felt my own brow get wrinkled. "I had Jefe pick up a
pebble so she could put it in her museum to mark her first
therapy session. You...you mean it wasn't--?" Every black
cloud began dissolving around me, every breath I took suddenly
sweet and warm. "I didn't scare her, then?? That
wasn't the reason she--??"
"Ah." His mouth went sideways. "I see now. It wasn't
the trick itself, no. It was..." He sighed. "Something
someone said in group tonight about making a clean break with
his past, about throwing out all the bits and pieces of his
old life so he really felt ready to start over again fresh.
Deena said that struck a chord with her, and she--" He
shrugged. "She was talking seriously about closing the museum
down, throwing all that stuff out."
Click on over to 37 if you wanna see where it all goes from here.
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