Miscellany

Robbie stood and walked up to JP. JP retreated a few steps, and Robbie advanced, until he’d herded Gabe’s learning aide all the way around to the opposite side of the Charger. “Why didn’t I hear this from you?”

JP swallowed and clutched Gabe’s backpack and crutches. “I'm just the teaching assistant. I'm not supposed to talk to parents directly about problems.”

Robbie's fist clenched and rose up without any conscious decision. He froze, shook his hand out, and lowered it deliberately back down. Breathed in and out, oil-smoke faint in his nostrils. “You were with him all day?”

“A teacher—” JP swallowed. “A teacher's supposed to call you tonight to discuss any issues with learning—”

“I want to hear it now,” Robbie pressed. “Was he staring off into space? Twitching with his mouth?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“Slow to respond to questions?”

JP shrugged, backed up another step.

Robbie sidestepped around him and cornered him against the driver's side door. JP leaned away from him, back resting on the glass. “Did you even ask if he was okay? Did anyone take him to see the nurse?”

“I dunno,” JP said. His eyes were screwed shut and his head turned to the side. “Really, I dunno, man, Mr. Reyes, it's not my job, I just thought he was having a bad day.”

“How long did it last?”

“Wh-what?”

Robbie gritted his teeth. “The absence seizure. How long did it last?”

“I dunno. I dunno. Mr. Reyes. I didn't know. I'm just the teaching aide.”

“Useless.” JP wanted to teach kids. But he couldn't muster enough attentiveness to distinguish Gabe daydreaming from Gabe completely unresponsive. He stared up at JP's sweating face, and his fists shook.

He should kill him. He should mark him, or look him up online and follow him to school, to whatever bars or clubs he went to, to his home—wait for him to be alone. Then, bam. Lug wrench to the back of the head. JP would fall on his face, skin his knees through his fifteen-dollar khakis. Maybe he'd struggle up, stare up at his doom in horror or confusion, but by then he'd be too dazed to run, his vision blurred, unable to see the second strike coming. Then he'd haul him up, dump him in the trunk, and leave him there, let him thrash and cry and scrape at the steel shutting him in like a coffin, until he was ready to let JP out. Take him to some remote hilltop, like Northwick. JP would be dizzy, weak, confused. Unable to run, nowhere to run to. And there would be time to explain to him, in small words and practical demonstrations, exactly how badly JP had failed his responsibility. Time to extract the blood due for his failure to watch over Gabe.

He stopped himself, rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. This heat-haze of protective fury was inappropriate, incapacitating. Gabe was unharmed: drowsy, but no worse than after any previous seizure. Since when did he care so much about Gabriel Reyes, anyway? Sure, the little cripple was blood, but the thought of him coming to harm seemed catastrophic, the end of his world. This wasn't right. This wasn't what he'd asked for.

“I'm so sorry, Mr. Reyes, I didn't know what to look for,” JP choked, bending backwards against the car to get as far away from him as possible.

Reyes? He looked up at JP sharply. Reyes, of course JP called him Reyes, he was wearing Robbie Reyes, that's all JP knew, not Elias. JP was an ignoramus, a flea. Irrelevant compared to the skinny kid wilting in the passenger seat—was that his brother or his nephew?

He grabbed Gabbie's bag and crutches from JP and stepped back, let him scramble around the car onto the sidewalk. He bared his teeth, jerked his head contemptuously, popped the trunk and tossed in the boy's things. “If Gabbie isn't tracking, either he doesn't care, or something's wrong,” he snarled. “If you ever talked with him, you'd know the difference. I'm taking him home to watch for more seizures. Tell Mr. Cortez I'm waiting for his call.”

He opened the driver's door and collapsed into the seat. Gripped the wheel spasmodically, his gloves creaking. He breathed slow through his nose, fighting to center himself; he couldn't tell where he began and ended, in his thoughts or in his body. Inside the car, his awareness of his self was doubled, inverted. He could feel the press of his hands on the wheel as clearly as he could feel the wheel with his hands. He shut his eyes, but through his lights and mirrors he could still see the minivan behind him pulling away from the curb. He felt his own weight compressing his seat. The only thing in the car that wasn't part of him, was Gabriel.

Gabe had fallen asleep.

Seizures always wiped him out, even the quiet ones that just happened inside his head—when they didn't cascade into more, stronger episodes. He felt Gabe's lax limbs sprawled on the leather, his warm breath on the seat back where his head rested on his own shoulder. Steady, easy. No tension, no tremor, just sleep. He reached across the boy and shut the passenger door, rolled the window down. Gazed down where the afternoon sun struck his face, illuminating the tips of his eyelashes and raising copper highlights in his dark hair. He remembered watching Gabe gel it up this morning, “Just like Robbie-Robbie!” the forward comb and upward flick that Robbie had shown him, and he noticed that it was getting long, time to sit him down in the kitchen with the clippers again. The front cowlick had come completely loose, fuzzy and a little oily, because he fiddled with it when he was anxious.

The boy had so much to be anxious about.

He'd spent all day today surrounded by half-teenagers who moved suddenly, looked at him strangely. Half of them might grow up to be predators like Guero Valdez. Teachers talked too quickly, used irrelevant figures of speech, handed out worksheets with tiny cramped boxes and lines to write on, and they couldn't see through the haze of his incoordination to the curiosity in his mind. They didn't expect him to keep up, so they didn't notice when he'd gotten lost.

Gabriel couldn't look at his brother's body and know at a glance if he could trust the person driving it anymore. Robbie Reyes, his provider and protector and hero and the center of his world, could be stolen from him at any moment, just like his wheelchair last fall, just like his own brain could bury him in the surge and crackle of electric misfire.

Gabe might lose this entire day. All the lectures, all the other kids he'd introduced himself to, burned out in static. He'd struggle to catch up again. Have to list what he'd forgotten. Even with Robbie backing him up, the gen-ed teachers would look at him like he was stupid. They might say cruel things they thought he couldn't understand. They might single him out during group projects, hand him a box of manipulatives, and turn their backs on him while Gabe retreated into more colorful worlds inside his head.

The kicker was: Gabriel Reyes was one of the luckiest bastards to wheel across the earth. When pregnant Juliana Reyes had her great fall down the stairs, Gabriel should have bled to death in the womb. After the early labor, and the struggling and screaming and yelling, he should have passed on in the NICU incubator. He should have choked to death by the age of three. His movement disorder could have been completely incapacitating, preventing him from interacting with the world in any purposeful way, and his intellectual disability could have been profound, denying him language or memory or social relationships. His epilepsy was relatively mild. On the new drugs, he hadn't had an episode in over a year, and this one hadn't even been noticeable to the untrained eye.

For Gabriel, this was as good as it was ever likely to get.

He felt his throat close and stifled a sob, trying not to wake the boy. It wasn't fair. Gabbie was just a kid. He shouldn't have to rub his arms rough as alligator skin on his crutches. He shouldn't have to struggle to retain and connect new concepts, shouldn't have to spend endless hours in speech therapy to suppress his lisp and learn to swallow more easily. He should be able to reach out and grasp the life he wanted for himself, not whatever life his brother could scrape out for him. If he could call out into the dark, make a deal, take his burdens away, put them on me— But there was no deal on offer that wasn't poison.

I did this, he realized. Horror hammered him. He had done this to the boy, this was all his fault, his selfishness, his jealousy: he had kicked his sister-in-law down the stairs, he had stolen Gabbie's brother's body and destroyed his innocent faith. He was a monster. He should have let himself fall meekly into Hell, where creatures like him paid back the balance for their crimes. Why had he ever come back? What hubris had driven him to demand more, more, ever more from this world, from his own family?

No. No, this isn't what I wanted.

He should die. He wished he could die, but then the child would be left all alone.

Something struggled and turned over in the back of his mind, crying out in confusion. I don't want this! This isn't what I asked for! Get out, get out of me!

Tears burned in his eyes, and he pressed his gloved palms into his face. He breathed slowly, concentrating so as not to burn up, or make a sound and wake the boy. He would drive him home. They would stay up playing video games and if he had another seizure he would drive him to the hospital. Gabbie wasn't scared, “It happens,” as he'd told his new friend. But it was a new reminder that the storms in Gabbie's brain would plague him forever. And there was no way to go back in time and undo what he'd done.

This isn't me. The presence in his head again, thrashing, clawing. Prying him apart, opening fissures. You are not me! Get out! You little fucker, this hurts! This is wrong!

He looked up from his hands, tears blurring his eyes even as the images of cars and children from his lights and mirrors filled his vision. That phantom voice wasn't Robbie. That sounded more like...

No shit I'm not Robbie. Get your grubby fuckin' hands outta my brain.

He felt a tug and something deep within him unraveled. Memories that had been so clear evaporated like summer rain. He wiped his eyes and looked around, naming and placing what he saw—his old middle school, Eli's car, the leather jacket he'd saved up to buy at Goodwill years ago, his own hands, his brother. The misery, the helplessness, the guilt remained, and the desperate, all-consuming love, but Gabe's injury wasn't his fault. Robbie hadn't kicked his mother down the stairs. Eli had.

Holy fuck, kid. Do I need to get out the duck tape? That side of the line is your brain, this side's mine?

Robbie folded in on himself and ground his palms into his temples. I'm sorry you had to endure having a fucking human conscience for two minutes. I'm no happier about it than you are. What was that?

That was a suicidal ideation. Ain't healthy.

Don't do that again.

You don't do that again.

A memory flashed before his mind, just before it faded out for good: Robbie's mother, looking small and furious and terrified, snarling up at him from a concrete stairwell, both arms wrapped around her belly, her lips white with shock. I hate you, Eli. If I ever find a way, I am going to rip you out of me.

Eli scoffed. Kid, without me, this car, and our eternal spiritual bond, you'd still be a barbecued corpse in a back alley.

You really up for killing JP? I told you you'd get the taste for it, didn't I. Come on. Rid the world of the weak-willed and stupid, that's just as important as bumping off kingpins.

That's not our deal. Our deal is we only kill people like you.

So what was Northwick? Because I flatter myself that I was much worse than a surgeon who only killed one fiance.

Robbie grunted and started the car. The rumble of the engine and whine of the supercharger roused Gabe, and he turned his head and looked over at Robbie sleepily. “Time for school?” he asked.

Robbie wiped his eyes again. He was getting salt all over his driving gloves. “No, buddy. We're gonna go home and eat chicken soup, and then we're gonna stay up and play MarioKart.”

“Yay, chicken soup!” Gabe mumbled, sing-song. “Yay, MarioKart!” He shut his eyes and rested against the seatback again.

“Sounds fun, right?” Robbie said, pulling away from the curb. “Gabe?”

“I love you, Robbie,” Gabe breathed into the leather. He rubbed his elbows, sleepily, like they were sore from going on his crutches every day.

“Love you, too, Gabe.”