The day couldn’t have been better. Utah was flirting shamelessly with spring, and it was sixty degrees out, even though it had no business being that warm. I’d told Moses and Georgia we were coming, and Georgia was ready for us. Before long we were in the round corral with Millie and Henry petting Georgia’s Palomino, Sackett, and a horse named Lucky who was as black as Georgia was fair, and who followed Georgia with his eyes wherever she went. She’d told me once she’d tamed him right alongside Moses, though neither of them had known she was actively breaking them.
Moses still wasn’t comfortable around most animals. He’d come a long way, but a life time of nervous energy was hard to corral, and animals, especially horses, tended to mirror his unease. He and I stayed out of the way, leaning against the fence, watching Georgia work her magic. I was holding baby Kathleen—who I insisted on calling Taglee just to bug her father—and making faces at her, trying to make her smile. When she started yawning widely, Moses reclaimed her and propped her on his shoulder where she promptly dozed off. We listened to her baby sighs in companionable silence until Moses eyed me over her downy head, his eyes narrowed, his hand stroking Kathleen’s tiny back.
“Say your piece, Mo,” I said, knowing it was coming.
When Georgia had greeted Millie with a hand shake and a sweet hello, she had smiled at me like she really wanted to tease me about my new “lady friend,” but she contained herself. Moses didn’t want to tease. He apparently wanted answers.
“What’s going on, man?” Moses didn’t mince words. He never had. You wanted to get to know Moses, you had to pay attention, because he didn’t give you much. You had to force your way into his space and refuse to go when he pushed you away. That was what I had done. That was my gift. Push, fight, cling, grapple, wear you down. It was what Georgia had done too, and she’d paid a price. The price for Moses’s love and devotion was a high one. But she’d paid it. And in return, Moses worshipped Georgia.
“What do you mean?” I scowled at my best friend.
“Millie’s not like the girls you . . . date.” Moses finished the sentence with a much milder word than the one we both mentally inserted into his long pause.
“That’s because I’m not . . . dating . . . her.”
“No?”
“Nah. She’s an employee. A friend. She’s funny. Interesting. And tough. I like that. I like Henry too. She’s been bringing him by the gym. I’ve been working with him a little. His dad split when he was little, and he just soaks it up.”
“You rescuing people again, Tag?”
“I don’t rescue people.”
“Bullshit. You collect lost causes and charity cases like old, white women collect cats. You rescued me. You rescued Axel and Cory and even that piece of shit Morgan, who thinks he’s doin’ you a favor by managing your bar. You call it Tag Team, but you should call it rag tag team. You rescue everyone. You have an invisible cape. You’ve been wearing it your whole life.”
“I never rescued you.” I couldn’t argue about the rest of it, though I’d never thought of it that way.
“Yeah, Tag. You did.”
“We rescued each other.”
“Nah. I would have let you drown, man. That’s the difference between you and me. At least the Moses I used to be. I would have let you drown to keep my head above water. I was all about surviving. But not you. You would have died before you let me sink. Maybe it worked out for both of us in the end. But you saved us, Tag. Not me.”
“What about all the people you help with your art?”
“I’m just a messenger. You? You’re a savior. That’s why you fight so hard. You don’t know how to do anything else. But that girl doesn’t want a savior. She wants a lover. Two completely different things. Georgia’s more like you. That’s why she and I work. But Millie? I’m thinking she’s more like me. She just observes. Takes it in.”
“Observes?” I questioned, my lips twisted wryly.
“Observes. You don’t have to see to observe. I guarantee that girl already knows what kind of man you are. And she likes what she observes. But she doesn’t want saving. I didn’t want saving either, not from Georgia. I wanted submission.”
Moses’s eyes lingered on his wife, who was leading Henry and Millie around on horses she’d broken and trained with her own hands. Her back was straight, her voice steady. She was a tall, young woman with a lean, strong frame and sun-streaked blond hair that swung in a fat braid almost to her waist. Submission was not in her vocabulary. But then she glanced up, and I watched as her eyes skipped over me and rested on Moses, holding their sleeping child, and I understood what Moses meant. Sometimes submission meant releasing pride, letting someone else take the reins, trusting someone with your love and your life, even though they didn’t deserve it. She’d done that.
“You want Millie? You’re going to have to take off your cape at some point and give in, baby.” Moses spoke again, his voice soft, his eyes softer. “Submit.”
“Who says I want her?” I resisted.
“Give me a break, man. You’re talking to an observer. I know you better than you know yourself. Don’t try to pull that crap with me.”
“So I have a best friend who sees it all and a girl—” I couldn’t say girlfriend, “—a girl who sees nothing at all.”
“She sees plenty. You’re the blind one. You’re blind because you’re scared. And you’re scared because you already know it’s too late. And you should be scared, man. She won’t be easy to love. She’s a package deal. She and Henry. But hell, Tag. You’ve never been about loving the lovable. I’m about as unlovable as it gets. And you practically threw yourself at me. I couldn’t shake you off. You like a challenge. Hell, you live for it!”
“I’m not there yet, Moses,” I said firmly. “Don’t push me.”
“Says the man who told me to go hard and fast with Georgia.”
“Turns out I was right, now wasn’t I?” I laughed, loving that I had been right.
“You were. But so am I. You’re not ready? Fair enough. But don’t hurt her.”
“Now why would I do that, Mo?” He pissed me off sometimes.
“Because you can be stupid.” He smirked at me over his daughter’s tiny head and I considered how and where I could punch him without causing him to drop her.
“Her mother’s dead.” It was a statement, not a question. Moses didn’t ask. He didn’t have to. His smirk was gone and his eyes had that look he got when he was seeing things.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “A while back. Lung cancer. Their dad took off about a year after Millie lost her sight. Millie seems to think it’s because he couldn’t handle having an autistic son and a blind daughter. I don’t know what the truth is. But they haven’t had any contact with him, beyond money. At least he sends money.”
“She’s worried about her kids. She keeps showing me Amelie’s walking stick and a book, a children’s book. Something about a giant.”
“They’re doing all right. They look out for each other,” I insisted.
“Hmm,” Moses muttered, and something oily and dark twisted in my gut.
“She’s not waiting on one of them, is she Moses?” Moses said spirits started to linger around their loved ones when they were about to die, as if waiting to greet them or take them home.
“Nah. It doesn’t feel like that.” Moses didn’t offer anything else and I let it go, accustomed to Moses’s quirks, to his abilities, accustomed to his reluctance to expound.
(End of Cassette)
Moses
“YOU SAW MY mother, Moses?” Millie asked me.
I nodded and then caught myself and answered out loud. “Yeah.”
“What did she look like?” Millie asked, and I heard more wistfulness than doubt.
“You. She looks like you. Dark hair, blue eyes, good bone structure. I knew who she was the moment she came through. But you and Henry were right there in front of me. It wasn’t hard to make the connection.”
Millie shook her head briskly
like she needed to rearrange her thoughts, rearrange everything she thought she knew. It was always like this. It took people time to process the improbable.
“The book—the book about giants. What is that?” I asked, giving her something tangible to focus on while her head and her heart found compromise.
“I don’t know . . .” she stuttered, her hands fluttering to her cheeks.
“Giants playing hide and seek?” I prodded. The picture that filled my head was of a huge pair of feet sticking out from under a bed.
“Where do giants hide when playing hide and seek? I can’t think of any place that will cover up their feet,” Millie whispered.
“That’s it,” I said.
“They cannot wiggle under the bed, or cower in a closet. They cannot hide behind a tree or slip inside a pocket.” This time it was Georgia who recited the lines, and I looked at my wife in surprise.
“It’s called When Giants Hide. I used to read it to Eli. He loved it. We read it almost as often as we read Calico the Wonder Horse.”
I felt the same slice to my gut I always felt when I thought about my son. And then I felt the answering peace, the knowledge that love lives on.
“I forgot all about that book! Henry used to love it—my mom and I would read it to him, over and over. I memorized it, actually, and even when my sight started to go and then left me altogether, Henry would turn the pages and I would pretend to read.”
“They could hide behind a mountain, but climbing takes all day. They could hide beneath the ocean, but they might float away,” Georgia recited.
“They could stretch their arms and grab the moon—” Millie said.
“And hide behind the clouds—” Georgia supplied the next line.
“They could tiptoe up behind you, but giants are too loud,” Millie finished, smiling. “In the story, the giants are hiding in plain sight. They are everywhere you look, but they are camouflaged by trees and buildings. In one picture you think you’re looking at a boat dock, and then you realize that it’s a giant laying on the sand. In another picture the giant is shaped like a plane, laying on his back, his arm stretched out to form wings, his shoes pointing upward to make the tail. It’s a look and find book. You know, Where’s Waldo, but instead of tiny figures in red and white striped shirts, the giants are huge. But the artist drew them in such a way that they just blend in.”
“There is a place where giants hide, but I’m not about to tell. If you want to find the giants, you’ll have to search yourself,” Georgia inserted. She was smiling, but her smile was pained, and I reached out and grabbed her hand.
“When I went blind and started using the stick, Henry was only four. He thought I was looking for giants. He thought my stick was a giant finder. He’d walk around with his eyes closed, smacking things with it.”
“So why do you think your mom wanted me to see that book?” I asked, remembering her insistence. “She kept showing me the pages, the pictures. She wanted to tell me something.”
“My dad left,” Millie pondered, as if she wasn’t sure how to answer me, but was willing to explore the question out loud. “We stopped reading that book when my dad left. He played for San Francisco—so he was a ‘Giant.’” She shrugged like she was trying to convince herself that it hadn’t been that important. “We knew where every giant was hiding in the book. We’d found them hundreds of times. But we didn’t know where one giant was. That giant disappeared altogether. I remember hearing my mom read it to Henry once, right after he left. And she started to cry.”
I wanted to take it all back. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. But Millie continued.
“Then Henry started having nightmares, and the hiding giants were no longer whimsical and harmless. They were scary. He was sure our beds were really giants in disguise and they would take us away while we slept. He thought the refrigerator door was a giant’s mouth, that the garbage truck was a loud, hungry giant who would eat everything in sight. It got ridiculous until my mom banned the book and that was it. The giants slowly became household appliances once again, and his bed was just a bed. He still doesn’t like garbage trucks though.” She smiled at that, and I chuckled. But it wasn’t very funny. None of this was.
“It’s strange,” Millie added. “Henry asked me about a month ago if I knew the story of David and Goliath. And even though I told him that I did, he felt it important to inform me that David had killed Goliath. He seemed especially thrilled that we had our very own giant slayer.”
Giant slayer or not, I wondered for the first time if Millie’s mother had been trying to communicate her distrust of Tag. Maybe she’d known he was going to run, just like her husband had. Maybe she knew her kids deserved better.
HENRY FELL ASLEEP on Millie’s shoulder five minutes into the drive home and succeeded in crowding her into my side, gobbling up more than his fair share of space on the bench seat for the ninety minutes it took to get back to Salt Lake. I liked it too much. I liked the press of her thigh against mine, my arm resting between her knees every time I touched the gearshift, the smell of her hair every time I glanced down at her face. The conversation with Moses taunted me, and I felt a flash of anger that he had called me out on my friendship with her, that he’d forced me to examine the relationship. I didn’t want to examine it. I wanted to enjoy it.
We’d spent the afternoon in comfortable conversation and time with the animals. Henry had taken to the horses with very little fear, and I had a feeling we were going to be getting a whole slew of statistics and interesting facts about jockeys and horse races in the days to come. Georgia had told Henry he was exactly the size of most professional jockeys, which made him puff out his chest and walk a little taller. He was already asking when we could go back. I’d promised him soon and scowled at Georgia and Moses when they’d waggled their eyebrows and smirked. They weren’t very subtle about their fascination with Millie, but it was impossible not to be fascinated. She hadn’t shown any fear either, and I’d spent much of the day trying not to stare at her, trying not to feed my friends’ curiosity.
“How did that feel, being on a horse?” I asked Millie, my eyes swinging from the road to her face and back again.
“Like having eyes. The horse knew where to go and I was just along for the ride, but it felt good.”
“You weren’t afraid, not even a little?”
“Sure I was. I’m afraid all the time. I was so afraid when I first lost my sight that for a while I just sat in my room and played my guitar. But after a while, I realized if I allowed myself to be too afraid to do anything, that I wouldn’t just be blind, I might as well be dead. That scared me more. The only thing I can see is me, you know? The stuff going on inside of me. My thoughts, my feelings, my fears, my faults. They are the only things I see clearly. The rest is a guessing game. Being blind forces you to come to terms with yourself, I think.”
“Perks of being a blind girl,” I said, and she laughed.
“I say that a lot, don’t I?”
“You do. And it’s damn cool that you do.”
“Well, I could list the sucks of being a blind girl, but that would take all day.”
“The sucks?”
“Yep. All the many things that suck about not being able to see,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Tell me one. The first thing that comes into your head,” I insisted.
She started to speak and then shook her head, biting her lip. “Nah.”
I bumped her with my shoulder, making her head bob a little. “Come on. Whine, baby. Whine.”
Her cheeks grew rosy. “No.”
“You were going to say something and you changed your mind. I saw that!”
“All right. That. That sucks.”
“What?”
“I can’t see what YOU are thinking. I can’t look at your face and get some kind of clue as to what’s going on in your head. It’s so unfair. I would really love to see your face. Just once.”
We were both silent for half a second
before I broke the tension.
“Damn. That really does suck. I do have a beautiful face,” I teased, but my chest felt tight and my throat ached a little. I gasped and laughed as she dug her sharp little elbow into my ribs.
“You know what else sucks?” she shot back, emboldened by my apparent lack of empathy.
“I told you you could only name one. We don’t want to open the floodgates, Millie.”
She growled and continued on as if I were driving her crazy.
“I can’t drive. I can’t run away. I can walk, but that’s not the same thing as just getting behind the wheel and taking off. Instead, I’ve got to rely on meanies like you to take me places. I hate that more than anything,” she huffed.
Without warning, I changed lanes and took the nearest exit at a pretty aggressive speed. It was an exit just past a little town called Mona, and I sped under the overpass and turned onto the frontage road and pulled to the side of the road with a screech of tires. Henry bobbed in his seat belt and changed positions without waking up, conveniently freeing Millie’s shoulder.
“Whoa!” Millie cried, grabbing at my thigh. “What are you doing? We’ve got a ways to go, don’t we?”
“I’m gonna let you drive.”
“Wh-what?” she gasped, clutching at the dashboard.
I adjusted the wheel up to create a little more clearance, shoved the seat back as far as it would go, which wasn’t much farther, considering my size, and pulled Millie up onto my lap, ignoring the warning light that was bleeping in my head. Too close. Back away. Hot female in lap. Breach! Friend zone breach!
“David!” She was pressed back against me, her hands clinging, as if I’d told her we were jumping from a cliff.
“Stop wiggling!” I laughed so I wouldn’t moan, and she immediately froze.