“You don't have to,” she said.
“I know.” I took a deep breath and righted myself again. “I want to.”
Back in the living room, Mayra and I sat down on the couch with fresh glasses of soda.
“I don't know where to start.” It was hard to admit that to her.
“Start with whatever you want to say,” Mayra said.
I sat back against the cushion and took a long breath. I already knew the words I needed to say, which made talking about it easier.
I can do this.
“The first doctor said I had attention deficit disorder,” I told her. “She said I couldn’t focus on anything because of that. Dad said she was crazy—I was focused on everything at once. The next one said I had obsessive compulsive disorder.”
I rubbed my hands on the thighs of my jeans and wriggled my toes around in the carpet. I was still hot from the boxing, and I hadn’t put my shirt back on either.
“So, you’re OCD?” Mayra asked. I realized I hadn’t continued the story.
“Not…exactly,” I replied. I glanced over and sighed before continuing. “Have you heard of autism?”
“Sure,” Mayra said. “That’s kids who can’t talk to their parents, right? And they do the same thing over and over again?”
“Kind of,” I replied. “There's a spectrum of autism. Some people have it a lot worse than others. The next doctor they took me to said I might have Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a very mild form of autism. Actually, we’re supposed to just say autism spectrum disorder now, but they still called it Asperger’s when I was diagnosed. I started going to therapy then, but it didn't help much.”
“So which one is it?” Mayra asked after some more silence.
“A little of all of it, I guess,” I told her. “I have…”
I paused and mentally pushed down the panic in my chest again.
“…social deficits,” I finally got out. “You may have noticed.”
“You aren’t like some of the other kids.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mayra shrug. “Sometimes it seems like it’s hard for you to even be in the room with them. I thought it was because of your…”
“Because my parents died.”
“Yeah.”
“No, I was fucked up before then,” I admitted. “It just got worse.”
“Sorry,” Mayra said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“I don’t really fit Asperger’s,” I said, continuing. “People with Asperger’s usually have one or two things that become fixation points. I have hundreds.”
“Fixation points?”
“Once I start thinking about something, I can’t stop,” I said. “When I was up here before, all I could think about was hitting the bag. I had to go do it, or I’d drive myself nuts. But it’s not always the bag. My sister is all about the clocks.”
“Your sister?”
“Megan,” I said. “On the autism spectrum, if I’m at one end, she is at the other. Megan has never said anything except the time.”
“I don’t understand,” Mayra admitted.
“She knows what time it is all the time,” I explained. “She will tell you it’s eleven twenty-six a.m. She will tell you it is time to eat dinner, and she will tell you it is time to watch iCarly. She can also walk by and tell you how many clocks and watches are in the room and what kind they are. She doesn’t talk about anything else at all. She’s never even said hello to me or called me by my name.”
Mayra sat with her hands in her lap and thought awhile.
“Where is she?” Mayra asked.
“In an autism institution in Cincinnati,” I said. “When Mom got sick, she couldn’t take care of Megan, and then when Mom was gone…well, I can just barely take care of myself. Most people who have some form of autism can’t interact with others at all. I can, at least some of the time. It just has to be under certain circumstances.”
“Like it’s okay for me to be here, but you can’t really come to my house, can you?”
“Not really,” I whispered. I had no idea why I was speaking softly. I had no idea why I was speaking at all. I never told anybody about any of this outside of the therapist I quit seeing right after Mom died when the insurance wouldn’t pay for any more sessions.
“Is it just because you haven’t been to my house before?”
“I don’t know what’s inside,” I said. My heart started pounding just thinking about it. “I don’t know if there are dishes in the sink or if you have magazines on the coffee table or when your Dad might walk in or if he has a gun.”
Mayra snickered a little.
“He never actually uses them outside of hunting and the practice range,” Mayra told me. “He spends most of his time cleaning them.”
“He still has guns.”
“What’s wrong with magazines on the table?”
“They might be out of order,” I said. “They might be from different months, or magazines that don’t go together might be touching each other.”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I leaned over and put my face in my hands. I sounded ridiculous, and I knew it, but I couldn’t help how I felt. I rubbed my fingers into my eyes and jumped when I felt Mayra’s hand on my arm.
“Lots of people with autism don’t like to be touched,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” Mayra pulled her hand away.
Shit, shit, shit.
I hadn’t meant my words to be taken that way. We’d been talking about autism, and I was just stating a fact.
“I just meant…others don’t like it.”
“You don’t mind?” Mayra asked.
“If…if I know it’s coming,” I said, clarifying. “I don’t like to be surprised.”
“Because that’s not what you’re expecting.”
“Right,” I said. I looked over to her, and Mayra was smiling just a little. I didn’t know what made her smile, but there were a lot of times I didn’t understand the behavior of others. I just wanted to get this over with. “So, they all finally decided I was just messed up in multiple ways.”
“You seem to do pretty well.”
I replayed her words in my head a few times, trying to decide if she was being sarcastic or not. I had a hard time picking up on sarcasm.
“I’m okay,” I said softly. I took another long breath. “The doctor I had most recently said I had mild forms of Asperger’s and ADD and had developed various obsessive-compulsive behaviors to combat those other characteristics.”
“Does that really work?”
“Usually,” I said. “As long as things are the way they are supposed to be, I’m fine. Here I’m fine. It’s when I leave here that I run into things that are out of my control.”
“Like Devin in your seat the other day,” Mayra said with a nod, “and having to work with me on this project.”
“Yes,” I replied quietly. “So for me, it’s all about finding ways to cope with what’s in my head and finding ways to focus. To everyone else, the coping makes me look like an idiot.”
“You aren’t an idiot,” Mayra said. “Aimee has ADD, too.”
“She does?”
“Yeah. When she was little, she was on medication for it, but the meds made her cry all the time. Her mom got a bunch of books about different treatments, and now she has a really strict diet. That’s why we play soccer. She’s my best friend, and we started playing at the same time. As long as she gets enough exercise and eats right, she does okay without the drugs. I’m sure that doesn’t work for everyone, but it does for her.”
“I have to take the meds,” I said. “Even if I work out, it’s not enough.”
“Aimee still gets a little scatterbrained,” Mayra said with a smile. “I used to sit with her to make sure she got her homework done. She’d get distracted by anything and everything around her, but she’s better about it now.”
“Homework help.” I stared at my hands and remembered Mom sitting with me and trying to get me to focus on math problems. When I got di
stracted, she would turn the page around and make me do the problems upside down. It made the work more challenging, and I could focus better.
I felt her hand on my bare shoulder and I flinched a little, wondering if she’d been talking, and I had missed it.
“Is this okay?” Mayra asked.
I looked at her hand on my shoulder and thought about it being there and how it felt. I wasn’t going into any kind of panic attack at least.
“I have panic attacks when things aren’t the way I expect them to be,” I said. “Those got a lot worse after Dad died.”
“He was in the reserves or something, right?”
“National Guard,” I said.
“There was an accident.”
“Yes.” My voice had dropped back to a whisper again. “They were up on the trails in the Appalachian Mountains, doing a training exercise. One of the hummers went off the road, and he was hit on the head by the tree it knocked down. Fluke accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. So many people said that during his funeral. I was never really sure what it was supposed to mean. The people who said it weren’t responsible for the accident. Lots of them didn’t even know Dad. They only knew Mom, or they were distant relatives or someone that I had never met before.
“Your mom?” Mayra whispered.
“Osteosarcoma.” I felt a shudder run through me, and my skin went cold.
“Cancer, right?”
“Yes,” I whispered. I gripped my legs with my fingers and tried to stop the shaking. I couldn’t think straight—I couldn’t even count. I tried to breathe deeply, but everything was coming out fast, and I was starting to get dizzy.
Mayra’s hand was still on my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to say any more.”
“It was a month after Dad died,” I said quickly. It was the only way I was going to get through it. Now that I’d started the tale, I had to get it all out. “She went in for something routine, and they said they saw a shadow on an x-ray. They thought she might have a slipped disc or something in her back. It was giving her a little pain, but it wasn’t a disc—it was bone cancer. It had already spread. She asked them how long she would have if they did nothing—no treatment. My grandfather had cancer, too, and the treatments were worse than the sickness, Mom thought.”
“What did they tell her?”
“If she did nothing, she would have eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks?” Mayra gasped. I nodded.
“She started treatment right away—I wasn’t even eighteen then. She thought if she did radiation and chemo and all that, she would at least live to see me graduate. She died six weeks later, twelve days after my eighteenth birthday. The cancer was in her blood, too.”
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe normally again. My limbs felt icy and lethargic, and I wondered if I overdid it with the heavy bag. I did that sometimes. I would lose track of how long I had been down there. It wasn’t just the physical feeling in my muscles though. My head felt numb and worn out, too.
“Matthew?”
I wondered how long I had been sitting there without saying anything or how long she’d been trying to get my attention.
“Yes?”
Mayra turned sideways and got up on her knees on the couch next to me. She started reaching toward me and leaning in at the same time.
“I just want to try something,” she said. “Would that be all right?”
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t so sure that it was, especially not when she reached out and ran her fingers through the hair on one side of my head. My hands started to shake a little, but then she ran her other fingers over the other side of my head, and it was okay again.
“I’m going to give you a hug,” she said quietly as she leaned in more.
“Okay,” I whispered back.
Mayra’s hands moved down to my shoulders, and she was very, very close to me. I was suddenly quite aware of the fact that I was still not wearing a shirt or shoes or anything. I swallowed hard.
“Don’t worry,” Mayra murmured. She wrapped her arms around me and pulled my head to her shoulder. “You aren’t alone.”
As soon as my head touched her shoulder, my entire body gave out. I nearly fell against her as she held me tightly, and the burning sensation behind my eyes gave way to tears. I slowly wrapped my arms around her waist, inhaled her scent, and began to sob.
Letting go was an unexpected win.
Chapter 4—Ask Me No Questions
Though there was still plenty of natural light coming through the windows and lighting the room, I was groggy. I was also sore everywhere and keenly aware that I was lying in Mayra Trevino’s arms. My body ached and my eyes burned. I was pretty sure I had bruised a couple of knuckles, but I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so good.
At some point, Mayra and I had lain down on the couch and fallen asleep. I wasn’t even exactly sure when or how long I had been crying earlier, but we were still lying together. Even before I opened my eyes, I could feel her arm around my shoulders and the other around my head, holding me against the spot on top of her arm and next to her neck. I had one arm beneath her body, around her shoulders, and the other was resting just underneath the tank-top she wore with my fingers splayed across the skin of her lower back.
I tilted my head to look up into her face, and I could see her eyes were still closed and her breathing steady. In the back of my head, I wondered why I wasn’t panicking in the slightest. This was new. This was different. I always panicked at new and different. However, I was also surrounded by the most incredible scent. It was all warmth and comfort and security and serenity—and just her.
I tucked my head back into the crook of her neck and closed my eyes again.
In what felt like the next moment, I was startled awake.
“Holy shit, shit, shit!”
I opened my eyes. The light in the room was the soft, dim glow of dusk.
“Oh my God,” Mayra mumbled under her breath.
I managed some incoherent sound before turning my head to look over my shoulder toward the sound that had originally startled me. Travis was standing in the open area between the foyer and the living room with his mouth hanging open and his eyes as big as Phobos and Deimos.
“Travis?” I was still really groggy. “What are you doing here?”
“I brought dinner,” he said as he held up a paper bag from a Chinese restaurant a few blocks away.
“Oh no,” Mayra said as she glanced around and noticed the low light in the room. “I need to go. Dad will be home soon, and I need to make dinner.”
“Okay,” I said. I still watched Travis. I couldn’t understand why he was looking at me so strangely. Mayra was shifting around beside me on the couch.
“Matthew, you have to let go of me.”
“Oh, yeah…sorry.” I pulled my arms out from around her. She stood next to the couch, adjusted her jeans, and fixed her shirt. Her cheeks had gone really red, and she didn’t seem to be acknowledging Travis at all.
“Matthew,” Travis said after he managed to shake loose the weird look on his face, “introductions, maybe?”
Shit, shit, shit.
“Oh, yeah…sorry,” I said again. “Mayra, this is my uncle—Travis Rohan. Travis, this is Mayra Trevino.”
“Good to meet you, Mayra,” Travis said with a toothy smile. “You must have been Matthew’s savior when he needed a ride the other day.”
“Yeah, it was raining really hard,” she told him. Her face was getting redder by the second. “He was soaked.”
“I bet he was.” Travis pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows. He snickered. “You probably were, too.”
He was acting weird. I didn’t get it.
“It was nice meeting you, too,” Mayra said as she gathered up her things and placed them into her book bag. “Don’t forget to bring your laptop tomorrow, Matthew!”
“I won’t forget,” I said with a f
urrowed brow. It was a pretty rare occasion for me to forget much of anything, certainly not something homework related.
Mayra laughed.
“No, I guess you won’t!” She waved and headed out the door. “Bye!”
“Bye.”
“Matthew Anthony Rohan!” Travis boomed as soon as the door was closed.
I half jumped out of my skin.
“What?”
“Did you fuck her?”
“Wha-wha-what?” I had to have heard him wrong.
“Did you have your dick inside of that hot chick who just waltzed out your front door?”
“N-n-no!” I stammered. “We just fell asleep!”
“With your shirt off and your hand up under hers?”
Everything clicked together. I was still, for all intents and purposes, half naked, and we had been lying all wrapped up in each other on the couch. My hand had been up her shirt though I really didn’t recall when or how that happened.
“It wasn’t like that,” I whispered.
“Dammit, Matthew!” Travis bellowed. He dropped down heavily on the easy chair and stared hard at me. “Are you telling me you were alone in the house with that beautiful girl, and nothing at all happened?”
“Yes!” I swore to him, nodding my head quickly.
“You didn’t even kiss?”
“No!”
Travis growled and stood up, grabbing the bag of Chinese carryout and heading into the kitchen. I followed, and he started pulling out little cardboard boxes of lo mein, Szechwan tofu, and rice. He slammed each one down on the table as he pulled it out of the bag, practically breaking open a little plastic packet of duck sauce.
“Travis, what’s wrong?”
“Dammit!” he said, swearing once more. “Bethany’s been gone for two weeks. How am I supposed to live vicariously if you aren’t getting any either?”
He didn’t really seem angry, but I couldn’t understand what the hell he was talking about, so I grabbed an eggroll and dove in.
“So what were you doing, then?”
Travis was about as fixated on Mayra and me as I had ever been on counting cracks in the sidewalk.
“We fell asleep,” I said again.
“What were you doing before then?”