The Art of Feeling

by Laura Tims

  Rex gets home after dark. The only person with less grace than me on crutches is Rex when he’s high. I listen to him crash into the living-room cabinet, mistake it for someone named Jeremiah, and threaten to kick its ass. I’m readying for intervention, because if he sticks his fist through the glass, I’ll have to drive him to the emergency room, but then his bedroom door bangs shut.

  Dad arrives even later. He moves like he’s haunting his own house: silent, but filling every inch. He pads upstairs, and I launch myself into bed just as he peeks into my room. I fake sleep-breathing. His gaze is like a screw tightening until I’m about to scream, but then he leaves, shutting the door softly behind him.

  I scroll through my phone under the covers. Eliot is the first new contact I’ve added in months. I type “disorder where you can’t feel pain” into Safari, and after ten minutes of reading, I’m listing all the working limbs I’d trade to undo saying he was lucky.

  Over half of all sufferers die before the age of three. The rest often do not make it past twenty-five years. . . .

  . . . can’t sense heat or cold, so heat stroke and febrile seizures are common . . .

  Most people with CIPA have some form of mild mental problems, but not all. . . .

  . . . statistically the most fatal kind of the seven types of hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy . . .

  No wonder he claims he doesn’t want to get old. It’s probably easier than facing the fact that he might not have a choice.

  I spend another minute energetically hating myself, and then I google his full name. I’m struck by an article captioned with a picture of a dark-haired little boy with a swollen eye and his arm in a sling. He’s grinning like he just won a fight.

  Six-year-old Eliot Rowe is one of about a hundred people worldwide affected by a rare genetic disorder that prevents him from feeling pain.

  “Infections, injuries . . . we never know something’s wrong unless it’s obvious from the outside,” said his mother. “He broke his elbow and we didn’t realize for two days. Once he almost chewed off his tongue. Not to mention all the tests. . . . It’s beyond exhausting.”

  As a baby, he rarely cried. Researchers have studied him and are attempting to develop more effective painkillers via gene sequencing.

  “It’s fascinating because we get to observe the relationship between physical and emotional pain,” noted a psychologist who has been working with the family. “Will his emotional development be stunted?”

  Eliot’s older brother, sixteen, offered a counterpoint: “When our dog got run over, he cried for a week.”

  “A normal kid who touches a hot stove once will never do it again,” continued his mother. “Eliot doesn’t understand what the problem is. He looks at us like we’re crazy when we tell him no.”

  Children with the condition often experience repeated injury. Pain serves an important evolutionary purpose: it teaches avoidance.

  “What do you think when you see someone in pain?” we asked Eliot. He shrugged and said, “Ow.”

  “What is ow?”

  After seemingly thinking about it, he couldn’t answer us.

  Oh, Eliot.

  I text him: I’m sorry.

  He responds in seconds: It’s fine.

  What are his mom and brother like? The brother’s twenty-seven now. Obviously they’ve never figured out how to keep Eliot safe. That’s probably impossible.

  I google “Myers-Briggs.” I’m supposed to be guessing which type Eliot is, but I don’t even remember what the letters stand for. I find an infographic. E stands for Extraversion, and I is Introversion. S is for Sensing, which apparently means you like things more concrete, versus N for Intuition, if you’re more figurative. . . . I rub my eyes. Eliot’s definitely introverted anyway. Then there’s T for Thinking, and F for Feeling. . . .

  Which one did he say I was—ISFJ? I read the description: Loyal, responsible, forgiving, pragmatic. Devoted caretakers who enjoy being helpful to others.

  That sounds more like my sister than me. Or at least how she’d like to be. All the summaries sound like ways people would like to view themselves. No wonder everyone loves personality types. It’s probably nice to see something good and decide that’s what you are.

  Eliot saw something good in me, apparently. But he doesn’t know me. I scan descriptions for one that sounds more accurate, but none are. Where’s the type for mentally checked out and usually in a bad mood?

  I can’t decide which one is Eliot’s. Which is probably because I don’t know him either.

  But I do know one thing, and it’s that the blankness that I usually feel went away the second I got into his car and it hasn’t come back.

  Chapter Four

  THE NEXT MORNING, I BANG ON REX’S DOOR with my crutch. “Wake up, sunshine.”

  “Dear sweet baby Christ,” I hear him groan loudly. “It’s Saturday.”

  “I need Anthony’s number.”

  There’s a curse, a crash, and he appears. I scream.

  “What?” he says, like he’s not plastered in mud, like his eyes aren’t a supervillain shade of red, like his nose isn’t broken.

  “I think your nose is broken.”

  He swears and gropes for the bulbous thing in the center of his face. “I fell.”

  “You should get that looked at. Seriously.”

  He ignores my plea and swipes a bottle of ibuprofen from his dresser. “Why do you need Anthony’s number?”

  Dr. Brown told me that grief is like a dying lightbulb. Sometimes it’s dark for an hour, sometimes it sputters for a day, and sometimes it seems fine before giving out when you least expect it. I feel the tears in my throat. Before the accident, Rex was a morning person.

  “Aw, shit, Sam,” he says guiltily.

  I scrub my face. “I just need the number.”

  He wavers between being a dick and ignoring my tears, or being an asshole and noticing them. The first wins, but he tries to make up for it by turning up the dial on Big Brother Mode. “Tell me why you were at that house yesterday. Is Anthony trying to get with you? He knows you’re off-limits.”

  “First, you don’t get to decide who I’m off-limits to. Second, ew. Third, fucking ew. And fourth, I’m not telling you why I need his number, but you’re giving it to me because you owe me.”

  “For what?”

  “For not doing this.” I lean back toward the stairs. “Dad!”

  Rex tenses all over like a cat and hisses like one, too. “Shutupshutup—”

  “Give me the number,” I hiss back in similar cat fashion.

  “Like hell—”

  “Dad!” I bellow. “You better come up here.”

  “What’s wrong, Sam?” he calls back faintly from the kitchen.

  Rex grabs my arm. “No, shut your mouth—I just have to clean myself up—”

  “Da-aad—”

  “Fine, fuck you, fine,” and he shoves his phone in my face.

  Dad’s head appears at the bottom of the stairs, and Rex hurtles back into his room. There’s flour on Dad’s shirt. My heart sinks. He’s cooking, which means he’s trying to Make Changes, which means he’s going to bug me to go back to physical therapy.

  “Sorry. Thought I saw a spider,” I say in my singsongy for-Dad voice.

  “Oh.” He sags in relief, not remembering that I’ve been the spider killer of the house since I was seven. He puts on his Since Mom Died smile. It doesn’t fit his face right yet. “I’m making pancakes. Tell Rex to come down when he’s ready.”

  Rex never eats breakfast, but grief made Dad forgetful. He forgets I don’t like Chinese food, that I’m allergic to strawberries. But I don’t mind the blank slate. It’s a chance to remake myself into someone who suits him better.

  I chase Rex into his room, which is as messy as mine, except my trash can isn’t full of tissues and I don’t have a poster of a model humping a car. He glowers at me from his bed like a hungover gremlin. “You’re not allowed in here.”

  I fin
d Anthony’s number on his phone and put it in mine as he tears through his room for clothes, unearthing a bag of pills in the process. He’s kept his habit secret from Dad, though it’s not hard. He’ll go downstairs in twenty minutes with a clean-shaven face and a funny story about tripping over Tito to explain his nose.

  He surfaces with chili-pepper-patterned boxers clenched in his fist. “I thought I told you to stay away from Anthony.”

  I bathe him in my haughtiest Lena glare before leaving.

  The kitchen is full of good smells that shouldn’t make me feel this sick. Dad is stirring batter. Three glasses of orange juice are on the table, surrounded by four chairs. I swallow. It takes me five seconds to work my face into my own SMD smile, which is my number-one tool for dealing with Dad and which I have perfected through trial and error.

  “Sam,” he says. There used to be lots of ways he would say my name: a happy “Sam!” or “Sam-antha Herring” if I stayed out too late. Now it’s just the careful—

  “Sam, what kind of pancakes would you like?”

  “Chocolate chip, please!” I beam. Everything I say to Dad is dangerously close to being a musical number.

  He upends a bag of Nestlé chips into the bowl. Mom would have said, “Everyone wait. I’m getting a vision of the future—it involves dental visits—” and the lightbulb flickers, but it’s against the rules to cry in front of Dad. He’ll think I’m falling apart again, and I’ll go crazy trying to act like I’m not crazy.

  “I thought we could have a family breakfast.” He pours batter into the pan. There’s a mug of coffee next to the blender, which nobody uses anymore—Mom was the smoothie person—but caffeine can’t disguise the bags under his eyes. “I was hoping Lena would get here early, but she’s stuck in traffic. She ought to be here in time for our appointment, though. Did you do your list of goals?”

  I nod and pull out a chair as Tito nudges my leg. There’s no traffic on Saturday mornings—Lena is just an expert at timing her arrival so she doesn’t have to spend any more time with us than therapy mandates.

  “Dr. Brown is very good?” Dad was always a nervous up-talker, but it’s gotten worse SMD.

  “Yeah, really good.”

  The pancakes look exhausting, like slabs of flesh. I yell for Rex, but the shower is still running. Traitor.

  “How’s school?” Dad’s scared it’s awful and I’ll be honest about it.

  “School is amazing. And I hung out with Kendra yesterday.”

  It’s not that Dad is inherently fragile. It’s that he’s so terrified of me being fragile that it makes him fragile. It’s my fault. I spent the winter in my room with the lights off, and he’s still scanning the sky for the bomb that will send me back inside my bunker. But I’ve learned that coming out of your room doesn’t mean you have to come out of your own head.

  “I’m glad you still spend time with those girls. I was worried about that because you had to leave the team. . . .” He rubs Tito’s ears. “Things are going well?”

  “So well.” I start counting the swans in the wallpaper. I’ve gotten up to seven hundred and fifty-four. One day I’ll know exactly how many there are.

  I take a bite of my pancake, which is mostly chocolate. People say grief turns food to ash in your mouth, but it’s just that you get sad when food is good. Like, She’ll never taste this, or She’ll never see how pretty the sky looks today, until everything nice makes you want to cry.

  Dad opens the vitamin cupboard. Mom’s expired supplements are in the back. She hated the way the pills felt going down but said she planned on going hiking with her great-grandchildren. People who think flaxseed oil will make them immortal should be warned: it’s not worth it. Switch to junk food like my dad. Your Omega-3 intake doesn’t matter when a car hits you.

  Dad wordlessly gives me my antidepressant bottle. I take one pill and hand the bottle back and he puts it away, a practiced gesture that both of us pretend is happening to someone else. He tosses Tito his cheese-wrapped pills, too. This whole family is medicated.

  “So I was thinking it might be good to make some changes around here,” Dad starts. “I called the doctor, and he says he has a physical therapy appointment open—”

  “Breakfast was delicious, but I gotta run,” I interrupt. “I’m meeting with Kendra for a group project.”

  “What class?”

  I miss not having to worry about being a good liar. “Biology. Frog dissection thing. Can you give me a ride? We’re meeting at McDonald’s.”

  We both hear the joke Mom would have made, like a record playing, about how a dead frog soaked in formaldehyde is probably more nutritional than a Big Mac. SMD, our conversations are full of moments of silence for the comments she’d have contributed.

  He places the dishes in the sink and says, a little confused, “Grab your jacket.”

  The car ride is only slightly awkward, a teaser for the ride we’ll all take to the therapist’s office later. I blank out the way I should have in Eliot’s car yesterday, and Dad doesn’t bring up physical therapy again.

  The McDonald’s in our town is semifamous. They were going to tear down a town landmark, this old Greco-Roman house, but Mom was part of the protest. They ended up putting their restaurant inside the original building, so there’s waxy floors and a soda machine in a house that looks like it belongs to an heiress. BMD, Rex worked here, but now he can’t even hold down a job at McDonald’s.

  As soon as I have my greasy bag, I call Anthony.

  “How did you get my number, Samantha Herring?” he asks immediately, which means he had mine.

  “We have to talk about yesterday. Meet me at McDonald’s—I bought you a Big Mac. You used to beg my mom for these, remember?”

  “I’ll have to pass, due to the unfortunate shortage of shits I give.”

  I crunch a fry audibly. “These fries are so fresh. Like ridiculously. And all crispy—”

  He yawns into the phone. “I haven’t had breakfast.”

  Anthony’s one weakness is fast food. Fifteen minutes later, he walks in behind a mom and her kids. He’s on the phone. I wave his Big Mac meal, and he saunters toward me, still chatting.

  “I talked to Principal Chase. She loves me—she’s suspending me for two weeks, no expulsion.” Silence. “No, Mom, I’m not expecting you to fly—” Then he stops talking and stares at the phone. His mom must have hung up. He glances up and recovers. “How can I help you, Samantha?”

  I squash the anger in my stomach. “Leave Eliot Rowe alone.”

  “I can’t leave someone alone who I haven’t touched since Monday.” He grabs the bag, not bothering to acknowledge his lie from yesterday.

  “Your friends hurt him because you told them to.”

  “Do you know why I sell pills?” he asks. “I don’t need the money. But people need medicine, which means they need me. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a problem they can get a prescription for. So when Eliot Rowe puts my business at risk, he’s putting my clients at risk. You’ve known me a long time—I’m not a bad guy. I’m just ensuring this never happens again. Looking after the people who’ve come to me for help, because they respect that I’ll come through.”

  He smiles at the girl behind the counter who’s been checking him out. His appearance is disorienting sometimes. You want to believe the best of people who look that good. It’s like brainwashing. “Eliot didn’t narc.”

  “I know you’re smart, and you know I’m smart, so we can talk facts, correct? And here they are: I don’t store anything in my locker. Obviously. But Principal Chase found weed there on an anonymous tip. I don’t even fucking sell weed.”

  “He didn’t do it,” I snap.

  “Do you know what loyalty is when you give it to people who don’t deserve it? It’s stupidity. Stay smart, Samantha.”

  The best way to deal with Anthony’s silky voice is to throw up a blank wall, which is good, because I’m a walking one. “It wasn’t him.”

  “Then it’s a fascinating co
incidence that I got arrested the day after he threatened me.”

  “He wasn’t threatening you—” I’m about to bring up Trez, but I remember what Eliot said about her not being able to handle the retribution. I squeeze my leg under the table.

  “If Principal Chase wasn’t as willing to make exceptions for top students, this could have affected my Yale acceptance.” He’s sipping his soda calmly, but a shiver runs through me.

  “Drop it or I’ll tell the cops what your friends did.”

  “Then I’ll tell them Rex sold me the weed in my locker,” he says easily. “Are we done with this game?”

  It’s not Dad’s reaction I imagine but Lena’s. Rex isn’t underage anymore. He could go to jail. I know Anthony’s different now, but somehow I thought we’d always be safe from him. “You’d do that to him?”

  “You’d call the cops on me?” He sounds genuinely wounded. “Eliot gets your loyalty after a week, and I don’t have it after years?”

  He’s actually making me feel guilty. “It’s not like we even still talk at school.”

  “I’m a certain person at school.” He doesn’t say but, but he doesn’t need to. I don’t fit that person anymore. I fit No-Moore, and Anthony’s so desperate not to be him that he’s become the opposite.

  “I care about you, Sam,” he says softly after a minute.

  I shift. “Just don’t hit Eliot anymore. He has a health problem.”

  He rips open a ketchup packet with his teeth. “He looks fine to me.”

  I’m not going to get anywhere. I should have realized that from the beginning. I hook my crutches under my armpits and stand.

  “Don’t burn yourself out for Eliot,” he says. “People like him don’t care about anyone else. They’re not programmed to.”

  “People like him?” Past the toy display case, the mom stares at me. I guess I was loud.

  He bites the last fry in half. “Retards.”

  I am so grateful that he hasn’t finished his drink.

  “Fuck!” He jumps up as I plant my crutch back on solid ground. Luckily he’s wearing a nice shirt. The brown Coke stain spreads fast. His eyes lock on me, and I get this shooting feeling, like I’m prey and he’s a predator. Our history doesn’t mean I’m safe.