Sympathy Between Humans

by Jodi Compton

  She spoke quickly. “I am sorry about the way I talked to you, the day that-”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what I mean,” I told her. “I’m not angry about what you said, but the question I asked you that day still stands.” I paused, watching her face. She undoubtedly remembered what we’d been talking about, but I reminded her anyway. “Kids don’t get sent away from their families for no reason,” I said. “Good reasons, bad reasons… there’s always something.”

  True to form, she didn’t answer.

  “I get the feeling that there’s something else you’d like to tell me,” I said. “Do you trust me, Marlinchen?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s just that Aidan is a painful issue.”

  “Sometimes, in my line of work,” I said, “I tell people they have to make their pain worse for a while on the way to making it better, or they’ll go on dealing with the same low-grade pain indefinitely.”

  Marlinchen looked straight ahead, staring out into the blackness beyond the kitchen windows. She wasn’t ready to make the pain worse. I’d tried.

  “Finish your wine,” I said, “and let’s go to bed.”

  ***

  I very nearly shut myself into Hugh Hennessy’s bedroom before I remembered the loose knob. Leaving the door cracked, I felt a little frisson of anxiety. It was so dark and quiet out here, I felt like I had stepped into a Gothic novel, complete with trick doors that trapped you behind them. In bed, I missed the small city noises that would have helped me sleep.

  Because I’d left the door open, nothing alerted me that someone else was in the bedroom until I heard movement. I rolled over quickly, judged from the shape of the shadow that it was Marlinchen, and relaxed. She was barefoot, dressed only in a camisole and boxer shorts.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I want to talk about Aidan,” she said.

  Finally.

  Marlinchen came closer, to sit on the floor by the bed.

  “I didn’t say anything against Aidan being sent away. I thought it was for the best.” She drew in a shuddery breath. “I was afraid of what would happen if Aidan stayed.”

  “Why were you afraid?” I asked.

  “He was beating Aidan,” she said. “Toward the end. But it started a long time before that.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  21

  Marlinchen Hennessy was her father’s little girl; she was bright and verbal, and her father loved to read to her and teach her new words and listen to what she was learning in school. No sound had been sweeter to her own ears than the nickname of “Marli” that only Daddy used, and it hadn’t been until she was perhaps 10 that she’d realized that Daddy wasn’t six feet tall, but only five-foot-eight.

  Aidan, quiet as his twin sister was talkative, gravitated to their pensive, withdrawn mother. Like an astronomer, he studied her silences and her moods. When she seemed saddest, she’d draw him up into her lap and hold him, stroke his golden hair, kiss his maimed hand. Sometimes they’d sit together under the magnolia tree and look out at the waters of the lake. When he thought it would make her feel better, he’d bring the baby down to her, first Colm, whose weight had bowed Aidan’s small back, then later baby Donal. That was close, of course, to the end.

  All the children had been stricken by their mother’s sudden death, but none more than Aidan. After the funeral, he’d lain under the magnolia tree and wept without restraint. Daddy had finally looked out the window and seen Aidan there, and his lips had narrowed to a thin line, and he’d opened the door and gone down the back steps and stood at Aidan’s side. Marli, watching from her bedroom window, hadn’t been able to hear his words, but Aidan wasn’t responding. Then Daddy had bent down and pulled Aidan to his feet, and when he saw Aidan was still crying, slapped his face.

  Marli forgot her shock in a day or two. She was young.

  She was busy, too. There was so much to learn. Daddy gave her a footstool so she could reach the table where she changed Donal’s diapers. She dressed the baby in the morning and put him down for his naps and to bed in the evening. In the weeks after Mother’s death, there were babysitters, but soon they faded away. “It’s our home,” Daddy said. “We’ll take care of it, like we’ll take care of each other.”

  Marlinchen liked that idea. She thought of it as she poured cereal into bowls for her brothers and made their school lunches and washed up the dishes. She was not yet eight years old.

  Marlinchen worried about her father constantly. She’d heard him talking to someone on the phone about having an ulcer. That was new, in addition to the back pain that came and went, and Marlinchen knew that stress aggravated it. With Mother gone, Daddy had to do the shopping for six now, and drive them to school and buy them their clothes and school supplies.

  Daddy used to kiss the top of her head and say, “What would I do without you?” He sampled the dinners she started cooking at eight years old, her first recipes, and proclaimed every one of them “superb,” even the ones she knew she’d messed up. He came to stand in the doorway sometimes when she was reading bedtime stories to Colm and Donal. She’d always pretend she didn’t see him, keeping her pride in his approval to herself.

  There were other compensations: a little extra spending money. A white kitten on her birthday. Marlinchen was the first girl in her class to have pierced ears, with permission from Daddy, who said she was mature enough for them at nine.

  Lost in the unconscious narcissism of childhood, she didn’t realize for a long time that Daddy never really made eye contact with Aidan much, or spoke directly to him. If Marli was around, that’s who he talked to. When Marlinchen did begin to notice this, she thought it was because Aidan was so quiet all the time, and self-sufficient. Not like Colm and Liam, who got scraped knees and had arguments that needed to be refereed, or Donal, who needed everything. Aidan never required much of anything.

  Then, one midwinter day, he got sick.

  It wasn’t serious. Shouldn’t have been, at least. It was a flu, one of those things that runs around schools in wintertime. Aidan caught it, but kept going to school until a teacher sent him home.

  When Marli got home that day, she went to his room to see how he was doing. He was very sleepy. When she touched his cheek, it was like a furnace covered by a thin layer of muscle and skin. She took his temperature with the little thermometer from the bathroom. What it showed her made her run to her father’s study.

  Daddy was working on a lecture he was giving at Augsberg College. She found him deep into his writing.

  “Daddy?”

  “Hi, honey,” he’d said, not stopping his work.

  “I think Aidan’s really sick,” she said.

  “It’s the flu,” Daddy said. “Bed rest is the only thing you can do for it.”

  “I think he needs a doctor,” Marlinchen said. “His temperature is 104.”

  “Really?” Daddy said. “Better give him a couple of ibuprofen, then. That’ll take the fever down.” He was still typing.

  Marlinchen swallowed. “I really think he needs a doctor, Daddy.”

  Daddy had stopped typing, but he hadn’t turned around. “Did you hear me? Give him the ibuprofen,” he said. His voice had become sharp. “I’m giving this lecture tomorrow. I don’t have time for this shit.”

  “All right,” she said faintly.

  Marlinchen had seen a movie where people saved a man with a high fever. She made Aidan wash the ibuprofen down with a big glass of ice water, and then another, and she ran him a very cold bath and made him get in it. In an hour, his temperature registered at 100, and she knew he’d be okay.

  Daddy came out of his study three hours later. “I’m sorry, Marli,” he said.

  Relief warmed her.

  “I shouldn’t have said that four-letter word in front of you,” he said. “That’s a bad word, I know.” He pressed $20 into her hand. “How about ordering pizza tonight, so you don’t have to cook?”

  Daddy’s back had been hurting of late, Ma
rlinchen decided later. That was probably behind his short temper.

  Another year passed, and another. She was taking on more and more responsibility around the house. Despite the fact that he wasn’t teaching, Daddy seemed busier than ever, staying behind his study door for long hours, working on the new book. Outside, the other kids looked to her not only for meals but for homework help, reprimands, discipline.

  All except for Aidan. He was a help. He watched Colm and Donal- Liam was already well into his love affair with books- when she needed to study, playing catch with them or taking them for rambles along the lake. And Aidan was her friend in a way the other boys weren’t. They shared jokes and secrets, and when Daddy went to bed early with pain in his back, sometimes they’d stay up together and watch forbidden R-rated movies on cable.

  Aidan alone among her brothers could be described as tall. And when they were both 11, her brother had a growth spurt. One day, while the family was assembling around the dinner table, she’d noticed Aidan standing at the open refrigerator door, his maimed hand resting casually on the side of the appliance, looking in. It hit her suddenly how tall he was, how his arms were beginning to take on that smooth ripple of muscle that men had. He looked older than 11.

  And then Marlinchen noticed her father. He was looking at Aidan, too, and his blue eyes were oddly narrow. He didn’t say anything. In fact, he was quiet all that night.

  Dad had been quiet a lot of late. Marlinchen began to suspect his writing wasn’t going well, and she knew his ulcer was acting up. He spoke tersely and was short-tempered. It was around that time that the Photo Incident occurred. Marlinchen always thought of it like that, like some historical event that would be capitalized in a history textbook.

  Daddy had put Marlinchen in charge of the family photos from long ago; she enjoyed making albums. She’d given Aidan a photo that was too big for an album, an eight-by-ten of their mother holding him in her lap under the magnolia tree. Aidan had never done much to decorate his half of his and Liam’s room, but he bought a frame for the picture and hung it up next to his certificate for being the fastest miler in his grade at school.

  It had been up for two days when Dad, passing the older boys’ room on his way out, saw it.

  “That photo doesn’t belong to you,” he’d said to Aidan, “and I don’t like seeing it in that cheap drugstore frame.”

  “The photo’s mine,” Aidan had insisted. “Marlinchen gave it to me.”

  Dad had simply walked over and picked up the photo and the frame.

  “That’s mine,” Aidan repeated.

  Dad pulled the photo free of the velvety backing. “You can have the frame,” he said. “I believe you when you say you bought it. The photo isn’t yours.”

  “Yes, it is,” Aidan said, one last time, but Dad had ignored him, walked away.

  The next day was the anniversary of their mother’s death. They always went to put flowers on her grave on that day, every year. It was a family tradition.

  This day, when Aidan went to the garage with everyone else, Dad had laid his hand on the car door when Aidan reached for the handle, and shook his head. “You’re staying home,” he said.

  “What?” Aidan’s throat had worked, as if he’d misheard.

  “You know, you’ve been doing poorly in school again this year,” he’d said. “Your teacher suggested I restrict you from outings and family trips until your work improves. I think she’s right.”

  Marlinchen’s eyes had been trained on her twin brother’s face. She knew how much their mother’s memory meant to him. Aidan had waited, as if Dad would relent. Then, color flooding his cheeks, he’d gone back to the house.

  It wasn’t for two days that Dad realized what Aidan had done with his time alone in the house. That afternoon, Dad came out of his studio and down the hall to find Aidan laboring over his homework.

  “Where is it?” he’d demanded.

  “Where is what?” Aidan asked.

  Aidan had taken the photo from his father’s study, and wherever he’d hidden it, Dad couldn’t find it. He’d torn Aidan’s half of the bedroom apart, he’d searched the bathroom and old hiding places around the house, but without luck. He refused to ask Aidan again where the photo was, but his black mood hung like a cloud over the house. Aidan said little, his face closed, but Marlinchen was deeply frightened.

  “Can’t you just give the photo back?” Marlinchen said.

  “No,” Aidan told her. “It’s not here anymore.”

  “You’re provoking him.”

  “He took something that was mine,” Aidan said. His voice was changing, and for a moment she heard a man’s timbre, his future voice.

  “If you just give it back, things will be all right,” she had said.

  Marlinchen had better grades than Aidan. She helped him with his schoolwork. But now he was looking at her like he knew something she couldn’t grasp.

  “No, it won’t,” he said. “It’s not about the picture.”

  When the beatings started, Marlinchen and her younger brothers dealt with it by pretending that it wasn’t happening. It wasn’t that hard. Most of the hostilities were staged away from their eyes. When they heard something through the walls, Colm would turn up the volume on the TV set. Liam would put on the headphones of his Walkman and read. Marlinchen took Donal outside, to walk by the lake. Aidan himself never spoke of it in front of them, and he disguised the bruises from both them and his teachers.

  The younger boys were changing; Marlinchen saw it. They began pulling away from Aidan, as if afraid that the lightning that struck him regularly might strike one of them as well. Colm, who had once followed Aidan like a shadow, became rude and oppositional to him. At dinner he pointedly sat as far as possible from Aidan, echoing his father’s opinions and ideas. Liam grew quiet and nervous, retreating into the stories he’d begun to write.

  One day, in late spring, they were all outside, enjoying the first good weather. Colm was tossing a baseball around with Donal. Marlinchen was sitting at the outside table, finishing a book she needed to write a school report on. Aidan was working on Marlinchen’s bike, the lovely metallic-orange one she’d just gotten and was still growing into. They’d taken the handlebars off and put them back on reversed, and Aidan was worried about the brake tension.

  Colm made a long throw to Donal, who was standing near the deck stairs with his fielder’s glove. The throw went wild and hit the porch railing about four feet from Aidan, who put a hand up to field it a second too late. The baseball ricocheted off the wooden railing into the kitchen window. Glass shattered.

  They were all statues for a moment. They knew Dad was upstairs, and he would have heard.

  “Shit,” Aidan said, getting up off his knees and walking toward the window. They all clustered around it, in time to see Dad enter the kitchen, observe the broken glass on the floor and the baseball that had rolled to a stop by the refrigerator.

  “Who did this?” he said, when he’d emerged onto the deck, his eyes taking them all in. There was silence for a moment, then Colm said, “Aidan did.”

  “What?” Marlinchen protested. “Colm.”

  “Aidan did,” he insisted, nervy defiance on his face. Aidan, like her, was staring uncomprehending at Colm, who was looking only at their father.

  Dad spoke to Aidan. “Get upstairs,” he said. He didn’t ask if what Colm said was true. Marlinchen knew that he wouldn’t, not now and not upstairs.

  “Colm,” she said when Aidan was gone, “what did you do that for? It wasn’t Aidan’s fault.”

  “How do you know?” Colm said mulishly. “You were reading. You didn’t see.” Then he went inside the house, retrieving his baseball.

  Marlinchen watched him go, and as she did, she realized that there was a poison spreading through her family. What Colm did once, he would try again, because it had worked. Marlinchen was afraid of how things would change from there. But what happened next was far from what she’d expected.

  It was perhaps a m
onth later that their father called Marlinchen and Aidan into his study. “I’ve been in touch with your aunt Brigitte, your mother’s sister,” he said to both of them. “She’s generously offered to let Aidan live with her.”

  Why? Marlinchen wanted to ask. They didn’t even know Aunt Brigitte. She had never visited Minnesota, and the family had never traveled to her home in Illinois.

  Instead, she said, “For how long?” Summer was here; that must be what her father had in mind, a summer away.

  “We’ll see,” her father said. He tapped a narrow folder on his desk with a Northwest Airlines logo. “You leave as soon as school’s out,” he told Aidan, who swallowed hard and left.

  “Dad,” Marlinchen said softly, but she didn’t know what else to say.

  “Help him pack, would you?” her father said. “Boys are hopeless at that sort of thing. And, honey”- he turned back from booting up the computer-“tell your brothers, will you?”

  Upstairs, Aidan required no help in packing, and he seemed to have already adjusted to the idea that had so shocked Marlinchen.

  “Don’t worry,” he said quietly, pulling out his suitcase. “I’ll be fine.”

  “But we’ve never even met Aunt Brigitte,” Marlinchen protested.

  “Yes, we did,” Aidan said. “We were down there once, at her place in Illinois.”

  Marlinchen gave him a quizzical look. “I don’t remember that,” she said. “Besides, Dad doesn’t even like her.”

  “Then she’s probably all right,” Aidan said bitterly.

  “It’s just for the summer, I bet.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I don’t care where I live,” Aidan said.

  “But-”

  “Just drop it, okay?” Aidan said sharply. “And get your cat out of my suitcase.”

  Marlinchen saw Snowball happily digging her claws into the clothes Aidan had laid in the open case. She got up from Liam’s bed. “Snowball isn’t my cat; she belongs to all of us,” she said.

  “No, she doesn’t,” Aidan said. “Snowball is your pet, and you’re Dad’s pet. Why don’t you just leave me the fuck alone?”