Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

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 month 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?”

Aidan had never thrown it in her face before, her special status with their father. Tears welled in Marlinchen’s eyes.

“Linch,” Aidan said, relenting, but she fled, into the hallway, into her own room.

On the dayof Aidan’s early-morning flight, Marlinchen got up at 5 A.M. to make him pancakes. Her reflection in the blackness outside the kitchen window looked like the pinched face of an old woman whose hair had failed to go gray. Aidan ate only a third of what she’d made him.

She got up again at seven to make a second breakfast for the boys. Dad wasn’t home yet. Liam cried at the breakfast table, and Donal followed suit. Colm’s face was set and hard.

Marlinchen called Aidan a few times on the phone, until one day her father left the phone bill on her bed, with the Illinois calls outlined in yellow. She knew he didn’t want money for the calls, and a cold feeling coalesced in her stomach. She started making the calls from pay phones, when she could, but opportunities were few and far between. Aidan told her he was all right, and that Aunt Brigitte was nice. After that there was little to say.

When schoolstarted, Hugh didn’t bring Aidan home. Marlinchen started several times to ask her father why not, but the words froze in her throat. When Aunt Brigitte died in a car accident, and Aidan was sent farther south to live with an old friend of their father’s, Marlinchen heard nothing about it until it was over and done with. When she finally found out, she understood that Aidan was never coming home. Their father was never going to change his mind.

I have to do something. I have to talk to him. I can’t let Aidan live down there with someone we’ve never even met.

But she didn’t say anything, not right away. If Marlinchen was afraid for Aidan, she was just as worried about her father. He’d been under pressure for so long, financial and otherwise. His back had flared up, and he was moodier than ever. Once, he’d said he’d had something important to tell her, and led her down to the magnolia tree to say it.

All the way down there, her heart had raced. What was he going to say? I have cancer, I’m dying? When they’d arrived, he’d been at a loss for words. He’d looked down at the ground and out at the lake, and finally told her about how much he’d loved her mother, how much he missed her, how important the kids were to him.

Still frightened, Marlinchen had hurried to say, I understand, Daddy, we love you. She hadn’t understood what he meant by it. Was he still depressed over Mother’s death? Could he be trying to tell her he was having suicidal thoughts? For nearly a month afterward, Marlinchen hadn’t been able to sleep through the night. She’d gotten up at least once to creep down the hall and look into his bedroom, making sure he was all right, his chest rising and falling under the bedspread.

Not long afterward, something happened that changed everything.

At school one afternoon, during PE, she saw Aidan on the other side of the chain-link fence. He raised a single finger to his lips. When she left the campus that day, he fell into step beside her. The school-bus driver didn’t notice as Aidan climbed aboard with everyone else.

For two days, Marlinchen hid him in the detached garage. She sneaked him food and brought him a blanket so he could sleep stretched out on the backseat of Dad’s old, defunct BMW.

The second day, she told Liam. After dinner, they brought Aidan his food, and afterward, the three siblings sat and talked. Mostly Aidan spoke, telling them about Aunt Brigitte, who had been nice, but almost too sweet and clingy. He said Pete Benjamin was okay, but he was a total stranger, and after two weeks, Aidan had been too homesick and lonely for his siblings to stay any longer. He told them the story of his late-night escape, funding a bus ticket with money he’d saved from an allowance Aunt Brigitte had given him, of the night highway unfurling under the bus’s headlights, of walking all day to Marlinchen’s school. In the twilit world of the garage, the miseries of Aidan’s life took on the character of adventures.

Then the door had opened, Colm in the breach. “What’s going on?” he’d said.

Three faces turned to him, and Colm’s gaze came to rest on his oldest brother. For a moment he was startled, then his face hardened, and he said, “I’m telling Dad.”

“Colm, no!” Marlinchen had jumped to her feet, but her younger brother was running for the house.

Their father was almost frighteningly still and quiet when he came to stand in the doorway, looking down at his estranged son, nodding as though he weren’t surprised.

“Dad-” Marlinchen began, trying to speak although her throat was turning to stone.

“It’s okay, Marlinchen,” Hugh had said. “I figured he’d turn up here.”

Then he’d addressed Aidan. “You’re going back in the morning,” their father had said. “Until then, come up to the house. You can sleep on the couch downstairs tonight.”

Relief had filled Marlinchen; she’d expected much worse. That night, she’d made up a bed on the couch for her brother, and fell asleep instantly upon returning to bed. The tension of the last few days, of hiding Aidan, had taken its toll on her. Now it was over, and exhaustion claimed her.