Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

I took the decision from Marlinchen’s hands. “Yeah, that might be a good idea,” I said. It was probably best that Hugh didn’t have another stroke at the sight of his long-lost son.

Aidan slipped from the visiting room. After he left, Marlinchen carried on with her open-ended conversation, with Liam and Colm still helping at irregular intervals. Increasingly, I felt like an interloper, and after a moment I left the room, as Aidan had.

It was around one o’clock, with the iron heat of a June midday in full effect, but I wandered outside. The exit door was conveniently just beyond the visiting room, and I’d somehow wanted relief from the atmosphere of the nursing home: aseptic, yet cheerful; verdant with plants, yet somehow stale.

Once outside, I saw that Aidan had made the same decision. He was at a distance on the grounds, walking, and had drifted toward the only shade available, where willows overhung the shallow, reedy pond. The Canada geese that had been bathing there rose up and flew off at Aidan’s approach. All but one, which was flopping awkwardly.

Aidan still hadn’t noticed me following him. His attention was on the straggler goose. As it flailed forward into the sunlight, I saw a tiny flash of metal in its beak, and I realized what had happened. At one of the small lakes nearby, the bird had gotten a fishhook caught in its beak. It had flown here before settling down in this safe haven and trying to dislodge the hook, probably making things worse in the attempt.

Aidan, surprising me with his reflexes, snatched up the goose by its neck. The bird squalled with surprise. Its outstretched wings worked wildly, the tip of one scraping at Aidan’s cheekbone and forehead while he worked at the goose’s beak with his free hand. Aidan pulled his head back, out of reach of the bird’s thrashing wings, and spoke to the goose, not loud enough for me to overhear. Then he withdrew his hand, and I saw light glint off the small crook of metal.

Aidan released the bird, which shook itself indignantly, then took to the air. It flew low at first, only a few feet over the turf, as if making a test flight to see that all systems were go. Then it banked higher and was out of sight. Aidan, after watching it disappear, moved toward the pond’s edge. He cocked his arm and threw the fishhook out into the waters of the pond.

In a field full of cool, analytical thinkers, I’d always worked from instinct. In that moment, I made up my mind about Aidan Hennessy.

It was such a small thing Aidan had done, removing the fishhook from the goose’s beak, yet it spoke volumes. I didn’t believe that Aidan had known that anyone was within view of him. He had acted naturally and without forethought to ease an animal’s pain. I couldn’t reconcile that image with the idea of him ripping up Marlinchen’s cat.

Other people had tried to tell me. Marlinchen had been his staunchest defender, of course, but Liam had said it as well: he’s our brother. And Mrs. Hansen, the grade-school teacher, had called Aidan a fighter but not a bully. I just hadn’t been able to hear any of it. Gray Diaz’s investigation, Prewitt’s suspicion… it had all set me on edge, and the resulting paranoia had spread throughout my life, coloring how I’d viewed Aidan, making his unexpected return seem sinister.

When Aidan sat down in the shade of the willow, I went to join him.

“Hey,” I said, sitting with my knees drawn up, resting my forearms on them.

“Hey,” he said.

“Look,” I said, “I should say something. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot.” Come on, Sarah, you can do better than that. “I was too hard on you, the night you came home.”

Aidan looked over at me.

“Suspicion is a cop virtue,” I explained. “It’s my fallback position when I don’t know what to think.”

“It’s okay,” he said, taking out a pack of cigarettes and starting to remove one. I suspected that he, like most smokers, fell back on cigarettes at awkward moments, not necessarily for the nicotine but just for the distraction of a simple physical activity. “I mean, I can see how it might have looked to you.”

I nodded but said nothing else.

“I guess I should say, too…” He paused, thinking. “Well, Marlinchen says you’ve been looking out for them, since Hugh had his stroke.”

I shrugged. “Mostly, it was my job.” I wasn’t sure that was true, but it sounded good.

“Well, anyway, it’s…” Aidan tore up a handful of grass. “I’m glad someone was there.” He slid the cigarette back in its pack.

“Quitting?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Marlinchen’s on my case about it.”

That was Marlinchen, nothing if not forceful in her opinions. I plucked a dandelion globe. “Can I ask you a question?” I said. “It’s another cop habit.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

“I know you don’t have a criminal record,” I told him. “That’s kind of hard for a runaway to do, to survive without breaking the law. I don’t mean to get in your business, but were you really law-abiding, or just lucky?”

“Mostly law-abiding,” Aidan said. “There’s always work off the books, if you know where to look for it. When I couldn’t find jobs, I raided garbage bins behind stores. Panhandled. Made up stories about having a bus ticket stolen. That kind of thing,” he said.

“You never thought about contacting your dad for money?”

Aidan’s eyes flicked toward the building, where Hugh was secreted behind the glare off the big plate-glass window. “I didn’t want anything from him,” he said. He didn’t elaborate, not sure what I knew.

“It’s okay,” I said carefully, knowing it was a sensitive area. “Marlinchen told me about Hugh. About how things were before you were sent away.”

“It was a long time ago,” Aidan said, looking out at the waters of the pond. “I try not to think about it.”

We were silent a moment. I decided not to push things further than we’d already gone, but Aidan surprised me by speaking again. “You wanted to know, the other night, about why I decided to come home.” It was half a statement, half a question.

“Yeah,” I said, half responding, half prompting.

“There was no big thing that made me leave the farm in Georgia,” he said. “Pete was okay, but he wasn’t my family, and we never really warmed up to each other. I finally decided that the farm was his problem, not mine. So I split.”

“And you didn’t want to come home, because of Hugh,” I said.

“Yeah,” Aidan said. “I thought I’d go to California and start over. So I did. I made some friends, guys who’d watch my back if I watched theirs. Met some girls, had some times. But I didn’t stay there, I came home because”- Aidan hesitated-“it’s not that easy to explain.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.

“It was just something that happened on the beach one night.” A wisp of dandelion fluff landed on Aidan’s arm, and he brushed it away. “When I said before that I was ‘mostly’ law-abiding, well, I was, but I did some drugs.” He looked at me, making sure I was okay with that before moving on. “So one night, I was wired on crystal and sitting up smoking, because I knew I was never going to get to sleep. I don’t know why, but at some point I started thinking about Minnesota, and all of a sudden I realized I didn’t even remember what Donal looked like.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why it bothered me so much, but it did. And I realized that I’d been trying to tell myself that the people I’d met out in Cali were my new brothers and sisters, but that was bullshit. They weren’t and never would be. Some people in your life you just can’t substitute for. They aren’t replaceable.”