Alix Ohlin - Inside

“I’m so sorry,” Mitch said, and the kid nodded. He had spoken calmly, without tears or anger, his fidgeting and nail-biting the only signs of emotion. The office door was still open, and Mitch could hear steps and voices outside. Someone with a scheduled appointment was waiting in the hallway.

Thomasie leaned back, as if spent, and sucked on his bloody fingernail. He didn’t seem inclined to say anything more.

“What was your sister’s name?” Mitch said.

The boy’s attention strayed to his shoes, which he examined closely for some time. “Karen,” he finally said. Another pause. Then, still looking at his shoes: “I dream about her sometimes. She’s alone in the snow. It’s like she’s in heaven — except not really, ’cause she’s cold and uncomfortable. She keeps asking me to come see her, and I try, but I can’t get to her. Then I wake up.”

Mitch nodded. “You wish you could have helped her and your mom.”

Thomasie shrugged. “I been at the hospital so much, with my mom, they told me to come see you.”

“I’m glad you did,” Mitch said. “So let’s set up some appointments.”

“You got any drugs?” the boy said. “I don’t sleep good.”

Mitch flushed. “I’m not that kind of doctor.”

“My friend got some pills when his dad died.”

Mitch sat back. “I’d like to help you,” he said, and Thomasie looked up. “We can work with a psychiatrist on some treatment options. But mainly, you and me, we’ll just be talking, working through some of the stuff that’s happened.”

The boy was already standing. “Okay,” he said, in a monotone that implied neither agreement nor refusal. Before Mitch could ask him to wait, he loped out, his sneakers squeaking against the linoleum. Then a middle-aged man came in complaining that he shouldn’t have to be here just because he and his wife had “one goddamn fight.” Mitch had to focus on calming him down, and soon grew absorbed by this new story, this new crisis. But his eye caught a flash of red out of the window — Thomasie Reeves’s windbreaker, bright against the drab gray parking lot as he strode quickly away, his head down against the wind.

The rest of the day passed normally, with addiction counseling, unemployment sagas, eviction nightmares. These he was used to. He knew how to help people break such stories down into their composite elements and start to reconfigure them. He saw his job as gently prying their fingers from their own throats. A long time ago, as a young man, he had thought of himself as a savior, and this was the fervor he had passed on to Grace. Now he believed in small, specific steps and broad-based statistical results. He wasn’t as enthused about his work as he once was, but he was more confident in his ability to execute, and he slept better at night.

At six he finished up and walked through the clinic toward the exit. It was a quiet, dark place, with green corridors and an overworked, lethargic-looking staff that paid him no attention, but he didn’t mind. Nor did it bother him to step out into a bright June evening so brisk that he shivered. He had gotten away.

After his disastrous visit to her apartment, he thought he’d never see Martine again. The bachelor life he had grown used to now seemed pathetic, and a sense of futility draped itself over him, wrapping its suffocating arms around his neck. From now on he would be alone.

Then she called.

This time, they met in the middle of the day and took Mathieu to a movie and then to the park. An unexpected thing happened. Mitch had liked Martine — in the fizzy, hopelessly insecure way you like someone who’s out of your league, and clearly slumming in your league for just one night — but he fell in love with her son. And it was reciprocated. The kid had Asperger’s, it seemed; he was a dinosaur expert and could recite encyclopedia entries about them from memory. He told Mitch all about the T. rex and “the land before time,” apparently the dinosaur era. And as Mitch listened to this beautiful, robotic child, he felt his heart cracking like ice cubes in warm water. By the end of the afternoon, Mathieu was holding his hand and lecturing him about velociraptors.

Martine, for her part, was amazed. “This never happens,” she said, sounding almost offended.

“Can we take him home?” Mitch heard Mathieu say to her in French. “I want to play with him.”

Martine said, “He’s not a toy, my love.”

The kid just looked at her blankly. Other than dinosaurs, it was hard to know what he thought about anything. Mitch could only imagine the heartbreak of this for Martine, who constantly threw him lines, hoping their hooks would catch and she could reel him in. Mitch wanted to say that of course he’d go home with them, but the memory of his first encounter with the boy prevented him from speaking.

“Ask him yourself,” Martine finally said.

“You come with me?” Mathieu said to him instantly. He had yet to call Mitch by name or to acknowledge that he was an adult. He treated him like a cross between an audience and a companion.

“Yes, I’d like to come with you,” Mitch said, then glanced over at Martine, expecting to see gratitude and appreciation on her face. Instead, she looked irritated and a little concerned. She held out her hand to her son, who ignored it and took Mitch’s. Thus unified, thus fractured, they went home.

Over the next few months, Mitch’s relationship with the boy deepened into ferocious, passionate intensity. They spent every weekend together. He took Mathieu to Parc Lafontaine, to the planetarium, played with him, read Tintin to him. Martine wasn’t keen on school-night visits, so midweek he’d find himself in a reverie of longing, wondering what Mathieu was doing at that very moment, picturing his blond head asleep on his red flannel pillow.

Things with Martine were, understandably, a little strange. They hardly spent any time alone. They never went out to dinner or a movie, and he didn’t meet any of her friends. But he stepped into her home life, drawing himself inside the bubble of her apartment, her weekends, her kitchen table. After Mathieu went to bed, the two of them would talk — mostly about the child — while doing the dishes or drinking a glass of wine. They went to bed together, but a lot of the time they just went to sleep, Martine curled up against him with a hand on his shoulder or hip. Tired from a long week, she wanted to be held and comforted as she drifted off. When they did have sex, it was ritualized, purposeful, and quick — which was not the same as unsatisfying. There was a deep comfort in the dullness of it that he could never have anticipated. Sometimes she asked him to stay with Mathieu while she took a bath and read a magazine. It was as if they had skipped dating and gone straight to the long-married stage.

This went on for a year, then another. He didn’t meet the rest of Martine’s family, though her parents lived in Montreal North and her sister not five streets away. Somehow, without any conversation, certain rules had been established. Weekends only, even in summer — except in August, when they went on vacation together in Maine, where Mitch and Mathieu played Frisbee on the beach and jumped in the waves.

He wondered, every so often, why he tolerated these conditions, and always reached the same conclusions. First, as strange as the situation was, there was no doubt that it was better — a thousand times better — than living on his own had been. Second, he believed, though he never articulated this to Martine, that if he hung on and stuck around, eventually he would be more than her son’s companion and her weekend comfort. He would be indispensable. He was counting on that.

Thomasie Reeves came back a week later. In the interim, Mitch had been settling into the duplex; he had bought groceries and stocked the kitchen, and gone for walks around town to let people know who he was and how long he’d be staying. He was welcomed with uncommon grace, tinged with reserve; it was clear that they were used to seeing people like him come and go.