“I’d never loved anything so much,” he told me. “That little thing wanted to be wherever I was. He followed me everywhere.” He paused and then continued, “He had this thing, though, about barking. At the drop of a pin. He barked so much, and I couldn’t shut him up, and every time the doorbell rang or a car pulled up to the house or someone knocked on my door, I…I couldn’t get to him in time to settle him down before my father heard him and got angry.”
Dread knotted my stomach, and I pictured seven-year-old Damon and his puppy with their sliver of happiness in that shitty house.
“Even at seven years old, though,” he continued, “I knew the horror of finding my dog hanging from a tree in the woods wasn’t as awful as the realization that my father made no attempt to hide what he’d done.”
My face cracked, but I stayed silent.
“He wanted me to find him.” His voice grew thick with tears. “Even then I understood that the dog wasn’t the one being punished, and that next time he’d make me do the deed. I never asked for another dog after that.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, tears spilling over. Jesus Christ.
“And I learned, really quick, that life wasn’t going to be pretty. Not until…”
Until…me?
I put the pieces together. His dog at seven, the party at eleven and how his father yelled at him and how his demeanor had already started to go downhill. I had nothing to do with any of that.
“I was so alone,” he explained from somewhere on the other side of my room. “I couldn’t talk to people. I didn’t have any friends. I was scared all the time.” His voice was thick with memory, as if it all happened just yesterday. “I just wanted to be invisible, and if I couldn’t be invisible, then I just wanted it to end. I was going to run away, because…” His sad voice trailed off. “Because the only other way to escape was to end it all.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. That’s what was going through his mind when I met him that first time? What eleven year old wants to die?
“You were so little,” he mused. “When you came into the maze and noticed me hiding and crawled inside and sat down at my side, it was like…”
Like you had a pet again.
“Like I wasn’t alone anymore,” he finished. “So little. So quiet. But it was everything. Feeling you next to me.”
God, what was he doing to me?
“You taught me how to survive that day,” he said. “You taught me how to be strong and how to get to the next minute. And the next and the next. I could never forget, and when you came back in high school, and I had changed into this, because I’d seen so much shit,” he went on, “and my desires had morphed into something ugly and twisted, but I’d fucking survived, nonetheless, and didn’t swallow the bad for anyone anymore, because you had taught me how to get rid of the shit. I finally craved one more thing I realized had been missing when I laid eyes on you again.”
I didn’t understand. I was eight. What could I possibly have taught him to keep him surviving? To keep him fighting? And what was missing from his existence after he’d gotten through all that?
“I wanted something good,” he admitted. “Beauty, maybe? The night of the pool party, the house was quiet. It was just us, but you didn’t know I was in the house, too. I watched you dance.”
I remembered that night so vividly. For the two years after that, I’d looked back on it, excited and terrified, but also with this weird sense of being safe in that closet with him.
“You made the world look different,” he told me. “You always had, and it struck me as odd, because I had hated to watch my mother dance growing up. It was just some elaborate lie that I couldn’t stomach, but you…” He trailed off, searching for words. “It was pure, and it was a dream. I didn’t want to change you. I just wanted to be a part of it all. Of everything beautiful you were going to do.”
He sat there for a moment, and everything in my body hurt. I didn’t realize every muscle had been tightened this whole time. This was the first time he’d ever said things like this. The first time he’d ever really talked to me.
“But I was still me, and I scared you that night, because that’s what I do,” he admitted, sounding like he hated himself. “Something amazing happened, though. You followed. You wanted to feel that edge, too, as long as you were at my side, and for a few incredible days, I felt…”
He didn’t finish the thought, but I knew what he wanted to say. It had felt the same with me.
“When it was time to come clean, I couldn’t,” he said, his voice growing thick. “I just wanted to stay there with you. Behind the waterfall, in the shower, in the ballroom… Just stay with you.”
He rose to his feet, and the walls felt too close, and my clothes too tight, and I couldn’t get my lungs to open, because there was too much to take in and not enough said so many years ago. Why didn’t you say all of this years ago?
“Nothing was a lie,” he whispered.
And then he walked out, and my chest ached so badly, for air or for him, I didn’t know, but I ran to the window, yanked it up, and drew in a lungful of air, feeling everything give way. Slip away, fade, and ease.
My fear. My worry. My hatred.
My anger.
Why didn’t he say all that years ago?