Page 54 of On Your Knees

Blank.

He’s been like this since his mother walked out, and it scares me. I’ve never seen him this way.

I don’t understand what I overheard, and I didn’t hear all of it. I didn’t start moving down the hallway until Ethan shouted.

I heard something about Ruby protecting Ethan, something about the church board and “that night” and the confessions of dying men. Whatever it meant, it upset Ethan in a way that I could feel in my gut. Then he said that he didn’t want to be here, and I know that feeling really, really well.

“This is it,” I say softly when we reach the huge oak tree with the big fork between its raised roots.

Ethan climbs into the nook and sits down with his back against the tree. It soothes my worry about this being silly because he so naturally gravitated to the spot where I usually sit. When I climb into the nook, Ethan holds out his hand. I take it, and he pulls me down to sit between his legs and lean back against him.

His chest expands against my back as he takes a deep breath, then he lets it out, settling. I settle too.

For a long while, we just sit. Distant voices drift through the air. Closer, squirrels rustle around. A long way off, I can hear the waterfall. The smell of the city is filtered out by the earthy scents of trees and undergrowth.

I can tell when Ethan starts to come back from wherever he’s gone in his head. His fingers move from his own drawn-up knees to mine.

He’s been functioning well enough. He did manage to drive us here after all, like he didn’t want Patrick involved. But he’s been kind of checked out. Now, finally, he speaks.

“Do you come here often?”

I reply, “I haven’t for a while, but I used to come here a lot.”

“To think?”

“Or to not think.”

His fingers play lightly on my drawn-up knees. “What did you come here to not think about?”

I look out through the greenery, which is just starting to yellow in the cooling temperatures of fall. I let my mind drift back through the years. “Life, I guess. Home.”

“Home was always changing for you,” Ethan says, and I know he understands what that feels like because he was adopted. He was young when the Castles took him in, but he would have been in the foster care system before that. Like me.

“I was sometimes with good families,” I say, and even though it’s true, it leaves me feeling hollow for some reason. But that hollowness fills when Ethan makes a sound like he understands, like he knows that the truth is in the negative space around those words. Sometimes the families weren’t good. Sometimes I wasn’t with a family at all. Sometimes I was with my mother. Neither the good nor the bad ever lasted.

I skip over all those words and say, like it’s an explanation, “This place was always here.”

“How did you find it?”

“I ran away.”

Ethan’s fingers, which have been idly stroking my knees, go still. He’s silent for a long time then asks, “From where?”

“My mother. Well… from her place. From the people there.”

His fingers flex, digging in. “Who?”

I shrug. “Her friends. Other junkies. Johns.”

Ethan is silent again, like he’s building a picture from that. It’s not a difficult one to construct. I don’t need to explain it.

Ethan’s fingers loosen as though he’s forcing them to. “Did they hurt you?”

There’s so much in his tone. Understanding. Danger. I get it, because I know what could’ve happened. I know what happened to a lot of kids in my neighborhood and in the group homes.

I shake my head. “I wasn’t of interest.”

“And you were smart. You knew when to run.”