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Theo nodded. He scratched his beard. Then he wiped his eyes. His voice was thick when he said, “How long have you been doing this?”
“Theo, I promise, the surrogacy thing, I was only reading about it. I knew it was a fantasy.”
Theo nodded again, and the tears ran faster than he could wipe them away, but his voice came back clearer, more like the real Theo: resonant and low and assured. “This, Auggie. I mean this. How long have you been…handling me? You know what I mean. Telling me what I want to hear. Calming me down. I didn’t see it until just now, how quickly you reacted, how you anticipated the blow-up, immediately went into damage control. How long?”
Auggie’s silence lasted a beat too long.
Theo nodded and dried his cheeks. “Since the beginning?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Because I was in a bad place when we met, and I—” He laughed, and the sound had a rusty-hinge quality to it. “I don’t know if I’ve gotten any better.”
“Theo, no. I mean, we all do stuff like that in relationships, right? We get better at being in a relationship with someone, we know what sets them off, we know how to approach things. I hope I’m a little better at it than when I was nineteen and took my shirt off on your porch because I wanted you to have sex with me.”
A wet laugh escaped Theo. “You’ve gotten a little subtler, yes. I think you’re not answering my question, though. What I meant when I asked if you were afraid of me—God, I hope you know I’d never hurt you. Physically, I mean. But I meant this. Are you afraid of my…moods, I guess, for lack of a better word?”
Auggie thought about how it had been. Not always, but a year, maybe. Maybe a little more. The explosions of temper that came more and more frequently, with little warning or different triggers. The disagreements that escalated into cold, one-sided fury that sometimes took Auggie hours to recognize. The sleepless nights for both of them. That wire ran between his shoulder blades again, and he felt his breathing change.
“Ok,” Theo said. “That’s an answer.”
“I love you, Theo. I’m—I’m worried about you, I guess. And I know I’m part of the problem. This is classic Auggie, in case you haven’t picked up on it yet. I have this thing where I—I don’t even know how to put it into words. My mom, I mean, she’s a roller coaster, and growing up, every day, I was trying to play this game to be who she wanted me to be, and every day the rules were different, so I was always trying to catch up. It got better when Fer was older, when he could hold things together, but I bring a lot of that with me. Into our relationship, I mean. And I’m going to work on it.”
Theo was silent so long that Auggie wondered if it had happened again: some word or phrase lighting a fuse that wouldn’t explode for another hour or day or week. He shifted his weight, and the can clicked lightly against the rail, and he was aware, then, of how still the world had become around them.
“This might be an example,” Theo said with a faint note of amusement, “of what you’re talking about, Auggie. You’re not responsible for any of this. I—” He stopped. When he spoke again, the words were labored. “My anxiety has been…worse. I don’t know for how long. A year. A year and a half. It’s hard to know because I wasn’t keeping track of it, and it crept up on me. Some days I feel normal, or mostly normal, and other days, it’s like—it’s like I’m made out of all these different pieces that are fastened together, and someone just keeps tightening the bolts and screws. Me, I guess. I’m the one that keeps screwing everything tighter, ratcheting things down. Because I feel like if I let up for one second, everything is going to fall apart. I don’t even feel like me. And then, later, when it’s over, it feels like a dream, like it happened to someone else, except I’m exhausted, and a part of me knows it’s going to happen again.” He was silent again, and when the breeze rose, the maple leaves looked like they were doing cartwheels across the sky, incandescent for a heartbeat. “Nothing happened. That’s what makes it so fucking frustrating. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m getting older. I don’t know.”
Auggie waited. When more didn’t come, he said, “You made a lot of progress when you started seeing a therapist. Maybe it’s time to think about that again.”
Theo nodded.
“You can ask her about medicine, Theo. If it’s getting worse, maybe a low dosage.”
He nodded again. Then he worked his hand from Auggie’s. He leaned against the rail, propping himself on his elbows, and covered his face. His breathing was deep and uneven. After a moment, he reached into a pocket and fished out a baggie. He pressed it into Auggie’s hand without looking at him, and then he covered his face again.
Turning the baggie over, Auggie didn’t recognize the pills at first. Then he remembered the night at the theater, Ambyr’s deal with Dalton, and how he had left Theo alone with Dalton in the bathroom.
“Thank you for giving me these,” Auggie said.
Theo’s laugh was more like a sob.
“Did you take any?” Auggie asked.
“I wanted to.”
Auggie waited.
“God, Auggie. I wanted to so bad.”
“But you didn’t.”
The creek. The settling of maple branches. The bees.
“This time,” Theo said. “But what if it’s the same thing with whatever they want to dope me up with—”
“Ok, ok, hey. You’re not the first person in this situation, all right? We’ll talk to the doctor. We’ll see what they say. Keying yourself up like this, though, that’s not helping.”
Hands still over his face, Theo nodded. But he said, “I just keep fucking up your life. I just keep fucking it up, over and over again.”
