Gone, Gone, Gone(33)

I don’t know what those things have to do with leukemia, but I’m sure they’re significant. And I hate myself a little because instead of listening to the feelings behind his words, I’m keeping a list of these things in my head, inscribing it into myself that I need to watch him if he gets a cold. Or a nosebleed. Or a bruise.

I say, “Can it come back? I mean, I know it can, but . . . I mean, is it something that you need to be worried about or whatever? Or even, like, thinking about?”

“It’s statistically more likely that I will get cancer again than that someone who’s never had cancer will get cancer. But it’s by no means certain or even likely that I’m going to get it again. There’s about a seventy percent chance I’m done with leukemia for good.”

This is the first thing I’ve ever heard Lio say that doesn’t seem to cost him a lot of effort. He doesn’t agonize every word. I can see him well enough to be pretty sure that he doesn’t rub his nose while he talks. I realize, a minute of silence later, that this is because it’s the first time, I’m pretty sure, I’ve heard him say something not true. I mean, it might very well be true, I don’t know. But he doesn’t believe it. It’s not true for Lio.

I say, “You worry about it?”

He shrugs.

I don’t think I ever would have figured that out on my own, without this conversation, without that shrug, even if I knew Lio for a million years. I don’t know why I think that, because I’m generally so good at shaking things out of people that they don’t want to talk about, that they probably shouldn’t be talking about, but I just have the feeling that this is something that Lio is really good, even by his standards, at not talking about. I think this is totally different from the dead brother thing, but maybe the only reason I think that is because he’s still picking at his jeans, and when he talks about Theo he’s always so calm. It’s hard to know. I’m so focused on driving.

I say, “I don’t think you’re going to get cancer. I really don’t think so. I mean, smoking doesn’t help, probably, but you’re not going to get cancer.”

He shrugs again. “If you had been around when I was five, you wouldn’t have thought I was going to get cancer then, either. I was just a kid.”

And even though I don’t think I could have figured out, now, that he’s scared, I still think I could have looked at kid-Lio, even if I was five years old myself, and known that he would be one of the kids who gets cancer. I can’t get it out of my head that he would have had that old-photograph-cancer-kid glow.

But I’ve never known a cancer kid in real life. I guess there aren’t that many of them. I wonder what the chances are that one identical twin gets cancer if the other one does. I know Lio knows.

He says, “Some five-year-olds have to get leukemia. They just have to. It doesn’t matter to cancer which kids.”

But it didn’t have to be Lio. And it won’t be Lio again. I know it.

I want to pull this car over and say all the things we haven’t said yet. I want to scream at him, what the f*ck is this relationship, what are we doing, why do I care more about you than I do even about my missing animals, why have you gotten your way into my head when I can’t have you right now, when I probably can’t have you ever because I am a fifteen-year-old torn to shreds, do I just feel this because you’re crazy, is it just because you’re crazy and I need to fix a crazy boy, is all of this just because I need to fix something and holy mother of God, Lio, can I fix you, and you better not get cancer again!

“You missed the turn,” he says.

“What?” Fuck. I was driving to my house without thinking about it. I was driving to my house with a kid in the car that I’ve already decided can’t come to my house, what the f*ck, Craig, what the f*ck.

Lio says, “U-turn?”

“Fuck no, I don’t know how to U-turn.” I slow to a stop at a red light and look around. I don’t see anywhere good to turn.

He shivers a little. “I don’t know how else to get there. I don’t know this place at all.” He curls up with his head in his hands.

And at that moment, that’s when I know.

That’s when I know as much as I think that I can.

I say, “Come on.”

He looks up.

I say, “My house, come on.” I keep driving down this road. “You’re coming home with me.”

He doesn’t protest. He doesn’t say no no no I need to be with my family.

I’m going to take that as a sign.

The light turns green.

I unlock the front door. “Do you want some hot chocolate?”

He stands there, dripping on the kitchen’s fake tile. He takes his hat off and wrings it in his hands. “Really?”

“Of course.”

“Where are your parents?”

“At work.”

He coughs a little. I say, “Hey. Let me get you some dry clothes.”

He comes up beside me, quietly, while I put the kettle on to heat up water. I should probably make it with milk, that’s probably better. But the package says water, and I don’t want to screw it up.

He says, “I like your house.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“Craig?”

I swallow and turn around. And there is Lio, and right now he is all blue eyes and wet hair.