I Fell in Love with Hope(13)

“Don’t defend him,” Neo’s father says, only it’s not said, it’s bitten. Papers crumple in his fist, papers I recognize. Neo’s mother holds the cross around her neck. Then, his father starts to tear Neo’s stories to shreds. Slowly. In full view of his son.

“It’s fine. You’re just confused. You’re young. I can’t blame you,” he says, creeping closer to the bed, his quiet footsteps threatening. He lifts the papers, tossing their remnants at Neo’s feet. “But don’t let me find this filth again, you understand?”

I don’t hear anymore. I just see Neo staring out the window, his face blank of anything. Only his thumb and forefinger move, tightening the loop around his wrist.

—

That night, I don’t bring Wuthering Heights when I arrive with Neo’s food. I set the tray down on the side table and observe the carnage. The cardboard box is knocked over on the floor. The books are gone, all but Great Expectations cradled in Neo’s arms.

“It’s not Monday,” Neo says. His voice is drained, wet at the back of his throat. He picks up the apple off the plate.

Mondays are apple days.

“I think apples grow any day they want.”

“Thank you,” Neo says, but he doesn’t take a bite.

I don’t ask him about the shredded pieces of paper on the floor or the broken pen oozing ink. I don’t ask where his books have gone, and he doesn’t ask me about Wuthering Heights.

“Are there TVs in this place?”

I nod. “Do you want to watch something?”

Neo shrugs. “Okay.”

TV rights are an expensive commodity. Sick kids get the perks when no one else is around. Eric’s generosity (and desperate attempts to get us to leave him alone) win us the remote.

Neo and I watch movies all night. During, Neo chews on his apple and spits into the trash when he thinks I’m not looking. Out of the room, distracted, he seems more at ease. If there’s one nice thing about books and movies, it’s that they can make you forget for a while.

Forgetting is an essential part of grief.

When I see Neo the next morning, I lay a copy of The Great Gatsby in his cardboard box and kick it under his bed.

That ever-suspicious brow of his rises. “I didn’t give you that.”

“I took it from the library.”

“You stole it?”

“I suppose.”

“Weirdo.”

“Can I read your stories now?”

“I don’t write stories.”

My head snaps in his direction. Never has one of Neo’s sentences quite broken my heart till that one.

My own grief morphs into tightness in my gut. Neo’s writing is something precious, even if it isn’t mine. It’s another secret we share. I read once, on the very corner of one of his pages, Paper is my heart. Pens are my veins. They return words I stole, blood to paint a scene.

If that’s true, a cemetery is all that remains of Neo’s heart. It lays in a pile of rubble on his bedroom floor like the outline of a dead body. He hasn’t bothered to pick up the pieces. He knows his heart will only shatter again if he does.

Neo’s father is a taker, and he has nothing material left to steal. When it’s only him who visits, Neo is never unscathed. The first time, it’s a bruise, bottle green, and patchy purple. When Eric asks what happened, Neo says he fell in the bathroom. The second time, it’s blood, the back of Neo’s head stained with splatter spots. Some of his hair has fallen out, or, more likely been pulled.

There are other incidents, but we never talk about them.

So, every day, I bring Neo apples. Every day, he eats them to the core. We watch movies at night. We go to the library in the afternoons. He says he’s learning French, so I help him when time allows.

There are days we can do none of those things. There are days pain lashes at Neo without warning as his body rejects itself, an aggressive civil war.

There are days I think I’ll lose him. The worst days.

In a particularly bad fit, his skin becomes waxy, sweat lacing the sheets. Neo clenches his fists, lying supine, roughing out his breaths.

I scoot my chair closer to his bed during the worst days. My hand sneaks beside his. I press the back of my fingers to his knuckles. I can’t do much for him, but I can be another body, another soul, so that he knows he isn’t alone.

The worst of the worst days comes when Neo was supposedly well enough to go home for a few weeks. He returns through the E.R. His face is bruised from forehead to chin, all down one side as if he’s been shoved into something. Both bones in his wrist are cracked down the middle, and he can’t move his spine for the larger part of a month.

“Neo,” I whisper. “Have you told anyone?”

“It wasn’t him,” he says.

“Your wrist is broken, and your back–”

“It wasn’t him,” he snaps at me, reverting to his silence. “Just leave me alone.”

I don’t leave. I just join him in silence. But the tear that rolls down his face isn’t lost on me.

The worst days subside eventually. Neo finds the means to sit back up when the weather warms. He doesn’t spit out his pills as frequently. He starts to eat more. And it takes a few months, but Neo finally considers writing again.

I am determined. I steal pens from Eric’s station and ask for notebooks. Eric obliges since I won’t stop bothering him. He returns with fifty-cent composition books made of cardboard and thin, lined sheets. I toss them, loud enough for Neo to hear, into the cardboard box. As we mulled over books, I make noise with it. My foot nudges the box. I innocently pull it out from under the bed and let it slowly slide back. Neo never misses my attempts to draw attention to the tools. Actually, he goes to great lengths to ignore them. It isn’t until I put one of the notebooks directly in his lap that he considers it.