The room jumped in its shoes as Geno erupted, heaving over the table, sending chairs, markers, pencils and sketchbooks flying. Heads turned, residents and staff on their feet as Geno spun around, howling like a ghost.
Without taking his eyes off Geno, Stef stood up, his hand raised to the crowd behind him, signaling he was in control. He stood still. When Geno fell on his knees, Stef crouched at a careful distance, his mercury layer swiftly falling from the crown of his head and cloaking him. His heart wanted to break. He couldn’t let it. Now more than ever, he had to stand apart from the pain.
My most important job is going home.
He squatted on his heels, silent and motionless. Without judgment. Watching the boy weep into his hands and gradually go quiet again.
“Sorry,” Geno said.
Stef got a sheet of paper and the pastels. He put them on the floor.
“Go back to day one,” he said. “Draw you and draw them. Do it right now.”
Red faced and swollen-eyed, Geno made the big blue mark and the small black ones. He didn’t shove the paper away this time. He held still, a pastel in each open palm. Head bowed. As if waiting instructions.
“Pick another color,” Stef said. “For you. The most powerful color you can think of. Add it on.”
Geno picked red and drew around his blue line. A thin border. Then he held the paper steady with fingertips and made the red border thicker. The line gained weight, becoming a skinny rectangle.
Without prompting, Geno reached for orange next and made a second outline. A perimeter of fire. He hesitated, then drew lines radiating outward. Flames. He took the red again and made scarlet fire in between the orange. He found yellow and made flame tips at the end of each line.
He pushed the paper away then, but gently. Without anger. He put the pastels back into their slots and rubbed his fingers together.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll clean up.”
“It’s not important,” Stef said. He tapped the paper. “This is.”
Elbows on knees, hands steepled over his mouth and nose, Geno looked at himself. Clean, dependable blue encased in fire, looming over the black shadows.
“It hurt so bad,” he said softly.
“God, it must have.”
“And it just went on, and on, and on. I stopped counting after a while.”
Stef rolled onto his butt, sitting cross-legged. His fists clenched tight but he kept his demeanor soft and neutral. “Can you tell me more?”
Geno’s fingers reached and start blurring some of the orange and red together. “I was afraid I would die. And then I was afraid I wouldn’t die.” His hand lifted to touch his face, leaving marks of red and orange, black and blue.
“I don’t think words exist to describe that kind of terror.”
Geno’s head bowed, his fingers clenched in his hair. “I never had sex before that night,” he said. “That’s what it was like the first time.”
“That night wasn’t sex,” Stef said. “It was rape. Rape is about power.”
“God, I want to go home.” Geno sniffed and drew his colored face across his sleeve. He turned the piece of paper over, picked out the red pastel and began to draw a house. The architecture was odd—it seemed to be a shack on miniature stilts. A row of square windows by the roofline and the door smack in the middle of the front wall.
Stef held the paper steady as Geno took green and made rolling hills, nestling the house within them. Dark brown made a tree, its branches a curved shelter above. Then he took yellow and made light spilling out of the square windows.
“What is it?” Stef asked.
“Home,” Geno said.
“Tell me.”
“My mother kept her maiden name. Gallinero. It means henhouse. She called me and my brother her little chicks.” Geno drew a long ramp from the high door to the ground.
“I see it now,” Stef said, fascinated.
Orange was in Geno’s fingers again, drawing a four-legged figure in the distance. Like a dog with a long, pointed snout. A wolf?
No. Of course not.
“Fox,” Stef said.
Geno exhaled and the orange crayon fell from his fingers back into the box.
“The fox in the henhouse,” Stef said.
A little snort made Geno’s chest hitch. “My life as a metaphor, ladies and gentlemen.”
“Do you feel like he’ll always be in the picture, no matter what?”
Geno reached and tore the bit with the fox out, crumpling it up. His finger tapped the little coop. “This is one of my safe places. Like the beach. In my dreams, I see this house in the distance. Far away with the light spilling out of the windows.”
“Who’s inside?”
“Sometimes my mother.” He swallowed hard. “Sometimes you. Or Jav and Stavroula. Sometimes, though, it’s empty. Or I can’t reach it. It’s up there ahead, calling me and I want to go home so bad. But I can’t get there. Because nobody’s there. Nobody’s left. The road keeps going on and on and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know who’s going to love me.”
A tremendous sigh, like a tree toppling. Stef let it crash to the earth, at an utter professional loss.
“Does he love you?” Geno asked.
Stef blinked. “Who?”
“Jav.”
“Yeah.”
Geno pulled the pad of paper close and tore off a sheet. He pushed it toward Stef. “Draw you guys.”
“Me and Jav?”
“Draw love.”
Stef thought about it. His fingers picked out a couple of pastels. He made simple, broad strokes. A thick, curved ribbon of gold and brown that with a little imagination, could be a man sleeping. He took green and slate blue, and drew a second curve around the first.
“Which one’s him?”
“The brown.”
“You’re the dominant one?”
“No, it’s not like…” Stef felt himself smile. “Nobody’s the bitch in the scenario. The dynamic shifts, depending on what’s going on in our lives. Something kicked him down recently, so right now it feels like I’m sheltering him. Other times, it’s the opposite.”
A single, exhaled chuckle through Geno’s nose. “Like when a can of nuts and bolts gets thrown at your head?”
Stef laughed too. “Yeah, like then. But anyway. That’s what love looks like to me.”
“I’m really tired,” Geno said. Just like a woman not named Alison said when she stood on the railing of the Queensboro Bridge.
“You must be,” Stef said. “Go on upstairs if you want. I’ll clean up.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Take that with you.”
Geno took his paper and got up as if he had broken glass in his bones. “Thanks,” he said.
“You call me. Anytime. Any hour of the day, I’ll be there. I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me.”
A chime on the wind, soft and faint. “Okay.”