I FOUND SOMEONE to work at the bar part-time, and I started training Vince to manage. I still kept an eye out for Morg, but maybe he’d found a better situation. He baffled me. But it was his choice. I sent his check to the address I had on file and kept juggling. I trained for my fight four or five hours a day and was at the bar almost every night. And I kept walking Millie home.
She never wanted to drive. Neither did I. The nights were cold, but not too cold, and I looked forward to having her grab my arm, walk by my side, and talk to me. I made her laugh, and she made me laugh. She impressed me, and I didn’t have to try and impress her.
I liked her so much.
It was a weird sensation, genuinely liking a girl that much and not trying to get in her pants. I know that’s crude, but there’s a reason men are wired the way we are. There’s a reason women are put together the way they are. It’s just biology. Basic biology. But I wasn’t trying to sleep with Millie. I had no designs on Millie. I just liked her. And I pushed the rest of it away. I firmly ignored biology for the first time in my life.
I was relaxed with her. And I found myself continually telling her things that I didn’t comfortably share with anyone. One night, I pulled on a vest to walk her home instead of my jacket, and my white dress sleeves were rolled to my elbows, which was how I always tended bar. For the very first time, my forearms were bare to the touch for the walk home, and when Millie wrapped her hand around my arm she felt my scar.
What’s this, David?” Her fingertips traced the long puckered line on my right forearm that extended from my wrist to my elbow.
“There was a time when I didn’t want to live very bad,” I confessed easily. “It was a long time ago. I love myself now. Don’t worry.” I meant for her to laugh, but she didn’t.
“You cut yourself?” Her voice sounded sad. Not accusing. Just sad.
“Yeah. I did.”
“Was it hard?”
Her question surprised me. Most people asked why. They didn’t ask if hurting yourself was hard.
“Living was harder,” I said.
She didn’t fill the silence with words, and I found myself needing to explain. Not impress. Just explain.
“The first time I tried to kill myself, I held a gun to my head and counted backwards from seventeen; one count for every year of my life. My mother walked in when I reached five. The guns were locked away and the combination on the safe changed. So I resorted to a pocket-knife. It was sharp and shiny. Clean. And I wasn’t afraid. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t afraid at all.”
Her fingers traced the line as we walked, smoothing, as if she could rub the scar away. So I told her the rest.
“But fate intervened again, and they found me before it was too late. They kept finding me, saving me. But I couldn’t save my sister, see. And I felt helpless. Helpless and hopeless. After a week in the hospital I was transferred to a psych ward. My mother cried, my dad was stone-faced. They’d lost one child, and there I was, trying to take myself away too. They told me I was selfish. And I was. But I didn’t know how to be any different. They gave me everything and everything was never enough. And that is terrifying. Emptiness is terrifying.”
“That’s where you met Moses.” She remembered the conversation in the park.
“Yep. You’ll have to meet him sometime. His wife Georgia too. They are my favorite people in the whole world.”
“I’d like that.”
“They have horses. Georgia actually works with kids kind of like Henry. Equine therapy, she calls it. Henry would probably eat it up.” I found myself warming to the idea. Henry made everything easier. Henry made it okay to spend time with Millie beyond walking her home. He was a perfect buffer between biology and friendship.
Before I knew it, I’d set a date and I was bringing Millie to meet my best friend. And Henry too. Can’t forget Henry.
MOSES AND GEORGIA had leveled his grandmother’s old house and in its shoes built a sprawling, two-story with a huge wrap around porch and a private side entrance so Moses could paint and conduct his business without exposing his family or his clients to one another. It held no resemblance to the sad, little house with a tragic past that I’d first seen eighteen months before when Moses and I rolled into town looking for answers and trailing ghosts. Lots of ghosts. It hadn’t taken me long before I’d figured out I didn’t want to stay in Levan. It hadn’t taken Moses long to decide he wasn’t leaving. I wouldn’t have stayed if I were him. I would have taken Georgia and found a place to start over. But sometimes history can be magnetic, and Moses and Georgia, their story, their history, was there in that town.
And Moses wasn’t the only one who had a business to maintain. Georgia broke and trained horses and was an equine therapist, using her animals to connect with children and adults in a way that helped their bodies and their spirits. The land she’d grown up on butted up to Moses’s grandmother’s land, the land she’d left him, and I supposed it made a lot of sense to make it work. Moses always told me you can’t escape yourself. I guess I just felt protective of my friend. I wanted him to be safe and happy and accepted, and I worried that the people in that small, Utah town had already written him off. But what did I know? My friend was happy. So I kept my fears to myself.
The day couldn’t have been better. Utah was flirting shamelessly with spring, and it was sixty degrees out, even though it had no business being that warm. I’d told Moses and Georgia we were coming, and Georgia was ready for us. Before long we were in the round corral with Millie and Henry petting Georgia’s Palomino, Sackett, and a horse named Lucky who was as black as Georgia was fair, and who followed Georgia with his eyes wherever she went. She’d told me once she’d tamed him right alongside Moses, though neither of them had known she was actively breaking them.
Moses still wasn’t comfortable around most animals. He’d come a long way, but a life time of nervous energy was hard to corral, and animals, especially horses, tended to mirror his unease. He and I stayed out of the way, leaning against the fence, watching Georgia work her magic. I was holding baby Kathleen—who I insisted on calling Taglee just to bug her father—and making faces at her, trying to make her smile. When she started yawning widely, Moses reclaimed her and propped her on his shoulder where she promptly dozed off. We listened to her baby sighs in companionable silence until Moses eyed me over her downy head, his eyes narrowed, his hand stroking Kathleen’s tiny back.
“Say your piece, Mo,” I said, knowing it was coming.
When Georgia had greeted Millie with a hand shake and a sweet hello, she had smiled at me like she really wanted to tease me about my new “lady friend,” but she contained herself. Moses didn’t want to tease. He apparently wanted answers.
“What’s going on, man?” Moses didn’t mince words. He never had. You wanted to get to know Moses, you had to pay attention, because he didn’t give you much. You had to force your way into his space and refuse to go when he pushed you away. That was what I had done. That was my gift. Push, fight, cling, grapple, wear you down. It was what Georgia had done too, and she’d paid a price. The price for Moses’s love and devotion was a high one. But she’d paid it. And in return, Moses worshipped Georgia.
“What do you mean?” I scowled at my best friend.
“Millie’s not like the girls you . . . date.” Moses finished the sentence with a much milder word than the one we both mentally inserted into his long pause.
“That’s because I’m not . . . dating . . . her.”
“No?”
“Nah. She’s an employee. A friend. She’s funny. Interesting. And tough. I like that. I like Henry too. She’s been bringing him by the gym. I’ve been working with him a little. His dad split when he was little, and he just soaks it up.”
“You rescuing people again, Tag?”
“I don’t rescue people.”
“Bullshit. You collect lost causes and charity cases like old, white women collect cats. You rescued me. You rescued Axel and Cory and even that piece of shit Morgan, who thinks he’s doin’ you a favor by managing your bar. You call it Tag Team, but you should call it rag tag team. You rescue everyone. You have an invisible cape. You’ve been wearing it your whole life.”
“I never rescued you.” I couldn’t argue about the rest of it, though I’d never thought of it that way.
“Yeah, Tag. You did.”
“We rescued each other.”
“Nah. I would have let you drown, man. That’s the difference between you and me. At least the Moses I used to be. I would have let you drown to keep my head above water. I was all about surviving. But not you. You would have died before you let me sink. Maybe it worked out for both of us in the end. But you saved us, Tag. Not me.”
“What about all the people you help with your art?”
“I’m just a messenger. You? You’re a savior. That’s why you fight so hard. You don’t know how to do anything else. But that girl doesn’t want a savior. She wants a lover. Two completely different things. Georgia’s more like you. That’s why she and I work. But Millie? I’m thinking she’s more like me. She just observes. Takes it in.”
“Observes?” I questioned, my lips twisted wryly.
“Observes. You don’t have to see to observe. I guarantee that girl already knows what kind of man you are. And she likes what she observes. But she doesn’t want saving. I didn’t want saving either, not from Georgia. I wanted submission.”
Moses’s eyes lingered on his wife, who was leading Henry and Millie around on horses she’d broken and trained with her own hands. Her back was straight, her voice steady. She was a tall, young woman with a lean, strong frame and sun-streaked blond hair that swung in a fat braid almost to her waist. Submission was not in her vocabulary. But then she glanced up, and I watched as her eyes skipped over me and rested on Moses, holding their sleeping child, and I understood what Moses meant. Sometimes submission meant releasing pride, letting someone else take the reins, trusting someone with your love and your life, even though they didn’t deserve it. She’d done that.
“You want Millie? You’re going to have to take off your cape at some point and give in, baby.” Moses spoke again, his voice soft, his eyes softer. “Submit.”
“Who says I want her?” I resisted.
“Give me a break, man. You’re talking to an observer. I know you better than you know yourself. Don’t try to pull that crap with me.”
“So I have a best friend who sees it all and a girl—” I couldn’t say girlfriend, “—a girl who sees nothing at all.”
“She sees plenty. You’re the blind one. You’re blind because you’re scared. And you’re scared because you already know it’s too late. And you should be scared, man. She won’t be easy to love. She’s a package deal. She and Henry. But hell, Tag. You’ve never been about loving the lovable. I’m about as unlovable as it gets. And you practically threw yourself at me. I couldn’t shake you off. You like a challenge. Hell, you live for it!”
“I’m not there yet, Moses,” I said firmly. “Don’t push me.”
“Says the man who told me to go hard and fast with Georgia.”
“Turns out I was right, now wasn’t I?” I laughed, loving that I had been right.
“You were. But so am I. You’re not ready? Fair enough. But don’t hurt her.”
“Now why would I do that, Mo?” He pissed me off sometimes.
“Because you can be stupid.” He smirked at me over his daughter’s tiny head and I considered how and where I could punch him without causing him to drop her.
“Her mother’s dead.” It was a statement, not a question. Moses didn’t ask. He didn’t have to. His smirk was gone and his eyes had that look he got when he was seeing things.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “A while back. Lung cancer. Their dad took off about a year after Millie lost her sight. Millie seems to think it’s because he couldn’t handle having an autistic son and a blind daughter. I don’t know what the truth is. But they haven’t had any contact with him, beyond money. At least he sends money.”
“She’s worried about her kids. She keeps showing me Amelie’s walking stick and a book, a children’s book. Something about a giant.”
“They’re doing all right. They look out for each other,” I insisted.
“Hmm,” Moses muttered, and something oily and dark twisted in my gut.
“She’s not waiting on one of them, is she Moses?” Moses said spirits started to linger around their loved ones when they were about to die, as if waiting to greet them or take them home.
“Nah. It doesn’t feel like that.” Moses didn’t offer anything else and I let it go, accustomed to Moses’s quirks, to his abilities, accustomed to his reluctance to expound.
(End of Cassette)
Moses
“YOU SAW MY mother, Moses?” Millie asked me.
I nodded and then caught myself and answered out loud. “Yeah.”
“What did she look like?” Millie asked, and I heard more wistfulness than doubt.
“You. She looks like you. Dark hair, blue eyes, good bone structure. I knew who she was the moment she came through. But you and Henry were right there in front of me. It wasn’t hard to make the connection.”
Millie shook her head briskly like she needed to rearrange her thoughts, rearrange everything she thought she knew. It was always like this. It took people time to process the improbable.
“The book—the book about giants. What is that?” I asked, giving her something tangible to focus on while her head and her heart found compromise.
“I don’t know . . .” she stuttered, her hands fluttering to her cheeks.
“Giants playing hide and seek?” I prodded. The picture that filled my head was of a huge pair of feet sticking out from under a bed.
“Where do giants hide when playing hide and seek? I can’t think of any place that will cover up their feet,” Millie whispered.
“That’s it,” I said.
“They cannot wiggle under the bed, or cower in a closet. They cannot hide behind a tree or slip inside a pocket.” This time it was Georgia who recited the lines, and I looked at my wife in surprise.
“It’s called When Giants Hide. I used to read it to Eli. He loved it. We read it almost as often as we read Calico the Wonder Horse.”
I felt the same slice to my gut I always felt when I thought about my son. And then I felt the answering peace, the knowledge that love lives on.
“I forgot all about that book! Henry used to love it—my mom and I would read it to him, over and over. I memorized it, actually, and even when my sight started to go and then left me altogether, Henry would turn the pages and I would pretend to read.”
“They could hide behind a mountain, but climbing takes all day. They could hide beneath the ocean, but they might float away,” Georgia recited.
“They could stretch their arms and grab the moon—” Millie said.
“And hide behind the clouds—” Georgia supplied the next line.
“They could tiptoe up behind you, but giants are too loud,” Millie finished, smiling. “In the story, the giants are hiding in plain sight. They are everywhere you look, but they are camouflaged by trees and buildings. In one picture you think you’re looking at a boat dock, and then you realize that it’s a giant laying on the sand. In another picture the giant is shaped like a plane, laying on his back, his arm stretched out to form wings, his shoes pointing upward to make the tail. It’s a look and find book. You know, Where’s Waldo, but instead of tiny figures in red and white striped shirts, the giants are huge. But the artist drew them in such a way that they just blend in.”
“There is a place where giants hide, but I’m not about to tell. If you want to find the giants, you’ll have to search yourself,” Georgia inserted. She was smiling, but her smile was pained, and I reached out and grabbed her hand.
“When I went blind and started using the stick, Henry was only four. He thought I was looking for giants. He thought my stick was a giant finder. He’d walk around with his eyes closed, smacking things with it.”
“So why do you think your mom wanted me to see that book?” I asked, remembering her insistence. “She kept showing me the pages, the pictures. She wanted to tell me something.”
“My dad left,” Millie pondered, as if she wasn’t sure how to answer me, but was willing to explore the question out loud. “We stopped reading that book when my dad left. He played for San Francisco—so he was a ‘Giant.’” She shrugged like she was trying to convince herself that it hadn’t been that important. “We knew where every giant was hiding in the book. We’d found them hundreds of times. But we didn’t know where one giant was. That giant disappeared altogether. I remember hearing my mom read it to Henry once, right after he left. And she started to cry.”
I wanted to take it all back. I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. But Millie continued.
“Then Henry started having nightmares, and the hiding giants were no longer whimsical and harmless. They were scary. He was sure our beds were really giants in disguise and they would take us away while we slept. He thought the refrigerator door was a giant’s mouth, that the garbage truck was a loud, hungry giant who would eat everything in sight. It got ridiculous until my mom banned the book and that was it. The giants slowly became household appliances once again, and his bed was just a bed. He still doesn’t like garbage trucks though.” She smiled at that, and I chuckled. But it wasn’t very funny. None of this was.
“It’s strange,” Millie added. “Henry asked me about a month ago if I knew the story of David and Goliath. And even though I told him that I did, he felt it important to inform me that David had killed Goliath. He seemed especially thrilled that we had our very own giant slayer.”
Giant slayer or not, I wondered for the first time if Millie’s mother had been trying to communicate her distrust of Tag. Maybe she’d known he was going to run, just like her husband had. Maybe she knew her kids deserved better.