{Cary}

"So—five weeks, no incidents." There was a small pop as the counsellor opened the tube of hand lotion, and her office filled with the smell of lemons and vanilla.

Cary shrugged, stroking another dark line on the paper in front of him. He was keeping his head down at school, filling in more than half the blanks on his assignments with his cramped scrawl, and taking the bus back to the stop a block from the Whites' every day. Five weeks was the longest trouble-free stretch in his high school career, and as far as he was concerned, that meant there wasn't any reason to keep showing up here for an hour in the counsellor's office.

"So what's different now, Cary? My boss thinks I'm helping you, but I'm pretty sure that's not it. Since you talk about as much here as you do waiting for the bus on the bench out there."

"I talk in here." His voice was dry with disuse, like it got at school. He could go days without speaking.

After a pause, the woman asked, "What are you drawing?"

"A bird Bea found." He darkened the black bead of the eye, careful to leave the white dot of reflected light untouched. That tiny speck of light was the difference between dead and alive. "It fell out of the nest. Pete told her its parents were coming back for it. It had a broken wing or something." The bird's beak was open, crying that tiny cry as it fluttered on the ground.

"What happened then?" the woman asked.

"It died." He had gone back later that day and found the bird lying still and silent in the leaf litter under the bush. The black bead of its eye was dull, and its limp body weighed nothing at all in Cary's hand. He had scratched a shallow grave under the pine tree where the rest of the living chicks stuck their fuzzy heads above the nest and peeped—where Bea would never find it.

"How did you feel about that?"

Cary shrugged. "It's just a bird."

"Which you're drawing now," she pointed out.

He looked at her sideways, spreading his hand over the page. He hadn't drawn anything from his old house in weeks. Those memories seemed a long way away now.

The counsellor lifted her eyebrows, the corners of her lips turning up in an almost-smile before she turned her chair aside like there was something interesting on the wall beside her window. Today her hair puffed around her head like dandelion seed. "Do you think there was anything Pete could have done to save that bird?"

Cary dropped his eyes. The bird was a small, crumpled shape, dark in the middle of the white page. "No." He thought of Pete dropping to a crouch beside his daughter, stroking one hand down her back as she hugged his knee.

"She'll be okay, right, Daddy?"

"Sure she will, Honey Bee," Pete's voice had rumbled comfortingly. "Her parents will take care of her."

Bea had turned a glowing face to Cary, crouched silently next to her. "See?"

He had made a smile back—he could do that now—and Pete's warm look had moved from his daughter to Cary for a moment. Cary had carried that look to warm himself with for the rest of the day. He had the leftovers of Pete Whites' care for his real children, and he hoarded every scrap like treasure.

Cary shook his head. "It was too broken. If he'd tried, he would've just hurt it more. But if he'd thought there was a chance, he would have tried. He's good at fixing things."

She had her chin propped in her hand, watching him as he spoke. "Pete sounds like someone you admire very much," she said.

"I guess." Cary looked aside. He didn't really know what she meant by that.

"He sounds like someone you'd like to be like."

That dropped through the surface of his thoughts, sinking down to settle on the bottom in the dark. Feelings Cary didn't have names for swirled up in a cloud, making his throat tight.

He shrugged again, fiddling with his pencil. Five weeks of careful watching, and he was pretty sure Pete meant just what he said—he cared about him. Cary couldn't even make his thoughts shape the word Pete had actually used. The word that used to not mean anything to him. Nothing scared him more than imagining what Pete's face would look like if he really knew what Cary had done—what he was. Every alarm system he had ever set for himself was shaking itself apart, and it was too late for their warning. He cared what Pete thought about him now, and it was just a matter of time before that swung around like a wrecking ball and smashed him against the wall.

"When school's out, I want you to come and do your drawings at my other office."

Cary looked at her from under his lowered brows to see how serious she was. Next week was finals—he had been hoping this would be his last counselling appointment. She was frowning at her hands, picking at the polish on her frayed pinkie fingernail. "With the trial going forward ... it would be pretty normal to feel stressed about that and want to use old habits to cope. I want to make sure you have whatever help you need to get through."

Cary swallowed and carefully rolled up his drawing to put in his backpack. He rolled up the words she was saying and put them away too, where they couldn't touch him. He had done everything he needed to do, and the trial would go forward now with or without him. When her mouth was done opening and closing, he got up and left.

///

Some days Cary couldn't get the Whites' front door open because the entryway was so cluttered with shoes, coats and bags. Cary found the matching sparkly sneakers and patent flats and set them on the mat together like he did every day. He took his own bag to his room and tucked it beside his bed. He laced up his running shoes, listening to the banter of Jon's sisters in the family room and the clatter of Jon's mom working in the kitchen. He put his head into the kitchen before he left—Jon's parents didn't like him to disappear without telling them where he was going.

It wasn't Jon's mom; it was his dad. Pete glanced up from unpacking shopping bags full of cans and boxes, and his bearded face smiled. Anxiety went through Cary's middle like an electric current. There were lines in Pete's face that meant he was tired and unhappy; Cary absorbed that like it went into his skin.

"Going for a run?" Pete asked.

Cary nodded.

"How did your in-class essay go?"

"It went," Cary said. He made himself think of more to say; Pete had slogged through Macbeth with him for weeks. "I answered the one about guilt. With paragraphs and a conclusion like you showed."

Pete settled back against the counter, looking right in his face. "Proud of you, son. You worked hard for that."

Those words shut him down like Pete had thrown a punch at his head instead of giving him a compliment. There was probably something he was supposed to say back, but nothing about his previous life told him what it was. He dropped his eyes to the edge of Pete's shirt sleeve curving over his bicep. There was a scar there, a small white nick like Pete had caught his arm on a nail at a worksite.

He mumbled, "Still got finals next week," and backed out of the kitchen.

When Jon's mom first brought him a pair of running shoes from the Salvation Army, Cary didn't even have the wind to run for five minutes—let alone 10 blocks to the trails by the river and back like Pete did. Years of smoking had made Cary's lungs feel two sizes too small for what he wanted to do, which was eat the miles with his legs until he had pounded all his feelings into the cement and left them behind.

At the top of the block, Cary pushed into a slow lope, his heart rate picking up and his breath huffing in and out in time with his feet. His thoughts slid into a groove of just breathing and moving and feeling the air on his face. He could run for 20 minutes now, and he was getting stronger.

Ten minutes later, Cary turned down the gravel trail into the ravine, leaving the street noise behind for bird calls and the crunch of his runners on gravel. The ribs on his left side were tugging on his breath, reminding him how recently they had mended. He ignored them, and the tugging turned into burning, all the way to the bottom of the hill and back up to the look-out on the top. There was a waist-high beam at the high point on the bluffs, and he set his hands against it and bent over with hacking coughs. He hocked and spat, imagining another fistful of black tobacco goo had loosened its grip on his lungs. He kept his head down, sweat dripping into the dirt and his breath tearing in and out.

The lines from Macbeth he'd laboured over all afternoon came back to him:

I am in blood

Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Cary closed his eyes, pressing his lips in a thin, hard line. He wasn't good with words, but he understood those lines all too well. The past six weeks, he'd been able to pretend to himself that sitting at Pete Whites' table and sleeping under his roof meant he could change—that he wasn't too far gone to turn around and take another way. 

But the life he had now had a lie at the heart of it—a lie so big it beat in his throat whenever Bea or Tabitha was in the room with him. He had taken a life. He had brought all his father's violence down on his own head. He was stepped in blood so far he didn't know if it was even possible to go back. Pete White had no idea what he had agreed to when he'd said Cary could live with his family, and Cary couldn't make the sounds to tell him the truth now any more than he could the day his father had come for him—the day Conall had come so close to tearing Cary's secret wide open and leaving him gutted and speechless in Pete's entryway.

Cary pushed himself upright, the light across the water striking his face and chest and arms. He pulled his heel back to stretch, the light stabbing his eyes and making them water. The tears ran down his cheeks and were snatched away in the wind.

He was doing what Pete said and deciding every day to work against his nature, to fight for every inch of progress, but he couldn't change what he was. Murderer. That would be with him forever. When it came time for the trial, his father was going to nail the truth to his chest in front of everyone. In front of Pete.

Jesus-God. Cary didn't have words for how that thought made a hole open up inside him.

He folded and put his hands behind his knees, stretching his back in a long curve. He breathed, feeling how his muscles clenched tight as fists. God knew. He knew and he still made the sun shine on him, still gave him air to breathe. He gave him a body that didn't hurt anymore, and for now, He gave him the Whites. If Jon's God was like Pete, then Cary thought—hoped—that He wouldn't do all that just to snatch it back and laugh.

He uncurled and shook out his legs and shoulders, then turned to labour back up the hill to home.