Chemistry (4 page)

No, I hate Valentine’s Day because this is the day my parents were killed. On this day, my boarding school’s counselor called me out of class to tell me about the head-on collision. On this day, I packed my clothes, left the dormitory that had become my home, and sat in a sterile room at the hospital, avoiding the nurses’ sympathetic looks.

Then again, on this day, I met my kid brother for the first time, so I guess it wasn’t all bad. His name was Eugene, they told me, and he was my father’s child by another woman, who had died of an overdose the previous year. The kid had no one—I could see it in his face—and unlike me, he wasn’t fine with that. He was miserable, lost and alone. I could barely stand to watch him sit in the corner and cry like the world was ending for him.

I had no words of comfort for Eugene. What did words ever do to help anyone buried so deep in the pit anyway? I just sat next to him, so he wasn’t alone. Eventually, he stopped crying and fell asleep.

I made the doctors promise not to wake him when they told me neither of our parents survived. I said I would tell him myself, and I did. I told him without any flourish or pity. I told him quick like a Band-Aid, and he barely reacted at all. He’d already lost his mother, so this wasn’t anything new. And I think maybe he appreciated that I wouldn’t coddle him over it.

We spent the rest of our days in the system. At first, we lived in a group home together. Then they found a foster family for Gene, but not me. The family only wanted one, and they wanted a boy about Gene’s age. Even back then, I was too old.

The day I turned sixteen, I got work at the church across the street from my high school. Nothing glamorous, but I planned to attend the best college in the state with the money I would save. I wanted to study chemical engineering, get a good job, and be much better off than guys like Phoebus, who can’t do anything other than kick a soccer ball and… dance, apparently.

Gene and I were lucky enough to attend the same school, which may not have been the best thing for him. The older he got, the more trouble he caused. So there’s one failure on my account. Because who did he look to for guidance? Me. And now he’s a lost cause. God help me, I love him, but he’s already an addict and a near dropout. I’ve failed him. And now, it seems I’ve failed Valentine, too.

The only person I’ve ever done anything good for is Peter Gringoire. Peter and I became fast friends, as he was in need of a tutor and I was in need of someone I didn’t have to talk down to. He’s smart—he really is. He’s just distracted most of the time. He still lives in the same group home I left after I turned eighteen. He’s almost like a brother to me, and he deserves so much better than what he gets. He deserves better than all of us, except maybe Valentine.

II

Here, we come to the last bit of my little history. I met Valentine, as I said, on Valentine’s Day. I noticed him hugging his knees under the eves of my church one night. My first thought when I saw him was that he looked exactly the way Gene had the day I first met him: utterly lost.

I stood staring at him, hoping he would look up and notice me. He never did, so I spoke. “Hey. What are you doing here?” I didn’t give him the private-property speech. It was clear to me he was only here because he had nowhere else to go. “Hey, you.” I tapped his shoe with my foot, and he looked up at me. It was all I could do to keep myself from leaping back in shock.

His face looked more like B-rate horror movie make-up than a true face. Lumpy, one-eyed, and huge. He was a Cyclops. I had expected a fat kid by the shape of him, but he was far from fat. As he pushed himself to his feet, I could see he was all muscle. And for a moment, I believed he was going to reach out and snap my spindly, little neck. But he didn’t. He just blinked and bowed his head. I think he must have been crying, but his face was already wet from the rain, and I never bothered to ask. I try to leave people as much dignity as I can. Dignity is important when you’ve already lost everything else. I know it’s always been that way for me.

“You should probably come inside.” I started for the door and assumed he followed, but when I turned back, I saw him standing just where I’d left him, his head still bowed, rainwater dripping from his bright red hair.

“Well, are you coming?”

No response.

I think the look on his face was what gave me courage. I’m not normally a courageous person, but his expression told me there was nothing I could do that would move him to anger. He was too far gone for that. He was already drowning. So I walked back to him, took him by the elbow, and led him to the door.

I flicked on the sanctuary lights, turned up the heat, and sat him down in the front pew. He shivered and breathed like a horse through his mouth. Poor kid.

“You wanna tell me why you’re here?” I said.

He just stared at the floor.

“I won’t call the cops.”

Still nothing.

I wanted to leave him—go to the kitchen and fix myself dinner, read a bit, and then head to bed—but I didn’t dare. I didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. If something happened to the church because I let him in here, I would lose my job and my home in one shot. His stubborn silence tried my patience.

“Look.” I frowned at him. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, and frankly, I don’t care. But I’ve got to know you’re not going to damage the building. Okay? Can you at least assure me of that? I mean I didn’t have to bring you in here, did I? I could have left you outside.”

At some point during my speech he looked up. He didn’t say a word until I finished, and then he said very few in a thick accent. “Sorry. I’m deaf.”

We spent the rest of the evening learning to communicate. He could usually read my lips if I made sure he was looking at my face and didn’t try anything ridiculous like over-enunciating every syllable. And he could speak, though he hated to do it. He much preferred to write and sign, which meant I would have to learn some basic ASL. That was fine by me. I knew, as soon as we started talking, we were going to be in each other’s lives for a long time.

He was a ward of the state, like me. Though not yet aged out, he was unlucky enough to have snagged the world’s worst foster parents. Because he was a “special needs” case, they got an extra stipend to care for him. Of course, the stipend was their primary interest, so when he finally ran away, they never reported him, which was fine with him. He’d been in the system since he was a baby, and he was tired of it. It was win/win: he got out, and they got their monthly allowance, as well as the pleasure of rarely having to deal with him. The trouble was, as an underage deaf boy with a frightening face, where the hell was he supposed to go? So he ended up loitering across the street from our school, taking shelter in the eaves of my church.

I heated a microwave dinner for him, which turned out to be far less than he needed—he has an impressive appetite—so we ended up at an all-night diner. There, I saw the way he existed in the world. He was utterly visible, a huge bubble of look-at-me, when all he wanted to do was disappear. Everyone saw him, but no one spoke to him. They all spoke to me instead, like I was the master and he was the dog.

“Would your friend like anything else with that?” they would ask. And if I had any courage, I would have answered,
Why don’t you ask him? Do I look like I have a psychic link to his mind?
But I didn’t. Because I did have the closest thing to a psychic link: I had his complete confidence.

I don’t know why he chose me. Probably I never will. He never got along with anyone else. He’s an ornery guy with a short and violent temper. If he weren’t so physically intimidating, that might have been beaten out of him at a young age. As it is, people just tend to avoid him. Best to leave the beast in peace. He must have been starving for real human attention by the time I came into his life.

I once asked him, “Do you ever get tired of the way people stare at you?”

And he answered, “Do you ever get tired of being invisible?”

Yes. Yes. Yes. It must be true for everyone. At some point in life, we are all exhausted by having encountered the same situations over and over again. Let something new happen, we think. Anything. But it never does. By the time we reach high school, we’ve learned that nothing ever changes, and all our efforts will only perpetuate whatever endless cycle we’ve been living in since they day we were born. We are what we are because we don’t know how to be anything else.

Even now…

Valentine is a monster on the outside and an angel to his core.

I am the devil in a cassock.

Who do you suppose is the most dangerous between us? I honestly don’t know. If you beat an angel over the head with a stick again and again, won’t that angel eventually strike back? Does it even have a choice? And what about me? No matter how much charity you throw at the devil, can you ever really hope to change its nature?

III

At first, I shared my income with Valentine, and he secretly helped with my daily chores. I enjoyed having someone to work with. It made the hours go by faster, and the more I got to know Valentine, the more I appreciated his self-deprecating, sarcastic brand of humor. Then I discovered his talent for music.

He was toying with the pipe organ one evening. I was vacuuming the sanctuary, but I soon found I’d been going over the same spot for what must have been fifteen minutes. The piece Valentine played wasn’t one I’d ever heard before. I could only imagine he was improvising, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t dare interrupt him while he played, not for fear of his temper, but because I didn’t want the music to stop. I turned off the vacuum, sat down, and listened. I closed my eyes. I leaned back. I soaked it all in.

You can measure the divinity in a piece of music by how long it takes you to notice it has ended. It will transport you to another world, and even after the player walks away from his instrument, that’s where you’ll find yourself: listening to that other world. I didn’t notice the music had stopped until Valentine tapped me on the shoulder.

“Finished?” he said.

I shook my head and signed, “Sorry. I was listening to you play.”

He blushed.

“You’re good.” I wasn’t lying. “Really good. You should talk to the choir director—see if he needs a player. I’m sure he’d like a break once in a while.”

That was how Valentine got his job as the church organist, and Mass has never sounded better. I suppose you think I must be exaggerating. He’s deaf, after all. How can he hear the music? I’m telling you he
feels
it, probably better than anyone I’ve ever listened to. He could be the next Beethoven for all I know. And I’m not usually generous with that kind of compliment.

These days, he sleeps in the organ loft and spends hours going over his music before bed. He’s named the instrument and talks to it when he thinks no one is listening. He’s a mad genius. Music is everything to him—well, music and me. I’m not bragging about this. In fact, I’m a little ashamed of it. He would do anything for me. He worships me. The idea that I can order him around still doesn’t sit right with me.

And now, Valentine is sitting in a cell, waiting to see his foster parents and suffer the humiliation of having failed to thrive without them, all for the sake of a girl I can’t stop thinking about… I’ve never felt so sick in all my life.

BOOK SIX

This is probably the second stupidest idea I’ve ever had, next in line after my determination to rescue Esmeralda. Rescuing Valentine seems even more laughable. He’s a monster of a boy, and Esmeralda looked like such a fragile thing when I first saw her. But I wonder whether the opposite is true. Maybe she can handle herself just fine. Maybe I was wrong to worry about her falling for Phoebus’ lines. Valentine, on the other hand…

It’s late morning, and I’m on my way to his foster home. I don’t know what I think I’ll do once I get there. Carry him off into the sunset? My noble steed is an old, rusted pickup the church allows me to drive only when doing maintenance. But I don’t care about breaking the rules any more. Anyway, doesn’t retrieving the church organist count as maintenance? I decide it does.

It takes me more time to find the house than I expect, and I immediately hate this neighborhood. It has what most people might call “a woman’s touch” about it. All the houses are pastel pink or beige or white. Picket fences all around. It reeks of middle-class nobility, of polo shirts and khaki pants.

Valentine’s foster home looks like a baby-blue dollhouse with a sprinkler running in the front yard. The grass is already drowning. I imagine they’ve had the damn thing going all morning. I park across the street and sit for a good ten minutes with my hand sweating on the handle before I can get up the nerve to leave the truck.

I’m a coward; I freely admit this. And what scares me more than anything in the world—more than disease or disaster or death—is “good, church-going people.” This is the sort that will open their arms to you right before they punch you in the face. Everyone else in the world will cuss you out before they beat you, so you can prepare to fight or run. But “good, church-going people” will do whatever they can to love you, even though they don’t. The hatred they suppress will build and build until it finally explodes in your face. And it will hurt far worse than anything you’ve suffered at the hands of the usual assholes because you won’t have seen it coming… unless you know what to look for: those forever smiles, pressed shirts, made-up faces, and perfect yards; those sweet, gentle voices that just want you to know they’re here if you need to talk. They swear they won’t judge you again and again, until you finally spill your guts, and then they do. And the sentence they mete out is always unbearable, saccharine torture. If you’ve ever experienced it yourself, you know what I mean.

As I trudge toward the front door, I notice how scuffed my shoes are, how much water runs down the sidewalk from the front yard, and the ever-marching army of ants in the driveway. Then I hear shouting. It’s a woman’s voice. And since this is my honest confession, and I expect nothing less than your complete disgust with me by the time I’ve finished, I’ll speed the process along by admitting to this: there’s little else I hate so much as the sound of a woman’s voice. You can call on Freud in your next séance and ask him what that has to do with my mother. For myself, I can’t remember. All I know is the more feminine the voice, the more I cringe when I hear it. It’s fingernails on a chalkboard to me.