missing piece. For the last five years, she’s been muddling through this alone. So has he, but math is easier to avoid than words are. Words are everywhere. Words hurt.
Carefully, she stretches out on her bed, eyes closed, hands folded across her stomach. She feels like she’s measuring herself for her own coffin. That should make her uncomfortable. Right here, right now, it’s a set of simple parameters that makes everything better. Six feet by three feet by two feet; the dimensions of the world. Breathe in, breathe out, fill the world. Let everything else fall away. Let everything else go.
She’s been lying there for a while (seventeen minutes, thirty-one seconds) when the world shifts, a new weight appearing behind her eyes.
“You’re late,” she says. It’s not “hello,” but it’s the only thing she feels: he’s late. He’s seventeen minutes and five years late, and she’s been alone too long.
“I had to say I had a headache to explain why I was going to bed early,” says Roger. He sounds apologetic.
Dodger relaxes, and hates herself for doing it. She wants so badly to be angry with him, and all she can feel is that damned relief, like she’s the lucky one because he chose to come back, after being the one who chose to go away in the first place. She wants to yell, to rage, to shut him out and see how he likes it. She doesn’t do any of those things. They would all be bad math, creating equations her heart might not survive.
“I didn’t just mean tonight,” she says, and her voice is a whisper, her voice is a shadow of the anger she wants it to contain. She sounds small, and lost, and alone.
Roger sighs. “I’m sorry.”
“Why did you leave me?”
“They said . . . this psychologist came to my house and said people at school had seen me talking to myself. She said if something was wrong with me, the contract my parents signed during my adoption meant she could take me away and place me with another family.”
Dodger frowns. “You believed her? Roger, that’s stupid. Adoption doesn’t work like that. Why would they want to take the broken kids back? It’s hard enough to find homes for the ones who aren’t broken.”
She hears him sigh again. When he speaks, he sounds beaten-down, and for the first time, she realizes she’s not the only one who’s been alone for the last five years. “I know that now. I read a lot of law books, and there’s no way that sort of contract could be binding, even if it was real—which I don’t know. My parents seemed to think it was. They were wrong, but I guess when you’re a parent, sometimes impossible things can be scary anyway, and they were so scared of that woman, Dodge, and it was my fault; I was the reason she could come into our house and scare them like that. I was nine. I made the wrong choice. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t sleep for three months.”
The admission is so simple, so unornamented, that Roger stops, examining it, looking for the key to open it up and force it to make sense. The key isn’t there. He’s not accustomed to words not making sense. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. I didn’t sleep for three months, because I was waiting for you to stop being mad and try to talk again, and I didn’t want to miss you.” Dodger’s tone turns distant. “I couldn’t be in bed or I’d start to drift off, so I’d sit at my desk with tacks to hit against my thumbs, so the pain would keep me up. My parents caught on after a month, when I started seeing things. They begged me to sleep. They finally took me to the doctor and got these pills that were supposed to knock me out. It took them another month to realize I was spitting the pills out, and a month after that for them to stop me from hurting myself to stay awake. I’d pretty much given up by then. I was just staying awake because I’d forgotten what it was like to sleep. Because I thought I had to have done something to make you go away. I thought I deserved it.”
“Dodger, I’m sorry. That wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . . They threatened my family.” Roger is out of the habit of speaking quietly to himself: it takes too much effort to