you want sauce on your ice-cream?”
We sat around the kitchen table eating spaghetti Bolognese and ice-cream that night, but what is usually a fun and messy time of the day, was quiet and sad as one of our dining chairs remained empty.
Bobby’s best friend was conspicuously missing.
Izzy’s big brother was missing.
Jimmy’s best friend was sad.
I don’t know how to help Jon.
I don’t know why he keeps going back.
He never comes to us with black eyes. No broken arms or legs. No marks that we see. But he limps, he’s withdrawn, and can barely breathe through a coughing fit in the winters.
Every time I ask if his parents hurt him, he denies it.
Every time I ask what hurt him, he denies hurting.
Then he hurts himself more as he pretends he isn’t hurting.
Every time I even look at him when he’s clearly in pain, he clams up and hides in Bobby’s room for days.
My children sneak food from our kitchen.
They think we don’t notice. They think we don’t know they’re feeding Jon and Iz when they come to us hungry.
We know.
Of course we know, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, because he refuses to talk.
Jon and Iz sleep in my home a few nights a week. Iz, a little more often than Jon. They go missing for a few days, turn my hair gray with worry, then I find out they’re back in my home only because the secret jars of peanut butter are gone from the pantry and I hear crying in the night.
Not Izzy.
But Jon.
I bet he doesn’t even know he cries in the night. And I guarantee Bobby never brings it up.
Lying in bed and stroking Nelly’s shoulder, I breathe in the scent of her hair and stare at the ceiling. She runs patterns against my chest with her pointer finger as she, too, worries.
“Bry…”
“I know, baby.” Bobby’s room is barely twenty feet down the hall from ours. Our house isn’t large, so when the bedroom window in his room slides open and the counterweights tap against the frame, I hold my wife as her heart breaks.
We know Jon’s climbing through my son’s bedroom window right now, though he’s welcome through the front door any day.
I know he’ll be hurting.
I know I’ll hear tiny Izzy feet tiptoeing down the hall in a moment because, when Jon’s not here, she goes to Jimmy, but when he is, especially when he’s hurt, she goes to him.
She’ll sleep cuddled up against his chest tonight, and she’ll sneak Band-Aids from our cabinet and try to help him.
“We can’t let this go on, Bry. We’d never allow our boys to go there, why are we letting Jon?”
I sigh and pull her closer. “Because he won’t talk, Bert. He refuses to answer when I ask. Wayne Hart has legal power here. They could yank them back any moment.” I press my lips to her brow. “I can’t push until I get Jon to talk to me. I can’t make it stop until I know what’s going on.”
“But if he never talks, he might never escape this.”
Lances of pain slice my heart. She’s right; we would never allow our boys to go through whatever it is Jon goes through. We consider him one of ours, but we don’t have the same power when it comes to him.
We can’t yank him unless he wants to be yanked.
And he keeps going back.
“I know an abused child, Bry.” Pushing up onto her elbow, Nell’s dark eyes bore into mine. “They hurt him. They hurt him really bad, a million times worse than anything I ever got. And I think he goes back because he’s protecting Izzy. Like they’re his parole officers or something; if he doesn’t check in, they come looking. He’s keeping them away from here.”
“That’s why he leaves her here so often. He’s keeping her away.”
Nodding softly, she drops her eyes to my fingers that play with hers. “I don’t think he’ll ever tell us. I was never going to tell anyone. I didn’t tell anyone until I told you, and I was nearly eighteen by then.”
“Bert–”
“He’s twelve, Bry. You want him to come back here every third day starving and beaten for the next six years, or do we do something about it and fix it?”
“Baby. I don’t know how to fix it. He won’t admit it, and they’re not leaving any marks. We know what we know, we know he’s hurt, but unless I catch them mid beatdown, how else