“To bed. It’s too loud in here,” he responded groggily. He opened the patio door,
limped through, and disappeared into the darkness outside. Carly and I watched Spider and
Cameron stare each other down. The tension in the room was now thick and unnerving.
Carly smartly excused herself and left through the kitchen doorway. I followed her lead and went
to check on the patient out on the deck.
It was pitch black outside. At first, I couldn’t see where Rocco had gone, but as my eyes
adjusted to the darkness, I saw his elongated shadow lying on a lounging chair. There was no
moon; the sky was softly lit by a million twinkling stars. It was amazing how quickly it came—
my sense of insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
I sat down next to him and watched the sky. It smelled like summer now, like the woods were
breathing, too alive to sleep the darkness away. Rocco drowsily mumbled and tussled on his
improvised bed. After a few minutes, he went silent. I assumed that he had finally fallen
asleep.
“He loves you,” he garbled.
At first I thought he was still mumbling to himself, but as I turned to look at him, I saw that
he had twisted onto his side and had been staring at me. His hair was disheveled—with one side
completely flattened while the other stood straight up on its ends.
“Who are you talking to?” I asked, playing along with his drugged stupor.
“You, stupid. Who do you think?” he grumbled and turned on his back and squinted, like he was
trying to figure out what those twinkly things above were doing on his bedroom ceiling. He gave
up trying to focus on anything and sighed, “I think Cameron has for a long time.”
I couldn’t remember how it went: inebriated people always tell it like it is, or never trust
what someone under the influence tells you? Maybe the truth was, as always, somewhere in the
middle. Either way, my heart thudded.
He scratched his nose and then his ear. “That night, when I knocked you over the head, I
seriously thought that Cameron was going to kill me … I screw stuff up all the time … so I
guess that wasn’t really weird … Except that he made me bring you here, you were more than
just some chick he picked up off the street. I think it’s driving him nuts having you here. He
must have called me a thousand times in the middle of the night to check up on you last time he
left to go to work.”
“You should really get some sleep, Rocco,” I suggested unwillingly.
“Before you came here,” he continued, ignoring me, his sole audience, “Cameron used to work
all the time and then left us whenever he wasn’t working. We used to assume that he just wanted
to be alone. Since you’ve been here, he doesn’t disappear anymore.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that, out of all the people in the park that day, Meatball
would run after you?” he asked me. “I mean, I’m not really good at math, but it seems pretty
slim odds that the dog would jump on the one girl whose brother just happened to be the dog
owner’s best friend. I think Meatball knew who you were a long time before you actually met. He
likes you better than everyone else, that’s for sure.” Was he still talking about the dog? He
turned to me, keyed up. “You know what else?”
I shrugged, because I didn’t know what else there could be, because I was holding on too tight
to my bottom lip to play along anymore.
“I overheard Tiny tell Spider that someone told Tiny …” I was having trouble keeping up with
this given my state of mind and wondered how he managed given his state of mind. “ … that
Cameron was in the projects a lot even when he wasn’t working. After you came here, it all
stopped … and,” he added like he was expecting a drumroll, “Tiny told me that when they went
to get your stuff from your house, Cameron knew exactly where you lived and where your room was
in the house. Tiny was the only one Cameron even allowed in the house. But no one was allowed to
go near your stuff. Cameron packed it all himself.”
Images were running through my head—images of what had, might have, already happened; images of
what could be … it took me a while to remember how to speak. Rocco was—absurdly—making a lot
of sense, or at least that was what my heart wanted, very much, to believe. My head, on the
other hand, was shielding the rest of me, challenging the mere possibility. For Cameron to—and
I had trouble saying this even quietly to myself—love me, was, as Rocco had used, slim odds.
Cameron was everything; and I was, not enough. My mind was looking for ways to protect me from
the reality of my shortcomings.
“Why would Cameron send Meatball after me?” I contradicted, but there was no answer. While my
innards had been fighting, I hadn’t noticed that Rocco had gone quiet. I looked over—he was
asleep.
A serene voice in the darkness did answer me. “I didn’t.”
Cameron had been standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, listening to Rocco and me.
“Meatball got away from me after he spotted you running.” His shadow moved past me to the
furthest end of the deck.