What drew me to Wick? What kept drawing me to Wick? I don’t want to soften him for you, or give excuses, or hand over to you things that are too personal or ammunition for like or dislike.
But maybe in the beginning it was similar to what I liked about Borne. In the beginning, I could remember the childlike delight he took in so many simple things that subsumed or put aside his dread, his fear, his stress. The most hackneyed, clichéd, sentimental things. Like a ray of sunlight or a butterfly. Because that was such a contrast to the brittle quality of his suspicion. The wariness he wore like an exoskeleton, to disguise the shy boy underneath.
Even in those difficult times, stressful and uncertain, this sensibility could return to him. Just a couple of days after our conversation I observed him mirthful, not knowing I watched: running and skipping down a corridor of the Balcony Cliffs, saying over and over to himself, “I can do this. I can do this.”
I wondered if Wick’s diagnostic worms had eaten into his brain, for him to become so happy. I could remember this mood in Wick early on, but not now, so surely he must be drunk. Then, a little later, I went to his apartment and he was serious again. Could he only show that side of himself when he was alone?
I’ve brought you in late. I can only recite what were hauntings. He could be kind. He could be thoughtful. He could be idealistic. That’s what I know. But I also know Wick put words in my mouth. I had never flat-out told Wick he had to accept Borne, never told him Borne was my friend.
HOW BORNE LET ME KNOW HE NEEDED PRIVACY
A few days after I’d caught Borne following me in the city, he shocked me with a formal announcement: He was moving out of my apartment. To tell me this, Borne had made himself small and “respectable” as he called it, almost human except for too many eyes. But, really, “respectable” meant he looked like a human undergoing some painful and sludgy transformation into a terrestrial octopus with four legs instead of tentacles. This is how he presented himself to ask a favor. Anyone else confronted with Favor Borne would have run screaming.
“Moving out, huh? That’s something,” I said, inane. My hands were shaking at the thought. My heart was up near my throat, everything in my head like a fluster of wings. Was he serious? He couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t let him do it.
“Yes, Rachel,” he said, releasing a smell like honeysuckle and sea salt, which was his way of pushing. “It was bound to happen.”
Really? Bound to happen? Because I truly had never thought it would happen. For all that I could see every branching tunnel of the Balcony Cliffs when I shut my eyes, this future had been dark to me. Borne existed in one particular place, existed at the heart of all the lines I had drawn here. I would raise him in my apartment and we would live here together and that was that.
But all I said was, “Where are you moving out to?”
“To another apartment in the Balcony Cliffs.”
“Why?” Such a naked word, looking at him.
“I need my space,” he said, and said it so adorably that I melted even in the midst of my panic. “I need privacy. I need to be private.”
“Do I make you feel like you don’t have enough space?”
“No,” Borne said. “I just want some of my own. I promise I’ll come visit. You can come over after I get settled, after it’s all better in there.” Which meant he must have chosen a real dump, requiring a lot of work. Or that a Borne-friendly apartment looked very different from mine, which hurt, too.
I couldn’t help but think he’d read a scene like this in a book and was acting out one of the roles. Perhaps the role I was playing had gone to someone in the book who shouted at him or told him no or led him into a long, circular dead end of an argument about why he was wrong. But I couldn’t be like that to Borne.
So many bad and not-so-bad thoughts, unworthy of either of us. Castigating myself already, cursing how I didn’t know how to be a good mother. How of course if I forbid him to go outside, if I offered up slights, I might not even recognize that he’d leave me. And also: Wasn’t this the natural progress of a child growing up so fast? To become an adult. To move out. To be on their own. But it wasn’t the way in the city, where to hold fast, to be as one, was safer, even if I’d been filling him with the idea of a normal life, with commonplace ideas.
“I have conditions,” I said, after a pause. “There are rules. Break them and you’ll be living back with me again.” As if that was such a bad thing, such a horrible thing, and me still not quite sure where this impulse, this urge for separation, had originated. Had it come from some outside source? I kept seeing the little fox as if the fox were a question mark behind everything.
“What are the rules?” Borne asked.
“You come visit me every day.”
“Of course I will!” He seemed sad I’d thought he might not, or maybe I projected that onto him.
“You don’t go outside, into the city, unless I’m along with you. For now, that means you don’t go outside. You can sneak out of your own apartment under the door all you want, but you do not leave the Balcony Cliffs.”
“That’s fine, Rachel,” Borne said. “I will be busy decorating my apartment anyway.”
“And you still help me around here whenever I need you. And Wick, too, now.”
It was inevitable that Wick and Borne would exchange more than suspicious glances soon enough. Each knew the other existed. Each acted a role around the other. Someday soon they’d be formally introduced. I’d taken pains to only talk about Wick in positive ways while around Borne, although I’d slipped up a couple of times.
“I can do that,” Borne said. “Do we have an agreement?”
“Yes, we have an agreement,” I said, bending to Borne’s wording, as if we had signed a treaty.
A treaty that hurt my heart, but the great lurch within me, the thought I was losing him, had receded. He would be close by. He would still be with us.
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.”
Borne became huge, spreading almost manta ray–like wings, and bore down on me to give me an enormous, all-enrapturing hug—and I withstood it, standing there buffeted and wondered why I was so sad. He was so strong now even this well-meaning gesture would leave bruises.
“You need to get off me.” But I clung to him a little longer.
*
Borne’s new apartment was only a corridor and a corner away, and the first night it didn’t even feel permanent, as Borne dropped by to talk, mostly about the tragic lack of lizards in the Balcony Cliffs. Then we played a game from when he was younger, scant weeks ago. He was too old for it, but it served as a happy memory, something we shared now to show affection.
“Rachel, Rachel—what am I?” The strobe of colors felt like a smile or a flash of relief.
“That’s a tough one, Borne. I don’t know what you are.”
“Am I a squirrel?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Am I a fish?”