“My mom never got pregnant again. I...we had everything ready. Like, it was a real challenge to go from a camper to a house. Even if it must have been tiny, because I would’ve had to share my room with a sibling, I didn’t care at all. I was used to living in small spaces, and the house seemedginormousat that time. My dad did most of the renovations himself. He found a job at a nearby factory, and after his shifts, we worked on the house together. He was really good with his hands—still is. He creates things out of thin air. I…wait, I can show you!” I reach for my phone and scroll to the file that holds all the photographs I took before leaving for college. They’re not the best quality, sincethey show the printed pictures Dad never got rid of, but even then, and through the broken screen of my cell, the beauty of that place is palpable. A lush green backyard, a scenic forest, and high peaks looming in the distance, a small yellow house with a wooden wrap-around porch taking up the front.
“That looks so beautiful,” Linden whispers. He’s leaning forward to catch a better look, his fingers gently wrapping around my hand with the phone to keep it steady. I didn’t even notice it started to shake.
I clear my throat, locking the screen again. “Yeah, it was. Until we got sick.”
“Sick?” Linden’s head snaps up, his grip tightening around my wrist. “All three of you?”
I press my lips together and give a nod. “Yeah. First, Benny—that’s what I called the pup they got me for my birthday. He was a little”—I gesture to indicate the size—“a little German Shepherd because my dad wanted a protector for Mom and me when he wasn’t—” I break off when a lump appears in my throat, too big to speak around, so I swallow thickly, waving the topic away with my hand.
“Anyway, I remember him being completely fine. We spent the whole day playing by the little stream next to the house. That night, he started throwing up all over my bed. When Mom drove us to the vet the next morning, he was already so weak and I…fuck, this is stupid.” I shake Linden’s hand off to press the heels of my palms against my stinging eyes. It’s beenfourteen years,for fuck’s sake!
“Hey, hey, no, it’s not stupid,” Linden insists. He crawls up the bed until he kneels in front of me, wrapping his arms around me without hesitation. His warm breath tickles my ear as he speaks. “Crying over a pet isneverstupid—you wouldn’t believe how often I’ve seen my dad cry over the loss of an animal.”
I sniff and give my eyes a final wipe before blinking up at him. It’s hard to imagine Brandon Woodrow crying.
“Yeah? He seems more like the kinda guy who gets stuff in his eyes,” I joke weakly.
“Oh yeah.” Linden snorts. “He gets stuff in his eyes a lot. Like when a calf doesn’t make it or a fox gets to the chickens.”
I bite my lower lip, nodding slowly as I remember the day he took me out to fix that fence. There’s a softer core to that man than he wants people to believe.
“Do you want to take a break?” Linden sits back on his heels, his hand squeezing my knee. “You don’t have to get it all out in one go.”
“No, it’s okay.” I know that picking this topic up again will be so much harder than just ripping it off like an old band-aid. I wet my lips and take a deep breath before giving him a small smile.
“After Benny…our goats got sick, too. We had three of them. Mom named them after Santa’s reindeer—Dasher, Dancer, and Donner. And then my mom and I.”
There’s a flash of fear darting over Linden’s face, and now it’s me who’s grabbing his hand and squeezing it, just to remind him that I’m still here, right next to him, big and ogre-sized and all.
“It was this terrible headache from the moment I opened my eyes to when I went to sleep at night, and just…nausea, you know? I remember being so tired all the time. It was better when I was at school, but it got worse when I came back home in the afternoon.” My legs are going heavy from the memory. It felt like walking through mud, getting stuck at every other step.
“My mom went to every doctor she could find, but they all said it was probably stress, the move, the change, you know? Going from an ‘unstable’ life to this. That we’d both need time to adjust.”
“Did the goats need time to adjust, too?” Linden asks bitterly, anger vibrating in every word. I still laugh at the joke, once again squeezing his hand.
“To be honest, I don’t think my parents connected our issues to the goats,” I tell him. “And my dad was mostly fine. He had random headaches, but nothing major. So that’s when they started fighting because…well. He told Mom she was overreacting, that she should try to relax more, that she projected her symptoms onto me.” I close my eyes, trying to push the mental images back down. At first, they tried to keep these arguments to the evening, when they thought I was fast asleep, but after a while, they started as soon as my dad came through the door and found my mom lying on the couch with all the curtains closed and me hugged to her chest.
I sigh, shaking my head to come back to reality. “It went on for a whole year. It was better in winter, but our symptoms came back in spring. When the next summer rolled around, Mom didn’t even look the same anymore. There were days when she barely made it out of bed because she was so weak.”
“Fuck, Micah, I don’t know what to say,” Linden murmurs, and I shake my head again, unable to come up with anything in return.
“It’s okay,” I finally whisper, even though it’s not. Those are the worst memories, even worse than the fighting—her pale face, gaunt from not being able to eat properly, the watery eyes, and stringy hair. She had beautiful hair before, thick and long and shiny. I loved burying my hands in it, loved playing with her long braids. I vividly remember it thinning. When I asked her why she only ever did one braid now instead of two, she burst into tears.
“It was one of the nearby farmers who finally figured it out,” I pick up again when I trust my voice not to betray me.
“He had lost a lot of sheep to a weird illness over the past months. Turned out, they all drank from that little stream that also went by our house. The one I played in with Benny. The one where my mom got the water for our garden from.” I lean back against the headboard, some of the tension leaving my body. It’s easier to talk about this part because I don’t have a concrete memory tied to it, just second-hand information I picked up later, be it from my father or online.
“Ironically, it was the factory my dad worked at. They didn’t want to pay a shitton of money for chemical waste disposal, so they just released parts of it into the—”
“Jesus!” Linden gasps when he puts the pieces together before I finish my sentence. “Please tell me there was a trial or something. They didn’t get away with this, did they?!”
I can understand his outrage. Now, years later, as a grown man, I still sometimes long for some kind of justice. But real-life people who go toe to toe with big companies rarely see a happy ending.
“They kinda got away with it. I mean, I was too young to really understand what was going on. I just remember suddenly being asked a lot of questions. By my teachers and doctors, police, lawyers…in the end, my parents took the money from the settlement deal, agreed to never talk about it in public, and left. My dad always said there was a lot of pressure and intimidation, like his former boss knocking on our door, someone smearing his car with cow shit, slashing his tires, stuff like that. I didn’t really care; I just wanted my mom to get better again.” I lean my head back against the wall and release a deep sigh. Now that most of it is out, I feel exhausted, limbs heavy, my throat raw.
For a moment, neither of us says a word. I’m too busy regulating my breathing again, in and out, carefully through my nose. Linden’s eyes have taken on a faraway look, like he’s noteven in the room with me anymore, so I jump a little when he suddenly speaks up.
“Did she get better? I mean, is she okay now? Areyouokay?”
