What No One Else Can Hear (29 page)

I knelt on the floor beside him and tried to talk him down. “Steve, what’s going on big guy? Talk to me.”

“I didn’t have my wall high enough.” He whined. “I didn’t think I needed it. Everyone here felt good.”

“What changed then, bud?”

“Screams. Scared.”

“Who’s scared, Stevie?”

“He’s scared.” I thought that was all he was going to say for a while, but he finally pointed out the window. Then he jumped up and ran toward the door. “
He’s scared.”

Mike caught him with ease as he ran past him. “Whoa, big guy. What’s up?”

“He’s scared.”

That’s all he’d say. He kept repeating it over and over while slapping at his ears or scratching at his skin, but he clearly wanted to go outside.

“What do you think about letting him go, Jess?” Drew suggested. “Follow him. See what’s going on.”

That was just one more thing for me to love Drew for. There was no doubt in his mind that Stevie was feeling something real.

“Okay, big guy. Show us.”

I grabbed his hand and let him pull me out the door. Right across the street was an old run-down building that probably should have been condemned years ago. I had noticed it before in passing, only as an eyesore. I’d never given it much more thought.

“He’s scared.” Stevie was pulling so hard he would have run across the street without looking for cars if I hadn’t had his hand.

He led us to the back of the building and I heard the screams. Drew had his cell phone out before I could even get out the words. A boy, maybe five or six years old, had tried to climb through an opening to crawl into an already half-collapsed part of the building and the supports had given way. A broken piece of wood had impaled the child and more of the already crumbling supports had fallen on him. His feet were sticking out but his back and head were covered in debris. His screams were muffled, but they were audible, so he was still alive.

“Hey,” I spoke before I laid my hand on his ankle. I made sure I didn’t move it. “Hey, calm down. We’re going to get you out.”

Mike had already started taking smaller debris away. He was a firefighter so we took our cue from him about what to move and what not to. In no time, the ambulance arrived, along with the police. A distraught mother from a house a few doors down came running when she heard the sirens and noticed her son was missing.

Stevie had calmed down a lot as soon as we got to the little boy and now that he was on his way to the hospital, it looked like Stevie was ready to forget all about it.

“Hey, Bear, we need to get back before they throw away my chicken nuggets.”

I
LAY
in Drew’s arms that night while he was playing with my hair.

“I can’t get over Stevie today.”

“You’ve come so far with him,” Drew said.

That surprised me and I pulled away enough to look at him. “He’s doing this all by himself. I didn’t even know what was going on. And you’ve put together most of the recent stuff. The idea of him zeroing in on one person at a time through his drawing. I didn’t think of that. He initiated actually doing it and you came up with the interpretation. And today? That was
all
him. How does that equal me coming so far with him?”

“Oh come on, Jess. You’re a smart man. You know Stevie wouldn’t be in a place where he would stand a chance in hell of coming up with a way to use his empathy without you. You brought him back to us, Jess. You literally brought him out of his own mental world so he could join us in ours. Anything he’s now able to do is because of that. And you saw how he was when you weren’t with him during the trial. Just you being around helps. I still think it’s because you’re an empath too, but whatever the reason, you’re a calming influence and one that gives him the power to find ways to do more than survive his empathy.”

I wasn’t sure I could give myself that much credit, but I was willing to accept that Drew did.

S
TEVIE
AND
I were driving away from the center one Sunday afternoon on one of our now frequent outings. We had eaten lunch at the center with Drew since he was working, and Stevie and I were going to go to a movie, then to the park and grab dinner before we came back later that evening. We were nearing the end of the center’s driveway when we saw a car on the main road slam on its brakes but then it just went on again without coming to a full stop. Once it passed, I could see an animal in the road. The car had either just hit it or had tried to miss an already injured animal, but my bet was on the former. I couldn’t see the license plate of the car from where we were and I was soon otherwise occupied.

“Bear, it’s a puppy.” Stevie reached for his seat belt and looked ready to jump out of the moving car to get at the lump in the road.

“You stay put.” I tried not to have a harsh voice, but it was urgent that I stopped him. I knew my Stevie. If he thought it necessary, he
would
jump out, regardless of the danger to himself. “We’re going to stop and help it. Stay buckled till we stop.”

I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was practically vibrating with effort to stay where he was. The animal up ahead had been moving around, flopping frantically in place in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. But now it was lying still. I was afraid it had died, or at least passed out.

I got the car stopped alongside the road, and grabbed a coat from the backseat. I told Stevie to stay in the car, but he jumped out anyway.

“Stevie, I’m serious. You are absolutely
not
to touch this animal.” I gave him my best stern voice. “We’re going to help it as best we can, but you have to let me handle it. I don’t want you hurt.” He just started toward the dog, but I took him by the arm. “Steve, I want a promise, or we don’t go a step farther.”

He seemed to think for a moment. “Okay, Bear,” he finally agreed, and we headed toward the dog.

By the time we got to the pup, it was unconscious, but still alive. To my eyes, it seemed like a stray. It had mud caked on its mangy coat, as well as the blood caused by the accident. It had no collar and looked like it hadn’t eaten in quite a while. When I got a good view of the injuries, I didn’t think the dog was going to make it. One leg was obviously broken, with a bone protruding through the skin. The dog’s entire right side was covered in blood, and the way it was breathing made me think that, at the very least, broken ribs had punctured a lung, most likely with other internal injuries as well.

“He needs help, Bear.” I didn’t think Stevie had any concept of just how bad this little guy’s situation was, but he obviously needed to do
something
to help.

As I gently scooped up the pup and placed it on the coat, I noticed something. “Hey Steve, I think
he
is a
she.”

“Yeah, but he still needs help.” Okay, the discussion about gender and the proper use of pronouns could wait until later. I wrapped the little thing in my coat, placed it in the backseat, and we rushed to the nearest animal hospital.

The receptionist took one look at the little bundle and yelled for the doctor. Apparently triage exists at a vet’s office too, because a couple of people were already waiting with their pets in the reception area. They too were looking at the now bloody coat, and didn’t seem to mind when we moved to the head of the line.

One of the owners, a small, elderly lady, asked Stevie, “What happened to your puppy, son?”

Stevie expressed anger I didn’t even know he felt. “He was hit. By a car. And they didn’t even bother to stop. They just squealed their brakes, and then the car just zoomed off again. They didn’t even
stop
.”

The elderly lady looked sympathetic and told Stevie she hoped the little thing would be okay. By then, a vet tech had come out and was leading us to the nearest empty room. She was striving not to express to Stevie how hopeless the situation looked, but
I
could read it in her face. If Stevie was picking up her emotion, he didn’t say anything about it. She hurried out the back door of the examining room and into the lab area, presumably to retrieve the doctor. She returned with him almost immediately. The vet took one look at the dog and told us it needed immediate surgery.

“The dog isn’t ours,” I explained. “I don’t really have any way to pay for an operation.”

He shook his head. “We’ll worry about that later.” He looked back at the dog. “She’s in really bad shape, but I think I can save her if I operate immediately.”

The doctor struck me as someone who wasn’t going to give up on the dog easily. I was thinking of asking for him to put the dog down, but after one look at Stevie’s face, I just had to do anything I could to save her.

“Go ahead and operate.”

A
S
MUCH
as I endeavored to convince Stevie to leave, he wouldn’t hear of it, so we sat in the waiting room for almost two hours. By then, it was almost four thirty and the place would be closing soon. Just as I thought of trying one more time, the doctor emerged from the back rooms. “That is one feisty little dog. I wasn’t sure she was going to make it, but we got the leg and ribs repaired, fixed the internal injuries, which included a punctured lung, and so far the little thing is still with us. She must be quite the little fighter.”

Both Stevie and I let out a sigh of relief as the doctor continued. “We need to keep her at least overnight. I can call you tomorrow morning to tell you how she’s doing.”

Stevie started to protest and said he wanted to stay the night with the dog, but the doctor was very patient with him.

He kneeled down by the chair where Stevie still sat. “Bud, that’s really nice of you to want to stay with your new friend.” Stevie started fidgeting but the doctor continued. “But I just can’t let you do that. I have to follow a lot of rules here, and one of them is I can’t let nonemployees stay overnight.” He could see he wasn’t getting through to Stevie so he tried a different tactic. “You don’t want me to get in trouble for breaking the rules, do you?”

That struck a chord. Stevie was very black and white with regard to rules. It was a trait of autism and I once again wondered if that diagnosis might actually be more correct than I had first thought. There was no reason that an empath couldn’t also be autistic, after all. Or at least have some autistic traits.

The doctor took advantage of his headway. “I promise you I’ll take really good care of your friend, okay? If anything happens, I’ll call you right away. And if she does all right overnight, I’ll call you first thing in the morning to let you know her condition.” Stevie still didn’t like the idea, but he had to admit he didn’t want the doctor to break the rules. So he reluctantly went with me to the car.

We had missed the movie and it was too late to go to the park. Stevie didn’t want to go out to eat or even back to the center, so I just took him home. He had stayed the night in Dottie’s guest room a time or two before and seemed to enjoy it. Technically, the guest room was Drew’s but he never slept in it anymore, so it wasn’t an imposition for Stevie to use it from time to time. Besides, that way Stevie could receive that call in the morning.

I had called Dottie and told her we’d be coming home instead of going out to eat as planned, and she had dinner waiting for us when we arrived. Stevie ate his meal in relative silence as usual. He had never been one for talking while eating. He tended to do one thing at a time with every fiber of his being. Not a lot of multitasking for my Stevie. Another autistic trait. So we set out with the ritual of eating fish sticks, which involved copious amounts of ketchup and lots of little bites. After he finished dinner, he took the better part of the next hour telling Dottie in great detail all that had happened, and he finally fell asleep on Dottie’s couch, almost in midsentence, like he sometimes did when he’d been fighting sleep. Neither of us had the heart to wake him up, so we just covered him with one of Dottie’s quilts.

I went back into the kitchen as Drew came in from the driveway, finally home from work.

“I hear we have a new puppy,” he said as he flopped down at the table and grabbed a leftover biscuit. “Dottie called me.”

I rolled my eyes. “I guess so,” I agreed. “I don’t know how I’m going to afford to feed the thing, or where we’re going to keep her, but Stevie will be crushed if we don’t…. If she pulls through the night.”

Drew became more serious. “It’s that bad?”

“Pretty bad. She survived the surgery, though, and the doctor says she’s a fighter,” I filled him in. “So we’ll see what happens, I guess.”

Drew twirled one of my long curls around his finger. “You’re up to the challenge. You always are.” Then he gave me a quick kiss.

“Let me get Stevie to the guest room and I’ll meet you in the apartment in a flash.” I grinned as he ran his hand down the side of my cheek.

“And that’s my cue to go to bed and turn my music up really loud.” Dottie got up with a mock disgusted smirk on her face.

“You can
not
hear us in your room,” I said, hoping that was true. I hadn’t really thought about how thin the walls might be. My apartment was just a couple of rooms at the back of Dottie’s house. It wasn’t like there was any real distance between my bedroom and the rest of her house.

“I’ll tape it for you sometime.” She grinned.

“You’re kidding, right?” I was getting a little concerned. She just patted my shoulders as she went by me to leave the kitchen, so I asked again. “Right?”

She just laughed.

D
REW
WAS
already in my bedroom when I arrived, so he came over to enfold me in a huge hug.

“So,” he whispered into my ear, “a puppy?”

“Well…” I chuckled.

“Next you’ll be getting him a pony,” Drew teased.

“Hey, if a pony gets hit right in front of him, it’s
your
turn to get it into the car and take it to the vet.”