There's A Place For Us

Chapter 14:Timothy

Even though I take it slow, one nightmare sets Hugo off. I try to comfort him but I let him go eventually, understanding that it’s not helping. I ask him if I can do anything but he just tells me to go back to sleep. I do feel guilty that I can’t help him through it. I wake up hours later to him in the shower. I knock on the door and he emerges, he looks similar to the first time I met him, thin, scared and vulnerable. I keep my distance so he’s comfortable but eventually, he comes closer. I end up leading him to the couch and telling him he should get some more sleep. I sit with him until he’s sleeping peacefully before getting up to make myself some food. My aunt ends up calling me to update me on the adoption situation. They said they’d consider her. After I hung up with her I found Hugo awake. I sat with him a bit and held his hand, it was interrupted by a call from the social worker. Hugo seemed honest, yet, like he was holding back while talking to her. After the call, we lay down together.

I hadn’t been to class in a few days. I was honestly happier here with Hugo. I didn’t feel as lonely or lost or overwhelmed.

“Do you want to go out?” I asked Hugo after a while.

If I was going to lose Hugo to another foster family I wanted to spend as much time with him before I had to go back home and he had to go there.

“Okay, let’s just stay away from the university and Seth,” he replies quietly.

“Of course,” I murmur.

We get up and bundle ourselves up for the outside autumn weather of Maine. The snow has fully melted but it’s quite windy and cold. We walk back to the park but it’s a bit more crowded and overrun by children since it’s not the middle of the night anymore. We continue our walk to a quiet field, we sit down on a bench under a tree that is raining orange, and yellow leaves. The sky is pale blue and dotted with white-grey clouds. In our ventures, I remember Halloween is in a few weeks. Soon these neighbourhoods will be decorated with pumpkins, ghosts, and witches. Yards will become graveyards, with headstones, coffins, zombies, and vampires raising out of them. People will have those fake bloody, sticky handprints and footprints stuck to their doors and windows. The children will dress up and go, door to door for candy. I wonder when the last time Hugo got to go trick-or-treating was. He obviously got to go when he was younger before his parents died, but since he’d been in the foster care system?

“What were you the last time you dressed up for Halloween?” I asked.

“Why?” he asks.

I shrug, kind of embarrassed. I wanted to know the little things about him. I wanted to know him, I knew the bigger events of his life, the incident with Seth, his parents’ deaths, and being homeless for the last two years but there was more to everyone than that.

“The last time I went trick-or-treating, I was the Grim Reaper,” I replied, offering him a reason to give out his.

“The last time I went I was eleven, I was The Joker, I was with a great foster family then, they let me go out with their kids and the other foster kids they had on Halloween, we got candy, and that Christmas we got presents, too. They were sad to see me go, it was just before Spring Break. They decided to take in a four-year-old boy and give me up. They told me they loved me and helped me pack but I was angry at them for a while after. I didn’t even say goodbye to them, I just got in my social worker’s car with my things and I watched them talk to her for a bit before she got back in the car. I remember seeing them wave me off and not waving back,” he answers.

We can attach so much to one memory. A simple question about a Halloween costume turned into a whole story about one of his foster families. It held so much meaning, happiness, and anger.

“What were your parents like?” I asked.

“My mother was a doctor, she worked a lot of night shifts at the hospital so she could bring me to school and spend time with me during the day. My dad was one, too. He tried to switch between night and day shifts, so he could get as many hours as possible and so he could spend time with his family. They had been called in on a night they’d been on call. They were rushing because the page was a 9-1-1 and that was when the crash happened. I remember waking up the next morning and some of the doctors from the hospital who were friends with my Mom and Dad were there to tell me, police officers and the social worker came later,” he answered.

He attached a lot to most memories, I know memories are connected but I wasn’t trying to make him remember the bad things.

“When’s your birthday?” I asked trying so hard to steer clear of the pain.

“It was about a month ago,” he answered simply.

Not an exact day, or any elaboration.

“Mine’s the 7th of January,” I answer.

“Sorry,” he replies, “September 5th.”

“Where do you live exactly?” he asked afterward.

I realized I hadn’t told him where I was from originally.

“New Hampshire,” I answer. “In Hampton, it’s on the coast. It’s beautiful there, you’d like it.”

“I hope I do,” he replies.

“Do you want to see pictures?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he answers.

I pull out my phone and go through my album to summer, a few months ago. I, Aunt Sam and my mother spent a few days at the coast on her boat before I left for Maine and the university. I show him pictures of the Atlantic Sea, the boat, the whales and the sandy, rocky beach.

“It is beautiful,” he whispers. “You grew up there?”

“Yeah,” I reply looking at him.

I search his expression for something, I don’t know what. Maybe I want him to want to live there. To approve in some way. I know New Hampshire wouldn’t have been my first choice if I could have picked where I grew up, I don’t think it would have been anyone’s first choice honestly. But it was my home and I wanted it to be his home, too. Even if it wasn’t where he grew up first, or where he was born. I wanted it to be part of one of his stories and I wanted happy memories to be attached to it. It would be clouded, of course, because not everything can be happy or perfect. We will have disagreements and fights, as all couples do, I just hope we can get past them. If we don’t and this goes bad he’ll be alone again. He’ll have Aunt Sam and she’s good at getting people to trust her and open up but I can understand his struggles also by being his age in the modern world and then there will be some things that neither of us can understand or help him through, I hope that is where the therapist will come in. I know he needs it, he’s been reduced to tears multiple times and he’s hurting and sometimes family and loved ones aren’t enough.

I wanted to be enough in some situations, like right now, until he could get the proper help. Not forever, but for now.

After he’s done looking through the photos we make the walk back to my apartment, I make him some lunch and I watch him eat. I watch him lie on the couch. I kind of want to take him to the movies, that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to do with the person you like, but I’ve already dragged him out once, sure we had fun but he might get irritated if we do it too much.

I go into the bedroom and pull out my diary. It’s a newer one that only holds about two years’ worth of thoughts, as opposed to my others which hold about four years each. I could easily give this to him and he would know everything. With him, it was harder, he had to say everything. It wasn’t as simple as slapping a book in front of me with his life’s history inside and saying, “Read!”

Whatever I could share with him probably was as painful or traumatizing as the incident with Seth. But if something like that ever happened to me, I hoped he would be there for me like I was there for him. We’d get through it together.

I set the diary on my bedside table, there was no sense in hiding it, Hugo wasn’t hiding anything from me, and I didn’t want to hide anything from him. I had to go back to the university to withdraw from my classes at some point. I guess, even though I had no idea what Seth looked like and there were thousands of students going there that I would run into him. I could have become one of his victims, we could be in the same classes, even though it was unlikely.

I wonder if at some point Hugo blamed Seth for how he felt about boys. He said he didn’t know he liked boys until he met me. He hadn’t liked Seth, it was a crime of opportunity, it had just happened. Seth had taken advantage of not having to leave his own house to find a victim. Seth might not even of liked him, he might have just done it to get off, that seemed more like the case considering he went on to do it more than once and to more than one person. He’d taken advantage in every sense of the word. I always thought the people who preyed on children were the worst.

Had someone done the same thing to him? In foster care or maybe by the foster parents he was adopted by? Maybe that was why they didn’t report him. I never understood why if someone did something like that to you, why you would go and do it to another person. Was it some warped sense of revenge and gratification? I wanted to know why but the fear would keep me away.

I left the bedroom and went back to Hugo on the couch, I sit beside him, I wanted to snuggle with him but I was afraid I’d set him off again. I couldn’t be mad at him, he had valid reasons for it, ones I was sure I’d understand if I’d had the same experience but I hadn’t. I felt guilty and ashamed for wanting him to be normal. If he’d never had that experience we never would have met or at least not in the same way or time or place. We might not have liked each other if any of it was different.

My mind wandered, I imagined him getting drafted into the army, leaving for months and me missing him. Waiting for him to return, maybe preparing to purpose to him when he came back. Maybe him coming back would be a surprise. Maybe he’d showed up at my house in Hampton, maybe he’d surprise Aunt Sam and my parents as well, that’s if their introduction went well, to begin with.

I hoped they liked Hugo, I hoped they weren’t against me being gay because I wasn’t even sure about that. I didn’t know what I was going to do if it didn’t go well.

I was imagining a future with Hugo and I wasn’t even sure if this was going to work out. Was I getting my hopes up just to get them dashed? Hugo seemed to notice.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Did something happen?”

“No, no, I was just thinking,” I replied quietly.

“About what?” he asked.

“Worse case scenarios,” I answered sadly.

“Don’t think like that. I don’t want to think like that. I need something to go right after everything, and if this and the court case don’t go right I don’t know what I’ll do. I want this to go right for both of us. And I want justice for what Seth has done to me and others,” he exclaims.

“I’m a pessimist, forgive me,” I continue quietly.

“I should be the pessimist, everything’s gone wrong for me. My parents are dead. I got r***d. My foster parents kicked me out. My social worker lost my file. I was homeless for two years. You were the first thing that didn’t turn into a complete disaster,” he continues.

“I know, I know, I want it to go right, I do. I thought about things going right and then my mind just went to the other side. It’s reasonable, but I am sorry. Things haven’t gone perfectly for me either so maybe I’m just…I don’t know preparing myself? For the worst?”

“I imagined you getting deployed for months and me waiting for you to come home, maybe you would surprise me, maybe you’d call and tell me you’re coming home and I or you’d purpose afterward. I imagined that. Okay?” I continued.

“Purposing?” he questioned. “I’m sixteen.”

“Now, when you get deployed, if you get deployed you’ll be like twenty or something and by the time you come back who knows how old you’ll be, and I mean if everything works it would happen eventually,” I reason. “That’s how I feel about you, that’s how much I want this to work out.”

“It’s just a lot,” he says quietly. “I like you, I really do. It’s just different when you say it like that. It’s…I don’t know.”

“I understand, it’s not going to happen any time soon and you can always refuse if you’re not ready when I do ask you. I want you to be happy. That’s all I want. And you deserve to be happy,” I reason quickly wanting to calm him and not scare him off again.

I look away ashamed for even mentioning it with everything else that was going on right now. Aunt Sam said to go slow, mentioning getting married wasn’t going slow. But don’t people start dreaming or thinking of a future when they’re with someone they like?

“I’m sorry,” I apologize.

“I wasn’t saying I’d be opposed to it. I just said it would be a lot. Right now. With everything, and we’ve known each other for a few weeks. It’s fine,” he continues.

He reached over and took my hand gently and looked up at me. He reached up with his other hand and turned my face towards him. I turned my head but didn’t move towards him in case he didn’t want it. He leaned in and kissed me. I didn’t move at first, worried I’d spook him. We broke away, he stayed close, and I could feel his breath on my skin.

He moves closer and puts his arms around me and leans into me, maybe trying to seem comfortable in my presence. I leaned back onto the couch, and we settle in a comfortable position, close to each other, going silent and watching the TV flickering in the fading light of the day.