Nothing could be heard in the old, battered pickup besides the sounds of potato sacks shifting in the truck bed and four tires bumping along the tree-surrounded gravel road. Jona Keller boosted himself up in the driver’s seat for a moment to look through the windshield at the road below. Work calloused hands turned the steering wheel slightly, maneuvering the vehicle around a large pothole. Then, glancing downward from the windshield, he opened the glove compartment and removed a cellphone.
Storm-colored eyes glanced up at the road from under wispy gray eyebrows. He dialed a number on the device in his hand.
“Hello, Mr. Keller. What can I do for you?”
The toothpick moved contemplatively from the center of Jona’s lips to the edge. “They still offering that reward for that phase trial?”
“Yes, Mr. Keller. The reward is still available.”
There was a short silence.
“I’ll be needing some days off, then.”
“Arius! Excuse me, have you seen an Asian boy? He’s short, kind of cute-looking, has—”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Excuse me, I’m looking for my brother. Have you seen him? He was wearing a gray sweatsuit—”
“Nah, I ain’t seen nobody.”
“Can you help me find someone? He’s—”
“I’m sorry, I’m on the phone.”
Paper clenched in Gabriel’s hand, forming an even tighter ball. He hadn’t seen the people who put up the posters, but the posters were everywhere. Arius’s mugshot, description, and information were plastered on every corner. “5’6”, 125 lbs, Korean, dark hair/dark eyes, numeral 21 tattooed on left side of neck.” They could have added his blood type, his biometric work, his fingerprints, his DNA pattern. The Arouras clinic knew everything about Arius. And yet, the blatant lie directly below the full-color image of Arius’s face: “Lost from mental home. May be danger to self or to others.”
Another rainstorm was coming in from the South. Thunder rumbled close by as Gabriel tossed the wadded poster into a garbage can on the sidewalk. He had checked the bridge he and Arius spent part of the night under. He had trekked around downtown in circles, wracking his brain for where Arius might have gone. On an ordinary day, places that would attract the nineteen-year-old were the pavilion outside United Bank, the butterfly garden in front of the Historical Art Museum, and the elaborate walk-through fountain at the corner of the courthouse. Arius could have climbed up on the concrete arches decorating the Goldwin Theater building. He might have walked down to the tiny bio-life pond outside the wildlife office. He could have crossed downtown and gone all the way to the aquifer on the other side.
But none of those places made sense for a teenager who had gone almost forty-eight hours without food, been in cardiac arrest the day before, thrown up several times while running for his life, and been assaulted in a homeless shelter.
“One twenty-five? One twenty-five?” Gabriel reached Main Street and realized he had once again completed a circle. “A hundred and twenty-five pounds?” Is that an old weight? Gabriel inwardly wondered, Or did he lose those ten pounds he worked so hard to put on?
The midday sun had disappeared behind a rising blanket of black clouds. Gabriel stopped beside a street sign and let his hands close into fists. He had to think. He had to stop walking around in a panic and really think about where Arius would have gone. If Arius was even anywhere to be found at all…If those people hadn’t found him first…
Cold, heavy raindrops began to fall. I should have done better. I shouldn’t have let him walk away. I should NEVER have let him walk away. If Arius had been anywhere out in the open, he would have been found. Posters had been set up all over town. Someone would have seen him. Gabriel shouldn’t have let him walk away. He shouldn’t have even let Arius out of his sight. Why hadn’t he figured that out the moment Arius stood up? Why hadn’t he just thought?
But that was how it was, now. How it had always been, perhaps. Last night, Gabriel had experienced a fear he had never known to exist. He had not paused to think. He had cut straight to reaction. Grabbing Arius, leaving the shelter, walking away as fast as possible. He hadn’t known what to say, how to even try to talk about it. Innately, he had always subconsciously extended that kind of protection to Monica and Amana. Not Arius. Gabriel had said what he thought he himself would have wanted to hear. Arius could have protected himself, if only…
I should have asked him if he was okay, Gabriel realized. I never even asked if he was okay.
A torrent of heavy rain swept in, transforming the pavement into a mass of tiny water drops striking and splattering all at once. The street emptied out, but Gabriel kept walking.
Up ahead, he spotted a familiar face. The elderly Hispanic woman, whose phone he had borrowed earlier, was closing up her thrift store. Broom in hand, she was sweeping rubbish out of her doorway, careful not to lean too far out from under the overhang and let the rain catch her.
Gabriel hurried up to her, hands pressed into his drenched jean pockets. “Excuse me, I’m looking for a short Asian boy. He was wearing a gray and blue sweatshirt—”
The woman did not even look up at him before she was waving her hand dismissively and turning from the doorway.
“Please!” Gabriel gasped, a sudden wave of desperation welling up in him. He couldn’t do this. He had already been separated from the rest of his family. He couldn’t lose Arius, too. It wasn’t just about how he would face his mother, Monica, and Amana. It was so much more. A depth Gabriel could not explain. In that moment, standing before that thrift shop doorway, he would have traded never seeing his family again for keeping Arius by his side. “Please, we spent the night under a bridge, and he’s very sick. He left because we got in a fight, and I said some things I didn’t mean, and this isn’t very far from that bridge—you might have seen him—Where he went. The direction he walked away in. Anything.”
The woman hesitated. Her hand tightened on her broomstick slightly, and she turned slowly back to face him: that soaked, pitiful young man in her doorway; his blue eyes blinking quickly to shield his vision from the impaling raindrops.
The woman’s firm stare softened a little. She reached for something by the wall inside and retrieved an umbrella. After putting her broom aside, she descended the two little steps leading down from her shop. “Come with me,” she grunted.
Gabriel followed her around the corner of her building, heart lifting with hope. She led him into a narrow alleyway.
“I tried to bring him inside,” the woman told Gabriel, voice raised to be heard over the rain. “But he wanted to stay where he was.”
“You…You saw him? You spoke to him?” Gabriel asked hopefully. The drumming of the rain all around them nearly drowned out his suddenly quiet words. “When?”
“This morning. But he was still there when I checked again this afternoon.” She walked quickly toward a large gray dumpster, her boots splashing through the flooded alleyway.
Gabriel immediately detected the direction of her steps and moved past her to the dumpster. The louder sound of raindrops hitting metal filled his ears as he stepped around it. And there, collapsed against the far side of the dumpster, sat Arius.
“Shit.” The word escaped grit teeth as Gabriel immediately dropped down beside the nineteen-year-old. The boy looked as if he was asleep. Soaked strands of his soft dark hair streaked his sickeningly paled face, and his eyelids only lifted for a moment as Gabriel pulled the boy against himself. For a second, as Gabriel closed his arms around that cold frame, he thought Arius had stopped breathing.
“He’s been there all day,” the woman informed Gabriel from where she stood close by. She made a gesture toward the dumpster. “Like he wants to—throw himself out.” She shrugged and shook her head.
“Arius, come on, wake up.” Gabriel tipped the boy’s head back a little. Hand on Arius’s face, arm supporting his body, the moment felt heavy and surreal. He couldn’t remember the last time he had held Arius like this. When they were kids, maybe. That time Arius had experienced his first bone ache. He had been almost eight, and Gabriel had heard him trying to cry himself to sleep.
“I’ll sing you to sleep instead, you doofus.”
“I—I want—Mommy!” He had been almost too tearful to speak.
“Too bad, you’re stuck with me. Mommy has work tomorrow.”
The bone aches had never gone away. They had worsened. Intensified to the point that some nights, Arius got no sleep at all. But he had never again accepted Gabriel’s company. Arius had taken to nursing himself through the pain nights with headphones and a movie watchlist.
“Come on, Ari. Come on.” Gabriel swept dark hair out of Arius’s face, hand hovering over the boy’s eyes for a moment to shield them from the rain should he revive. But when Arius still did not respond, Gabriel found himself checking the boy’s pulse and breathing. His own heart pounding in his chest, Gabriel counted Arius’s heartbeats.
“He’s not waking up?” the woman questioned, leaning over to get a better look at Arius’s face. A stream of water from the edge of her umbrella hit Gabriel’s shoulder, and she stepped back. “Get him out of the rain, don’t you think? I’ll call my nephew to help you get him inside.” She started to turn back the way she had come.
“No, it’s okay, I can lift him,” Gabriel responded.
“Well, my nephew is here at the shop with me.” The woman glanced over her shoulder at Gabriel. “And he’s studying to be a doctor. You should let him look at your friend, whether you need help taking him inside or not.”
“He’s my brother,” Gabriel almost corrected. But there was an inexplicable sense of relief in not having to say those words. Gently, Gabriel slid an arm under Arius’s knees and lifted the boy off the ground. 125 or 135, the weight had never been so difficult to stand up with. Every ounce of exhaustion and malnourishment seemed to hit Gabriel’s muscles at the same moment.
Arius was soaked to the skin. Water ran out of his sleeve as Gabriel lifted him, drenching the wet bandage on his hand. Like he was carrying his own life in his arms, Gabriel followed the woman back to the thrift store.
There was a small, finger-drawn line in the water on a sheltered portion of the dumpster they walked away from. It was small, tilted, and curved at the top. Like a sloppily written letter “C” or half of a heart shape.
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