Jake Undone(48)

I definitely wasn’t laughing now; my heart ached for that little boy. “God, that is so sad.”

“It was fine. I didn’t know any different. My mother worked hard, and she had no choice. She taught me to take care of myself, and the old lady next door would look in on me from time to time. But the thing is, for two years, I looked forward to seeing that little critter every day.”

I was not about to cry over a hamster.

I was…about to cry over a hamster.

My eyes became watery, and I ran my hand over the carving. “Well, for a latch-key kid, you turned out really well.” I nudged him playfully with my shoulder. “You’re seriously the smartest person I have ever met.”

He didn’t say anything. He just closed his eyes with a placid look on his face as the wind blew on us. I felt honored to be here with him at the place where he experienced so many things that shaped him.

He opened his eyes and rubbed my shoulder. “Are you cold? You wanna get going?”

The truth was, it was the warmest I’d felt all day. “Let’s stay for a little bit longer. We came all this way.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

We just sat, taking in the cold air and listening to the sounds of sirens and children in the distance. I wanted so badly inside his head as he looked around. It was clear this place still meant a lot to him.

I really wanted to hold his hand, so I reached for it, and he opened his palm for me, taking mine in his and said, “Thank you for tagging along with me.”

“Does it make you sad to be back here?”

“Not if I take my own advice and only think about the good memories. It’s all about focusing on the good ones, remember?”

I squeezed his hand tighter. “What are some of the good ones?”

He looked up over at the house. “Oh, I have a lot at this place. Christmases with my mother were definitely good ones. She would save up her vacation days and use them all up during the holidays. She’d do up the whole house in cheesy tinsel and plastic mistletoe, and we’d eat greasy Chinese and play games like Monopoly. We’d watch A Christmas Story over and over because that’s the best fuckin’ movie ever.” He laughed. “Then, of course, there were the teenage memories. Let’s just say being a latch-key kid ain’t so bad when you want to sneak girls in at fifteen.”

I cringed. “I bet.”

“Then, there was the day I found my sister…coming back here and telling my Mom. Or the day I checked the mailbox right out front there and opened a letter that said I had gotten a full ride to Northeastern. Man, I’ll never forget that day.”

“Wow, I never knew that.”

“Yeah. As they say in Boston, I was pretty smaht.”

“Well, I knew that part.”

“Anyways, lots of good memories...focus on the good…”

“I am trying. I don’t know how I got to be such a negative person…so flawed.”

He turned to me. “Flawed?”

“Yeah, you know, with all my crazy fears.”

He didn’t respond right away and seemed to be thinking about something. “When did your first panic attack happen again?”

“I was a senior in high school.”

“What was going on in your life then?”

Maybe it should have seemed obvious, but for some reason, until this very moment, I had never connected my own issues to my brother’s death. The truth was, “My brother had just died…a month before the first attack.”

My brother had just died.

“See, Nina, I hadn’t even realized that part. Is it really that unusual for someone who experienced a traumatic event to lose control? That doesn’t make you flawed. It makes you real.”

I looked down at our intertwined hands and back at him. “I have honestly never thought about it that way. I always just assumed my panic attacks were a sign of weakness.”

Jake scratched his chin and turned his body toward mine. “I’ve been thinking about something a lot since I met you. Everyone has fears. Yours are just more tangible. You wear them on your sleeve. You think you’re weak, but you’re one of the strongest people I know, because as of today you’ve knocked the top two things you feared down one by one in a relatively short amount of time. Do you realize how rare it is for people to actually do that? Some people never have the courage to face their fears in an entire lifetime, let alone a matter of months.”

I pushed my shoulder into him playfully. “Most people don’t have crazy roommates who take an interest in helping them do it.”

“You think I’ve helped you…but you inspire me, Nina, without even realizing it. Seeing you and how you’ve trusted me enough to guide you through your own fears, makes me think about facing some of my own.”