Free Sympathy between humans by Jodi Compton Page B

checked the details that Lorraine had mentioned; it was clear that the laundry was getting done, and the house was as clean as anyone could reasonably expect with four young people living in it. The Hennessy home wasn’t meant to look aseptically neat, anyway; that was part of its charm. It was an old house, and everywhere were testaments that this was a longtime family home. There were nicks in the shabby-elegant pine furniture, and along an upstairs hallway, there were dots and dashes of bleach, a Morse-code tale of someone’s haphazard attempt to scrub out stains. From the length of the pattern, I didn’t think it was Kool-Aid. Blood, maybe, from a nosebleed or some childhood mishap.
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But on a day-to-day basis, the kids kept the house fairly tidy. It was soon plain to me that these kids had been self-directed from an early age; Hugh hadn’t been a micromanager as a parent for a long time, perhaps never. Other kids might have fallen apart after what had happened to Hugh; the Hennessy kids had taken the reins of their lives also automatically.
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The absent Aidan was still on my mind. But by now I was familiar with Marlinchen’s ready defenses. If I was going to make any more progress on the subject of her brother, I’d have to approach the issue a lot more carefully than I had last time. For now, I was letting it lie.
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I did speak to her around ten o’clock one evening, when I’d stayed later than usual, because she was standing alone on the back porch, her slight figure a dispirited silhouette. She was looking out into the darkness of her nearest neighbor’s land. There was absolutely nothing of interest out there, but she seemed troubled.
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“Is something wrong?â€

 
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My next trip to the gym was more successful. I didn’t run into Diaz, or my unwanted supporter, Jason Stone, either. I bought groceries after and, on the way home, was stopped at a traffic light when something caught my attention. A lone figure was climbing up a concrete staircase that led to a pedestrian-and-bike overpass over the freeway. Except he wasn’t really climbing.
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Popular culture writes off drinking to excess as a rite of passage among the young, but there’s something painful to watch about someone who has drunk himself into complete incapacitation. The boy— he looked underage in his hoodie, loose jeans, and running shoes— was literally crawling up the stairs toward the bridge on his hands and knees. At the halfway landing, he stopped and lay down to rest. Or he’d passed out.
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A horn sounded behind me. The light had turned green, and I was holding everybody up. I pulled away, into the intersection.
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The last I saw of the young man was that, as if galvanized by the sound of the horn, he had started crawling again.
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A rectangular pattern, across the interstate and back along a side road, brought me to the corresponding staircase on the other side of the pedestrian walkway. I didn’t go up to intercept the kid. He’d be safe crossing the highway; the overpass was bounded on each side by a high chain-link fence. Even if he rose to his feet and walked, there was no way he could topple over into traffic.
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In time he appeared at the top of the stairs, staggering, but nonetheless on his legs. He looked down at the steps as though they were an obstacle course, then wisely decided to descend on hands and knees, just like he’d gone up. I got out of the car and climbed up the stairs to meet him.
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His body, viewed from above, was even more slender up close, and his hair looked a little too blond to be true. When he looked up from my running shoes to my face, that suspicion was confirmed: his features were clearly Asian. Hmong possibly, or Vietnamese.
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I saw something else, too. He wasn’t just under 21; he was