The responsible adults of the other five families who lived on the far side of Nameless Canyon were all at work.
Maggie’s first sick day began with a McDonald’s confrontation and ended with a Dairy Queen Blizzard dripping in her cup holder as she sped home, so she would never consider counting herself among any group thought of as responsible.
Responsibility found her soon enough.
Even before she hit the brakes at the intersection facing the canyon, she saw him.
There was nothing shocking about it. She’d come here to find him. And this was the same intersection where she’d stopped the car and he’d leaped out of it. Chasing roadkill, chasing the dead.
For the duration of Milo’s short life, she’d watched this child do things some parents might have found shocking. Swallowing ants, cooking invisible dinners, birthday tantrums so severe they lost him for hours.
Milo sat so tranquil on the guardrail. Legs limp over the edge, arms spread wide on either side of him. The lightest tap on his back would topple him.
Blood rushed in Maggie’s ears. She pulled onto the shoulder behind the stop sign.
“What else is new, Milo.”
Maggie got out of the car.
When Milo was born, he was like many other babies. Seven pounds, nine ounces. He cried and laughed and played with things like all children do, plastic things and plush things. He perched on Hank’s shoulders and was tickled by Ana’s fingers. His first words were “ki-kat” though they had no cat, and “Mama” because he had one.
Maggie used to kiss his feet; sometimes he would kick her.
Maggie looked both ways before crossing the road. She noted how wide Milo’s arm span had become, how it really was as wide as he was tall, how precarious his little fingers appeared in a breeze like this.
When Milo was three, he stopped speaking.
It happened without warning. When he stopped speaking he also stopped smiling, making eye contact. For a year, Milo said not a word. Doctors had much to say instead. Assessments were made, well-intentioned diagnoses granted. Ultimatums of Milo’s oddment.
Maggie kissed Milo’s feet; sometimes he would kick her.
The air that spun up from the base of Nameless Canyon couldn’t help but whorl, couldn’t help but lift and pull everything in all directions. Milo’s wings tilted like a plane’s in a high wind. Heavy turbulence.
Arms spread like that. Maggie wondered: Was this another sign for everything?
“Hey. What are you doing?”
“Something new,” Milo said flatly.
“I can see that.” She willed her voice not to tremble. “But didn’t you want me to show you how to make coffee?”
“I’m not Milo.” He tilted his head back, a little too far. He pointed one daggered eye at her. “I’m not your son.”
“I didn’t think you were,” Maggie said. At last she was meeting the hallucination, the thing that knew them all.
This morning, in the kitchen—Milo had been better. But better wasn’t Milo. What made Milo himself wasn’t behaving how other kids did. It wasn’t being calm in school or making sense or making breakfast for his mother.
“I never did fool you. The Vasquez mother.”
“Milo can only ever be Milo.” Maggie walked over gravel, into sparse grass. “That’s one thing I do know.”
“You have terrified me since I met you.”
“Well. Ditto.”
Maggie locked eyes with the thing behind Milo’s gaze, the thing that wasn’t him. “If I can have any body I want. If I can reach others, can grow bigger all the time, why am I holding on to this? These tiny useless hands.”
Maggie quirked a smile. Maybe it was real. “Milo grows on people.”
“He does.” Milo’s arms tilted up and down, back and forth. “Don’t you ever want to get out? Just leave them and go?”
“Do you?” Maggie sat carefully beside him, with her back to the canyon. “Have you been able to leave my ridiculous kids alone?”
“They wouldn’t be alone.” There was bitterness in his voice. “They never are. Irritating things swarm around them. Friends. How can they be called friends? These things haven’t even seen Vasquez bone marrow. I have seen it. I’ve lived in it.”
Maggie cleared her throat. “I think I know how you feel. It’s becoming pretty clear that they don’t need me anymore, either.”
“Yes.” This close, she could see Milo’s face twitching, fighting itself.
Maggie breathed in through her nostrils. She recalled her conversation with Donovan. And she set it aside, tucked herself into a compartment in her chest and lied, because Milo was here on the edge of a cliff. “Well, what are we waiting for, then? Let’s get out of here.”
Luz turned both eyes on her—the tilting threw Milo’s body just off balance.
“Maybe you and me have just outgrown the Vasquezes, Luz.”
Luz grinned at her, wider than his head. He lowered her son’s arms, stopped her son’s legs from kicking.
It took everything in Margaret not to grab him then.
Slowly, Luz lifted one leg back over the guardrail. Then the other. Finally he lowered both back to the earth.
“Well done, son.” Luz’s eyes widened, but Maggie knew what she was doing. When she wrapped this thing in her arms and held him close, she knew precisely what could happen.
She knew her son was buried in there, as he’d often been buried in himself. She knew that any boy who kicked when his feet were kissed had spirit in abundance.
Milo could not be bested by the emptiness of the world if the emptiness had always been part of him.
As Luz appeared like a swarm of termites spewing from the ears of Milo while she embraced him, Maggie did not close her eyes, did not look away from all those buds of light leaving her son in dribbling lines, did not flinch when she felt their tiny needle-feet in her nose and mouth and ears and eyes.
Not for one second did she mistake this thing in her arms for anything but what it was. But she also knew how badly it wished she could. Luz wanted to be something else. She could understand that.
Margaret Vasquez had not traveled, but she had seen much of the world.
We’ll travel now, Maggie, Luz said. We can go anywhere.
“Are you sure, Mags?” Donovan had kissed her head, put his hands over hers on her swollen belly. “There’s probably a cheaper house closer to the school.”
“Probably.” Maggie extricated herself from his arms. “But I’m sure. They don’t make houses like this back in Wisconsin.”
“Nah. And they don’t make families like ours anywhere.”
Maggie walked to the lip of the canyon. “Not sure about that.”