Page 2 of State of Mind

He shrugged. “I’ve stayed awake longer, babe.”

“You’re going to die. You’re too old for that shit.” She flopped back down and buried her face in his pillow. “What’s wrong?”

And he knew she was no stranger to his occasional, who the fuck am I, freak outs. She’d suffered all his late-night calls and 2 am runs to the Taco Stand for the thirty-eight-cent chicken soft tacos that always, always gave him food poisoning. But usually, somewhere between worshipping the porcelain throne on his knees and chugging down a gallon of room temperature Gatorade, he found himself again.

This time, after Adriano brought home Noah, it felt more profound.

“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Gabby let out a small chuckle and turned her face toward him. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“Yes.” He leaned over and kissed her full, plush mouth, not caring much that she tasted like he imagined a dead raccoon might after binging on a Joe’s Crab Shack dumpster. “But it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to forget all about me. You’re going to be an amazing attorney. You’re going to make waves, and get rich, and I’ll just be the guy somewhere in his sorry little condo saying, I knew her when.”

“It took your brother like seventeen years to have even half that,” she reminded him—and he hadn’t forgotten.

He even missed when things were simpler—when he was some kid at UCSD on too many loans and too few grants. But he’d liked living in the dorms and eating stale ramen straight from the pack. He missed when his friends were genuine, when he had nothing to offer anyone except himself and maybe a little bit of stale weed and old pizza when he was assistant manager of the little shop near campus. Once upon a time, he was just a guy who didn’t have much. Once upon a time, he had nothing for people to use.

“I have to get the fuck out of here,” he told her as he unwrapped her from his embrace. “I need to…I need to get away for a while.”

Gabby laughed quietly. “Well, I saw that coming.” She kicked her feet until the sheets slipped from her body, and he was momentarily distracted by the curve of her hips. He liked those quiet, unsuspecting parts of her body that no one ever paid any mind to. Like the top rib near her under arms, like the spot just below her belly button, like the backs of her knees, and the dimple below her ankle. She stretched her arms wide, and he ran the tip of his first finger between her naked breasts. “It was only a matter of time. You can never let Adriano one-up you.”

“I—” he started, flustered. “This isn’t about him.” He rubbed a hand down his face and forced himself to acknowledge the truth of how he was feeling—without his usual mask of arrogance, without his usual dismissal of anything real. “Gabby, I’m miserable.”

“You’ve been miserable your entire life, babe.” The honesty of her words was sharp and stabbing, but he deserved it. Sitting up, she grabbed him by the hair, kissing him slow and soft. “What’s different about it this time?”

He didn’t really have an answer. It was impossible to put words to the red-hot, searing fire in his belly. It was small now, just a single, flickering flame deep inside him, but he knew it was only a matter of time before it erupted into a wildfire, consuming every inch of him. He needed to get away from the people he cared about so none of them would be caught in the destruction.

“I don’t know,” he finally answered, “but I’ve made up my mind.”

She lifted both brows, her forehead wrinkling with one single crease. “Where are you going to start?”

He wasn’t quite sure about that, either. But his brother had been singing the praises of Savannah for two damn years now. Every time he and Noah went back to visit, he’d come home and wax poetic about the someday when they moved back there—after Noah was done with school, after Adriano was ready to retire. Luca had hated that place at first, but now he was starting to wonder if maybe there wasn’t something there for him to find—if he gave it a chance.

And if not…well. There was an entire world out there. He’d seen a lot of it, but maybe he could find more beauty with fresh eyes. But he had to start somewhere.

CHAPTER 2

‘We named you Wilder, because you are our wild boy.

You are the child we dreamed of having the day we agreed to marry each other. You spent nine months never letting me forget you were inside me, and the moment you were out, you looked at me with these big, brown eyes, and I knew you were mine.’

It was a single entry in his baby book—the first hour of his life with a Polaroid photo of himself nestled in a bassinet with a shock of dark hair and his thumb in his mouth. The photo was dated—a mark of the late eighties with the ancient medical equipment and the Care Bear blanket that had kept him swaddled. A nurse had taken the photo, and she had pasted it into the book that night as he slept. His father had been the one to tell him this story after he found the book, when his questions flicked over his fingers, ‘Did my mother ever love me?’

The answer was yes. For a moment, she did.

It was irony at its finest that he was too young to remember what might have been the only kind words his mother ever said about him. They were written in the book, memorialized as maybe a way of mourning that she had lost the one child she had desperately wanted.

Twenty-four hours after his mother had looked into the face of the one child she had been dreaming about, the nurses returned with a smile and a certificate with a little bunny on the front declaring him an outsider.

‘Today I passed my hearing test!’

The very birth of him had denied her the child she’d been wanting since the day she married her husband. Twenty-four hours of life and would remain then and forever, a constant reminder that he was never going to be enough.

His sister had come along after that, three long years of waiting for the child his mother could finally call her own. Wilder had been raised no different than a Deaf child, but to her, he was an outsider.

He was an interloper who had defied generations of genetics that produced a legacy of Deaf Pride long before they had even the hint of rights and privileges and jobs. When spoken language was drilled into them by angry-faced hearing teachers forcing them to sit on their hands and repeat the mimic of sounds until it resembled English, his parents had raised their hands and declared they would not be defined by the hearing.

‘Never my children,’ his mother would say. ‘Never them.’

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