“How do you know her, Ralph?” Dennis asked.
“It’s not your concern, son.”
Dennis had found the man in his janitorial closet. He was hiding there. He was literally shaking.
Ralph looked over his shoulder. Martha would be watching them. She would be watching everyone, from now on. There would be no hiding from her.
“Was she at the place you talked about?” Dennis asked.
“Don’t bring it up, son.”
“Is she going to be mean?”
“Not in the ways you think. She has ways to be mean where everyone around her stands up and claps. That’s the worst kind of meanness, son. The kind where everyone says it’s for your own good.”
Dennis thought of the chapter in the rabbit book where it said that if you chase a rabbit, they can die of fear. Its heart literally stops in its chest. But if provoked or for the right reasons, a rabbit will turn aroundand fight. It will kick, hard, with its hind feet. It will use its razor-sharp teeth.
“Did you do something bad?”
Ralph looked at the boy. Dennis was getting younger as he got older. He no longer smirked and sneered. His gaze was open and curious. His little nose even twitched. Like a rabbit’s, the custodian thought helplessly. Please, God, help me save him.
“No, son,” he said. “The only bad thing I ever did in this life was breathe.”
That night, Ralph folded himself into his truck, his body aching from stress and worry.
He had never expected to see Martha King again.
His truck rattled as he drove down the mountain road, and he unrolled the window to catch the ocean breeze. He had told Dennis he was sent to a center when he was ten. He had not told the boy how the hot wind blew off the Arizona desert in the mining shack he had lived in with his father. He had not said that one day his father left and never returned. He found out later that the old man had gotten drunk and assaulted the local sheriff. The sheriff had said like father, like son, and taken Ralph to a place in the desert called the Axis Treatment Center.
He remembered that day, stepping out of the van that dropped him inside the barbed-wire gates. He had walked into blinding white light.
Later, what Ralph would remember most from the Axis Treatment Center was not what happened in the treatment room—those four walls had a way of blotting out the most pernicious memories—but the lone field trip Martha had taken him and a few other boys on.
He was twelve by then, and had suffered through two years at the center. Martha said he was an intractable case. So were the otherboys. The trip was educational, she said. She wanted to show them something.
They had taken a van and driven deep into the desert. Leaving the security guard by the van, Martha led the boys to the very edge of a canyon. Down below them, framed in red rocks and harsh buds of cactus, was a giant figure. It looked like a cave painting, only it had been carved into the hardpan of the desert floor.
“Do you know what that is?” Martha had asked.
The boys knew better than to answer. They waited for her to tell them.
“It’s called a sleeping giant,” Martha said. “There are dozens of them around here. They were carved by the first people here, maybe millions of years ago. The town was named after them. When I was a little girl, my dad used to bring me out here, to the desert. He knew where all the sleeping giants are hidden. See how this one waves at the sky?”
It was true—the female figure on the desert floor appeared to be waving at the sky.
“I always wondered, why did they make them?” Martha asked. Her voice changed ever so slightly. “All of the sleeping giants are like this. They are waving, as if asking for help.”
The guard lounged in the shade of the van, drinking warm Pepsi.
“All of them alone.”
Ralph had listened silently. He hated Martha with every bone in his body, and he felt as wedded to her as that stone figure cut into the desert floor.
“I wanted you to see this,” she told them. “Life isn’t anything without each other. We are nothing without a family. We are as lost as the sleeping giants. As lost as this woman below us.”
She doesn’t look lost, Ralph had thought. She looks free.
On the ride back to the center, Martha sat beside him, her longthigh bone pressing into him. He could smell her sunscreen. Martha closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep, almost on his shoulder. He had felt such an awful mixture of compassion and hate then.