“I never said you were broken.” She stood up, tried to touch him, but he shrugged her off. “You’re not broken.”
“I am. I am broken, and the sooner you accept that, the better we’ll both be.”
“I don’t believe that. I won’t believe it. Just talk to me, Wyatt. Just—”
“What the fuck do you want me to say? What the fuck do you think is going to make it better? You think my telling you how it felt to watch my father get pulled under the thresher at our farm is going to make it better? Do you think if I tell you how I’ll never forget the look on his face when it ran over him for the first time that it will somehow make me okay?”
She gasped at his words, tried to reach for him. But he was having none of it. The dam had broken and so, she was afraid, had Wyatt.
“Is it going to make me forget the fact that, even though he’d taught me two or three times how to turn it off, that I couldn’t remember how? That all I managed to do was turn the wheel so that it went in a circle and ran him over again and again and again until the fucking thing ran out of gas? Do you think it’s going to make me forget what he looked like lying there? Or my mother’s face when she found us in the field hours later, me still sitting on that goddamn tractor and him…him…”
Oh God. Oh God. Ohgodohgodohgod. All the things he’d said before made sense, as did so much of what she’d read. About his mom not cooking dinner after he was five or six, and him coming to Austin to live with his aunt when he was in eighth grade, and—
“Would talking about it somehow have made my mother forgive me? That’s how she died, you know. She couldn’t even look at me unless she was drunk. Couldn’t talk to me. Couldn’t be around me. And since she couldn’t get rid of me, she just kept drinking to make it better. Drank herself to death before she was forty. Before I was thirteen. You think talking to a counselor is going to make any of that better?”
His chest was heaving when he was done, loud strangled sobs coming from him even though his eyes were dry. She went to him then, because she couldn’t not go to him. Couldn’t not try to hold him. She didn’t know if he’d let her, but she had to try.
To her shock, he did. When she went to hug him, he grabbed on to her like she was a lifeline, his arms around her shoulders, his face buried against her neck.
She tried to think, tried to push through all the pain his words had brought forth in her, tried to think past the sorrow and the horror she felt for him—for the little boy who’d watched his father die and been unable to stop it, and for the man who had never been able to forgive himself for something that wasn’t his fault.
If she was piecing things together right—things he’d told her and things she’d read online—he must have been a baby when the tractor thing happened. Maybe five or six at the most. Old enough to remember. Definitely old enough to be traumatized by what had happened. But certainly, certainly not old enough to be responsible for it. To be blamed for it.
She prayed it wasn’t true, prayed his mother hadn’t taken out her sorrow over a tragic accident on her already traumatized son. But even as she prayed, she could see it in Wyatt’s eyes. Could read it in the torment on his face as she cupped his cheeks in her hands and pressed kisses to his cheeks, his chin, his lips—wherever she could reach.
“It’s not your fault,” she told him in between kisses. “None of what happened is your fault.”
He shook his head. “It is—”
“It’s not,” she told him fiercely. “Not one bit of it. You were a child—”
“That doesn’t matter. Children do a lot on farms, way more than they do in city households. He’d taught me how to work the gears. He’d showed me what to do and I panicked. I couldn’t—”
“You were five years old. No five-year-old could have been expected to stop that machine. And no five-year-old should have been blamed for it, especially not by his mother.”
“It wasn’t her fault—”
“It was her fault. Not your father’s death—that was nobody’s fault. That was a horrible, horrible, horrible accident, and I am so sorry you had to be there. So sorry you had to see it and live with it and carry it around with you—” Her voice broke, but s
he shoved the tears back down. She could cry later, deal with her own emotions when he was gone. Right now, she needed to make him understand. “But Wyatt, baby, what happened to him is not your fault. No one who wasn’t grieving or seriously disturbed would ever, ever blame you for what happened that day.”
“I blame me. I didn’t stop it. I didn’t—”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know—”
“I do. I do know.” She grabbed his hands, pulled them to her mouth. Kissed each one in turn. “It wasn’t your fault,” she told him again.
“Stop it,” he said, voice hoarse and shattered. “Just stop—”
“It wasn’t your fault. What happened to your father. What happened to your mother. You were a child—”
“I was awful. After my father died, I was always acting up in school. I started sneaking my mom’s whiskey when I was eleven. I didn’t make it easy for her. I—”
“You were a child. A traumatized, distraught child and it was her job to make things easy for you, not the other way around.”
“You don’t understand.” He shook his head, started to back away. But she was holding on to his hands and she wasn’t letting go.