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betrayed by it, abandoned. Lying there staring at the wall, he felt a great cold well of lonesome course through him and he wanted away. Her hand on his was steadying and he opened his eyes.
    “Morphine,” he said.
    She reached for the flow control on the IV.
    He waited for the feeling of warm honey on the brain. He felt his limbs grow soft, vague, less defined until his whole body and the whole world was one warm pliant thing and all thought vanished.
    He wouldn’t speak to her. In the rare moments when they happened to occupy a room together he pretended she wasn’t there and the weight of that silence hurt her as badly as a punch to the ribs. He came and went from school in silence and she found the words he used to tell her where he was going short and sharp and chopped off and blunted at the ends like corn stalks. They hurt to walk through. But at least the man was pacified. No one spoke of the beating. He seemed content with the situation, and if henever asked about the boy at all it was okay with her because in an odd way she felt she was protecting him by excluding him from their talk. The two of them only looked at each other when they happened to meet. Aiden was sullen and Eric looked at him wide-eyed, expectant, awaiting any kind of word at all. Aiden merely offered him a flat, unyielding stare that started and ended nowhere. He moved deliberately, and when he crossed the room he maintained the look, never taking his eyes off Eric until the man would throw up his hands, arch his eyebrows and ask, “What? Say it. Whatever it is say it, kid.” But he never did.
    Instead he became less and less of a presence.
    “Are you okay?” she asked him one day.
    “Why?”
    “I’m your mother.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes.”
    “My mother was proud. My mother had guts. My mother would never let a man do her bad. I don’t know who the hell you are.”
    “Aiden, I—”
    “Save it,” he said. “I don’t need any explanations. You said enough already.”
    “I haven’t said anything.”
    “Exactly.”
    She looked at him. She could feel his defiance. It radiated outward from the dark pools of his eyes and from the solid plant of his feet. There was nothing of what she remembered of her son in him now. He’d moved beyond it somehow and she’d missed the passing.
    The thought of a stiff, wizened thing dangling off his shoulder incapable of independent motion angered him. The idea of notbeing able to rein a horse, curl a rope or even move around a paddock as naturally as he always had frustrated him and he opted for the dangle of an unpinned shoulder. They helped him like they always did. His mother and his father never left him all that time, and when the time for choosing came they went through all the options, all the possible scenarios and all the likely outcomes before they left him holding choice. No matter what, he couldn’t bear the thought of life without movement.
    “Let it hang,” he told Foley.
    He awoke in the bright sunshine of a desert afternoon in a warm, hazy stupor to see the four of them surrounding his bed. He grinned, more out of disciplined politeness than any degree of pleasure, and the eyes of his grandmother and grandfather filled with silent tears. If it was going to be like this all the time, people getting weepy eyed when they saw him, people constantly mourning the vision of what he once was, what he almost became, what he lost, it would drive him crazy. But for now he allowed them their fuss.
    “How are you, boy?” the old man asked.
    “Been better,” he said.
    “Do you need anything?” his grandmother asked.
    “Eight more seconds, different wrap,” he said.
    She squeezed his hand. “I know,” she said, and Joe Willie wondered if she did, if anyone really, truly did.
    There were cards and gifts from all sorts of people, and for the next while they helped him open and read them. He was awed a little by the display of emotion, especially from the strangers, the fans, the ones