People Who Ask Believe They’ll Be Given Something

A curb by an empty playground, a burning cheekbone, an open contact on the screen. “To call meant admitting out loud that there was nowhere to go. Letting another person find that out about you — and living on afterward with the fact that he knows.” Simon has never asked anyone: not his father, not the doctors, not Ashley under the umbrella. “People who ask believe they’ll be given something.” He reached out once already — and was shoved away with both hands. He presses call “before he could change his mind.”

For someone who grew up in neglect, asking is not weakness but an act of faith with no grounds for it (see “Never, From Anyone”). That is why it is heard so rarely and costs so much: the “Sorry. I shouldn’t have” after “I…” is an attempt to take the request back before it can be refused. The second half of the act is accepting the hand when it is held out: “The same hand: it had lain on his throat once… And took it.” This is neither forgiveness nor forgetting. It is consent to the possibility that help may come from the same place pain once came from — a risk Simon takes consciously for the first time.