Halfway Home (30 page)

Only now was I swamped with a wave of terror, unable to cry out, locked in the cell of my body. I started to shiver, despite the heat from the fireplace. Sweat sprang out on my forehead as I tried to scream and nothing came.

A stroke, just like my father. I could see his specter in the flames, the horrible sag of his right cheek, as if his face were melting. The slurred speech and the groping hand, a man drowning from inside out. I strained to move, frantic now, feeling the blood pound in my head from exertion. Some muscle must have twitched in response, for my shoulder shifted on the cushion, pitching me down prone on the sofa.

And when I felt my brain begin to flicker too, I thought,
Let it be over now.
Death being better than the vegetable state of the last long year of my father, or Teddy Burr in a shriveled coma, only able to blink his eyes to tell us he wanted to go.

For a while there I was already gone. Though I heard Kathleen come down the stairs, laughing with Daniel, it was happening on another plane entirely. My eyes were fixed on the fire, the substance of me all mercurial, transparent as the flames. From very far away Mona's voice joined them. A small pinprick of my brain still attended their human interchange. Time for them to depart, said Kathleen. Time! The very idea was so frail and poignant, nothing to do with me anymore.

Then Mona came close, and I knew she was standing above me. "Should we tell him we're leaving?" she whispered.

"No, let him sleep," hissed Kathleen in reply.

Yes, by all means. Let me get out of it easy as this, like falling off a log. I had already left the husk of my body, or seemed to be sitting on the edge of it, like the kid who used to read himself bleary in the loft. Gently Mona unfurled the afghan and lay it across my motionless form, curling it under my chin. Go now, I thought,
before I start missing you.

Good old Miss Mona, always does what she's told. She grabbed up her bag and hurried away, a last whiff of
Blue Angel
floating in her wake. Then total silence, once the two women had left the room.
Now,
I told myself,
go.
As if I needed that one more push to slip off the edge and be under the ocean, all the storms behind me.

Can you really make yourself die, by sheer force of will? If so, then why had all my friends gone out with such ghastly protraction, flailing and eaten up, every exit walled up but the last groveling hole? All I can say is, for a few moments I thought I'd got through it painlessly, a Houdini escape from my body's broken vessel. I'd already passed through the flames. I was waiting on the other side, patient for the bus to heaven.

Then my line of sight to the fire was severed. Someone was blocking the way. I didn't want to focus, didn't want to come back, but I could see it was Daniel. He slouched against the sofa, careful not to wake me, but I could tell he wanted to be in my orbit, as if I was some kind of safety zone. And as soon as I realized that, I wasn't dead anymore. I was locked again in a body that didn't work, struggling again to scream.

Daniel turned. Even I could hear the low toneless wail coming out of me. "Are you okay?" he asked, then leaned down to peer in my face. "Uncle Tom, why are you crying?"

I kept screaming in my head, and the thin wail continued. Feeling began to thud into my arms and legs, like the blood unfreezing, horribly painful, the bends of reentry. I must have reached out a hand like something climbing out of a grave, because the boy stepped back fearfully, not knowing what to do. I could hear myself blubbering now, and a great writhe ran through my body.

"He's sick," said Daniel urgently to someone I couldn't see.

I clutched my hands in front of my face like a prayer, stunned and still disoriented, my nerves going every which way. Then Gray was by my side, wrapping his arms around me. "It's okay, it's okay," he said. "I'm here."

At last the cry broke from me, a wail of release that sounded like coming. My unbound arms seized him around his neck, and I could feel my body lift as he drew me deep into his embrace. I was sobbing with relief, gulping in life like air, though the dark still beat against the windows, wanting in.

"I couldn't—" I gasped, but there was no verb big enough to encompass all that had been robbed from me. Gray rocked my torso, making a hushing sound, as if he understood it all without my saying. My face was against his neck, kissing and crying and holding on. "Don't—leave me," I choked out, desperate, a child too scared to go back to sleep.

"I'm not going anywhere," he whispered, soothing me down, one hand stroking my head.

And when I finally took a real breath, I was looking over his shoulder. Daniel stood against the table, still too frightened to move, the desolation in his eyes enough to break your heart. I reached out a hand, and that was all he needed. He threw himself against us, gripping us both and burying his face, burrowing like a dog in a thunderstorm. Now we could let all the tears be his. His boy's grief was something else, of course, but right now all that mattered was his letting it out. For here was the crux of the difference between my nephew and me: that I had been the crybaby of Chester, and Daniel Shaheen the hero's son had never shed a tear.

We made a most peculiar threesome, I daresay, Gray and I holding each other's eyes across the sobbing figure of the boy. Did his mother and father hear it all and lean over the stairwell to see what was going on? Did it make Susan flinch that he hadn't come to her? And was this what the Coalition of Family Values meant, when they talked about queers recruiting children? Surely I was a special case, Lazarus raised from a sudden grave. In any event I only wanted one thing for Daniel—that he learn to cry when he lost something, or how would he ever be sure he truly had it, or know what to look for again.

The oldest wish of the race, that the child should have it easier. So: let him not grow up among people who learned too late how to feel. I knew about this, down to the marrow. I looked across into my lover's eyes, flashes of amber in the firelight, knowing it could be stolen at any second, the next time pitching me all the way down, broken on the sand.

Not that I had any regrets for the life that brought me here, not a minute of it. The slightest turn might have diverted me from the perfect balance of our three hearts. At last, to feel everything down to the marrow. If it only lasted a moment more, it had come to me in time.

F
IRST THING IN THE MORNING I CALLED THE DOCTOR.
Overnight the storm had mostly cleared, the early sky pillowed with white clouds rolling off to the east. As I stood in the booth at the Chevron, the brittle morning air was so cold I could see my breath. Sometimes the bite is as sharp as the Oregon coast—or even Maine, where my father used to drag us for a week in June, doubling up with our mick cousins while the uncles wallowed in beer. I left the accordion door open, so as not to feel cut off from Gray, who waited a few feet off in the pickup. His eyes never left my face, his untroubled smile a magic circle of reassurance.

Which I badly needed, for I felt like a fugitive turning his ass in. I had to talk my way through an answering service and two nurses, explaining again and again that I had to speak with Dr. Robison now, since I had no number to leave. They all acted deeply offended, as if I was worse than a welfare case. I hated to use the word but finally bit the bullet:
emergency.
On hold for half a minute, I put out my tongue and flicked it obscenely at Gray, who laughed, a billow of smoke in the morning chill.

When Robison came on, I felt an instant flush of shame. Haltingly I chronicled my symptoms, the random blanks and then the bad event of the night before. Hearing myself now, I experienced the most peculiar memory trace—recalling the sweaty confessional in Chester, mumbling my boy's impurities through the grille to Father Donegan. I felt the same claustrophobia, even with the door open to the ocean air. And when Robison cut me off, directing me to report for tests to the neurology unit at Brentwood Presbyterian, I felt the same Catholic emptiness, punished without being heard. A lost soul, unforgivable, knowing it in my gut when I was twelve, because what the good Father was calling mortal sin would be my life.

I walked to the truck in a stupor. I told Gray where we were going, then slumped against the door in a daze of dread. None of it was any kind of surprise. We'd both known when we left the beach house, cutting out before anyone else was up, that a gauntlet of tests was in the offing. But now it was real. Gray let me be as we headed down the coast road, beating the rush hour. I had my own horrors to face, just steeling myself to walk in the doors at Brentwood Pres. The place where Mike Manihan died, eighty-five pounds and purple with lesions all over, like a rotting eggplant.

But then, there wasn't a hospital in the county where I hadn't sat one vigil or another. They dotted the city like the torture centers of some deranged tyrant. Nothing about them spoke to me of healing or sanctuary. Once you passed those portals it was all downhill, a delirious descent into the magma of pure suffering. Everything you ever loved was checked at the door, exchanged for a suit of prison grays. Later they sent somebody around to pry the gold from your teeth. Sorry, but they were out of local anesthetic.

We parked underground, in B-13. Carefully Gray jotted it down on the back of the parking ticket, as if there was any way out. In the elevator to the third floor he slipped his arm around my shoulder, and the orderly riding up with us instinctively stepped aside, fearing contamination. At Neurology Reception, I filled out about thirty-five forms, attesting to my abject poverty and formally begging the state to underwrite my care.

Twenty minutes later I was in a peach-flocked johnny gown, sitting in a wheelchair waiting for a CAT scan. The chair was mandated by hospital regulations, in case I had a foaming seizure. Gray waited on a bench beside me, grazing a finger along the back of my hand. I looked to the side and caught sight of us in the mirror steel of the double doors that led to X-ray. Already we seemed transformed, rocketed into the last stage, invalid/inmate and caretaker. My mood alternated black and blue.

By the time they'd run me through the Frankenstein maneuvers, zapping me with rads enough to light up Santa Monica, I felt as if I'd been disappeared. When they wheeled me out of X-ray, Dr. Robison was standing there in his white coat talking to Gray. They were almost exactly the same age, except Robison tipped in at two-seventy-five, a coronary waiting to happen. I'd always been oddly touched by Robison's girth, since it was so clearly a stress response to losing a patient a week. It was no picnic being a gay doctor. He'd pulled three plugs on friends of mine, so we'd known each other in combat.

"I can still count backwards," I announced grandly, wheeling into their midst, "and I can name you every Best Actress back to 1935, which should've gone to Garbo for
Camille.
My role model, I might add."

Robison grinned. "Sounds like end-stage dementia to me."

"Just start the morphine drip and let me sail, Doc."

Gray seemed more disoriented than I, hearing this manic banter. He didn't understand that I'd roped the good Robison—a Westside doc in a silver pearl Mercedes, not known for his care of indigents—by the fact of my small fame as a fringe comedian. Jocularity was
de rigueur
in all of our encounters. I fully expected to be gagging out one-liners around the ventilator tube when we got to the short strokes. Perhaps I was just overcompensating, guilty at being treated free, but I felt like Robison's last laugh.

"I think we better do a spinal," he said gently. At which my jaw locked involuntarily, and the free-floating anxiety seemed to hiss out of my ears. "You'll just be in overnight."

I licked my dry lips and nodded yes, unable to think of a quip. But even as Robison squeezed my shoulder and toddled off, all I could really see was my nephew. Two days left, and I would be spending one of them here. The beach house seemed impossibly distant from this place of torments. To get back there I would have to run away, change my name, go underground as deep as Brian. And something in me berated myself for losing it, as if this had all happened because I'd taken my desert island too much for granted.

"He says it could be nothing," Gray observed mildly.

"I want to die at the beach house. Not here."

"You're not going to die."

He said it without really thinking. In the silence that followed, as I raked him with a baleful look, I had no wish to punish him. It was only that we needed to share an awful moment of reality, eye to eye, the same unwavering gaze we had exchanged last night by firelight. Yes, I would die. Not today, unless the spinal technician was wired on uppers and let the needle slip. But this morning was the beginning, here in this castle whose only law was pain. Gray's eyes were suddenly sharp with an inexpressible mix of rage and grief. He must have wondered, now if not before, what he had signed on for.

Yet the moment served to help us catch our breath, honing our priorities. I stood up from the wheelchair like a cripple at a Baptist revival, and embraced him fiercely. "Just get me through this one," I whispered in his ear, as if I wouldn't be asking the same the next time and the next. What I meant was he should walk me through it a step at a time, because I couldn't put another foot in front of me alone. His arms gripping tight around me were all the response I needed to shake off the ghosts who roamed these halls.