He found himself thinking of Julia, a little girl he’d been treating for nearly two years. She’d been born with some severe jaw deformities and had required a series of surgeries to correct them so she could speak and eat normally. She was only four years old but her face was like sparkling sunshine. She knew that every trip to the hospital meant pain and discomfort, but still she hugged him when she arrived, calling him “Dr. Jacky” in her distorted speech and giggling when he tickled her. He remembered her face when she’d demonstrated to him all the new words she could say with her new jaw and how she’d been brave and hadn’t cried when she realized it was time to go to surgery again, though her lip had trembled and her big brown eyes had filled with tears.
Who was caring for Julia now that he’d gone? Was that doctor holding her hand? Was he visiting her in recovery and waiting to see her eyes open? Did he care about minimizing her scarring, was he being careful with her gums so her permanent teeth could come in later? Did she remember Dr. Jacky and wonder why he wasn’t taking care of her anymore? Did she feel abandoned?
Julia was just one of many patients he’d had to leave behind, whose care he had been forced to entrust to colleagues. Most of them hadn’t even gotten the courtesy of a conversation with him first; things had happened just that fast.
Jack felt a tear spill over and fall down his cheek. He dashed it away with an impatient swipe of his hand. You’re alive. Be grateful.
Jack leaned his head back against the tree trunk. He’d expected his whole life to change, but he hadn’t expected to meet somebody he’d have feelings for, feelings that frankly scared the shit out of him… mostly because he was having a hard time imagining any other outcome than one in which he got his untested heart truly and thoroughly broken.
~~~~~
D watched Jack storm out of the house, a little relieved. Jack had been Mr. Okay-With-It nearly since he’d met him, cracking wise and coaxing D out of himself to a degree he would never have believed possible, and that was bound to get old sooner or later. It was good to see him feeling it, whatever it was. It wasn’t an easy thing he was doing, and it wasn’t going to get any easier.
Yer not makin’ it easier by fuckin’ him eight ways from Sunday, neither. As if you ‘n’ him gonna have some kinda loving supportive relationship. Not too fuckin’ likely, but ya know he’s thinkin’ it. Jus’ gonna get him hurt in the end, and ya think he needs this shit on top a everythin’ else?
He stood there leaning against the counter, stuck as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Two weeks ago, he would have let Jack be and gone about his business, but it wasn’t two weeks ago. Part of him was pulled out there, wanting to go to Jack and get him to talk, or maybe just….
He sighed, shutting his eyes. Admit it, asshole. Part a you wants ta jus’ go out there ‘n’ comfort him. Put yer arms ’round him ‘n’ hold him ’til he feels better, dry his tears, maybe kiss him ’til he forgets why he’s upset.
Jesus. What was he turning into? A fucking girl? One of those sensitive New Age guys who’d run their mouths for hours about their feelings without saying a single thing that made any sense?
One of those… gay guys?
Jus’ let him alone, fer cryin’ out loud. Would you want him bargin’ in on ya when yer havin’ a moment? He’ll be fine, come back inside all his normal self again.
He sat at the table, his back resolutely toward the patio doors, and ate his eggs and toast. He didn’t taste much of it. He made a list of things to get at the grocery store, adding items he knew Jack would like without realizing he was doing it.
He put the dishes in the dishwasher. He scrubbed the pan he’d used for the eggs. He put away the toaster and rinsed the coffeepot, and when he could stall no longer he took a deep breath and went out into the backyard.
Jack was pacing, arms crossed, eyes on the ground. D was pretty good at reading body language and everything about Jack’s was saying “Fuck you, fuck me, and fuck off.”
He stopped a few feet away and just waited, at a loss for what to say, or if he should say anything at all. Jack didn’t acknowledge him. “Hope it ain’t me’s pissin’ you off,” D finally said, going for a little levity.
Jack glanced at him, and then shook his head. “No. Just… I guess some things are hitting me all at once, here. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you fuckin’ apologize, y’hear? You been through hell these past weeks, yer entitled ta some frustration. I been amazed at how calm ya been, frankly. Most folks woulda lost their fuckin’ minds by now.”
“Yeah, well. That’s my way, isn’t it? Put on a happy face, pretend it’s all fine so no one else has to be bothered.” He raked his hand through his hair. “Swallow it and smile. That’s me in a nutshell.”
“You don’t gotta put on a front for me.”
“No, it isn’t for you. I don’t know who it’s for, actually. Who am I trying to please, anyway?” He kicked at the grass, his face creased with anger and frustration.
D saw what Jack was about to do before he did it, saw it in the tension of Jack’s shoulders and the twist of his hips. He started forward, one hand out. “Jack, don’t—” was as far as he got before Jack hauled off and punched the tree, hard.
“MotherFUCKER!” he yelled, staggering back, his bruised hand held out before him. D grabbed him from behind, holding his arms to his sides.
“Jesus, Jack! Cut that shit out!”
“Ow ow ow ow,” Jack muttered, half-laughing through it. “Goddamn, I am such a fucking idiot.”
“Lemme see, come on,” D said. Jack held out his hand. The knuckles were scraped and bloody. “Can ya move yer fingers?” Jack wiggled his fingers, wincing a little. “Okay. Let’s go wash it off.” He started to walk Jack back to the house.
“That really hurt, D,” Jack said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Somehow I didn’t expect that. I don’t get it.”
“I do,” D said, leading him into the bathroom and sitting him down on the toilet seat. “I’ve hit a lot of things. Punching bags, sparring gloves, people’s faces. Hard things too, like boards and yeah, a few walls. You can know in yer head that they’re hard, but when yer all riled up and ya jus’ wanna punch somethin’, it’s like somewhere inside yer head ya secretly believe that they’ll give.”
Jack was nodding. “Yeah, that’s it, exactly. I thought it would give.”
D knelt on the bathroom rug and wiped Jack’s hand with a wet towel, then some hydrogen peroxide. “Be sore fer a bit,” he said.
“My own damn fault.”
“Hope it made ya feel better, at least.”
Jack sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was okay, I really was. I had my shit together… well, mostly together, until….” He trailed off. D looked up and met his eyes. “Feelings come in packs, D. Let one loose and they all want to run together.”
D held his gaze for a moment until it became too intense and he had to look away. He wound some gauze around Jack’s hand and secured it with a butterfly clip he found in the first-aid kit. “There. All better.”
“My mom used to kiss it and make it better,” Jack said.
A smartass comment sprang to D’s lips but he bit it back. He looked down at Jack’s poor hand and felt that tug of responsibility again, and the quiet warmth of Jack’s fingers in his own. He lifted the hand, bent his head and kissed the bandaged knuckles, letting his lips rest there for a moment. He felt Jack shudder, looked up and saw his eyes filling with tears, gaze haunted and far away, then he tilted forward and slid off the toilet to the floor into D’s arms, folding against him like a little boy. D held him, sentinel silent.
~~~~~
After D left for the grocery store, Jack went downstairs. The basement was finished off as a kind of rec room, with a pool table and some old couches, a stereo and a larger TV than the one upstairs. One corner held some exercise equipment; Jack had a mind to run on the treadmill for awhile and work off some nervous en
ergy.
There were a couple of doors set into this far wall. One led to the laundry and utility space, but the other one he’d never opened. Jack stared at it, wondering why he’d never investigated this; his inherent nosiness had taken him into most of the rest of the house by now.
No time like the present. He opened the door and stepped through. On the other side was an office of sorts, with a desk and a recliner and some bookshelves. Scattered about were photos and mementos that drew Jack like a magnet, fascinated as he was by any glimpse into D’s family past.
Photos of people he didn’t know. Souvenirs from destinations he couldn’t identify. Memories of lives he’d never heard about. He stood staring around at the detritus of this man’s life and felt a surge of resentment yet again that D still held so much back from him. They shared meals and activities and could be comfortable in a bathroom together but he still didn’t know where the man had come from, not really, or what his life had once been like. He shared his bed, but didn’t know his name.
He picked up a photo of three blond children and held it up to the light from the window-well, his chest tightening as he recognized D in the center. He looked about ten, but it was him, no mistake. Those same brown eyes, that same nose, that same tight-lipped not-quite-smile. Jack smiled, one finger stealing out to touch the little face, blond curls blowing in a long-ago wind. “Jesus, D,” he breathed. This little boy looked like he enjoyed playing Parcheesi and making his action figures mount a sneak attack on the family-room ottoman. The tragedy of all he could have been and what he had become instead was near enough to knock Jack flat.
Where had this been taken? It looked like a park, maybe a family outing, or even a vacation. D had implied that his childhood had been poor, so a vacation wasn’t too likely. Jack turned the picture over and popped off the felt backing. There was a woman’s spidery handwriting on the back of the photo.
June 1980, Yellowstone. Darrell, Anson, and Merle.
Jack held his breath. He blinked and looked again, but it was still there.
Anson. It clicked into place in his mind as if there’d been a fitted slot just waiting for it to pass through and fall in.
He flipped the picture back over and stared at the boy’s face. “Anson,” he whispered, touching the image again. He looked over his shoulder; was the name an incantation that would summon the man himself if spoken?
For long moments he stood there staring at the picture, not moving, the name echoing up and down the corridors of his mind, a mind that was so full of D—of Anson—these past weeks that his presence had squeezed out other things that had been contained.
Why hasn’t he told me?
But Jack knew why. This boy was dead, as far as D was concerned. He’d killed him when he’d taken up a weapon against another human being in cold blood. That name no longer belonged to him, and D no longer thought he had any claim to the things this boy had: a family, an identity, a place in the world where he was understood and welcomed.
The temptation to be hurt by this last omission was strong, but Jack resisted. D had told him so much, and Jack knew without needing it spelled out that D hadn’t told anyone else what he’d told him. His Army experiences, his first kill, his family’s deaths, his guilt, his blame, his rage, his conflict. These were things that D had shut away for long years and was only now allowing out into the sunlight, but it wasn’t over. He wasn’t done. And until he was, that name would never be his.
Jack put the picture back in the frame, replaced the felt backing, and carefully put the frame back where he’d found it, a line bare of dust on the shelf guiding it into its place. He backed away and nodded once.
He heard the back door open. “Jack?”
“I’m coming,” he said, climbing the stairs. D was putting bags of groceries on the counter. Jack went to the car and hefted the other two bags, balancing them in one arm while he grabbed a case of beer with the other. He kicked the door shut behind him and put the bags down with the other ones. “See any hit men in the produce section? Hiding amidst the arugula?”
“Real fuckin’ funny, asshole,” D grumped. “It’s the ones ya don’t see ya gotta worry ’bout.”
Jack busied himself putting things away. Bread, chips, D’s goddamned beef jerky, cheese, ketchup. “Did you get the—”
“Yeah. Hadta get generic; they didn’t have that brand ya wanted.”
Jack shrugged. “Pickles are pickles. I just get cravings for them from time to time. It’s probably the salt.”
D snorted. “I could say somethin’ but I won’t.”
“No, go ahead, make the predictable pregnancy joke. I’ll pretend it’s funny and we can all go back to our lives.”
He turned around; D was opening a beer, leaning casually against the counter, his groceries unloaded. Jack folded up one empty bag, and then peered into the other one, throwing an exaggerated pouty face in D’s direction. “Huh. That’s it?”
D mumbled something under his breath.
“What? Didn’t quite catch that.”
“I said, I ain’t buyin’ no chocolate-covered cherries.”
“Oh, come on. You know you want to.”
D shook his head like Jack was just too much to be believed. “I do not either want to, and them candies make me think a my grandmother, so it’s real fuckin’ weird that you turned ’em inta some kinda sex fantasy, okay? ’Cause then I get all mixed up in my head where I’m in my grandma’s livin’ room makin’ Play-Doh french fries while you suck my dick and that’s just ten kinds a wrong. Even I ain’t that fucked up.”
Jack laughed. “Not yet, you aren’t.” He looked at D’s face, smiling, laughing with him, as open as he’d ever seen him, leaning there against the edge of the counter. Jack sobered.
Anson. His name is Anson.
D frowned. “What?”
“What what?”
“Ya jus’… got a funny look on yer face there for a second.”
Jack thought a minute. “Can I ask you something?”
“Go on.”
“You’re… well, you’re more okay than I thought you’d be. With this. Us, I mean.”
“Okay in what way?” D said, crossing his arms over his chest.
“If I’d had to guess I would have thought you might be a guy who’d wail and rend his garments over having had sex with a man, protesting about how not gay he was, denying everything and making himself miserable.”
D thought for a moment. “Well, it don’t make too much difference when it’s jus’ you ‘n’ me here, does it?”
“It won’t be just you and me here forever, though.”
He looked at the floor and shuffled his feet a bit. “Don’t wanna think ’bout that jus’ now.”
Jack took a step closer. “We’ll have to think about that eventually.”
“Eventually don’t mean today.” D met his eyes.
Jack held his gaze for several beats. I know your name, D. I don’t have to wait until you decide to tell me. I can say it right now and watch your face as you realize that I have something of yours that you didn’t let me see. Then maybe I could stop waiting for you. Maybe if I called you by your name, you would be mine, as surely as I am yours. He opened his mouth.
D spoke again, cutting him off. “Cain’t think no further ahead jus’ now, ’cause today I got you here and I cain’t think ’bout that time comin’ when I won’t.” He was shaking his head. “Nobody knows me but you, Jack,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Weren’t nobody in here ta be known before you, and after yer gone be nobody in here again.”
Jack shut his mouth, struck dumb by this unexpected confession. He couldn’t think what to say, so he said nothing, just reached out and embraced him, D’s arms coming around him at once.
He pressed his face into D’s neck. “You were never nobody,” he murmured. “Not to me, D.”
His name is Anson. And he’ll tell me when he’s ready.
Chapter Eighteen
The sun was warm on the back of Ja
ck’s neck as he scooted forward on his knees, yanking at the weeds with boredom-fueled enthusiasm. He’d taken on the yardwork as a project to distract himself and hadn’t done so half-heartedly, spending hours at a time weeding and mowing and edging and pruning, sending D on mission after mission to the nursery and Home Depot. He fervently hoped that D would get tired of running his errands and let him actually leave the house, but so far he’d made the frequent trips without comment, showing no signs of changing his mind.
As of today, they’d been in this house for one month. Jack was starting to feel alarmingly… settled. The life in which he and D had found themselves unlikely co-participants no longer felt balanced on the knife-edge of catastrophe; it just felt like routine. D got up early every day and did some kind of calisthenics that looked kind of like tai chi but weren’t, then made coffee and sometimes breakfast. Jack would stumble out of bed around nine and usually found D at the table with the paper, though he often made himself scarce soon after Jack rose. D was not much for casual company. He was always close by, but he got antsy when they were in each other’s pockets for too long.
They got groceries. They argued over whose turn it was to do the dishes. They watched mindless TV together. Sometimes they holed up in different parts of the house, other times they hovered close.
At night they would retire to what had long ago become their bedroom and go at each other for as long as they could before collapsing. Jack had discovered a reservoir of sexual need in himself that he hadn’t suspected, and as for D… sometimes it seemed like he was discovering sex for the first time. Jack would often catch him with a look of amazement on his face, as if he were thinking “Holy shit, I didn’t know I could do that.” Jack looked forward to this time, because it was only here, in their bed and in his arms, that D relaxed his guard and let Jack see him, even if it were only a small part of him.