by Marie Sexton
Now that he was in the car, headed for the hospital, the rush was fading, leaving him limp and exhausted. Her question confused him. He pulled it around in his head, trying to make sense of it. Finally gave up and said, “Wha—”
“His dad will get the cops involved. You want to be part of that?”
“Oh God. Nate’s dad is the cops. Remember the guy who came to our door when Pete and Kathy reported a break-in?”
He caught his mom’s scowl in the rearview mirror. Nate’s dad was going to freak. He’d already told Nate several times to stay away from Cody. And the Grove kids all had their daddies’ lawyers, and he was pretty sure Billy Jones’s uncle was a county sheriff. And on top of everything else, there was the simple knowledge that the blame almost always landed squarely on him. Everybody knew Cody Lawrence was trouble. He lived in the Hole. His mom worked the truck stop. Everybody knew he was a fag. Cody shook his head. “They’ll say I started it.”
“Did you?”
“Jesus, Mom. How dumb would I have to be to pick a fight with nine guys at once?”
The wrinkles around her eyes seemed more pronounced in the rearview mirror than usual, but he recognized that she was trying to force a smile. “People do crazy things for the ones they love.”
Cody’s heart burst into motion, but Nate chose that moment to begin coughing—a deep, hacking sound that brought up way too much blood.
“Hang on, kiddo,” his mom said.
“I’m bleeding all over your upholstery.”
It was the first thing he’d said, and Cody’s mom laughed, the same sad laugh she used when a “past due” notice arrived in the mail. “Don’t you worry none ’bout the car.”
By the time they reached Warren’s tiny hospital, Nate was a bit more coherent. He looked worse than ever, though. His entire shirt was blood-soaked, and the left side of his face was already beginning to swell. They helped him out of the front seat with his arm over Cody’s mom’s shoulders. She waved her hand at Cody, shooing him in the direction of the car.
“There’s napkins in the glove compartment. Clean yourself up as well as you can before you come in.”
It surprised him. He didn’t want to leave Nate, but when he plopped into the passenger seat and flipped down the visor to check the mirror, he understood. His face looked almost as bad as Nate’s. His eyebrows and his bangs were caked with mud. His nose had obviously been bleeding at some point, but he hadn’t noticed. Now, it had dried all over his mouth and chin. Flakes of it clung to the light stubble on his neck. He looked down at his shirt and realized it was red down to his navel. If he walked into the hospital looking the way he did, they’d make a fuss over him. At the very least, they’d whisper about him. That Lawrence kid from the Hole again, always causing trouble. They’d insist he wait for the cops to arrive.
If he wanted to get out of there with as little hassle as possible, he needed to look less like a victim.
The mud in his hair was red, a mixture of blood and dirt, but things dried fast in Wyoming’s high-desert climate. It didn’t take much to scrub it out. He dug in the glove compartment and found napkins, plus a few wet wipes from the diner. He also found a warm can of generic soda in the front seat. He drank half and used the rest in lieu of water, scrubbing his face clean. He took off his shirt and put it on backwards, so the blood was hidden in the back. There wasn’t much blood on his sweatshirt, so he zipped it up and checked himself again in the mirror. There was a broad, oozing abrasion on his forehead from having it rubbed in the dirt. He combed his hair down over it, wishing he had a baseball cap. Other than that, he didn’t look too bad. He’d have a black eye and his upper lip was about twice its normal size, but hopefully nobody in the ER would look at him closely enough to notice.
Finally, he hurried inside.
Nate was nowhere in sight, but his mom was sitting in one of the waiting room chairs. He took the empty one next to her. “What’s going on?”
“They’ve already called his father. He’s on his way.”
He thought of Nate, somewhere on the other side of the waiting room doors, all alone. “Can I see him?”
“I don’t think so. They wouldn’t let me go back.”
Cody ran his hand through his hair, then remembered he was trying to keep his scraped forehead from showing and shook his hair back into his face. He glanced around the waiting room. A middle-aged couple with worn, haggard faces sat in chairs on the far side of the room, holding hands, their heads together, caught up in their own crisis, and Cody couldn’t help but wonder if this was how Logan’s parents had looked on that horrible weekend after Thanksgiving. In another corner, two men sat side by side, legs splayed, heads back, their eyes closed, their muddy work boots and company hats marking them as roughnecks from a nearby oil rig. A bunch of nurses and receptionists sat behind the desk, more than were probably needed at such a small hospital, looking busy without doing much of anything. They were trying so hard not to look at Cody and his mother, it must have been giving them headaches.
Now that he had nothing else to think about, the pain was kicking in. His head hurt, and his ribs. But whatever he was feeling, he knew Nate had it worse. And Nate was somewhere in the back, completely out of Cody’s reach.
“Should we just go?” He didn’t want to, but if he couldn’t see Nate, there was no point in hanging around.
His mom’s lips thinned, her hands clenched together in her lap. Cody knew she was dying for a cigarette. “Not yet.”
He didn’t argue. He didn’t have the energy. He put his head in his hands and waited without knowing what exactly he was waiting for.
Some indeterminable amount of time later, the door swished open and his mom tensed. Cody glanced up in time to see Nate’s dad bearing down on him, still in uniform.
“Cody? What the hell are you doing here? What happened? Where’s Nate?”
But before Cody could answer, his mom was on her feet, rushing toward Mr. Bradford. She grabbed his arm and led him away from Cody, talking low and fast. Cody couldn’t hear her words, but he recognized the briskness of her motions, the flash in her eyes, the thin set of her lips.
“What?” Mr. Bradford’s voice was loud, and everybody in the waiting room turned his direction.
One of the receptionists began circling from behind the counter, whether to intervene, or simply to take Mr. Bradford to see Nate, Cody didn’t know.
“That’s ridiculous!” Nate’s dad said to Cody’s mom. “If these boys—”
Cody’s mom cut him off, edging forward, her voice still too low to carry, but her anger causing him to take a step backward. He finally glanced again over at Cody. He nodded, rubbing one hand through his thinning hair.
“I can take you back now,” the receptionist said to him.
He nodded, his eyes still on Cody. “Okay.” And then, to Cody’s mother. “Okay. I don’t understand it, but if that’s the way you want it—”
“It is.”
Mr. Bradford threw up his hands and turned away, letting the receptionist lead him through the double doors into the back area. Cody’s mother kept her head up as she crossed the room, even though everybody was watching her. She didn’t even stop as she passed him.
“We’re leaving.”
Cody hurried to follow her out the door. The passenger seat was spotted with blood and littered with the napkins he’d used to clean his face. He pushed them all on the floor while his mother punched the lighter, a cigarette already between her lips. He reached for his out of habit, stopped short, glancing her way. It wasn’t like she couldn’t see the packs in his room, or spot the butts in the ashtray that didn’t match hers, but he never smoked in front of her.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I think you’ve earned it.”
He didn’t, though. It felt too strange. He just watched as she lit hers, sucking deeply before leaning back to blow smoke toward the open window. Only then did she start the car and head for the parking lot exit.
Cody waited for the que
stions to begin, but they never did. His mom’s lips were still thin, her jaw tight, but her grip on the wheel wasn’t white-knuckled like it had been on the way to the hospital. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or upset or indifferent. He finally cleared his throat and made himself break the silence.
“What did you say to Nate’s dad?”
“I told him you weren’t there.”
Cody blinked at her, trying to wrap his head around that. “You what?”
“I told him you found Nate after it happened. You called me for a ride, but you have no idea who did this or why. I told him Nate may say differently, but if he does, it’s only because he’s confused about what happened, and I told him that dragging us into it won’t do him any good anyway. Not if he wants to protect his son’s reputation, and I have a feeling he does.”
“Do you think he believed you?”
“No, but I think he got the point.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“First of all, that you weren’t the one who beat Nate up.”
“And what else?”
She didn’t answer right away. She pondered it while she took another drag off her smoke. Finally, she sighed, the smoke blowing out of her nostrils in two fast puffs. “I know Nate spends half his time holed up in your bedroom, but I told his dad that as far as I’m concerned, nobody needs to know about that. And if anybody asks me, I’ll deny everything. I’ll tell them I’ve never seen that boy before tonight.” She glanced Cody’s way and almost smiled. “Wouldn’t even be a lie, since I work weekends, and even when I’m home, he always sneaks out after you think I’m asleep.”
There was no judgment in her voice. No disgust. “You know about that?”
“His car’s at our place more often than not. Your bedroom door’s always closed, and you guys are awfully quiet in there.”
Cody’s cheeks began to burn. “That doesn’t mean—”
“Of course it does.” She chuckled. “When it comes to kids, silence is way more suspicious than noise. Apparently that’s true of teenagers too. And the fact that you’re suddenly washing your sheets every weekend is hard to miss.”
He waited, expecting accusations or a lecture, or maybe to be told how much of a pervert he was, but his mom was silent. “That’s it?” he finally asked. “You don’t want to yell at me, or tell me I’m a sick pervert, or that I’ll get AIDS, or that—”
“Would you prefer that?”
“No, but—”
“I’ve met plenty of truck drivers like you over the years to know it ain’t all bad.” She took another drag of her cigarette before tossing the butt out the window. “At least you won’t knock up some girl and be stuck here like the rest of us. I wish you were normal sometimes, but only because it’d be easier on you. In my experience, most men are pigs. They’ll fuck with you and leave you broken and never look back. Kind of like that boy a few years ago.” She shrugged. “But I guess there’s plenty of men who’d say that about women, so it don’t much matter what I think.”
He didn’t even care that she’d essentially called him abnormal. “You knew about Dusty?”
She turned toward him, her eyebrows up, as if to say, Do we really need to go over this again?
He thought about Nate, and about how hard they’d tried to hide their secret, even though they’d failed. “You told Mr. Bradford about Nate and me?”
“Not quite, but I imagine he’ll figure it out soon enough.”
Cody’s headache was quickly escalating. He leaned back in the seat and tested the abrasion above his eyes. It stung like hell. “But what if he—”
“How Nate’s dad handles it isn’t my problem. I know that sounds harsh, Cody, but that boy isn’t my concern. You are. If his dad tries to get the rest of the police department involved, it’ll cause as much trouble for Nate as it does for you. And I’ve met Billy Jones’s uncle before.” Her voice was thick with contempt as she said his name. “I won’t let some self-righteous hick who got his badge out of a Cracker Jack box try to lay this at your feet just because you’re different. As far as I’m concerned, whatever’s been happening in your bedroom isn’t anybody’s concern but your own. God knows the cops in this town ain’t never done us any favors.”
He closed his eyes, too stunned to speak, both by his mom’s easy acceptance and her fierce protectiveness.
They were silent the rest of the drive. Once home, his mom took a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer and tossed them his way. “Knew I bought these for a reason. Put that on your eye.”
He sank into one of their kitchen chairs and followed orders. It felt wonderful. He should shower and change out of his bloody clothes, but all he wanted to do was sleep.
“You hungry? I can make you dinner, long as you don’t mind generic SpaghettiOs or tuna casserole.”
“Tuna casserole sounds great.”
“You got it.” He had his eyes closed, but he tracked her footsteps across the kitchen to where he sat. “It isn’t fair, is it?”
He could think of plenty of unfair things, but it was hard to say which one she meant. “What isn’t?”
Her hand settled on his head, stroking his hair. It was something she hadn’t done in ages. He’d forgotten how good it felt. “You’ve been so happy these last few months—happier than I’ve seen you since you were a boy—but nothing good can live in this town. It all gets stomped to dust in the end.”
She kissed him on the head and walked away, and Cody sat there, his face stuck in a bag of frozen peas, thinking how he’d never appreciated his mom as much as he did right then.
Nate had been to the emergency room before. Granted, that had been in Texas, but he’d needed stitches once as a kid after falling off his bike and splitting his chin open, and he’d broken his arm in seventh grade, and needed stitches again in tenth grade after his cousin’s dog bit him. He thought he knew what to expect. But this time, something was different.
“Don’t you worry,” the first nurse told him after taking his blood pressure and his temperature. “We’re calling your dad right now.” She handed him a hospital gown. “I’ll go out. You undress and put that on, and lie down on the bed there. Then we’ll get you cleaned up while we wait for the doctor.”
Nate did as instructed, although undressing made his ribs hurt like hell. A few minutes later, the nurse came back, but before she could do much, one of the other nurses called her over. They stayed within sight as they whispered urgently, glancing toward him every few seconds. Another woman joined them—not a nurse, he didn’t think, but maybe one of the women from the front desk—and soon they were all whispering, their eyes straying his way more often than seemed normal.
The nurse came back, but this time, her smile didn’t seem quite so genuine. She began going through drawers, pulling out cotton balls and gauze pads and a bottle that he hoped wasn’t plain old rubbing alcohol—that was bound to sting. Finally, she dug around in another cabinet and came up with a box of rubber gloves.
“Okay,” she told him as she opened the box and pulled a couple of them out. “Let’s take a look at those cuts on your face.”
Nate watched her, puzzled. He knew from TV that doctors wore gloves for surgery, but in all his visits to the ER, he’d never seen them used. “What do you need those for?”
“Just being careful.” She was careful, all right—careful not to meet his eyes as she said it.
“I’m not sick.”
She gave him a tight-lipped smile. “One of the other nurses went to a symposium in Denver last month. She said they’re recommending rubber gloves for everything now. Even sports physicals and dental visits. It’s practically routine.”
Practically. Except not really. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have had to search for them.
She began cleaning the many cuts on his face, fumbling a bit with the bottles and tubes of ointment, obviously unused to having her work impeded by the gloves.
A cold little knot of dread began to form in Nate’s gut. He had a sinking
feeling he knew what was going on.
“I don’t think you’ll need stitches,” she told him. “That’s good news, right?”
“Right.”
“The doctor will be in any minute now—”
She was interrupted by the arrival of his father. Nate didn’t think he’d ever been so glad to see him.
“Jesus, Nate, what the hell happened?” his dad asked, once the nurse had gone.
“Just some of the guys from school.” Trying to talk about it made it all come back to him—the terror and the shame and the pain—and he fought to keep his voice steady. “They slit the tires on the car so we’d have to walk, and then they were waiting for us in the empty lot behind the gas station. Cody tried to—” His dad scowled, and Nate stopped short. “What? Is Cody okay?”
“Better off than you, it seems.” But his voice was strained.
“Can I see him?”
“I’m pretty sure he and his mom left already.”
“Oh.” Nate tried not to sound too disappointed. In some ways, it was just as well knowing Cody wouldn’t have to see him dressed in a flowered hospital gown, with one side of his face swollen up like a balloon. Still, he was surprised Cody would leave without even saying good-bye.
“I told you not to hang out with him. I told you it would lead to trouble.”
“You busting Brian’s dad for cocaine possession didn’t exactly help, you know.”
“I told you. That had nothing to do with what you said about him.”
“Well, try telling Brian that, why don’t you? He was too busy kicking me in the kidneys to listen to excuses.”
He was glad to see the doctor arrive. At least it would put an end to their argument. But rather than examine Nate, the doctor asked to speak with Nate’s father. Again, they stepped away, staying within sight of Nate’s bed, but moving far enough away to talk without Nate overhearing.
Nate watched them, waiting. He hurt everywhere. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, he wanted to cry from the pain. His stomach and his back and his face all ached. His face hurt the worst. But it all paled next to the shame he felt, watching them all whisper as they glanced his way. His dad became agitated once, raising his voice to say, “That’s ridiculous! My son is not—” before they all shushed him. His dad’s jaw clench, the color rising in his cheeks.