Clear Water

by Amy Lane

  He didn’t remember any more questions after that, but he did remember Whiskey’s hand on his forehead, so that must have been what happened.

  WHEN he woke up again, it seemed to be the next day, and his father was in the room.

  “Where’s Whiskey?” Patrick muttered, and Shawn sighed and came from the little couch in the room to sit in Whiskey’s chair.

  “He had to take a leak—and I think he had to talk to someone on the phone. Something about Greenpeace and a trip. He’s not sure if he should go.”

  Aw. Aw, fuck. “He’s got to go,” Patrick slurred. He was feeling sharper than he had, and stronger, but his speech—it was like the less his head hurt, the harder it got to keep his tongue, lips, and mouth coordinated. “He’s got to. How’m I supposed to make us a home if he doesn’t go and let me fix it up?”

  Shawn sighed and made useless gestures in the air with his hands. Patrick had the feeling that he wanted to hold Patrick’s hand, but that seemed pretty baseless, didn’t it?

  “You want to make a home for you?” Shawn asked quietly, and Patrick made an uhm-hm sound in reply.

  There was a silence, and Patrick realized he had the words to elaborate. “The houseboat is as tacky as hell, but I think we can make it nice, yanno? And I was going to teach yoga and go back to school….” Patrick groaned and, for the first time, tried to move the broken arm. It gave a throb, and he groaned again. “Aw, shit. The yoga job. They were going to hold it to the end of August, but I doubt they want to hold it now!”

  “Sure they do,” Whiskey said, walking into the room and glaring at Patrick’s dad. No one was more surprised than Patrick when Mr. Cleary moved off the stool in a hot hurry and let Whiskey sit down.

  “I doubt it,” Patrick grimaced—and then grimaced again. God, everything hurt—almost worse than when he had first woken up.

  “Here,” Whiskey murmured. There was a little paper cup with more water on the pull-over table. “The nurse came while you were asleep and said when you woke up, you might want some of this.”

  Patrick took the little tabs and groaned as they went down. Just knowing he was going to be out of pain soon made it all feel better.

  “I talked to your boss—Brittany something-really-WASP-y?”

  “Radcliffe.”

  “Yeah. She said they don’t have anyone to replace you yet. Give them a call in a month. Even if you can’t actually do the moves, she’s pretty sure you’ll be better than—and this is a quote—‘the braindead sewer-sump of vanity’ who applied yesterday.”

  Patrick smiled a little through the throbbing in his head. Brittany was one of those girls who had majored in softball in college, no matter what her degree said, and as the manager of the gym, she took her athletics seriously. “Brittany’s good people,” he said happily. “That’s awesome. When am I out of here?”

  Whiskey’s happy-for-Patrick-ness faded. “In, uhm, two weeks. In fact….” He cleared his throat. “You’re supposed to come home the day after I’m supposed to go. I was trying to get in touch with the director of the trip just now, try and get a replacement—”

  “Don’t!” Patrick stopped short, trying to figure out where that word came from. Oh, great. Here he had no words when he needed words the most.

  “Patrick….” Whiskey shook his head. “If you were okay, I’d go, because that’s what we planned, right? But you need someplace to stay that doesn’t rock, and you need someone to make sure you eat and take you to the doctor’s and get you to school until you get your cast off and shit. I mean, it doesn’t make you a fuckup.”

  “I could take care of him,” Shawn Cleary said from across the room, and the look Whiskey shot him was so angry that even Patrick recoiled.

  “Oh, please!” Whiskey snapped. “You’ve had him twice, and both times I got him back broken! I’m really going to trust you with him one more time?”

  Patrick watched, shocked, as his father shrank into himself, became older, nervous, became sad.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Shawn said reflexively, and Patrick blinked. “I’m sorry I broke him. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to listen! I’m sorry you don’t think you can trust me with him. But he’s grown, okay? Maybe, if he thinks it’ll work, you’ll listen to him!”

  Whiskey’s face hardened, and Patrick wanted to kiss his bunched-up forehead, his tightened jaw, all of the tensed-up, scrunched-up, angry parts of him until Patrick’s Whiskey was back.

  “I always listen to him,” Whiskey hissed. “Not just when he was trying to save my life.”

  Shawn deflated even more. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Look. I’m gonna go get some coffee or something. You guys talk it over. Do you want anything?”

  Patrick whimpered hopefully, and Whiskey smiled a little, the expression lightening up on the sudden anger that had darkened it. “Vanilla ice cream for Patrick—I already talked it over with the nurse.”

  Shawn nodded and wandered out, casting one last, wistful look at the two of them, and Patrick was relieved to hear Whiskey sigh. There was a sudden shifting in Patrick’s head, a sort of spreading curtain of numb, and his shoulders relaxed completely. Wheeeeww, yeah! Those pain meds were gorgeous.

  “I was hard on him,” Whiskey said softly.

  “You were. You’re not hard on anybody.” Patrick remembered that—the patience, the gentleness, the way he’d taken those imperiled cell phones out of his hands without flinching once.

  “Patrick….” Whiskey shook his head, looked away, said the rest of it to the window that looked out on a day so bright it hurt even coming through the blinds. “Patrick, I ran into that room, and you were yelling at him about the fucking bomb, and he wasn’t listening. And then… then you threw yourself in front of it and almost died.” Whiskey’s voice rose, cracked, crumbled. “You think I’m going to leave you with him? When… I mean, I’ll never let you down, man. Don’t you deserve someone who’ll never let you down?”

  Patrick swallowed. “I have him,” he said. “And he’s got to go on a trip to freeze his balls off so that he can come back here and get a job he loves and then stay with me forever. I lived with my dad for twenty-three years. What’s another six months? I mean… hell, I can’t even have sex for… what?”

  Whiskey laughed humorlessly. “A month. I asked.”

  Patrick grinned at him, because his voice had been so full of longing. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah! It was good.”

  “Yeah, it was!” Patrick wasn’t sure if it was the drugs or the memory of Whiskey’s rough hands on his skin, but it really had been good.

  Whiskey turned to him, and for once he wasn’t smiling or relaxed or trying hard to show Patrick a happy face. “I haven’t had a home in so long,” he said softly. “I—I want a home with you. I don’t want to leave you when you’re hurt, or fragile, Patrick. I want to be a guy worth making a home for.”

  Patrick nodded. “I don’t want you to stay with me thinking I’m with you because I’m fragile, Whiskey. I want you to know I’m staying with you because I love you and I don’t want anybody else. I want you to know I’m strong—and I want you to be happy. You go on this last thing, this last trip, and when you come back, I’ll make you a home and you’ll take care of me, and we’ll be happy ever after, okay?” And now Patrick’s voice was made of cookies, weak and crumbly with the bitter taste of truth.

  Whiskey’s throat worked. “My parents died just driving in the snow, you know that, right?”

  Oh, hells. “No.” Patrick wanted to claim sick now and say he wasn’t up for it, and he was getting tired. But it wasn’t fair, Whiskey being his everything and Patrick bailing now.

  “And I’m going to… well, not Antarctica, I’m going to the North Pole, and looking at seals and polar bears and studying climate change. And I’m—you almost got blown up in your own backyard with me, Patrick. What’s going to happen to us when I’m 3,000 miles away?”

  Patrick had never been good with epiphanies. He hadn’t realized his mother didn’t love
him until she was gone. He hadn’t realized his father did love him until maybe just this minute when Whiskey made Shawn feel like shit. But suddenly, flat on his back in a hospital room, he looked at Whiskey, who had always been strong and always been capable and always been in control, and Patrick had an epiphany.

  Wesley Keenan was just as vulnerable, just as fragile, and just as afraid of loneliness as Patrick Cleary.

  Well, hell! Patrick snagged his hand where it rested on the bed, and held it to his cheek and let helpless tears come. “We’re going to be fine,” he said through them. “We’re going to be fine. I’m going to recover, and you’re going to come home, and we’re never going to be apart. And in the meantime, I’ll get my shit together, because I may be a fuckup now, but that’s not who you’re going to come home to, you hear me?”

  Whiskey turned a miserable face to him—miserable, in part, because he seemed to be listening, truly listening, to what Patrick said. “I never thought you were a fuckup.”

  “I know. And you’ve always listened to me.”

  Whiskey closed his eyes like it hurt too much to keep them open. “I’m listening to you now.”

  “I know. Keep listening. I love you like… like longer and wider and three times as deep as the fucking river. That’s not going away. I’ll be here when you get back. I promise.” Patrick kissed the back of his hand then, as soft as he could with lips that felt chapped, and Whiskey leaned over the rail of the bed and just stayed there, his eyes closed. They were like that—still and unhappy but at peace—when Patrick’s dad got back with the world’s biggest cup full of soft serve.

  “Jesus, Dad—you think I can eat all that?”

  Shawn flushed, the color blotching unevenly at his ginger-gray hairline and on his tanned, freckled skin. “I brought three spoons.”

  Whiskey sighed and reached out and took the ice cream from him. “You got one more chance, asshole,” he said without preamble. He took a bite of the ice cream and then passed it to Patrick. “You fuck this up again and I’ll come back from wrestling polar bears in Alaska and totally beat the living shit out of you.”

  Patrick took a bite of ice cream because, well, it was ice cream! And then watched his father to see what he’d say to that. Shawn Cleary didn’t do ultimatums.

  “I’m only a little stupid,” Patrick’s father said. “I swear—you’ll get him back okay.”

  “I’m not a CD!” Patrick protested through a full mouth, and Whiskey looked at him soberly.

  “Do you think we’d be doing this over a CD?”

  Patrick shook his head and had another bite of ice cream. “No,” he said, and then he decided to devote himself to his craft.

  Shawn said, “So what’s the plan?” and Whiskey started giving him details about flight schedules and how Patrick would have his key and could use his crappy car when he was up for it, and Shawn said, “I’ll get him a new one. Maybe with all the shit he’s going to be doing on the houseboat, a truck would be a good idea.”

  Whiskey looked like he was going to protest for a moment, but Patrick, who was not stupid either, bumped Whiskey’s hip with his hand and offered him a bite of ice cream. Whiskey sighed and took the bite. “Okay. Fine. Whatever. I won’t be here by that point. It’s up to Patrick. He’s got the car when he wants it.” And that was the end of it.

  Patrick didn’t plan to take his father up on it, of course. Although he had never really objected to his father’s money and he had started having visions of half-ton pickup trucks and all the things they could do, he still remembered the part about being a leech. Besides, mostly what pickup trucks could do was look good, which Patrick had no objection to that either, but he found that vanity didn’t seem to be as big a thing as it used to. So no, he didn’t intend to get the big car—but he didn’t want the big argument either.

  Since Whiskey and Patrick’s father looked like they could exist in the same room together, it seemed to be a good move. And Patrick’s father seemed to look like he could exist in the same room with Patrick, and that was saying something. Patrick gave the rest of the ice cream to Whiskey, who passed it to Shawn, and decided to let the sleep that was overwhelming him take over. Before he went under, though, he had one last question.

  “Whiskey, if I’m going to live with my dad, who’s gonna take care of the frogs?”

  Whiskey’s eyes crinkled the way they did when he was thinking of something that might possibly shock someone who didn’t know him. “Don’t worry about it, baby. I think we’ve got the frogs covered.”

  HE WOULDN’T say anything more about it in the next two weeks—and he was there at the hospital every day. Sometimes only for an hour, and sometimes for a couple of them. Sometimes he just brought the laptop and they’d watch a movie in companionable silence, and sometimes he talked about the ins and outs of the paper he and Fly Bait were writing so it would all be in order before he left. One day he brought a big stack of brochures and pictures and even printouts of scientific papers on climate change so Patrick could look at it and know what he was talking about when he called.

  “Calls might be rough, because there’s not a lot of satellite coverage out there, and it’s still pricey. But I’ll text and send pictures—you should be able to get those whenever we get in range. I’ll get yours too, so, you know. Just keep sending.”

  Patrick nodded, trying not to let his attention wander. This was about talking to Whiskey. This was important. “I’ll try to drop you a line every day, okay?” he said seriously, and Whiskey kissed his forehead.

  “You’d better. You know I already miss you, right?”

  Of course Patrick knew. He already missed Whiskey too.

  One day Fly Bait and Loretta came in with Whiskey, and they played Scrabble and talked happily—this was toward the end of Patrick’s stay in the hospital, and apparently Loretta was there to help Fly Bait move the last of her stuff out of the house boat.

  “Did you really buy that piece of shit?” Fly Bait asked after playing the word “zoon” for an ungodly amount of points.

  Whiskey played “zerk” off of “zoon” and recaptured his lead. Patrick had given up asking them if these words were real or not back on the boat—they always had a reference book handy that proved they were right.

  “Yup,” Whiskey said, looking at Patrick. “I bought it from Fish and Game for a song.” He sighed and Fly Bait grinned.

  “Still cleaned out your bank account, didn’t it?”

  “What little there was. Hopefully when I’m done with this, I’ll get a job that will let me buy pants without holes.”

  Patrick looked at him in panic. “You’ve got gear and shit for the arctic, right?”

  Whiskey smiled a little, and Patrick could suddenly see how tired he was. “Yeah—I’ve been pulling that together. Don’t worry—now that you finally know what to do with those parts, they’re not gonna freeze off.”

  Loretta said “TMI!” with passion, and Fly Bait rolled her eyes. “Just be glad you didn’t see Patrick do yoga. God!” She shuddered delicately. “The fucking horror.”

  That was a nice afternoon. Patrick’s dad stopped by after work at the end of it with two half-gallons of really expensive ice cream and spoons, and they’d shared, and then Fly Bait had given him a fierce hug.

  “You take care of yourself, okay? We’re coming for Christmas—don’t let your old man tell you different.”

  Patrick found he was smiling so broadly his face hurt—hell, he might even have been pulling some of the stitches in the back of his head. “Yeah? We’ll put ya up! I promise. We’ll get a tree and we’ll take pictures and send them to Whiskey and—”

  Fly Bait kissed his cheek so hard it might have left a bruise. “I hear ya, kid. It’ll be epic. It’s a promise, then.” She pulled back, and her face was soft, and she looked like a girl named Freya Bitner and not a bitch named Fly Bait. “I’m really glad you fell into our laps, Patrick. You guys will make a kick-ass family.”

  She left, and Patrick eyed his d
ad and Whiskey warily. They seemed okay now, eating ice cream together. He didn’t see “family” there, but then, he hadn’t when he’d woken up on the houseboat feeling like turtle crap either.

  THE next day, Whiskey left and it sucked. Patrick didn’t remember crying when his mom left, and he certainly hadn’t cried when he’d left his dad, but that day—crap.

  “I can always call it off,” Whiskey said gruffly, and Patrick shook his head and reminded himself that he’d been the asshole who’d said he could do this. Patrick could be okay alone. He’d be better with Whiskey, but in the meantime, he could take care of himself.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, and then he lost all pretense of holding it together and sobbed against Whiskey’s shoulder like a little kid. Whiskey had stayed then, stroking his hair (shorn in the back, dammit) helplessly until the last possible moment.

  “God, Patrick. This is your last chance, man. I’ll stay. I will. I’ll—”

  “Kiss me and go,” Patrick whispered. “I swear I’ll pull my shit together afterward, okay? You said you were listening.”

  “I did,” Whiskey whispered back into his hair. He shifted his ass on the hospital bed, preparing to move and get on a plane, and Patrick held him so tight for a moment he heard Whiskey hitch his breath. “I did. I’ll always listen.”

  And with that, he tilted Patrick’s face up and kissed him long, hot, and deep, and even though Patrick’s shoulder still ached and his arm was plastered and a lot of him was still in bandages, he still got a hard-on, and Whiskey still kissed him until Patrick groaned a little. Whiskey released him, and he fell back against the pillows, and Whiskey gave him one more hard kiss on the forehead. “I’ll love you forever. You say the word, I’ll break my contract and chopper home. I’ll be listening. I love you.”

  They rarely said it.

  “I love you too.”

  And then he was gone.

  AN HOUR later Patrick’s dad got there, and Patrick had barely stopped sniveling like a six-year-old.