by Boye, Kody
“Yes.”
Jamie didn’t bother to elaborate any further. He simply disappeared down the hall and into the bedroom.
“I didn’t want to say anything,” Erik said.
Dakota set a hand on the man’s arm. “You need to sleep somewhere dark anyway.”
“I’ll take the couch,” Ian said, speaking up for the first time since they’d returned. “Jamie and Dakota can stay in the master room, you can sleep in Jamie’s room and the kid and Steve can sleep in the guest room. It’s no big deal.”
“I just didn’t want to bring up any bad memories.”
“He’ll have to face them eventually,” Dakota whispered, patting Erik’s arm. “Besides, I’ll talk him down if anything happens.”
“I know you will, Dakota.”
Dakota stood and made his way toward Jamie’s old room. He didn’t know what he’d say if anything happened tonight, but regardless, he would still be there for him.
“I haven’t been in here for years,” Jamie said, settling down on the bed before them. He pressed his hand into the foam mattress and smiled as the imprint remained for a moment afterward. “I remember when Dad got this bed for Mom after her back started acting up.”
“Your mom had a bad back?”
“I think it was mostly because of all the stress she was going through. Dad was active military and all. She used to get stress spots on the back of her head. I could barely touch her shoulder without the muscles tensing up.”
“That’s a lot for a five-year-old to deal with,” Dakota said, setting the picture of Jamie’s mother and father back on the cabinet before them. He looked at their smiling faces for a moment longer before turning back to look at his boyfriend. “Are you ok with sleeping here?”
“I’ll have to deal with it eventually. Why not now?”
“I dunno. I just thought…” Dakota paused.
“You thought what, babe?”
“That you might not be ready.”
“I’ll never be ready to accept my parents’ deaths,” Jamie sighed, leaning back against the pillows arranged before the headrest. “I don’t think anyone ever really is.”
“So you think your mom is—“
“Gone? Somewhat, yes. I hope not, but I’ve accepted the fact that she’s never going to be in my life again.”
“I’ve kind of accepted it. It’s not the same though.”
“What? You accepting your family’s passing?”
“No. I…I don’t know how to explain it. My family was gone before this happened. I guess that makes it easier and takes less of the pain away.”
“Dakota, do you ever wonder what happened to your dad?”
“Sometimes, but I don’t really care. He killed my mother. I can never forgive him for that.”
Jamie nodded. He gestured Dakota forward and took his hand when he was only an arm’s length away. “I have a lot of respect for what you’ve gone through. I hope you know that.”
“I know.”
“And I hope you know that there’s no one else I’d rather go through this with than you.”
“Thank you.”
“Come on, let’s get some shut eye. We’ve had a long day.”
After stripping out of his clothes, Dakota crawled into bed, closed his eyes, and sank back against Jamie.
Beneath the covers of a past that should have been doubtful, Dakota felt nothing but warmth.
CHAPTER 11
“He’s dying,” Eagle said.
“I know,” Kevin replied.
Back against the wall and knees drawn to his chest, Kevin pressed his hand against his face and tried not to look at the Native American man before him. His heart felt like a thousand-pound weight and his head felt like it would explode at any moment, a bomb set to go off.
He bowed his head and closed his eyes.
This couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t.
In the short moments that followed, during which he felt as though small and poised before the greatest hurdle his life would ever really throw at him, Kevin sought out Eagle’s eyes in the light seeping from the candle in the corner. He found them in near darkness, where he would not have expected them to be—directly in the corner of the room, seated in an old, wooden chair.
He’s not some Shaman sage wonder-maker. You already know that.
Still, that didn’t stop him from giving in to clichéd superstition and imaging that Eagle was something more than he really was. He’d never been prone to racist ideals, to imagining men of different colors and backgrounds as things they obviously were not, but at that moment, the Native man in front of him looked like a diamond in the night, a glimmering moment of hope in his worst night of darkness.
“Eagle?” he whispered.
“Yes, Kevin?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t believe any man should know what to do in times like these.”
“That doesn’t help me any.”
“I know.” Eagle rose. The wooden chair creaked as it rocked forward, then again when it bounced back against the wall. It took a moment for Kevin to realize that the man was walking toward him. When he did, Eagle was already at his side, seating himself atop the bed they shared and staring at him with dark eyes. “May I say something, Kevin?”
“Please.”
“Only you can decide what’s best for your son. No one else.”
But what if you can’t decide? he thought. What if you don’t know what to do? What if you’re afraid of knowing what to?
With no answers to the thoughts running amok in his head, he sighed, stood, and pushed himself toward the door, but stopped short before he could wrap his hand around the doorknob.
He isn’t going to get better.
The reality of the situation froze him in place. At first he thought he would start shaking, as his hand trembled in front of him as though frail and without stability, then his eyes began to burn. Somehow, though, he managed to retain his composure, despite the stark realization that ran through his head.
“Kevin?” Eagle asked.
“He isn’t going to get better,” Kevin said, dropping his hand at his side. “His fever’s been at 103 degrees for the past three days. I don’t know what to do.”
“Kevin…”
“Is there anything you can do?” he asked, turning to face the man. “Anything at all?”
“I’ve tried everything, Kevin.”
“He’s fuckin’ suffering!”
“Quiet!” Eagle growled, slapping his hand over his Kevin’s mouth. “Don’t wake your children! They don’t deserve to go through this.”
“Neither do I!” Kevin wailed.
“It’s up to you to decide what to do. Your son is dying. Every waking moment is wrought with pain and agony. I’ve barely been able to keep him asleep. At this rate, he’ll just waste away if we keep him in the state he’s in.”
“What do we do?”
Eagle pressed a finger to his lips.
“Your. Son. Is. Suffering. Would you want to suffer the pain he does?”
“No.”
“Would you want someone to keep you in that pain if you had any choice?”
“Of course not,” Kevin said.
Rethink your answer. Repeat his question.
The breath went out of Kevin’s lungs.
His heart stopped in his chest.
Every memory that he could have possibly had swam to the front of his vision and pushed at the base of his skull. Them at the park, eating dinner, laughing at something on TV, going to the first day of school, taking him to the hospital after he broke his ankle, running amongst autumn leaves so red and yellow that they looked as though they would crumble at any moment, having ‘the talk’ when he turned thirteen, meeting the first girlfriend, going to the first day at high school, encountering the first heartbreak of teenage love and talks of college—everything came forward, all at once, together, as one.
Tears broke from his eyes.
&nbs
p; His heart throbbed one hard, painful time.
He fell against Eagle in tears.
“I can’t do it,” Kevin whispered. “I can’t, Eagle.”
“He won’t feel a thing,” Eagle said, bracing his hands against Kevin’s back. “I have something that will just make him go to sleep.”
“What is it?”
“Peyote.”
Tears running down his face, Kevin reached up to wipe them away, only to find that the look he’d initially seen in Eagle’s eyes was not mistaken. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“No. I’m not.”
“You want to drug him to death?”
“It’s the simplest way.”
“I’m not gonna do that.”
“Would you rather put a gun against his head?”
“I—no.”
“As I said,” Eagle continued, “he won’t feel a thing.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s been used before. Mercy is perhaps the greatest thing you could ever offer to anyone suffering the pain he is.”
Kevin stilled the quiver in his lower lip by digging his teeth into it. “How would you do it?”
“In a soup. I’d just mix it in.”
“He won’t know?”
“Won’t feel a thing,” Eagle said. He reached down to touch Kevin’s now-trembling hand. “It’s up to you whether or not you want to do this. He is your son, after all.”
“I just want what’s best for him.”
“I know. I do too.”
Kevin bowed his head.
This is it, he thought. This is where you have to decide what to do.
Only one thought occurred to him when he lifted his head and looked into Eagle’s eyes.
How would his children feel?
“Boys,” Kevin said. “I need to talk to you about something.”
Both children looked up. Though Mark’s eyes were wide and innocent, Arnold’s eyes showed an awareness that nearly pushed Kevin to tears. His second-eldest who, until recently, had exhibited complete resilience to anything going on in the household, seemed startled, shaken by the tone in his father’s voice and the sense of finality in the air.
Can they feel it? Kevin thought. Do they know it’s the end?
“It’s about Jessiah,” Arnold said. “Isn’t it?”
Kevin nodded. “Yes,” he sighed. “It is.”
Mark’s eyes softened. Arnold simply continued to stare, eyes darkening by the second. It took Kevin a moment to consider his choice of words before he seated himself on the couch and gestured his sons up beside him.
It’ll be all right, he thought, swallowing a lump in his throat. You can do this.
How many times in a man’s life did he have to consider the possibility that, one day, he would have to tell his children that their sibling was going to die? Did this man see an infant dying in a nursery and think about his child, his Julia with her silk-blonde hair and her big blue eyes, or did he disregard it in a way that all people do when they see tragedy and suffering? It’s not every day that you see a car crash in the middle of the road, the driver’s head cut off and lying three feet away, but it never hurts you the way it should because that driver is just a stranger and a stranger he or she will always be, but what about when a man sees a child starving in Haiti, on the shores of destruction with his mother dead nearby? Does he think about his child—his Fernando, with his chocolate-brown eyes and his raven-black hair—or does he simply turn away, flip the channel so he doesn’t have to see them suffer? It’s not as though they will ever have an earthquake, a tsunami that will come to wash them away, so what good is it to think that his child could be on that shore, lying in that sand with the blood on his hands? With so many thoughts running through his head, Kevin found it hard to imagine just what he should say, what he should do, how he should present himself and his case. It seemed impossible to think of just what he would say, so when he looked into his children’s eyes—when he saw both their Julia and his Fernando looking at him—he felt his heart sink and his mind turn to dust.
In the next few minutes, he would have to say the four most horrible words he would ever say in his life.
Your brother is dying.
“Dad?” Arnold asked. “Jessiah’s not going to get better, is he?”
“No,” Kevin said. “He isn’t.”
Mark positioned his hands on the floor and crawled forward like an infant until he sat at his brother’s side. There, he watched his father as though their world would end, burned asunder by the flames of judgment.
Kevin set his hands on his knees. “You both know that your brother has been really sick for the past few days. Now, before either of you ask, I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Neither does Eagle. The only thing we know is that he has a bite on his shoulder that hasn’t been healing.”
“A bite?” Arnold asked, puzzled.
“Why isn’t he a zombie?” Mark questioned.
“Jessiah told Eagle that he wasn’t bitten by a zombie before we started giving him sleeping pills,” Kevin sighed, already regretting the lie that laced his lips. “He’s not getting any better, guys…and we can’t do anything to help him.”
The children simply stared.
This is it. This is where I’m going to start crying.
The first tear slicked down his face.
Kevin blinked.
The second and third followed.
“Dad,” Arnold said.
“What, buddy?”
“Jessiah’s going to die, isn’t he?”
Mark let out a sob. “Yes, Arnold,” Kevin said. “He’s gonna die.”
When both of his children started crying, Kevin could only bow his head.
He’d failed. And there was nothing he could do about it.
“You did the right thing,” Eagle said, pressing his hand to Kevin’s back as he entered the room.
“I hope so.”
Kevin closed his eyes.
Tomorrow, he thought.
When he looked back at Eagle he saw the glimmer in his eyes that seemed to understand his each and every thought, and a part of his soul that yearned to be set free finally curled up and died.
“This is it,” Kevin said, falling to his knees in front of his two youngest children. “Eagle said he’s not gonna make it much longer.”
“Is he awake?” Arnold asked.
“Yes.”
“Daddy, isn’t there anything you can do?” Mark begged, eyes gleaming with tears.
“We’ve tried everything, Mark. There’s nothing more we can do for him.”
The youngest boy nodded. Reaching up, he wiped the tears from his eyes and hardened his face as much as he could, locking his eyes in a way that surprised Kevin. In that moment, he saw a whisper of the boy’s future self in his eyes, on his lips. He saw a man with hollow cheekbones not from frailty, but life, and he saw a strength that rivaled that of the Native American man standing nearby, sadness in his eyes and a frown on his face.
“You can tell him anything you want to,” Kevin said, taking both of his son’s hands, “but I want you to tell him you love him above anything else.”
“Dad,” Arnold started.
Kevin cut him off. “I know you would’ve said that even if I hadn’t have told you, Arnold, Mark. I know that you love your brother more than anything else in the world, but I want you to tell him how much he means to you, that you care about him. He knows this. He knows you love him, but I want him to hear it. He’s not going to live for much longer.”
Standing, Kevin squeezed Arnold and Mark’s hands and looked to Eagle, who set a hand on each of the boys’ shoulders. “When you go in,” the Native said, “you need to be as quiet as you can. Lean down and whisper in his ear, squeeze his hand to let him know you’re there. He might not be able to talk to you, but he can still hear you.”
“Yes sir,” Arnold said.
Kevin opened the door and both of the boys went inside.
As the two stood besi
de the bed, talking to the brother they would soon not have, an unbearable guilt began to overwhelm Kevin’s mind as he looked at his oldest son. In the pale light that pierced through the curtains—dancing across the room and slicing it in two—the boy’s skin seemed ashen and grey, darkened at the joints and hollows and gleaming like stone long since lost to the earth’s darkest places. Some would have thought he looked like a gem, an unnatural rock formation crafted in the ugliest shades of grey, but to Kevin, he could see nothing but his son, a human being slowly succumbing to a disease that seemed worse than death.
A hand pressed against his back.
Kevin tensed.
Eagle sighed.
Faintly, almost hidden in the shadows of the room, Kevin saw his oldest son reaching out to his brothers.
The hand that greeted him was not that of a seventeen-year-old boy.
No.
No boy’s hand was wracked with age, bent in two like a claw extending to grasp its prey, nor did his joints buckle under the immense pressure of death and swell in the absence of blood. No. No boy looked the way Jessiah did, with his eyes closed and his pupils long gone, and no boy ever would, could, should, as for that to be the case would be to determine that all men are created equal—that age, as long-lasting as it happened to be, was not without distinction, and that life, in its bitter progress, was not rife with challenge.
“Kevin?” Eagle said.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Are you ready?”
Kevin looked down. Eagle held a bowl of soup in his hand.
Is anyone ever really ready?
He whispered, “I am.”
Kevin knocked on the door. “Guys,” he said, “we need to let Jessiah get some rest now.”
“All right,” Arnold said. He looked down at his older brother, took his hand in his, then leaned down to whisper in his ear before pressing a kiss to his cheek. Mark did the same.
Both times, Kevin noticed, he heard three faint words before his sons stepped away from Jessiah’s bed.
I love you.
It broke Kevin’s heart to watch his boys leave the room.
“Jessiah,” he said, stepping up to the bed. “Buddy?”
“It hurts,” the boy whispered.
“I know, baby. I know.” He linked his hand into his son’s and wiped his thinning hair away from his face. “Eagle’s gonna help you eat something, ok?”