Over Time

by Kyell Gold

  I turn off the car. Two spots down, Dev parks. “Why do you say that?”

  His tail flicks, and he holds his paws in his lap, extending and retracting the claws. “Just thought it. He never takes that gun out. He keeps the drawer locked.”

  I stay quiet and Bradley, nervous, goes on. “He hasn’t talked to us much, and he’s been different, angry a lot. We had a class on depression in school and they said those were some of the signs. But he didn’t try giving things away and he didn’t seem sad.” He bunches one paw into a fist. “He still wanted to fight, and in the playoffs he called us and said things were going great, but…”

  “I don’t know,” I say, “but I know that whatever happened, it wasn’t because he doesn’t love you guys.” Dev hovers outside the car. I crack the door open so he can hear me. “Dev says he talked about you a lot and he’s really proud of you.”

  At the sound of my door opening, Bradley reaches for his, and when we’re all outside, Dev repeats what I said. “He talked about you guys all the time.”

  That doesn’t have much more effect on Bradley than my words did. So at the entrance to the parking lot, I stop him for a moment. “Whatever happened,” I say, “he’s still your dad and he’s going to need your love and support. If it was an accident, he’ll be really embarrassed about causing you guys all this stress. And if it wasn’t—”

  “I’m pretty sure it was,” Dev interrupts.

  “Okay, but if it wasn’t…” I look up and Bradley looks back at me, attentive now. “If it wasn’t, then he’s probably already regretting it. It was probably just a one-time crush of retirement and frustration and he’ll still need your love and support. Okay?”

  The young tiger nods slowly. He looks toward the hospital. “I wish I didn’t have to go in there.”

  “You want to stay out here for a bit?” I nod to Dev. “Dev can go in and tell them we’re waiting out here. I’ll wait with you.”

  “I can wait by myself.” He sounds a little irritated, but not much.

  “Yeah, I know.” I fold my arms. “I know you don’t know me, but Dev and I are friends of your mom and dad—”

  “It’s not that,” he says. “I just want to be alone. Forget it. Let’s go in.”

  “You sure?” I ask, but he’s already walking to the hospital.

  Dev meets my eyes and inclines his head. “Tigers,” I sigh.

  “Teenagers,” he says with a slight growl.

  “Yeah.” I take his paw, and we go inside.

  17

  Waiting (Dev)

  Damian calls me as we walk into the emergency room, and I still can’t quite hear properly out of my right ear, so I hold the phone to my left. I fill him in on what happened, and he snaps into efficient agent mode, telling me not to worry, that he’ll take care of it with the Firebirds and will meet us at the hospital. “Jesus,” I say to Lee as I hang up, “imagine the mess Ogleby would have made of this.”

  It’s another hour before Damian shows up, and by that time Fisher’s long been in surgery and my hearing is pretty much back, along with a mild headache. We still haven’t gotten any news; the doctors said that once he went in, it could be as short as half an hour. They didn’t say how long it could be. Damian takes me aside.

  “Keep me updated,” he says. “I’m going to take off, because no family wants the agent hanging around at a time like this. I’ve already postponed my flight back to Crystal City, though. I’ll stick around until we get a definite word on him. And let’s put off our business call until Thursday.”

  “Sure. What’s happening with the retirement?” I ask.

  He pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Fisher signed the papers yesterday.”

  “He didn’t say anything about that.” Damian meets my eyes and I curse myself for forgetting his memory loss. “Right.”

  “We’d drafted a statement; I told the press that he wasn’t here to read it himself but I gave them all copies of it. He’s retired. It’s official.”

  “Great. Some good news for him to wake up to.”

  He nods sympathetically. “I told Gena and she’ll tell him when the time is right. Obviously not first thing.” His paw lands on my shoulder. “This isn’t strictly your business, but in case you were wondering, I also told her that I’m not done with him by a long shot. He won’t have any more football contracts, but there are things he can do. When he recovers, he could maybe coach, or get endorsements, and I’m there to help those things happen.”

  “You take good care of your clients.” It makes me feel good.

  “I’m responsible for them.” He lowers his voice even though we’re out in the hallway, separated from the waiting room by a closed door, and Gena’s talking to her sons and not listening to us at all. “I don’t care how it happened, either. I’m going to send a statement to the Firebirds that it was an accident.”

  “Yeah, okay.” An accident? I have no fucking idea how it could have been an accident. He sends them all out of the house and only shoots himself afterwards? Did he want to wait until the family was away before cleaning his loaded handgun?

  I want to ask Lee about it, but there’s never a good time; we sit with Gena and the boys all afternoon. It isn’t until dinner, when we’re all hungry and the nurse says she’ll come find us if there’s news, that he and I have time to ourselves.

  I can’t help but compare the cafeteria in this hospital to the one in Lake Handerson, the time I was there to see my dad after the fight with Lee, just like I kept thinking about the waiting room the time I had to take Lee to the hospital late at night with a broken thumb. Hospitals now remind me of that family tension, the echoes resounding from weeks ago and making me shift in my seat, tail curling and uncurling. Then I see Gena and her two teenaged boys and I’m reminded that the familial tension here isn’t mine. I’m also reminded that Gregory never came to see Dad in the hospital.

  Lee and I sit at our own table eating mushy chicken and pasta in cream sauce with overcooked peas and carrots, and we talk about anything but Fisher. At the end of the meal, we look over to the family of tigers. “How long do you think we should stay?” Lee asks me.

  “I have no idea.” I sigh. “I want to find out what happened, and whether he’ll be okay. After that I guess we should go home.”

  “Should I cancel the flight on Thursday?”

  I tap the table. “Not yet. I mean…once we find out what’s up with Fisher, if there’s a reason for us to stay, maybe I will. But I need to go clear things up with my parents and…” Saying Gregory’s name evokes him in a way I don’t want to do right now, a tightening of my gut and paws.

  He glances over at the family. “I feel like I owe them something.”

  “Doc.” He looks at me, and I take his paw. “You’ve already done a lot for them. We’re not family. Gena wasn’t shy about asking for help when she needed it. So let her ask if she wants more.”

  “You’re right.” He lowers his ears and his tail swishes. “Maybe they’ll be better off alone.”

  “Of course. I’ll call some of the guys, let them know Fisher might appreciate some visitors.”

  He wrinkles his nose. “Maybe only a couple people. Who were his best friends on the team?”

  I think about that. “Me. The line coach. I guess Pike maybe, or Jenks, the other DE. I dunno, he spent a lot of time working with me when I got there.”

  “Wait a day,” he says.

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  He meets my eyes. “Glad we can help each other out.”

  I keep hold of his paw. “It’s easier when it’s not about either of us, right?”

  “Right.” He looks up more intently at me. “How are you doing? You had to be in there with him, see him…”

  I try to block out the memory of Fisher sprawled on the floor, blood pooled on the carpet under his head, of the EMTs rolling him over and finding the gun still clutched in his paw. I can still hear his rasping breathing, hear the armadillo say that if he’d falle
n onto his back he might have drowned in his own blood, and I can smell the thick haze in the air, gunpowder and flesh, and for a moment I worry that my dinner won’t stay down.

  But it’s not much better to think about why he was lying in a pool of blood holding a gun. I focus my attention on the russet fur and black nose in front of me, on the concerned blue eyes and the tall chocolate-brown ears. “I’m doing okay,” I tell my fox. “Being with you helps.”

  He smiles. “Maybe we were wrong about the universe’s capacity for dumping shit on us, eh?”

  “Well, if it was all quiet and peaceful, what kind of test would that be?”

  Gena raises her voice at their table: “Don’t say that!” It draws our attention, though by the time we look, both boys are staring down at their plates and we can’t tell who it was directed at. My gaze lingers on her, though, on the curl of her lips showing more teeth than usual, on the tight wrap of her tail around the chair leg, at the tension in the table.

  What if that’s Lee in ten years, or twenty? Not that I’d ever do to myself what Fisher did, but…but it’s a violent game. I’m sure Fisher never thought he’d end up here. He thought he’d play forever, the same way I do.

  The cafeteria has some kind of light jazz playing just loud enough to insulate conversations; kind of like Neutra-Scent for the ears. (There is also a lot of actual Neutra-Scent around.) I sneak another look at Gena and the boys, and lower my voice. “You think Fisher will get better from the concussion?”

  He sighs. “Let’s let him recover from the gunshot first.” His voice, too, is low, and his ears flick around.

  We both look down at the table. “When you have that passion for the game,” I say, “retirement’s gotta be like dying anyway.”

  Lee nods. “I think…there was more to it. It might really have been an accident. I mean, maybe he was thinking about it, took the gun out to look at it, and it just went off.”

  “While he was…” I check to make sure Gena isn’t paying us any attention; she and the boys are eating silently. “…pointing it at his head?”

  “Or maybe he was putting it away and looking down.” Lee turns his paw over to hold mine. “Until we ask him, we won’t know, and maybe not even then.”

  We finish eating and get up when Gena, Bradley, and Junior do. On our way back to the waiting room, Gena tells us we can go home. “I really appreciate all you’re doing, but I don’t want to keep you here all night.”

  “If you’d rather be alone,” Lee says, “we’ll go, but we don’t mind waiting, honestly.”

  “I want to make sure he’s okay,” I add.

  She smiles and doesn’t argue, so we settle down in the comfortable chairs. Conversation is slow because we don’t want to talk about Fisher, but he’s clearly on everyone’s mind, so it’s hard to talk about anything else. I’m thinking a lot about Lee and Damian, but I can’t really talk about Damian because that leads back to Fisher’s retirement.

  Lee tries to talk to Bradley and Junior, and finally engages them with one of the sports magazines left on the table in the waiting room, something from about four months ago—basketball, not football. While he’s talking, Gena and I sit together and drink bad coffee. I know it’s a stereotype. I wish the coffee wasn’t bad, but it is.

  “Feels like I’ve been in hospitals more the past six months than the rest of my life.” I look over at Lee.

  She seems relieved to have someone else to worry about, even retroactively. “What happened in the past six months?”

  So I tell her about my father breaking Lee’s thumb, about Lee going up there to get in a fight and knocking my father out (I gloss over the particulars of the head wound). “Oh, and he was in jail overnight. Lee, I mean.”

  Gena looks startled. “That wasn’t the time he was in the fight in Boliat?”

  “Hah. No, that was a different thing.” I rest my elbows on my thighs and lean over. “That wolf got sixty days of community service, by the way.”

  “I would never have thought he’d be so…fiery.” She watches him point at a magazine article and smile, sandwiched between her two large boys. “He seems so nice and sweet.”

  “Even when he was dressing up as a vixen?”

  Her brow wrinkles. “I still don’t understand that.”

  “I’m not sure I do either.”

  “Is that why you two were having problems? Not the dressing up, the other things.”

  “Well…” I clasp my paws together, tail flicking around. “Sort of. Maybe. I think it’s more that, you know, for the past two years we’ve only been seeing each other long distance, getting together on weekends, and it’s been fun and exciting. Now it’s serious, it’s full time and we’re living together.”

  “But he’s moving to Yerba.”

  “Right, but we don’t want to just go back to long distance if there’s not going to be a future in it. You know? If we can’t live together then what are we doing?”

  She doesn’t seem too worried by this. “I know at least two couples, one married, who keep separate residences.”

  The thought is intriguing: Lee and I with separate apartments in the same building, me going to his place, him going to mine. I file it away to suggest to him. “I think we’ll stay friends, whatever else happens. We care about each other too much not to.”

  “Good.” She pats my knee. “I like you both.”

  We talk haltingly for a little longer, and then a nurse comes out, a short mouse who smiles as she goes over to Gena. “He’s stable now and resting,” she says.

  “He’s all right? He’s going to be okay?” Gena wrings her paws.

  “The doctor will go over all that with you. If you would care to follow me?”

  Gena looks down at Lee and her boys, then over at me. “We’ll be fine,” I tell her. “Go.”

  So she follows the nurse back into the hospital. I go sit with Lee and Bradley and Junior, but none of us feel like talking much. The sports magazine they were discussing lies open to an article about basketball leagues outside the States, but they’re not looking at it anymore.

  Gena comes back about fifteen minutes later and walks right over to us. Lee gets up, and I follow suit. “We can go,” he offers.

  She shakes her head. “He’s going to be okay. He’s got some damage to his jaw. It’s…they wired it shut. Six weeks.”

  We wait. She breathes. “There was…a little damage…” She touches her cheek, just below the eye. “But they don’t think there was anything else.”

  “It missed his brain?” Junior says.

  Gena winces and her ears go flat. “Yes. Well. They said there is a risk of…they want to monitor him. He’ll have to stay in the hospital for a day or two.”

  “Do you want to stay?” Lee asks softly. “Should we take the boys home?”

  “If you’re staying, we’re staying,” Bradley says stubbornly.

  Gena shakes her head. “There’s no use in us staying. He won’t be awake until morning. I’ll call the school…you can come here tomorrow and we’ll sit with him all day.” She wipes her eyes. “I left my number, so they’ll call me if there’s any change, but he’s heavily sedated. They said he’ll sleep through the night.”

  Junior looks stubborn, like he wants to stay anyway, but he doesn’t say anything. Bradley stares at the floor. Gena turns to Lee. “Can I…talk to you for a minute before I take the boys home?”

  “Ah.” He splays his ears. “Sure.”

  They walk off, out of the waiting room and out through the sliding glass doors at the front of the hospital, where they pass out of my sight. I try to cheer up Junior and Bradley. “So your dad’s gonna be okay.”

  “Yeah.” Junior doesn’t seem all that enthusiastic. Bradley still doesn’t talk.

  “You know, uh…a buddy of mine in college had his jaw wired shut after he broke it in a game. So your dad’s going to be drinking all his meals for a while, but after that he’ll be fine. My buddy’s jaw was just like new when they were done.” I sea
rch for anything else I can tell them. “Once he got so desperate for something to eat that he tried putting a Big Mac in a blender.”

  “Ew,” Junior says, looking more engaged.

  “Yeah. Don’t do that. He didn’t enjoy it.”

  “Okay.” He looks at Bradley and then makes an effort to keep the conversation going. “What kind of things do work?”

  “Soup, of course. Vegetables puree up pretty good.”

  “Milkshakes?”

  “Well…my buddy tried that, but the cold ended up hurting his mouth. So maybe warm them up a bit.”

  He sticks out his tongue. “We’ll take good care of him. Jeez, I can’t believe he had an accident like that. He always told us to be so careful with the guns.”

  “Just goes to show, even careful people can have accidents.” I glance at Bradley as I say that and he curls his tail around his leg, still not talking.

  So I ask Junior who his favorite FBA team is, and we talk basketball for a bit until Lee gets back with Gena. Her muzzle is damp around the eyes, but she’s got a smile on. “Ready to go home, boys?”

  Bradley does look up then, and both of them go to hug her. We all walk out of the hospital together, and I watch the three tigers hanging on to each other as though worried they might fly apart. The hospital rises cool and white behind us, red lettering across the face of it, and we leave behind the smell of antiseptic and Neutra-Scent, walking through the glass doors and into the night.

  I put my arm around the fox beside me and I swear silently that I will never do anything like this to him. That, in there, that will never be me.

  We don’t talk much in the truck on the way home, both lost in our thoughts. At one intersection, he says, “What Gena wanted to talk to me about…it was kind of personal. It’s not about Fisher or anything. I’ll tell you about it if you really want me to, but I feel like she’d rather it be kept private.”

  “I wasn’t wondering,” I say, although now I am, a little. But I guess it was probably something she wanted to get off her chest, and she feels closer to Lee than to me. Or else she needed to leave someone with the boys.