by Amy Lane
Pain washed over him, and a wave of black nausea followed. Tossing his cookies on the frosty grass was almost a relief. They got to the truck right when a man ventured out of the house next door, skinny legs sticking out of his bathrobe, wispy hair scattered over his head, and a big scary gun in his hand.
“Who’s there?” the guy shouted. “What the hell’s going on in my backyard?”
“Sorry, Mr. Simpson!” Reg called, opening Bobby’s door for him. “My sister got away again. Keep everybody inside—the mental health people’ll be out!”
“If she’s not careful, she’s gonna get shot!” Mr. Simpson shouted back. “Crazy bitch—she needs to be put away!”
“So do you!” Reg shouted back, helping Bobby into the cab. “But we let you stay there with your fifty zillion cats and everything!”
The door slammed shut, and Bobby leaned his head against the window woozily, thinking Oh. That’s where the cat pee smell came from. It had been bothering him since he’d first been to Reg’s place, since Reg and V didn’t have a single goddamned cat.
Reg got into the driver’s side, and Bobby handed him the keys. The truck started right up, and Reg pulled out of the residential neighborhood, driving as fast as safety would allow.
Bobby regretted not putting his seat belt on, though, when the truck screeched to a halt.
Reg threw the thing in Park, leaped out the door, and made a flying tackle on the shadowy figure on the lawn next to them. He had a struggling V in a three-point restraint in short order, and Bobby made it out of the truck in time to watch him strip her shirt over her head and bind her wrists behind her back with it. He yanked her up, wearing her bra and her sweatpants, and hauled her into the truck while Bobby got back inside.
“You can’t fuckin’ keep me here!” she screeched. “You fuckin’ retard! You didn’t even know I was spitting those pills up! How in the fuck do you think you can keep me there, you faggot?”
She wiggled something awful, but Reg had bound her up tight, and Bobby had no choice. He leaned his head against the window and blanked her out, the fear, the pain, all of it, relegating it to a haze in the distance.
The bay to the ER was a relief, because Reg opened the door and the noise stopped. He helped get Bobby into a wheelchair and said, “I’ll find you.”
As the nurse wheeled Bobby into check-in, he heard V’s screaming, and then he realized he heard the most disturbing thing of all.
Reg’s silence.
Reg’s absolute and complete silence as he dealt with that rage, that confusion, that misplaced hatred, and tried to fix someone who had been broken before he’d been born.
TWO HOURS later, Bobby’s hand was wrapped, his shoulder was stitched, his upper arm ached with tetanus shots and antibiotic shots and vitamin shots, for all he knew. He sat in his cubicle in the ER and wished desperately he could grab Reg’s hand or his shoulder or something and calm him down, because he was becoming unglued.
“They took her off!” he raged, pacing the thin strip between the curtain and the bed. “They took her off her meds. That’s why she put them back in the bottle—so I’d think she had a full prescription when we weren’t gonna get no more this next time. She went in two months ago and said she hadn’t been taking her meds for a week! And the doctor, who’s probably more retarded than me, goes, ‘Yeah, sure, you seem fine. We’ll just not give you any more anti-fucking-psychotics and let you back into the world with your brother, who doesn’t know!’ Because… because I got no idea! Why the fuck would they do that, Bobby? Why in the holy mother of fuck would they do that?”
Bobby stared at him, at his red eyes and his complete confusion. A ball of rage hit Bobby’s chest, and he stood up, grabbing hold of the IV tower and taking the papers Reg was waving right out of his hands. “Where am I going, whose ass am I kicking, and who do I have to fucking kill to figure this shit out?”
Later, he’d wonder at his luck, because the overworked intern who’d fucked up two months ago was actually working that night. He shouldn’t have been. Bobby didn’t know which time the guy was out of his element, filling in for a position he wasn’t qualified for in the least, but he didn’t actually care either.
“You took her off her meds?” he snarled, catching the guy by surprise as he did his charts. After stalking through a maze of corridors that Bobby was already lost in, Reg had gestured to the man, a young, thin thirtyish guy who looked like he hadn’t slept in months.
The guy closed his eyes. “She reported that she’d been off them for some time—”
“And you believed her?” Bobby asked, his voice shaking in anger.
“There was no reason to doubt—”
“No reason?” Bobby’s voice rose. “No reason? Do you have any idea what happens when you send her home like that? Do you have any idea what we’ve been through?”
“The hospital can’t afford to have patients on drugs that aren’t necessary,” the doctor said primly—but he couldn’t meet Bobby’s eyes, and his hands shook as he ran them through his unruly dark hair. “I didn’t know. I had no way of knowing—”
“Her brother has her conservatorship papers,” Bobby said. “You didn’t think maybe you should discuss this with him?”
“Well, you know, she said she’d tell him….”
Bobby just stared at him and shook his head. “Jesus. Everybody looks up to you people, and I’d rather be in porn. At least when you’re fucking with someone, they know why and they get something out of it. What happens now?”
“Well, f-f-first we assess the situation—”
“The situation is that she’s been terrorizing her brother since September, and she finally ran out of the house and into the night in a T-shirt and bare feet. We’re exhausted,” Bobby said, looking apologetically at Reg. “We can’t fucking sleep. I keep trying to fix their house, but I can’t, because if I leave so much as a hammer behind, I’m afraid she’s going to drive it through my skull. Her brother hasn’t left the house for longer than a day’s work in years. And you thought it was a good idea to wean a woman who has been on antipsychotics since she was a teenager without even a how-de-fuckin’-do. Have I assessed the situation?”
Bobby was snarling in his face, and the guy was almost in tears. It wasn’t fair—Bobby wasn’t proud of himself, but fucking Jesus.
“She needs… she needs to be admitted,” the guy muttered.
“No!” Reg protested. “No—Bobby, I promised!”
“For how long?” Bobby said, holding his hand up to calm him down. “How long will she be in captivity or whatever?”
“She’s not a zoo animal!” the doctor protested. “It’s a perfectly reputable mental health facility that’s designed to get patients to respond to a schedule, take their medication regularly, and function in the outside world.”
“It’s a filthy place that stinks of cigarettes and pee!” Reg retorted. “And you never fucking feed her there! She says so!”
“Reg?” Bobby intervened. “I mean, your sister isn’t exactly a reliable witness. Maybe if we take her food once in a while….”
“Bobby!” Reg had reached the end of his rope, and Bobby had nothing in him for appearances. This time, when he held up his hand, it was to pull Reg forward so they could stand, forehead to forehead, and Bobby could be real.
“Baby,” he rasped, “you need a break. A month’s break. To see what life is like when you’re not trapped in the house with your sister. And your sister needs someone not you to drug her up. To test her levels. To get her into a routine that doesn’t include the goddamned news channel. It’s not forever.” He turned reluctantly from Reg, who was openly crying now. “Right?”
The doctor nodded, gnawing on his lip. “No. Not forever. We can admit her for a month, reassess her then, and see if she can go home.”
“Okay?” Bobby asked, nodding, willing Reg to say yes. He felt weak and stupid. He hadn’t predicted this. He’d done nothing to prevent it. He couldn’t protect Reg from this decision. An
d right now they were exhausted from other people’s problems, from the storms of their own hearts, and from just a goddamned awful two days.
“She can’t go home tonight, anyway,” Reg told him, relaxing with a sigh. “They totally sedated her. Martians could invade and she’d keep snoring.”
“Thank God,” Bobby murmured. “Good. You can come meet my mom. I can replace your goddamned fence. We can repaint her room again. It’ll be okay.”
“Okay,” Reg agreed. Bobby pulled him closer so his face was buried against Bobby’s chest.
“Okay.”
He had no idea if it was going to be okay. He felt like the world’s biggest fraud, because he was so lost on okay at the moment. But he wanted to be back at Reg’s house, tucked in his bed, finally able to sleep.
An hour. An hour of paperwork, of nurses fussing over him, of finding a pair of scrubs since his sweatshirt and T-shirt had been torn to ribbons. An hour of reassuring Reg and double-checking with the doctor who had already proven less than reliable, and finally an hour of signing paperwork so they could get the fuck out of there.
Bobby remembered filling out the papers for health insurance and thinking, “Oh yeah. That might be nice.” He’d never been so grateful for “nice” as he was as he and Reg left Kaiser to get back in the truck. Reg pumped the heater as soon as they got in the cab, because it was mid-January and cold as balls outside.
They were quiet on the way back, until Bobby had Reg stop for food. In-N-Out—very necessary right now.
“Thank you,” Reg muttered in the quiet of the idling engine.
“For what?” Bobby had taken painkillers, but whatever had been in the IV was wearing off. He missed it. That drug had been his friend.
“Not telling the doctor I couldn’t take care of her anymore.”
Bobby sighed and tilted his head back. “This… this might not work. You know that, right?”
“No,” Reg mumbled. Then, louder, “No. I wish I did. I wish I could look in the future like you did. My sister disappeared, and I thought, ‘Find her! She’ll get cold!’ and you thought, ‘Find her! She’ll hurt people!’ And I was, like, ‘No she wouldn’t!’ And then I remembered. She would. She has. She’s hurt me. How dumb—”
“Stop it,” Bobby snarled, done. “You’re not dumb. You’re overwhelmed. And you did fine. You were going to call the mental health people before you spotted her. I was impressed.”
“Thanks.” Reg sighed and let the truck creep up a space. Late-night drive-thru was always damned slow. “But… but you still think this might not work.”
“Yeah, but Reg, that’s not you. It’s not. I can’t deal with this situation. Hell—the doctor couldn’t deal with this situation, and he’s had years of fucking useless education to tell him how to deal with this situation.”
“I still don’t know why he’d do that,” Reg muttered, flummoxed.
“Yeah, well, maybe he was like us. Maybe he’d been on rotation and was somewhere he had no training to be and no sleep in fucking forever. They’re not gods. They’re just like we are—doing their goddamned best. And if she can outmaneuver everybody’s goddamned best, maybe she… you know. Shouldn’t be in a place where we’re all she’s got. You think?”
Reg shook his head, wiping under his eyes, because he was exhausted too. Finally they were in a place where he could pay, and he handed Bobby a large chocolate shake and took his own, strawberry.
“Mm….” Bobby swallowed and enjoyed. “We’re going to have to work out forever for this, you know that, right?” He took another swallow. “And don’t you have a scene in two days?”
Reg nodded. “Yeah. Me and the enema bottle are gonna be good friends.” He took another drink and swallowed. “But sometimes, you just fucking need a big-ass shake.”
That sounded wise as fuck to Bobby.
REG SLEPT in, but Bobby couldn’t.
He sat in bed for a while, arms wrapped around his knees, making a mental list of things he was supposed to do that day.
He was supposed to wait tables, but looking at the way Reg curled in on himself, the idea of leaving him alone was just too painful.
He needed someone. He just did. Bobby could rattle around his apartment, walk around the city, find a world outside himself. Reg wasn’t as limited as he thought—Bobby firmly believed that. And his limitations weren’t “being smart,” as he said. His biggest limit was that the world he’d built for himself, when he was young and ignorant and unprepared, was really small. Bobby couldn’t hold that against him. He’d just left a town full of people who thought Dogpatch was the center of the world. Reg wasn’t any different.
But if Reg was going to have a bigger world, he needed a Bobby to help him find it.
Today, he needed Bobby to help him see beyond this empty house.
Bobby kissed his cheek and thought yearningly that he’d love to just stay in bed, hold Reg’s naked body, make love in the gray cold of the winter morning. But Reg had a scene tomorrow, and that wasn’t going to work, and Bobby was too practical to mourn over stuff he couldn’t change.
He put his nose in the hollow of Reg’s shoulder and breathed deeply, letting the warmth and maleness wash over him.
With a sigh he wriggled out of bed and wrapped a tattered afghan around his shoulders. He’d gone to bed in the scrubs the nurses had rounded up, and his sweatshirt and jeans were too torn up to save. In addition to the shoulder and the hand, he had some scrapes on his knees and shin that had smarted during cleanup as well.
He would need to go get clothes from his apartment sometime that day, but first, coffee.
After he’d started the pot and downed his first mug, he settled down at the kitchen table and called his mother.
He wasn’t planning to tell her much, but, well, moms.
“Sweetheart? You okay? You don’t usually call me at work.”
He cursed himself, because he should have thought of that. “No,” he said, voice quiet. “I’m fine. Just don’t want to wake my friend up. We, uh, cleared some dates so we could come visit.”
“Oh, that’s nice!” She hmmed a little, and he assumed she was checking her calendar. “I have to work this weekend, but next Saturday and Sunday I can have off free and clear. How’s that?”
“Perfect.” He and Reg could go out dancing. They could let the hickeys and the beard burn of someone else’s sex fade off their skin. They could have sex with each other every morning for a week, as loud as they wanted.
And they could go see his mom without all the stuff that was hanging over their heads now.
“Are you sure?” she asked kindly. Someone said something to her in the background, and he heard her say “It’s my son” through the muffled receiver. “You sound… odd. Sad. Are you okay? How’s your friend? The one with the sister.”
“Sad,” Bobby said, because that was the only word he had. “She’s in observation right now, at a mental health place where they try to get them back on their med schedule.”
“Oh, honey.” She muffled the receiver again. “It’s important, okay? Consider this my break.” Then, back into the phone, “What happened?”
“I’m messing up your work,” Bobby said, suddenly undone by her concern, by her effort to put him first. She’d done that their entire lives—even when the old man was beating on her, she’d done her best to make sure Bobby came first. “We’ll come up in the morning, first thing. Weekend after next. Me and Reg. You’ll like him, Mom. I swear.”
“Okay, hon.” She sounded puzzled. “Good—”
“Wait! Mom—has Keith Gilmore been by lately?”
He heard a heavy breath on her line. “Yeah, hon. Actually….” Her voice dropped. “Yesterday morning, I went to leave for work and two of my tires were flat, which was weird because I’d just had them checked at the gas station. And Keith Gilmore came driving down the road, asking if I wanted a ride. It was really strange, Vern—he had no reason to be there. I told him no thank you—we have the generator out in the garage
, you know.”
“Yeah. The air compressor still works, right?” It had the last time Bobby had needed it.
“Oh yes. I filled up my tires and got to work just fine, but I swear—there was no reason at all for him to be down that road unless he thought I was going to need help.”
Bobby grunted. “Good job, Mom. Seriously. But, you know—keep avoiding him if you can, okay?”
“What’s going on with him? Do you have any idea?”
Bobby let out a breath. “Yeah. I do. And… and I don’t want to tell you over the phone while you’re at work. Can you just wait until I get there? And not tell him?”
“Yeah, honey.” She sighed. “I miss you. Call me in the evenings sometime. We can watch TV together or something. I swear, I hadn’t realized how in the middle of nowhere this place was until you were gone.”
“Mom, I’ve got an apartment down here. It would be small and cramped, but I spend most of my nights with friends. Would that be enough?” He closed his eyes and tried to decide if he wanted her to say yes or no.
“Let’s wait until the summer,” she said gently. “It’s easy to hate this place in the winter. If I’m still hating life here in the summer, then yes. Yes, if you don’t mind your mother as a roommate, I’d love to.”
“It might not be just me,” he said hesitantly. “I might… I might have a friend who wants to room with us.” If he decides to leave his sister in hell so he can have his own life. Oh Jesus, this is not going away.
“That would be fine, hon. You’re sort of a picky roommate, you know. No dishes in the sink, no creaky stairs—if your friend can deal with you, I’ll deal with her.”
“Him,” Bobby said without thinking. He cringed, but his mother corrected herself with “Him” without missing a beat, and he realized she took friend to mean just that—friend.
He was going to have to be plain and clear with her—and like he’d said, not now.
“Okay, then,” he mumbled, needing to be off the phone. His body and wounds ached, and he longed to crawl in next to Reg, but what he wanted to do was off-limits for a whole other day. “I’ll talk to you later, Mom. See you in a week or so.”