“So you…”
“What?”
“You know.”
“It was just messing around.”
I nodded.
“To him.”
“He’s like, with a different girl every year,” I countered.
“Exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing is what it means. Come ’ere.” He opened his arms.
I felt the rise of tears as I held him, nestled in the aroma of his medicinal-tinged sweat. His kiss to my neck led to my cheek, then lips, as I adjusted myself to face him. He held on, so I cautiously climbed onto the bed and lay beside him.
He reached a finger to dab at one of my tears, then brought it to his lips. “Now, that means something.”
I slowly caressed his face. He closed his eyes, tingling at my touch, it seemed.
“Can you stay a while?” he murmured. Despite his gaunt complexion, he still retained a ghost of the near-simian charm I’d grown to adore.
“Sure. Last train back’s at eleven.”
“You took the train?”
“It was cool. My parents had stuff to do, so–”
“They’ll kick you out at nine.”
“Okay. We have a few hours.”
“Ooh, baby,” he taunted.
“Not for that. And not here.”
“Well, just keep touching me,” he whispered. “If you can stand it.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“And promise me?”
“What?”
“Hang out with Kev. He’s a jerk, but he’s a nice guy.”
“I know.”
I shared with Everett how Kevin had recruited me back to the track team, how I wasn’t sure why he’d done it. Perhaps just being Everett’s boyhood friend had had something to do with it.
“Besides,” Everett said, “As I recall, he’s hung like a donkey.”
I gasped in false shock, but confirmed his comment by sharing the amusing sight of Kevin’s revealing pole vaults.
“Well, you know what Holly says,” Everett said.
I waited, confused.
“Be good. And if you can’t be good…”
“…be perfectly wicked,” I finished.
“Hey, you oughtta stay with Holly when you visit,” Everett said. “She likes you. She can keep you posted on my schedule. I don’t want you coming this far and have me stuck with doctors all day.”
“Sure. Sounds like a plan,” I answered, tabling my confusion. It felt wrong to grill him about Kevin. Was Everett trying to set me up with a sexual substitute? Was this a not-subtle hint that all things romantic between us were over? I was too confused to even question such an idea.
As we cuddled, Everett began to doze off, but then said softly, as if half asleep, “When I get better, we can take another nice romantic walk in the woods.”
It pained me to lie to him, but I did. “Sure. It’s a date.”
I tried to slowly leave his side, but, half-awake, his arm pulled me back. We nuzzled, until a stern nurse announced the end of visiting hours.
Somehow, in the dark of that night, I kept myself composed. Finding my way around, up and down hills via buses, back to the train station, into a seat on another train, through those forests, tunneling through mountains, I returned home.
Only after reporting to my parents about Everett’s condition over a wolfed-down reheated dinner, omitting references to Kevin and so many private moments, did I finally retreat to my room, where I clutched a pillow and silently cried myself to sleep.
Chapter 22
Despite the emotional drain of that first visit, I planned a regular schedule. The next Saturday, after a disappointing dual track meet where I placed fourth in the five-kilometer, I called Holly to check on my plans. It was a good thing I did.
“He’s all booked up today with doctors and therapists.”
“Should I come anyway?”
“Sure, why not? You can stay over, then we can both visit on Sunday, too. The coast’ll be clear.”
By that, she meant her mother would not be visiting. At some point after his accident, Mrs. Forrester had heard about our little spring fling at the country club.
“Hey, bring a jacket and a tie. I can get you a ticket to the opera I’m working on.”
“Which one is it?”
“The Cunning Little Vixen. It’s about animals. You’ll like it, even if you don’t like opera. The designs are freakin’ amazing, if I do say so myself. I have to work backstage. Those big-assed ladies and queens are always busting out of their costumes.”
Perhaps her cheerful invitation was a way of compensating for the whole situation. While I didn’t expect Holly to maintain a hand-wringing state of grief, it seemed a bit odd. But given our interactions before Everett’s accident, I shook it off as Holly just being herself, getting on with life.
With a little extra packing, I made room for a jacket I borrowed from Dad, placing it carefully in a suit bag. I didn’t want to borrow either of my parent’s cars. I wanted to be without obligation.
Dad once again drove me to the Clock Tower train station downtown. I got out to buy a round-trip ticket, checked the time for the next train, and returned to Dad, who sat in his car waiting.
“You okay?”
“Sure.”
“Need any money?”
“Mom took care of it.”
“Okay. Look, Reid …”
“Yeah?”
“I just … Tell Everett we’re sending good thoughts his way.”
“Okay.”
I knew he’d wanted to say more, perhaps ask me why I insisted on visiting Everett again. He’d probably realized while trying to form a hesitant protest or word of caution that it wouldn’t matter what he said.
As I’d been warned, Everett’s day was a full one. I waited patiently in a chair outside his empty room for about two hours, almost getting lost in a textbook, when one of the patients on a gurney being wheeled past me held out a hand.
“Jerr-affe,” Everett half-sang. We brushed fingers as a nurse turned and pushed him into his room.
“Hey, Monkey.” I stood.
“Oh, good,” said the nurse, an older Asian woman. “You have a cold or any infectious diseases?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Good. You can help.”
It took a little effort, but I figured out how to hold Everett, help him sit up and transfer from the gurney to his bed. The nurse asked Everett if he wanted me to leave the room as she adjusted his catheter.
“He’s seen it before,” he smirked through obvious exhaustion. Despite our familiarity, I did avert my eyes a moment after the nurse pulled back Everett’s hospital gown. It felt wrong to be looking at his penis, even if he was my sort-of boyfriend. But I didn’t know when, or if, I’d ever see him naked again, so it seemed slightly justified.
Finally satisfied with her work, the nurse left us alone.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Holly says you’re staying over. Cool.”
“Yeah, it’s … You okay?”
“Oh, more poking and prodding. I think we’re done with the hope for a miracle cure. But you never know.”
It was late afternoon. A grey glow of refracted sunlight filled the room. Everett’s haircut looked odd, as if he’d been shorn.
“Regeneration,” I blurted.
“What?”
Some random science fact had popped into my head. “Nothing, I just … Plants and trees can grow new branches even after they’ve been cut down, sometimes even after a fire.”
“Okay,” Everett replied warily. “So, I should think like a tree?”
“It couldn’t hurt. I’m sorry. It’s stupid. I’m just… I’m happy to see you.”
“Well, good. ‘Come forward, Scarecrow.’”
And I did, realizing I was standing awkwardly away from him. Delicately hugging him, I half-knelt while crouching beside his bed, as if about to offer a prayer. I f
ound myself unable to find words.
Instead, we just held hands, which led to some aimless grazing of forearms. After a long while of serene silence, we two just looking at each other, Everett whispered out that little song.
“Every time I think of you, it always turns out good…”
The opera turned out to be quite entertaining, though stranger than I had expected. Written by Leos Janacek, and based on a comic book from the 1920s, it involved a female fox who becomes domesticated by a woodsman. The chorus included a lot of wildly costumed singers dressed as insects and frogs who were delightfully silly. But it was really about the fox. Unhappy being tied up in the woodsman’s back yard, she breaks free. The fox is eventually killed, and a human bride later wears a coat with her pelt. In the final scene, the bereft woodsman returns to the forest where he first met the vixen.
As the audience poured out through the lobby, I waited for Holly as she had instructed, gazing up at the ornately decorated ceiling. I wanted Everett to be with me, to experience this. Looking at the doorways and staircases, I wondered how it would have been possible to even get him inside.
“So? What did you think?” Holly had arrived.
“Beautiful. Congratulations. Is that what you say to an assistant costume designer?”
“Yes,” she said with an exhausted air. “Look at you, all preppy.”
I blushed.
“So, let’s get home and spark one. Pizza again?”
“Sure.”
Since Holly had been the host of my first night spent with Everett, I felt a connection that dodged a clear definition. She had become a combination of sister, confidant and den mother for horny minors.
During the drive home in her car, her gossip about the backstage drama didn’t dampen my admiration for the opera. She gossiped about the fussing before and even during the production, and the fascinating details of the construction of the animal and insect costumes.
We arrived at her apartment and began digging into the pizza we picked up on the way home. I sat down on the sofa bed where Everett and I had been so close, and felt yet another longing for him, as he probably lay sleeping or in pain on the other side of town.
Holly’s offer of a beer and a bong hit didn’t need a second invitation. Unlike that first night in her home, instead of zoning out, I found an ease in babbling about our shared concern, Everett.
“The sick thing is, our mom is secretly thrilled by all this.” Holly toyed with the loose strands of her long hair, finally tying it in the back with a clip. “I mean, just when she’s ready to let her kids go, you know, the empty nest thing, now all of a sudden she feels needed.”
“Huh.”
“I know. Freaky, right?”
“Yeah.”
“She can’t wait to get him home again. They’re gonna release him in a few weeks. There’s really nothing else to do, except teach him how to poop and exercise. Besides, the hospital bills are gonna tank my mom and dad, so she’s hiring a private nurse.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, we’re not as rich as we look. At least not by next year, probably.”
“Huh.” I pondered that possibility. With Everett back in Greensburg, did I even want to take the state park job?
“You get along with your folks?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, it’s nothing like your– Sorry.”
“No, don’t be. They know about you?”
“They do now, thanks to your brother.”
I leaned back on the sofa, as if resigned. Although she told me that Everett had shared our misadventures in some detail, I filled Holly in on my version of our recent encounter with her father.
“You should thank him.”
“Who, your dad?”
“No, silly; Everett.”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
“Because you love him?”
“Yes,” I said, declaring myself so clearly again, despite being in an inebriated haze, or because of it.
“He’s going to go through so much difficulty. I need to ask you. Do you … Reid, do you really want to be here for all this?”
I considered Holly’s blunt question, and thought about the opera, how perhaps Diana Forrester thought of me as nothing more than a fox in her henhouse.
“I really don’t have a choice. I can’t stop thinking about him; worrying, remembering what he did for me. I was … I was this average guy last year, and he just set me loose. It’s like, you know certain plants and flowers lay dormant for a season or more, until something or someone pries them open. I … I owe him.”
She pondered my response. “But is that love?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not– believe me, I am so on your side, and his side. But, you know, I had what I thought was love, and it took me all the way to Paris and back.”
“Right.” Behind me, the poster of that French painting loomed.
“It’s funny,” Holly said. “A few days after the accident, we were sitting in his room, Mom and I. Dad had been with us, but had to go back to work. Ev was all drugged up, and sort of half woke up, and said, ‘My giraffe. Where’s my giraffe?’ Mom was so confused. She was like, ‘He never had a toy giraffe. What is he talking about?’ So I asked him about it days later, and he told me. It’s you. You’re his giraffe.”
I don’t know why I shoved the emotion back inside. I could have cried in front of her. I held it off, but Holly didn’t.
“I call him Monkey sometimes. It’s just …”
I considered explaining to her that we’d come up with those nicknames while lying naked on her sofa. I didn’t.
“You know he may never walk. He might never be able to–”
“That’s not important.”
“Yes, it is, Reid.”
She was right. How would I be able to have any kind of relationship with Everett with a cluster of doctors and therapists and nurses, friends and protective parents always there?
“Are you still going to Temple?” Holly asked, as she blew her nose on a paper napkin.
“Yeah, and the park job for part of the summer, probably. But, I don’t know. I filled out the admission forms and the scholarship application. But, I was thinking, maybe I could just take some classes at the Greensburg Penn State campus. I just …”
“You should go. Philly’s a big city. Maybe that’ll give you some time to sow some wild oats.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It means, keep loving Ev, but don’t lose your whole life over him. You’re fuckin’ seventeen.”
“Eighteen.”
“Oh. Happy Birthday, then.” She handed me the bong.
The next day, at my insistence, Holly accompanied me to visit with Everett. I sat close to his bed, touching and holding hands for a while, since I was comfortable in her presence to do so. It was also relaxing to simply listen to their inside jokes and family stories. There were no awkward pauses, fewer longing glances, and I actually felt more comfortable.
The truth was, I had begun to consider whether I had to let him go, and if so, how to do that.
Chapter 23
Despite their suggestions, I wasn’t wicked. I didn’t return Kevin’s phone call a few days later. I waited.
Dad pestered me when I cancelled a planned visit to Temple University. He had the long drive all planned out. I told him I was just going to apply sight unseen, although I was still unsure. I couldn’t pass up a weekend when I wanted to see Everett.
My two subsequent Saturday hospital visits became a regular pattern, until Everett said that he would be brought home. When he called on a Tuesday night, telling me he had finally been moved home the day before, I almost dropped the phone to run and see him. But he warned me.
Every Time I Think of You Page 12