by Amy Lane
Jersey sucked in a hard breath. “Well, that sucks. Yeah. I hear you. Okay. We’ll get someone else—Sean is a good one. Yeah—Kelsey would be perfect. Oh wait—you’re right. Let me call Donnie. I forget, you know? Yeah, thanks, Dex. I’ll keep you updated. Okay. Thanks, man.”
The conversation ended, and Jersey hit another number.
“Hey, Donnie? This is Ethan, you know, from where Chance—Chase works? Yeah, how’s he doing?” There was a sigh. “Yeah. Great. What’s the shrink say? Yeah, listen to the shrink—those guys are smart. Okay. Well, we’re trying not to let Tommy be alone too much. We weren’t sure if you wanted in on tha—okay, you will? ’Cause I was gonna stay with him tonight, but—okay, you will tomorrow? And Kevin too? And your sister—damn. Okay. We were going to take care of him, but—”
A wounded quiet fell. “Well, yeah, but he’s our friend too!”
“Ethan” didn’t move, didn’t hardly breathe, and Jonah was suddenly interested in someone’s problems besides his own.
“No, no. Don’t apologize. It’s okay. I know what you think of us—”
A sudden penitent burst of something echoed from the phone.
“Man, don’t worry about it, okay? We just want the same things. I think it would be great if you spent the night at Tango’s tomorrow—but you gotta promise not to kill him, okay? Yeah, I think you’re right. Maybe Kevin would be a better bet. Not even Tango could be pissed at Kevin.”
After some more pleasantries, Jersey—wait, Ethan—signed off on the phone, and Jonah was left with a whole lot of questions and an unholy interest in this perfect stranger.
Ethan pocketed the phone in his leather jacket, smiled gamely and wandered over to sit down. One of the dog toys was on the table—the cardboard thing used to hang it up for display had disintegrated—and he picked it up, pulling the rope braid between his fingers, tracing the path of every strand of the twist and lightly stroking the blue fur of the little stuffed dog head that capped the braided bone. He simply petted the thing for a minute and then looked up, realizing he had an audience, and pulled a grin out of nowhere.
“This thing’s neat,” he said into the silence. “I like it. What’s it do?”
“Mostly gets chewed on by dogs,” Regina said, rolling her eyes. “Jonah, buddy, my break’s over. I’ll see you in ten.”
Jonah gaped at her as she sauntered out, mostly because his break was actually the one that was over, and Regina had ten more minutes to go.
Ethan didn’t seem to notice. “That’s a shame,” he said, almost to himself. “I mean, shouldn’t you have a better purpose than to get chewed on?”
He was talking to the little dog head, and Jonah found himself smiling. “Well, he gives the dog a lot of joy,” he said, and to his disappointment, Ethan didn’t smile back.
“I think that’s probably true,” he said thoughtfully. “But it’s sort of a shitty price to pay, you know?” He had blunt fingers with nicely buffed nails, and he kept stroking that damned toy, squeezing the head until it touched the little squeaky thing inside but not squeezing it hard enough to squeak.
Jonah fought the temptation to put his hand over those questing, gentle fingers. He didn’t know this god; he wasn’t even in the same stratosphere.
“So, Tommy—you’re worried about him?” Jonah posed delicately.
Ethan looked sideways at him. “Tommy? Tommy’s gonna be fine,” he said with a quirk of his full lips. “His boyfriend?” Ethan shook his head and stroked the little dog some more.
“What happened?” Jonah asked.
Ethan puffed out a breath. “That is a long story,” he said quietly and then looked sideways at Jonah, smiling slightly. “You seem like a good kid. What’s your name?”
“Jonah. Jonah Stevens.” He stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
Ethan grinned at him as though he wasn’t used to this sort of introduction. He took Jonah’s hand and said, “Ethan—pleased to meet you.”
And then they were touching palms. Ethan’s was warm and firm, and he shook hard, like you were taught in business school, and Jonah trusted that grip implicitly. It was like that touch couldn’t lie to him, and he was grateful.
“How old are you, Ethan?” he asked on impulse, watching as those strong black brows met in the center.
“Twenty, why?”
“’Cause I’m twenty-two—why’d you call me a kid?”
Ethan’s smirk was incorrigible—the wicked smile of the naughty elf. He held tight to Jonah’s hand and, with the finger of his other hand, touched the tip of Jonah’s nose like a grown-up would a child’s.
“’Cause you don’t look quite grown,” he said, winking, and then he released Jonah’s hand. “So, are you doing anything else while you work at PetSmart? Tommy’s starting classes in the spring if… if Chase is okay. What are you doing?” He twisted and untwisted the braided bone while he talked.
Jonah caught it and felt stupid, because it was like the fifth time Ethan directed his questions away from anything personal. But then, Jonah didn’t get asked about his personal life that often, so he allowed himself to be manipulated. “My little sister is sick,” he said. “I mean, it’s sort of chronic, but it’s constant. Constant trips to the doctors, constant managing her meds, helping her exercise, just… just constant. So my mom works for health insurance, and I work for everything else, and between us, we keep Melly from falling apart.”
Ethan opened his eyes wide. “That’s really hard,” he said, obviously sincere.
Jonah nodded. “See, but we’re lucky. Kids with CF didn’t use to live past six or seven, but Melly’s sixteen—she can live to her thirties if we’re careful.”
Ethan grunted. “So you sort of spend your life living for your sister,” he said, but like he was trying to understand that idea, not like he was making fun of it.
Still, Jonah felt his face heat. “Not as glamorous as whatever you do, I’m sure,” he said stiffly and stood up with his elbows and knees making a full appearance as he banged the table and almost knocked over his soda. His break was almost up anyway.
Ethan shook himself and looked up. “I’m just thinking,” he said honestly. “Don’t be… don’t be offended or whatever. It just… it takes someone special, you know? To make those sort of sacrifices for someone else?” He shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t have it in me. You’re a good person, Jonah.”
He smiled up into Jonah’s eyes, and he reminded Jonah of one of those kids he used to hang with in high school, a comic-book geek like himself who would get so lost in the stories that just telling him lunch was over was like waking a sleeper from a dream.
It was incorruptible, that smile, like Gatsby’s. Jonah saw hope there, and he didn’t even know what to do with that.
“I’m… I’m pretty sure anyone else would do that,” Jonah said, undone by the smile and the compliment and by the unexpected conversation with the Italian god during his break.
Ethan shook his head. “I’m a hedonist,” he said proudly, like he’d just learned the word and had been embracing everything it meant. “I’m all about me.” He held his head sideways, daring Jonah to contradict him because he could take it on the chin.
Jonah might have dished it out, even, but there was something vulnerable in that defiance, and Jonah knew vulnerable.
“I’m sure that’s fun too,” he said mildly, and at that moment Tommy burst out of the door.
“Ethan—man, I got the fucking job!”
Ethan’s face split into a huge block-out-the-sun sort of grin, and he surged to his feet with a fluid grace for someone with lats wider than the break bench. “That’s awesome, Tango—you wanna go celebrate?”
Tommy (Tango?) suddenly looked wary. “Yeah, uhm, what kind of celebration you got in mind?” He had some sort of East Coast accent, something Jonah had only heard in movies, and in spite of his intensely pretty face and bright-brown eyes, Jonah got the feeling this guy wasn’t afraid of a fight.
“Some
place good. Broiled meat and salad—right?” And there, in the voice of the man who had just professed to live only for himself, was the sound of someone pathetically eager to please. A friend trying to cheer up another friend. Ethan nodded, his softer, warmer brown eyes wide until he caught Tommy’s gaze.
Tommy smiled, relaxing a fraction, and nodded back. “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s go eat at a restaurant—”
“And then we’ll watch some movies at your place,” Ethan said, like Jonah hadn’t just heard him making plans with Tommy’s friends to make sure Tommy wasn’t left alone.
“Yeah, okay—but first, you know….” He looked at Ethan pleadingly, and Ethan gave a no-nonsense acquiescence to whatever it was he was asking.
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Have they let him out of the recovery ward yet?”
“Naw—he can barely walk. And he’s got another two days in observation. But….” Tommy swallowed convulsively and his jaw wobbled.
Ethan grunted, like finishing that sentence was absolutely not needed. “Of course! There’s no worries, none at all. It’s a given, man. You want to be there for him, we’ll be here for you, right?”
Tommy smiled, and Ethan threw a companionable arm around his shoulders and started to walk out of the break room. He stopped at the last minute and turned and tossed the dog toy in a lazy arc. Jonah caught the toy automatically, just like he caught Ethan’s cocky grin over his shoulder.
“Chat ya later, Jonah—nice talkin’!”
Jonah nodded and watched them go bemusedly, holding up a wistful hand—with dog toy. A hedonist, right? Someone who was only interested in himself?
Yeah. Right. A hedonist.
JONAH actually liked his job. It didn’t take a lot of smarts, which was too bad, because he’d done all right in school, but people came in with their animals, and that was fun. He also got to lift the bags of food and stuff off the shelves, so it was sort of a workout. He knew his arms and torso might be thin, but he had some muscles in there, and he was proud of that. And, of course, when he got depressed, or when the customers were driving him batshit or someone’s Great Dane had taken a giant steaming shovel-sized dump in (on!) aisle three, there was always the tropical fish.
After he clocked out, he walked over to the fish tanks and gazed happily. The tetras were maybe his favorites, just because of the color, but he did love himself a plain, average little guppy. They had charm, when they weren’t eating their young.
“Hey, Jonah!”
He looked next to him to see Regina looking at the guppies too. “Yeah?”
“We got some new bettas in. Want to take a look?”
Jonah lit up a little. He had four double betta-fish hexes, and he kept a fish in each cubicle. He’d lost a fish the week before, but they’d been out of bettas to fill it up. He liked the symmetry of it, the eight fish, one in each little self-contained bowl, all of them fitted together like an apartment complex for fish.
It felt orderly, and while he couldn’t have a cat or a dog or even a rat or a snake, he could have as many fish as he could care for. And unlike the tropical fish or the saltwater ones, bettas were notoriously easy to take care of. All you had to do was put a lid on their bowls to keep them from leaping to their deaths, and they were okay. He needed as many things as possible in his life not to be fragile, to be self-sufficient.
Too many of the things he couldn’t control needed him.
The PetSmart sat square in the middle of the Arden-Arcade area, on Watt Avenue, which wasn’t a great part of town but not a crappy part either. The best part about it was it only took two buses to get him to the fourplex he shared with his mom and little sister off of Northrop.
Again, not the greatest part of town, but there were worse. The three bedroom sat at the top of the stairs, and by the time he’d taken his two buses and walked the two blocks it took to get to the buses, each step felt like another five-pound lead weight added to his back. If he hadn’t been clutching his new betta in its little semi-sealed cup, he would have crawled the last step just to make himself laugh. God. So much to do.
“Jonah?” His mom peered out the door, looking as tired as he felt. Sometimes she dyed her graying blond hair dark brown, but not often enough, and the color had faded so it was a mousy brown, and strands of it always escaped her practical ponytail before she even walked out the door for her shift. Her thin, long face was lined, and her gray eyes were dulled to hazel. She was in her forties, but she looked older, especially since his dad had left, and Jonah couldn’t blame him.
This was a rough gig.
“Hey, Mom. Is she ready? I thought I’d have a few minutes to set up my fish before I took her to the gym.”
Laura Stevens took a step out the door and shut it quietly behind her. “I think we’re going to have to do an ER run and a breathing treatment instead,” she said, her voice dropping. She was already wearing scrubs and her soft-soled shoes for her shift as a nurse at Kaiser.
Jonah groaned. “Really? But Mom—”
“She skipped PE for the last week, Jonah—what do you want me to tell you?”
“Why would she do that? Dammit—she knows—”
“Because it’s hard! Because she has to stop and hawk spit after every lap and because her body hurts. And yes, before you ask, she snuck a giant chocolate cookie in during lunch. And yes, we had the diet talk again. And now she needs the insulin and breathing treatment and the forced PT for a week, and no, it’s not worth it, and she knows it. So don’t yell at her!” His mom’s temper crackled, and Jonah glared at her.
The entire trip home he’d been thinking about Ethan’s proud assertion that he was a hedonist. It had sounded lovely, living only for himself, getting laid whenever he wanted (or at all) and just taking off to have dinner and a movie and staying at a friend’s house. He could see that Ethan’s life wasn’t like that, even after ten minutes of acquaintanceship, but seriously? Two buses and two blocks and the damned fish half-dead and slopping water with every step?
God.
“It would just be nice, just once, if she wanted to live as much as we wanted her to!” he snapped.
The soft smacking sound actually hit him before the sting of her palm on his cheek.
“Jonah Isaac Stevens, you take that back!”
He glared at her, defensive and embarrassed. “No,” he muttered. “I’m taking her to the damned doctor’s. Isn’t that enough? Now excuse me, I’ve got another damned fish to kill.”
He brushed past her to open the door, leaving her, shoulders hunched and miserable, standing outside on the wooden porch that overlooked the shitty parking lot. His sister was sitting on the couch, pale and clammy. Every breath she dragged into her lungs crackled with phlegm.
“Don’t say it,” she muttered. “I’m sorry, okay?”
Some of his anger bled out his spine. “Dammit, Melly—”
“It’s cold,” she said, her face pinched and thin with misery under her wavy, sand-colored hair. “And my joints hurt, and I just wanted a hot cookie and a little corner to read. Is that so goddamned bad?”
Jonah let out a half-exasperated laugh. “I don’t know, Mel, all I want is dinner and a hand job, and that’s not going to happen either!”
Amelia grimaced. “Gross!”
“Well, don’t piss me off,” he grumbled.
His little sister smiled penitently. “I’m sorry, Jonah—I know you looked forward to ogling the guys at the gym.”
Jonah sighed. “Yeah, yeah, well, my odds with them would be better if I ever worked out. Gimme fifteen, we’ll be good to go.”
She smiled tiredly, and he fought the urge to smack her on the arm (because she’d bruise horribly, for one thing) and make her get up and go walk around the block. Dammit. Just dammit. It wasn’t an easy disease to manage. There were insulin injections and breathing treatments and an ever-revolving array of antibiotics to keep away the constant threat of lung infections, but it would be better, so much easier, if only Amelia would stay active
.
But activity had never been Melly’s style. Many children with chronic diseases were restless, eager to burst out of the cage that illness penned them in, but not Amelia. She’d been grateful for the times she hadn’t needed to move, content to sit and read or watch television, lost in the wonders of worlds without pain. That stillness had only gotten worse as she’d gotten older—forcing her to exercise was painful and divisive.
Their father had taken it the hardest. She’d been his favorite, almost since birth, and he’d worked so hard at the beginning, studying, finding acceptable activity regimens, monitoring everything from her breaths per minute to the salt on her skin to make sure she was keeping ahead of the secretions building up in her lungs and organs. But Melly—Melly fought him. She fought them, with every step. When she’d been younger, she’d whined, she’d sulked, she’d sneaked.
Now that she went to high school, she cut classes and ate stuff not on the prescribed diet and bitched enough about going to the gym that getting her out of the house was a constant battle.
No wonder their mother looked old. No wonder their father left, tearfully, saying he’d support them any way he could, but he couldn’t sit there, watching day by day as his darling daughter tried to die by her own apathy. He stopped by every week, made dinner, talked to Amelia, asked Jonah how he was doing, and brought his wife groceries.
And pretended his daughter’s health wasn’t balanced on a very fine fulcrum, and that he hadn’t bailed on the balance.
But the thing was, she was never angry with them. She didn’t resent them for forcing her to live—she just tried to get out of it.
Jonah felt better after he’d set up his new fish—he was currently going through the entire character roster of Battlestar Gallactica, and this one was going to be Racetrack. A quick shower, some clean, much-laundered jeans, and a comb through his curly sandy-blond hair, and he was good to go.
“C’mon, Melly,” Jonah said, coming out of his bedroom.
Amelia looked up from one of her favorite television shows and sighed. “No getting out of this one,” she wheezed.