Ethan in Gold

by Amy Lane

  “Belladonna, why?” Ethan asked, surprised. Oh God. Of all of them—of all of them—she had chafed the most, complained the most, needed the most to get out from under Carolina Costa’s sensibly heeled shoe. “You have the chance to go—go!”

  Belladonna shook her head and stuck out her hand. With resignation, Ethan gave her a tissue. “I can’t,” she said, wiping carefully at the eyeliner that ringed her lashes. “I can’t, Ev—’cause… ’cause you can’t… you aren’t….”

  Ethan closed his eyes. He knew this. He’d known it as soon as Allie had started to cry. “I can’t come,” he said, not surprised or hurt or even resigned.

  “It’s not her fault,” Belladonna said, pulling a hand through her long, layered dark hair. She looked at Allie like she was giving absolution. “It’s not, sweetie. It’s not your fault. Even Devon feels bad.” She looked at Ethan again and shrugged. “But the judge… it was like Danni could be rehabilitated, right? But not you. The only way Allie—hell, all of us—could be with the baby again was if you….” She tried to smile and gnawed the rest of her lipstick off instead.

  “If I stayed away,” Ethan said, still empty. “It’s okay.” He nodded at all of them, his fellow prisoners of war. “It’s okay. I’ve got a life here. I mean, a job, friends. The friend that hooked me up with this place, he’s gonna help me find a ho… apartment. I’ll be okay.”

  As he looked at all of them, he had a sudden sense of déjà vu, to right after the deposition. He’d been seven by then, and he’d gone in and seen the film of him talking to Dr. Uncle Stottemeyer, and had verified that yes, one Lawrence Gerard had taken him behind a handball partition of the playground of his Kindergarten and had exposed himself and masturbated and climaxed on little Evan’s exposed backside. He’d been seeing a shrink—even beyond when he felt like he needed to, his mom had made him see the shrink, until she’d been the reason he’d kept seeing the shrink and Dr. Uncle Stottemeyer hadn’t cared—and the shrink had assured him he wasn’t bad.

  And his mother kept telling him the bad man had to be punished.

  And his sisters kept telling him to just go away; hadn’t he caused enough trouble already?

  And his mother had steered him out of the room where he’d given his deposition and into the hallway, where his sisters, dressed in their Sunday best, all looked up from their books and video games to where he stood.

  For the first time since any of it happened, he remembered they loved him. Allie smiled at him and Belladonna came and hugged him and Danni grabbed his hand and asked him if he wanted soda. For once, in that moment, it was okay that he needed them.

  He looked at them now, begging him for forgiveness with their eyes, and realized that it was okay that he needed them. But just like last time, this minute here, in this cold cinderblock room, was going to be the last time in a while he would get what he needed.

  Belladonna shook her head and started to cry harder. Ethan put out his arms tentatively, and she dove into them. He clasped her, and his brittle candy shell seemed to crumble, leaving soft, dark, and devastated in its place.

  “I don’t want to leave you again,” she said thickly. “It’s like you were five, and we just… just left you to the shrink and the courts and that was where you were supposed to go. And you did. You went somewhere else and that’s how you grew up. And now… now we’re leaving you again, and you’re all grown up, and you don’t have us. You don’t have anyone….” She broke down then, crying on his chest while he cradled her and realized how tiny she was, how short, at five three, how fragile, and how wide his shoulders had become and how he had to shelter her now, when she hadn’t been able to shelter him, had never even thought to try.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said over and over again. “I’m fine, Donna. You gotta go. You gotta get away. You all gotta get away. I’m out. She can’t get me anymore.” And suddenly Belladonna wasn’t the only one there in the hug. Allie and Mina were on either side of him, their bodies shaking against his. With a sound both pathetic and lost, Danni stood up and ran around the table with the rounded corners with the rubber stoppers and she joined the hug too. And they cried, all of them, for the family they’d never really had and the thing they were losing without realizing, until now, how so very badly they all needed it.

  The hug had to end. An orderly came to collect Danni, and she went willingly, so destroyed the orderly had to remember her cigarettes and lighter. They all stood for a minute, and Allie broke the silence.

  “God. God. That sucks. This sucks.” She looked up at Ethan and reached for his hand. “You want to go out to lunch, at least, Ev? I can give you the info on where we’re going to be, we can talk. I mean….” She half laughed. “I don’t even know where you’re staying!”

  Ethan grimaced. “I’m staying at a friend’s house—and I wish I could at least come eat.”

  “Not even lunch?” Belladonna’s disappointment just radiated off her body, and Ethan grabbed her hand too.

  “I’ve got a friend here,” he said quietly. “In another wing. He… he tried to kill himself a couple of weeks ago. He was like, catatonic two days ago—his boyfriend almost lost his job, almost lost his fucking mind. Now that he’s awake, I want to visit. He needs us.”

  Belladonna just shook her head. “Ev… Ev, are these work people? Your friends you keep talking about? Because, you know, that’s work—”

  Ethan found he was squinting at her, his jaw locked angrily. “You don’t get to say anything about my friends,” he said, his voice hard. “You got no idea, okay? Yeah, I got out from Mom, but I did it alone, and I had to make myself someone else to do it. These guys—they were part of it. They were there for me when none of you even knew I needed someone. So you hear me? Are we clear?”

  Belladonna nodded and tried to clean her face off with the one disintegrating tissue in her hand. Ethan reached into his pocket and pulled out the empty packet, and laughed self-consciously.

  “That’s okay, Ev,” she said, giving it up and wiping her face on her own shoulder. “You can’t take care of all of us. You… you gotta take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking a step back and releasing their hands. “Yeah. I’ll do that.” He smiled at them, that same smile he’d had as a kid, the one he’d tried to give them when the scary-stranger thing got too intense. “I’ll be fine.”

  He wanted a hug again, that moment where his skin was surrounded on all sides by people who loved him. He wanted that so bad. But his sisters were still crying, and it was time to get out of this horrible, horrible room, and he needed to say good-bye.

  “You guys got my number,” he said, nodding. “Text me the info. E-mail me. Keep me in the loop. I’ll be good.”

  He turned and opened the door, and then held it open for them to file out one by one.

  He stood there for a moment and watched them, their shoulders and body postures binding them together more than their dark eyes and diminutive height, as they turned at the end of the corridor. Then he walked down to the end and turned the other way, looking for the mental health ward, which, he understood, was a hell of a lot more pleasant.

  ETHAN shot two scenes with Chase Summers, and he’d thought the guy had probably been the prettiest of all the Johnnies models, next to Dex. His body had been toned and rangy—and Ethan liked that, he’d admit it—but that hadn’t been the whole package. The whole package had been his eyes, blue, ringed with black and intense as all hell, burning from under a secretive brow.

  Right now, those eyes were shadowed, his body was losing bulk fast, and his cheekbones looked like they’d split his skin. He sat on the foot of his bed and looked sightlessly toward the head. A small television was set up there on top of the dresser, and Fifth Element played in the attached DVD unit.

  “Heya, Chase,” Ethan said, relieved when Chase looked up with a brief smile and acknowledged his presence. Apparently he’d spent two days sleeping while Tommy had been going out of his fucking mind—a smile and a look, that
was improvement.

  “Hi, Ethan. You came!”

  “Well, yeah. Couldn’t leave a buddy hanging, right?”

  Again, that faint smile. “I’m not very good company,” he mumbled, but Ethan could see that.

  “No worries. It’s just….” And, oh God, he was going to ask a mental patient for a favor. But hopefully it would be like sex, right? And the favor would help them both. “Can I sit next to you?”

  Chase straightened his shoulders. “Yeah, sure. God, I wouldn’t mind a hug.”

  Ethan’s whole body shuddered. “Yeah, you know? Me neither. I could use a goddamned hug right now like you wouldn’t believe!”

  Maybe if Chase had been in a little less pain, he would have asked about Ethan’s, but he didn’t, and that was okay. “So scoot over and share the pillow, man. I fuckin’ love this movie!”

  “Yeah. Never gets old. Watched it a thousand times.”

  Comfort movie.

  Chase’s arm around his shoulders felt comfortable and right. That long, rangy skin-and-bones frame shuddered against Ethan’s, and Ethan closed his eyes and drank in the body contact. It was weird how something they both needed so badly didn’t cost either one of them a thing to give.

  Chase fell asleep on him, and Ethan actually nodded off himself. God, he wasn’t comfortable on Tommy’s couch. He needed to find a place—especially now that things with his sisters were all resolved.

  His heart fell a little as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He set Chase gently down and tucked the pillow that had been at their backs under Chase’s head. Chase’s hair had grown out, and you could see how it was darker blond under the stylist’s coloring. Ethan smoothed that hair back from Chase’s high forehead and dropped a kiss there, then stood and stretched.

  He almost screamed like a girl when he turned and saw a balding, squat fiftyish man standing in the doorway. The guy was wearing a really ugly brown cardigan with a T-shirt underneath that was tie-dyed and said something about the Grateful Dead, and when he saw Ethan’s startled expression, he held a finger up to his lips.

  Ethan nodded and turned to turn off the television, then followed the guy outside.

  “Hi. I’m Chase’s shrink, Dr. Stevenson, and you are….” The older man smiled hopefully, and Ethan smiled back. He was good with grown-ups.

  “Ethan—I’m a friend of Chase’s.”

  Doc Stevenson—yeah, Ethan had heard of him—nodded. “Yeah, he’s mentioned you. You are a friend.”

  Ethan smiled, pleased. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

  “You and Chase work together, don’t you?”

  Uh-oh. “Yeah. Uhm….”

  “No, no—I know what you do. No worries. I’m just wondering what your real name is.”

  Ethan swallowed. “Evan. But not many of the guys know that.”

  Doc nodded his head. “Evan—you seem pretty, I don’t know. Tender, I guess. With Chase, I mean.”

  Evan… Ethan swallowed. “I had a friend a lot like him in high school.”

  “Had?” Oh, for an older man, he did know how to be delicate and tactful.

  “He’s still a friend,” Ethan clarified, smiling reflexively. “But, well, he’s living in a place like this.” He swallowed. “Probably forever.” He had a boyfriend too, one with such dramatic bipolar that he needed observation daily, even with medication. Apparently, somewhere between Curtis’s depression and Jimmy’s mood swings, they found fragile moments of happiness. Ethan prayed for those moments sometimes, because they were probably the only reason Curtis hadn’t found a way to kill himself in a perpetually suicide-proofed room.

  Stevenson nodded again, and Ethan wondered if he ever got tired of doing that. “Okay, Evan. I’m sorry to hear that. But it sounds like you’ve had some experience dealing with mental illness, haven’t you?”

  Oh God. “Yeah, I… you know? I’m sort of talked out about this, okay?”

  Doc Stevenson closed his eyes then and grumbled something that sounded like “Oh for crying out loud,” and then opened his eyes and shook his head. “Look, kid. Don’t hurt yourself. I was just going to be relieved that Chase had another friend who was in it for the long haul. But don’t forget that if I’m on his health insurance, I’m on yours too, if you ever need to talk, okay?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Okay. That’s nice of you to offer, but I’m sort of shrink-free right now, okay? Hey, Tommy! Look, there’s Tommy! I’m gonna go say hi to Tommy, okay?”

  The gust of the good doctor’s sigh chased Ethan across the corridor as Ethan ran the hell away. Ethan didn’t care, though, and he didn’t look back. He was in no way shopping for a replacement for Dr. Uncle Stottemeyer—that was the last thing he needed.

  “Jesus, Ethan!” Tommy laughed. “Could you run away from the shrink any faster? He’s not a bad guy.”

  Ethan resisted the temptation to send a hunted look behind him. “Yeah, but me and shrinks—there’s a history. Anyway, he’s asleep, but he probably needs a good hug, okay?”

  Tommy nodded, looking sober, and Ethan hated to fuck up his day more, but he had no choice.

  “And I’ve got another couple of days on your couch. I’m sorry, man—I just had to get shit squared away with my family before I started hunting for a place, right?”

  Tommy shook his head and draped a casual arm around his shoulders. Ethan shuddered and fell into his body, just that easy. “No worries, man. You’re helping me a lot, actually, okay? And Dex said he could help you find a furnished place to start with, so you don’t have to get everything all at once, okay?”

  Ethan nodded and let Tommy take some more of his weight. “Thanks, Tango. God. I hate this, you know?”

  Tommy kissed his temple. “Yeah, I know. You like to have all your shit together. So did Chase. You don’t always get what you want. But hey—you know what you can do, right?”

  “What?”

  “Help me plan a welcome home party for him in a week or two, okay?”

  Ethan smiled. “Yeah. Yeah. That sounds awesome. When’s he coming home?”

  Tommy’s sigh shook his rock-solid little body next to Ethan’s. “In four weeks, if he’s good. He’s….” It was Ethan’s turn to drop a kiss on Tommy’s temple. “He’s fragile,” Tommy said, his voice so soft it almost didn’t register.

  “Yeah. I noticed.”

  He knew this, he thought as they clung together for a second. He knew how to hold his guys, how to draw strength from them. It was why they were his guys.

  “Hey,” Ethan asked, when they’d stepped apart, “did you give Jonah the tickets?”

  “Yeah—why’d you do that? Buy them?”

  Ethan shrugged and tried really hard to be casual. “I don’t know. He’s dragging his sister out to see this movie—I didn’t want him to wait for me or anything. And, you know. I wanted to be able to go if I got a chance.”

  Tommy squinted at him like he wasn’t making any sense. “Ethan, I told him we were hand-and-foot models.”

  Ethan grinned. “That’s a good one. I’ll remember that.”

  “No, you asshole. This kid—he looks at you and he’s got it bad. Man, you gotta tell him what you do!”

  Ethan swallowed, thought of his sisters, who were about to go start a life without him. “Just… you know. Not now, okay? I mean, right now, he’s a just a friend. I mean… we get those, right? Just friends.”

  Tommy’s face tightened, and he grunted like Ethan had elbowed him in the ribs. “Aw, fuck. Yeah.”

  “Why’s that piss you off?”

  “’Cause it means I gotta be nicer to his best fucking buddy since they were gay babies, that’s why.”

  Ethan didn’t even have to ask. There was only one “he” in Tommy’s world, and that was Chase, and Chase had one best fucking buddy since he was a gay baby. “Donnie?”

  Tommy shook his head. “Yeah. Fucking Donnie.”

  “I like Donnie. He’s nice.”

  “Yeah. He’s a fucking prince. His whole life handed to him on a platter, fucking well-ad
justed as a fucking clock. And Chase thinks he’s normal.” Tommy’s voice dropped, and the fractures from the past weeks—from worrying about the one man, as far as Ethan could tell, he’d ever really loved—started to show, and Ethan could see the exhausted, frightened man inside the faithful lover.

  “He is normal,” Ethan said gently, leaning into him, giving him more warmth. “It’s us who are freaks.”

  Tommy glared at him and wiped his eyes with his hand. “But don’t you see? We’re not freaks. Chase ain’t a freak. We’re good guys. We take care of each other. But whenever he compares himself to the almighty sainted Donnie, how’s he supposed to see himself—you answer me that?”

  Ethan swallowed, thought of all the therapy he’d had, of all he probably still needed, and of his sisters, Danni in particular, who needed to do just what he had, and invent whole new people to be. “As a work in progress,” he said with dignity.

  Tommy had a great grin, with long canines and manically joyful eyes. He turned that grin to Ethan, and suddenly Ethan felt like all his pain was worth it. He could comfort his friend.

  They hugged again, and Tommy turned down the beige corridor, and Ethan left. He stopped at the store on the way back to Tommy’s and got lots of healthy stuff for Tommy to eat. When he got to Tommy’s house, he called Dex and asked for help again. This time he was smart—he did what Tommy said. A furnished apartment. Yeah. That’s what he’d do. Not a hotel room. A furnished apartment. It was a good idea.

  Dex rang off, and he checked his phone for messages and ended up with a big goose egg.

  And that’s when it hit him.

  He’d talked to his Johnnies guys already—they wouldn’t be calling him to leave a message.

  And he didn’t have a family anymore.

  THE apartment was… plain. It was downtown, not too far from Johnnies, and not in a great area. Ethan very practically traded the car in for something less flashy, a little Honda hybrid that wouldn’t be quite so at risk in the new neighborhood. It wasn’t until he was getting his stuff out of the trunk to transfer it to the new car, standing in the brisk wind and bright sunshine of the dealership in Roseville, that he realized how much he’d loved that bright-red, superfast, superecological stupid fucking MKZ.