Double Blind

by Heidi Cullinan

  “I don’t think you’ve truly been sad over it, no. You’re weird when you talk about it, Sam. You talk almost like it happened to somebody else, like it’s just facts. You’re all wooden about it. Like if you turn to stone, it won’t hurt you. But every night until your phone says Mitch is going to bed, no matter what time it is or where you are or what you’re doing, you can’t sleep. I don’t know what the hell that has to do with your mom, but I swear to God it’s something. You and Slick both do that, whenever you brush up against your demons. You just go all funny, and it creeps me out.”

  Laura held up a hand. “Who is Slick?”

  Randy had almost forgotten she was there. “My—boyfriend. His ex was a jerk. Married, which he knew. They had a long-term affair, but the dickwad cashed in their joint savings to save his ‘real’ family.”

  Sam startled. “I didn’t know that.”

  Randy probably shouldn’t have said it. But goddamn it, he wanted this sorted out. “He came down to Vegas to gamble away all his money, and then he was going to go out to his car and blow his brains out.” Sam gasped, but Randy ignored him. “Except I met him first. But God help you if you bring up the past. With either of these two. Why do they do that? Why do they go all stony? I just want to help them, but they don’t let me. Why? Do you know? Because it’s clear they aren’t fucking going to tell me.”

  The therapist regarded Randy a moment. When she leaned forward, Randy could feel the danger coming even before she spoke.

  “I don’t know, Randy. How do you handle your demons? Maybe—to help Sam—you could tell him about how you dealt with your uncle’s passing?”

  If she’d been a man, he’d have hit her. Except that was a lie. He wouldn’t have been able to then, either.

  Because the Look wasn’t just during sex. This bitch was good. Because there it was. Right there. Space. Safe, huge, protective space.

  Twenty-two years is probably enough time to spend running. Don’t you think?

  Randy gave his inner voice the finger and surrendered.

  “You have to understand my family was all in the auto industry. Everyone. My dad, mom, aunts, uncles. We were so blue-collar it was practically a tattoo. Not so much with the smarts, either—not book smarts, anyway. When everyone lost their jobs, it hurt everybody’s pride more than anything, and it was like this cloud everybody pushed around. This big, black, fucking awful cloud. A lot of it ended up on Uncle Gary.”

  He shut his eyes, seeing it again all too clearly.

  “He was quiet, see. Big bear of a man, so he looked mean, but he couldn’t kill a cricket. Big spiders he’d have me go after, but he felt bad even for them. And he was gay. I didn’t know it at the time. I assume he was having sex, but I never knew about it. That wasn’t something he would have considered appropriate for us to talk about. I liked to think, later, he’d have helped me out when the time was right, that he knew how I was going to end up before I did, but maybe not.”

  Sam squeezed his hand. Randy squeezed back and kept going.

  “All I knew then was he really seemed to understand me, and he was kind. If my mom was on the warpath or my dad was drunk, I could go to Gary’s house, and he’d make me dinner and play poker with me or help me with my homework. Made me finish before we could play poker. Told me math was the most important thing I’d ever learn. He taught me about people, how to read them. How to ‘turn them your way’, he said, but that was just a nice way of saying how to manipulate them. He was good at it. Really good at it. He was a goddamn charmer, which was how he survived being a gay man in a working-class town full of unemployed assholes looking for someone to hit.”

  Randy shut his eyes, swimming in it now.

  “Sometimes he’d have a friend or two over, and we’d all play together. Those were the best nights. There I was, this skinny, ugly piece of shit at the table with big, tough-as-shit men. Which, of course, they weren’t. Bunch of bears, tame as all hell. Same as Gary, couldn’t hurt anybody. But there I was, playing Black Maria. They gave me my nickname, which I loved. Made everybody call me Skeet, because I was a poker hand. I was cool like Gary. I was going to be just like Gary when I grew up. Mom would get so freaked out when I said that, and I’d get mad at her. ‘What the hell’s wrong with Uncle Gary?’ Finally one day my brother said, ‘Because he’s a fag, that’s why.’ I had no idea what that meant, but I could tell it was bad, so I punched my brother in the face.”

  Randy stared at the ceiling for a while.

  “He was probably cruising when they killed him. For a while I worried—when I was old enough to get it, to understand he was gay and who all those men were and what they were giving up to play poker with a snot-nosed kid—I worried I’d gone over too much and he’d had to go out to get laid, and if I’d just stayed away, he’d still be alive.”

  He had to stop there for a minute, and he caught himself going to stone. Fuck it. Peaches, watch this, because this is how it’s fucking done. He exhaled and let the tears roll down his cheeks.

  “He took a risk for sex, maybe even for love, and he got a bad beat. I’ve known that for a long time. But it hurt, thinking I might have sent him to his death. I can’t shake it completely. Probably because I always think I could have stopped it. I would have done anything to keep that from happening. Somebody should have stopped it. People should have cared more than they did, shouldn’t have fucking said he deserved it. That was almost as hard as losing him—nobody stood up for him, so I lost everybody else too. It sucked. I was only ten years old, and everything stopped. Every fucking thing.”

  Randy took a breath. He was mad now, really fucking mad.

  “It’s just wrong, so fucking, fucking wrong, as wrong as Sam’s mom dying, as wrong as Ethan’s stupid lover stealing the money, as wrong as so many goddamned things—but this is my wrong, and when I think about it, it fucking hurts.”

  He sat there a moment, reeling until his pain faded back into his personal darkness. When he glanced up, Laura was smiling.

  “I never had a dad.”

  Randy turned to Sam, surprised, because he didn’t sound like himself. He sounded like a little boy.

  Sam wiped at his eyes. “I never had a dad. I never had an Uncle Gary. I never had anybody like that.” He bit his lip, but the tears were coming out now, just rolling, and he kept looking at Randy—at his cheeks, Randy realized. Where he hadn’t wiped his own tears away yet.

  Randy didn’t let himself touch them.

  Sam stared at the floor as he spoke. “Mom was great. She was everything to me, and I know how hard she tried. But no matter what she did, she could never be a dad. We did the big-brother programs, but they were always run through churches. The ones in Middleton that did those programs were all anti-gay, and later she told me they kept telling me stuff she could tell made me feel sad, so she pulled me. She was like your uncle, protecting me before I even knew I needed it. But it meant I never got to have a guy around outside of my uncle. Who, if you remember, is nothing at all like yours.”

  Randy made a face. “That man is a fish if ever there was one.”

  “Yeah. But I used to ache for him to say something to me.” He looked at the therapist. “I don’t know why my mom couldn’t be enough for me, but no matter how she tried, it wasn’t the same. I needed a guy to tell me I was okay. Somebody to look at, somebody to copy, like you did with your uncle. Somebody. Anybody. But there wasn’t one, not even a best friend.” He turned to Randy again, his eyes so full of longing it made Randy hurt to look at him. “I couldn’t wish away my mother. But if I could have had an Uncle Gary, even for a long afternoon—”

  He shut his eyes and tucked his head down, going quiet again.

  Randy had this weird fissure of awareness, this momentary sense that he had it, that he understood—it wasn’t his mom, it wasn’t that at all, it was…it was—

  But it was gone before he could name it. Was it…guys? Male attention? He turned to the therapist, ready to tell her to start doing her damn job here,
but she focused on Sam. “Would you tell me about your husband? You’ve spoken about him in passing, and it’s clear you love him—but if you wouldn’t mind telling me, I would be honored to hear what Mitch means to you. I would love to hear you talk about what a gift it must have been to find the person you knew you wanted to spend your whole life with.”

  When Sam spoke, he was surprisingly defensive. “Are you trying to tell me I married Mitch for a father figure?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m sorry if that’s what you heard me say, Sam. I sincerely meant to ask. It seemed a natural extension to me, because after wanting to find a male role model for so long, you have not a model but a partner. I would love to hear about him.”

  Sam relaxed and began to talk about Mitch, hesitantly at first, but the therapist was encouraging, and Sam quickly warmed to his task. He skipped the X-rated bits, Randy noted with a wry smile. Sam told her about Mitch’s proposal and their life in Iowa as they waited for Sam to finish school. With or without the gay porn, it was quite a romantic tale. Yeah, there was an age difference. Yeah, Mitch liked to cocoon Sam. But he was not his dad, or his brother, or his uncle. He was his friend and his lover. His life partner.

  The real kicker was, Mitch was better with Sam. Mitch might coddle Sam, but Sam carried Mitch too, probably more than he knew. Sam was Mitch’s rudder. He’d calmed down. He’d settled down. He still had kinky fantasies, but loving Sam and living with him had made Mitch better and stronger. Sam hadn’t changed, not that much. But Mitch had been transformed. Sam wouldn’t know the difference, because he hadn’t known him before.

  That was when Randy got it. It was right there, so obvious. He stared at Sam a minute, basking in it. So fucking obvious. So brilliant.

  “You didn’t need a role model, Sam.”

  Sam turned to Randy, disoriented and even a little irritated at being interrupted. But Randy couldn’t seem to make himself stop.

  “You didn’t need one. You want one, yeah, I get it. You should have had one, and it’s as bad as losing your mom.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sam was freezing up again, or trying to.

  Randy’d fucking had enough of this.

  “Sam, can’t you see it? That great guy? The amazing brother, the perfect dad, uncle, best friend—you had the best of all, the most amazing one you ever could have had. Because only somebody who had one that perfect, that great, could turn out like you. And you had him. You had him all along.”

  Sam shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Randy leaned forward, taking his hand. “You had you. You had that guy because you had you. Your model was you. Because you are amazing, absolutely amazing. You can’t see it, because you’re standing in it, but I see it. I see what you are to Mitch. I know what you are to me. He calls you Sunshine because you are a fucking sun to him, and honestly? You are to everybody who meets you. You are so gentle, so kind, and so strong, and so much has happened to you, so much is against you in so many ways, and yet you’re always there, shining. You’re great not because somebody showed you how to be a man. You’re a man because you showed yourself. You made yourself great. You, Sam. You.”

  Sam was crying. Fuck, Randy was crying. The therapist wasn’t, but she looked like she was working to keep herself even and professional. Which was good, because Randy had no fucking idea what anybody was supposed to say now.

  But he tried anyway.

  “Peaches, you are the best guy I know. I swear to fucking God. You’re a better guy even than Ethan. The best I’ve ever met. I’m glad you brought Mitch back to me, but I look forward to you both coming now. I love you so much. So many people do.” He squeezed his hand. “Remember that, okay? I know it doesn’t give you the dad you should have had. I know you still wanted to have somebody, a guy, some guy, even a half-rotten guy, to have him tell you what a good job you were doing when it mattered. I know. But—shit, I’m telling you now. You’re great. You’re fucking, fucking great.”

  He was a big, fat, slobbery mess by the end of that soliloquy, and Sam was too, so when he ran out of air and then words, Randy gave up and pulled Sam across the couch and into his arms.

  As they sat there, rocking from side to side, he let himself remember. He let himself remember the days he’d come home from school and somebody had hit him, when someone had made fun of him or he’d screwed up and hurt somebody else, every time when the world had been wrong and he’d gone to Uncle Gary to make it right. He replayed those moments as he held Sam.

  There had been a lot of rough spots, and a lot of mistakes. His life was a lot harder without his uncle, that much he knew. He did okay, though, in the end. He liked who he was, who he’d become, overall.

  But while he rocked Sam and wandered down memory lane, he wrote in a few more memories too. The times when he’d wished for Gary—it hurt to do it, but he was already a fucking mess, he was already so fucking exposed, how could it get worse? So he wrote them in, as if his life were a movie he could fix in the editing room. He pretended Gary hadn’t been killed. He pretended Gary had explained sex to him, had told him how to not make it hurt. He pretended Gary had told him that first fuckwad he let have him was an asshole and not to give himself away so cheaply.

  He pretended Gary had been there to take him in when his dad kicked him out, that he hadn’t had to run away and sell himself. Eventually things had worked out okay, and his experiences had made him tough and smart and lean—but he pretended for a minute he hadn’t had to do it. He pretended he’d finished school and gone to college and taken science and math classes like Gary had told him he should. He didn’t know how to pretend after that, because it would have been a different life. But he played those parts he knew damn well had been bad over, and made them better. It hurt, but it was a good hurt.

  He held Sam while he did it, and Sam really was a sun. He was warm and full of life—and he was here. He was alive.

  Ethan. He didn’t know what to do with Slick yet, didn’t know how to think about him.

  He’s here right now. And he loves you right now. You have to count it, for now.

  Randy shut his eyes, let the hurt come, and then let the sun burn it away with warmth and love.

  “He’s going to come home, Peaches. Mitch is going to come home, this time, and a lot of other times.”

  “You can’t promise that.”

  “No, I can’t guarantee you no more stupid shit is going to happen to your life.” Randy pulled Sam’s chin up so he had no choice but to look at Randy. “But I can tell you that you have the best of it, kid, and you know I always have a corner on the odds. Mitch is more likely to come home than he isn’t. And even if you get a bad beat and something happens, even if it does, you have me. And I think Ethan, probably. And Crabtree, weird as he is. You have lots of people, and you’re going to meet more at work. You never get one hundred percent odds, Sam. But your cards are fucking aces.”

  Sam’s tears spilled out, but he smiled. “I love you, Randy.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Randy saw the therapist move, and he turned toward her. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take over.”

  “That’s quite all right.” Her kind, understanding smile was very much like his uncle’s.

  Which was likely his imagination, him making it up or wanting to see it. But in that moment, in the nice, delicate little bird-egg moment? He didn’t fucking care what it was. He was taking it.

  SAM AND RANDY took their time getting home after the appointment.

  Randy wanted to go up to the top of the Stratosphere again, but Sam asked if they could take another ride on the bike, so they did that instead. They rode all the way out to Lake Mead, and then stopped for dinner on the way home.

  “I want to learn to ride a motorcycle,” Sam said as they left the restaurant.

  “Your husband would gut me if he found out I taught you how to ride.” When Sam gave him an angry look, he held up his hands. “Hey. I’m not saying he’s right or he’s wrong. I’
m telling you the truth. You should have him teach you.”

  “That would never work. He’d be too scared.” Sam kicked at the bike’s front tire. “I hate it when people point out the age difference, but you know, sometimes it is like he’s my dad. Which seriously messes with my head, I’ll tell you. I don’t want that. But I don’t know how to stop it.”

  Randy leaned on the bike. “He’s scared, Peaches. He’s as scared of losing you as you are of losing him. He hates that he has to be gone. Don’t think he didn’t try six different ways to make this work without his having to leave. Hell, he took a job for Crabtree so you could go see this therapy lady.”

  “I know. But I want… I want…” His jaw set in determination. “I want to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Because I want to know how, and because I don’t need his permission to do it. Because he’s not my dad. I’m my dad, like you said. I say I get to learn.”

  Me and my goddamned fucking mouth. Randy thought frantically, trying to figure out how to get out of this one. Then he decided there wasn’t any way out but through.

  “Okay, but you’re telling him, and trust me, I’ll know that you’ve done it. Not ask—tell. If you’re not man enough for that, you’re not man enough to ride.”

  “Okay,” Sam agreed, but his tone told Randy he had at least a few days’ reprieve before he had to give Sam a lesson.

  He still spent the whole ride into town trying to decide how and when and under what conditions he could do this, or whether he should hire some sort of professional. He could see the argument both ways, and he could tell he was going to go back and forth on it for a while.

  He wondered if it would be worth asking Slick what he thought. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. He hurried home a little faster, both to ask him and because after the big raw day of digging up the past, he was looking forward to sparring with him.

  But when they got home, Randy found a note on the kitchen table.

  For a moment his heart stopped. He’s gone.

  The world tipped sideways until his eyes fell on the actual words.