By Any Other Name (7 page)

Of course, there was no other place for clumsy Adrien to fall. Twin screams rent the air. Sam was tugging on him again, and small as he was Andy had no recourse but to go where the larger man was pulling him. They met Anthony and “E” at the edge of the street, and as Sam turned to bring the other two up to speed on the situation, Andy wrenched his arm loose. Running up the path to the door, he flung himself at the front door. Beating at the unyielding surface, Andy continued to scream.

“No, no, I didn’t mean to hurt him, not like that…”
“E” wrapped strong arms around him, picking him up and carrying him away from the door. Andy quieted for a while, until the paramedics arrived along with the police. He heard one say something about a deep puncture wound just as another pair wheeled out a gurney with Michael strapped to it, head shorn down to the scalp on one side, eyes closed, and whole body still as death. Then he started to scream again, and didn’t stop until the second set of medics shot him full of something that made the whole world seem soft and pretty. Before his eyelids got too heavy to hold open, Sam came over to check on him.
“Holy shit, Andy, you’re scaring the crap outta me. Michael’s gonna be okay, and Devon too. Adrien’s the one who has us worried right now, but you know my bro. He’ll be up on his feet, ready for me to immortalize yet another of his pratfalls on “Stupid Shit Adrien Does” again in no time. Right?”
Andy tried to fight through the inexorable pull of the drugs to offer Sam some comfort, but the only word he could form was a rampant denial of the whole situation.
“No, no, no, no…”
****
“What shit in my mouth? No, scratch that. What died in my mouth, thereby releasing all its bodily fluids to create a fetid pool of noxious waste around its slowly decomposing body, and why the fuck did whoever I was with last night let me drink so much?”
Speaking as he fought to open his eyelids against the heavy weight fighting, with equal intensity, to shove them closed again, somehow gave Michael the extra oomph he needed to crack one eye open. The room he was in was at once, completely foreign and all too familiar. He was in a hospital room and damned if he knew how or why. He lay still for a moment to run a quick inventory of his person. There were no suspicious bandages. All his limbs were present and accounted for. Michael decided to sit up and get someone to come give him some answers about where he was, and what he was doing here. As a result of his effort to push up on one elbow in preparation for sitting up, a wicked shaft of white pain lanced through his head.
Groaning and attempting to cradle his head in his hands brought another unpleasant revelation.
“Oh shit, I’m still in the military. Fuck, the whole thing with Andy was just a dream. Damn it.”
A husky chuckle sounded off to his left.
“In fact, Michael, you’ve been out of the military for quite a while now, and your new hairdo has nothing to do with your career choice.”
Rolling gingerly to his side, Michael gaped at the classically beautiful, dark haired woman sitting calmly next to him knitting what appeared to be a baby bootie. It might also have been a hat, or the start of a very lumpy blanket. Michael couldn’t rightly tell. The thick, honey rich tones of her sultry contralto voice were as familiar to him as the vividly blue eyes and gentle smile she turned his way. He blinked, unable to reconcile her appearance with his recollection of living in Syracuse, New York.
“Mama? What in the world are you doing north of the Mason-Dixon Line in the dead of winter?”
Donna Jean Rose gave him a long, level look out of her clear blue eyes.
“David called and told me you’d been taken to the hospital. Where else would I be?”
Michael blinked at her.
“Mama? Would you please fetch David for me? I’d like to ask him a thing or two.”
Nodding in affirmation, his mother stuck her tongue between her teeth as she glared fiercely at the—thing—she was knitting.
“Of course I’ll go get him for you. Just let me finish this here row… if I stop now I’ll forget where I was and have to pull the whole thing to pieces and start again.”
She looked up at that point, with her mouth curving up in a smile.
“Then again, it might be best if I did just start over. I’m not sure what I was trying to make in the first place.”
Pulling the needles carefully from the light blue yarn, she tossed the mess onto the bed next to Michael.
“Here, son, you just grab onto that loose bit at the end there and pull until all the stitches come out. It’ll give you something to do while I go find your rascal of a brother.”
Then she was gone, and Michael was staring at what was possibly the ugliest bit of knitting he’d ever seen. The color was nice, somewhere between summer sky and silver. The last time he’d seen his mother, they’d been screaming at one another about David. She’d been trying to insist that David go stay with their grandfather, and David had been refusing to even speak the old man’s name. Michael had tried to intervene. Without a doubt, that had been one of the poorer decisions in his life. He and his mama were exactly alike in the temper department. Instead of explaining why David was refusing to go, Michael had resorted to raising his voice until his mama was so damn mad she kicked him out.
Oh, he’d known she only meant for the night, but he was too damn proud to go back, and so he’d packed himself and David onto a Greyhound bus headed as far away as his money could reach. They ended up in Syracuse, and could have ended up as two more runaway statistics but for the timely intervention of Lynn Jimenez. Looking back Michael could see how painfully young his mother had been—she was only twelve years older than him, and fifteen older than David. It was no wonder she’d so quickly signed over guardianship paperwork when Lynn had requested it.
Fifteen minutes later he’d pulled the yarn thing into a long strand of gorgeous silvery-blue yarn. In fact, he’d started to roll it into a ball, all the while wondering why it wasn’t already in a ball at one end, because that seemed the right thing to do with a lot of loose yarn. However, he had not made much progress in figuring out why he was in a hospital, or why the hell his brother had called Donna Jean. Consequently, as soon as his brother pushed open the door to his room, Michael lit into him.
“What the fuck, David?”
David’s thin shoulders hunched and his head drooped.
“Devon woke up right away, but you didn’t, and nobody knew for sure if you would. I thought she ought to get to say goodbye if you weren’t gonna wake up.”
Michael’s stomach did a slow roll as he reassessed the situation. Gathering up the fraying reins of his self-control, he tried again.
“I’m sorry I yelled, David. What—Jesus, I don’t even know why I’m here, or even where here is.”
David blinked their mother’s blue eyes at him, and then pointed to a little white board on the wall opposite Michael’s bed. Marked on it in neat block letters were the name of the hospital where he was as well as the name of his nurse and aide. Michael gave a wry half grin.
“Sorry ‘bout that Doodle-bug—my head’s not quite screwed on straight right now.”
David blanched bone white before sitting down abruptly in the chair so recently vacated by their mother.
“Oh my god, Michael, you haven’t called me Doodle-bug in over seven years… not since before we took the long bus ride. I-I don’t know where to start. Um. Adrien says you went to give Devon his phone. You didn’t trust Dieterman, or something, and you wanted to check. But, he got the drop on you and koshed you over the head with something. Then he decided he was gonna practice on you before he tried to open up Devon’s head, because though he’d practiced before, he hadn’t used a power tool. He told Adrien he wanted to be sure he got it right.”
David’s voice came out flat and thin as he curled his thin shoulders even farther in.
“He-he shaved your head, and gave you the drugs too, but you tricked him, you did, ‘cause you’d already called us!”
His eyes shining with the unabashed heroworship Michael had never felt worthy of, David continued.
“So Adrien ran into the house and fell on a glass sculpture thing and that guy felt bad, because Adrien’s so little and he let him call an ambulance and even helped him until they came. I gotta admit that I don’t really like that part. I can’t just hate him for what he did to you when he tried to help Adrien and he let himself get arrested and put in a nuthouse so Adrien wouldn’t die. I really wanted to hate him when you wouldn’t wake up, but Adrien and Devon say I’m not allowed to. I guess now it’s okay, though. You woke up, so everything’s okay now.”
Then David put his head down on the edge of Michael’s bedrail and wept. Michael reached a hand through the cold, hard plastic of the rail to lay a hand on his brother’s unruly mop of curls.
“It’ll be okay, David. I’m gonna be okay. Shhh, don’t cry. I’m gonna be okay.”
Michael needed to find a way to talk to Lynn without David present. He didn’t trust Donna Jean not to tell his brother, and there was no reason for David to ever know the truth about who their father really was, or exactly why Michael had taken him and run. Opening weary, stinging eyes, he searched the emblems on the inner surface of the bedrail until he found the one that would call a nurse or aide in to assist him. He’d get someone to get Lynn for him. He just hoped she got here before his mother came back from wherever she’d crawled off to.

When Andy came back to himself, he was sitting on the low bed of a little room. The door was propped open, and a plain, but kind faced black man sat in the open door. He sat, crouched over in what appeared to be a slightly uncomfortable position, his legs thrust out in front of him and his well-muscled backside resting in a too little chair. Andy knew the backside was wellmuscled because the man also worked at a local nursery where Andy had purchased three new trees for his yard last spring. When he’d put the trees into the back of the pickup truck Andy had rented to take his trees home, Andy had rather enjoyed the view. His name was Arthur, and he was reading Andy’s favorite magazine about home improvements.

Andy blinked at Arthur a few times, swallowed thickly and then burst into a coughing fit. Arthur immediately dropped his magazine, picked up a yellow plastic pitcher from the little cart on the other side of him. He carefully poured water into a flimsy, disposable plastic cup.

“Here you go, Andy. Sip it slowly so you don’t choke.”
Of course, since he’d been told not to choke, the first thing Andy did was accidently suck some of the cold water right into his windpipe. Once he’d stopped coughing, he shot Arthur a disgruntled look.
“Seriously, at the risk of seeming redundant, you should never tell someone you’re handing a beverage or some sort of food to not to choke. It’s like putting a hex on them or something. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”
Arthur’s eyes crinkled up at the corners.
“I can’t say that the idea has ever been put to me quite like that before. And before we go any further in this little heart to heart, I’ve been told to let you know that your boyfriend is okay. Lynn Jimenez herself came up to let us know that you were to be told that immediately. Don’t tell anyone I told you though… that’s a bit above my pay grade here. I just know the nurse who’s on duty tonight is new to this floor, and they stuck her up here by herself with a full ward. Since you’re only on “as needed” meds, you may not even see her tonight unless your one-to-one—and yes, that would be me—calls for her… and Mrs. Jimenez was quite adamant that you know right away. She also said to let you know she’d get the ball rolling to spring you first thing tomorrow.”
Andy smiled. Mrs. Jimenez was the nicest person in the world to have on your side.
“Thank you. Did she say anything about Adrien?”
Arthur shook his head.
“No, I’m sorry. I know her son had to go to surgery, she told me that herself, but I don’t know anything else.”
A golden balloon of happiness swelled into being in Andy’s chest as Arthur shared the good news about Michael. However, Andy’s meltdown earlier had far more to do with feeling guilty about his unrelenting jealousy in regards to Adrien. Consequently, his feeling of joy deflated like the sad, week-old thirtieth birthday party balloon of a pretty and vain gay man as soon as Andy learned that Adrien still might not be out of the woods.
Arthur pressed his large, roughly callused hand against the skin of Andy’s hand.
“I’m due for my break in a bit, Andy. I figure if I should happen to run into Mrs. Jimenez on my way down to the cafeteria, and she should happen to tell me how Adrien is doing then I just might let that information slip while I’m talking to myself after you’re asleep.”
A wide white slash of a smile flashed across Arthur’s dark face, and Andy wondered what he’d done right in some previous life to have earned enough good karma to have this particular man show up as his aide tonight. Whatever it was, he’d be trying hard to duplicate it in this life, because he could surely use more good things like this in his life.
“Thank you, Arthur. I’m sorry I never stopped to talk to you before when I was at the nursery.”
Watching Arthur laugh was like watching a sunrise; as he tipped his head back the sleek muscles of his throat and shoulders bunched and flexed beneath the mahogany sheen of his silky seeming skin.
“Why would a pretty young thing like you think to stop and chat with an old geezer like me?”
Andy shook his head hard. His hair whipped over his eyes in a froth of blond negation.
“I never thought of you as old. I just-I’m shy. I never expect people to like me, and I don’t like it when I try to make friends and they don’t want me.”
Arthur’s eyes crinkled at the edges again, but this time his mouth curved down in a pinched looking arc at the same time. As the expression swept across his savagely noble face, Andy felt that golden balloon in his chest lose the last bit of air holding it aloft.
“Is it okay for me to go to sleep now? I’m awfully tired.”
Arthur nodded gravely as the cinnamon brown shade of his eyes darkened briefly. He picked up his magazine again.
“Sure thing, Andy. Don’t worry, about the age thing… I was just teasing you. I’m thirty-two, and sometimes that feels old to me. Yeah, you get some sleep. I’ll be here all night except for my break, so you don’t have to worry about some stranger watching you sleep, okay? Mrs. Jimenez didn’t want anyone bothering you, so she made them put you on a one-to-one. I’ll make sure to talk to you before I leave in the morning if you’re asleep when I come back from break.”