By Any Other Name (8 page)

Eventually, David cried himself to sleep. He snuffled and sighed in his sleep the same way he did as a kid, and Michael’s heart stuttered for a second. God, who’d have thought he would do such a good job getting the kid mostly raised? David mumbled, letting Michael know he was truly asleep, because he only ever did that when he was down for the count.

An aide popped her head in the door to see what Michael needed, and promised to try to locate Lynn for him. She came back in twenty minutes to let him know the nurse had placed a call to Lynn and they were waiting for a reply. Lynn herself showed up twenty minutes after that, her face drawn with exhaustion. For just a moment worry lines were clearly etched deep around the corners of her mouth and eyes, giving her a pinched look she rarely wore. Then she smiled at him, dispelling the strained look.

“You called for me, mijo?”
Michael cut straight to the chase.
“I don’t understand why she’s here. I want

you to keep her away from David. He doesn’t need to know about all that crap, Lynn. I got him out before anything happened to him.”

“You know I don’t agree with you about this, Michael. He’s old enough now. You should tell him. As to why she’s here—the woman is your mother. And she was just as much a victim as you were. I kept in contact with her. She’s been in therapy for years, you know. She’s even dating now—a nice man who treats her decently, unlike your father. Mijo, would it kill you to give her the chance she never had before?”

Michael grunted, his face pulling into such an extreme grimace he felt like a caricature of himself or a gargoyle. Lynn walked softly across the floor, stopping at his bedside to lay her small brown hand on his cheek.

“It won’t kill you, you know. I give you this choice. You can tell David, or I will. She’s come a long way, but I don’t think she’s ready to keep that kind of secret. Even if she were willing to try, I wouldn’t ask it of her. That’s a killing secret, Michael. You were right to keep him safe, mijo. But the hardest part of being a parent is learning when to let your children grow up… and he was always your little boy, wasn’t he? That man may have donated the DNA to give David a body, but you were always his little papa. Don’t think that Carlos and I didn’t know this. It’s time, mijo, time to be just his big brother, and past time to let him know who his father is.”

Regardless of the truth in her words, Michael couldn’t bring himself to agree. Turning his eyes away, he clenched his jaw until the howl of rage he wanted to let loose curled back up in the dark corner of his mind it normally lived in.

She squeezed his hand hard, leaning down to buss a kiss across his cheek. The warm scent of gardenias and Lynn wrapped around him. His heart still felt as though it had been scraped across miles and miles of gravel-strewn road, but the heavy weight forcing him to take shallow breaths to keep from sobbing seemed to have lifted. He squeezed back, careful of his bigger size and greater strength.

She nodded brusquely, her curling hair sliding into her eyes where it had come loose from her hair ties.

“Alright, mijo, but make no mistake about this. I will tell him tomorrow. I’ll send Donna to a hotel tonight, so she can get some rest. But, she’s not going away. She moved here two months ago, mijo. She wanted to be close to you. She lives in Auburn.”

Michael felt the words like a solid fist to the solar plexus. For such a small person, Lynn Jimenez packed one hell of a punch. Michael grinned crookedly at her.

“Geez, Mrs. J, don’t be so delicate about it next time. Just rip that Band-Aid right off as quick as you can.”

Lynn laughed softly, touching David’s curls with a feather soft touch before planting another kiss on Michael’s cheek.

Arthur was as good at keeping his word as he was at picking out the perfect tree or shrub or plant at the nursery. He woke Andy up just before he had to leave in the morning, and told him that Adrien had pulled though his surgery with flying colors. When Arthur talked to Lynn, he told her that after she left someone had moved Andy up to the psych floor. He told Andy that the fire, which lit up in the depths of her eyes as he relayed that bit of knowledge was truly frightening. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket, and set it down next to Andy.

“I’m going to head out to change of shift now… I have a few minutes still to get there, so if I should happen to leave my phone here, and then hurry back in a moment or two, I wouldn’t know if you just happened to put your number in there. And of course, once you’re discharged, if I run into you somewhere else, I wouldn’t be breeching any hospital policies.”

Arthur winked broadly at him, and then turned to walk slowly out of the room. Andy scooped up the phone, quickly pressed his digits in and hit send before calling out to Arthur.

“Oh, Mr. Aide, I think you left your phone. I’d hate for you to get in trouble.”
When Arthur turned around, Andy winked back at him, one hand extended with the phone in it. Arthur walked briskly back into the room, accepting his phone with a serious expression.
“Thanks, Andy. I’d hate to lose this job. It means the world to me.”
Andy nodded. “I see that it does. Goodbye Arthur. I hope to only run into you at the nursery from here on out.”
Arthur shook his head. “I hope the next time I see you is somewhere other than here, but I’d be thrilled to see you more than at the nursery, Andy. You’re good people.”
Then he was gone out the door, and Andy was left waiting for Mrs. Jimenez to grease the wheels of the hospital’s bureaucracy. Less than an hour later, a frazzled looking woman with a pen sticking out of the bun at the back of her head showed up. After introducing herself as his ombudsman, she proceeded to ask him a slew of questions about how he’d been treated in the hospital and ask if he had any questions.
“Well, for fuck’s sake, of course I have questions. Why did they shove me in the psych ward? Where is Michael, Michael Phillip Rose, that is? Where is Mrs. Jimenez, for that matter, and most pressing of all, what the hell is that gelatinous mass leering menacingly at me from my breakfast tray?”
Andy ended his diatribe by pointing a quivering finger at the scary crap he’d set across the room on the floor and drawing his feet entirely up on the bed. Cheryl Rixsom, his ombudsman, was laughing out loud by the time Andy finished his list of questions. He eyed her warily before reaching up to push his bangs out of his face… only to realize that the damn haircut he should never have gotten still hadn’t grown out, so he didn’t need to push his hair back. Of course the businessman’s cut hadn’t grown out; he had only had his hair cut yesterday morning. Just because a lifetime’s worth of events had been rolled up in a single twenty-four hour time span did not mean the actual passage of time had altered. Damn it. Shaking his head to clear it of the whole too-shorthair issue Andy addressed the most important issue at hand.
“When can I get out of here?”
When Cheryl smiled at him, the white tips of her teeth seemed to lengthen hungrily before his eyes. Andy’s throat dried out in a flash while the fine hairs at the back of his neck stood on end. Holy crap, Batman, if he were that little chipmunk from “Enchanted” he’d be pooping out a pellet or two in response to the
Carcharodon carcharias, aka Great White Shark gleam in her eyes and on her oh so white teeth
.

“Well, seeing as you should never have been on this floor at all, I imagine I can get you moved to where you should have been rather quickly. Let me go drop a few money-maker phrases like inappropriate care and malpractice up at the nurse’s station and I’ll see what we can do, okay?”

She whirled off in a fuzzy halo of strawberry blond hair and swirling batik skirts, leaving a lingering scent of patchouli behind. Andy giggled softly in the wake of her departure as the meaning behind the words she’d just spoken to him became clear. Cheryl had no intention of snapping those razor sharp chompers on his skinny twink heiney. Nope.

As he chewed on his lip for a moment, Andy stared at the open door of his room. There was a stranger sitting just outside his door looking distinctly uncomfortable in the wake of Cheryl’s bandying about the words inappropriate care and malpractice. The slim young man looked up, and catching Andy’s eye, shrugged. When he spoke, his voice was a surprisingly deep, irritatingly smooth bass.

He accompanied his question with a bobble-head like shake-nod-shake of his head before reaching up to push his hair out of his eyes. Andy leveled his best Darth Vader type death stare at the guy simply because he had longer hair and lacked any resemblance of fondness for all things Cheryl, aka, the ombudsman. The twentyish, auburn haired man seemed heedless of Andy’s fulminating glare. With a deliberate huffing noise, Andy pointedly turned his back. He figured the smell of the guy’s Axe cologne would ramp up from slightly overwhelming to throat-choking if he came any closer, so it was safe to assume he didn’t need to keep an eye on him.

This was the third time Michael had woken in a hospital with David by his side. Thank god he’d managed to keep David in the visitor’s chair every time. His little brother sprawled on his back in the funky plastic covered lounger-convertible bed with his mouth hanging open and a thin trail of drool falling onto his shirt. This was the stuff blackmail was made of. Michael snagged his cell from where Lynn had placed it earlier on his overbed table and quickly snapped several shots. They would make prime April Fool’s Day cards in a month or so. David snorted, snuffled, and swiped a hand across his face as he rolled onto his side. Blinking and sleep mussed, he looked almost as young as he had the day Michael dragged him onto a Greyhound bus heading north. An easy smile stretched Michael’s mouth wide before he cleared his throat.

“Hey, bro. You wanna take my card and go get yourself some real food? You slept right through breakfast.”

David blinked some more before scrubbing the heels of both hands across his eyes.
“Urk. Yes. I need coffee. I think something died in my mouth.”
After a beat of silence, a deep rolling belly laugh rushed out of Michael’s mouth to fill the sterile, white space of the room. David’s eyes crinkled at the corners for a moment before his whole face crumpled.
“I-I thought I lost you, Michael. I—”
Michael slashed his hand through the air.
“Never gonna happen, Davy Gravy. I’ll be around irritating your ass when we’re both creeping around on cool-ass canes and need Depends for when we can’t schlep our old behinds to the toilet fast enough.”
Choking out a watery laugh, David nodded. A shaky little smile crept around the corners of his mouth while he rifled through Michael’s wallet for the cash card. Extracting the slim rectangle of blue plastic, he lifted his chin to meet Michael’s gaze.
“I’m holding you to that.”
With a circular motion of his wrist, Michael gestured him closer until he could cup David’s cheek in his hand.
“You do that. Oh, and bring me back some decent coffee. The stuff they served with breakfast tasted like tepid brown canal water.”
David wrinkled his nose.
“Ewww.”
Michael patted his cheek.
“Yeah. Definitely ewww.”
Straightening up, David flashed an impish smile at his brother. Doing his best Vanna White impersonation he presented the card. The little turkey even waggled his eyebrows.
“Have no fear, bro. I will hunt down the wild java bean and bring you back a worthy cup of the good stuff.”
With that complete dorkfest displaying the many hours he’d spent watching Wheel of Fortune, David skipped out the door for all the world as if he were eleven rather than nineteen. Lying back against the raised head of his bed, Michael gave himself over to laughter once again. He was still chuckling five minutes later when the door of his room whooshed open to reveal a very wan looking Andy sitting in a wheelchair being pushed by a tall blond Valkyrie.
Lips parted, hands clenched around the cool plastic of the bedrails, Michael drank in the presence of the pale, slender blond in the wheelchair. How the man managed to appear mouthwateringly sexy in a grey and maroon hospital pajama set baffled Michael. Even with bluish black smudged half-circles of exhaustion marring the skin under his eyes while he reached up to fuss with his spiky bangs, the sight of him pushed all the air out of Michael’s lungs in a hissing rush. The winter ice blue of those eyes cut right into the crevices and dead end canyons of Michael’s brain. His mouth moved; jaw, lips, teeth and tongue combining into the shape he loved best of everything and best of all. As the sound rolled out into the room rich and mellow as a fine old whiskey, Michael knew he’d said too much already.
“Andy.”

The husky tone of Michael’s aged whiskey voice rolled over Andy, lulling him for the barest second before the full impact of what that damned maniac had done hit him like a clenched fist to the balls. Shit. Andy’s fingers twitched on the cracked plastic of the navy blue arm rests of the chair Cheryl had insisted he “sit his ass in” before she would transport him off the floor which housed the psych ward. He must have made a sound—it couldn’t have been much, but undeniably probably sounded as though someone were removing his tonsils. Without anesthetic. Though his anus.

Cheryl’s hand reached forward from behind him, gripping his shoulder lightly before smoothing down the upper part of his arm. The warm scent of her patchouli wrapped around him, reminiscent of Mrs. Tophel, his third foster mother. Letting his eyes slide shut, Andy pretended, just for a moment, that he was sitting in the corner of her breakfast nook. He’d always felt so safe there with the broad expanse of the scarred wooden table between him and the world.

Michael cleared his throat.
“Andy?”
This time the word was empty of all those

unfathomable depths and strangely stalking fish, which seemed to be made up of alternating parts shadow, bone, and deep-sea phosphorescence. Damn Michael and his obsession with Jacques Cousteau documentaries, and while he was at it Andy figured he’d better damn his own brain for equating those things with the way the hulking, tousled, fucking dishwater blond could pack enough meaning into just Andy’s name to fill the whole of the Atlantic. Understanding that Michael of all people would find it an acceptable reason to put off answering, Andy cleared his throat.