Proof of Angels (4 page)

G
ASPAR PULLED HIS SUITCASE BEHIND HIM AS HE
walked briskly toward the taxi line outside the airport baggage claim at LAX. Once at the end of the line, he stopped, jammed the handle down on his suitcase, and sat on it. Finally at rest, he pulled out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat sluicing down over his caramel-colored cheekbones, collecting in his five o'clock shadow that appeared to be much grayer than his jet-black hair.

The past two days had been a blur of surgeries, patient complaints over rescheduled procedures and appointments, Cathleen's cries and worries over her ailing brother, babies crying in the night, airports, mad dashes across terminals all to get here.
Here. Los Angeles
.
Again
. It hadn't really hit him till he exited the sliding doors of the airport. Till he inhaled the air, though it was not so different from the noisome air he'd left back at LaGuardia. He hadn't fully embraced what it meant to be back in the city that brought with it so many
memories, not to mention the life he now had. The life he could hardly have imagined for himself just five years earlier.

Ever since he'd met Cathleen, her sick boy Colm, and her brother Sean, life as he knew it had been a similar blur—a mad dash from one destination to another. From ER to ER. From New York to Italy. Then New York to Los Angeles. Then back to New York. Then India. Then marriage. And all of it was leading him to this moment. Every moment he now lived as a husband, a father, a friend once again could all circle back to a moment on a hillside in Los Angeles. Everything he had now—this new life—Cathleen, the boys, a marriage, a home. Every blessed thing was because of what had happened on that hill that overlooked the city.

Gaspar remembered it all.

He didn't recall it being so damn hot though. But then again, the last time he'd arrived here he wasn't wearing cashmere. This time he had left on an exceptionally cold New York spring morning. The thick purple sweater that covered his lavender plaid button-down—both items Cathleen had laid out for him for the trip—were far too heavy for the scorching L.A. heat.

“You'll get cold on the plane, Gaspar,” Cathleen insisted as she pulled clothes out of their closet and nervously packed Gaspar's bag, and added things Gaspar knew he wouldn't wear or didn't need. But Gaspar never felt the need to disagree with her anymore. He had learned early on that whether or not Cathleen was right, she always seemed to win. By not arguing with her, he was saving himself time, and the world much needed oxygen.

He laughed at what she would say now if she saw him like
this. He looked ridiculous amid the women in stilettos and short skirts, grown men in skinny jeans and ripped T-shirts. L.A.'s hallmark, he thought, was not the beach, the movies, or celebrities, but its inhabitants' eternal state of adolescence; the summertime of everyone's life.

It was sweltering, but it would be undignified if he stripped down in front of everyone. He was hoping the cab line would move, and soon he would feel the AC. He was anxious. His foot tapped on the sidewalk. He looked at his watch over and over. It was nearly 2
P
.
M
. It would be 3
P
.
M
. by the time he got to the hospital. There was no reason to rush, really. Sean had been lying alone in a hospital bed for six weeks.
Six weeks
. Gaspar shook his head as he rolled the words around in his mind. An hour, a half hour, it probably didn't matter much at this point. But it mattered to Gaspar. He wanted to be there now. Sean's self-imposed isolation had gone on long enough.

Although it was unlike him to force his way through a line, Gaspar stood up, pulled sharply on the handle of his bag, and walked past the head of the taxi line and out into the driving lane, holding his hand up as any New Yorker would.

A cab swooped in beside him. Gaspar, wasting no time, threw his bag in the backseat and shouted, “Good Samaritan, 1225 Wilshire Boulevard.” As the car sped away past the open-mouthed and indignant passengers waiting for cabs, Gaspar tore his sweater off and ripped off his tie.

He wasn't in New York anymore.

Sean had been asleep when Gaspar walked in. The first thing Gaspar did was look at Sean's vitals. Everything appeared normal. But then he looked at his friend's face, and there
was nothing normal about him. Lines had deepened around Sean's eyes over the past three years. His flesh was no longer soft and boylike. His oceanic waves of auburn hair had been shaved for the surgery that released the pressure in his skull and exposed the burned flesh on the outer edges of his face and neck. Gaspar could picture what the scar beneath the bandage wrapping Sean's head looked like. His right ear appeared to have melted into the side of his head. But Gaspar knew it looked worse than it was. The swelling would subside, and after a couple more surgeries he might even have an ear that looked somewhat normal. Both of Sean's hands were in bandages. His legs were both in casts, but one was elevated. His head and back were in a stabilizing brace.

“Rest, Sean. Rest,” Gaspar whispered.

Gaspar put his hand on Sean's chest. He was not doing so as a doctor, as a person looking for a heartbeat or a sign of life. Gaspar needed no such proof. Gaspar wanted Sean to know that someone was there. That someone knew Sean's heart. That he wasn't alone any longer. But if he had to be honest, Gaspar wanted some reassurance, too. If he had his way, he would have hugged him, wrapped his arms around his wayward relative. But Sean could not be embraced. There was no part of Sean that any person could wrap one's arms around.

Sean felt the hand and woke to see Gaspar standing over him.

“Took ya long enough,” Sean said with a smile before opening his eyes to even see it was Gaspar.

“I tried, but you know that L.A. traffic,” Gaspar said with a mock shrug.

“I thought it would be days, maybe a week. How'd you get away?” Sean said weakly, barely getting the words out.

“Are you kidding me? I had no choice. As soon as I told your sister what had happened she all but dragged me out of the hospital. And believe me, if she could have, she would have launched me here on a rocket. Once the plans were in her hands, I'm afraid, I lost—”

“Control . . .” Sean finished Gaspar's sentence, and they both laughed until Gaspar stopped suddenly and seriously added, “She worries about you. We all do.”

Sean didn't say anything for a few minutes. It was a heavy silence. Gaspar could tell that Sean was holding back what he desperately wanted to say. Gaspar felt the same way. It hadn't always been this way. Talking used to come easily to the two friends, but both were tired of jokes and false pleasantries. It would be pointless. Both knew neither man would say it. And instead they would fill the air with vacuous words. If Sean said, “I'm fine,” Gaspar knew it would be a lie and Gaspar would argue it, and eventually Sean would have to concede that he needed help. A lot of help.

“I'm scared, Doc.”

“I know, Sean.”

Gaspar looked down at Sean and took in the whole of him. He was still massive, long and wide. There was nothing diminutive about him. Even after all the surgeries, the coma, the weight loss, Sean's basic structure was mammoth. His shoulders jutted out wide, taking up the majority of the hospital bed. His legs looked even larger, the width of small tree trunks in their casts.

A gentle giant
. That's how Cathleen had described him to Gaspar a long time ago. But Gaspar knew better.

A small tear crested from Sean's eye. It made a track
behind his ear and flowed along the edges of his bandaged head before falling on the pillow.

Gaspar pretended not to see. Sean pretended not to have shed it.

“I'm broken, Gaspar.”

Gaspar nodded. A lump swelled in his throat. If he spoke now, he would reveal all his cards. Show Sean he had been bluffing the whole time. That he wasn't up for any games. He wasn't as strong and as funny as his friend thought he was.

Gaspar swallowed hard and composed himself. “Bones heal, Sean. They take time. Six months, maybe a year, you won't even remember feeling so badly. You'll be back on them sooner than you think.”

“I'm not talking about the bones.”

“Sean, it is just going to take time.”

“That's all I got, Doc. From here on out. It's just time. Me until the end of this life. Nothing but time in between. And I'm broke.”

“Sean, I thought you said they'll pension you. You'll have a paycheck.”

“I'm not talking that type of broke. For a guy who gets paid the big bucks, you're not too quick on the uptake, ol' man.”

“I blame it on age, the children, and lack of sleep.”

Sean smiled and then tried to shake his head, but remembered he couldn't.

“Kids.” Sean coughed. “Kids.”

“Sorry . . . I . . . Sean . . . I don't know what to say . . . how to make this . . . better. Tell me what you want. What can I do? What can make your life better?”

“You know, I've been thinking a lot about that lately. In
fact, all I do now is think about that question. God knows I've got the time to think about it,” Sean said, waving his bandaged hand around the room. “I sort of came to a conclusion. I sort of figured something out.”

“Oh?” Gaspar said, grabbing a chair and pulling it up beside the bed.

“Long before this fire, long before all that we went through with Colm, not just back in L.A., but all the years before then, I was broken. Something wasn't right. I mean, I walked around. My arms worked. My legs worked. My mouth sure as hell worked . . . ,” Sean said with a wink.

Gaspar smiled and nodded.

“But I didn't. I didn't work. Something was fundamentally broken in me. I've been sitting in here and thinking
what if
. . .
what if
. . . I don't know . . . God . . . or whoever is calling the shots upstairs . . . knows it already, too. Knows I am just a screwup. Knows I am broken all the way down to the studs. I was formed like that old house I jumped from. I was just an explosion waiting to happen.”

“Sean, you've been through a lot. You're just feeling down,” Gaspar said, trying to assuage his feelings.

“No, no. It's not that. I've been depressed before. I've been sad. This isn't like that. I just know this. I know this. No matter what I try to do, what I try to be, wherever I try to go, it's always the same answer:
You're broken, Magee. Call it. Throw in the towel
. The universe has been givin' me signs. Year after year. Screwup after screwup.”

“Are you saying you're suicidal? Sean . . . if you are . . . we can help you. Cathleen and I can help you . . . the hospital can help you.”

“No. No. I'm not finished yet . . .”

“I'm sorry. I'll shut up now. Go on,” Gaspar said while adjusting his tortoiseshell glasses with his forefinger, pushing them back up on the bridge of his nose, though they were already perfectly placed.

“I've been thinking. I have been broken. But I've also been thinking I can get better. I can
be
better. I think I can finally do something—really—do something about it. For a long time I haven't been honest. Not with you. Not with Cathleen. Not with anyone. Not even the people at my meetings. I'd tell them I am an alcoholic. I've been giving different reasons to different people for so many years for why I do what I do that I actually started to believe my own bullshit. I actually convinced myself that I drank because of nine/eleven, or because my mom died, or because I didn't have a dad, or because of this bs or that bs. Me and everybody else, right? Doesn't everybody have their own bag of crap they have to carry around? Look at my sister. The girl never complained. Never drank. She was in the same apartment with me. Lived the same life, and in some ways she had it that much harder, and she didn't drink. She didn't feel sorry for herself. And I've never told anyone this. No one, Gaspar, not a soul, so I am telling you now: I think I know what is breaking me. Keeps breaking me. What's keeping me broken.”

“Sean, it's okay. It's okay.” Gaspar tried to calm Sean with a gentle pat on his chest. He could hear the increased beats of Sean's heart on the monitor. He could see the sweat brimming over Sean's eyebrows. “Whatever it is, Sean, it's okay. Just stay calm. Okay?”

Gaspar feared something awful. Had Sean killed someone? Raped someone? Beaten someone? He knew a side of Sean that his wife, Cathleen, didn't often see. He knew that beneath Cathleen's seemingly “gentle giant” lived a volatile, mercurial man whose temper had been known to explode. Shortly after Colm's final collapse in L.A., Sean had admitted to Gaspar that he had unleashed a torrent of hateful things on his nephew. Sean had been so angry with the boy one day for running away from and scaring his mother that Sean screamed at him and accidentally shoved him to the ground. Sean told Colm that his real father wasn't coming for him and that his father didn't love him. Sean regretted the words as soon as he spoke them. But he couldn't help himself. The anger was so raw and so real, he was helpless to stop it. Gaspar remembered Sean being inconsolable about the event. He blamed himself for Colm getting so ill and for taking such a turn for the worse shortly thereafter. He felt like his outburst had broken the boy's heart once and for all. Gaspar tried to tell Sean that's not how the heart works, but there was no convincing Sean. He blamed himself. He told Gaspar of other times over the years he'd lost his temper. It happened mostly in bars when he was drunk, and he usually took his fury out on hapless strangers.

What type of thing could a man do that would so paralyze him and keep him from living his life, drive him to nearly drink himself to death at points, drive him away from his family, compel him to think he was so fundamentally broken that he was beyond fixing?
Gaspar almost didn't want to know. He didn't want anything to come between him and the love he felt for Sean. He didn't
want to judge him or have to hold something against him. Most of all, he wanted to be able to honestly say, “No matter what it is, Sean, you can be forgiven.”