A red tainted Silence (61 page)

Carolyn Gray

I shook my head. “No, no. I mean, yes, I think you were right. But he already told me about Seth. I mean, not about his --” I shoved my hands against my face, trying to think. I dropped my arms and leaned toward Jon. “His computer,” I said.

Jon’s eyes widened. “All that writing he’s been doing.” I nodded, excited that Jon had caught my meaning. “Yes! Maybe he’s written about it.

On his laptop.”

Jon stood, pulling his keys out of his pocket. “I’ll run to the house and get it. I just hope the cops didn’t take it as evidence.”

“If they did, you can damn well be sure I’ll get it back,” I said.

* * * * *

“I’m Mrs. Ashwood.”

I looked up from the magazine I hadn’t been reading. Everyone in the waiting room tensed. It was, I presumed, the surgeon. Margaret looked over her shoulder at me. I stood, joining her, biting back the resentment that it was Brandon’s parents, not me, who the surgeon addressed.

“How is he?” Margaret asked, wrapping her arm around my waist. I pulled her close.

Brandon’s dad stared at me, then looked away.

The surgeon looked exhausted. I stared, mesmerized, at his scrubs, flecked with blood.

Brandon’s.

“He came through the surgery, but it was difficult. The shock from blood loss was harder on him than the surgery itself. I repaired the hernia, and he should recover well from that. You can see him in a few minutes.”

Then he was gone. “Is that it?” Adam asked. “What about everything else?”

“He’s a surgeon, honey. He’s done his job,” Margaret said. She squeezed me. I laid my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes as she stroked my back.

Strength.

A few minutes later a nurse looked into the room. “Mr. and Mrs. Ashwood? You can come see your son now.”

I started to follow. The nurse held up her hand. “Immediate family only.” I nearly burst into tears, but rescue in the form of a ninety-eight-pound Irish fury arrived. Noreen glared at the nurse. “He is immediate family. Come on, Nicholas. You boys, too, Jon and Adam.” She held out her hand and I took it. She squeezed my fingers tight.

Strength.

* * * * *

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Oh, Brandon, I don’t want to see you like this.

I stood by his bed, his cold hand in mine, lifeless except for the steady pulse beneath my fingers. Tubes and IVs were everywhere. I felt like sobbing, seeing what they’d done to him. A dick monster, he had a dick monster, and he was intubated, and I counted no less than seven IVs pouring into him. His hair was matted against his head, his skin pale. His body kept shuddering.

“From the anesthesia,” Margaret reassured me.

It was so hard, looking at him. Just a handful of hours ago he’d made love to me. How did it end up like this? Why, dammit? Who had put that tape on, knowing he’d come out right then and see it?

The cops didn’t have any answers. The open doorway onto our deck was the only clue they had. That and footprints in the snow, which, to my fascination, they actually took molds of. But so many people had been in and out of the house since we’d moved in that there were too many prints to get a clear picture.

And bright boy here, throwing the camera, hadn’t helped. Detective Anderson was unhappy with me. What’s new there? Me and my big mouth, me and my overreactions. But the tape was okay -- and he wanted me to watch it.

I dreaded that.

“Nicholas, say something to him. He might hear you,” Margaret said.

I nodded and moved up to the head of the bed, my gaze drifting to the bandage over his stomach. He was bare, naked beneath the sheet that hardly covered him up to his hips. His chest rose and fell, forced by the intubation to keep him going. The tube would come out soon, I knew, but I hated seeing it force him to breath in an unnatural rhythm.

This was how you looked to him, Nick. Even worse than this. How had he stood it? He never said. Not really.

Strength. Where did you find it? How did you cope, all those weeks so alone, not knowing what was happening to me? How did you hack it when you got those photographs?

How did you handle it when you found me, imprisoned and filthy and cold and scared, like the wild animal I was, barely recognizing you, nearly insane with hunger, thirst, what had been done to me?

Oh, Brandon, what they’d done to me --

Who was there for you?

“Hey, babe,” I whispered to him, drawing close to his ear, sucking my breath in as I realized his earrings were gone. I stroked his hair back from his forehead, ghosting my fingers over his face the way he liked me to do. “You’re going to be okay. I’m here; we’re all here for you,” I murmured, brushing my lips over the edge of his, the only part of his mouth I could touch. I kissed his cheeks. I kissed his eyelids -- happier memories came to me of 362

Carolyn Gray

doing the same thing to him as he sat at his piano. I remembered how he’d leaned into me, lost himself to me at just a whispered sigh, a brief touch.

My mind drifted back to a more recent memory -- that of just hours before. I couldn’t believe it, how quickly things could change. As I held his hand and watched his chest rise and fall, my gaze drifting over his slack face, I let myself drift back to us, in the bathroom, taking out the memory and savoring it, remembering it. I didn’t want to forget it, not a single part of it.

“You need a chair, Mr. Kilmain?”

I broke away from my thoughts, my face heating. I smiled at the nurse -- Noreen had seen to it that it not be forgotten again who I was. What I meant to Brandon.

“Thanks. Where’s Brandon’s parents?”

“They left a little while ago,” she said, smiling.

“Oh. I didn’t -- I didn’t notice.”

“You were a little lost in thought.” My face blazed, so I looked at Brandon, hoping she didn’t notice. “Try talking to him some more. Hearing is the first sense to come back. He should be waking soon.”

“I thought they were going to keep him sedated?” She nodded. “Yes, but we have to bring him back for a little while, just to make sure he’s able to.”

“Oh. Okay.”

I sat in the chair and leaned on the bed. I’m not sure what I said. I sang softly to him, song after song. The nurses came and went, smiling at me, one leaning over me and whispering, “I love that song.” I was impressed -- a true fan, knowing a B-side song. I gave her a hug. I needed that.

I sang until I couldn’t sing anymore. Time passed, not sure how much. I dozed in my chair, never letting go of Brandon’s hand. Jon came in at one point. He had the laptop, but I wasn’t ready to leave Brandon. Not yet.

“Do you know his password?” Jon asked me. “He always kept it locked, Adam being such a nosy bastard.”

“Oh, my gosh, no, I don’t,” I said in despair.

“Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.”

He stood on the other side of the bed, holding his brother’s hand. Adam hadn’t touched Brandon, just stared at him, but Jon had no such qualms. He stroked his brother’s arm much as I had, whispering some wicked nonsense about me and him in Brandon’s ear.

I watched Brandon’s face, praying for a flicker of recognition, but nothing yet.

They kicked me out eventually, and I had no choice but to go home. It was almost eleven o’clock at night, and I had nothing left to draw from. The too familiar weakness had A Red-Tainted Silence

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given way to total exhaustion. I couldn’t even talk, I was so tired. Jeff almost literally carried me into the house. Jon stayed up, working on breaking into Brandon’s computer, but I stumbled into bed, fully clothed, pulled Brandon’s robe and pillows to me, and fell immediately to sleep.

Jon woke me at three the next morning. He looked like hell, but he was grinning in triumph. “Get up, Nick. I got in.”

It was easy to find the file, practically the only thing on the computer, except for a shopping list. I made a copy of the file and gave it to Jon -- he knew his brother in ways I didn’t, would maybe see something I couldn’t see.

Amanda got up, made us some coffee, started a fire, and after a phone call to see how Brandon was doing -- no change -- we settled into our chairs and got to work. My heart skipped a beat as I read the first lines, and I said a little prayer that we would find what we needed to find, deep within Brandon’s writing. Deep within his soul.

“Come on, Brandon,” I whispered beneath my breath as I began to read. “Show me.

Show me what you’ve been hiding from me all this time.” I’ll never forget the first time I saw him -- the wild shock of black hair, the beautiful blue eyes, the full lips with that perfected pout. Such a diva, even from the beginning. I was entranced, smitten, mesmerized. He had the face of an angel, and the voice of one, too. And almost from the start, I began the pattern of losing Nicholas. I was good at that. I guess I never believed I really deserved him, what he would bring to us both. What we would experience because of him. What we could be because of him. What I could be because of the strength and belief he had in me.

Denial denial denial.

Damn, I was good at that.

“Oh, Brandon,” I murmured. “You never lost me. Not once. Not a single time.” With a heavy sigh, I returned to my reading, and in so doing witnessed the unfolding of a side to my lover, my best friend, my soulmate, that I had never known.

364

Carolyn Gray

Whenever I start a new piece of music, write new lyrics, find myself faced with that blank page waiting for me to fill it up with my words and the secrets of my soul, I’m seized with terror.

Can I do it? Am I really good at this, like they all say? Like my fans believe?

Can I possibly reach down deep inside me once again, just one more time, please, God, and find something tangible ... or maybe not tangible, no. Maybe something elusive and as afraid of being drawn out as I’m afraid of it being drawn out? Yet I know must be drawn out because it is those things, those rare intangible things, that set me and my music apart from so many other artists.

The terror is real, but I know without it, I am nothing. Fear is what keeps me honest with myself.

Fear of failure, fear that I can’t possibly do this again, can’t possibly produce, yet again, what is expected of me. I feel like a child, an unformed child, as I stare at the blank screen or the notepad in front of me or even that imaginary writing space in my mind. I nearly always panic. I nearly always leap up and run away. I don’t want to dig inside myself. I don’t want to expose what I know must be exposed if I’m going to satisfy my fans.

It is so damn scary.

But I always go back to that blank screen, page, space in my mind. And the words and the melody do come. Hard at first, yeah, but they do come. And then I lose myself in the amazement of it. But it is always scary at first. Always. And I always have that fear that I won’t climb out the next time, that the next time I will be totally lost.

That’s how I felt reading Brandon’s writing. Scared. Terrified. Lost. Desperate to find a way to help him, not knowing if I was wasting my time reading over his thoughts, meeting the boy he was. As I read, I realized just how much I’d depended on him all those years.

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Brandon was the one person in my life who I knew, without question, could pull me from the deep, dark places inside me where my creativity resides, and save me. He had to do it more than once over the years. Many, many times, in fact.

There did come the time, of course, when he wasn’t there. When I was writing everything for my first solo album. Writing those songs, I didn’t really dig as deep as I should’ve, and it showed. Yeah, my first solo album did well enough, but it wasn’t the same.

Because I didn’t dig deep, really, really deep. I was afraid to without Brandon there to save me. Because he wasn’t by my side.

Yet as I read what he’d written, saw the sad, sad boy that he was, in no small part because of me, I was so damn sad. I was never there to pull him from his dark places.

Sometimes, I just lucked out being there at the right place at the right time, which is funny because I never even knew he was in those dark places.

Some of the revelations in his writings amazed me. Like, he loved me from the moment he first saw me, sitting out in that audience I couldn’t see. It’s hard for me to believe now that while I was up there on stage having the time of my life, he was out there watching.

Watching me, wanting me. Setting himself on the awful-beautiful path of love and despair that would be his life.

As I sat in my chair in a house once so happy but now cloaked with a grey pall of despair and read his words, I can’t stop the tears falling. Neither could Jon -- from time to time we looked up at each other, pacing our reading so we pretty much stayed together. That morning, when we first started to understand the real Brandon Ashwood, let’s just say we were devastated by most everything we read. From Brandon’s heart-wrenching realization that yes, he was gay, to dealing with his brother Adam’s hate, his father’s brutal rejection, and even Jon’s innocent but painful teasing, to living with the knowledge the boy (me!) he’d come to love was lost to him, probably forever. It was no wonder he was sick all the time.

“You know, I remember that time. After the play, before he found you,” Jon said.

“What he was like then.”

I didn’t want to hear it, but like a drowning man in seawater I looked at Jon, ready to lap up whatever he could tell me. “What was he like?”

“It was rough, Nick. Really rough.” Jon shrugged. “He acted so lovesick, it was pretty comical. And I teased him. Teased him all the time. Of course, I thought it was a girl he was being so mopey about, but --” He shrugged again. “He never would talk about it, what made him like that. Who he was so tragically in love with. I’m just damn glad you came back around when you did.”

Guilt flashed through me even though that was so far in the past there was nothing I could do about it now. “He was sick a lot even then, wasn’t he?”

“That’s when it all started, yeah.”

We went back to our reading. From time to time we would chuckle, even laugh, and Jon would tease me about blushing -- reading about the coffee shop incident, for instance.