If I Must Lane (3 page)

Melody snorted, her eyes half closed in sleep. They’d talked until nearly one in the morning. “So he can’t take care of himself, but he can take care of the cat? How’s that work?”

Joel shrugged. “I think he thinks the cat’s more important.”

A week after their little sex-ed discussion, Joel came home to find a little tin of high-priced cat food on the landing.

The thing eating out of it and snarling through spittle-covered whiskers barely passed for a cat.

“Ian?” Joel called, jostling his bike and his backpack over his shoulders and hoping they could co-exist for just a few more steps. He’d just come from work and was wearing his bike shorts. “Ian?” Gingerly he reached over to open the door (Ian rarely remembered to lock it) and swung a leg over the threshold. The cat—a dark brown short-haired behemoth with pale tortoise-shell stripes on its side—stuck out a massive paw and clawed his bare ankle.

“
Ian
!” Joel screamed, not wanting to kick this new development off a three-story landing and not wanting to lose any more blood, either.

Ian popped out of his room—shirtless, as usual—and trotted over to help Joel through the door.

“He got you? Why would he get you?”

Joel glared at the cat who looked at him and growled some more. “Because I interfered with his evil plan to rain destruction down on mankind,” he said sourly, and the freaky thing licked its whiskers and damned near smiled.

Ian laughed, and now that Joel was safely inside, he sank to his haunches and scratched delicately under the cat’s chin. The feline monstrosity had the balls to purr.

“Hullo, you manky bastard,” Ian murmured. “You giving Joel a hard time? You can’t, you know. He was here first.”

Joel looked at the cat in a mixture of humor and horror. “Well, it’s nice to know I rate!”

Ian’s grin appeared again, and Joel wondered why the cat suddenly looked more like a cat and less like a refugee from a zoo. “Rate? Brother, you’re more important to me than Riemann!”

Joel had to blink. Wow—Riemann was like the guy’s god—or at least the subject of his latest paper. Joel took a big breath and realized most of his irritation with the animal was gone. All that was left was his perpetual good humor.

“Jesus, Ian!  I said get a cat —I didn’t say to just let one wander up to the house.”

Ian turned that sunny smile up at Joel one more time, and although he refused to admit it, Joel’s heart stuttered in his chest. “I don’t know, brother. That’s sort of how I got you, isn’t it?”

Joel’s mouth went sober. He met Ian’s gaze and flushed, and Manky Bastard (as the
female
cat would forevermore be known) sank her pointy, street-cat teeth into the ball of Ian’s thumb.

Ian shouted and stood, and the little opportunist took that moment to run inside the apartment and sit, snarling, in the corner of the bathroom between the toilet and the tub. Joel, still a little dizzy from that long look he’d shared with Ian, went out and got cat litter, a box, and a pooper-scooper, and they put it where the cat seemed to want to stay. Ian had already bought enough food to last the damned cat a year. (They still hadn’t gone through even half the Fancy Feast under the counter.)

Joel made two appointments the next day: one for the cat, which Ian kept, and one for Ian, because his thumb turned blue and doubled in size. Joel took Ian to that one. While they were there, he made Ian take a blood test too.

The results were negative, and Ian had promised to go back after the window period was over. “Well, if I must!” Whenever he said that, Joel had no doubt he’d do it.

Melody seemed to have gotten her second wind. She sat up on the couch and was staring avidly at Joel’s face. Joel wondered if she could see something he couldn’t.

“So now you gots a cat?” she asked, her face soft in the glow from the television. Joel had no doubt his sister could be hard as nails when she was driving a bargain or running her staff, but with him, she was all Little Mommy.

Joel nodded and grimaced. “You should see Ian with her. He brushes her, feeds her shit that cost more than my food, and she thinks he put fish in the damn ocean. But she’s sick. I think she’s just old.” He shuddered. “I hope she’s okay. Ian really loves her.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Melody’s voice went up at the end of that, and Joel found himself sitting up and looking at her funny.

“What was that for,
mammi?
It sounds like you thinking something you shouldn’t!”

Melody shook her head. “I’ll tell you when I’m ready, little brother. So, you think he’ll take care of the cat when he can’t take care of himself?”

“I know he will,” Joel answered softly. That was one story he
didn’t
want to tell Melody. For some reason it just hurt too much.

Joel had been gone for a two-day seminar. He’d asked Ian repeatedly, “You going to be okay, Ian? You going to be okay?” But he had to go—what, he was going to tell work he was going to turn down free training because his roommate was a flake?

He got back to find a mound of open, empty cat food tins on the floor, and Ian sitting shirtless on the couch. (He was always shirtless. The man would have clients come over to get their taxes done, and he’d meet them in cargo shorts, flip-flops, and sweat.)

He was eating cat food out of the tin, and he was stinking drunk.

“Ian?” Joel asked, dropping his luggage on the floor inside the door. “Ian, what the hell? You said you’d meet me at the airport! I had to take a cab!”

“I’m sorry, mate,” Ian said, sounding more than distraught. “I was gonna.” He nodded solemnly. “I was gonna… but I woke up this morning, and there was nothing in the fridge but beer. And cat food. There was lots of cat food. So first I drank the beer, and then, when I threw up, I ate the cat food!” He sniffled a little, sounding pathetic, and then he had what looked to be an attack of clarity.

“What kind of asshole lets a friend down like that?” he asked himself cruelly, and he sniffled again.

Joel stared at him in blank horror.

“Jesus, Ian,” he said softly, walking to the refrigerator and feeling lost. “There’s corndogs in the freezer, you know that, right?”

Ian started to giggle softly, and he put the cat food down on the floor next to the couch. “Thank God, mate. I thought I was going to have to puke again!”

Joel told himself it was anger as he threw the corndogs on the plate and broke out a can of corn to nuke with them. Jesus. He and Mel had been fixing themselves dinner since the third grade; you’d think a certifiable genius with an IQ of 170 would be able to fix his own goddamned lunch, would be able to….

Joel turned to Ian, who was sitting on the couch looking so dejected that Joel’s heart lurched.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, not even trying to meet Joel’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m a pain in the ass. I know I am. I- I’m up all night and I never wear clothes and… I just… when you’re not here, all I am is the stuff in my head. I’ve got curves and hyperboles and Riemann and Gauss and they’re sayin’ shit and the world looks clear but time… it just passes, and I don’t see it. How come I know mathematical theory, but I can’t count to sixty? What kind of right is that? And the only thing that makes me more than the shit in my head is doing something for Bastard or…” Ian swallowed, hard, “or when you’re here. You’re the only one who makes me… real.”

 Joel realized that helpless tears were running down Ian’s face. Oh God. He hadn’t even said a word—not one goddamned word—and here he’d gone and made Ian cry.

The microwave dinged in the silence between them, and Joel grabbed a towel and brought the plate over, not forgetting the fork for the corn and the ketchup.

Ian took a bite of corndog and seemed to pull himself together, smiling that sunshine smile through his muddle-headed misery, and Joel wanted to do something, stroke his face, pet his wild hair, do
something
that would reassure him.

He thumped him heartily on the thigh and hoped that worked okay. “Look, Ee,” he said softly. “I’m mad at you because you’re my friend here. I come home, and you’re falling apart. How’s that supposed to make me feel? I can take care of you for you, but you can’t take care of yourself for me? C’mon, Ian, I worry about you.”

“I was just fine before you came along, I swear!” Ian nodded eagerly. “I pay bills. I’ve got money. I make it to my lectures.” He smiled for a moment, shaken out of his despondency. “You should see me give a lecture, mate. I sound… smart, you know?”

Joel nodded seriously, because he actually had seen Ian lecture one day, when Ian hadn’t known he was there. Ian had been poised and intelligent, and even funny, but that man was hard to see in the lost soul Joel was feeding now. Something in Ian’s handsome, sweet-natured face haunted him. Ian may have stayed alive, he may have made it through school across an ocean and into a job, and he may even have managed to pay the bills (he was, after all, an accountant), but whatever he had been before Joel got there, Ian had obviously not been “just fine.” No amount of thinking about teaching the guy to take care of himself would ever assure Joel that he would be “just fine” without Joel, himself, personally, to help in the task, and he just didn’t want to think any further than that.

 Instead, he cleaned up the cat tins, helped Ian into the shower, and then pulled out a T-shirt and some jockeys for the guy. When Ian was dressed, Joel made absolutely sure he lay down in bed. He slept for sixteen hours, and Joel thought he’d probably been up for the seventy-two before that. He woke up apologetic and sheepish and more than ready to accept any crap that Joel wanted to ladle out for him being (his words) a manky arse, but Joel didn’t want to bring up the incident again.

“Just do me a favor, Ee. Feed yourself, okay?”

“Right, mate!” And then, to make it a promise, “If I must.”

Chapter Three

Joel
and Melody actually fell asleep on the couch, probably in the pause between “Ian stories,” but Joel couldn’t be sure.

They staggered to their own beds in the wee hours of the morning and slept late, which was what you got to do over your Thanksgiving break, wasn’t it? But Joel didn’t sleep too late. As soon as he was awake enough, he snagged his cell phone from the end table and remembered to call Ian.

“Hey, Ee.” Oh geez did he sound like he just woke up? Did he sound like he was calling from bed? Suddenly the inappropriateness of calling from bed hit him, and he swung his legs over the side of the mattress and sat up so he would feel less self-conscious.

“Joel, you having a good time?” Ian sounded happy to hear from him, and just hearing his voice on the other end of the line eased an ache Joel hadn’t known he’d harbored in his chest.

“Yeah, mom’s trying to make me fat, and me and Mel are catching up. You staying sober?”

Ian laughed. “I should be. You left enough food in the freezer for a horde of wild barbarians. I even went out and bought vegetables. Aren’t you proud?”

Joel thought about his sweet, brilliant roommate, who would probably go down in history as the guy who… well, whatever it was Ian knew that the rest of mankind didn’t, he’d go down in history as the guy who figured it out.

“I’m always proud of you, Ee,” he said sincerely. “I just miss you is all.” Oh God. That must have sounded…. In his mother’s little house in the Denver suburb, Joel fought the urge to tuck his head under his pillow in embarrassment.

But if he sounded like a weepy asshole, Ian didn’t seem to notice. “Miss you too, mate. Here, I’ll call you after I get home, how’s that?”

Joel doubted he’d remember, but it sounded promising. They spoke a few more moments and then rang off, and Joel showered and prepared to face his family. He couldn’t think of why, but he thought he should be embarrassed to say good morning to Mel. Had he really talked all night about Ian? What an asshole! This morning he needed to ask her about her job. Mel being Mel, there would probably be a quiz later.

But Mel being Mel didn’t want to talk about work. As their mother bustled about in her flowered housedress and apron, pouring coffee and cleaning up the last of the breakfast dishes (corn pancakes—Mommy was definitely trying to send them both home fat!) Mel made it perfectly clear that what she wanted to talk more about was Ian.

“Ian?” Mommy asked, sitting down to drink her coffee with them. “Isn’t that the man you share a house with?”

“More like an apartment, Mommy,” Joel said, telling them about the vast top floor of the Victorian that dominated the block.

“His roommate is a real character,” Mel said, looking over her coffee at Joel. “Seems like he couldn’t find his ass with both hands if Joel didn’t hand it to him all labeled and neat, you know?”

Lucia Martinez nodded. “That’s Joel—even as a
niño,
he kept neat—you remember his room? He used to save his shoeboxes to keep his toys straight.”

“I liked knowing where to find them,” Joel said with dignity, and then, because he couldn’t stand that his sister thought badly of Ian, “and Ian’s brilliant.”
Lost, but…
“Don’t let me give you the wrong impression. He’s just eccentric.”

“Eccentric?” Mel had what Joel always thought of as her “evil” look now. She was teasing him, trying to get him to say something that she could get him with later. “You told me the guy once forgot his own birthday!”

Joel regretted telling that story. It was a fun, glib story you could use to get someone to laugh, but now it felt wrong. Now it felt like Mel was getting to know Ian, and Joel wanted his big sister to like the guy.

“He remembered his birthday,” Joel corrected seriously. “He just forgot how old he was!”

“Well, it must be nice to get so wrapped up in your work you can’t remember you’s getting wrinkles, eh
papi?”

Joel shivered, and the mood at the kitchen table grew inexplicably sober. “No,” he said quietly. “No. No. Nothing nice about it at all.”