One Voice 02 - Here Without You (20 page)

And by mutual agreement, if we didn’t find him and deal with this situation, it was over. He was
out
of our relationship. We’d agreed that tonight we’d be a throuple or a couple, but no longer a question mark.

“Well, we’re going to give it our very best shot.” And Zander started driving.

We checked at McDonald’s, and we walked through the Walmart in search of Nate. We hung out at the Starbucks where we’d done our long-ago French project, during which our relationship had been born. We drove around in the back lot behind the grocery store. We circled Benjamin Franklin High School. He was nowhere to be found.

Finally, parked in front of the high school, we admitted our despair.

It sure seemed like strike three.

“What are we going to do, Zander?” I leaned over so my head was on his arm. “What are we going to do?”

And Zander replied, a new confidence ringing in his voice, “We’re gonna think like Nate thinks.”

And so we brainstormed a list all of the places in town we’d been together, the moments we’d been close and happy, and the places we’d been at those special moments. At basically the exact same instant, it hit us both.

“Down by the lake,” we said in unison.

“Nate’s in that clearing down by the lake.” I restated the now-obvious fact. “In the middle of all the pine trees. I
know
that’s where he’d go.”

“Yeah. If he’s anywhere in this town, it’s there. Let’s get over there fast.”

And just like we thought, when we pulled down the dirt path, we saw that his truck was parked in the little clearing down by the pond.

Z
ANDER
Z
ANE
’
S
One Voice Blog Spot—by invite only

Your host, Zander Z

I’m writing this story on my blog. No, I’m not ready to share it with anyone but you, Dan. And you were there for a lot of this, man, so you already know much of what I’m gonna write. But I still want to record it, and I figure, what better place to record it than here? I’ve recently come to the conclusion that it is possible, and maybe very likely, this blog will never be shared with the public. I’m okay with that. This blog is primarily for me. So I can understand. So I can remember.

W
HAT
ME
and Casey found in that truck was devastating. I got to the truck before Casey—like, maybe five big running steps before him. I pulled open the driver’s side door, and Nate’s big body sort of dropped sideways outta the truck and fell against me. And the most fucked-up part of it was that he never even fucking woke up. My first thought was “He’s dead!” But then I saw that he was breathing. So his upper body was dangling out of the truck, and he was sound-the-fuck asleep. Which quickly led me to the new conclusion that he was not just asleep. He was unconscious.

“Zander, what’s going on? Why is—” Casey stopped short and gawked at us. “What’s wrong with him? Zander, something’s wrong with Nate.”

Um, yeah. I’d noticed. But I didn’t say that to Casey. “Help me get him back into the truck.”

Casey immediately ran around to the passenger side. As I gently pushed Nate back in, Casey pulled him from the other side. It took a minute, because Nate was a big dude, but soon we had him flopped down in the other direction, inside the truck.

“He’s really cold. Like,
really
cold, Zander.” Casey’s hands were on Nate’s face. “We need to warm him up.”

“Let’s put him between us.”

And that’s pretty much what we did. I slid in the driver’s side, and we moved Nate so his head was against Casey’s chest. I took off my coat and put it on top of him, and then we both cuddled up to him, trying to touch as much of his body as we could to warm him.

After a while, he started to wake up, which was a huge fucking relief. First he struggled to get free of us, almost automatically. But when he finally opened his eyes and focused on me, then on Casey, and then on me again, he said plainly, “I’m dead.”

That was a pretty alarming statement. Casey and I exchanged wary glances. But since he clearly wasn’t dead, we both shrugged and focused our attention back on him.

On this newest version of Nate, that is. This guy was not the Nate we knew. In fact, he wasn’t even the burnout Nate we knew from freshman year in high school. He wasn’t the pissed-off Nate we’d met who’d broken up with us either. This Nate was a shell of the most broken and despondent version of Nate DeMarco that I could imagine.

So I was sure he wasn’t dead, at that point. His eyes were open and blinking, and he was moving around. But he sure did look like hell. His skin was gray, his hair was one ginormous knot, and his mouth and lips were dry and cracking. I remembered an experiment I learned one summer in camp, and I pinched the back of Nate’s icy cold hand. The skin was slow to go back into place. I recalled that this was a bad sign.

“I think he’s superdehydrated. I’m gonna run up to the car and get those bottles of water,” I said to Casey, reaching for the door.

“You don’t need to. I have mine in my coat pocket.” Casey leaned forward and pulled his water bottle out of his coat, unscrewed the cap, and held it to Nate’s lips. At first, Nate shook his head and refused it. I thought maybe he was still dazed and confused. But then his better judgment, or maybe it was instinct, inspired him to drink. He drank like a baby from a bottle, with Casey holding it to his lips.

After he drank a good portion of the water, he started to shiver, and I thought maybe he was coming back to life. I said, “Hey, man, think you can walk? You need to get into my car, and we can put the heat on really high.”

Nate nodded dully. He still wasn’t fully with the program. With great effort, we slid out of the truck, inching out the passenger door. With Nate between us, one arm resting over each of our shoulders, we stumbled all the way up to the car. When we got there, Nate bent over, like right in half, and barfed out a good portion of the water he’d just sucked down. He was in worse shape than I’d thought.

Once we got him seated in the passenger side of the car, still staring blankly like he didn’t know up from down, I cranked the heat. When the warmth hit his face, he closed his eyes and basked in it like a cat on a sunny windowsill.

“We should take him to the hospital, shouldn’t we?” Casey asked from the backseat.

“Probably. I think he’s dehydrated and kinda frozen.”

And that’s when Nate made his second statement—the first since “I’m dead.”

“Don’t wanna.”

So I asked the obvious. “What
do
you want?”

Casey leaned forward to hear his answer.

But instead of answering, Nate just sort of melted down. He slumped forward in the seat and then made a howling sort of sound that didn’t stop for what seemed like a very long time.

Danny, my heart frigging broke for Nate right then. I could see and hear the signs—he was completely fucking broken. And then, as soon as my heart put itself back together, the surge of love that came forth from it could have knocked over a brick wall.

“We’ll do whatever you want.”

I knew, bro, right then, that I’d wait forever for this guy. I love him that much.

“I love you, Nate.” The nearly inaudible words came from the backseat, along with a small hand that snaked its way around Nate’s chest. “I love you, Nate.” Apparently Casey was experiencing the very same overwhelming feelings of love for Nate that I was. “Take him to your mom’s apartment. We can take care of him there.”

And just before I put the car in drive, Nate did the strangest thing I’d ever seen him do. Right there in the front seat, he turned on his side and tried to curl up into a fetal ball. His long legs folded up beneath him, his back curved in around his middle, and he wrapped both arms around his body, as if to comfort himself.

Casey and I exchanged yet another “holy shit” glance, and then I drove like a bat outta hell toward our place. I mean, can you blame me?

B
Y
THE
time we got back to the apartment, Nate had fallen asleep again. He was sitting beside me all whitish-gray, with dry red lips, curled up as much as a big guy in the front seat of a sedan could get. And his head kept falling backward. That he looked like the living dead, as in a vampire, crossed my mind more than a few times. His cheekbones were protruding, as was his collarbone. I could see the top part of his chest above his collar. He’d definitely dropped a lot of pounds since we’d been together.

We woke him gently, but he still startled like a nervous cat. His eyes got wide and stayed that way. From this point, Dan, you were around to witness the ugliness, but still I want to make a record of it.

Casey and I had to drag him outta the truck. He didn’t want to move. The thing that struck me hardest, though, was that he didn’t seem to recognize Casey and me. When I looked into his eyes, Nate DeMarco wasn’t looking back, you know? There was nobody home. It’s hard to describe, but it was super fucked up.

Once we got him inside, you and Abby were there to help us. The first thing we did was get him settled on the couch. That’s when I noticed he wasn’t wearing a T-shirt under his button down, and by the looks of it, he didn’t have any boxers on under his jeans. No coat either. It was like he was sitting in his truck, with no heat on, dressed for summer, just waiting to freeze to death.

I knew Nate had given up. On everything. On Cindy, on us… on life.

My head throbbed and felt tight, like it was gonna burst from emotional overload. Why hadn’t he come to us, told us he was down and out to this extent, and asked for help?

“Hey, sweetheart. Looks like you’ve had a rough time of it.” Casey was sitting beside Nate on the couch, rubbing his knee. “You okay with this? With being here on Zander’s couch and out of the cold?”

Casey was asking permission to proceed with lifesaving measures from a virtual zombie. Nate turned to him and stared into Casey’s eyes. It was as if he were trying to remember who Casey was, what he had meant to him. But he nodded.

Abby came to us right then with a big, puffy, unzipped sleeping bag in her arms and placed it over Casey and Nate. Then, Dan, you said, “Zander, why don’t you sit down on Nate’s other side? Comfort him and warm him up.”

I was having my own zombie moment. I remember staring at you, trying to make sense of your words. I guess the intensity of the situation had overwhelmed me. But I slipped beneath the sleeping bag beside Nate and reached one arm around his shoulders. I swear he leaned toward me a few inches.

“Dude, you hungry? Thirsty?”

Nate turned to me and stared like he’d stared at Casey a minute before. He nodded. “Thirsty. Nothin’ to drink since yesterday, ’cept for what I….”

Except for what he barfed on the ground, down by the river.

“I’ll go get him some water.” Abby left the room.

“Nate, I think we should take you over to the emergency room and get you checked out.” Casey again seemed to be asking for permission to administer medical care.

But Nate wasn’t giving it. “No.” Short and sweet. He didn’t want to go. “Can I… can I just sit here… awhile?”

I blurted out an answer before any of us had a chance to think. “You can sit here, buddy, for as long as you want.”

Again Nate nodded and refocused his eyes on the nothingness before him.

Abby brought a glass of water and a bowl of chicken noodle soup and crackers left over from dinner. She put them on the coffee table in front of him, and he studied the bowl of soup as if he’d never come across one before. “Can I eat it?” He looked at Abby for permission. Her eyes flooded with tears before she nodded.

What the fuck had happened to him? It had been barely six weeks since we’d had him in our bed down at BCC and he was making love to us with tenderness. And now he hardly knew who we were? He was barely even a shell of the guy we spent almost two years with.

Right then, without a shadow of a doubt, I knew I needed to change that. He was ours. Nate DeMarco belonged to Casey and me. And we belonged to him.

We needed each other to be whole. The evidence was right there in front of me, drooling over a bowl of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.

I lifted the bowl of soup and held it by his chest. Casey handed Nate the spoon. “Eat, Nate.”

Nate cautiously took the spoon from Casey’s hand. You and Abby went back into the kitchen at that point. You guys knew he wouldn’t want to be stared at while he ate. And after he took one bite, it was like he couldn’t resist. He started wolfing down the soup like he hadn’t eaten in days. And it hit me—he probably
hadn’t
eaten in days.

“Crackers… uh… please.”

I noticed that Nate’s dark eyes were fixed on the plate of saltines.

“Ain’t eaten for like… like two days or so, and I’m….”

Casey lifted the plate and offered them to him. Nate was clearly too hungry to hold back, like the soup had awakened his taste buds.

“Want me to go make you a sandwich, Nate?”

Casey always tried to feed us, so it didn’t surprise me. Casey started to stand up, but Nate grasped Casey’s hand in his fist. He made a sound that resembled the word “no,” so Casey sat back down.

“I’ll stay here, sweetie. I won’t go anywhere.”

Again Casey and I looked at each other. We tried not to show that we were floored by Nate’s desperation. After Nate finished eating, he gulped down the entire glass of water and leaned back on the couch.

“Would it be all right if I took your temperature? Your skin feels warm.”

Casey was pressing on with his caretaking efforts. Again, Nate refused.

He shook his head. “Can I take a shower?”

“Of course you can.” I didn’t attempt to jump up and grab him a towel, though. I was gonna let Nate make the first move.

After a full two minutes, while Casey and I studied him and he studied the air in front of his face, he finally made the effort to stand up. We did the same, and I headed for the stairs. Nate and Casey trailed behind me to the bathroom near my bedroom.