Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) (27 page)

T
HE
wait went on.

About a half an hour after Mikhail and Martin left in search of ice cream, Deacon's doctor came into the OR with news. Crick stood up to go talk to him, and Jeff didn't need Shane's subtle push on the shoulders to go join him. Jeff was the GBFF—he was up.

“Deacon is stabilized,” Doctor Mackey was saying as Jeff came up alongside Crick. The hand that sought out Jeff's was as icy as Jeff's had been not half an hour before.

“Glad to hear it,” Crick said, his voice wobbly and cracking. “Can we see him?”

“You can, Carrick—you've got his living will, and Jon's listed as his legal counsel, so you're the designated visitors. But you've got to make it quick. We're putting him under in about five minutes. I don't want to wait another second before we cauterize those nerve endings in the atrium, or we're going to have to go through the last five hours all over again, and quite frankly, I don't know if he'll make it.”

Crick nodded, and Jeff pushed at his shoulders. “Tell him we love him,” he said, and Amy told Jon the same thing. It was funny—Crick and Jon disappeared after the doctor, and Amy and Jeff simply filled in their places and held chilly hands while they waited.

In about two, maybe three and a half million years, the two of them returned, both looking as gray-faced as Deacon had when the ambulance arrived. Amy rushed into her husband's arms, and Jeff let her go.

Crick took a sort of lost look around the waiting room with bleary, brown eyes and ran a hand through his stringy hair. “I've got to get the fuck out of here,” he said after a second, and as he pushed through the door to the waiting room, past a returning Mikhail and Martin, Jeff sensed the eyes of everyone else on him, and he nodded. It was still his up.

He caught up with Crick at a vending machine in the corridor— Crick was attempting to buy a soda, and the
wheemp-whomp
of the machine as it rejected his dollar bill repeatedly echoed loudly. His injured hand was shaking too badly to straighten the bill when he put it in the slot.

Jeff nudged him aside and straightened the crumpled bill, then sent it smoothly through the feeder, and then the other one, when Crick held it out for him. Crick made his selection, and the thump the plastic bottle made was loud enough in the silence of the corridor to make the two of them jump.

Crick leaned back against the wall, downed half a bottle of soda, and belched so loudly that Jeff could swear the soda machine rattled. Then he spoke randomly into the waiting silence. “I don't know how you do it. You just… you're so strong.”

“You're doing a lot better than I would be,” Jeff told him truthfully, but he wasn't surprised when Crick shook his head.
“It's like… I don't see in color anymore, you know? I look at something and I think I know what it looks like, and then I think about what the world would look like without Deacon, and it goes to black and white.”
Crick was an artist. He didn't draw and paint as much as he would have liked to, but then, Jeff was pretty sure he wouldn't have traded his life with the horses and Deacon for any other life on the planet. For Carrick James to see things in black and white—that was saying that the sun was silver and the moon was dark as pitch.
“He'll be all right,” Jeff said, believing it. “That man's got a onetrack mind—he wants to wake up and see you.”
“And ride horses,” Crick said with a semi-hysterical laugh.
“But mostly see you.”
“It's like I spent all that time,” Crick went on, not hearing any comfort because he couldn't, “watching his diet, checking to make sure the things he ate, or did, or the way he lived would make him stay with me for as long as possible, and none of it mattered. I mean, I get what happened to me”—he held up his damaged arm for emphasis. “I get it. I was dumb as pus, I had no fucking business being in Iraq, and that's what fucking happens in a war zone. But Deacon… man, he….” Crick threw his head back against the wall so hard it cracked, but he didn't wince.
Jeff stood up from his crouch at the soda machine and put his hand behind Crick's head, making shushing noises.
“Easy, there, chief,” he murmured, but Crick didn't even bend his knees to make it easier to comfort him.
“He told me to go home and get some sleep,” Crick muttered. “He said, „Get some sleep, Carrick James, you can't make yourself sick. Folks will need you.' God. God, I'm just so mad at him!”
“Why? He didn't choose this! It's not like he
wanted
to be sick, right?”
This makes sense, Jeff, you know that.
“Nobody
wants
to be sick. Nobody
asks
to be sick. He didn't even do anything dumb, you know? He didn't engage in anything he knew was risky, he didn't step in front of a fucking grenade… he's totally fucking innocent—you don't get to be angry at him!”
Don't yell at the suffering spouse, Jeff, you dickhead— what the hell's the matter with you?
Crick was looking at Jeff with a sort of blank revelation on his face, and Jeff was powerless to stop talking.
“I mean, if he has one wish on earth, it's to spend more time with you, right?” His hands were stiff against his sides, and his jaw was locked, and he felt a wave of red fury just sweeping his body. “He wants to be together. He was taking steps to do that, healthy or sick, and you were helping, and this isn't his fault!”
This is about Crick, Jeff, you know that, right?
“I know that, Jeff,” Crick said, and Jeff should have seen the weary acceptance on his face, but he couldn't.
“It's not like he yanked the rug out from underneath you, or just yanked your entire world out from under your feet because you proved to be a fuckup that he didn't understand, right?”
Deacon wasn't the one who did that, was he?
“Yeah, Jeffy, I know.”
“I mean, you guys had your entire lives together, right? Why in the fuck would he want to leave you?” Jeff ran a shaking hand over his face and wondered why he couldn't shut up. “There's no reason for it—he didn't do it on purpose, he didn't want this, and what kind of asshole would just… just fucking leave you or kick you out? Deacon wouldn't do that. He wouldn't do that to you.”
No, but someone did that to you, didn't he?
“Jeff, Jeff, you're really freaking out here, okay?”
“I'm fine. I'm fine. And you're going to be fine too. Because he wouldn't do that to us. Deacon wants to stay. He's
dying
to stay, and I'm so jealous, Crick, so fucking jealous because even if he can't, even if God's the vicious liver-eating, balls-ripping motherfucker we all think He is and takes Deacon away, he wanted to stay, and no one's wanted to stay, not in my entire life, and at least he—
oh God
!”
Jeff would have fallen to his knees then, because his entire body just gave out on him as his brittle glass bubble exploded outward, leveling anyone in its path, but two strong arms caught him from behind as he fell, and suddenly he was being turned around and held, just held as he disintegrated, crushed like a flamboyant Christmas tree ornament under the heel of a pagan god.
“I'm sorry,” he managed, enveloped in the comforting smells of engine grease and soap and sleepy man. “Collin, tell Crick I'm sorry, please tell him I'm sorry.”
Crick's face appeared between Collin's shoulder and Jeff's line of sight, and Crick reached out and ruffled Jeff's hair. “It's okay,” Crick said softly. “You can't be strong all the time, Jeffy. I'll be okay.”
“No you won't,” Jeff mumbled, absolutely sure of this. “You won't be okay. You can say you're okay, and you can think you're okay, and suddenly you're having a meltdown when someone needs you the most.”
Crick dashed his cheeks with the back of his hand. “Don't worry— don't worry about me, okay, Jeff? I'll go in with everyone else. Jon'll be happy to have me fall apart on him. You've earned a break from being everyone's fairy-Jeff-father, you hear me?”
Collin's arms tightened around his shoulders, and Crick disappeared, and it was suddenly Jeff, alone with the man—not the kid, the man—who had come through for him when he didn't know he needed it.
“God, Sparky, I'm so glad you're here.”
“Jesus, Jeff, I'm so glad you called.”
Jeff sniffled and wiped his face on Collin's shoulder, wishing maybe for the first time in his life that he was just about two inches shorter. “Yeah, well, if you don't tell someone you care about that you need them, it's sort of like a kick in the balls, isn't it?”
“Yeah, baby. It would be. Thank God you didn't do that.”
Jeff didn't have any more words then. He just stood there, shivering in Collin's arms, wondering if God would listen to him pray after he'd just called the Big Guy all those awful names.
Eventually Collin guided him back to see his family. Crick was sitting between Jon and Amy again, except this time, he was laying his head on Jon's chest and crying quietly with simple stress. Jon, who had known Crick since he was nine, had an arm around his shoulders like the big brother he truly was, and Amy was cuddling into Crick's arms in sort of a family sandwich.
Jon looked up when they walked in, with nothing in his eyes but simple concern. Jeff smiled sheepishly, and Jon cocked his head—it was the same look he'd given Deacon the year before, when they used to make him get on the scale to make sure he was taking care of himself, and Jeff's smile went watery. Jon nodded, like that was the way it should be, and Collin situated them on another couch. To Jeff's surprise, Martin came and sat next to Jeff there and patted his shoulder.
“You hug me, and I'm outta here,” the kid grumbled, and Jeff nodded.
“Understood.”
“Jeff, what time is it?”
“Around 2 a.m. You want I should send you back to The Pulpit? There's food and a bed, or at least a decent couch.”
Martin nodded. “Next time someone else goes, I will. Look, I hate to ask—you're paying for my cell phone plan—but is there any way I could… you know. Tomorrow. Call my parents?”
Jeff swallowed. “Too much drama for you?”
Martin shook his head. “Naw. Man, I just want to… you know? I'm still pissed at them, but I sort of want to talk to them anyway.”
Kevin's kid brother was an all right human being, wasn't he? “No worries. Talk as long as you want.”
Martin nodded, and then, shocking the hell out of Jeff, he turned his back and leaned up against Jeff's shoulder, settling in for a wait. It was the sort of thing a kid would do with a friend or a brother—and Jeff settled in on Collin accordingly.
“You realize,” he said softly, looking up at Collin with such total weariness he knew he'd be asleep in moments, “that you're supporting a whole lot of drama on those double-wide shoulders, don't you?”
Collin grinned, shaking his brown-gold hair out of his lean face, and Jeff felt it, right under his sternum, in the dead pit of his gut, how pretty he was. “It's easy,” Collin said. “Youth has its perks.”
Jeff's shoulders shook right up until his eyes closed abruptly, and the pain and the fear and the stress were all swallowed by the pleasant dark. For an hour or so, not even the uncomfortable couch or the hospital noises intruded on his peace.

Collin: I’m Just a Baby Duck

T
HE
last time Collin had been in a hospital (and not the CARES clinic) had been when his niece, Kelsey, was born.

The Labor and Delivery unit was
so
much happier than the OR waiting room.
Collin had been asleep when he'd heard his cell phone buzzing, and Jeff's voice in the message had sounded…
strained.
Desperate. In pain.
But that had been
nothing
compared to what Collin had heard as he'd rounded the corridor and found Jeff in a shrapnel-studded cyclonic meltdown on the guy he was supposed to be comforting. Oh Jesus. Poor Jeff, who loved so much to be there for everyone else.
God, baby, how could you let the pain get this bad?
Collin tightened his arm around Jeff's shoulders. When Jeff murmured “Collin” into his chest, Collin felt something huge release from around his ankles, and he felt like he could swim in air for the first time since they'd both woken up early Tuesday morning and dressed hastily and without romance to hurry off to their jobs.
He'd said “Collin”—
not
Kevin. It was one thing to know the guy had waited six years to break his celibacy over his dead lover. It was another to be absolutely certain that Collin was
not
a substitute for dead hero boyfriend.
It was Collin's name Jeff had called out when they were making love, and it was Collin who was comforting him now. These truths made the being awake in the OR in the gawdawful crotch of a slutty dawn absolutely worth it.
“It's good you came,” Martin said suddenly, still facing the back wall. He was resting his head on the back of the couch, and the fact that he was leaning on Jeff seemed at once very young and very dear.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He needed someone. Maybe has for a long time.”
“Doesn't bother you who anymore?”
Collin felt rather than saw the shake of the head. “My folks, they've got their shortcomings, you know? But they always taught us to recognize good people. Jeff, you, all these folks here—good people. Maybe, I talk with my folks, they'll see that Kevin never stopped being who they thought he was. It might make them happier to know.”
Collin risked waking Jeff up to reach over and rub the back of Martin's head—Martin didn't say anything, but Collin heard his accepting grunt and figured they were good.