April - The Flood 17 страница

I began to feel better, if only for a moment. For a night with Jasmine. She moved her kissing to my neck and I began to slide my hand under her shirt again. We wanted to finish what we had started before. I undid her shirt, but instead of going right for her breasts, I touched the mound of her stomach and lingered there awhile. She had been growing so much in the past few weeks. I could feel the extra heaviness of her breasts when I did go there again and the skin around her waist. When we moved our bodies closer up towards the bed, I pulled down her pants and felt how warm and solid her entire body was. She pulled off her top and I began to slide my clothing off as well. I stood over her naked and we both looked at one another for a while. She had been with Hilda so much, and I had been with Gerard that it seemed like ages since we had been alone together. She pulled me down on top of her, but I was still very careful with her stomach. She insisted she as all right, but we eventually switched positions and I was on the bottom. She crawled on top of me, and positioned herself over my hips before beginning to rock back and forth slowly. I held her hips and waist as she went, and I touched her stomach occasionally too. When she leaned down to kiss me, I touched her breasts, her chest, and her neck as our tongues met together. She began to go very fast and it was hard for me to reach her speed. She leaned back and forth as she rocked, her hair becoming tangled and draping over her face. Her moans had become more and more persistent. I reached my hand between her legs and began to rub and within a few moments, she gasped and breathed hard. When she finished, I did as well, and she leaned on top of me again. I ran my hands through her hair and kissed the top of her forehead, and then I noticed that she was shaking. I felt her wet tears on my shoulder and I tried to shush her.

"Jasmine, it's May 5th and you're five months pregnant and we live in a house together and we're going to have a daughter," I repeated. Then, realizing I had done the same thing to Gerard earlier today, I began to sob as well. We both rolled onto the bed and cried. Not as strongly as before, but tears trickled down our faces and we felt utterly helpless. Pathetic. We couldn't even have sex without crying. Why had we even bothered to have sex when Gerard was upstairs, alone? Was he upset or happy? Did it hurt losing your memory? I wanted to know this so badly. I needed to know if he was in pain, but first I needed to get past my own. If I couldn't get past it, I thought to myself, then our lives would be like this, crying on a bed, naked, like a child. We were bringing a child into the world. We needed to stop acting like them.

It took us a while, but we each began to breathe normally. A calm dropped over us, like the eye of a storm. Jasmine asked, "How do we tell people?"

"They all already know," I told her. Everyone else seemed to. When Hilda dropped the bomb that finally gave it a word, everyone seemed to agree. Everyone seemed to act as if they had known it all along but didn't want to be the first to say it. I had been repeating conversations back in my mind, and they all lead to that conclusion. We were really the last ones, along with Gerard, to finally get it.

"We were too close," Jasmine said. "But there was nothing we could have done."

I nodded, agreeing with her. I thought back to everyone else who already knew and who didn't say anything. They were in denial as much as we were then. Now that everyone knew, what would happen next?

"They will help us," Jasmine said, thinking along the same line as I was. "They will help us out when we can't anymore. They will want to keep him here as long as we all can."

I nodded. Maybe the reason that no one said anything was because that they had come to the same conclusion as we had. It was far better to have an unreliable narrator tell you beautiful lies about what had happened, then to face the fact of reality. We would deal with it when the time came, and they would help. But while we did it, we would make an image of that narrator and add a few lies here and there.

"Don't you ever tell yourself stories to stay alive?" Jasmine had asked me that night, a long time ago now, when she woke up thinking that Shylock was after a pound of her flesh. He had arrived, only he was taking Gerard's skin. I thought of Lydia and Alexa, and the story they had tried to tell us about the soucouyant, the negative spirit that was in the house. It had been here this entire time, but it was after him. We would call it the soucouyant, or Shylock, or something else. It didn't really matter what we called it, we were always still talking about the same thing. Something that makes things and then takes them away. Something, anything other than what it really was. This was the story we were going to tell ourselves to keep us alive. It was the story I needed to fuse together the pieces of Gerard that had suddenly exploded everywhere. He had always been a myth in my mind, this wonderful artist who had come in and changed me for the better. That story did not stop or end. It would always live on, and I knew that I could write pages and pages about it. But his frailty, his humanity, and ultimately his mortality began to become its own story, its own myth that I needed to develop and figure out for myself. We no longer had an image to work with, so we had to create another story as the other faded away. Jasmine and I were nothing but children, in that bed, telling each other lies in order to prevent bad dreams. We were trying to make the nightmares in reality make more sense, so that we could still see the beauty underneath.

He was not gone yet, I reminded myself. I still had time with him. It was closing down, though, minute by minute. We were all terminal. Jasmine turned on her side, away from me, and I turned with her. I placed my hand on her stomach, and felt my daughter kick for the first time.

You are now at the place, I told myself. I just needed to figure out what and where that place was.

Jasmine had told me not to worry, but I did anyway. Though we had come to the best conclusion that we could have given the circumstances, I still worried. There was nothing that we could do, but I felt weak and powerless knowing that. At first, the thought had been freeing, relinquishing all bonds like that. But I couldn't bear the reality we had unleashed idly, without doing something to change it. So I plotted and I planned and I schemed. Jasmine slept as well as she could, but my mind began to wander into those dark places that I didn't want it to go.

The next morning, Mikey picked me up for work and expressed his sympathies. His eyes were dark from crying, too. We both had the same sleep deprived body language that just didn't care anymore. It was odd, seeing him so unrefined. It made me feel badly because I still could not even bear to talk about what had happened without crying, so I did not express my sympathies to him as well, though he was losing a brother. I merely nodded and we drove on in silence. I tried to think about something positive, but my mind went back to my half-realized plan, and began to work on it becoming a reality.

I filled my time at work with ticking clocks and silence with my new plot. It would come at me, suddenly, when I wasn't even thinking about it. I would be answering the phones and doing data entry, then it was there, wanting to be fulfilled. I had considered how I would do this, and by the time it came for Mikey and I to leave, I had worked it all out.

I asked him to drop me off at the drugstore where I used to work so I could pick something up for Jasmine.

"Is she all right?" he asked, and then wanted to know if there was anything that he and his wife could do. He offered to bring us dinner tomorrow night, and then to drive Gerard to his next doctor's appointment so we didn't have to do it by ourselves.

"He's not going to see a doctor anytime soon," I said feebly, looking down. My plan seemed to come at me with each heart beat, and I tried to maintain my composure as Mikey began to question the methods that Jasmine and I had worked out over crying fits and ashamed sex the night before.

"Are you not seeing a specialist? Is he not being treated?" When I didn't answer, Mikey went on. "If it has to do with money, I can see what I can do. We're not rich, especially with the kids, but I can see if I can work something out."

I paused. For the first time, it seemed like a way out was being provided. I swallowed again, and tried to elaborate the situation more. I was so afraid that explaining it to an outsider would then make it obsolete. That telling Mikey would somehow highlight just how awful Jasmine and I had handled things. We were still kids ourselves, barely able to raise our own let alone take care of an old man.

"Gerard doesn't want to waste his time in doctor's offices. He doesn't like those places," I repeated, my mouth dry. My plan thudded in my ears; I was so fucking close.

Mikey clicked his tongue, considering this excuse. I watched as his knuckles went white on the steering wheel, and then he sighed. "He always was so stubborn like that."

It seemed to be all he was capable of saying for the longest time. Moments stretched on in the car between us, his engine still on and the car idling with the radio on low as I waited to know when I could leave and just become my own self-fulfilling prophecy.

"When things... when things get bad," he began again.

"We will take care of it. I promise, Mikey, we will," I said. My guilt did not escape him. He looked at me, and then, deliberating for a few moments, put his hand on my shoulder quickly.

"I would never ask you to promise that. Don't take on that burden alone. That was the mistake I made with our parents," he confided in me. I realized I didn't know a thing about their parents, only that his father had beat Gerard for being gay when he was younger, and that his mother's maiden name was Thibodeaux. And apparently, that the two of them had died fairly close together and Mikey had tried to be all the support. He did not want anyone taking on that burden, making themselves a martyr the way he had, even though Alexa had told him to stop. I realized their parents must have died when he was in Paris, and I wondered why Gerard had never mentioned this before, at least for his mother's grief.

"When things get... bad. Call us. Okay? Don't do that by yourself."

I looked up from the car window, meeting his eyes. I couldn't believe the support he was giving us, the freedom to fulfill Gerard's wishes. Then when Gerard became too incoherent to really even have wishes... No, I stopped myself. I didn't want to think about that then, and I could tell that Mikey didn't want to either. His speech was just as much an obligatory action as anything else, I tried to convince myself. At the end of the day, I would be the one going home to see Gerard and watching him all fall away. Not Mikey. He would be affected, but he wouldn't see what I saw. That future vision was what I wanted to erase. That was what my plan was for.

I thanked Mikey, and then went back to talking about the drugstore and how I should get going. Jasmine was all right, sure, but I still needed to get something for her. Ginger tea, I bluffed my way through. I was getting anxious, now. I didn't want him to know my plan, and I was repulsed that I was even thinking it. I held my anger between my teeth.

"Do you want me to wait?"

"No, it's fine. I can walk from here." Mikey cocked his eyebrow at me, noticing for the first time how jittery I had become. He had been given orders from Jasmine since the first incident to drive me home and make sure I got there okay. I knew this hurdle was the toughest part of the entire plan. I hated myself for lying, for using the sadness that plagued us both for this purpose.

"I will be fine, Mikey. I just need the time to think, you know? A lot has happened..." I trailed off, hoping he'd get it. He merely sighed.

"It will be okay, Frank. You are doing the best you can, I know you are. I trust you two, and Alexa and I will help."

"Thank you, I know, but I'd really like to be alone."

Mikey finally relented. Maybe his own past burdens had weakened his pledge to Jasmine, but whatever it was, it had worked. He nodded and gave me a final squeeze on the shoulder. I looked down, refusing to meet his eyes. I felt ashamed, but I probably just looked sad. I walked towards the drugstore, and waited until his car disappeared around the corner. And then... There I was. It had worked.

I walked towards the memorial park and began to look for Travis.

The bar was the same as it ever was: bad lighting, watered down beer, and dirty table tops. But it was familiar to me now, though I had only been there a few times. Travis was familiar, and that was what mattered the most. He kept me company and reminded me of high school. Sam was dead, Vera was dead, and I had a feeling I knew who would make that whole "death comes in threes" prophecy real as ever, I said to myself as I drank down the vodka Travis had gotten me. I hated Lydia and Alexa for their premonitions. They had made this whole ordeal come true. If they had just shut up, we may have never noticed it and I could have gone on living in ignorance. I tried to drink away the part of my brain that remembered it, and I laughed. I was trying to forget the forgetting disease, and I was remembering the old high school friend that made me numb myself with the drink that made me forget. The drink that made me forget which lead me to the man that would eventually get the forgetting disease. I slammed the drink down and got another. My thoughts were blurring together, but the sadness did not stay out. Why didn't it stay out? I wondered to myself. This was supposed to make things better. I drank it back when it came, and tried to forget the forgetting disease with a newfound sickness that I told myself I was powerless to stop.

I barely heard Travis speaking. I nodded and extended fake sympathy, but he didn't seem to see that my smiles were really sneers. I had walked in on his own catastrophe: his girlfriend Diana had apparently left him.

"I don't know what I've done, man. She's been with me for three years and now all of a sudden I'm not good enough or something. I don't know what to do," he lamented. He was sipping his beer steadily, but not enough to actually shut up and stop his complaining. Oh, three years, huh? I waited for Gerard for seven and now I was going to lose him in probably about that many. How long had we even been back from Paris? It wasn't even a fucking year yet. All that time apart from one another had been wasted. I took another drink as I remembered the difference between lost and wasted that he had taught me. Tout ce qui n'est pas donné est perdu. All that is not given is lost. Wasted.

Well, then, I was getting wasted.

He went on and on about Diana. "First Sam, now Diana," he whimpered. Pathetic Sam had died in a fucking car crash that his idiot self could have prevented. He left behind a child almost fucking intentionally. If the idiot had just stopped getting high for maybe two days and just fixed his fucking car, then it would not have happened. It may as well have been a goddamn suicide, and I told Travis that to his face. At this point in our evening together, I was drunk enough not to care anymore.

"Sam probably did that just to fuck with everyone. Just to see how many people he could hurt. Well, mission accomplished, you fucker." I raised my drink in the air to a mock toast and then took a drink. Travis looked horrified. "What?" I challenged him. "He could have fixed his damn car but he didn't. He deserves this shit right now, this shit that I'm saying because I knew him. I knew him better than you, probably, because I could see what an asshole he was while you bought his bullshit. Goddamn. He left behind his daughter purposely."

"Sam had a son," Travis corrected me, his voice calm, and regaining some of us composure.

"So? Same fucking difference."

"You're right, Frank. You are so right. Sam did that on purpose. I found the note, but I didn't tell anyone. How did you know?"

I looked at his face, no longer concerned with my angry diatribe against my lacklustre friend. I didn't believe Travis was serious at first. But as soon as I realized he was not fucking with me (he had never been the one to manipulate emotions), I burst into tears. The alcohol left me no barrier, and even though people were looking at me because I had been shouting, I didn't care. I was not mourning Sam. I was crying because I had thought Sam had a daughter, I had said he did. I knew the kid was a son, I knew that... but I said daughter because that was who Gerard was going to leave behind. That was who Gerard was going to forget about.

We were told to leave the bar shortly after my outbursts. I ended up knocking over a couple of glasses accidentally (though it looked to be in a fit of rage from the bar tender's point of view) and was now almost too drunk to walk. We staggered outside and Travis kept me propped up. I was an utter mess; I kept crying like a baby. Travis kept comforting me, thinking that I was mourning Sam. I hated Sam more than ever in that moment for what he had done to his family and all around him. For what he had done to Travis, too. He left him at a shitty bar at the end of town, being kicked out of police school, lamenting over his lost love who was probably actually a lesbian from what he was telling me about her, but couldn't see himself. Travis was even more of a child than I was. I wasn't a child then, Jasmine and I weren't kids for acting the way we were. We were just fucking sad.

"How did you know, Frank? How did you know it was intentional?" Travis kept asking me and I didn't know what to say other than what I had said before. Sam was an asshole. He wanted to hurt people. He did all of this on purpose. I was convinced for a while that Sam had also made Gerard have Alzheimer's but then Travis with his big mouth started to talk again.

"He talked about you in the letter. Said he hated you because you were able to accept yourself. You were able to be okay with being gay, and he wasn't," Travis confessed. "I mean, I'm cleanin' up the language a bit because Sam was never one for nice words, but you know what I mean. He was jealous that you could be gay, and he was ashamed, man. I can't imagine shame like that."

"I'm not gayyyyy," I enunciated, but then, realizing what I had said, I shouted it over and over again. Yes, I was gay. Of course I was gay. I could no longer erase Gerard from my sexual history. I told Travis in a drunken stupor that I had fucked the guy that had dropped paint on us seven years ago. And I liked it. "I loved it. I loved him..." I trailed off and started to sob. I fell down onto the grass. I told Travis we had had sex there, too. Right in this park, and then he had told me he loved me and would never waste a moment with me ever again on those benches. I couldn't keep anything straight in my mind and I didn't understand what was happening anymore. Sam was gay? He killed himself because he couldn't accept himself? And he thought I could? Hah! I thought to myself. That made me laugh. I was suddenly overcome with the urge to vomit, and I turned away from Travis and threw up in the dirt. I did it a few more times and then noticed it was very quiet. The ringing in my ears had stopped and so had my loud sobbing.

Travis pulled me to my feet and wanted to know again how I knew about Sam. I shrugged my shoulders. I was not as mad as I had been before. I felt wobbly, shaky, and really sick, but okay.

"I loved a man, too, I guess. Maybe that's how I knew," I answered him so he could have some closure over this issue. It was a lie, but I realized that Travis needed that, he needed a story to tell himself to get him through his day. Sam's death had torn him apart. I began to feel my chest tighten again as I realized I could be in the same position one day. I also realized I had used past tense for Gerard.

"I still love him," I said, correcting myself. Then I threw up again. Travis rubbed my back, mutely. We started to walk soon after, a calm silence between us. I was leaning a lot on Travis, focusing more on the act of walking than what he was actually telling me.

"Thank you, Frank. Just, fuck, thank you." He slapped me on the back playfully. "I've wanted to know for so long about Sam. I just never understood it. That's why I didn't tell anyone. I didn't want him to go down like that. I wanted him to be remembered for a hero that he was."

I laughed, but it sounded more like a gurgle to Travis. Sam, a hero? He was an asshole. Maybe an asshole with a reason for being a jerk now, but still. He had responsibilities. He couldn't just run.

I realized that Travis had walked us to his apartment. He kept telling me thank you, thank you over again. He went back to lamenting about Diana and how he had no one in his life.

"But you, Frank. Thanks for finding me tonight. I needed that. You're the only person I've got right now." He opened the door with one hand, propping it open so I could walk inside while still keeping his other hand on my shoulder to steady me. Although my gait was still a little wonky, I had suddenly sobered up. At least, my thinking did.

This night was not good for me. I did not need this. I looked at Travis, at the door, and then apologized as I turned around. I tried to run, but settled for a feeble walk-stumble routine. He tried to call after me, but I ignored him. I needed to go home. I needed to see the people who meant something to me and I needed to never go down this path again. My plan had been stupid, I knew that from the very onset when I had lain in bed and tried to forget about my life. But my life, even with all its faults, was so much better than this. I had planned, but at least I had stopped. That made me better than Sam, I told myself. I was better than Travis. I felt bad for him, but I could not be his everything. I already had mine, and I could not let him slip through my fingers anymore than he already had.

When I got home, Jasmine was waiting. She did not say a word to me, but she hugged me. She understood, she always did, because my body yelled what my mind had been thinking all day. I was quiet like I always was, and though she was not happy, she understood.

"Never again, Frank, okay?"

I nodded. Never, never, never, never, never again. I held her body in my arms and I nodded out each word. I did not promise her, though. Jasmine said they were always the first things to break, and I knew she was right.

Chapter Four

Gerard began to sleep a lot. While Jasmine and I were at work, he would sleep during the day, usually waking up when he heard me come home or at least when he smelled us cooking dinner, would be up for a while with either one of us after that, and then he would fall back to sleep for most of the night. Jasmine had read that this was a symptom, and I told her to stop reading. Everything was going to end up being a symptom if we kept doing that. He wasn't going to be able to just be if we kept reading into every little thing he did and categorized it. She had apologized, and so had I because I knew I was doing it too. I tried to comfort her, and she did the same with me, but we usually turned away from one another and tried to not bring it up anymore. Our relationship became weaker as it became stronger. Because we were both in love with him now, things were completely different. We split ourselves apart in order to take care of him. In the morning when I left early for work, Jasmine was usually up in his room. She would greet him with breakfast and talk with him to see how he was doing, and then it was my turn at night. Her classes usually took up her time in the evening, or otherwise she was with Hilda. Hilda became an invisible balance beam of support, redeeming herself in my mind from before, especially now that I had accepted the diagnosis. Hilda had done this with her father, after all, and had been able to maintain distance from the event long after it was done; when I couldn't stand to be around anymore tears with Jasmine, Hilda was there. I grew to like her. We nodded respectfully to one another anytime I saw her in our front hallway, and at one point, I shook her hand and thanked her. At nights, she had Jasmine and comforted her, while I got to have the house alone with Gerard. I would bring him his dinner and we would talk or paint the rest of the night. He was still working on drawing Jasmine, and if they had had a sitting that morning, he would usually show me.

He was alert and attentive most of the time. I would sometimes forget there was anything wrong with him at all. We would lie together and read a book or just fool around with some paint and he would be so healthy, so normal. I was praying for normalcy for once and then congratulating its arrival. But then he would try to get up and need me to show him where his supplies were (if he had not already labeled them), or he would call a paintbrush "the hair thing" and I would be reminded again of why Jasmine and I were so sad when we weren't around him. They were small things, location issues mostly, and the loss of a specific type of vocabulary. If he did not use the word on a regular basis, it seemed to go, along with some concepts, too. He seemed to lose his specificity with events, words, and timelines, but he was still there, and still very present. He was just not exact anymore. I tried to not think about the loss of certitude that was already happening, and tried to think about what he did know, what he was able to communicate even if it was with this new mixed up language. And I knew that he did still know who Jasmine and I were, and he was still able to show love and affection for us. That fact was enough of a small relief to keep us both going. With one another, we were despondent, turning away more often. It wasn't that we were mad with one another. It was just that through seeing Jasmine's body, I also saw Gerard's and the same thing happened with her. We were both so deeply and irrevocably in love with him that when we were together, even alone, it felt as it our love for him was the only thing that linked us. It consumed us; it was all we could think about.

Also, when we were together each of us was reminded about the baby that was inside of Jasmine, that was half of each of us, and that we had wanted so badly so she could meet Gerard. I began to realize slowly, day by day at work when I talked to Mikey (if I talked to him; we had a silent period between us for quite some time since he had been angry with me for tricking him at the drugstore, but eventually forgave me because everyone had been thinking what I had gone and actually done), that the parenting job that we had intended on being a triangle arrangement had gone back to a coupling. We didn't know how long Gerard would live to begin with, but now there was another extenuating factor weighing against us. He would be lucid for awhile, we hoped, to at least have the parenting arrangement we had first envisioned for some time. I didn't know how Mikey handled it with five kids and only two adults. Having one baby and three adults seemed manageable, but not when one would forget where the diapers were. I mostly pushed those thoughts from my head. I didn't want to think about things until it got to that point, so I tried to do that. Mikey gave me some less than enthusiastic advice about baby sitters and a good day-care program that the workplace sometime subsidized for parents, but I could tell that he was also trying not to think about his ailing brother, his first child, and finally being an uncle to have that precarious responsibility suddenly shift. I stopped bringing up the issue, for the time being, and tried to talk to Mikey about work instead. Like Jasmine, he perked up when busy. It was how he handled things, and got as far as he did. He told me more about the company and a merger that had happened recently which really shouldn't have (some jargon I didn't quite understand), but he was sure it would be good for the firm. I nodded, drank coffee on break, and then went back to my desk.

Jasmine and I, in spite of not talking a lot when we were around one another, began to exchange emails while at work. At first it had been her updating me whether or not Gerard was having a good day and what to watch out for, but they slowly became love notes between the two of us. Jasmine liked love notes; she had been leaving them all around our new place before the event happened. Now they had moved here, to a virtual plane that would hopefully be left untouched and unmarred. We needed this place to vent and for the stuff we could not say face to face (for fear of crying and turning away) so we wrote these shitty office emails from our desks. She would tell me about the movement she felt inside of her and how happy it made her. She would type, "Paloma just kicked as I wrote this!" and I would smile in the office for no reason. I guessed our name from before had stuck. It was the one that Gerard had suggested, and though she and I had discussed a few others in emails, it seemed to be the one that had the best story behind it. We were also too afraid to remove it from our minds as the most important, simply because it was the one that Gerard had suggested.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14