At least, Javier thought, neither of them presumed that being homosexual precluded Nelson from fathering a child. For all they knew, ten years ago Nelson might have still been concerned with fitting in, dating women to reassure himself the attraction to men was just curiosity, nothing more.
Which didn’t ring true to Javier, even as he thought it. That was his story. He doubted it was Nelson’s. Even knowing him for only a day, Javier could see Nelson didn’t give a damn what anyone thought, and probably never had.
Javier glanced at the bed. The sheets were mismatched, and the faded paisley bedspread was stained as if a glass of red wine had spilled on it years ago and never quite come clean. The bed was big enough for two, with two pillows, but the pillows were stacked on top of one another as if only one person had used them. Possessions were piled and scattered—books, a guitar, a chess set, a microscope covered in punk rock stickers—but they all seemed like Nelson’s things. Not those of a mysterious missing Vietnamese woman.
Nelson headed back down the hall with Bobby trailing behind. “Where’s my phone?” Nelson asked him.
“Charging.”
“Good thinking.” He slipped past Javier, touching him as usual, but distractedly now, a brief hand on the shoulder to keep from colliding with him as he navigated the doorway. Tim flinched back from Nelson’s desk as if he’d been caught snooping. Marianne sat on the bed and pulled out her phone. “There’s still no signal.”
Nelson pulled his phone from the charger buried among books and papers on his desk. “No, but Internet’s up. I might be able to get a VOIP connection.” He opened an app, dialed, then held up his finger for quiet. Everyone leaned toward him, straining with hope.
When the man on the other end answered, his voice sounded small and far away. But it was audible. “Cullen.”
“Kev. It’s Nelson.”
“Shit, it’s crazy here…some kind of riot—”
“I know. I was there.”
“We had a few dozen incoming last night, and there’s still more trickling in. The bigwigs are meeting right now to decide whether they’re gonna activate the Unified Victim ID System.”
“Kevin…” Nelson’s voice was strained. “Tuyet’s missing.”
There was a beat where Javier wondered if Nelson had shifted his grip on the phone, preventing this Kevin’s reply from being heard. But after a pause, he said, “I’ll check and call you right back.”
“Why would you ask him?” Bobby stood in the hall, agitated.
“Go sit with Grandma, okay?”
Bobby’s face crumpled, and he turned and ran toward the living room. Nelson pushed past Javier again. Javier found himself missing all those flirtatious brushes and touches from before. It was less than a day ago—but now it seemed like a distant, fading memory from a much better time.
“Bobby—”
“Why’d you call Kevin? She’s not at the morgue. She’s not.”
“Shut up, you’ll just freak your grandmother out. Bobby? Don’t you dare tell her.”
Javier slipped out of the bedroom and eased his way toward the living room. It was fairly large, but a lofted bed with a desk beneath it took up much of the space. The smell of Asian cooking was strong. A glance into the adjacent kitchen revealed it was just as cluttered with items as the rest of the apartment, baskets of fresh produce, strange, foreign-looking pots and pans, a steamer, a huge ladle.
“He’s got a VOIP phone too,” Nelson said in desperation. “That’s all. Bobby, stop bawling.”
A short, thin woman—not exactly what Javier had been picturing as “Grandma,” since she was maybe in her late forties, wearing a Knicks sweatshirt and her hair in a tight ponytail—was whispering something urgent to Nelson in Vietnamese. He was right. It was practically all vowels.
She glanced at Javier, his eye patch, then turned back to Nelson and said something else…or maybe it was whatever she’d just said, repeated with more emphasis.
He stammered something back in halting Vietnamese. It sounded incongruous coming from his mouth, like hearing a Berber slip into French. Even so, at that moment, Javier felt something inside him shift. Something profound. He’d assumed plenty of things about Nelson Oliver. Entitled. Overeducated. Shallow. Playboy. And now he could see that every last one of them had been wrong.
***
“It’s okay,” Nelson told bà ngoai in Vietnamese. Since that was his go-to phrase, something that meant anything from, “Don’t worry about the B on Bao’s report card,” or, “we’ll figure out a way to pay the electric bill,” or, “that guy I brought home was just leaving,” the family’s matriarch wasn’t particularly comforted.
Bao—Bobby—told his grandmother something that sounded pretty much like, “Nelson’s going to find mom.” Nelson didn’t think he heard the word morgue in there. Not that he knew the Vietnamese word for morgue. Hopefully Bobby didn’t, either.
If Pham Thi Mai had been an American woman—or, heck, even a white woman of almost any nationality—Nelson would have hugged her, or at least patted her on the arm. But bà ngoai didn’t do displays of affection. Even arm-pats. “Mai,” Nelson said, hoping she’d understand that by using her given name he was being urgent, and not rude. “It’s okay.”
She stared him in the eye, and it spooked him. Mai was no more fond of eye contact than she was of physical contact. She hadn’t looked at him like that in years, not since she’d worked out that while Nelson was happy to be the man of her house, he didn’t intend to be the man in her daughter’s bed, and they’d fallen into a sort of truce. Nelson was the one to look away. No doubt there was a whole laundry list of stuff they should do while they waited for Kevin to call back. Things like…like….
He couldn’t think of a damn thing. And that scared the shit out of him.
When he turned away from bà ngoai to escape the weight of her unaccustomed gaze, he saw his ragtag group of new friends clustered in the hallway. Marianne was there in front with her ruined shoes, toes upturned, looking like a beat-up elf. Randy stood behind her with precisely half his face covered in a blue-green bruise like some sort of comic book villain. Javier’s expression was unreadable. Tim—well, that weirdo was probably still rifling through Nelson’s desk.
Nelson went to the stack of plastic tubs that served as Tuyet’s wardrobe, and pulled out a pair of slip-on shoes, trendy little mules with braided hemp around the soles and beaded tassels dangling off the top. Bobby looked like he was about to challenge Nelson for going through his mother’s things, but a stern look from bà ngoai kept him quiet. Nelson handed the shoes to Marianne. “Here, do these fit?”
Marianne toed off her ruined pumps and tried them on. “A little snug, but a lot more comfortable than walking around with my toes pointed at the sky. My calves are killing me.”
Nelson cleaved through the group in the hallway and went back in his room. Half his desk was covered with a scale model of the Titanic made of recycled snips of plastic that he and Bobby had been putting together. It didn’t look much like the ocean liner, but it was something constructive to do. Epoxy? No, too hot, and it took too long to set. There—super-bond glue. He held up the tube. “C’mere, Randy. You can lose the gum.”
“You’re gonna glue my tooth back in?”
“No, you don’t want this stuff leaching into your bloodstream through your gums. I’m gonna stick it to the tooth’s next door neighbors. It should hold for a couple of days, as long as you take care not to chew on it. Then all your dentist needs to do is buff off the glue and wire your teeth together ’til it re-implants.”
Randy didn’t slip into the point / counterpoint dynamic he and Nelson enjoyed; he seemed to sense when it would be to his advantage to just shut up because Nelson knew what he was doing. He sat at the desk and allowed Nelson to probe around in his mouth again, which felt weird, because unlike the cadaver head, Randy was breathing on him. “It’ll be hot for a couple of minutes—you’ll feel it if your teeth are sensitive—but then the resin will cu
re and you’ll be good and glued.” Nelson squeezed some glue onto a scrap of paper and scooped up a bead of it with the broad end of a toothpick, like he’d done so many times before on the crappy model of the Titanic. “Here, hold up your lip for me, and don’t let go. I’d hate for you to glue your mouth shut.”
It felt good to have something purposeful to do. It almost made him stop thinking about the possibility of finding Tuyet on a metal slab.
Chapter 13
The smokestacks were very clever. Shampoo bottles and takeout coffee cup lids had been snipped apart and used in such a way that some well-placed logos formed the black and gold layers of the stacks. But of course it was clever. Tim wouldn’t have expected anything different.
Although the Vietnamese family really was a bit of a shock. Jealousy had rocked Tim—quietly, as the things that turned his life upside down typically did—until he realized there weren’t any pictures of a Vietnamese woman in Nelson’s room. A few casual shots of Nelson and Bobby, yes. But that felt okay. Maybe a bit disappointing, in that he’d never imagined Nelson to be on the I-must-exercise-my-right-to-a-child bandwagon. At least the kid seemed nice enough. A bit older, well past that overly-precious stage. More like an actual person.
Tim stared hard at the plastic ship model while Nelson glued Randy’s tooth in, and he did his best not to think that Nelson would make a totally awesome survivalist, with his quick wit, and his martial arts, and all his education—but, of course, telling himself to stop thinking about something only made him think it more.
Maybe it was for the best that Nelson already had a son. One of the parting comments Tim’s ex had made was that maybe the whole “gay thing” wasn’t worth it. Maybe he wanted to settle down and have a family, before all the women who hadn’t had their tubes snipped were taken.
Where Phil was now was anybody’s guess. Tim could have kept tabs on him, but had been very deliberate about letting him drop off the radar. Maybe he’d found his future wife by now. Or maybe he’d only been saying he wanted something Tim couldn’t give him just to be hurtful.
“Okay,” Nelson said. “Glue’s cured. You should still chew on the other side and stick with plain, steamed manna. But that’ll hold for now.”
“As of right now, I’m going on a diet,” Randy said. “No more punch.”
As Tim tried, and failed, to stop staring, Nelson peeled off his shirt. “Okay. Clothes. Who needs what?”
Tim needed a shirt that didn’t make him feel like an idiot. Though he strongly suspected Nelson wasn’t offering a fashion rescue.
Nelson pulled on a long-sleeved thermal top, then a battered T-shirt over that. There was a logo on it, though Tim had no idea which band it was for. Or if it even was a band…or something else, like Nelson’s tattoos. Assuming they were more than just decoration. But they didn’t feel that way to Tim—just like the band logo. He knew it was “something” when he saw it. He just didn’t know what that “something” was.
“Do you have any sweatpants?” Marianne asked. “If I never see pantyhose again, it’ll be too soon.”
Nelson sized her up and tossed a pair of cargo pants her way. “Try those. They have a drawstring waist.” He found another thermal shirt and tossed it her way, too. Unlike Nelson, who was happy to dress and undress in front of anybody and everybody, Marianne slipped out to the bathroom to change in private.
“What about you?” Nelson asked Javier.
“I’m fine.”
“At least take a sweatshirt. It’s cold out there.”
Javier grudgingly reached out for the shirt, but Nelson, instead of letting go when Javier’s hand closed around it, gave it a gentle tug to pull the two of them closer. “But make sure you give it back to me after the dust settles. It’s one of my favorites.”
“Still angling for my phone number.”
“If at first you don’t succeed….”
Tim was staring now, really staring, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Javier and Nelson were staring, too. Not at Tim. At each other. Javier set his jaw and gave the sweatshirt a more definite tug, which dragged Nelson even closer. Once they stood right up against each other, and once they’d stared at each other long and hard, Javier dropped the shirt and grabbed a thick black marker off Nelson’s desk. He took Nelson’s wrist none too gently, turned his arm over, shoved his sleeve up and scrawled a number on the underside of his forearm.
Tim’s brain was caught in a loop, and “Oh my God” seemed to be the only phrase his mind was willing to produce—because, while it seemed like he should feel jealous that Nelson would look at Javier like that…he was equally as blown away by the appearance of the Javier he’d met in the chatroom. The hot Javier. Hot? No, that word didn’t even come close.
This Javier was scorching.
A fuzzy ringtone—possibly also a band, though Tim wasn’t positive—broke the tension of the staring and the staring and the staring.
***
Elation turned to dread so quickly Nelson was surprised he didn’t get whiplash when Kevin’s photo popped up on his phone. “Nelson,” he began…and then he didn’t follow it up with a phrase like, “everything’s fine.” He just breathed, groping for words.
Nelson turned away from Javier, from everyone, so that he faced the wall, and said, “Is she there or not?”
“That’s the thing.” Kevin exhaled a gusty sigh into his phone that came across as distortion. “I’d need you to I.D. her.”
“Are you serious?”
“Nelson—”
“You’d fall back on fucking procedure with me? With me?”
“I…it…if you’d just calm down a second—”
“Calm down?”
“Because I can’t…I can’t tell if it’s her or not.”
How could he not be able to tell? He knew damn well what Tuyet looked like. He stared at her hard enough when he thought no one else was looking. Nelson’s brain was firing in overdrive, though, and there were dozens of reasons someone might be unable to identify a body. Bloat. Crushing injury. Missing head. Sonofa…he tipped forward and pressed his forehead into the wall, and wondered if he was going to throw up. His knees felt wobbly, and only partially from the serotonin oversaturation. “Send me a picture,” he said finally, in a very small voice.
“It’s bad.” Kevin’s voice was just as small.
“I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get up there, maybe hours, and all that time I’m gonna be thinking the worst. If I can tell you now, then we’ll know. Right now. We’ll know.”
“Hold on. I gotta wait ’til Dreyer’s out of range.” It was probably illegal to send a photo from the county morgue, or if not illegal, in violation of departmental policy. Kevin could probably be demoted or even fired, though at that particular moment, Nelson didn’t care.
Kevin had stopped talking, but his side of the connection didn’t go completely quiet. He breathed loud through his nose, and in the background, footsteps echoed off all the hard surfaces—linoleum, plastic, stainless steel.
“I’ll start with her shirt,” Kevin whispered.
Oh hell. It had to be bad if they were going by the clothing. A few moments later, Nelson’s inbox received a photo. He steeled himself, and he opened it. Blood, partially dried. He noticed the color of the fabric, the cut of the neckline, sure. But it was phenomenally difficult to move past the blood.
Kevin was there, waiting patiently, when Nelson navigated away from the photo and put the phone to his ear. “I’m not sure if she has a blouse like that or not. How about jewelry?”
“No jewelry.”
“Is she definitely…Asian?” What Nelson really wanted to know was whether or not there was enough left of the body to tell. Thankfully, Kevin didn’t make him say it.
“Asian or Hispanic.”
“Her hair?”
“It’s singed at the ends so it’s hard to tell for sure—but it would be the right length. Unless she got her hair cut recently?” Kevin’s voice turned
up at the end with the sudden hope that Tuyet had decided to have a makeover, a really recent makeover, since he’d just been by for poker night less than a week before.
“Just show me her face,” Nelson said.
“That won’t help you.”
“I might notice something you missed.”
“I really don’t think you—”
“Who’s been living with her for the past dozen years? Me. Not you. So shut up and send me the fucking picture.” Nelson had never spoken to Kevin like that. In fact, he didn’t talk like that to anyone, period.
Kevin could have hung up on him, but he didn’t. A pause, and then Kevin said, “Okay, check your inbox.”
Even on the small screen, and even holding it at arm’s length, squinting, the blood-and-gristle sight of the wrecked face was more than Nelson could handle. A huge whooshing sound enveloped him—like a migraine, a nasty migraine, and yet different.
At least with a migraine, there was a sense of passing time. Excruciatingly slow, if there were no meds. Faster, like falling into and waking from a nap, if there were. But this reaction was more like a drinking binge that ended in a blackout. Now there were arms around him, fingers stroking his hair. Those details came into focus slowly. But whatever had come before was simply gone as if it had never happened, and Nelson struggled to recall….
“Are you awake? I’ve got you.” A voice Nelson half-recognized, soft in his ear. “I’ll take care of you.”
Nelson’s head began to clear. His cheek was pressed into a short beard—or maybe it was long stubble.
Tim?
Tim ran a hand down Nelson’s upper arm and chafed the feeling back into his tingling limbs. “Are you with us?”
“What happened?”
“You had a jolt. And you’re probably not even recovered from yesterday’s headache.” He cleared his throat nervously and patted Nelson on the shoulder. “I’ll drive you.”
The Starving Years Page 10
