by Marie Sexton
“What? It’s a simple question?”
“It’s a simple question which you have already asked me a dozen times. The answer is the same. I’m not interested.” His voice had that low, controlled tone, which I knew meant he was furious. Joseph either didn’t notice or didn’t care. I suspected the latter.
“How can you not be interested? If not her, what about that redhead? Your mother wants grandkids, and you’re not getting any younger. Are you ever going to stop being so damn selfish and do your duty?”
“Lucy,” Mom jumped in suddenly, “didn’t you tell me last time you were here that you were planning a trip to Florida?”
“Uh.” Lucy was looking very flustered, fidgeting with the scarf around her neck. I think she could sense disaster in the air but couldn’t quite figure out which way to dodge. “Yes, that’s right. We went to Orlando—”
“I want to know!” Joseph’s voice was much louder now. “I want to know how can you go around with this, this—” He was gesturing at me and obviously couldn’t think of a word bad enough. “This pansy, like it doesn’t matter! It’s no wonder none of the girls want to date you.”
“Joseph, that’s enough,” Lucy said quietly, but he didn’t listen.
“Have you thought about that? Have you thought about what people are going to say about you?”
Lizzy stood up now. “Mr. Richards, I think I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”
“No! I’m not going anywhere! I want to know why my son is still hanging around with a fucking faggot. Don’t you care what people will say?”
“Joseph.” My mother stood up, and her voice was sharp enough to cut glass. “That is my son you are talking about, and—”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass!”
Mom turned around and slammed her way through the swinging door into the living room hard enough to rattle the pictures hanging on the wall. Joseph was standing up now, swaying a little on his feet. Matt hadn’t moved an inch. His hands were clenched in front of him, and he was staring straight ahead, which put his gaze somewhere over his mother’s head. Lucy had her hands over her face. Brian had the classic deer-in-the-headlights look. Lizzy was still standing with her hands on her hips, glaring at Joseph with murder in her eyes.
Joseph still wasn’t done. “You should be ashamed to be seen with him! Don’t you know what that could do to your career? Are you so fucking stupid that you can’t figure out what people will say?”
“I know what people say, Dad.” His voice wasn’t as quiet now. He didn’t sound angry anymore at all. Just resigned.
“So you know that they’re going to assume you’re a faggot too?”
“Yes, Dad, I know that.”
“They’re going to assume you’re his boyfriend.”
“I know that too.”
“They’re going to assume that the two of you are fucking each other.”
His voice was stronger this time. “I don’t care.”
“How can you not care?”
And I saw him make the decision. I saw his hands unclench, his shoulders relax. I reached out to grab him, to tell him to stop, I even started to say, “Don’t,” but he shook me off. He sat up straight, squared his shoulder, looked right at his dad and said, “Because it’s true.”
“Oh no.” Lucy’s voice was a whisper behind her hands, and she put her head down on the table.
Nobody else moved. Nobody else spoke. The silence seemed to go on forever.
Joseph finally said, his voice low and deadly, “Are you telling me—”
“Yes.” Matt stood up now, back straight and head up. I couldn’t believe how calm and sure he looked, as if, having now set his feet on the path, he had no reason to look back. “I’m telling you that I’m gay. That apartment you saw? The day I took you there was the first time I had been there in weeks. I live with Jared.” I would like to say that I was holding my head up, as proud as he seemed to be, but the truth is, I was doing my best to stare straight through the dining room table in case there was a hole underneath it I could climb into.
Another deathly silence, and then Joseph said, “You are not my son.”
And Matt actually smiled at that, just a bit. “I don’t remember the last time I agreed with you more.” Lucy was really crying now. Nobody moved to comfort her. “Here.” Matt tossed a set of car keys on the table. “Take your rental car and go home. I’ll be going home—to my home—with Jared.”
Joseph looked like he was about to say something, but he never got the chance.
Suddenly, Mom burst back into the room. “Matt, you need to come. There’s something going on.”
Matt, Mom, and Brian went first. Joseph and Lucy followed. Lizzy was still standing in the same position, hands on hips, staring at the empty place where Joseph had been standing. I was in shock. I felt like the whole world had been turned upside down. I was waiting for somebody to jump out and yell, “Surprise, you’re on candid camera!” But instead, Lizzy turned to me and said, “Well, that went better than I expected.”
And just like that, I was laughing. She came and pulled me out of my chair. “Come on. Let’s go see what’s going on.”
When we got into the living room, nobody was there. The front door was open, and there were people all over the front lawn. At the curb were several police cars with lights flashing. It was dark outside, and the only light came from the red and blue strobes on top of the cars. Matt was talking to Grant, Tyson, and one other cop I didn’t know.
“What’s going on?” I asked Matt.
“We need to talk.”
“Do you have your weapon?” Grant asked him.
“No.”
“There must be a spare in one of the trunks.” Grant headed off to the cars.
Matt led me over to where Brian, Lizzy, and Mom were standing. Mom had James in her arms. “Somebody broke into my apartment earlier. They broke all the windows and trashed the place. The neighbors noticed the broken window and called the police.” He was speaking quickly and quietly. “When they got there and realized it was my place and that I wasn’t there, they went to our house.” He looked at me as he said this. “And they found the same thing there.”
“What?”
“Our neighbor heard a commotion and watched out the window and saw Dan Snyder leaving.”
“Holy shit.”
“When they didn’t find either of us at either place, they got worried and called in everybody.”
“Why didn’t they call you?”
He suddenly looked sheepish. “The battery on my phone is dead, and the charger is at home.” By which I knew he meant at my place, where he hadn’t been all week. I felt my eyebrows go up, and he gave me the pseudo-smile. “I know. I’m an idiot. I’m going to catch hell for it later. Right now, they want me to go and help with the search.” He reached out and grabbed my wrist. “Jared, stay here. Don’t go anywhere until you hear from me.” Then to the rest of them, “In fact, you should all go inside and lock the doors. If he knew to go to Jared’s house, then he might know to come here next.” Lizzy’s hand flew up to her mouth, and Mom clutched James to her like she thought Dan was going to jump out of the bushes and try to snatch him out of her arms. “I tried to talk them into leaving an officer here, but they don’t think I’m right.”
Just then, Grant ran back up to Matt. “I found a gun for you. It’s in the car. Are you ready to go?”
Matt looked over to where his parents were standing. Joseph had his arms crossed and was staring at the sky, and Lucy was talking quietly to him. They didn’t seem to notice the chaos around them. “Give me one minute, Grant.”
“Hurry.” Grant turned and went back to his car. The other cops were all back in their cars too. Some of them had left already. The ones that remained were just waiting for him.
Matt took a deep breath and then walked over to his parents. His dad turned his back on him and walked away, but Lucy was listening as he started to explain what was going on. Lizzy, Brian, and Mom went
up the steps back into the house. I watched until they were inside and then turned back to where Matt was talking to his mom. That’s when I saw Dan.
He stepped out of the dark shadows next to the garage. We were three points of a triangle—Dan on one point, me on the second, and Matt with his mom on the third. I saw his hand come up. I saw the gun. It was pointed right at Matt.
Everything was in slow motion. I was running toward Matt, yelling his name. He and Lucy were just turning to face me when I reached them, and that was when I heard the gun go off. Something slammed into me. Matt pushed past me and ran full speed, straight at Dan. Dan squeezed off another shot, but he was obviously thrown off guard by Matt bearing down on him, because the shot went wide. Matt barreled into him in a tackle worthy of the NFL, knocking the gun out of his hand, and had him pinned on the ground in record time.
I was feeling a little wobbly and turned to see that Lucy was hanging on to me. “I’m so glad I’m not the only one he can do that to,” I told her.
For some reason, she didn’t laugh. She looked scared. “Jared, I think you need to sit down.”
And suddenly I realized she wasn’t hanging on to me. She was trying to hold me up.
And then I was on the ground.
“Matt!” she yelled. The whole thing had only taken seconds. The cops were just now getting out of their cars and rushing toward us. I saw Matt, who was still holding Dan to the ground, look over at me and his face went white.
“Somebody bring me some fucking cuffs!”
I was trying to stand up when I heard Lucy say, “Jared, hold still.” I realized she was sitting on the ground next to me. “Jared, you’ve been shot. You need to be still.” She pulled the scarf from around her neck and held it against my side.
And suddenly, it hurt.
A lot!
I heard somebody say, “The ambulance is on the way.” And then Matt was next to me, holding my hand and looking down into my face.
“Hang in there, Jared.”
“He shot me?”
“Yes.” His eyes left mine as he glanced down to where his mom was pushing hard on my side. Then he looked back at me. “There’s a lot of blood.”
“Rub some dirt on it.”
“He’s delirious,” Lucy said, but Matt shook his head, a tiny hint of a smile in his eyes.
“No. He’s not. He’s going to be fine. Right, Jared?”
“Yeah. I feel great. What’s for dessert?” He squeezed my hand.
Dan was yelling—I couldn’t tell what. Cops were all around, and there was so much noise. I could hear Lizzy and mom crying. And now, it was really starting to hurt, and I could hear Grant saying, “Stay back. Give them some room.”
“It’s just like the movies,” I said to Matt. Now he started to look concerned. He was obviously re-evaluating his denial that I was delirious. “Jesus Christ, Matt, it hurts.”
“Hang on.”
I was feeling very light, like I might float up off of the ground. It seemed good that Lucy was holding me down, although I wished she didn’t have to make it hurt so much. There seemed to be lights floating around that I couldn’t focus on. I heard Lucy say, “He’s going into shock.”
“Jared.” And now Matt sounded scared. “Jared, I love you. Don’t you dare die on me.”
I tried to put my hand up to touch his face, but I couldn’t quite get it there. My vision was starting to fade. “Matt, I think I’m going to faint now.”
“No, Jared! Stay with me!”
I didn’t hear anything after that.
CHAPTER 29
THE first few times I woke, I was heavily drugged. I was vaguely aware of a parade of faces: one gray-faced doctor and an army of nurses, all interchangeable in their blue scrubs. Lizzy, Brian, Mom, Matt. Lucy? My molasses brain caught on that one, ripples of confusion, before flowing along into oblivion. I was vaguely aware that there were often people in my room I couldn’t see. They talked a lot, but only random phrases stuck with me—“replace the window” and “like a nanny”—but I couldn’t make any sense of them.
I kept feeling things crawling on me, but nobody seemed to notice. I finally managed to catch one of the nurses and said, “Bugs on my skin.”
She patted my hand and said, “It’s the Oxycodone.”
I heard the words but had no idea what they meant. I was trying to break the sentence down. It was definitely in English.
I fell asleep again before I got any further than that.
THE time finally came when I woke up, and the world made sense again. The fog in my brain had receded and become only a cloudy blotch in my memory. I was relieved that, at that moment, the only person in the room with me was Matt. He was leaning against the wall, looking out the window.
“Oxycodone makes me itch,” I said. Well, maybe there was still a little bit of fog left. I wasn’t exactly sure why that was the first thing to come out of my mouth.
His head whipped my direction. “What?”
“The painkiller they were giving me. It makes my skin crawl.”
He smiled and came to sit on the bed next to me. “That explains a lot. You kept saying ‘bugs.’”
“Next time I get shot, tell them I want Vicodin instead.”
“I will.” But then his face became serious. “You look like hell. How do you feel?”
“Like I need a shower.” I was looking around a little more and realized there were flowers everywhere. “Who are all those from?”
“Mostly your students and various members of the Coda Police Department. The school. Mr. Stevens. A lot of them are from people I don’t know. You’re a hero, you know?”
“Do I get a cape? I want red.”
“The way the story is being told, you bravely jumped in front of Mom and me in order to save our lives.” His eyes were crinkling at me, and his voice was light. “You took a bullet for us.”
“What am I, the secret service? I was just trying to get your attention. I wasn’t planning on getting shot.”
He smiled. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
We didn’t talk for a minute, and I started thinking about the scene at the table, before the incident in the front yard. Matt had actually told his dad about us.
“Why did you do it?”
He must have been thinking about it, too, because he didn’t have to ask what I was talking about.
“That day, I just kept thinking about the choices I had made in my life. Some of the hardest ones were decisions I knew he would hate if he knew about them. But they all turned out to be good. First, I decided not to join the military. And I think that was the right choice. Second.” He was ticking them off on his fingers as he talked. “I decided a few years ago to quit dating. I’ve already told you that my life got a lot easier after that. Then, I decided that your friendship was more important to me than what my coworkers were saying. And that turned out to be a good decision. And then when Cherie died, I decided to accept the fact that I wanted to fuck your brains out.”
“And that,” I interjected, “was a very wise decision.”
He smiled and winked at me. “It was.” His face grew serious again. “So we were all sitting there at the table, and he was screaming. And I was thinking about all of those decisions and how they had brought me to this place in my life where I was really, truly happy for the first time ever. So I asked myself, what’s the worst he can do to me? And I knew the answer right away—he could disown me. And I wasn’t really sure anymore why that seemed like a bad thing. It was like the solution was right there in front of me, and I was just being too fucking stupid to see it.” He was looking down at where our hands were clasped together on the bed by my side. “It’s actually a relief. I don’t have to waste another second of my life trying to make him happy.”
“What about your mom?”
He brightened a little. “Once she calmed down, she told me that she had suspected all along.” Funny how that works, I thought, remembering my conversation with Brian so many years ago. �
��I can’t really say that she’s happy about it, but she knows I’m happy. And that means something to her, I think.”
“I thought she was here.”
“She was. She delayed her flight and spent a couple of days here. Turns out with Dad gone, she and Lizzy and your mom are like three peas in a pod.”
“She’s gone now?”
“She is, but she’ll be back.” His eyes tightened a little, and he frowned. “She’s leaving him. She went home to get her things in order. Lizzy offered to let her live with them for a while. She said she could use help with James anyway.”
“Like a nanny,” I said quietly to myself, as one piece fell into place.
“Yes.” He was smiling again. “She’s so excited to have a surrogate grandchild; I think she would leave my dad for James alone.”
We were quiet again as I thought about all that he had said.
“Matt, I’m so sorry. You lost your family, all because of me.”
He looked at me with alarm. “What? No! You’ve got it all wrong.” He leaned forward on the bed and put his hand on my cheek. “I didn’t lose my family because of you. I have a family because of you.”
I leaned into his touch. “I want to go home. When are they letting me go?”
“Tuesday afternoon. I work the two to ten that day, but I’ll get it off.”
“Don’t. Mom or Brian or Lizzy will give me a ride.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“I’m sure. I’ll be waiting for you when you get home.”
“Will you be naked?” he asked with a wicked grin.
I laughed and pushed him off the bed. “Just wait and see.”
CHAPTER 30
IT TURNED out to be mom who took me home from the hospital. I was surprised to see that the large front window was covered by plywood. I had forgotten that, prior to showing up at Lizzy and Brian’s, Dan had ransacked our house.
“They’ve ordered the glass,” Mom told me. “I think Matt said it would be installed next week. We cleaned up inside as well as we could, but you’ll probably need to have the carpet in the living room replaced.”
