Honesty

by Seth King

  After about ten days I had one good evening where I finally got the motivation to make myself some food and tidy up the disaster area that was my kitchen, and the next morning I bit the bullet and went to the hospital. I had no real plan in my head, I just figured I’d sniff around and see where the wind took me. I went to the information desk posing as Nicky’s cousin, and thankfully I had his Puerto Rican ID card – he’d left it at my house and totally forgotten about it. The lady at the desk, Phyllis, was suspicious, but she still sent me to another waiting room on the third floor, which I guessed was where he’d been treated. The fact that his body had seen these same walls seemed to pound against my skull as I waited for a new receptionist to help me. The plan fell apart as soon as I failed to produce any real details about the case, though. In the end, they sent Dr. Martin, a kind-eyed man of about fifty who took me into a break area that smelled of cheap coffee and industrial cleaning fluid.

  “Coffee?” he asked, and I shook my head, faint from the fumes and the fury. “Okay, well, Mr. Furman. I’m afraid we’re not permitted to give any visitors any information which may inform them of any patient’s case.” He paused, breathed, looked down at me. It was then that I noticed his shirt was a beautiful salmon color, and that he was far more chic than any doctor had the right to be. “That’s why I’m legally required to verbally confirm that you are the victim’s…stepbrother? That’s why your names are different?”

  “Yes,” I said after a minute. I knew I would never be able to repay him for this. Ever. “His…stepbrother. Yeah, yes. That’s me.”

  He sort of smirked. “Okay, well, I will tell you everything I recall. I was the doctor assigned to break the news to the immediate family, and that is not something you forget easily, no matter how many years you’ve done this. Please, let’s sit.”

  We sat. He spoke. “Nick Flores died of blunt force trauma after an auto accident. The accident itself is still somewhat of a mystery. I’ve never seen anything like it, really. It was very…open-ended. So many variables. Sooo many things to consider…”

  Thanks, I wanted to say. You’re really helping me out here. “I know,” I told him. “And I know what some people suspect. But there were so many things it could’ve been besides suicide. He had two mild seizures in middle school, so maybe-”

  “That’s a possibility,” he allowed. “But because of the nature of the…accident, and how long it took to get him here…it was impossible to say with any certainty that it was seizure, or even the beginning of one.”

  He grabbed my shoulder, but it felt empty and awkward. I could tell he didn’t have any children – parents knew how to touch you better than he did. Most of them, at least. Not mine.

  “I also heard of a car issue,” Martin said, “a recall of his specific make and model that he never knew about. Three similar cars were tracked accelerating, but none like this, none were ever so deliberate, or so quick out of the gate.”

  I swallowed. This wasn’t solving anything – it was deepening the pit of questions. So I looked for anything to grab and cling onto. “Well he had really bad mood swings, he must’ve-”

  He raised a hand. “There is no way to know his mood that morning, or anything that was happening with…the mental situation at all, since there was never a diagnosis.”

  I tried to keep it together, but the gates broke. I’d wasted so much of my life hiding, and I had nothing at all to show for it.

  “We were in love,” I finally said in a voice that was not so much resigned as already gone. But the words still felt hot and scary and exhilarating as they rushed out of my mouth like that, like a beaver dam finally breaking apart. “God, it feels so weird to say that. Anyway…yeah, I loved him the first day I met him, and I love him today. I guess we were both sort of immature, and we’d date for a little while and then break up again and not talk for a few days, and then a few weeks, and then…yeah. We’d have no contact during our breaks, either. He kept me totally out of his life because he was scared, and so I didn’t even know about this until last week. I had no way to find out. His family didn’t know about me, his friends didn’t know about me, his own sister didn’t even really know about me…and so when this happened, I just figured it was another breakup, another dry spell…I had no idea he was…dead.”

  The last word made a world of horror bloom inside me all over again. I looked away a little, but he didn’t. His eyes were leaking onto his white coat. “I’m…God, I’m truly sorry to hear that, Cole. I don’t even know what to say. I’ve probably never heard a story that tragic. And I work in a hospital…”

  I wiped my face. “What do you think happened?”

  He hesitated. “Well. I didn’t know Mr. Flores, and I’m a doctor of the body, not the soul, so I’m afraid I’m not the one you should discuss that with. However, I do think the answer to that question will eat you alive if you don’t give it up. Not to sound like a fascist, but it happened, and you’ve got to deal with it. There’s nothing else you can do.” He swallowed, his eyes pained and his resolve cracking, and that’s when I knew he’d lost someone, too.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He glanced at me. “I can still remember it – the day my…best friend, Neil, disappeared on this white-water-rafting weekend in North Carolina.” He fidgeted, and I knew exactly what type of “friend” this had been. “He was last seen at a campsite by the creek, drinking a beer, and to this day they have never found a body. Anything could’ve happened. He was in and out of rehab and everything, but the strange thing was, before that weekend, he’d been doing so well. He found a job and started gardening again, and we all thought he’d turned a corner, and then it was just…poof. Gone. And I will sit here today and tell you that I wasted almost five years of my life despairing over what sent him into that river.”

  He faltered, but only for a moment. Then he put a hand on my leg, and I tried not to flinch. “I’m sorry, Cole. I really am. For…everything. I don’t like this world any more than you do. All we can do is deal with where we find ourselves, you know? And hope we don’t disappear into the river, too…”

  I met his eyes. “And what if we find ourselves in that river?”

  “Just keep swimming,” he said. “Swim against the current until the current changes. That’s bravery.” Something in his eye sparkled, and I didn’t really know what it meant. “And again, I’m truly sorry. If I can do anything else – with honesty, I mean that – here’s my card.”

  He handed me a business card and got up to leave.

  “Wait,” I said, and he turned around. “Can you tell me where he’s buried? I don’t even know his family.”

  He shook his head one sad, final time, said sorry again, and started down the hall. Ugh. I was so sick of being sorried, of being apologized to. Why was everyone always Sorrying me, anyway? What did I have to be sorry about?

  “Oh, and Cole?” he asked, and I looked up. His face softened. “What you just told me wasn’t easy. Hell, I’m fifty-four years old and I still can’t say it. So I admire you. I truly admire you. I just want you to know that.”

  He turned and left before he could say anything else.

  Back in the car I wiped my eyes and took out my phone and wanted to Google and Facebook stalk the case again until my sight went bad and my fingers broke. Something twisted and lurched in me, though, and I knew I had to stop. Dr. Martin was right: I would never find out what really happened that day. I would never find out why he never came back, and whether he still loved me at the end or not. It was all just stuff I’d have to live with, because if I didn’t jettison this, or at least try to jettison it, it would burn me alive.

  I slipped into traffic thinking of how much I’d give up for one final hug. I knew I would probably forget a lot about Nicky Flores, too. He was a rain that would never stop falling, but soon those droplets would all look the same. I’d lost three grandparents already, and I knew how this all worked. I knew a day would come when I would no longer be able to breathe in a qui
ck burst of future air and use it to synthesize his crisp, clean scent, and I knew there would come a night when I would try to picture him saying something and realize I’d forgotten what his voice had sounded like. He’d be gone. I would probably forget the way he moved, the way he laughed, the exact proportions of his jaw, the way his face looked in the light of July. I would wear his clothes until they fell apart and keep his things until I lost them, and soon I would have nothing left to remember him by. But I knew I would never forget how that boy made me feel – like I was in the company of clouds, like the sun had found a home inside my throat, like I wasn’t me anymore. Those feelings were mine forever.

  I thought of his smile then, and how it made me want to melt into the sun. I thought of his dark/bright galaxy eyes, and how I could sunbathe in them. Mostly I thought of how he made me feel, like John Hughes soundtracks and warn tomato soup and watching fireworks pop over water. That boy had taught me what glory tasted like: metallic, electric, like when you bite down on tinfoil and feel that surge in your jaw. That sweet little world we’d created, away from the watching eyes and the prejudices and the word “faggot,” where he was kind to me and he acknowledged our love – I missed that world. All my little inside jokes, all our little things we’d ever seen or shared or laughed about – all of it. It didn’t matter that he’d deny me as soon as he left that world, and that our heaven was shattered time and time again – it had existed once, and it was real, and nothing and nobody could ever take that away from me. That’s what I had to tell myself, at least.

  When I really loved a book and bonded with its characters, I loved to stop in with them in my mind here and there over the years, envision where their futures would’ve taken them, where they’d be, who they were becoming, who they slept beside every night, whether it had all worked out for them. And maybe the fantasy versions of us were still out there somewhere. Maybe ColeyAndNickyVille would live forever – maybe that little universe we’d created together would stretch on and never die, just like I’d told myself after the breakup. Maybe somewhere, Coley and Nicky were talking and laughing and roaming the cobblestoned streets of Savannah together. Maybe, maybe not. But I’d hold onto that hope with everything in me. God knows I had nothing else to grasp.

  I wanted to be left alone forever, but right on cue, my dad came over to “drop off some mail” that evening. Immediately I knew his mind was somewhere else, though. My family had known something was wrong with me, they just didn’t know what it was. But all at once, I knew my dad had an idea.

  “Shitty weather, eh, kid?”

  I glared at the window, my esophagus tightening around itself. I didn’t want to talk about the weather with him. Or anything at all, really. He made a little throat-clearing sound, and I looked at him. “You didn’t come here to talk about the weather, did you, Dad?”

  He inhaled. “No. Here’s the thing. A few months ago – or more than a few, maybe – I saw you at the movie theater. And I can’t get it out of my head.”

  I turned my face and buried it in the covers. My stomach clenched up and my already-sweaty body started pouring. Oh, God, I thought as this dizzy sort of nausea rolled over me in waves. He knows. Not now. This cannot be happening right now. Today. Can he not do this right now? Like, literally any other time but today?

  “You were with…someone I didn’t expect you to be with. Doing things I’d never expected you to be doing.” He swallowed. “And the worst thing was…the boy looked like…he looked like…some kind of Hispanic…and, hey, what do you say, isn’t that his picture by your bed?”

  I flipped over the Honesty Polaroid from that first day at the gym as my entire body bloomed with rage. So now my dad was being a racist, along with all the other shitty things he already was? Really? Really? Had he not been enough of a shit-bucket before? In all my angst over the gay issue, I’d never even stopped to think about the fact that Nicky had spent his life with a whole different set of prejudices, prejudices I could never even begin to imagine, all because of the tone of his skin. Oh, my poor boy. I’d been so caught up in my own struggles – being gay in a world that largely wanted to erase me and make me go away – I’d never even realized I’d been enjoying a privilege I didn’t even know I’d had, which was being white in America. Just as I’d envied the clueless freedom that straight guys took for granted, people of darker pigments probably looked at me and envied my freedom…

  And how could my dad have said he didn’t know about all this? He knew, and he’d been rubbing the suspicion in my face for years like I was a dog who’d shit in the dining room. He’d held this over my head forever, and everyone knew it. Ugh, I was so fed up with living by this stupid man’s outdated rules. I’d never been sicker of anything, and I’d had severe asthma as a boy. My father had seen me loving the person I was born to love, a boy who was dead, and he was horrified. Why would I ever feel bad about that?

  I almost wanted this to be some shitty after-school special. I almost wanted him to sit on my bed beside me and tell me he loved me no matter what, that I was still a treasure to him. But he never would. My father was a real person, with real prejudices, real hatred in his spirit, and there would never be some softly-lit, come-to-Jesus, sitcom moment with him. He would never take me in his arms and rock me, wipe away my tears and say “it’s okay, son. It’s okay.” That just wasn’t going to happen.

  “So,” my dad said, “whatever this is, if it’s some breakup or something, I just want you to know that your stepmother and I are monitoring you, and-”

  “Richard,” I interrupted, calling him by his first name because he was no longer a father to me, “you cannot come into my house and stand at my bed and tell me these things. You just can’t. It’s not in the cards for you. You’re a bad father, and that’s the worst thing anything could ever be. You hated me because I…because I wasn’t who you wanted me to be. You always did. You treated me like a pile of hot garbage my whole life.”

  “I didn’t hate you because of all that,” he snapped, and I winced. I guessed it was too much for me to want him to say he didn’t hate me at all. “Well…that factored into it, maybe. You know how I feel about the gay issue. I don’t support what they do, and I’m perfectly within my rights to feel that way.”

  I leaned back. “Your wife,” I said plainly.

  “My wife?”

  “Yep, your wife. She’s Asian, and she didn’t choose to be Asian. She was born that way, just like other people happen to be born gay – she didn’t choose her race any more than anyone else chose their sexuality. So you saying that you ‘don’t support gays’ would be just like saying you don’t support Asians, and that would sound racist as hell, right? Gay people are born gay, and you don’t have the right to ‘disagree’ with that any more than you have the right to ‘disagree’ with race or eye color or anything else that people don’t choose about themselves. Bigotry is bigotry, and will be treated as such.”

  He stuttered, then tried again. “Cole, I…”

  When he finally realized he was speechless, he reset his shoulders and glared at me. “Whatever. Never mind all that. Mostly I just hated you because you were arrogant.”

  “Arrogant?”

  “You’d shut yourself up in your little world back in your bedroom with your camera and your music and your books, totally oblivious to the rest of us, to the fact that I was hurting too, I’d lost my wife…you never cared about me. You never cared about the son I wanted you to be.”

  And my voice evacuated my throat for a moment. “But you’re talking about a – I was a freaking child!”

  The Coley that had existed before Nicky would’ve never talked to his father like this. He would’ve crossed his arms, lips trembling, and taken it on the chin. But if I could survive Nicky Flores, I could survive anything.

  My dad looked away, and for probably the first time ever, I saw a glimpse into his mind. All I’d ever done was deny him his dreams. He wanted the football-star son he could play catch with – that was his dream. He d
idn’t want me. I was a defected product to him. Sure, it was a hateful and homophobic dream, but that wasn’t his fault. People dreamed about all different things, for all kinds of crazy reasons. And maybe this was adulthood: seeing your dreams fall away, and then walking on. Looking for new dreams…

  But that still didn’t mean I had to give a shit.

  “You were the parent in this situation,” I said, “and you were supposed to-”

  He started to say something, but I interrupted him and told him to shut the hell up. He stared at me and then I smiled a little, because when I was really mad, like really REALLY mad, I got nice. (Hell hath no fury like me with a smile on my face.)

  I stared down at my hands, marveling at this new universe. My dad knew I liked dudes – holy shit. What a crazy new world we lived in. I waited to feel panic, self-loathing, all the things that would’ve come before. But nothing came, not really. I knew I was gonna have to deal with the fact that Nicky had left me, abandoned me, found death more attractive than a life with me, but right now…I knew he’d be laughing like hell with me at the look on my father’s face.

  I knew my dad was probably about to kick me out, but the crazy thing was, I didn’t even need him anymore. I was the boy Nicky Flores had loved once, and I would carry that strength with me forever, whip it out whenever I needed and let it unfurl in the breathless wind, triumphant like the stars and stripes. I was also free from my father for other, more monetary reasons. I could still hear the book agent’s voice, in rapidfire New York, speaking to me yesterday, after I’d finally picked up the phone for the first time in what felt like forever.