by J P Barnaby
“I’ll have someone come in and talk about organ donation. She has viable, healthy organs that could save someone’s life.” The callousness of the doctor’s words shocked Spencer.
“Thank you,” his father said, shaking hands with the doctor. “I think that’s the option she would have chosen.” He put a hand on Spencer’s shoulder. “Yes?”
“Yeah..” He couldn’t manage any more than that, thinking about them carving her up like a Thanksgiving turkey and pulling out what they wanted. His heart hurt.
“Can. We. Say. Good-bye.?” Spencer asked, not looking at the doctor but at his dad.
“Yes, we can take Sophie in for a bit,” his father signed. “But I do not think it would be a good idea to be there when they turn off the machines. She does not understand now, but she does not need that memory later.”
Spencer nodded. He didn’t have any memories of his mother, but that’s one he wouldn’t have wanted.
All the stories he had about his mother, everything he knew about her, came from Nell.
Jesus.
He held Sophie a little closer and stroked her hair.
How do you tell a little girl that her mother is never going to wake up, that she’s never coming back?
How had Nell told him?
Chapter 6
FOR THE next week, Aaron dragged himself to classes and work in Dr. Mayer’s office, but nothing kept his mind off Spencer. They sent texts back and forth most days, but Spencer had been busy helping his father with arrangements for Nell, her house, and her daughter. He’d described the funeral as well as he could in short messages—the flowers, the small number of close friends, and Nell’s ex-partner, Jane, who spent the service sobbing and asking about Sophie. Spencer spent the service in the back, playing tea party with Sophie. He said he didn’t need to see his hero lying cold and stiff in a coffin waiting to be buried. Dr. Thomas tried to get him to go up, saying he’d regret it if he didn’t, but Spencer didn’t think so. Neither did Aaron. He was glad he didn’t have the memory of Juliette lying in the coffin, lifeless. Watching the life drain from her had been bad enough.
The worst part was Aaron didn’t know when Spencer would be back. His texts and Dr. Thomas’s calls didn’t give him any sense of time. It was all meetings with the lawyer, dealing with Jane, and packing up what they needed from the house so it could be sold. They didn’t know when they’d be done.
Aaron had gone back to their apartment to pick up clothes the day after Spencer left. He’d crawled into their bed, the smell of Spencer still fresh on the sheets. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine his boyfriend next to him, around him, holding him—but every noise made him jump. The bumps from the upstairs neighbors sounded like someone trying to come through the front door. The rustling outside their window turned into someone trying to break the glass. By eleven, he’d been walking through his parents’ front door again, bag of clothes in hand.
His patience for the kid wore thinner with each passing day. He worked, he came back to his parents’ house, he hid until Allen came to pick up Tony, then he ate dinner—day after day. The hours he spent in class felt worthless. Nothing stuck in his head. Not even the PHP code for advanced programming kept his mind occupied. For the first time since he started college, he was doing the minimum for class. The notes he left on students’ homework assignments were halfhearted. They certainly weren’t getting his best recommendations.
The storm raged around him, and Aaron held on for the ride.
After two weeks of scattered texts and infrequent phone calls, Aaron sat sullen and detached on the living room floor. A pain centered in his chest made it hard to breathe. Not thinking about it helped. So he pulled Tony’s wooden alphabet blocks off the top of the toy box and started to build. It didn’t take any mental acuity, simply putting one onto the next onto the next.
“Awon,” Tony said as he sat down across from Aaron on the floor. Aaron didn’t say anything but handed him a block. With the awkwardness of a toddler, Tony set it on the tower, and it crashed to the floor. The world lightened a little as Tony giggled and started the tower again. They played this game for a long time, with each pile of blocks becoming increasingly shorter in Tony’s impatience. Finally Aaron watched him wander off with a mixture of sadness and relief. The kid got on his nerves, but it was nice not to be alone.
Allen came in a few minutes later.
“Play blocks with me,” Aaron told his younger brother without looking up. He meticulously added another four-block section, fortifying the bottom of his structure from toddler invasion.
“You’re kidding, right?” Allen sat down in the same place his son had been. He looked at Aaron around the slowly rising tower.
“Nope.” Aaron handed him a block and then kept building.
“I remember doing this when we were kids,” Allen said with a smile.
“I don’t. I don’t really remember anything about being a kid.”
“Is that why you don’t like him?” Allen didn’t meet his eye then, probably offended that Aaron wasn’t in awe of his little offspring, like everyone else seemed to be.
“It’s not you, and it’s not him. It’s a combination of things.”
“Like what?”
“The depression makes me very sensitive to noise, for one.” Aaron looked at Allen over the blocks.
“And Tony is the very definition of noise,” Allen conceded. To his credit he kept setting the wooden alphabet blocks on top of each other. Their letters spelled nothing, but the bridge coming together between Allen and Aaron meant everything.
“Anything can happen to a kid. We all know that. I don’t want it to be on my watch. That’s why I won’t babysit. It isn’t because I can’t. He’s two. It doesn’t take that much effort to keep him in line. I’m bigger.” Aaron smiled in spite of himself. “I just can’t be responsible for him. If something happened, I don’t know that I could live with it.”
“That’s all of us, Aaron. We’re all scared. What happened to you was the watershed moment for us, but it’s on the news every fucking day. I can’t protect him any more than Mom could protect you. But I’ll do my damnedest.” Allen’s face flushed with the passion of his sentiment, but that’s all it was—a sentiment. He couldn’t control the world any more than Aaron could.
“Dada.” Tony toddled back into the room with ice cream on his face, and Allen laughed.
“I’m pretty sure Grandpa wasn’t supposed to give you ice cream before dinner,” he called out, loud enough to be heard in the kitchen. The only response came as a noncommittal grunt. Allen held out his arms, and Tony raced into them. Well, as fast as little legs go, anyway. Tony sat in the open basket left by Allen’s cross-legged position.
“Have you heard from Anthony lately?” Aaron went back to the blocks. This structure resembled the Leaning Tower of Pisa, though that hadn’t been his intent. It would crumble soon. Then he’d start again.
“I talked to him last week. He was getting ready for the new semester. Bren has started going to the movies with him, things like that. It will be a while before he’s able to go into the store again, if he ever is. He’s made a lot of progress with Anthony and his therapist helping.” Allen wrapped his arms around Tony, who rested against his daddy’s chest. Tony’s little yawn showed all the teeth that were coming in. He seemed to have more teeth than mouth.
“That’s good progress for three years. I’m glad they only had to go through a couple of therapists. It seems like I went through a hundred.”
“Yeah, but you found the right one in the end. And hey, you got a bonus.”
“I did. I just wish that bonus would come home.” The wistful tone of his voice echoed through the emptiness inside him.
“He’ll be home soon, Aaron. I know you miss him, but they need to get that little girl settled. I can’t even imagine her in that car with her dying mother in the front seat. It’s chilling.” Allen stroked his son’s hair.
“I wonder if she’ll remember it,” A
aron said.
“Probably not. Most people can’t remember that far back. She’ll remember that she lost her mom as a little kid but probably not the details.”
“That’s good. It’s easier when you can’t remember details.”
“I wish you couldn’t,” Allen said, his voice suddenly hoarse.
“Me too.”
They spent a while longer building, but it woke Tony when they fell, so Aaron stopped. When Allen decided to lay the little boy down for a nap in the playpen, Aaron wandered upstairs to get his laptop. Nothing would satisfy his restless mind.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, he got a text telling him Spencer would be flying in that evening. Aaron’s mother had offered to pick him up since Dr. Thomas would be staying behind for a few days to finish working with the lawyer. He also needed to hire someone to deal with the house. Spencer said they’d shipped the things they wanted, memories of Nell and such, but the rest could be donated to a local homeless shelter. That’s what Nell would have wanted.
Aaron hadn’t told Spencer he would be coming to the airport with his mother. That would be a surprise. Aaron couldn’t wait to see the look on Spencer’s face when they saw each other again. God, he missed Spencer with an ache that was almost physical.
It took every bit of his concentration to get through the rest of his day. He didn’t much care about the paper he had due in economics or the code he needed to grade for Dr. Mayer’s freshman programming class, but he managed to get what he needed to done.
Dinner, while usually quiet at the Downing household, turned out to be a loud, boisterous, annoying affair. Allen and Melanie stayed, dropping Tony into his throne-like high chair at the head of the table—the prince holding court. Aaron took the chair on the other end so he wouldn’t get hit with flying mashed potatoes. Allen and Melanie took one long side while his parents took the other. Just another cozy night in with the Downings.
“Aaron, how are things with Spencer? Mom said you guys are going to pick him up after dinner.” Allen asked the question as he cut up another round of cranberry sauce for his son. Tony scarfed down the potatoes and cranberry sauce but had little interest in the chicken baby-food pieces that lay beside his overturned plate.
“I think they have everything situated. His dad is staying behind to wrap up a couple of things with the house.” Aaron picked at the chicken on his own plate. He’d taken very little food to start with. Something in him just felt uneasy, and it would until Spencer came home.
“What about the little girl?” Melanie asked, trying to wipe excess potatoes from Tony’s face. He was having none of it, though, squirming and trying to get away from the rag as if it burned him.
“I don’t know. They met with the lawyer about custody, but I don’t think I got an answer to that.” Aaron frowned. It seemed like a pretty big oversight that he hadn’t asked for or that Spencer hadn’t offered information about what would happen to Nell’s daughter. Spencer hadn’t mentioned her again after they’d gone to dinner and had grilled cheese. Maybe they found the person who’d gotten custody.
Maybe he hadn’t said anything because Dr. Thomas would take care of her. After all, he was Nell’s brother-in-law and she didn’t have anyone else.
It didn’t matter. He and Spencer would be in their own bed tonight.
Together.
“That poor little girl,” Melanie said. “I can’t imagine growing up without my mom.”
“That’s what I said when I found out Spencer’s mother died when Spencer was born. I couldn’t imagine not having Mom.” His mother looked at him, her expression warm.
“She survived the crash. She’ll grow up—happy and healthy. That’s what her mother would have wanted,” his father chimed in, scraping the last of his potatoes up with a few stray kernels of corn.
“That’s true. It’s just sad.”
“Worse things happen in life,” Aaron said, and four sets of eyes turned to look at him. Sympathetic, pitying eyes.
“So you guys working on kid number two yet?” He tried to steer the conversation away from himself and the attention he hadn’t meant to draw.
Melanie glanced at Allen, who laughed.
“We work on it all the time,” he said with a wink.
“Allen!” his mother cried.
Melanie slapped him on the arm, her face tinged red, while their father laughed, causing little Tony to laugh right along with them. The moment smacked of normal family camaraderie, and it made Aaron’s chest tighten a little. God, he wanted Spencer.
“Okay, just for that, Allen Downing, you get to do dishes. It’s time for Aaron and me to head to the airport,” his mother said.
“I suppose that’s fair.” Allen shrugged. “And that means I don’t have to give Tony his bath and wash potatoes out of places where potatoes should never be.”
“Nope, I got that.” Melanie laughed and disengaged the prison tray on Tony’s high chair. She scooped him up, and pieces of chicken followed kernels of corn toward the splat mat protecting the dining room carpet.
Aaron followed his mother out of the kitchen, a nervous anticipation welling inside him. He hadn’t seen Spencer for a couple of weeks—maybe the longest he’d gone without seeing him since they started dating. It made his skin tingle, thinking about Spencer’s fingers on his cheek. Then his mom grabbed her keys and cell phone.
“Ready?” she asked.
“More than,” Aaron answered.
The drive to O’Hare in the early evening just past rush hour meant they didn’t have to wait in traffic. He didn’t mind it so much, but his mother got antsy when cars didn’t move. If he’d come from their apartment, he’d have already been halfway through the hour drive, but he wouldn’t have made it into the busy airport alone. He’d never been anywhere near O’Hare in his life. So he sat back and watched the suburbs pass in their monochromatic glory.
Traffic got busier near the airport, and Aaron looked up out of the windshield. A giant jumbo jet passed over their heads, low enough to see faces in the little windows as it passed over the highway.
“Wow, did you see that?” Aaron asked, awestruck. He’d never seen a plane right in front of him. When he was a kid, they hadn’t gone anywhere that required air travel. Later he wasn’t able to be around all the people. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to do it this time, but he wanted to see Spencer so badly.
“I know. It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?” his mother replied and got all the way over to the right and headed for O’Hare. Even once they’d gotten off the highway, it seemed like forever until they got through the winding roads, the parking garage, and finally the long hallways of flat escalators the computer voice called “moving walkways.” It took a few more minutes, but finally they arrived at baggage claim.
“What flight was he on?” Aaron asked, staring up at the huge arrivals board so he didn’t have to look at the other people clamoring around him.
“UA 1353 from San Diego,” his mother read from her phone.
“There it is. It’s baggage claim number twelve.” They wandered down through the numbered carousels, and even before they’d gotten past number ten, Aaron saw those beautiful curls. He wanted to wave to Spencer, but his boyfriend had his back to Aaron and wouldn’t see. They moved past eleven, and then Spencer was standing within touching distance. He reached out to put a hand on his boyfriend’s shoulder, but Spencer was already turning around.
Sophie hung fast asleep in his arms.
Aaron stopped moving and his mother bumped him from behind.
“Aaron, what?” she asked, but then saw what, as Aaron stood staring at Spencer and the little blonde bundle in his arms.
He didn’t move.
He didn’t speak.
He just stared.
“Aaron., Stop..” Spencer’s voice sounded tired and out of patience. “I. Just. Dealt. With. A. Screaming. Three. Year. Old. All. The. Way. From. San Diego.. I. Can. Not. Do. This. With. You. Right. Now..”
For their e
ntire relationship, Spencer had gone out of his way to accommodate whatever Aaron needed. He’d never lost his temper with Aaron or even his patience. It shocked Aaron, stung him, to hear irritation in that slow cadence. Irritation for him.
The world kept moving around them, though.
“Give her to me so you can get your bags,” his mother said, taking the sleeping child from Spencer. Aaron still didn’t move, even with the people jostling around him. “Was she crying the whole way?”
“She. Was. In. My. Lap., And. I. Could. Feel. The. Sound.. People. Around. Us. Started. To. Get. Angry.. Some. Of. Them. Even. Said. I. Was. Lucky. I. Was. Deaf..” Spencer sighed and then perked up when he saw something coming off the belt. He grabbed two suitcases and then turned to Aaron’s mother.
“We. Need. To. Pick. Up. The. Car. Seat. At. Oversized. Bags.,” Spencer said, strapping both huge suitcases together and rolling them behind him. He didn’t even bother trying to get Aaron to pull one. Aaron followed dumbly behind them.
“Mom, what is going on?” Aaron asked from behind Spencer so his boyfriend couldn’t read his lips. “Do you know?”
Without turning around, his mother answered, “Henry said that Spencer is Sophie’s only living relative. Nell must have left custody of Sophie to him.”
The world went cold.
They grabbed the car seat, and Spencer allowed Aaron to carry it as they made their way to the car, parked hell and gone from baggage claim. Tired, they slid the suitcases into the trunk and piled into the car. Spencer sat in the back with Sophie.
“Aaron, can you sign for me?” his mother asked as she backed out of the space. Aaron half turned in the seat so Spencer could see him.
“You and Sophie should stay with us, at least tonight. We have plenty of room, and you look exhausted,” she said and waited while Aaron translated.
“I will not argue. I would love the help,” Spencer signed, and Aaron read them off.
