“You don’t look unhappy.”
“I wasn’t.”
In the second picture, Tom held Jay’s hand and beamed. He didn’t resemble a carefree teenager. On the contrary, he looked like he had many cares, but they were all under his control. Whatever he may have been juggling was in perfect balance. And as Tom’s hallucination came to him, Luke wondered if maybe all the cares weren’t in the palm of his hand. Perhaps everything Tom valued was standing next to him in that picture.
“Tom, did you love my father?” Luke asked.
It took Tom a few moments to respond, but when he had, his answer had been as revealing as the length of time it took him to construct it. “Irrelevant, and in violation of rule number two. Next question, please.”
Luke never directly asked Tom again. He hadn’t felt he needed to. He knew the answer, not from the stories Tom told, but from the way he told them. This man had a profound and unreciprocated love for Jay. Both before his transition and after. That had been irrelevant to him.
But only for Tom had Jay’s transformation been immaterial. When Jay had turned eighteen and been able to start fixing his situation, all his other relationships changed.
“Your grandfather had moved back to the States with his new wife, but he wanted nothing to do with Jay. He refused to accept him.”
Tom told Luke about this a few weeks after the yearbooks. They’d been on his balcony late one evening. He repeatedly reminded Luke that it wasn’t necessary to stay up with him when he couldn’t sleep, but Luke still had. He’d been freezing, since it was always cold at two in the morning, but Tom had been fine with only his sweater.
“That’s why he changed his full name, not just the first two. That fucker was unwilling to accept Jay as his son? Your dad was fine with it,” Tom said. “Well, not fine. But he decided that his father wasn’t worth much grief.”
“Did he have a reason for picking ‘Jay’?” Luke had drawn his legs up on the patio chair and wrapped his arms around his knees.
“I’d think that would be obvious. Shortly after prom, your dad was assigned to read a book in English class. About the self-created man.” Tom gave Luke a shrewd look that said he shouldn’t need to say more.
His parents were voracious readers, and there were many books in their library. But three rows on one shelf were dedicated to seventy-five motley copies of the same title. Luke had never questioned or wondered if there was any significance to this collection. After all, a beer company had the same name as one of his uncles, and the man decorated his house with their merchandise.
“In a lot of ways, he felt he was a self-created man. Everything he knew about how to be a man, how to be a father, how to be a decent human being, he’d read in a book. As far as he was concerned, he’d never had a father. The best thing that sperm donor ever did for Jay was to have a horrible, agonizing death.”
Luke stared at Tom in confusion. For a man in the midst of a “horrible, agonizing death,” he had little empathy. Death was death. Everyone had to surrender, so they were all equal in it, asshole and saint alike.
Luke had learned this from Jay, who took the utmost care with whoever happened to be on his embalming table. And even though he hadn’t wanted to do it himself, Luke admired Jay’s ability to not only see past the blood, or manner of death, but he could go beyond the person if he needed to. Everyone deserved decency and kindness.
The suicide in the garage was the most disgusting thing. But the one I remember most and that encapsulated him was also a suicide.
He remembered how the young man shot up with heroin, locked himself in a bathroom, and blew his head off. It’d only been because Ginger was in Pittsburgh taking his final exams that Luke accompanied Jay on the pickup.
He’d seen plenty of gore, though the scrambled-egg-man had been yet to come. A part of the man’s skull had been on the bathroom counter. His blood coated the walls and floor. Bits of his brain dangled from the ceiling like dust caught in a cobweb.
Luke had been thankful to leave that horror room, but as they wheeled the stretcher out, the dead man’s wife blocked their path. She had a baby on her shoulder, and her eyes were crusty from crying. She motioned to the massacre.
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We only take care of the body,” Jay had said.
Thank you, God.
“Please.” She sniffled. “I can’t clean my husband’s brains from the walls. I can’t! I’ll pay you. Please.”
“I apologize, but this is all we can do.”
Not for a million dollars, lady. Not for a million fucking dollars.
And they’d left her there. They drove the body to the funeral home and slid the bag in the refrigeration unit. But Jay had stopped Luke on his way into the house. His father had handled the messy end, but he’d still felt disgusting and couldn’t get the smell of hot metal and blood from his nose.
“Don’t shower yet. But change your clothes.”
“For what?”
“We’re going back.” Jay looked at him as if it’d been apparent.
“But you said we just take care of the body, that we can’t do anymore,” Luke had protested.
“And that’s true. That’s outside the services a funeral director will perform. That’s why we’re going back, not as professionals, but as human beings caring for one of our own who’s suffered a devastating loss. Now change your clothes.”
When they’d returned to the home, the woman had been sobbing on the bathroom floor with a bloody sponge in her hand as the baby wailed in a crib. They took over the grisly task while the widow comforted her child. Jay had refused to accept any kind of compensation.
That’s how I ended up cleaning brain matter out of a ceiling corner with a toothbrush at the age of thirteen. And when I realized that even if I didn’t want to be my father, I wanted people to think of me like how they thought of him—as a good man.
Back on the patio, Luke thought of Tom, perfectly comfortable in his chair. He couldn’t imagine Jay would condone Tom’s statement that the most valuable thing Jay’s father had done for his son was to die in pain.
“What makes you say that?” Luke asked.
“Because it’s true. That’s the only reason you’re here today, Luke. The death of his father was what enabled Jay to become a father himself.”
Tom proceeded to answer a question Luke hadn’t thought to ask. How had Jay financially been able to afford not only the expense of starting a family in this way, but to live in Utah, unemployed for a year?
It had been due to his grandfather’s death at the hands of the nursing home and the large settlement from the neglect lawsuit.
“Bed sores,” Tom said. “Stage IV when someone caught it, but it was too late. Sepsis and so forth.”
“Wasn’t Dad checking on him? Wasn’t anyone checking on him? How could that have possibly happened?”
“He refused to see Jay. They hadn’t seen each other in years. And why would anyone check on him? He was a miserable bastard who drove his wife away and treated people like shit his entire life. When you’re a dickhead to everyone, can you expect people to give a rat’s ass if you’re a little uncomfortable?” Tom laced his fingers behind his head.
“Sepsis isn’t ‘a little uncomfortable.’”
“Call it ‘suffering for the greater good.’ The only positive thing Jay ever said to me about his father was that he finally came through by providing the means to get what he’d always wanted—you.”
Something Tom had communicated often over the past eight months was that throughout his life, Jay had had a fervent desire to be a father.
✩✩✩
“He always wanted you,” Tom lay in bed with his eyes closed.
It hadn’t been a good day.
“When we were kids playing all kinds of shitty games, we didn’t know there was such a thing as literally being born in the wrong body. We’d play house and he’d insist he was the dad. Even when he was corre
cted, he was adamant. Someone told him, ‘You can still hold the baby if you’re the mom.’ But that wasn’t good enough. That wasn’t it.”
Luke sat silently in a chair next to the bed, his hand touching his arm so Tom would know he was there.
“When he first moved to Pennsylvania, he worked part time at a toy store along with his other job. He loved it at first. He brought home carloads of toys and collected them in the attic with clothes and blankets he’d been stockpiling for years. It was all okay when there was still hope he and your mom would be able to afford it someday.” Tom shifted in the bed and resumed talking.
“But it finally dawned on him that it was never going to happen. Your mom’s siblings and everyone else our age started popping out the kids. Jay was so upset. He had to quit that job because he couldn’t stand to be around children, to look at children. Every one of them was a slap in the face, a reminder. He became reclusive. There were days he couldn’t leave the house.”
“He couldn’t just be happy for other people?” Luke asked.
“It’s hard to be happy for people who take for granted what they have. He’d call me and sob over the phone. And when I say ‘sob,’ that’s what I mean. It wasn’t light, pitiful ‘I wanted a pony for my birthday’ weeping. It was like he’d already had you, but you’d died. Just this intense, inconsolable grief. People who let their children run naked and dirty in the street could have them. People who worked constantly and never spent a minute with them; they could have them. Mormon mothers who had children could have six fucking more. And he couldn’t have one. Not one.”
“Adoption? Fostering?”
“You had to have the green.” Tom opened one eye. “There are those who feed their children cat food, who can’t put clothes on their backs, and they keep reproducing—no application, no background check, not a motherfucking thing. That killed him. So be grateful your grandfather died half-rotten in a nursing home. If that hadn’t happened, not being able to have you would’ve driven him mad. It might have literally killed him.” He closed his eyes again. “Jay told me once that you were so real, he could hear you playing right outside the window. But when he went to find you, you were always gone.”
Luke hadn’t been able to visualize Jay not being in complete control. He’d been the voice of reason, of sanity. How else could he have been a funeral director? How else could he live surrounded by sadness on a daily basis? If he’d been so unstable, how did he continuously collect the pieces?
“You were his dream, his ‘green light.’” Tom curled his middle and pointer fingers twice without raising his hands. “Once he had you, he’d accomplished everything he set out to do and had everything he ever wanted. That’s the man you knew. And it shouldn’t be the least bit confusing to you that if a person is deprived of their passion, of their purpose in life…” His voice rose. “Then there is no stability. And there might as well be no life either.”
By this time, Luke had become skilled at shutting one eye to see Jay’s blue and the other to see Tom’s red. Yes, some of this last statement was Jay, but it was humming with Tom. And it struck him then that Tom might want to commit suicide. Because it was bad. Though Tom didn’t complain, he also hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning to play his piano.
“Tom.” Luke placed two pills into his hand. He had an appointment the next day, and Luke would press the oncologist about new meds. Or stronger doses to control the pain and nausea so Tom could have his piano. Luke hadn’t believed he could stand to either help Tom do it, or walk in on the deed having already been done. It wasn’t the principle of suicide. It was the man. Tom wasn’t his father, but by then Luke loved him and wasn’t ready to lose him.
As things typically do before they get worse though, they became better. Even in the last months there’d been a sprinkling of good days.
Luke remembered waking one morning to the music.
He’d walked down the hallway as he had the first day, and Tom had been playing the piano. He was frailer, his complexion more pale and sickly, but it’d still been him. Luke didn’t hover in the doorway, listening and thinking, as he had the first time. He wasn’t the same person who’d walked through the door six months previously.
Luke sat on the bench next to him. Tom hadn’t looked over, but an unhurried smile spread across his face. He began to play the song Luke had been singing when Tom had taken the photograph now framed on the piano.
“He did see himself in you,” Tom said, his fingers gliding over the keys. “He told me, when he saw you on that stage performing this song, he saw himself: the times in his life that pushed him to take action, to do more, to be more, and then the moments when he carried those things out.” He chuckled. “And I said to him that one of those instances was damn near exact what you, in the role, were doing.”
Tom was referring to the hormone replacement therapy portion of Jay’s transition. They’d talked about this several times because it had been so important to Jay. The majority of his identity as a transgender man had been sealed and forgotten—the name change finalized, every document updated and the old destroyed, new relationships built—but the testosterone had persisted. He could never forget his past as a result of the compulsory injections.
For twenty-five years, under his children’s noses, Jay had taken his shot every ten days. Somewhere in the house he and his sister grew up in, there were syringes and vials. Twenty-five years—913 shots. Luke could’ve walked in on him at any time.
“He’d have told you he was diabetic,” Tom said when Luke mentioned this possibility. “Would you have believed him?”
Luke hadn’t had to think it over. The more time he spent with Tom, the easier it became to be real with himself.
“Yes, I would have.”
“You’d have been that stupid?”
Luke also hadn’t had to consider his response. “No. I just wouldn’t have given a shit enough to question. The needle wasn’t in my ass, so why would I have cared?”
And they both smiled. If that had been the truth then, it wasn’t any longer.
So Luke had no questions about Tom’s reference. He was satisfied to just be with him. Happy that Tom felt like playing anything. Sitting on the bench was an improvement over the last few days. There’d been a hospital visit, and another procedure to keep things stable and buy a little more time, only it was never—
“In a way, you were right and wrong.” Tom lifted his fingers from the keyboard and turned to Luke. “He did want you to be him. To a certain extent, he was trying to recapture how he wished he could’ve been. If you’d known about him, about his past, you would’ve spoiled that and what success he had in sculpting the life he wanted. He wanted to be a father and to have a son who didn’t struggle like he did. He wanted to be a parent like he never had. Telling you would compromise that. And that’s why he didn’t. It had nothing to do with you.”
They regarded each other for several seconds before Tom broke the eye contact. And when the “Intermezzo” flowed from the body of the grand, Tom returned to a topic Luke increasingly felt was less important.
“I’ll tell you about this other time, when your dad was seven—”
“Tom.” Luke had placed his hand on Tom’s arm. “I don’t want to talk about Dad anymore. I want you to tell me about you.”
“Rule—”
“Fuck the rule. Listen, I know why you made the rule. You don’t want me to lose sight that he is my father, and not you. You’re protecting him. I understand. Trust me, that’s not an issue. But I still want to know you. I want to hear what you have to say about you.”
Tom tugged at the collar of his shirt with his left hand.
“A large part of everything about me has been your father.”
“I know that. And I’m okay with it.” Luke smiled. “I love my mom. She and my dad did love each other. But I can still love my parents and be sorry things didn’t work out for you. I’m sorry he didn’t feel the same way about you, Tom. I truly am.”
&nb
sp; Tom had never displayed any emotion. Not as he heard the increasingly grim news from the doctors, or as they kept doing test after test, futile procedure after procedure. Even when the occasional sentimental thing happened. Even when he knew it was over and held Luke’s hand for the last time.
This moment had been the only time when Luke had seen Tom become upset. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and his body shook from pent-up angst. Later, after Tom confessed to trying to convince Jay to stay with him twenty-eight years ago, Luke realized he’d been the first, apart from Jay, to acknowledge Tom’s feelings.
He wasn’t sure if their story had ended the right way, or not. Tom genuinely loved Jay. Maybe it could’ve worked out. Luke and Beau could’ve been raised happily by two fathers. How would it have been with Tom instead of Jackie? To have Tom drive them to school, tuck them into bed at night, feel their foreheads and cheeks when they had fevers. Luke didn’t believe Tom would’ve been a poor father. Jay could have still had his funeral home, and Tom might have settled down to teach music. Tom, rather than Meecie, could’ve taught him and Beau how to play the piano.
Luke pictured sitting next to Tom on the piano bench as a little boy and being shown more than form, more than mechanics…but art. When Tom played Liszt, when he played “Paganini Etude No. 5," his hands moved like butterflies. The left perched over the right, playing with his wrists crossed and picking up his left hand with periodic grand gestures. He would’ve instilled a passion for music in his children. Tom would have sat next to his son and shown him how to pour over the keyboard like rain. It could’ve been a good childhood.
But what’d happened hadn’t been bad. He loved his mother. For all Jackie’s biting comments, tough love, and occasionally cold behavior, she was part of what had shaped Luke into the man he was. Who would he have been without her? Tom had been wrong in what he’d said to Jay in the cemetery. Jackie did love him and Beau. It wasn’t the same love as his father or as Tom might’ve given them. But when Jackie heard his voice on the phone after a month of silence and worry, she hadn’t yelled. She hadn’t criticized. She’d cried for minutes on end. Jackie loved her children.
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