Erik began to cry. He didn’t know if it was from fear or joy, but unable to stop it, he wrapped his arms around his legs, put his mouth on his knees and caved into it. He listened to the sound of his chest-wrenching sobs echoing off tile. He was both frightened and fearless. His own splendid anguish ricocheting around him. This was the real story. This was how it started. Not with locked eyes during romance and sex, but with blood. With locked eyes in a crisis. With I am here. Helping even though it hurt. Making your fingers let go even as your heart was breaking. To do what you had to do to survive so the story could go on being told.
The bathroom door creaked open. Another pair of blood-stained work boots and maroon-spattered jeans. David, crouching down. Back in the theater, he had looked pale and grim. Almost stoic. Now he looked terrified. Though the florescent light was harsh, his pupils were enormous, eclipsing the deep brown irises. His eyes were black pearls, slick with tears, fringed in fear. “Erik,” he whispered.
Erik could not remember the last time David had called him by name. “I’m all right,” he said between sobs. “I’m all right.”
David put his hands on Erik’s shoulders. Put his forehead against Erik’s brow. Erik clenched handfuls of David’s shirt. Head to head, like twins in the womb, they hung onto each other, floating in the madness.
David, Erik thought, filled with a desperate affection. Her blood is on you, too. You are in the story now. You are part of my pack.
“Come on,” David said after a minute, wiping his face on a sleeve. “Let’s get out of here.” He stood up, put a hand down. Erik slapped his opposite palm against it and let David pull him to his feet. He went to the sink and splashed his face again, scraping the blood out of his hairline and eyebrows. He soaped his forearms, got as much as he could out of his fingernails. Watched the red fade to pink and swirl down the drain.
David handed him a couple paper towels. “You good?”
“I’m good.” He balled them up and fired at the garbage can in the corner. Perfect shot.
“Come on,” David said. He thumped Erik’s back, ruffled his hair. “Fishy, fishy in the brook, come along on David’s hook…”
This Is My Son
For an hour and a half, Erik, Lucky and David sat in the main waiting room of Philadelphia Trauma Center. The admitting nurses would not tell them anything, other than Will and Daisy were both in surgery. Not even to Lucky, who covertly switched her grandmother’s sapphire ring to her left ring finger, laid the jeweled hand casually on the counter and said she was Will’s fiancée.
Frustrated and depleted, they dropped onto couches and chairs. After a few minutes, Erik summoned the energy to get up again and call his mother. Christine could not get an evening flight out of Key West. The earliest flight she could book was eleven o’clock the next morning. Erik wrote down the information and said he would pick her up at the airport. Or someone would.
“Call me when you leave the hospital,” she said. “If you go somewhere—anywhere different—you call me.”
“I will,” he said, and then yawned.
“Don’t you dare not call me. I need to know where you are, Byron Erik.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Erik said, leaning his head against the payphone. It was a riff they had developed since he had become an adult: she called him by full name—which he’d always detested as a child—and he retorted with ma’am, which Christine loathed.
Back in the waiting room, Erik sank into the couch cushions and put his feet up on the coffee table. He stared at nothing. Felt nothing. In a moment, Lucky toppled over and pillowed her cheek on his leg. He rested his hand on her shoulder, yawning again, his face splitting. He was a little hungry but too tired to do anything about it.
Lucky slept. The boys sat and withdrew further into their exhausted selves. David’s eyes blinked and finally closed. Erik absently played with Lucky’s spiral curls, picked at the dried blood in them. His mind dipped and rose on waves of disjointed thought until he too, fell asleep.
At the touch of a cold hand on his brow, he opened his eyes. Looked up at Daisy’s face.
I’ve slept a hundred years. I’m an old man now. And she’s grown old with me.
Then he realized it was Francine Bianco’s hand. Daisy’s mother, perched on the arm of the couch, her palm now cupping his jaw.