Sidecar (30 page)

Joe reached into his drawers and pulled out a pair of flannel boxer shorts. He sighed as he pulled them on. “God, we haven’t even done laundry,” he muttered, looking at the stack of luggage in the corner. “I’m going to be living in scrubs for a week!”

“I’ll do laundry when you go to sleep. Did I mention you took me by surprise?”

Joe eyed him suspiciously. “You know, kid, I just left my mother’s house. I don’t expect you to take over.”

Casey grunted. “Sit down. Are you sitting down? Good. Awesome. Glad to see it. Here’s your soup, now eat it like a good boy.”

Joe glared at him and took a bite.

Casey smiled evilly. “You
are
a good boy. Awesome, kid, keep it up and I’ll buy you some ice cream. I’m going to brush your hair now, and—”

“Are you enjoying yourself?”

Casey pursed his lips, pretending to think. “Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s safe to say I
am
enjoying myself.” He went to the bathroom and came out with a brush, the kind with the hard individual bristles, and then he clambered up on the bed behind Joe and began to work carefully on that long hair.

Joe grunted and Casey said, “Don’t pay any attention to me. Just eat, okay? Did you see that thing on the table? Alvin got that as a present, and at first I thought it sort of sucked.”

“Why’s that?” Joe asked through a full mouth.

“Because the first thing he did with it was show me a picture of a girl with her whositz stretched about six miles wide.”

Joe struggled with his food for a minute, and it was touch and go whether he was going to spew it back into the bowl. Finally he swallowed it, and Casey sat and let him and then resumed combing out that long, straight hair. He found a strand of gray there at the temple and thought about plucking it out, but he decided to let Joe keep it. He deserved it for spending two weeks with his family and not once bitchslapping his annoying sister.

“So how do you feel about it now?” Joe asked gruffly, wiping at his streaming eyes.

“I like it,” Casey said as he took another section of hair and worked it gently. “I think I’m going to take a programming class next semester—I sign up for classes next week.”

Joe grunted and took another bite of food. “I’ll tinker with your car some more.” Joe had actually given up on Casey’s car in those few frantic weeks between reconciliation and leaving for New York. Casey and Alvin had gone to school in the pickup truck, and Joe had come to visit on the motorcycle. A couple of times Joe had driven Casey back and forth to Roseville on the back of it again, and Casey had clutched his waist and shivered in the cold December sleet. It would be nice to get the car back—and Casey had a moment to privately wonder how far he would have gotten without Joe. He didn’t want to think that way—plenty of other working students managed—but still. Family was good. Support was good. He shouldn’t have needed two weeks in New York to figure that out, but there you go.

“Well, that’s nice of you and I appreciate it,” Casey said, working on the last section of hair. It was drying a little in his hands, straight and coarse but smooth from the crown to the ends. Joe kept it meticulously trimmed. It never got ratty or split; he never let it get greasy or hang in his face. He was maybe a little vain about it, but in a quiet way, a way that told Casey that, for all it made him look like a nonconforming hippie, he was actually deeply rooted in his family’s spiritual past.

It was funny that Joe had worried that Casey was too young to fall in love with him, because every day Casey knew him seemed to be another day to find a reason to fall deeper in love.

“Not a problem,” Joe mumbled, and Casey laughed a little. Joe’s hair was all done, and his mostly finished bowl of noodles was tipping dangerously. Casey rescued the bowl and set it on the end table, then laid Joe down on the bed and started rubbing his back—just skin on skin, no kneading—and Joe was asleep in moments.

Casey went back downstairs to get laundry started and pet the dogs and send Alvin to the grocery store, and the whole time he felt a sort of deep contentment in his bones. He really was home. He could leave and come back, and home was still here. Every time he went back up into their room, he bent and kissed a sleeping Joe on his temple or his lips. Joe was far too tired to respond, but Casey knew he’d done it.

“Welcome home, Joe,” he whispered once, and he could swear the man smiled in his sleep.

Don’t You Want Me

~Joe

1995

T
HE
baby was only three pounds, but that was a damned sight better than the two and a half it had been two weeks ago at birth, and Joe sat in the rocking chair next to the Isolette and held the child to his chest, talking softly.

“Hullo, Levi, how you doin’? Yeah, me too. Kinda sleepy. Yeah, I know—I was gone for a couple of days. Sorry about that—two days off. Casey and I went down to Santa Cruz and played on the beach. It’s pretty down there, my man. I don’t know what to tell you. Just is. Yeah, I know, I should tell him I bought him the tickets. Stop grunting at me like that—you’re three pounds, I don’t think you get to be my conscience just yet. He’s going to take it wrong. You know he is. I just don’t want him to take it wrong. And, you know. I want him to come back.”

There was a tiny sound next to him, and Joe figured he’d spent about enough time with Levi—it was Seth’s turn now.

He stood up carefully, because Levi was still attached to the respirator, the heart monitor, the shunt that let them give him antibiotics, the feeding tube, and the pulse-ox monitor. It was a whole lot of tiny insults to a much tinier body, and the volunteer baby rockers who came to hold the drug-addicted bodies with the horrible knife-edged screams often stayed away from the preemies. It was too frightening, and there was too much chance of doing something wrong.

But Joe had been there when Seth and Levi had been born, and he felt a sense of ownership where they were concerned. He’d been spending his lunch hours and time after work coming in to talk to them, to hold them, to give them the sort of human contact that they needed to thrive.

It was hard to thrive when the person who should have loved you most didn’t want a fucking thing to do with you.

Joe had been there when the mother had given birth—pediatric nurses were always present during a birth, and this was no exception, but there was also a pediatric doc who specialized in preemies there, and that was Joe’s second clue that this was going to be a fucking circus.

His third clue was the social worker standing grimly by the fifteen-year-old girl with the yellow complexion and dirty brown and cracked lips, screaming that somebody had better get this fucking thing out of her because she needed another fucking hit.

Yeah. She’d been his first clue.

She’d shrieked so loud that the social worker consented to gag her—she was freaking out the other birthing mothers, and that was a bad thing. She was too violent to sit still for an epidural—the anesthesiologist would have shoved a needle through her spine and crippled her for life—and she was too hyped up on God knows what to put anything in her IV but fluids.

Joe remembered when Casey had first showed up on his doorstep, and smoking a little weed was no big deal, and only the rich kids snorted coke, and then, hey, it wasn’t addictive, right?

God, the country had embraced one hell of a learning curve as far as drugs were concerned, and all the lessons were hard, and the cost of that education…

God.

They were the two tiny bodies that had issued, screaming silently because their lungs had barely developed, out onto the birthing table as Joe had watched.

The first one, Seth, had weighed in at two pounds, four and three-quarters of an ounce, and his twin brother, Levi, had been the bruiser at two pounds, five and a half.

They were born at twenty-five weeks, their little persons racked with the hard edge of addiction, their underdeveloped lungs not even capable of supporting their screams of pain. Joe had worked furiously on Levi until a second peds doctor showed up to help him, while the original doc had worked on Seth until he got a nurse in support as well. The girl had barely been dragged in at all, and the fact that she was carrying twins was a definite surprise.

Finally, finally, the babies were stabilized, their portable NICU Isolettes ready to be transported to the neonatal intensive care unit, and Joe heard Seth’s doctor ask the girl if she wanted to see her babies before they took them away.

“I don’t have no babies,” the girl said, turning her face away. “Them things ain’t a part of me.”

In the end, Joe named them, because after three days the girl had relinquished her parenting rights in one scrawl of the pen and had hauled herself back on the streets, probably to die early somewhere Joe didn’t want to think of. After three days of “Baby Gresham 1” and “Baby Gresham 2,” Joe had quietly changed the placards to “Seth” and “Levi” and asked the social worker for their birth certificate paperwork as well. He’d given them his last name. When they grew up, he just wanted them to believe that someone had welcomed them into the world.

Joe sighed. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard of a woman doing that, not by a long shot, but now that Casey was about to graduate from college and that slightly temporary feeling that all college students carried with them was fading into permanency, the knowledge that he was giving something up, something important, was starting to etch its way into Joe’s heart.

The population of the foothills was growing, and with it the number of strays Joe and Casey (and even Alvin, once) wrangled to social services had seemed to increase. With every child abandoned, or who had run away or been kicked out of the house, a small wail had started up somewhere in his vitals.

That’s not fair. I would have loved that child with all that was in me.

Casey knew. Casey didn’t talk about it because Joe knew he felt guilty, no matter how often Joe told him that everyone made sacrifices for things they really wanted. Casey gave up going to parties for Joe, and Joe gave up this idea, this picture in his head, for Casey.

The one time they
had
talked about it, Casey had gotten pissed, screaming (and they
never
screamed, much like they never fought):

“Oh. My.
God!
I’m not giving up a fucking thing, you asshole! Not a fucking thing! There’s
nothing
in this life that I want more than being with you.
Nothing.
Coming home and watching movies with you and sleeping in your bed is
everything
I’ve
ever
dreamed about. Don’t compare what you’re missing to what I’m missing. It’s like I missed dessert and you’re fucking starving to death. And don’t think I don’t know the horrible fucking injustice, right? A woman can go out and buy some dude’s jizz, and
boom
, she’s a parent. I looked adoption up, Joe. I know what you make, and I know what I’ll make, and
maybe
we’ll be able to afford it in five years, but even if we can, there’s no guarantee anyone will even give us a baby. None. So don’t tell me you’re not sad, and don’t tell me there’s not a little part of you that isn’t just
pissed
because you see these women who are given this wonderful fucking miracle, and they just throw it away.” Casey gasped out a sob. “I’m pissed,” he muttered. “I’m so pissed. It’s not fair. Because look at you. You’re… God, Josiah, if anyone deserves to have a child to love, man, it’s you.”

And an interesting thing had happened then. Joe had looked at Casey, who had been furious and hurt to the point of being in tears, and Joe had experienced a surge of faith. It was all he could call it—it was the only name he had.

“Our child will come,” he said simply, believing it. “Casey, you want this for me—I can see it—and you want it for us, and that makes me so incredibly proud. I’m going to believe that if you’re not giving up a thing for me, and you feel that in your heart, then our baby will come.”

Casey had stood there for a moment, wiping his hand in front of his eyes, and then he had launched himself into Joe’s arms. “I’ll believe with you,” he said, wiping his face on Joe’s shoulder. “I believe
in
you, so I’ll believe because you do. How’s that?”

It was all Joe could ask for. It was all he needed to sustain him. He just hoped that Casey had the same faith in Joe’s decision to send him backpacking over Europe, because that was going to be a tough sell.

He did the delicate hand dance around all of Seth’s attached wires and tucked the baby against his chest before placing his own hand on the baby’s chest and expecting the cries, shrill and painful, at any moment. It had been proven that holding babies like this helped them thrive, but it was hard to hear, hard to see the pain that any sort of sensory input caused the little guys, even human touch. It had also been proven that the cry of a drug-addicted infant raised human blood pressure, and Joe knew it took his commute home before his eyelid stopped throbbing with the increase of his heartbeat.

But Seth didn’t cry, not this time. Joe looked at him, talking to him softly. “What’s wrong, little man?” He scanned the monitors quickly, taking in heartbeat, blood-gas levels, temperature—uh-oh.

It was elevated by two-tenths of a degree. Maybe the nurse who had just checked the vitals had missed it. Hell, maybe it had happened in the last ten minutes, because these guys were so little, their metabolism moved just that fast. An alarm would sound in another tenth of a degree, but Joe looked at the little face—sallow, because Seth and Levi’s father had been African-American, and they weren’t quite healthy enough to be light brown yet—and saw the truth, and the peace, and he swallowed.

One of the NICU nurses came in. There was one more baby in the unit, and she needed to be fed.

“Jan?” he said softly, and the woman—a comfortable woman in her fifties who had seen too many changes in her life to have much sympathy for babies like Seth and Levi—turned.

“Yeah?”

“He’s getting a fever,” Joe said softly. “He’s coming down with an infection.”