The Intersection of Purgatory and Paradise (5 page)

“Look at me? Please?”

Christopher opened his eyes, his constant smile gone.

“Is this what you want?” Doug asked.

“Home,” Christopher choked out, nodding. “I want to go home.”

The word should have echoed. It should have exploded out of Christopher in a shout. A single word with the power to shred the happy delusion that Christopher thought of Doug’s house as his home. Home for Christopher would always be San Diego. Christopher probably already had his car packed. He hadn’t woken him up, hadn’t told him why he wanted to go to San Diego, because he hadn’t planned on Doug going with him. If Doug let him go now, he was pretty sure Christopher would never come back.

“Okay. Give me a minute to throw some stuff in a bag?”

Christopher’s eyes snapped open. “It’s a two-day drive each direction, and you’ve got work.”

Doug sighed and kissed him despite how rigid Christopher had become. “You asked me to get time off. I got two weeks. I was going to suggest a trip down to Missoula for a few days, maybe stay in the same hotel where we went the night we met, but I doubt you’d want to miss your best friend’s wedding.”

“You really got time off?”

“Absolutely. After that little shit with the rock and it being your birthday and all, I figured you’d want to get away. And it’s been a year since we got together too….”

Christopher dropped his gaze, refusing to look at him.

Doug tilted Christopher’s chin up, searching his eyes for some sign that Christopher wasn’t ready to walk away from him forever. “So is this gig formal? Should I dig out cuff links and a nice suit, or will regular work stuff cover it?”

Christopher gaped at him. There was a hint of amusement in his crystal blue eyes, and hope too. So long as the hope was there, Doug knew they’d be okay. “A nice suit, I think.”

Doug held him close. “It’s been so long since I got to see you dressed up….” He ran his fingers along the buttons of Christopher’s shirt. “You look good.”

Christopher leaned against him, his slender weight against Doug’s chest. He buried his face in Doug’s shoulder. “How do you do it?”

“Hmm?”

“How do you make everything feel okay again?”

“I can’t imagine anything’s going to feel okay today. But it’ll pass. Today will pass. And we’re rescheduling your damn birthday, because even if this day sucks for the rest of our lives, I want a chance to celebrate the fact that you were born.”

Doug heard the whir of an engine and the crunch of gravel outside. “Were you expecting someone?”

Christopher shook his head and stepped toward the door. A dusty patrol car spun out on the gravel in front of the porch. Christopher glanced back at him, obviously annoyed. “Time off, huh?”

“If Daniels wanted me to come in today, he’d have called,” Doug pointed out.

After the dust settled, the patrol car’s passenger door opened. Christopher’s relaxed posture stiffened. Doug stepped around Christopher when he saw eighteen-year-old Nate Marshall, his expression terrified. The boy’s father, dressed in a dark blue polo shirt and a pair of jeans, climbed out of the driver’s side door.

Doug reached back for Christopher. Christopher wrapped his fingers around Doug’s wrist and set one hand on his shoulder. He smiled at Doug, and no matter how fake Christopher’s smile was, it was reassuring. It was the smile of a man who had absolute confidence in himself, who’d never faced a challenge he couldn’t tackle. It was impossible for Doug not to feel that same confidence with Christopher smiling beside him.

As if Christopher felt him relax, he slipped his fingers off Doug’s wrist and down to his hand.

“Morning, Terry,” Doug called from the porch.

Terry Marshall nodded and smiled nervously. He strolled up to the porch, practically shoving his son along in front of him. “Doug. Chris. Sorry to come out here and bug you on your day off. Do you have a few minutes, Chris?”

“Actually,” Doug cut in, “we’re getting packed to go out of town.”

“Just a few minutes? It’s important.”

“I guess we’ve got a few minutes.”

As much as he hated having people invade their privacy, hated having to put on the same professional mask he used at work in his own home, Doug knew this was how things were done. This tiny corner of Montana wasn’t the type of place where problems were left for lawyers to sort out. If your son screwed up, you brought him around to the neighbors to make it right. Doug was pretty sure he’d never merit the almost equitable title of “neighbor,” as far as anybody in Elkin was concerned, but at least Marshall was trying.

“Why don’t we go inside? There’s coffee, and I’ve got some iced tea in the fridge,” Doug offered.

Marshall nudged his son toward the steps. “Coffee sounds great.”

The teen didn’t move. He was staring at Doug and
Christopher, his eyes wide and his lips turned down at the corners. “But they’re….”

When Christopher loosened his grip to slip away, Doug grabbed his hand. He would wear the mask in Elkin. He would be a professional at work. But he would not act like he was ashamed to hold his lover’s hand on his own front porch, on his own land.

Christopher chuckled beside him. He brought their intertwined fingers up and kissed Doug’s knuckles. “Kid, I might be wrong about this,” Christopher said, “but I think by your age you should know that sometimes people hold hands. I know sex education doesn’t exist anymore, but you must have gotten that whole birds and bees talk by now.”

Terry Marshall stuttered and ran his hands over his face. “Jesus,” he whispered.

The boy’s eyes narrowed. “It’d be the bees and bees, wouldn’t it?”

“Or any other combination of consenting adult flying things, yeah. It’s still pretty much the same conversation. And kids hold hands in, what, second grade?”

The boy’s disgust morphed into annoyance. “Well, yeah, but he’s a cop. He’s a shift sergeant, even.” His eyes slid sideways toward his father.

Doug nodded slowly. “I am a cop. Your old man’s a cop, too. And the man you and your friend assaulted is a cop.” He cocked his head at Christopher.

The boy stumbled back into the unmovable bulk of his dad. He shook his head frantically.

“I’m on temporary disability,” Christopher clarified, “but I am technically still a police officer.”

Despite Marshall’s obvious discomfort, he was smirking. “Go on,” he pointed at the steps.

At the dining nook in the kitchen, Marshall sat his son down and loomed over him, arms folded across his chest. Christopher sat down opposite the boy, and Doug started a new pot of coffee.

Nate Marshall fidgeted with his hands. “So you two really are….”

After a long pause, Doug glanced between Christopher and Terry Marshall. He knew Christopher could draw out the silence, work it to his advantage, but Marshall was already trying his best not to squirm. “Gay? Queer? Homosexual? Pick one of those. There are some other labels, too, but I know you’re smart enough to not use any of those terms at my table.” Doug suddenly had a flashback of his father standing in this same kitchen and ending a lecture with the same phrase. He wasn’t sure when or how he’d ended up channeling his father, but that’s exactly what he’d just done. He’d laugh about it, but it’d ruin the impact.

“Uh, no, sir,” Nate muttered. “Together, I mean? The gossip’s true?”

“Almost a year, now,” Doug confirmed.

Nate swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry,” he blurted, looking up at Christopher desperately. “Jeff told me to slow down, and he got all excited, but I didn’t know….” He shook his head so fast he looked like he was trembling.

Christopher smiled. But it was the same unnerving smile
Christopher used when he had to deal with something horrible. “And he just happened to have a rock in his pocket?” Christopher asked.

“I….” Another frantic head shake. “I don’t know.”

“Did you think it was odd when he unrolled the window? Climbed halfway out of the car while you were still driving?”

“I didn’t…. How could you know that?”

Christopher rolled his eyes. “I looked.”

“I… I didn’t want him to….”

“Did you do anything to stop him?”

“No.”

“And who was it that was laughing with him?”

“That was me.” Nate dropped his gaze to the table. He was wringing his hands so hard, his knuckles were white. “Would it be all right if I talk to you alone? To both of you?” He looked at his father. “Would it be okay?”

“You actually going to apologize?”

Nate sniffled and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Marshall shrugged. “It’s fine with me.” He took the coffee cup Doug offered and raised it in a mock salute. “I’ll just take this out to the porch.”

When the sound of his footsteps on the hardwood floors faded, Nate leaned forward earnestly. “Testify,” he whispered. “I really am sorry. I am so fucking sorry I don’t even know where to begin. Jeff is a dick, but he’s my teammate, and I’m supposed to ask you not to testify against him so he can keep playing. But you have to. He has to go to jail,” Nate hissed in a stage whisper.

“Team?”

“Nate’s the varsity quarterback this coming year,” Doug explained. “Kid, you’ve got to know, if the sheriff decides to press charges, you’re going to be in trouble too.”

“I don’t care if I get in trouble. You have to do it.”

“Even if it gets you kicked off the team, too?”

“I don’t give a fuck about the team,” he snapped. “Jeff’s done this before, and he….” Nate ran his hands through his sandy-brown hair and tightened his knuckles around the short strands. “Please?”

“He’s done this before?” Christopher asked.

Doug eased himself onto the bench beside Christopher. “Do you mean that kid he beat up on the bus? The one who ended up in rehab?”

The fidgeting stopped instantly. Nate began sucking in quick, panicked breaths. The panting seemed to leach the color from his skin, but he didn’t move.

“Huh. Sounds like this friend of yours has got bigger problems than me,” Christopher said simply.

“He beat up a kid on the bus the football team chartered for a tournament last year. Him and a few of his
teammates
,” Doug said, glaring across the table. “The kid dropped out, got into drugs. Sheriff Daniels said he even tried to kill himself by overdosing on Tylenol.”

Christopher drew back slightly. His smile didn’t vanish so much as drain, the color fading from his cheeks like his fake smile.

Doug thought about how Christopher had sounded so hopeless this morning. He squeezed Christopher’s thigh beneath the table and focused on him. Christopher’s confession in the living room replayed in his mind over and over. He said he’d wanted to sleep, to sleep forever and never wake up.

The only reason Christopher had come into his life at all was because Doug had been the one to cut Christopher’s brother down from the side of a cliff. Every now and then, when Christopher let his hair grow too long, or Doug caught a glimpse of Christopher from just the right angle, his fucked-up imagination tried to superimpose his memories of the corpse over Christopher’s face.

Suicide was not a good topic for either of them at the moment.

Christopher nodded slowly, his smile springing back to life in an instant. “It seems weird, doesn’t it? A drug overdose is the way most women try to kill themselves. Guess it seems like it’d be easy, painless. Must be some weird mental association with the fact that it’s a painkiller being used.”

“That might be,” Doug nodded.

“So was the kid queer?” Christopher stared at Nate intently. “He even picked a girly way to die. What problem do you and your buddies have with homosexuals that makes it seem like this is okay? He tried to kill himself!”

“What?” Nate breathed. His eyes had become red-rimmed, and he was still panting. “Caleb isn’t dead. He can’t be dead.”

Doug tried to keep his voice casual and calm. “It sounded like he survived, but I’m not sure what happened to him.”

Nate shot up from the table, angry. “No!”

The stomp of heavy feet brought Terry Marshall back into the kitchen. Doug had to give him credit for not storming in screaming.

“I… I didn’t hurt him! I never hurt him!”

“Someone did,” Christopher said, his voice cutting like a razorblade. “Somebody hurt him so deeply, so badly, he dropped out. Sounds like he was trying to run away. But you can’t run away from pain. People, yes, but not pain. Someone hurt him badly enough he decided he’d rather die than live with it.”

Marshall groaned. “The Owens boy has nothing to do with this. He had problems from the start, even as a little boy.”

Nate stood up in a half-crouch, like a wounded animal. Tears slipped over his lower lashes. “You knew? You knew about Caleb? And you didn’t tell me?”

“I heard about it, yeah. It’s a private matter, Nate. It’s not something his parents wanted the whole town talking about.”

“You didn’t tell me!”

“I didn’t want you to feel guilty,” said Marshall, reaching out to his son. “He had a lot of problems, even before.”

Nate ducked away from his father. He sprinted toward the front door.

Marshall rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Mind if I get more coffee?”

“Help yourself,” Doug said. “I’m sorry about that. When he mentioned Jeff Lowe’s done this before, I assumed he… knew.”

“He wasn’t involved in that.” Marshall sat down at the table with a full cup of coffee. “His mom and I didn’t want him to find out about Caleb’s problems. The Owens live next door to us, and Nate and their son were friends when they were little. We didn’t let Nate associate with him when they got older, because the boy was a bad influence. But Nate wasn’t involved in that shit on the bus. I know he wasn’t, because my wife and I drove down to watch his game. He rode home with us.” Marshall looked at them both. “I like to think, if he’d been there, he’d have done the right thing. He’s trying to do the right thing now.”

Doug nodded slowly.

“He is sorry. And so am I. I can’t say I agree with….” Marshall gestured to the two of them. “Your lifestyle, I guess. But I’ve never held it against you. I swear I’ve raised him better than this, but you can’t control what they’re exposed to at school, you know? Whatever happens, whatever the sheriff decides to do with the charges, I just wanted you to know.” He stood up and took a long pull from the mug of coffee.