The Locker Room (34 page)

them back together—pins, sutures, Xander, it"s going to be a mess. It"s

going to be a fucking mess, man. My son—” Jed swallowed. “My son

will live, but they might have to take his legs. And if they don"t, then

walking again… it"s going to be… it"s going to be a long, hard haul, you

know?”

Xander nodded. He knew. “Well,” he said with a swallow, “we"re

just going to have to help him, right? Chris? He"ll bounce back. As long

as we"re there to catch him, he"ll bounce back.” Xander nodded

positively, and Andi broke into sobs and wrapped her arms around his

neck and wept until her body gave out. Jed pulled her back against his

chest and gave Xander a watery smile.

“See,” he said, as though Xander had said something profound.

“You two kids… it was like he found you, and it was the whole of his

heart, you know? Even before we figured out you were in love, we just

knew. You"d be there for each other. You couldn"t let him down,

Xander. It"s not in you.”

Xander swallowed hard, thinking of third home game of the month,

thinking about all the times he threatened to quit but didn"t, thinking

about what would have happened if he"d simply screamed, “We"re gay,

The Locker Room 193

asshole! Do something about it!” to their coach, in front of the team, and

then let the team do something about it.

“I don"t want it to be,” Xander said roughly, and then, in the corner

of his eye, he caught sight of Leo, followed by two state troopers, and his

stomach flipped over.

He hadn"t even asked if there had been someone else involved. He

hadn"t even thought of blood alcohol levels. Oh God… what if there

was… what if Chris had killed someone? What if he"d been drunk?

Visions of Chris recovering, just to go to prison and be taken from him

for a helluva a lot longer than six weeks were enough to make Xander"s

stomach just scream in protest, but he"d just told Chris"s father that he

wasn"t going to let anyone down again. He had to walk across that floor

and find out.

He just had to.

For a man who ran miles and miles a day, either on the court or

around his track, it was the longest walk he"d ever had to make.

“Leo?” he asked, feeling his skin breaking out in hot and clammy

patches. “Have you heard anything?”

Leo looked at him with grim relief. “Point oh-eight on the button,

Xander. Chris was under the influence, but not intoxicated. No one else

was involved—when he comes to, he"ll have a court appearance, and

probably a fine, but that"s about all.”

Xander"s knees had never felt so weak.

“Good to know,” he said from a throat dusted with silicate. Oh

God… it could have been worse. So much worse. So goddamned worse.

With an effort, he looked at the troopers at Leo"s back.

“What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked quietly. One of them

took off his glasses, and the other one followed suit. The first guy was

Jed"s age, and the younger one was in his thirties, and to Xander"s

intense sense of dislocation, they both started to look uncomfortable.

“I"m… I"m sorry to ask, Mr. Karcek. We were just wondering.

Edwards… he got Denver to the playoffs, right? We were just

wondering… is he going to be back on the court for them?”

Xander let out a hideous bark, a parody of laughter, the sound of a

sick seal being gutshot with a rusty musket. “Guys,” he said, looking at

194 Amy Lane

Leo as he said it. Leo looked away and wiped his face with the back of

his hand. “Guys, you can tell the press this, if it will get them off our

backs, but odds are really good that Christian Edwards will never play

basketball again.”

They stared at him in dismay, and just that suddenly, he had to be

somewhere else.

“Bathroom?” he asked, looking at his shoes.

Leo looked up. “Sorry?”

“For Christ"s sake, Leo, I need the fucking bathroom. I"m gonna

be—”

Leo grabbed his hand and hauled him to the waiting-room

bathroom, and Xander looked at it in despair. He was too big. He was

too tall for the tiny cubicle. He had to… he had to—

He lifted the seat up with a clatter and leaned over, puking up

stomach acid because that"s all he had left. When he was done, he was

still shaking from head to foot, and he threw himself back against the

door of the cubicle, propped his feet against the base of the toilet, and

tried to pull himself together.

Christian Edwards will never play basketball again.

Oh God. Chris and basketball, wasn"t that what he said? Chris just

had basketball taken away, and Xander was going to have to pray that

he"d be enough. He didn"t know if the shaking, the tremors, the spots

dancing in front of his eyes would ever stop.

He wasn"t sure how long it was, but it wasn"t Leo who came to get

him, it was Penny.

“Xander, everyone"s worried about you. Come fall apart with the

rest of us, okay?” Her voice was shaking, and she sounded like a little

girl.

“Penny, you sound young,” Xander whispered. “You never sound

young. You didn"t even sound young when you were young.”

“I grew up, you know,” Penny said quietly. “I grew up that

morning when I saw the love of my life kissing my big brother. You ever

wonder why I don"t date a lot, Xan?”

Penny might have been the second person in the world to ever call

him Xan.

The Locker Room 195

“Yes,” Xander said quietly, because he had. He"d worried about

her, all career and no love. He and Chris had each other. Who did Penny

have?

“I don"t date a lot because if I couldn"t have what you and Chris

have, I don"t want it.”

“Basketball, Penny,” he said, because she might understand. “He

loves this sport.”

“He hated playing it without you,” she told him. “He did it, but he

hated it. You being there for him—he"ll count his lucky stars he"s alive.

As long as he has you, Xander, losing the game won"t be any loss at all.”

Xander sucked in a sob. “God, Penny. Just… just… Christ. Go

away a sec, "kay? I"ll be there. I swear.”

“I"ll come get you,” Penny said, her voice as hard as she could

make it. “I swear, Xander, you don"t get to do this alone in a toilet,

okay? You never have to be alone.”

Xander nodded, and then spoke because she couldn"t see. “I have

this image in my head,” he said softly. “He"s magic, and golden, and

shooting the ball. He"s young and he… you remember. He looks like

he"d snap in two if someone grabbed him hard, but… he got plowed over

on the court in high school. He had bruises all over his arms and his ribs

in our senior year, because his skin"s so pale, and they started playing

rough. And he just kept going back out on the court because I wasn"t

going to keep him off, and no one else was going to try.

“And that"s how I remember him. I know there"s this young,

golden, magic shadow in his heart, and it"s going to be playing

forever—” And now Xander"s voice broke, truly broke, but he had to

keep talking. “But he"s never going to be able to move like that again.

It"s only going to be his heart, and… God, Penny. What if I"m not

enough to make his heart okay?”

“You"re all he needs,” Penny told him. She was sobbing now, on

the other side of the door. “You"re all he needs.”

Xander wiped his eyes, and wiped them again, and for a moment

the only sound was of the two of them breathing. His voice, into that

silence, was almost an obscene burst of sound.

196 Amy Lane

“Penny, I look like shit, and I smell like puke. Go away, wouldja,

and let me pull myself together?”

“I"ll go see if Leo can get you something to wear,” she said quietly,

and he heard her leave.

“Chris,” he murmured to the white-tiled wall, “you"d better pull

through this, you sonuvabitch. I fucking need you. Without you, I"m not

even living out of a garbage bag. I"m
in
the garbage bag, and it"s cold

and it"s dark, and the world"s pressing down on me, and I can"t breathe.

You pull through. Just fucking pull through, okay?”

And then, on a shuddering breath, he remembered that Chris was

only human.

“God, if you"re listening, give him a leg up. Sometimes he needs

someone to feed him the important shots. He"s still a good player. He

just can"t always stand on his own.”

And then he wiped the back of his face with his hand and opened

the door to the tiny john. He ran water over his wrists and over his face,

and wiped his eyes on the upper sleeve of his sweatshirt.

With a hard sigh, the kind that was meant to fortify his muscles,

bones, and sinews, he walked out of the bathroom and went to wait with

his family.

The Locker Room 197

Important Clocks

CHRIS was in his first surgery for sixteen hours. Cliff and Alicia, God

bless them, took Andi and Jed home. Andi and Jed came back eight

hours later, and tried to tell Xander to go home with Penny and Mandy,

but Xander wouldn"t.

“He"ll need me,” he said groggily. He was stretched out on the

couch with two chairs lined up in front of him to take the length of his

legs. Leo had gotten him a franchise sweatshirt—Denver Nuggets, of all

things—but he was still wearing his grody jeans. He"d been awake for

nearly thirty-six hours, but no amount of begging would make him go

back to sleep, to eat, to bathe.

“He"ll need me.”

It kept Xander in the hospital for four days. Sixteen hours for Chris

to get out of surgery, eight hours for him to semi-recover, then another

ten hours under the knife.

When that was over, it took him two days to wake up, and by then?

Xander felt like a fixture there, like some sort of outsized ghost, who had

been haunting the waiting room, marking the passage of other people,

worried, terrified people, praying for their loved ones too. Most had

happy endings, but two didn"t, and Xander watched complete strangers,

with whom he shared nothing but the waiting, disintegrate under the hard

news of life without.

The first time, he was alone. They didn"t leave him alone much,

even when (especially when) he was sleeping. He dozed fitfully on

occasion, in that stretched-out position on the couch with the two chairs,

but more than once he came awake with a clatter, knocking furniture

over and muffling screams in his arms.

There was
always
someone: Penny, Mandy, Jed, Leo, Andi…

someone
watching over him to make sure he didn"t take out some poor

complete stranger with the violence of his hidden pain. The third time he

did it, a nurse offered (none too politely) to give him a sedative, and he"d

looked at her with haunted eyes.

“Nothing works,” he whispered. “Nothing but Chris.”

198 Amy Lane

He wasn"t aware then that he"d just outed the two of them, but he

did see the terrible comprehension in her eyes, and not another word was

spoken about drugs to keep him asleep.

But nobody was there when Xander saw the surgeon come out to

give someone bad news the first time. He was not good at reading

people, had no real people-imagination, actually, so he couldn"t tell if it

was a husband or a father or a brother who had died, but he remembered

the faces of the family, as they tried to be strong at first and then

crumpled, like steel girders rippling under too much weight, and an

earthquake to boot.

They said “No no no no no no no—” a lot, and Xander wondered if

maybe, if he asked pretty, and the surgeon came out to greet
him
with

that look on her face, God would let Xander"s heart stop before he

realized that “Yes, it was true, and you will never see Chris smile again”

actually registered.

So that was the first time Xander watched someone get bad news.

The second time, Mandy was with him, and she watched his knees

buckle as he sat down on the floor,
hard,
when the surgeon came in with

that look on her face, and then went to talk to the other family in the

room.

That was when the universal decision was made to not only keep

someone there when Xander was sleeping, but when he was awake too.

Xander told them all that he was fine. He made sure everybody

went home and got rest, he went to fetch food and horrible coffee, and

pillows for everyone. He even sent Leo out to get a computer and

chargers and everything so they could distract themselves with smart