Crossing Borders (37 page)

Tristan was holding himself together by sheer force of will. He knew he must seem whacked at best; too much caffeine and too little calm. Crazy.

“Meghan?” Jim said into the phone. “Michael's friend is here to see you. Do you have time to stop by?” Tristan noticed Jim was treating him like an unexploded bomb, and he didn't care. Jim seemed to listen and then nodded. “Fine, I'll tell him.”

Tristan looked at him as he hung up the phone.

“She'll be here in about ten minutes.”

“Why?”

“She went to school with Michael. We both did. He's one of our best friends, Tristan. She's sick with worry.”

“Oh,” said Tristan. It had never occurred to him that someone else would feel that way, although he didn't know why not. Michael was well liked locally as a police officer and by everyone who knew him. Anyone on the force was bound to be anxious and angry that he'd been attacked, but Tristan hadn't even considered his friends, hadn't thought beyond himself and Emma, and maybe Edward. “
Oh
.”

“Don't worry, he's tough. He'll make it.” He cleared his throat and turned to look at the street through the window.

“Thanks.” Tristan sipped his coffee in order to have some reason to be holding it. They stood in silence, not really aware of the passage of time until a gust of air blowing the back curtain told them Meghan had come. She went straight to Tristan, her eyes red from crying and allowed him to fold her into his arms.

“Shit,” she said. Apparently she had the same etiquette book his mother had, or at least had gone to the same finishing school. Condolence 101. “This is such shit. In high school he was my rock. When the other kids gave me crap, he was always there for me.” She sniffed loudly, bringing a tissue to her nose and eyes.

“He's going to be okay,” said Tristan, his mouth working the words, but his head and his heart were someplace else, so they were hollow in his ears.

“You can probably tell how easily I fit in at school,” she said wetly, tears streaming down her inked face.

Tristan laughed.

“He's going to die inside when he hears about Mary,” she added, squeezing her eyes shut. “Even though she stabbed him, he's going to think it's his fault Mary died.”

Tristan stared at her. “I don't know what you're talking about.” He looked from one to the other. “Mary died?”

Jim and Meghan looked back at him with wide eyes. “How much did you see on the news?”

“None of it. I was in school, and my mom called me. I listened to the radio on the way to the hospital, and they only said—” He looked out the front window where the sun was beginning to set between the office buildings across the street. “Was that just this morning?”

Jim quietly told him how Michael came to be stabbed. “I have a friend who works for the FPD in dispatch; she went to school with my brother, Ian. She filled me in.”

“Oh, shit,” said Tristan, who knew very well Michael would carry Mary with him until he died. If he…

“Sparky,” said Meghan, almost as though she hadn't meant to say it aloud. “He calls you Sparky.”

“Yeah.” Tristan took her hand in his. He had come up with an idea sitting in the hospital, and the more he thought about it, the more inevitable it became. “Can you mark me?”

“What?”

“Can you mark me with the same band that's on his ankle, the exact same thing? On the small of my back, here?” He turned and pointed to the base of his spine, an inch or two above the crack in his ass. “Exactly like his?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I can do that.”

“Okay. Now?”

“Yeah. You want his name?”

“No…yes.” He thought about the police officers with their implacable eyes, the clerks and the rules and the hospital policies. “Put his name, with the lock in the 'a' like it is on Michael's ankle, but put his badge number,” he said. “Put FPD and his badge number, do you know it?”

She shook her head.

“I do,” said Tristan. “I'll write it down.”

Tristan lay face down on a clean white towel, listening to the crunch of the paper that covered the vinyl-padded surface of the table. He could hear the grinding buzz of the needle as Meghan applied it to his skin. He needed the sting and the burn and the almost-pain that she was inflicting on him. It was like a hard hand holding him down, anchoring him to the earth when his biggest fear was that he would fly apart and drift away with no one the wiser. The pain held him in place like a drug he needed.

“This hurts too much in one place, you say so. I can move away and then come back to that spot later.”

“No,” said Tristan, gritting his teeth, liking the tears that burned his eyes and the ache in his throat. “It's fine.”

Meghan put her head down and kept going, stopping every so often to look at her work and dab specks of blood away with a piece of rolled-up gauze. She sniffled every so often, but other than that made hardly a sound unless she spoke, periodically, to see how he was taking the procedure.

The white towel beneath Tristan was damp with sweat and drool and the thousand tears he shed as he lay there. When Meghan was finished and had covered his new ink with a dressing, she helped him rise from the table, giving him the same talk about aftercare she'd given Michael only a couple of weeks before. He nodded every so often, his mind wandering.

“And that means the ink will still be there when the skin finishes peeling, so don't be thinking your tattoo is peeling off and panic, okay?” she said finally, squeezing his hand in hers. He hadn't paid much attention until that moment, and she probably knew it.

“I've got to get back,” he said. The sky outside was full dark, and he had no idea what time it was or when Jim had left, although he clearly had.

“Hey,” she said quietly. “Can you leave your phone number so we can call and check up? We don't have Emma's; I tried earlier. She must have changed cell numbers.”

“Sure, but I can't have it turned on in the hospital. I'll check it periodically.” Tristan wrote his number down on the appointment book for her. “Thank you for seeing me today,” he said.

“You're welcome. I hope you never regret having Michael's ink on your ass.” She looked at him, her sad eyes going sadder. “Seems like every day I'm changing Sarah to Sherry or scratching it out and putting Nancy next to it.” She blinked back tears. “I did a Larry to Harry on a guy just the other week with a little Harry Potter face next to it.”

“Oh, man,” said Tristan, picturing picking up a guy and finding out he had Harry Potter's face on his ass. “Look, whatever happens…I'll never belong to anyone else the way I belong to Michael right now. I know that. I just hope…” He trailed off. Tristan was thinking he hoped he had the balls to stay with Michael. He was thinking that if he lost Michael, he'd never smile again. He was thinking of the very real possibility that Michael might not make it and what that would mean to him, when his cell phone rang. He looked at the number and saw it was Emma's.

“Emma.” He told Meghan, just looking at it. She gripped his hand hard. “Hello,” he said, swallowing.

“It's time,” said Emma. “They say we can see him for a few minutes each.” She seemed to wait for him to say something.

“Any change?”

“No, baby, he's still unconscious. But he hasn't taken a turn for the worse.”

“Okay,” he said. “Ten minutes, fifteen if parking is a problem.”

“Fine.” She hung up. He smiled at Meghan mechanically.

“I'm going to see him; there's been no change, better or worse.”

“Go,” said Meghan simply. “I'll call you.”

He began to remove his wallet, tensing when he felt the rasp of his trousers against his new tattoo. “What do I owe you?”

“For heaven's sake, go!” she said. “I know where Michael lives. We'll worry about that later.” She tugged his hand one more time and then let go, and he left.

A warm spring breeze scented with onions and peppers cooking rushed past Michael as he rode his Harley out old Route 66, past the business district and the little gas stations and restaurants and souvenir stands that went mostly belly-up when the powers that be decided that Interstate 20 would be a good idea, and relished the feel of his Sparky holding his waist as they sped up. How he loved the feel of the road beneath him, his boy behind him, and the sun on his shoulders. It just didn't get any better than this. They passed a small historical car museum and dumpy hotel, and he could hear, although he really didn't know how, Tristan keeping up a steady stream of chatter in his head about all the interesting places along the side of the road.

Fantastic places whistled past, the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, the bright green grass-seed farms of the Willamette Valley, and the battlefield at Antietam. All the while, his boy talked and held on as they sped over the road together. At last, the motorcycle slowed to a stop to wait for a procession of pedestrians in a crosswalk. They all walked behind a casket crossing the road in a carriage, New Orleans-style, with a jazz band and men and women carrying umbrellas dancing along behind it. Walking slowly behind the casket was a solemn, copper-haired boy, who looked at him as he passed, tears and accusations glowing in his eyes.

Michael looked down to see the hands that clasped around his waist and found, not the soft, freckled hands of his boy, but the gnarled and filthy hands of someone entirely alien to him, and he turned in the seat of his motorcycle to see Mary behind him, her eyes cold and dead, still holding him around the waist in rigor mortis.

Emma's voice came to Michael from far away, murmuring over the pings of something droning and mechanical that he could hear distantly as he fought to understand what had happened to him. After a while, the voice that had spoken softly beside him drifted away, the sound of a door closing firmly behind it.

It hurt him somehow to be without a human voice in this impersonal place where he was cold and fuzzy-headed, and pain exploded in the cave behind his eyes as he tried to make them open. Failing that, failing everything it seemed at that point, Michael wept tears of bitter frustration, which leaked down the sides of his face and fell into the hair by his temples. He heard the door open again and tentative footsteps approach him. He felt a warm hand flutter briefly along the side of his face, encountering the wetness there.

“Michael?” he heard Tristan's voice and tried to make his gritty eyes open again. “Michael, can you hear me?” He felt a warm hand on his own and weakly squeezed it.