Fragile Beasts (49 page)

“There was a time, yes, but I realized I was wrong.”

“When did you find out?”

I consider his question.

“When you and your brother came to stay with me.”

His smile returns. The expression suits him. I could easily get used to seeing him like this.

“We’re really that bad, huh?”

“No, no, not at all,” I protest. “I’m not referring to problems. I’m talking about the emotional commitment. I’m afraid I’ve kept very much to myself for most of my life. I’m wondering now if this was a mistake. Here I am, approaching the end of my life, and I realize I don’t have any friends.”

“Luis and Bert are your friends.”

“Yes, that’s true, but they also work for me.”

“We’re your friends, Miss Jack. Me and Kyle.”

“Kyle and I.”

“Kyle and I,” he repeats.

I was so concerned with correcting the grammar of his sentence, I didn’t listen to the content. This time I do.

“Kyle and I are your friends.”

“Well, thank you, Klint,” I reply, unsure of the feelings welling up inside me.

I’m going to cry. I must be overmedicated.

I take out the tissue tucked into the sleeve of my robe.

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

“You don’t have to thank someone for being your friend,” he starts to tell me, but his voice breaks into a rasping cough.

He winces and takes a sip from his cup.

“And I’m not being kind,” he adds in barely a whisper.

“That’s enough. You shouldn’t strain your voice.”

He reaches for a small pad of paper sitting on his tray and a pencil with Stanford Jack Memorial Hospital stamped on its side.

He writes something, rips the page free, and hands it to me.

The note says: It’s my pleasure.

“There you are!”

Luis cries out from behind me.

“I leave for twenty minutes and everything falls to pieces. You shouldn’t be out of bed. What are you thinking? Where is your doctor? Do you know how many broken bones you have?”

His voice is full of exasperation, but his eyes are soft and he looks refreshed and capable in a pair of tan trousers and a chocolate brown sweater with a mandarin orange shirt collar peeking out at his neckline.

Amazingly, his outburst doesn’t wake Kyle, who continues to snore.

He nods at Klint.

“Cómo está, caballero?”

“He’s not allowed to talk right now,” I explain.

“It’s okay. We talked last night and this morning while you were being Sleeping Beauty.”

“I’m just lucky that when I did wake up, I had a prince waiting by my side to take care of me.”

“Oh, yes, your prince,” Luis says, rolling his eyes. “Of course, Bert was with you when you woke up. I knew he was up to something when he convinced me to go home. I knew he didn’t really care if I looked rumpled.”

He disappears behind me and I feel my wheelchair begin to move.

“I’m taking Miss Jack back to her room,” Luis tells Klint. “You can see each other later.”

Unfortunately, Luis navigates a wheelchair in much the same way he drives a car. I’m feeling rather jostled by the time we reach my room, and I’m happy to get back into my bed.

No sooner am I situated than he begins to unpack a small suitcase filled with breakfast foods.

He narrates as he lays everything out on my tray.

“We have some fresh fruit, homemade bread, quince marmalade, fresh-squeezed orange juice, your favorite tea, some cheese and hard-boiled eggs.”

He ends by bringing out a single purple iris and a crystal bud vase. He fills the vase from a pitcher of water on my bedside table and sets the flower in front of one of Bert’s many yellow arrangements.

“Luis, this is wonderful,” I tell him, “but I’m really not hungry. You were right. I shouldn’t have got out of bed. But I had to see him with my own eyes.”

He studies the food, then my face, and begins repacking.

“You don’t look so good. Maybe I should call a nurse.”

“No, I’m fine. Could I have some water, please?”

“This is all my fault,” he says, pouring me some water. “If I had been here last night …”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” I interrupt him. “The only difference would be that you’d be the one lying in the hospital bed.”

“I would switch places with you gladly.”

“Not gladly. Trust me.”

I grimace at the pain and take a sip of the lukewarm water.

More worry shows on his face.

He reaches back into the bag and brings out a long string of beads that he hands to me.

“For you,” he says.

“This is a rosary.”

“I know what it is.”

“I’m not religious, and I’m certainly not Catholic.”

Next he brings out a small crucifix.

“Oh, dear Jesus,” I sigh.

“Exactly right.”

“Really, Luis.”

“As a favor to me?”

“Fine,” I concede.

As I watch him try to find the best location for his holy relics, I think about my talk with Klint and what’s written on the scrap of paper I slipped into my robe pocket.

“Luis, have you stayed with me all these years solely because I’ve provided you with a marvelous job?”

“Marvelous job?” he sputters.

I can tell he’s about to launch into one of his tirades where he compares his lot in life to that of an Egyptian slave toting great blocks of marble for his pharaoh, but he catches himself and turns contemplative instead.

“No, I have not stayed for the job,” he tells me quietly. “You and I have never shared a bank account or a child or a bed. But you are my wife.”

I
think the biggest change in Klint since he’s been seeing his shrink is that he doesn’t call me a faggot anymore.

Other than that, he’s pretty much his old self. He talks a little more than he used to and he seems more relaxed, but these are good things.

I always knew my brother had a personality. I knew he was smart and considerate and had a good sense of humor, but he did everything in his power not to let any of this show. He wanted to come across as a tough guy who didn’t need anybody or like anybody and who thought he was better than everybody else.

I never understood where this came from. He certainly didn’t get it from our father.

Dad was a friendly outgoing guy who loved to talk people’s ears off and who spent half his time laughing at funny things and the other half laughing at life’s tragedies. He bitched and moaned in private about his circumstances, but these were only words he thought he was supposed to say. Deep down he was proud that he had a family and he was able to support it, even if he didn’t have the most glamorous, high-paying job in the world. He didn’t care what other people thought about him. I don’t think the word
embarrassing
was in his vocabulary.

Klint seemed to be his opposite, but I knew better. I saw them together all the time and sometimes Klint would let his guard down with Dad and they’d joke around and talk about stuff and seem almost identical. I was the only person who could make Klint laugh, but Dad was the only one who could make him happy.

I never knew why Klint always seemed to be hiding, but now I do. He had been buried beneath a mountain of shame, and he believed if he dug even a
small hole to show any part of himself, even a good part, there was a chance the bad part would show through, too.

Since his confession to me we haven’t talked about Mom or any of the stuff he told me. Maybe we never will, and I’m okay with that. He definitely needs to talk to someone about it and that’s what his doctor’s for, but as far as how things stand with me, what matters the most is that he knows I know.

The burden of his secret has been lifted, and he can breathe again. When I think back to his deterioration during the weeks before he tried to kill himself and even the way he tried to do it, I believe he was choking to death, suffocating on shame. Tying that noose around his neck was the only way he knew how to end it.

Besides me, only Miss Jack and Bert know what Mom did. Miss Jack said she had to tell Bert for legal reasons and didn’t explain more than that and I didn’t want her to. She took care of telling Mom and Aunt Jen what happened. It’s been two weeks and we haven’t heard from either of them.

We’ve been able to keep that part quiet, but it was impossible to hide the truth about Klint’s suicide attempt. His breakdown was too public. It’s a small town. He’s a local hero, and the people here feel invested in his future and entitled to know about his present. And Tyler Mann is his best friend and if Tyler Mann knows something, all the Manns know it and exponentially speaking, within one hour of phone time, six hundred other people know it, too.

I don’t blame them for this. It’s not the kind of thing that could be kept secret. One of the cops who responded to my 911 call turned out to be married to our second-grade teacher. He would’ve had to tell her, and she’d go to school the next day and tell the other teachers. One of the ER nurses went to high school with my mom and dad, and the cashier at the hospital cafeteria was the mom of a kid in my geometry class who always falls asleep.

I’m sure that even Bill spilled the beans the next night sitting in a bar having everyone ask him if it’s true what they heard about the Hayes kid, the one who plays baseball.

When something dramatic and gut-wrenching happens to someone, everybody wants to talk about it. That’s human nature. I just wish all the dramatic, gut-wrenching stuff could stop happening to me.

For the most part, everyone’s been nice about it. I suppose that’s not easy for some people. Coming face-to-face with a guy who tried to end his life, who actually put the rope around his neck and let go, can bring out all kinds
of uncomfortable feelings from pity to fear and disgust. Some people think it’s a sin. Some think it’s a sign of insanity. Some people can’t allow themselves to feel sympathy for him because he did it to himself. Others feel too much sympathy and treat him too cautiously, like he might get up and throw himself through a window at any moment.

Bill’s been coming by almost every day. He’s even started having tea with Miss Jack, which I thought would be one of the funniest things I’d ever see in my life but instead in some weird way seems totally normal. He even stayed for dinner once and had some paella.

Tyler comes a lot, too, always loaded down with cards and homemade gifts from his pack of creative sisters who all have crushes on Klint, except for Britney who has one on me.

She’s the only one who’s thought of me in all this. She made me a Get Well card. At first when I read it, I thought maybe she got confused and thought I’d been in the hospital, too, but the more I looked at the rainbow with birds flying around it and a smiling sun above it and read the simple sentiment, the more I was convinced she’s just one very insightful kid.

“Dear Kyle,” she wrote. “I hope you’re feeling better.”

Two people have been noticeably absent from visiting Klint.

The first is Shelby. I thought for sure she’d be racing over here to tend to her one true love, but she hasn’t even sent him a text.

I know she visited Miss Jack in the hospital after Klint was already back home. (Miss Jack had to stay longer than Klint did.) I thought she’d come to visit her aunt once she got home, too, but so far she hasn’t been here.

I’m not mad at her anymore. I regret a lot of the things I said in that parking lot. I wish she’d feel the same way.

The other missing person is Coach Hill.

A bunch of Klint’s teammates have come out to visit from time to time along with Tyler. They go up to the TV room and at first it’s quiet, but then they start to joke around and it gets pretty rowdy.

Klint hasn’t said anything to me about the team. I don’t know if he even thinks he’s still on it or if he wants to still be on it. I don’t know if he’s upset that Coach hasn’t checked up on him. He hasn’t talked about baseball at all.

He hasn’t missed that much. The past two weeks have been nothing but practices leading up to the first game of the first round of the state championship in four days.

Counting the Laurel Falls game, he only missed the last three of their season. They ended up losing to Laurel Falls by one run. They were 1-1 their last two games.

They hadn’t lost a single game this year while Klint was playing. A superstitious man might place some importance in this fact and do everything possible to get Klint back, but Coach Hill doesn’t believe in luck of any kind. He believes a team that wants to win will win.

But if his logic is followed to its illogical end and it’s assumed that the reason the team didn’t win was because it didn’t want to, then it might also follow that the reason they didn’t want to win was because Klint was missing.

I don’t know if this has finally occurred to Coach Hill or if he wants him back based solely on his previous merits or if he’s only stopping by to ask Klint for his uniform but whatever the reason, I come downstairs after Miss Jack calls me and find Coach Hill standing stiffly in her ornate parlor in his gray sweatpants, team windbreaker, and ball cap; he looks like a piece of gravel that’s fallen inside a little girl’s jewelry box.

Miss Jack is standing beside him leaning on her new cane. She’s not supposed to be standing. She had bad knees to begin with, and she really messed them up running to get to Klint.

Between her arm in a cast and her broken collarbone, she hasn’t been able to get back into real clothes yet.

She’s wearing a long, emerald green robe and matching slippers. The glasses she keeps on a chain around her neck are perched on the end of her nose. The bruises around her eyes have faded from their original purplish gray to a faint yellow green.

Luis is standing nearby frowning at her. I know he wants her to sit down.

“Kyle, Mr. Hill is here to see your brother,” she tells me.

“Coach Hill,” he corrects her.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I hadn’t realized coach had become an official title like doctor or prime minister.”

“Hey, Kyle.”

“Hey, Coach.”

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” Miss Jack asks me.

“I don’t know. Are you here to see if he wants to play on Monday?”