Spring Rain (10 page)

“Don’t be afraid,” Billy said, holding out a hand and clicking his fingers. “I’ll take care of you, I promise.”

For a few minutes the dog wouldn’t move. Then he began a wary trek back across the yard, scanning the shadows continually for his enemy. Billy dropped to his knees and hugged the unhappy animal.

“It’s okay, buddy. She’s gone. She can’t hurt you.”

Terror gave a low whuffle, comforted but not convinced.

“She’s just a nasty bully.” Billy patted Terror on the head a few times, then looked at his mother and grinned. “You know how girls are.”

“Hah!” said Leigh, eyes sparkling in the light by the door. She turned to Clay. “We girls aren’t the ones who kick a person when she’s down, then disappear.”

“Ouch.” Clay rubbed his chest as he watched Leigh move to the apartment door. “A shot directly to the heart.”

She was nodding with satisfaction when he saw her freeze and heard her gasp.

“What?” he and Billy asked in unison.

“The door,” she whispered. “It’s not latched.”

A
FTER HIS MOTHER
, Leigh, and Clay left with the dessert dishes, Ted lay against his pillows. Numb with fatigue, he watched Billy wrestle with Clay’s dog. Terror. Stupid name. Cute dog.

We should get Mom a dog
, he suddenly thought.
A big one. We’re kind of isolated out here next to the beach, and it’d be good protection for her. A rottweiler maybe. She’d get a kick out of its brown eyebrows. And it’d keep her from being alone in this large house after I’m gone.

After I’m gone.
He still had trouble grasping the finality of that phrase. Even with the deaths of his father and Matt, it was still difficult to wrap his mind around the idea of not being anymore, at least not being as he knew being. But soon he would be gone; there was no question, especially on days when he felt as awful as he felt today. He knew he was walking through what the psalmist had called “the valley of the shadow of death.”

And death cast a large shadow as well as raising a number of questions. After he was gone, Mom would still be here, living in Seaside with Leigh and Billy. Clay would be somewhere, wherever the navy sent him. But question number one: What would happen to Ted after he was gone?

Heaven.
He sighed. On days like today it sounded so good.

“Uncle Ted.” Billy looked up with his arms wrapped around Terror’s neck. The little dog was busily washing the right side of the boy’s face.

“Um?” Ted pulled himself from his philosophizing, something he found himself doing more and more often these days.

“Don’t you like Clay?” Billy’s face was guileless.

Ted blinked. “Of course I like him. He’s my brother.” Even as he spoke, he knew he wasn’t being quite truthful.

“Then did you guys have a fight or something?”

The kid saw way too much. “Why do you ask that?”

Billy shifted slightly, and Terror began on the other side of his face.

“And how can you stand that dog slobber all over you?” Ted shuddered.

Billy looked surprised. “He’s just kissing me. He likes me.”

“He probably does, but still. He’s going to lick your skin right off.”

Billy grinned. “Then I’ll be a skeleton, and I won’t need a Halloween costume. And did you have a fight?”

Ted grimaced. He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to sidetrack a sharpie like Billy. “I wouldn’t say we had an argument exactly. We just don’t agree on some basic stuff.”

Billy nodded. “Like you being gay, I bet.”

That was getting to the kernel of the problem, not that he was going to discuss it with a ten-year-old. “It’s sort of personal, you know?”

Billy pushed Terror away from his face, and the dog began gnawing on his fist. “You mean you don’t want to talk about it.”

Ted looked at the boy’s earnest eyes watching him through the lens of the wire frames. How many times had Leigh had to replace or repair those glasses? “You’d better put some cream on your face tonight after you wash it, or you’ll have chapped cheeks from all that slobber.”

“Who says I wash my face?” And Billy turned his concentration to Terror.

Ted fell back into his theological musings with relief. It was safer to think about heaven and God than to talk with the kid when he was being insightful.

What was heaven like? No harps and puffy clouds and halos.
That was the stuff of cartoons. No Saint Peter at the gates. No gigantic scales weighing his good deeds against his bad to see if he was good enough to get in, thank the Lord. He knew he’d fail if that were the way salvation worked.

God. That’s what made heaven. Almighty God resided there, if God the Omnipresent could be said to reside anywhere, at least as he understood reside.

And no more suffering or pain. Not that he was enduring pain like a cancer patient did. AIDS didn’t always attack a particular body part and destroy it like so many diseases did, inflicting agony upon the victims. It was a systemic immunity problem that affected the whole body, annihilating its ability to deal with germs. You ended up with problems like the herpes sores that currently plagued his mouth or virulent diarrhea or infections like the one that took the vision in his right eye. You could end up with something incredibly painful as the end neared, but basically you wasted away as your body ate itself while it tried to find a way to deal with a problem it could no longer handle. Then you got something like pneumonia, which under normal circumstances was easily dealt with, and boom! No more overwhelming fatigue or unrelenting deterioration.

While he felt God was disappointed in him, and he was mad at God much of the time for the way his life had turned out, when the boom came, he didn’t doubt heaven. After all, he trusted in Jesus. He had confidence in the Bible when it said: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.” He’d had a saving faith since he was younger than Billy. Even as he railed against God he believed. He felt like Peter when he said to Jesus, “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” He might be one of those saved “so as by fire,” but he was confident of heaven.

What he wasn’t confident of was the next few weeks. The process of dying was hard. He knew. He’d been through it with Matt and several of their friends. His dad had been lucky. Teed up his golf ball and keeled over. No dying. Just dead. Quick and simple. Absent from the body and present with the Lord.

He often speculated on which was easier on the survivors: the quick punch in the gut with no time to prepare or the slow, anguishing process with more than enough time to spare.

One thing was for sure. When he did get to heaven, he had a
few choice words for Adam and Eve about that apple.

Leigh’s voice floated up the stairs. “Come on, Billy. Say good night to Ted and Terror.”

Billy made a face. “I gotta go.”

Ted nodded. “You can be my emissary and protect your mother from my brother.”

“Why?” Billy’s sharp eyes looked at him. “Clay’s nice. Why would he hurt Mom?”

“Don’t ask me, guy. Just a gut feeling.”

“Billy!” Leigh’s patience had obviously run out.

Billy nodded at Ted, ignoring his mother. “I was right. You and Clay do have trouble.”

“It’s our problem, Billy, not yours. Don’t worry yourself about it.”

“I have to worry. It concerns you.”

Suddenly Ted couldn’t swallow around the lump in his throat. If he’d ever had a kid, he’d want him to be just like Billy.

“See, I don’t have any brothers or sisters.” Billy sat on the edge of the bed, Terror forgotten. “I’m alone. I don’t like being alone. If I had a brother as neat as Clay, if I had any brother at all, I’d want to be close to him. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Ted felt all his defensive tendencies rise to the fore. There were a lot of things in his life that weren’t the way they were “supposed” to be. The last thing he needed was a lecture from Billy to remind him. “I know that’s the way it’s supposed to be, but sometimes things happen.”

Billy sighed, suddenly looking very young. “I’m making you mad. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“No, I’m not mad. It’s just like I said: It’s personal.”

“Yeah. I know. It’s none of my business.”

Billy looked down at the floor, and Ted knew he was upset. Usually they could talk about anything, so Billy didn’t understand Ted’s reticence to discuss something he had trouble even thinking about. He looked at the bright, perceptive face none the worse for all Terror’s loving bath and reached out to squeeze Billy’s hand. He forced himself to say easily, “Good night, guy. Never forget. I love you.”

“Night, Uncle Ted.” Billy leaned over and hugged him. “I love you too.”

“And I’m not mad,” he called as the boy rushed from the
room. His answer was a flick of a hand.

Ted sighed deeply. He hadn’t meant to hurt the kid. He didn’t mean to hurt any of them, though he knew he did over and over, ad infinitum, forever and ever, amen. Apparently it was his calling in life to inflict pain. Unfortunately he did it with all the Wharton compulsion and aptitude for excellence.

He smiled without humor. If he had a few questions for Adam and Eve, they were nothing compared to the many queries he had for God.

He slumped against the pillows, wearied with thinking and conflict. Much as he loved his family, including Clay, he was relieved that they were all finally gone and he could give in to the overwhelming fatigue. He could slump without anyone rushing to plump his pillows. He could whine without anyone looking hurt or upset. He could throw things.

Didn’t he wish. If he could throw just one thing, he’d feel better. He knew it. His blood would start pumping, and his mind would start clicking. But not only wasn’t there anything handy to throw, he also didn’t have the strength. He, former pitching ace on Seaside’s state championship baseball team, could barely throw anything across the room.

Another loss. Life had been reduced to one long string of losses. First had been Dad. He still got a hitch in his heart when he thought of the phone call from his mother telling him his father had dropped over on the golf course with three other doctors for company. Not even their concerted skills had been able to revive him.

It constantly amazed him that his father, Mr. Doctrinal Correctness, Mr. Heart for the Lord, had loved him with all his godly heart in spite of who Ted had become.

“You will always be my son,” he told Ted the weekend they’d confronted him about being gay. “I will never agree with what you are doing and the choices you are making, but I will always love you. This will always be your home, and you will always be welcome here.”

And he had been welcome. When he finally got up the nerve to bring Matt to the house, he had been welcome too. He’d met Matt at a clinic when they both went in for HIV testing. They’d exchanged phone numbers, and Matt had called to find out Ted’s test results.

“Positive,” Ted said, the disbelief still strong in his voice.

“Me too. Want to go out to dinner?”

They’d rarely been apart for the next seven years.

He thought of that first visit of Matt’s to his parents’ house. Both of them had come in with chips on their shoulders: Matt because he viewed life as a never-ending battleground where only his personal vigilance kept the enemies, who were many, at bay; Ted because he wasn’t certain how his parents would react to his finally bringing a partner home. To this point his gayness had been only in vague generalities. Matt, a tall handsome blond with a rapier wit, was very specific.

Mom and Dad hadn’t been happy, and Ted suspected she cried after they left. He was just glad he and Matt lived close enough that spending the night was never an issue. He knew his parents wouldn’t allow him and Matt to share a room under their roof. But they’d opened their door to Matt and fed him and loved him and even got him to lower his guard around them.

The first time Mom had sent Matt off with a kiss on the cheek just like she gave Ted, Matt had almost swooned.

“They like me. They really like me.” He shook his head in wonder. “And I sound like Sally Fields giving that Oscar acceptance speech.”

Ted sighed as he stared at his ceiling. He’d lost Matt too, last year. Mom had invited him to bring Matt home to die where she could help care for him, but he’d wanted that last gift of love for himself. Many, many days he was angry at God, but he was genuinely thankful that God had allowed him to stay well long enough to care for Matt.

And because of his parents, Matt had been able to trust Jesus.

“But I’m gay,” he told Dad during one of their discussions. “Christians hate gays.”

“Why do you say that?” Dad asked.

“I read the papers. ‘God hates faggots,’ ” he quoted.

Dad nodded sadly. “Just don’t forget that I’m a Christian, and I don’t hate gays. You have to decide which one of us represents Jesus best.”

It was a week after Dad’s funeral, a glorious celebration of hope in Christ, when Matt had said, “I want to have the hope everyone has about your father. I feel myself slipping, and I’m getting scared. I need that hope.”

“Then you need Jesus,” Ted told him.

“But I’m gay.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“What if I can’t change?”

“Matt, all I know is that Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.’ Salvation comes from believing that. Change comes after belief, not before.”

Matt had gone for a long walk on the beach to wrestle the issue out. He’d come back with a smile. “I believe.”

There had been changes, the biggest being the peace with which Matt now faced his deteriorating health and imminent death. He frequently read the Bible Mom gave him and asked questions incessantly. One of Ted’s favorite memories was of Matt lying on the sofa, his Bible in one hand and a yellow highlighter in the other.

“Did Jonah and the whale really happen?” Or “What did Jesus do those three days he was dead?” Or “When the Bible says we should love our enemies, does that mean the ‘God hates faggots’ guy too?”

One day Matt looked at Ted and said, “We can’t have sex anymore. It’s wrong. The Bible says so right here at the beginning of Romans.”