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Dancers - Chapter 5 (Grownups)
by menme
(This is a loopback in the ongoing story. It starts somewhere between Chapters 3 and 4 -the Christmas party, New Year's - and then goes past them to the next summer, when they'll have been together about a year. Other things were just going on at the same time that needed to be gotten in there. I hope it's not too confusing...)
Chapter 5: Grownups
K.
He heard the key turn in the lock behind him. Aside from a glass case, its lid resting beside it on the floor, and a thick coil of brown rope in one corner, the room was empty. He shrugged. He was nine, he could take being locked up. He could take whatever the guy could dish out.
Then the rope in the corner moved.
Slithering (uncoiling?), couldn't be a snake because the guy couldn't have known how much snakes scared him and who would leave the lid off a case for something that huge to get out anyway?
No, it was just a rope. A very big rope.
Then the rope lifted its flat head and fixed its black eyes on him and he knew it was true.
His Aunt Dani's new boyfriend had locked him in a room with a live python.
He spun, screaming, and began to beat on the door.
It had all started when his mom and dad flew with him to his Aunt Dani's. She was going to watch him for a day while they drove on to some clinic in Newark that would help his mom have another baby. New boyfriend of Dani's (yawn), not there when they arrived, except in the odd way his mom asked Dani if they'd be meeting him. (When she thought he wasn't listening his mom had repeated to his dad what Dani told her on the phone. Much older, she'd said and - in his aunt's exact words apparently - he can come across as rude. I think we're being warned.)
The guy who breezed in an hour later came across as not interested. A glance at him in the living room, playing games on Dani's laptop, then he moved straight on to the others in the kitchen. He'd met a lot of his Aunt Dani's boyfriends, always young, always eager to impress their girlfriend with their dad skills by being total (and very fake) buddies with him. This one told him with a look that he was simply ruining his afternoon off.
He sidled into the kitchen and perched on his dad's knee. "Kevin, this is Greg," His mom the introducer.
"Hi."
"Kevin or Kev?" The guy studied him while he made himself coffee.
"Kevin."
"Then I'll call you Kev." He caned his way to a chair.
"My dad calls me Kev sometimes."
"Then I'll call you Kevin."
He knew a kid at school who played games like that, always contrary. "What happened to your leg?" he asked. The table got quiet. Even Dani looked uneasy. His mom pursed her lips to hush him, confusing him (she was the one who'd said it was impolite when he didn't ask about their neighbor's broken wrist that time), when Greg, who had seemed not to hear, suddenly said, "What does your blood do, Kevin?"
He just stared.
"Come on - what does your blood do there in your body?"
"It runs around, like in your heart and all." No one else was moving.
"What happens if it stops?"
"You die, I guess."
"Good. What happens if it stops in just one place, say your thigh muscle?"
He felt like he was in school. "The - uh - muscle dies?"
"Very good. That's what happened to my leg. I had a blood clot in the thigh muscle -"
"What's a blood clot?"
"Ever make a spitwad? Same thing. Now, what happens to a dead body? Bet you know this from all those crime shows."
He did know and it was getting fun. "It gets stinky and starts to rot."
"Well, before my thigh could get stinky and rot, they cut it open and took the dead muscle out."
"You mean, there's no muscle in there at all?"
"Oh, there's a little left. Just enough to kick kids who annoy me." He wasn't smiling.
Some grownups could do that - get scary on you faster than you could say What did I do. And when they did, he knew the plan - get some distance in there, quietly and without fuss. He got up and walked out of the kitchen.
And stood just behind the door to listen.
"God, I love it when they're young enough to scare that easily." The guy's voice held delight.
"Maybe you shouldn't have scared him, Greg." (His Aunt Dani). "You are going to be spending the afternoon with him."
"You and I are going to spend the afternoon with him."
"Same difference."
"Different difference. You're going to do all the - entertaining."
"And what will you be doing?"
"Trailing along behind - " (that dreamy delight again) - "waiting for an opportunity to kick."
His mom sounded strained. "I...thought Dani said on the phone you liked kids."
"What?"
"I might have said something like tha -"
"I want my lawyer."
His dad was laughing. "It looks like he's in good hands, Kerstin. Let's go."
Then he was alone with Dani and the guy (who he was emphatically not going to call Greg, not the way his Aunt Dani did anyway, like she was saying God in a church or something, looking at him that way too). By the time they left to visit some natural-history museum at the university (that was his entertainment on a rainy November afternoon), he had dubbed him The Greg in his head.
And The Greg was even less able to cope with his little problem than his mom was. He hated the word hyper; his doctor had said it several times to his mom just the week before and he hadn't liked their voices when they said it. He preferred to be called a handful, at least that meant something. It meant the ashtray in the back of the car broke when he played with it on the way (scary look from The Greg) and it meant he dropped the cane in the mud when he tried to twirl it after they got out (very scary look). It meant he didn't realize it was a street he was about to dash across, a horn suddenly blaring. The Greg grabbed his collar so hard the quick reaction threw him off balance and they both fell backward onto the sidewalk. The Greg fell pretty cool, landing on his ass, still keeping a grip on his cane, but his face got worse than scary, a black sheen spreading beneath the skin that might have just been embarrassment because Dani and a passerby had to help him up, but which went all the way to his eyes and made them hard as jewels. His limp seemed worse after that. His Aunt Dani gave him warning - and somehow pitying- looks. And when he knocked over an urn in the museum, (not breaking it luckily, but chipping a floor tile), The Greg grew oddly calm. He motioned to the guard he'd spoken to at the door and apparently knew well, and then the three of them were leaving Dani behind and heading down a back stairwell (slow and awkward, the cane tapping each step angrily), to a room with a small kitchen, where The Greg locked him in another side room so he and the guard could discuss his punishment.
Which he knew now was to be crushed to death by a python.
No more pride, just his heart racing enough to come unhinged, he was sobbing like a baby, begging (and what if they'd gone away, a terrifying thought). His hands pounding the door hurt. He could feel the snake's breath on the back of his neck now, he thought he might faint, a warm wetness spreading in his pants -
The door flew open and he fell into the kitchen gasping and crawled past legs and a cane until he was out of reach. Through the door he could see the python hadn't moved from its original position. The Greg was staring at him, sniffing the air. "Please do not tell me you wet yourself. Please do not tell me that." He wanted to sink into the floor. He watched in horrified, hiccuping fascination as The Greg and his guard buddy entered the room, picked the snake up and put it back in its case. The Greg even stroked the snout, just a household pet here, murmuring "Good Bertha." Then he came out to shake his head at him and give him his jacket to tie at his waist and hide the stain. Dani was waiting for them in the lobby. When she was shown his pants, she looked at The Greg as though she didn't know him. "What did you do to him?"
"I helped Harvey" - he indicated the guard back on his post at the door - "with his cluster headaches a couple of years back and in return he introduced me to Bertha. A big-mama black-head python. When she's not on display they let her loose in her little room downstairs. She's harmless enough and I thought it might help Kevin calm down -" he winked "- if he was locked up with her for a while." She was staring. He got loud. "How was I supposed to know the kid had a snake phobia?" Museumgoers turned to look at them.
At home Dani gave him some shorts of hers to wear (she was small but they still hung like a saggy diaper on him) while she washed his pants. In the kitchen he couldn't look at The Greg. "Please don't tell my dad I wet my pants," he said.
"What will I get out of it if I don't?"
He shrugged.
"How about you call me Sir until further notice."
It was an easy deal. The guy was a sucker because he could have demanded so much more. A sucker and a - He couldn't think of another word. All he could think of was the hands, setting the cane aside before lifting the monstrous snake as though it were no more than a dropped coat to be hung away (albeit a heavy one), his wincing limp as he and Harvey carried it back to its case.
His parents accepted their explanation about the pants, The Greg's "He fell in a puddle" so matter-of-fact it was awesome. He wanted to learn to lie like that. His dad noticed the Sirs and gave him an odd look. They stayed for dinner and at some point an argument came out of nowhere, like the car on the street that afternoon, his mom's voice that hard knot it became when she was mad and suppressing it. "Well, he's been diagnosed now. I picked up the prescription yesterday." He threaded back through the conversation he hadn't listened to and realized they were talking about him being hyperactive. "And no, you're right. I haven't started him on it yet."
"He doesn't need R---" The Greg said. He didn't catch the word, though it sounded like Rid-of-him. "He's not hyperactive."
"Look, I know you're a doctor, but you haven't spent time with him-"
"And how much time did the pediatrician spend - five minutes? Oh, you're right. I'm sorry. Five minutes is more than an afternoon - no, wait. How does time work?"
His dad suddenly said, "Kevin, why don't you go play on Dani's laptop some more?"
He left and took up his position behind the door.
The argument was like waves battering a shore - loud and then soft. Holding itself back. Why couldn't grownups just yell at each other and get it over with? The Greg got points for insistence, repeating over and over: "He doesn't have ADHD. Don't give him the R---." It sounded more like Ridalin now. He could hear his mom fuming.
"Did this pediatrician mention alternatives? Check his reaction to food additives? The parents can modify their behavior -"
"Oh now it's all our fault, right? We just don't have the patience -"
" - too much verbal input and certain brains go haywire. There are methods you can learn - using gestures to get what you want, training him with specific moves. I know it sounds Pavlovian -"
"My son is not a dog."
"Your son is probably gifted." (He wondered if that had to do with getting too many toys at Christmas). "Everything interests him and he can't assimilate it."
"His doctor diagnosed him. He knows what he's doing."
"Oh, right. Ol' Doc Shucks from Bumfuck, Pennsylvania - he's always up on the latest." The table got very quiet. "Ouch, stop kicking me." That apparently to Dani seated next to him.
His mother's voice had reached that deadly quiet of a bomb ticking. "He's a very good pediatrician."
"How about Dad? You get any say on what goes into your kid?"
"Kerstin spends more time with him," his dad said. "It's her call."
"And I do spend time with him. You only spent an afternoon, as you pointed out. You don't know how bad it can get." (He felt ashamed when she talked like that. He didn't try to be bad.)
"Oh, I get it." The Greg's voice dripped sarcasm. "The medicine's not for Kevin. It's for Mommy, so she can have some peace and quiet."
More than quiet. Dead quiet.
"How dare you? How dare you suggest I'm doing this for myself? You blowhard bastard." (File that one away for future use). A chair scraped and he just had time to slip onto the piano bench, pretend to pick out notes, when his mom came banging through the door and into the bedroom. Dani followed, turning back at the door to say, "You've really managed to win friends and influence people again."
They didn't stay long. At the door The Greg looked at his mom, who was doing a good job of not looking back, and said something strange. He said, "Hate me." She looked up. "Go ahead and hate me. But don't give him the stuff just because you hate me."
On the plane his mom turned to him. "We have to go for another consultation in two weeks. You'll stay with them again. Are you all right with that?"
"Sure. Cool."
His dad looked at him. "Did you really fall in a puddle?"
"Yeah."
So matter-of-fact.
****
"I should have known that wouldn't work."
"What about it didn't work?"
"Oh, only that you traumatized my nephew, and that my sister hates you."
"I didn't know you'd planned to impress your sister with me."
"You know, she was married at 24, having a child at 25. She's had a family all this time, while I've just sort of rolled from one relationship to the next. Nothing ever lasted, and I know she thinks it's my fault, that there's something wrong with me. And maybe she was right up to now. Did you know, this is by far the longest I've ever got with anyone?"
"That's good. Isn't it?"
"I'll have to listen to her now telling me how I've got it wrong again. I had just...hoped to hear someone finally acknowledge that I've got it right."
"You've got it right."
****
He stared down at the man's open chest.
Blood and bone and pink gumps of flesh. The heart was still beating. Had to remember every bit of it for show-and-tell at school.
The Greg had displayed his rare lying talents again when he brought him to the operating-room gallery, by going up to the couple already watching, relatives of the guy on the slab, he guessed, and giving them some screwy story, see, the kid's granddad had a heart transplant the week before (thank you, turned out fine), but did they mind if the kid watched this one so his nightmares would stop?
A little scary at first. Not watching a surgery for the first time, but the moment that morning when Aunt Dani had said she was busy and he would be spending the afternoon with The Greg.
The Greg's idea of entertainment was the hospital.
"That's a machine heart." The voice near his ear was soft, fascinated (didn't the guy see this kind of stuff every day?). "Those pumps turning, keeping the blood going, is like a big steel heart outside the body. Cardiopulmonary bypass. Just call it the pumper." He tried to remember every word for later.
And later, when his parents were back and they all sat in a restaurant (The Greg getting constant calls on his cell phone about some patient), he announced that he was going to be a doctor. His parents had already been upset that he'd been allowed to watch an operation. They smiled and nodded. The Greg shut his phone and frowned. "You can't," he said. He felt his mom beside him bristle. "Have to have good grades for that, and yours aren't."
"I'll get better."
"Of course you will," his mother murmured. Not taking him seriously.
"How?" The Greg looked at him.
"I'll - um - pay more attention in class."
"That's a good start." He shrugged. "Two words you need to know if you ever do become a doctor. `More tests.'" It was what he'd just said on the phone, or rather yelled, while his parents stared at him. "Buy you time when you've just ordered the best steak in town. Repeat after me, `More tests.'"
"It's good to know it's not just us you're rude to," his mother said, indicating the phone. "I imagined you were probably rude to colleagues, and I was right - you do not disappoint."
"I hear that from women all the time."
The talk turned adult, the kind of thing he usually tuned out. The men made several jokes he didn't understand.
"Don't tell the cute brunette here," Greg motioned at Dani, "- but women are all over me."
"You know, they probably would be if you weren't so abrasive," Dani told him.
"So I'll shave."
"You're also a walking bad pun."
"A walking-bad pun?" He changed the emphasis, rolled his eyes at his cane. When he laughed he looked so different. "I'll have them stencil that on my door. So my patients will know what they're in for."
"You don't even know what your patients are in for."
"That's what they're in for."
His parents were laughing too. Dani suddenly looked like she had something up her sleeve. "Hate to ruin all this hilarity," she told the rest of them, "but you should know what you're witnessing here. It's called two Vicodin kicking in."
He knew The Greg took medicine for his leg. He didn't know why they all got quiet. "Ignore her," The Greg told them. "This is an old argument." He glared at Dani. "And a personal one."
"They're family."
"Not my family."
"Actually," said his dad the lawyer, "under common law we sort of are."
The Greg glanced at them all one by one and shuddered theatrically.
"Great theory of Dani's, isn't it? I'm in pain, I swallow something that takes away the pain - but it's not the lack of pain that puts me in a better mood, it's the pill itself. Notice anything wrong with that reasoning?"
"It's an opy---," she informed them (another word he couldn't understand). "It's the same thing they make heroin out of."
"Someone's been googling."
Dani seemed almost sad. "I would just rather know sometimes, Greg, that I'm talking to the real you."
He looked at her for a long time. "Did it ever occur to you that the painless me might be the real one?" A waiter dropped off the scotch he'd ordered and the fight continued on a whispered level, her head near her boyfriend's, shutting the rest of them out, though they could hear every word. The Greg had another pill out, apparently ready to wash it down with the drink. "Not with the booze. Please." His aunt sounded desperate. He felt embarrassed for her.
The Greg swallowed the pill demonstratively, and with a big I'll-show-you gesture picked up his drink - and handed it across to his dad. "Hope you like scotch," he murmured.
So the guy could do something for someone else's sake. If there was one thing he knew from school, it was that you didn't do what a girl asked you to. Very uncool. Yet there was something in the simple gesture, the calm hand holding the glass out waiting for his dad to take it, that seemed so...courageous, it made him think maybe he'd gotten it all wrong.
****
D.
She watched him limp to the bed where she lay and hang his cane over the headboard. They had ended up in her apartment after her sister and company left, the dinner quiet after her Vicodin remark, livened only when she and Kerstin played at irritating him by speaking German. He'd put an end to that by saying he'd take a class and learn it if he had to. She knew that he could.
Instead of snuggling in beside her, he sat down on the edge of the quilt and looked at her. His hair, messed to tight curls from his shower, made her throat catch.
"I'm only going to say this once," he told her. "I don't want you discussing my addiction in front of others. It's a private matter."
"Maybe it shouldn't be."
"Oh let me see. You think - what? - if you embarrass me in front of people enough it'll shame me into being able to kick the stuff?"
"Why not?"
"That's just stupid, Dani." She took a deep breath and let it out. "I'm sure the rehab clinics will be pleased as punch to know you've found the cure for physical dependency." He collapsed onto his back beside her. "Look - I need this stuff. I didn't get addicted purely out of weakness. And I believe I gave you fair warning. This is me. You knew what you were getting."
"No one ever knows what they're getting." She laid a hand on his chest. Tensed, hard against her palm. Her heart felt out of whack. In two weeks he would be taking her to the hospital Christmas party, a thought that scared her. He hadn't even introduced her when she'd gone there to see Martha. As though he were ashamed of her. In some ways, she knew, she was like the little bottle in his pocket. Four months had been enough to make him dependent on her (and oh she was dependent on him now, for happiness, for everything), but it also meant she was his dirty little secret when it came to admitting to others, or even to himself, how much he felt. If he felt. She was his personal matter. If not a bottle then a doll he carried around in his pocket and took out when needed, very real to him, the world they created together beautiful and strange, but god forbid his weird little obsession meant the doll started having a say in his life.
There would be some breaking point, she sensed, when he would have to start taking her very seriously. She sensed it wouldn't be tonight.
"There are just other things you could take, right? What about Dilaudid?"
He gave her his dramatic look. "Wow, Frau Doctor, you really know from painkillers. Look, do me - and yourself - a favor, Dani, and stop googling things you know nothing about."
"I can worry about you if I want to. This article talked about liver damage and -"
"Whoa, whoa - what am I doing here?" The question stunned her. "I'm lying in bed with the hottest woman in town and we're talking about my liver. If anything's sick, that is. Look - just do what I say. We're not talking about this in front of others. Subject closed."
And it was for him, she thought. In a moment he would turn to her, cock already swollen hard; he would touch her, hands stroking gently through the flimsy gown, the heat of his palms spreading along her meridians, possessing her, and she wanted it so much and suddenly didn't want it. Or rather wanted something else from him.
"I'm a part of your life," she told him. She tried to look angry, a thing she wasn't good at. "I...have a say, in whatever happens to you. If I want to talk about your addiction in front of others, I'm going to and you won't be able to stop me."
He was so much better at looking angry. "You know what?" He was already standing up, grabbing his cane. "Sleep alone."
The shock of it left her speechless. He could be boyish at times, with his jokes and gags, he could even pout, but he had never been childish. She sat up while he snatched the clothes he would have to put on to go across the hall, every move speaking rage, flipping her off with his entire body. She thought of his hand, holding out the scotch to Dan that evening. He hobbled to the door.
"I love you," she said.
It stilled him. She knew she had never said it before, just following his lead (we non-committers don't go there), and yet she was very aware that she'd never said it to any man. As the TV show had it, she'd just lost her I-love-you virginity. Her throat felt hot.
He gazed at the door as if it were the most fascinating piece of wood in the world, then his eyes closed, either in pain or utter joy. Finally he turned.
"Then you have a long hard road ahead of you," he said, and walked out.
****
G.
Two days.
He sat at the piano and ran his fingers over the keys without playing. Two days. Not one second without thinking about her, listening for the slightest bump against the wall as though it were a bump against his own skin, his heart turning to mush at work every time the phone rang. He knew withdrawal pain when he felt it. The silent treatment was crap, but boy it worked. He supposed he could crush something again if this pain kept up, the way he'd crushed his hand that time (insane for a player of musical instruments, he could have done permanent damage, which showed how desperate he'd been then), yet what would he crush now, what body part most affected by withdrawal from her?
A glance at his crotch. Nope, not going to happen.
She'd said... God, she'd said it, and he'd frozen, every cell yearning to rush back to the bed and take her in his arms. He'd studied the bedroom door instead, the way the light fell through the opening, the sliver of bookcase visible beyond, how his hand rested on the knob, preserving every detail so he would always remember how it was when she'd said the words for the first time, the glow inside him so thick and throbbing he thought he would choke. When his family had been stationed in Japan he'd often jogged alone at dawn in the woods behind the compound, and one morning an elk had stepped from the trees in front of him, sleek and splendid, freezing him the same way she did with her words, a moment like religion, his mind whispering this is life this is magnificent.
The hell with it, he had to see her. He grabbed his cane and stepped out the door. She was coming out her own door. No knapsack, flip-flops on her feet. She'd been coming to see him. They stared at each other.
"You weren't - uh - coming to see me, were you?" she asked.
"No, I was going to jog up and down the stairs for exercise."
"Oh."
Neither moved.
"One of us has to go for his gun first," he told her.
"We could stand here until someone comes by and sees us."
"Just neighbors chatting in the hall." He hobbled to her, the pull so strong he might as well have tried to stand in a hurricane. Her scent rose to him, sweet, a forest at dawn. He towered over her and she looked up. She often told him she was getting a permanent crick in her neck the longer they stayed together. So small, and so powerful. "Naturally it's me who has to cave," he murmured.
"You're the one who stormed out like a child. I'll have to cave if I want to forgive you for that."
"Okay. I walked down the hall. If you let me in, then we both caved. That a deal?"
Once inside, she took the armchair, leaving him the sofa. Keeping her distance. He tensed for the lecture, drinking in her face (two days, dude, pull yourself together) and telling himself to listen, but he'd missed something already because she was talking about her nephew.
"Doesn't that - create a kind of responsibility?" She was making some point about people affecting one another (why couldn't he think straight when she sat there like that?), about the import of everything he did on everyone else. "If Kevin has started to look up to you, which I doubt you intended, then doesn't that create a connection that you can't just walk away from?"
"Yeah, and if I don't smile at the cashier she may go home and kill herself." He hated it when she tried to unravel his mind. He was the one who was supposed to do the philosophizing, or at least the metaphorizing. "I know what you're getting at, Dani. No man is an island. Women are sometimes. One of those deserted tropical ones you'd like to be washed up on the shores of. Bikini atoll maybe or - "
"Would you stop it? And if you touching Kevin's life in even that little way creates a responsibility toward him, how much more responsibility do you have to me to - at least try?" He knew what was coming. He felt numb inside. "Everything you do, every pill you pop, affects me now too, whether you want it to or not. If I asked you to do it for me - not for yourself at all - just for my sake, then would you at least try to get off the Vicodin?"
"No." The answer was immediate, pistol-shot back at her, because he'd anticipated the question, yet she looked stunned. She stood and went through the kitchen to lean outside on the balcony rail. After a moment he followed. Trucks screamed from the distant highway. She turned. Her eyes were red.
"If it helps any, I'm taking less than I was when I met you," he told her truthfully. "A sort of natural reduction. Maybe the only kind possible."
She shrugged. "What hurts is not that you don't want to try for my sake, but that you wouldn't even consider it. Which I get from how fast you answered. Five seconds of pretending to think it over wouldn't have hurt you, would it?" She sighed. "I guess I just want you to think my opinion is worth something. To paraphrase you - what in the hell am I doing here?"
He suddenly realized what it was all about. What he had to say. She'd started it last night, said the first half and was waiting for his reply, had been waiting for two days, the echo that should have come naturally as he stood with his hand on the door. He'd said something else instead, he couldn't remember what.
He opened his mouth to speak -
- and the imp of memory said, Remember the last time you said it.
A hospital bed, he was diving into coma, vision already gray at the edges. It was the last thing he said before the dark and when he awoke everything in the universe had been different.
"I...need you," he told Dani. She looked away. "When you..." - (why was it hard?) -"when you touch me it makes the pain go away." It was the most intimate thing he could think to say, because it was true, a truth torn out of him, yet she only shrugged again.
"Great. Thank you. You just made me the ultimate sex object. I'm a 105-pound pill for your pain."
"No!" Night wind caught her hair and she pushed it from her face. Winter was coming. "You know it's not that, Dani. If it were just about the sex, I could have hookers going in and out -"
"Well, your bank account would run out at some point. Me you get free every night."
"You know what I mean."
"No, I don't, Greg. I really don't." Still waiting.
He approached and she tensed. Just a hand, just reach your hand out. Please. He could feel his fingers burn to touch her, to be touched by her, the same way they twitched when he felt for his bottle in his pocket, when he shook it to make sure it wasn't empty, the blood thick in the fingertips. Just reach out.
"It's...you," he said. "You do something nobody else can. It's what you say or it's the way you look at me, I don't even know how, but everything bad just stops -"
And then she was in his arms. And he proved himself once again incapable of shutting up when he should have. "You're like this elk," he said, but her lips were at his, hushing him; she had to crane when he didn't bend to her because like a moron he was still trying to talk, and she murmured, "I don't even know what that means" (a kiss, pain dissolving down through the balcony, to the street, up to the stars). "I don't want to know. Just shut up."
There was more to come, he realized. So much more. The stars rained down light and he held her.
****
K.
So instead of the yaawwn his visits to Aunt Dani had once been, or the Don't-leave-me-alone-with-this-guy they had looked like they were going to be when The Greg first showed up, there came to be a rhythm to them, an anticipation - when his parents flew with him or drove up for long weekends - of what new thing The Greg would have in store for him. He got to listen to hearts through a stethoscope and ride a table into some huge tube that had to do with magnets ("Unless you've got a couple of thou in your pocket, we're not running the test," The Greg told him). One Saturday they went to an archery range ("Haven't been here in years") where The Greg showed him and Dani how to shoot an arrow into a target fifty yards away. The guy wasn't bad himself, hitting the bull's-eye every time once he got back in practice. "I didn't know Greg could do that," Dani told him later in private. "It's a sport that doesn't need legwork, I suppose - you know, if you keep at him, Kevin, maybe he'll go more often. He needs something." He asked her about the pills, something he hadn't dared to do before, and she explained about the pain. Tried to explain addiction. "You've noticed he's in a bad mood lately. It's because he's trying to take less. We had this little...fight over New Year's." It was a new thought, that there might be something you couldn't stop putting in you. "I think I'm addicted to Cheetos," he told her, very seriously. "I eat a whole package sometimes." She smiled and told him not to worry.
Spring rolled around. Aunt Dani said she wouldn't be going with them to the hospital for a fundraiser one weekend and The Greg said, "She's traumatized."
"I am not traumatized." He didn't know what that meant.
"Means she thought she was sick for a while and so she can't stand being in a hospital." The two of them were looking at each other the way grownups did sometimes, challenging, saying things they hadn't said. "She hasn't come for lunch with me in a month. Ever since she had this little test there."
"I'll meet you in the cafeteria on Monday. How's that?"
The Greg smiled and whispered, "Traumatized."
"Not traumatized."
An Easter-egg hunt in the apartment, while rain lashed the windows. His mom sat in the kitchen with Dani, tired again, she said, which supposedly came from the baby in her, while the men hid the eggs. He wouldn't have found the last one if The Greg hadn't subtly knocked over the book it was hidden in. A hollowed-out place inside the pages. Weirdest thing he'd ever seen. "I use it to hide Easter eggs a lot," The Greg told him. His dad just looked funny.
The Greg helped him with his math homework. They sat in the kitchen one Saturday while Dani cooked, his parents gone again, the voice that had already started out strained getting harder and harder when he didn't understand ("Bad leg day," he'd heard him murmur to Dani when he thought he wasn't listening; he supposed he was having a bad-brain day himself because he couldn't concentrate), until The Greg finally yelled, "I just explained that - how long do you store something in that sieve of yours up there? Two seconds?"
He got up and walked out, not because it was scary (he was long past that) but because he didn't want the guy to see him cry. Their voices in the kitchen were low.
"You didn't have to be that way, Greg."
"Ooohh yes I did. It did me a world of good."
"You may not realize this, but Kevin worships the ground you walk on."
"You mean the ground I hobble on. Well, then he's learned an important lesson - even God can lose His patience."
"Kerstin says he talks about you so much it's making Dan a little jealous - a sort of Who's-your-daddy thing."
A long pause, then he heard the cane tap the floor. The Greg stood beside him where he perched on the piano bench pretending interest in the keys. He was too ashamed to wipe at the tears and they dripped off his chin. "We're going over it again until you understand fractions," The Greg told him.
"Yes sir."
"And stop calling me sir." That was a surprise. Instead of marching him back to the kitchen, he sat beside him on the bench and picked out a chord, and then another. For the next hour he taught him piano, the difference between a third and a fourth interval, octaves and how to run up and down with his thumbnail, other stuff he wouldn't remember later, but when they went to hit the books again he suddenly understood fractions.
It was the coolest thing.
Summer was sweltering. He cheered when school was out. His mother's stomach had grown into a real stomach - not a beachball as his dad teasingly told her, he thought, but a good-size pillow stuffed up in there. So he was going to have a sister, yawn. Greg and Dani flew down for one of the hottest weekends, his Gran showed up, and they had a barbecue with the neighbors and kids he knew, everyone chilling beside - and in - the pool. His aunt seemed happier than he'd ever seen her - and The Greg too, when he thought about it. They laughed and smiled and touched each other so much it was embarrassing, though none of the other adults seemed to think much about it; it was more as if they caught it too, like a germ, laughing along with them. He asked Greg if he'd swim with him. "Didn't bring my trunks," was the answer.
"I can lend you a pair," his dad told him and the poolside table got quiet. Dani whispered something a little urgently to his dad and he looked chagrined. "Oh. Didn't think about that." The women all looked as uncomfortable as though they were sitting on pins.
"Well, daddy," Greg said, "you can explain it to the kid."
"Sure. See, Kevin, Greg's got this humungous ugly scar on his leg - think Frankenstein - and he doesn't want anyone looking at it."
Made sense. "Oh. Okay." He was turning away, but he caught The Greg's huge grin at Dani, his relaxed "Who said men were complicated?"
He played chase around the pool with Mark and Kyle, hiding the miniature cannonball from his fortress playset in his mouth when they tried to take it from him, logical place while they ran around the table, till he tripped over a deck chair. Something happened that hurt his throat. A cessation, something always there that abruptly wasn't. He realized it was his breathing. Then he was stumbling into the table, scattering plates, scrambling for his mom, panic like flame in his head, god it hurt, every bit of color bright and hard in his eyes just make it stop! If they would just take the thing out of his throat, why didn't they take it out, all of them shouting, moving now, Dani running into the house yelling Greg which made no sense, he was the one who couldn't breathe - and then Greg was there, his dad shouting whether he knew that Hyme-lick thing, whatever that was, and The Greg spun him around and hurt him, hurt him bad (why was he doing that why didn't he help him) hugging him from behind and shoving a fist into his ribs with the force of a brick, no don't! Lights flashed in his head, red and orange. He hurt him twice more, until he thought his head would burst - he wanted to cry for him to stop but he had no voice, nothing left inside to struggle with, nothing but the fire in his chest, an animal crushing him from within, the python he'd had nightmares about for weeks had finally got him and this was what it was to be crushed to death -
He heard Greg (why did his voice seem far away?) yell for a knife and a straw (was he going to suck the toy out of him?), his mom screaming that he was blue (blue!?), then he was on his back and The Greg was holding a steak knife over him with ketchup still on it, like a bad B movie, but still scary, everything going gray at the edges, what had Mr. Thompson called it in that workshop - film deterioration? The Greg pointed the knife straight at his throat. Very scary movie. It struck him that he could just go to sleep and skip the rest and so he did -
--------
" - Straw. Quick quick quick!"
She almost dropped it, but his hands were steady. He used the knife to cut two inches from the plastic and worked it into the bloody hole he'd made in Kevin's throat. She felt faint. Kerstin was moaning oh my god over and over; Dan, with his forearm under Kevin's neck to extend the throat as Greg had instructed, was leaning his forehead on his son's cheek, his eyes closed as though praying (he was the atheist, she remembered, inanely, as though it mattered now). Greg bent to puff twice, hard, into the stump of straw, watching the chest. The thin body jerked, little spasms of the straw, and then the chest was rising on its own. He was breathing. Relief hit her, a joy like heat, the awe one must feel at a miraculous event: a birth, someone awakening from a coma: he's breathing!
The neighbor Ted Munn rushed from the house with the phone. "Got 911! They're sending an ambulance."
Greg held the straw in place, two fingers of his other hand at the pulse on Kevin's neck. He turned to her. "Help your mom," he said.
"What?"
"She's about to faint. Get her down before she hits her head."
Her mother stood half behind them, almost paler than Kevin. He'd seen it with one glance. She went to help her and when she returned to his side, he'd been patched in to the ambulance, asking their ETA and telling them Kevin's pulse. His voice sounded odd when he said it.
"Dani, you're going to hold this straw in place." Dan and Kerstin were staring at him. Greg wrapped her fingers around the base of the straw, her knuckles in Kevin's blood. She wanted to cry that she couldn't, but his hand positioning hers was calm. His eyes locked on hers, telling her she could. His other fingers were still on the neck artery, checking the pulse.
"Why - what are you going to be doing?" Her voice sounded stupid with fear.
"Keeping his heart going." Two more seconds with his fingers on the pulse, then he muttered, "There he goes," and he started CPR, thirty pumps then two breaths while sweat poured into his eyes and a siren growled in the distance, Kerstin screaming, "Did his heart stop? Is he dead?!"
Then the medics were there. Greg grabbed the paddles. Every shock hurt to watch, the little body in its swimtrunks flopping like a fish. On the third one, the fat EMT turned, "Got a pulse," and Greg collapsed to the side in relief, almost dropping the paddles, his forehead near the ground. She couldn't see his face. Everyone was talking at once. Kevin's eyelids fluttered and before Kerstin could move to his side, Greg had pushed her back, her eyes widening in disbelief, and he was bending over Kevin. "Kevin," he said loudly, "this is Greg. If you want your mommy, blink twice." It was absurd, why didn't he let her go to him, and then she realized he was checking for brain damage. She felt nauseous. The crowd on the lawn was silent, waiting.
Then Kevin blinked twice and Kerstin almost fell on him, sobbing.
Two men had to help Greg up and he stumbled off into the house, while the medics busied themselves with Kevin. When she could think straight, it struck her how pale he'd been. She found him in the downstairs bathroom. He sat on the floor against the tub, clutching his leg. "Sat on it wrong," he gasped, and she remembered his odd posture while he pumped on Kevin's chest. She knelt beside him. "I need...I need morphine."
"Would the medics have any?"
" -my shaving kit upstairs. There's a syringe, hidden at the bottom of the kit in a toothbrush holder." He looked at her, pleading, his eyes red-rimmed, and she wanted to cry. "Don't let anyone see you."
She moved fast, everyone too concentrated on Kevin outside to pay attention. The syringe in its red toothbrush holder was ugly, an evil little vial of ugly, of all the things he had to go through. She slipped it into her waistband under her shirt. When she got back, he'd already found the band from someone's bathrobe hanging on the back of the door and tied it around his upper arm to pop up the vein. "Tighten that." His voice wasn't his own. She watched the needle go in, so ugly, and she leaned her head on his shoulder as though it would help.
"I'm going to -" Dan entered, then stopped. "What's that?"
"It's morphine," she told him. "Please shut the door."
She could sense Greg loosening beside her, as clearly as though the liquid cascaded through her own veins. "Don't let me do this again," he murmured.
"Doesn't it work?" asked Dan.
"Works too well." His eyes were closed. "God, it's better than sex."
"That scares her," Dan joked feebly, then looked ashamed of himself. "I came to tell you I'm riding in the ambulance. Can you drive Kerstin?" She nodded.
And when they finally stepped out, Greg took one look at her sister, who stood with her hand braced oddly on the patio door while the medics carted Kevin off, and he growled, "I'm going to start applying triage in a minute." He stumped over to her. "That's a labor pain."
"No!" It came out a gasp. She knew her sister was stubborn. It was why she and Greg got along like two eighteen-wheelers on the same side of the road, but it seemed a bad time to be in denial. "It can't be," she gasped. "I'm in the thirty-fourth week."
"Which gives you a whopping three-percent chance of losing the baby. Gee, if there was only some way of getting you to the hospital fast." He called back Dan and told him Kerstin would be taking the ambulance in his place.
So while Kevin lay on the third floor of Pittsburgh Mercy with his throat bandaged, his mother lay on the fifth, the contractions stilled for the time. Greg called his hospital and she called Georg and they arranged to stay longer. They visited Kevin. He was propped up in the bed, a bandage at his neck, tucking away into a hospital lunch that looked like a dog's breakfast. When he saw Greg he grinned from ear to ear.
"You slit my throat," he said happily. His voice was still rough.
"Yeah. Cool, huh?" Greg wasn't listening, she saw, busying himself reading the chart on the bed. He found a stethoscope and held it to Kevin's heart. The black nurse glared at him. "I've always wanted to listen through one of these," he told her. "My toy one at home is crap."
Kevin seemed so delighted to be checked by Greg that it frightened her a little. He sat very still and struggled to suppress a grin. Hero worship, her mind whispered. Or rather it was her inner child that spoke, the one that knew what Kevin felt, the sweet and risky rush of abandoning yourself to someone you think the world of. Don't let him down, another whisper, though she didn't know if it was advice to Kevin or a plea to Greg.
So lost in thought it took her a moment to notice how quiet Greg was. He told the nurse he wanted to speak to the attending, adding a last-second "Please", as though just remembering it wasn't his hospital. The man who arrived, harried, ten minutes later was young and supercilious. When he heard the name House, something in his pretty-boy face changed. He introduced himself as Dr. Mayberry.
"Mayberry?" Greg looked incredulous. "As in Andy Griffith and all that?" She wanted to tell him to tone it down. "Tell me why this kid hasn't had an ECG."
"There's no indication -"
"His heart stopped."
"He wasn't getting any air. Usually the case with an obstructed trachea, Dr. House."
Greg went still. He could mouth off at will; others were not allowed to. "I traeched him. He was getting enough oxygen for a healthy 10-year old. His heart shouldn't have stopped. There's something wrong with it."
The argument that ensued centered around needed beds and unneeded tests. Mayberry was going to release Kevin the next day, no further observation. Whatever he had heard about Gregory House apparently made him overjoyed to be in control of the situation. Greg's rant seemed based on what Kevin's pulse had done while he lay choking and which she didn't pretend to understand. As they grew louder Kevin stared down at the bed, as though fearful Greg's wrath was really meant for him, and she took his hand and whispered, "It's not your fault."
Dan's arrival - with a huge wrapped gift and a bemused look - cut them off. She followed Greg out to the hall. "There's still time before tomorrow," he said. "He has to have an angiogram."
"Couldn't you test him yourself at Princeton? Cuddy would let you."
"Now that I know this, I wouldn't even recommend him flying."
Dan could drive him, she thought, but the urgency, the lightning beneath Greg's skin, made her ask instead: "What is it you know, Greg?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. "His heart sounds fine now."
They stood in the rush of visitors and she studied his distracted face. "Do you ever stop diagnosing?" she asked.
He looked at her for a long time. "Do you ever stop dancing?"
****
The head of cardiology in Pittsburgh was letting herself go gray with dignity. The salt-and-pepper hair framed a kind face and smart eyes. The tag said Bruckner.
They had caught her at eight in the morning as she arrived at the hospital. Kevin would be released at eleven. Greg's courteous approach once the cardiologist was pointed out to them had surprised her beyond measure, a deference she had never seen in him, least of all to another doctor. With a twinge of shock - as the three of them found a niche behind a potted plant so they could hear the tape he flourished - she realized that he was flirting with the woman, in the most subtle manner imaginable. Playing her intellect, and her fifty-something femininity, like a keyboard.
The tape was of Kevin's heartbeat. He'd bought a recorder and gone back to the hospital the evening before. "Do you hear what I hear?" he asked Dr. Bruckner, sing-songing it to the tune of Little Drummer Boy, and then more seriously: "I know that you do. It's very subtle." She was nodding, eyes closed. "It does amaze me that I have to do this to get a heart listened to." She shushed him with a raised finger for another second, then stopped the tape.
"Mitral valve," she said. "There's a catch there."
His answering smile was warm and vibrant. Making them co-conspirators. "I thought that if the head of cardiology talked to Mayberry..."
"Dr. Mayberry is the attending?"
"The very young Dr. Mayberry." Playing the age card, she realized. We're the experienced ones. She shuddered inside at how deftly - and shamelessly - he could manipulate when he wanted to.
Dr. Bruckner promised to do something. After she had rounded a corner (their handshake held half a second too long), he ejected the tape from the player and tossed it into the nearest wastebasket.
"Shouldn't you keep Kevin's tape?" she asked.
"Oh, that's not Kevin. It's some other nine-year old with a heart problem." She stared. "I had Foreman find a tape and overnight it to me. Hey, let's go tell Kevin they're going to pour ink in his heart and take a picture of it."
****
The damage they found in Kevin's heart stunned everyone except Greg. Or rather it did, she realized, his gaze locking far away over the heads of the cardiologists as they described to Dan what they'd seen in the angio, his eyes narrowed, already deciphering what it meant. What he would do about it. She followed him to Kerstin's room on the fifth floor, her sister's pale face leeching away its strength when she heard the news, while he drilled her about every illness Kevin had ever had - fever, rash, headaches, joints - until she started to cry. Another shock, seeing her sister so vulnerable. Dan came in to tell her, found they had beaten him to it, and sat on the bed to hug her. "The doctors will want to talk to us both -"
"Blisters on his feet?" They all stared at Greg. "When was that, Kerstin? Did he have them in his mouth too?"
It was as though he inhabited another world. Kerstin's tears meant nothing, garnering from him only a "Harness your hormones for one second and answer me." When she managed to finish describing Kevin's rash from months earlier, itchy feet she hadn't even taken him to a doctor for, Greg's expression grew mesmerized and he left to look for Mayberry.
She found them near the nurses' station. Greg held the file that said Murdock, Kevin and which he had obviously snatched from the nurse to review. Mayberry was telling him to put it down. "You do not work here, Dr. House."
"Low selenium." His voice was just theatrical enough to make white coats up and down the hall turn their way. "Right here on the third page. Doesn't exactly jump out at you, but then doctors aren't the kind to be bothered by details, are they? Are they, Dr. Mayberry?"
"What are you getting at?"
Greg eyed him as though leveling a gun at him. "He has Keshan's."
The doctor's face took on a new look. The wariness of someone who realizes the person they're talking to is truly insane. "I - uh. You'll have to give me a moment here, Dr. House. It's just that I'd heard all these stories about you. I'll need a moment to assimilate the fact that they were all true." The nurse behind him turned away grinning.
"Take your moment. Take five. Then check him for -"
"You want me to believe that a ten-year old middle-class American has a disease almost never seen outside one small province of China?"
"The virus that causes Keshan's is common, even here in America. Four months ago he had hand foot and mouth disease. Without the hand and the mouth, so a doctor never saw it. Do an Elisa on him for coxsackie virus -"
"Coxsackie alone does not damage the heart - that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." Mayberry had grown loud. More people stopped to listen. She wanted to take Greg's arm before he went ballistic, imagined her fingers on the muscle there tensed hard as rock, but she waited.
And he blew her expectations by staying calm, the effort of it visible only in a tightening at his temples.
"His immune system was shot due to a selenium deficiency," he explained. "It allowed the virus to invade the heart, where it chewed its merry way through the heart wall. The reason Keshan's cardiomyopathy shows up in that itsy-bitsy province of China is that the soil there has the lowest selenium deposits in the world. The inhabitants are all deficient, and a virus we thumb our noses at here can get its claws into their hearts and make them look like they've gone through a shredder."
Mayberry looked delighted. "Perfect theory. Except he doesn't have a selenium deficiency."
Greg thrust the open file at his face as though he wanted to wrap him in it. "You measured the blood serum. Only whole blood will have enough red and white blood cells to show how much selenium's really there." For a second she thought he was going to make it. Then he added: "You moron."
Mayberry looked stunned, then he shut like a book. "Couldn't be that deficient unless he was starved. I'm not ordering more tests." He turned to leave and Greg followed, their voices echoing down the hall.
"He was hospitalized for pneumonia twice last year. Didn't eat a thing. He's sick a lot. He could have contracted the virus then. Or there may be some underlying cause for the low selenium. If anyone had thought to get a history from the mom -"
"The kid hasn't got Keshan's!"
"The kid's got a name, it's Kevin -" They disappeared into an office, leaving her alone.
"There was a catch." The voice at her ear made her turn. Dr. Bruckner stood studying her. "I checked back. The damage they found had nothing to do with what I heard on the tape. That wasn't a tape of that little boy at all, was it?" She didn't know what to say. "Tell me, does he pull that one often with doctors? Sucking up to get what he wants?"
"I asked him that later," she told her truthfully. "He said the irregularity on the tape really was subtle, that he'd expected you would just go along and pretend to hear something to avoid embarrassment. He was truly amazed when you pinpointed it."
"That's kind of you, though I doubt he said anything like that. You know, I was listening just now. Mayberry's reaction is understandable. Keshan's is an insane diagnosis." Her gaze for a moment seemed far away. "I'm going to go over Mayberry's head to have the test ordered."
The test showed coxsackie antibodies. It was proof that proved nothing. Kevin would be implanted with an ICD ("Not a pacemaker," Greg assured Dan and Kerstin, struggling, she could hear, to keep the layman-impatience out of his voice). It would rest beneath his chest skin, with leads into his heart, ready to start it if it ever stopped again. All his life he would have to take care not to dislodge it. "Won't ever be a professional linebacker," was Greg's remark. "But then he won't be dead either, which sort of makes up for it." They booked plane tickets for Princeton and visited Kevin again before they flew. "To tell him they're going to make a wired android out of him." Greg sat on the bed while she stood outside. She watched him tapping Kevin's chest, showing how small the device would be, Kevin laughing. Kerstin had been allowed to get up and she stood beside her in the hall, hands folded across her huge stomach.
"Remember when you'd first met Greg," Dani asked her, "and you were trying to convince me later what a bastard he was and that I had no future with him?"
"I don't think that now."
"One thing you said actually made me think, because I was afraid there was some truth in it. You said you hoped I wasn't dreaming of a family with him because he didn't strike you as the kind of man who could love a child." Another burst of laughter fled Kevin's room. "Well, you were wrong."
Kerstin thought about it. "I know."
Home. Princeton was hotter than Pittsburgh. A letter fell out of the junk in her mailbox and she opened it. "Oh my god - I've been accepted!" She hugged him, so happy in the moment that she had to touch him to share it. "I'm going to Los Angeles!" All the way up in the elevator she chattered. The most prestigious invite ensemble in the country. She'd written months before, basically given up on getting an answer. His smile was a death mask. It dawned on her slowly, the tension radiating from him. He couldn't be that selfish.
"You could be happy for me, you know. It's a workshop. It's not like it's forever, Greg."
His face relaxed, the deathly grimace wiped clean. "Then it's not a job?"
"No. Of course not."
And she had to work through the jolt of that one, that he could think she would apply for a job at the other end of the country if it meant having to leave him. As though she could leave him. Burned child. What Stacy had done to him always present, never allowing him to wholly believe in his happiness, in her.
"No, Greg," she repeated. "I'll be back in six weeks."
I'll be coming back to you. I will always come back to you.
****
End of Chapter 5
(As always, with apologies for medical mistakes)
(With Christmas, Germany's Mardi Gras and a lot of other things, I probably won't have Chapter 6 ready till the end of February at best. A little longer, a lot darker... I wish everyone a peaceful Christmas!)
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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