Best Gay Romance 2013 (17 page)

“The caves?”

“The grottoes on the hillside, carved by the Buddhist monks centuries ago. Where the ancient giant Buddhas had been. They were cold, nasty places, and I have no idea how he stayed warm at night, because it could get very cold. There were many families living in the caves, and I can only imagine that their body heat was what was warming them—when they had food to fill their stomachs. The boy had been separated from his parents at a refugee camp, and he was staying with his older sister's family—her husband and a little baby girl. He wouldn't eat all the food that I gave him. There was always something that he tucked away in his pocket that I knew he would give to one of them later. It was heartbreaking if you stopped to think of it, but there was so much to think about, that this was only one minor thing. Every day there was another casualty or a patient with a problem—an abscessed tooth or a broken toe.
Something
. It was such a cold, harsh place. Beautiful. But
hard
.”

He continued. “One night I was able to bring him to the guesthouse to dine. It was owned by a local Muslim man and his wife, and they had always objected to my suggestion of him eating with us, in spite of my offer to pay extra to have the boy there, then one night they changed their mind. He ate with us—the rest of the MSF staff in the clinic and a few of the Red Cross guys who were also in the house—and they all knew him and were glad to have him with us. He helped the owner carry out the dishes of food and clean up—we ate on the floor, sitting
on pillows and using our hands most of the time. There were three or four of us staying in each of the rooms, and instead of having the boy walk back in the freezing dark to the cliffs I had him sleep beside me on the floor. It was a simple, polite gesture. I was just trying to be a good Samaritan, but I knew it would create trouble for me one day. He stayed with me every night after that. Each night he slept closer and closer until we were sleeping together. It was just so natural. One day I knew I was in love with him.”

“This was the fellow who drove the van?” I asked. “To the hospital. To Kabul?”

“Yes,” Sam said. His body was tense, frozen into thought.

“How old was he?”

“I don't know.”

Then again, after a pause, he added, “It was part of why I left. He was too young. I wasn't sure what I could give him. So I ran away.”

“You ran away?”

“I left him in Kabul. I told him that I had to return to America for a while, because of a family problem; that I would be back soon. He took it okay, because I convinced him that I was coming back. There was no family problem.”

“Are you going to go back?”

“I've gotten a new assignment. Working in Tunisia.”

He lay still for a while, breathing slowly in and out. Then we both rose and showered together, stroking each other to another orgasm beneath the warm flow of water.

Clean, exhausted and back in the bed, I drifted off to sleep in his embrace. I sensed him stir hours later, rise out of bed and begin to get dressed. The activity aroused Inky in the other room, and I groggily stayed awake until Sam was dressed and at the door.

“Good-bye and thanks,” he said, as he left. “I hope you find him.”

I nodded and closed the door, petting Inky and groping my way through the darkness of the apartment and back to sleep. I was by then too tired to miss him, but I knew I would in the days that followed.

Shanna Germain

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a dying dog the size of a small horse in my kitchen. She is nearly as tall as the kitchen table. Nearly as wide. With a hell of a lot more long white hair.

“I'm sorry,” I say to the man who brought her here. “There's been a mistake.”

The man who brought her is on his knees on my kitchen floor, rubbing the dog's brown- and gray-tipped ears. He has bits of gray in the dark hair above his own ears.

“It's okay, Annie,” he says to the dog, who lets her tongue fall from her mouth and tilts her head sideways to listen. “This is gonna' be
sooo
good for you. Okay, girl, it's all good.”

He doesn't seem to care that he's talking baby talk to this polar bear–like creature in front of me. He doesn't seem to hear me saying that the polar bear cannot stay in my kitchen.

When the man stands, his knees pop on the way up. “Ack, getting old.” He shakes his legs out and laughs. “Too much bending down to dogs is more like it.”

Even standing, he can't seem to keep his fingers out of Annie's fur. They nuzzle the pads of her ears while he pulls a clipboard from his shoulder bag.

I want to touch Annie, too. She's almost all white, except for those ears. From here, her fur looks like soft fuzz all over. But I don't touch her. I can't. It's not that she's dying. That, I'm used to. It's that she looks so damn healthy.

By the time Bella came to us, she was already missing her back leg from the knee down and was getting oral pain meds twice a day. Her owners had tried to save her by cutting off the tumored foot. But when the cancer spread, they decided it was too much and turned her over to the shelter. That's when she came to Thom and me.

It had been Thom's idea to take in a dying animal. A few years back, our local shelter had joined with a group of vets to start a hospice program for animals—some strays, some abandoned—who were dying, but still had quality time left in their lives. The goal was to get the animals into a good final home, a place where they could die with love and compassion. “We can still do something good,” Thom had said when he'd heard of it. “Think of it, these animals, having to die alone.”

He was thinking of himself too, of me after he was gone. That was after he got sick, but before we realized what it was. We'd thought it was AIDS, of course. As a gay man, you spend your whole adult life running from the thing you fear most, so fast that you don't see the other things on the way by. Until you get sideswiped by them. Car accidents. A guy in the alley with a knife. With Thom, it was lymphoma.

I'd said yes to the first dog—Bella, a lab-something-or-other—because I loved Thom, and I wanted to give him whatever I could, even at the end. Especially at the end. It made his skin ache to feel anything on it, but even so, it was Bella he let
in the bed at night, Bella he reached for when the pain was bad. It was helping Bella toward her death that gave us something to focus on, that helped us move toward Thom's death in a way that felt, if not normal, no, never normal, at least like we were working with some kind of plan.

I didn't know that somewhere between those last days at home and his final trip to the ER he'd signed us—no, signed me—up for another dog.

I try again with the man in my kitchen.

“Really, I can't take her,” I say.

He has finally let go of Annie's ears and is signing a clipboard with a big flourish. He holds the clipboard out to me.

“Of course you can,” he says.

There is something in his dark eyes, a glimmer around the edges that shows he doesn't have any doubts. I signed on for this dog. She is here in my kitchen with two months to live. Of course I can take her.

I push the clipboard back at him. The ID tag clipped to his shirt pocket says, I'M A PAWSPICE VOLUNTEER! Beneath that it says, SETH.

“Listen, Seth,” I say. “I can't take her. My partner signed us up and…” It is too complicated, too much to say. The words pile into my throat like bones and stick there.

Seth stays silent for a moment. Annie whines for the first time and pushes the side of her face carefully into his palm.

I feel like I have to say something, so I say, “I can't do it alone.”

Seth holds the clipboard as though it's a Frisbee he'd like to wing at my head. I can understand the impulse. He probably sees this all the time—people who sign on for this venture and then decide they can't see it through.

But he doesn't wing the clipboard. He just says, “You wouldn't be alone. You'd have Annie.”

At the sound of her name, Annie pushes her cheek harder against Seth's hand. When she doesn't get a response, she turns her head my way. The kitchen is small, and she's so big that she nearly touches my thigh with her nose. Her eyes are so dark in all that white fur. I think what it would be like to have footsteps in the house again, noise at the door when I get back from errands. Somebody who needs me again.

I need time, so I ask, “What…what is she?”

Seth doesn't seem to notice my change in subject. Or perhaps he's content to ride it through.

“Great Pyrenees,” he says. “Full-bred and papered.” He doesn't say it with anger. He doesn't shake his head like I would have, to think of someone dropping off an animal, any creature, papered or not, just because it was terminal.

“Pyrenees?” I've never even heard of it.

Seth smiles for the first time. It's a half smile, shy enough to bring out dimples on both cheeks. “It's Norwegian for small horse,” he says.

Annie wags her tail as though she gets the joke, and then drops herself to the kitchen floor at my feet. Her body makes a thud that's so loud I wonder if she's hurt herself, but she just puts her head down on her paws.

I stare at her. She looks so healthy. Thom and Bella both showed their illnesses. They were twins in the way their bodies responded. Losing weight no matter how much I fed them, until their knees were bigger than their thighs, until I could count every vertebra and rib with my fingers. Thom's fine blond hairs shedding on blankets next to Bella's dark curls. Neither of them said anything, not by mouth, but at the end, their bodies knew no language but pain.

This is what I think:
I can't do this again
.

This is what Seth seems to think:
He's going to do it
.

He is unpacking her things from his bag onto my kitchen table. The bag says, PAWSITIVELY PAWSPICE, in green letters with a big paw print on it. Like some kind of bizarre Mary Poppins, he pulls out two leashes, cans of dog food, an unopened package of very large bones, and a bottle of meds that rattles like maracas and makes Annie open her eyes warily.

“She doesn't need the meds very often,” he says. “I don't think she likes the way they make her feel.”

I nod. Thom complained of that all the time. The pain, he said, was easier than the disconnect. But then the pain would come on, hard, and he would let me open the IV, watch the liquid drip-drip him into semiconsciousness.

“She looks so healthy,” I say. I don't even realize I'm going to say it.

“Nasal cancer,” he says. “It's all on the inside.”

“Nasal?” I'm not sure I know what that even means. I mean, I know what it means, but, “How does nose cancer land a dog on the hospice list?”

“It spreads,” he says.

Seth keeps his eyes on Annie, who is, for the first time, starting to sound like a dog who might have something wrong with her. Her breath whines in, just a bit, only if you're listening in a quiet kitchen.

Seth reaches into his canvas bag and pulls out a tennis ball punched full of holes. Then he goes down on his knees next to Annie. I'm getting used to seeing the top of him like this. Even though it's not my own instinct, I like a man who will get down on his knees. Thom was a gardener, always in the dirt. Even near the end.

I realize that Seth is talking to Annie and to me at the same time.

“C'mon, girl, open up,” he says. Then, to me, “Now, you'll
want to catch her just before she falls asleep, and get the ball in her mouth. The holes help with the stridor, so she can breathe. She's used to it, so if you just ask her to open, she will. A bone works too, if you're out of tennis balls. Anything big enough to keep her mouth open while she sleeps.”

Annie takes the ball in her mouth and drops her head back down on her paws. Her breathing is noticeably quieter.

Seth is still on his knees. I try not to look at his hands across her back. He has good wrists, muscled enough to chop vegetables and lift weights, soft enough to hold books and wineglasses by the stem.

Seth is still talking about Annie. “You could give her one of the pain pills, too, if she's having an especially hard time, but the tennis ball usually does the trick.”

I realize I'm not listening. What I'm doing is eying Seth's back, the curve of his shoulders and hips. This realization makes me want to fuck and cry. While Thom was dying I looked at everything—everything—that walked by. I didn't touch; that was our rule. But, Jesus, I don't know if I'd ever been so horny in my life. We fucked some, then, almost to the end. Thom joked we were like pregnant women or little old ladies. He was afraid I wasn't attracted to him anymore; I was afraid to hurt him.

Near the end, sex took on this ritual: I would lie next to Thom, barely touching, and we would kiss. Just our lips and tongues. His lips still silver-soft from the lip balm he was addicted to. And then I would suck. As much as he was ashamed of his body at the end, he was always proud of his cock. I'm so grateful for that, that he had something to be proud of, always.

And I loved to suck him. The only part of his body that didn't lose its weight, that stayed full and heavy and alive in my mouth. I'd run my tongue up the ridges and veins, play over and over the soft curve of his head until his sighs changed from a long,
slow release to a near-pant. Until he lifted his hips off the bed and put his fingers in my hair and said my name, over and over. And then, sometimes, he could fall asleep without the pain meds. Sleeping then, he looked like my Thom again. If I squinted, I could pretend I didn't see the IV poles, the hospital bed, the pill bottles, and tissues scattered around the living room. I could pretend he was just napping in the middle of the day.