Full Circle (3 page)

When I went out into the main room he had rolled in a ball away from me, facing the wall. I put on a kettle of water for the steam, poured a glass out of the cold tap because it was the only thing in the house other than booze, and went to the bed. I sat on the edge by his hips, gripped his shoulder, and pulled him to face me. "Humidity, aspirin, and antibiotics," I told him. "Because if you die on me in here it will be one fucking mess."

For two days it was touch and go. Half a dozen times I almost called 911. Would have, if my phone service hadn't been shut off. But when he was lucid, he told me not to in violent terms. And when he wasn't, the thought of leaving him to go hunt up a neighbor and use the phone scared me. I wasn't sure he would be alive when I got back. And after Henri, I'd sworn no one I cared for would ever die alone.

The third day, his fever came down from stratospheric to merely uncomfortable. He let me raise his shoulders on pillows stolen from the couch and drank a little weak tea. I was reusing tea bags by then and seriously jonesing for coffee.

Toller blinked at me. Those grey eyes had some light coming back in them, and his long dark lashes swept upward. He looked puzzled. "Who are you again?"

I resisted the temptation to say,
the dirty, smelly drunk.
Not reassuring to a sick man. "I'm Jamison Seavers. This is my apartment."

He looked over my shoulder at the tiny kitchenette, almost reachable from the bed. "Do I know you?"

"Not really. You got sick and crashed here. It's been a couple of days."

He nodded slowly, a fine crease knotting his forehead, thinking back. "You're a doctor, right?"

"Not anymore. But I was." I stuck the thermometer in his mouth, mostly to shut him up because I'd checked it under his arm just a few hours before. He submitted docilely enough and looked around as it counted up his fever. At least all that time I'd spent in the last two days stuck in the house hovering over him hadn't been wasted. With nothing else to do, it was only logical that I'd washed the mound of dishes, although one plate crusted with
something
had to be thrown out. I'd put the laundry in bags, sacked the mounds of trash, and even mopped the two by six feet of linoleum in front of the appliances. It was still a rat-hole, but a fairly clean one.

When I took the thermometer back, he said, "So, can I leave now?"

I looked at it. One hundred and two. "Do you want to?"

He tried to sit up from the pillows and then sort of slumped back. "Guess not." Two days of raging fever on top of who knows how long of not eating well had fined him down to skin and bones. I was betting that even if he forced himself out of bed, he wouldn't make the ten feet to the door.

"How about we wait until you can at least make it to the john without help?"

He nodded and then looked horrified. "What have I...have you been helping me there?"

"Nah. Too much work. You've been peeing in a bottle."

"Jesus." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. You shouldn't have had to do that."

I laughed. "I was a doctor. Believe me, compared to a three hundred pound woman with stomach flu when I was an intern, this has been nothing."

"Thanks, I think." He struggled a little more vertical. "This is where you live?"

"Yup."

"It's small. Not that that's bad, but it's just...you really were a doctor?"

"Was. Now I'm a drunk." I stood up, rolling my shoulders to get the tension out.

"I shouldn't have said that."

"Humph. I wondered if you remembered. No, kid, you were right. That's what I am, and it's a full-time job. Or was until you tried to die on me. I've had to put it off for a bit."

He looked puzzled. "You don't seem drunk."

"Right now I'm just lightly pickled. Enough to get by on. When you're back on your feet I figure I'll go back to my real profession." I was drinking a glass of something every few hours. Enough to keep my blood levels out of the detoxing range. The kid was sick enough, we didn't need me on the floor rolling around and spewing.

He nodded like he got it, but his eyes were already starting to roll back in his head. I sighed. "Sleep some more, kid. Then we'll see if we can get you as far as the bathroom."

He muttered, "Toller. Not kid," before sleep pulled him under.

Whatever Toller had been doing to his body, in addition to the beating I knew about, it hadn't been good. His recovery was slow and difficult. It was five more days before his temp dropped below a hundred, and a week before he could make the twelve steps to the bathroom without help.

He wasn't a good patient. When he wasn't sleeping he was fretful and irritable. When he was sleeping, he had nightmares that brought him awake screaming almost silently, his mouth open in a rictus of pain, the tendons of his neck tight and straining. Sometimes he would hit out in his sleep, small muscle-inhibited motions with his clenched fists. He muttered too, but the only words I could make out were
no
and
please.
If it got bad I would wake him, and he grunted his thanks but never told me a thing more.

There wasn't much for him to do. He tried to read, but he quickly developed a headache and had to stop. I wondered idly if he needed glasses, but that was a thought for another time. I had an old TV, but no cable. I hadn't watched the thing in years. I dug out a pair of rabbit ears and set it up for him, and it pulled in two local stations adequately. We found ourselves watching
General Hospital
and making acerbic comments. He critiqued the character interactions; I gave them hell for the medical inaccuracies. We found ourselves looking forward to it. At least I did.

The first time I left him alone, I worried. It was the fourth day, his temp was 101, and he was pretty lucid but still unable to get up. I would have stayed, but we were out of pretty much anything edible beyond a can of sliced olives. We were also out of tea and coffee, and getting low on whiskey, all of which were disastrous. So I made a quick run for necessities, worrying my ass off straight through. But he was fine.

He asked me twice if I had to go to work, and once if I was okay for money. I told him I'd won the lottery and to just shut up. I really wasn't sure how much of Henri's life insurance was left. I usually went to the bank, drew out some cash, and didn't check the balance. Someday I would have the slip handed back to me, and the teller would tactfully whisper "insufficient funds." And then who knew what the fuck I would do. But so far they just handed me the money and tried not to breathe too deeply around me.

For all his restlessness, Toller was good company. He had a wicked sense of humor, but also a streak of compassion a mile wide. He hated watching the news when the stories were bad, always sympathized with the victims being hounded by reporters and cameras. And he liked my stories.

At first I told the medical ones. Inspired by the god-awful inaccuracies of
General Hospital
, I found myself telling him about real life cases. No names or details, but all the medical stuff. And he was genuinely fascinated. The first time I heard my own voice explaining how we debrided the necrotic flesh of a burn patient, I pulled myself up short. "You sure you want to hear this, kid? It's pretty gross stuff."

"No grosser than the crap I'm still coughing up." He hacked into a tissue, as if to prove his point. "I'm interested."

By the end of that first week, he had heard about pretty much all of my top one hundred cases. To celebrate his temperature hitting the 98 mark, I went out and bought barbecued ribs. He got up shakily, pulled on his jeans which I'd run downstairs to the laundry machines and washed, and made it to the table. We sat kitty-corner to each other and dug in. I had more appetite than I remembered in months, and with the end of his fever his teenaged bottomless pit had come back with a vengeance. We sucked those ribs down to dry bones and licked our fingers clean. Toller held his sauce-covered hand to his mouth and addressed it like a cat, small, slow glides of the tip of his pink tongue around his fingers.

Suddenly it was too warm in my place. I got up and took the dishes to the sink, then cranked the window open a bit. Halloween was over, Thanksgiving had passed while he coughed his lungs out. He'd been in my bed for seven days. I was sleeping on the couch. And until that moment I hadn't thought about anything except how uncomfortable the old cushions were, with that sag in the middle. But that wasn't what I was thinking about now.

"So, kid," I said to the open window. "You're getting better. What comes next? Do you have family or friends who might be looking for you?"

His "No" was sharp and bitten off. A clear no trespassing sign. But I never let that stop me.

"Where are you from? And as a matter of fact, how the hell old are you?"

"Why do you care?"

"Don't care, much. If you're under eighteen, though, I could get in trouble. Harboring a runaway, shit like that."

"I'm eighteen."

"Graduated from high school?"

"Not yet." He looked down, painful color washing across his cheeks. "I was a senior, back home."

"But you are legal now?"

"Yes." He dug in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a card. "Here, check it out if you don't believe me."

"Not a matter of belief." I took it from him without touching his elegant fingers. Fuck, I'd missed the card when I'd washed the jeans. Good thing it was laminated. And being offered a look was better than snooping. Toller Grange. Eighteen on the twenty-eighth of September, with a home address in Connecticut. I passed it back. "You're a long way from home."

His face closed down. "Not far enough."

"Ah." I could have stopped there, but like Henri always said, I couldn't stand not knowing stuff. And the alcohol embalming I'd given my curiosity over the past couple of years was thinning a bit as my blood level dropped. "You got family elsewhere? Anyone who might care if you drop dead?"

"Got a twin sister. She's married and somewhere overseas. Don't know where."

"Married young."

He glanced at me, an acid glare from under slitted eyelids. I guessed that whatever he had run from, his sister had found her own escape.

"So what now?" I went back to the sink and started the water, letting it muffle the undertones of our voices a little. Because I had just realized how much I didn't want to go back to living in my own filth and slowly drowning alone. But I didn't want him to hear it in my voice. "You're welcome to stay, if you'll take the couch and give me the bed back." His bones were a decade younger; he could take it. "Chip in some groceries, maybe. Do some chores. Unless you have someplace better to go."

There was a long silence, while I scrubbed the same plate over and over, letting the water run. Finally he said quietly, "No place better. Yeah, I'd like to stay for a while."

Toller was a much better houseguest once he could get around some. He did some of the cooking, simple stuff like spaghetti, but at least it wasn't take-out. When he could get down the stairs without a coughing fit, he started looking for work. He snagged a job bagging groceries in the late evening, but it was only a few hours a day. Still, he cashed out his first paycheck and put the money on the table with poorly-concealed pride.

I took out thirty bucks and pushed the rest back to him. "That'll cover groceries. Go to the Sally Ann and get yourself a warmer jacket. It's gonna get colder before it gets warmer."

He held the rest back toward me. "I eat more than that."

"Hell you do." I didn't take it. "Anyway, you get sick again and I'll have to buy more antibiotic. Call it an investment."

He hesitated and then stuffed it back in his pocket. "Okay. Sure." He glanced around the room and then picked up his jean jacket. "I'll do that now, maybe." He pulled open the door.

"And get new jeans," I yelled after him. "With less holes."

I didn't look when the door banged shut. I'd taken to being careful not to look when he was walking away. Because my eyes were drawn to the sweet line of his spine and the shape of his ass as he slowly put a little weight back on. And it was wrong and stupid and futile. He was young and straight and not for me. Except my dick just couldn't seem to get the message.

He came back from the Salvation Army with clothes and books. Figured he would buy books. The kid was a voracious reader, now that the headaches were backing off, and smart. Smarter than Henri, even, and Henri had run circles around me in medical school. Toller devoured everything in print in the apartment, including my Merck manual. When I asked him if there wasn't something more entertaining to do than read the definitions of hypothyroidism and goiter, he said it was interesting. And colored a little, so I wondered.

About two weeks before Christmas, we were sitting at the breakfast table. I'd started going down to the homeless shelter most mornings, to volunteer instead of eat. With non-stop drinking reduced to a slow simmer, I had all kinds of time. And I felt a little guilty about all the meals I'd eaten that I could have paid for, if I hadn't been too lazy to go elsewhere. I mostly worked the food line, serving breakfast and lunch. Did a few chores. I'd started handing out a little advice too. Most of the men and women who came in had some kind of illnesses, and I'd taken to bringing a few aspirin and tubes of Neosporin with me to pass out. Hadn't told anyone I was a lapsed medico though.