In the Middle of Somewhere (25 page)

I’m not sure what to do. I knock again, noticing for the first time that Rex doesn’t have a doorbell. Then I hear Marilyn whining at the door. What if Rex is hurt? What if someone broke in and shot him or he passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning or something? That happened to the mom of a guy I worked with at the bar. They just found her sitting in her armchair like she was watching TV, only she’d been dead for three days.

I push the door open even as my logical mind tells me there’s not going to be carbon monoxide in a cabin in the woods, nor is there likely to have been an armed robbery. Still, the fear of Rex lying somewhere, hurt, is stronger than the fear of finding him with someone else. As the door swings open, Marilyn darts through it. I’ve never seen her do that before; she’s so well trained. I swing around to run after her, not wanting to have to tell Rex I lost his dog on top of everything else, but she just pees on a bush by Rex’s garage and trots right back to me.

I walk inside tentatively, feeling like I’m about to find blood-streaked bodies lying all over the house like in a slasher movie or
In Cold Blood
.

“Rex,” I call. “It’s Daniel. Are you here?”

Marilyn runs toward the bedroom, where the door is closed. Maybe he’s sick?

“Rex?” I say at the door.

“Daniel?” a weak voice says from inside. I open the door and the bedroom is dark, the curtains pulled shut and taped together. There’s a lump on the bed and I walk over to it.

“Rex,” I say again, “are you okay?” I know it’s Rex under there, but for some reason, all I can think of is how my brothers used to hide under the covers and jump out and scare me.

I reach for the bedside lamp, but Rex grabs my hand. He pulls the covers down slowly and I can see that he looks tense.

“Hi,” he says. “I thought you were in Detroit.” His voice sounds strained.

“Oh, yeah, well, I came back early. I wanted to talk to you. Are you sick? What’s wrong?”

He smiles a little shakily.

“Sorry I didn’t answer when you called. I just get these headaches.” He makes a motion like he’s waving it away and pats the bed next to him. I sink down and run my hand over his back.

“Well, I hear orgasms are good for headaches,” I tease, leaning down to kiss him.

He winces.

“Mmm, I don’t think so just now.”

Now that I’m close to him I can see that the sexy wrinkle between his brows is deeper than I’ve ever seen it, and that his face is tight with pain. The bed smells warm, like he’s been lying here a long time. Oh shit.

“Do you get migraines?” I ask him, keeping my voice very low and even.

“Yeah,” he scrapes out.

God, that sucks. When Ginger gets them she’s in so much pain she can barely even cry because it makes it hurt more.

“Shit,” I say. “What can I do? Do you have medicine? Can I get you anything?”

“Can you take Marilyn for a walk?” he asks. “I let her out to pee this morning, but—”

“Yeah, of course. But what can I do for you? Do you have medicine?”

He mmhmms softly. “In the bathroom. But I can’t keep it down.”

I get up slowly and quietly walk to the bathroom, since light and sound are clearly not Rex’s friends right now.

I find the medicine sitting on the sink in the bathroom, and the slight sour smell makes it clear that he’s been sick in here. In the kitchen, I find a jar of applesauce and cut the pills into tiny pieces, hiding them in a spoonful of applesauce.

“Can you sit up a little?”

Rex drags himself up.

“Give me your wrist,” I tell him, sitting next to him on the bed. With one hand, I squeeze the pressure point on his wrist that should help him feel less nauseated. “Try and swallow this,” I say, holding up the spoon in the other. He makes a face, but swallows it. I put the spoon down and use my hand on the pressure point in his other wrist.

“Close your eyes,” I say softly, and I keep the pressure on his wrists and start telling him about the conference. Just rambling on to distract him.

I tell him how Detroit reminded me a little of North Philly, with the big, crumbling stone churches and the streets arcing around them instead of laid out in a grid. I tell him how cool I thought it was when this badass old professor got asked a convoluted question by a young guy trying to prove how smart he was and she paused for a second and then told him that she wasn’t really interested in that conversation because it didn’t seem to have value to anyone but academics, and how I wish that someday I could be brave enough to call someone on their bullshit like that. I tell him that I watched the Food Network for the first time and want to watch it with him so he can tell me what everything is. I don’t tell him how sorry I am for yelling the other night, though. I’ll do that later.

Little by little, I feel him relax; his jaw unclenches and the rigid set of his shoulders loosens. I lean down and kiss him on the forehead.

“I’m going to take Marilyn out. I’ll be back soon. You just rest.” I tuck the blanket back up around him and close the bedroom door.

It’s chilly, so I grab Rex’s quilted flannel coat from the hook beside the door.

“Your dad’s sick, huh?” I say to Marilyn when we get outside, and she barks in answer and bounds around me. I walk for a while, breathing in the clean-smelling air, and Marilyn runs off in front of me, scratches at something, then runs back, like she’s scouting ahead. With every breath, I smell the combination of cedar, wood smoke, and musk on Rex’s jacket and I pull it tighter around myself as if he were walking with me.

When we get back, a much happier Marilyn curls up in front of the fireplace. It feels a little cold in here, so I decide to light it. The only fires I’ve ever made have been by squirting gasoline in garbage cans in abandoned lots or in the alley behind my dad’s shop if we had to burn garbage, but I’ve seen Rex do it a few times. How hard can it be?

Hunh. Kind of hard. Every time I get the kindling going, it burns up before it lights the rest of the fire. Finally, with some maneuvering that almost loses me the skin on the back of my right hand, I get a pretty respectable blaze going. Then I go back to check on Rex.

I sit down next to him on the bed. I don’t want to wake him, but I want to see how bad he feels—if I should be getting him a prescription for something. I stroke his hair back and he whimpers. Poor Rex. He looks really awful.

“Rex,” I whisper softly.

“Hey,” he says.

“What can I do? Do you think you can keep any food down? I could get you something to eat?”

He laughs weakly. “I don’t need food poisoning on top of a migraine,” he says. “The pills are helping. Could you….” He trails off, like he wasn’t going to say anything.

“What?”

“Maybe just stay with me a little while?”

“Okay,” I say, “sure,” and I kick off my shoes. Rex scoots over a little and looks up at me. His eyes are uncertain behind the pain, and I realize we haven’t talked about anything yet. But it’s not the time. I slip my jeans off and slide under the covers, careful not to jostle him. I lie on my back next to him, not quite touching, like the night we were at my house, only this time it’s physical pain I want to protect him from. I hate that I don’t know what else to do for him. That there
isn’t
anything I can do. There wasn’t that night at my house, either. I hate feeling helpless and for a second, I’m almost mad at Rex for making me feel that way. Then he reaches his arm out, encouraging me to rest my head on his shoulder, and my anger melts away. It isn’t really at him anyway.

I lay my head on his shoulder and stroke his stomach lightly. He squeezes me a little, lets out a sigh and seems to relax. I listen to his slow breathing, my mind drifting.

When I wake up, it’s dark and, for a second, I have no idea where I am. I tense, but my hand feels the warmth of Rex’s body next to me and I relax. I tilt my chin up and kiss the underside of Rex’s chin.

“Hi,” he says.

“You’re awake.”

“Just for a minute.”

“How do you feel?”

“A bit better. It’s the tail end of it now, I think. It started on Friday night, and they don’t usually last more than two days.” He yawns. “I have to piss like you wouldn’t believe.”

Rex pushes himself up, his muscles trembling, and swings his legs over the side of the bed to heave himself upright. As Rex shakily makes his way to the bathroom, it gets me right in the gut: I want to take care of him. Not because I think he’s weak, but because I care about him. It’s so obvious. Ginger’s been saying it to me for years, but I’ve never—not once—actually believed her because I’ve never felt it before. Every time I asked my brothers for help they gave me shit about it. Anytime I asked for help from someone at school, they made me feel stupid or like I wasn’t trying hard enough. And the few times people offered help, it was obvious they expected something in return. Even my father’s gruff attempts at taking care of my car just made me feel awkward, because he so clearly resented them.

And Ginger… well, Ginger always just felt like an exception. I wanted to take care of her, of course, but, deep down, it felt a lot like paying a debt. She saved me the day I wandered into her shop. Somehow, she saw me differently than my brothers or my teachers and the other kids at school did. Not as a fuckup or a loser or a pansy. She really saw me, and so of
course
I felt indebted to her. I felt like each small thing I could do for her might go a little way toward paying her back for giving me a chance to
be
something other than a fuckup and a loser.

It’s not that way anymore. At least, I don’t think it is. But it segued from that to true, deep friendship so slowly that I can’t pinpoint when it happened exactly. And I’ve never felt it with anyone else. Definitely not with Richard, who would have viewed the idea of
me
taking care of
him
as absurd since, as he saw it, I didn’t have anything I could offer him except a hard fuck, which, clearly, was a service others could provide. And other friends? I don’t know. They never seemed to need taking care of—at least not from me.

But now, seeing Rex curled up in that big bed, struggling to get to the bathroom, all I feel is an itchiness in my palms to reach out and help him; a manic desire to somehow take his pain into my own body because I’d rather feel it than have to watch him suffer.

“You sticking around for a bit?”

Rex’s voice startles me. I look up at him. He looks better. The tension is mostly gone from his face, though he still looks a little out of it.

“Yeah,” I say, “if you want me to.”

Rex smiles, but he looks a little sad. Was that the wrong answer?

“I mean, unless you just want some quiet, for your head,” I amend. He pulls me gently toward him, hugging me to his broad chest.

“No, I want you here,” he says, and I relax at the rumble of it through his chest. “The pills really helped. How’d you know what to do?”

“Ginger gets them—migraines. She always throws up and the only way she can keep a pill down is with the applesauce. She says it’s like the migraine wants to take over, so it makes her brain reject the pill, but if she can’t see the pill in the applesauce, it tricks the migraine and lets her swallow it. I think that’s what her mom told her when she was younger, I mean. And the pressure points really help her. She’s a die-hard acupuncture believer. Her hands get really cramped from holding the tattoo machine all day, and her back hurts from sitting bent over, so she goes to this guy in Chinatown who’s done acupuncture for, like, sixty years. I swear to god, you look at this guy and you’d think he was forty, but he’s seventy-five. Anyway, she says it really helps.”

“Maybe I should try it,” Rex says.

“Maybe. I read that for a while in the seventies, it got a lot of press because in China doctors were doing open-heart surgery using acupuncture instead of anesthesia. I asked the guy in Chinatown about it and he said that that was a hoax they did for attention when Nixon visited China, and that the patient was getting morphine, but that it’s actually completely possible to render a part of the body pain-free using acupuncture if the person doing it is skilled enough.”

“I really love that,” Rex says.

“Yeah, it’s pretty amazing,” I say. “Especially since so many people end up dying after surgery from the anesthesia even when the surgery goes fine.”

“No, I mean, I love how you tell me all this information about stuff. I love how you always have some fact about something.”

“I don’t mean to be a know-it-all,” I say. My brothers hated when I’d bring up things I’d read, so after a while, I just shut up about it. But sometimes, I’d think it would be something they’d definitely be interested in, so I’d tell them. It never worked out how I thought it would, inevitably leading to them calling me a know-it-all or a smartass.

“Did I say that?” Rex asks, gently, tilting my chin up.

“No,” I say softly. “Listen, Rex. I’m sorry about the other night. How I yelled at you. I
should
have thought to ask you fix the table. I’m just… not used to having anyone to…. I’m just used to looking out for myself, you know?”

He nods.

“I know. I think I get it. You’ve never had someone help you who didn’t make you pay for it somehow. I shouldn’t have walked out like that. I just felt stupid. I’d already made such an ass of myself acting like a jealous caveman about your colleague. I’m sorry about that.”