Protection (17 page)

After his honorable discharge from the Royal Army, Joey had joined a struggling charity, St. Michael’s Hospital in East London. He’d hoped the administrators might permit him to at least step and fetch for the doctors, unload supplies or sweep the floors. But his military record and distinguished service to the S.O.E. had granted him a supervised practice with St. Michael’s geriatric patients. After six months, all supervision ceased. After a year, he transferred to the emergency department and quite unexpectedly began making a name for himself.

As he walked, Joey even returned to Wheaton Manor, site of his disgrace. Dr. Pfiser had been dead for ages, but his heirs’ threats of legal action had made it impossible for Joey to speak freely in television interviews. Those threats also compelled Random House to withdraw its offer to publish Joey’s memoir. That had been fine with him, although St. Michael’s – by 1968 one of Britain’s most successful charities – was crushed. But Joey had known he’d have to lie or leave out too much for the book to be worth writing. A frank discussion of his conviction would have sparked a legal firestorm.

And any mention of Gabriel would have humiliated his children, not to mention his late wife’s family.

It came again, that sound: a screeching, shuddering roar like the end of the world. Joey stopped, listening. He knew the sound but couldn’t name it. That, too, was in the way of dreams – effortless knowledge, inexplicable surety. He recognized the sound, knew what it meant. Yet he didn’t.

What did it matter?
 
He’d walked hundreds of miles in the course of a day and it all made sense. Just like Wentworth’s sudden appearance made sense, looming up in the mid-afternoon sunshine.

Joey remembered his first day at Wentworth. Arriving by bus, he’d shuffled down the steps in leg irons, as he’d recounted for his eldest daughter, Lily, more than once. She’d been both fascinated and terrified by the idea of her father behind bars. Throughout her childhood and teenage years she’d read everything she could find about incarceration and the penal system. Now the knowledge served Lily well as a solicitor. If society ever progressed enough to allow it, she would make an even better judge.

Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Joey’s younger children, Stella and Ben, preferred not to think about their father’s four years inside Wentworth. But Joey had long since shaken off any shame. In fact, he found himself looking back more with every passing year.

It was noon. Joey glanced around Wentworth’s exercise yard, bemused. It should have been filled with inmates. Walking, stretching, smoking, queuing up for the privy. After all, this was the Wentworth of 1936, Joey realized with a smile. Slopping out had yet to be outlawed and Rebecca Eisenberg had not yet helped abolish capital punishment in Britain. In the Wentworth of 1936, the inmates lacked flushing toilets, gymnasiums and tellys. An hour in the sunlight was a treat.

A duck darted out of the watchtower’s shadow, quacking at Joey like a watchdog. Bright-eyed and bold, it was clearly someone’s pet. He smiled at it, surprised all over again. Surely live animals had never been permitted at Wentworth, not even in cages.

“Oh, that’s just Jacky. Never mind him, he’s spoilt rotten.”
 
Gabriel MacKenna stepped out of the shadows, smiling at Joey. “Well now. At last. Kept me waiting long enough, didn’t you?”

“You say that every time,” Joey smiled, adoring the sight of this man, his great love even after almost thirty years. “But it’s still my favorite dream.”

Gabriel came closer. Joey sighed, knowing he’d awaken the moment their lips touched.

“Sweet Jesus. Look at that.”
 
Eyes wide, Gabriel stroked Joey’s hair, chuckling. “If it weren’t so gray you could play Jesus at Easter. Long hair on men. Times have changed, eh?”

Joey caught his breath. Not figuratively, but literally – he felt it, felt his breath stop, felt his heart leap, all the familiar physical sensations of surprise. This was no dream. His body was real. He was real. With a gasp Joey exhaled. Mind racing, he found himself unable to speak, fighting to process the knowledge transmitted by Gabriel’s touch.

“Fear not.”
 
Gathering Joey in his arms, Gabriel pulled him close. “I always figured there was a reason the angels led off with that. Not hallo, not it’s good to be seeing you, but fear not. Because ‘fear not’ is just what’s needed.”

“Gabe.” Joey was laughing, crying, losing himself in the other man’s embrace. And it wasn’t fantasy, wasn’t a fever dream. Gabriel was real, as lean and compactly muscled as ever, exactly as he’d been on the last day of his life.

“You’re alive,” Joey said over and over again. “Alive. This is brilliant!
 
More than I ever dared hope!
 
While I’ve gotten old … fat…”

“Not fat. Just a wee bit soft right about here,” Gabriel grinned, patting Joey’s stomach. “Julia kept you fed.
 
T’other one did, too.”

“Marc. That didn’t last.” Joey took Gabriel’s face in his hands, staring at him as he blinked away more tears. “He wasn’t you. But Gabe, how did you … how have I…”

The roar came again, the crescendo to an overture, the impact of metal on metal. Not cymbals crashing together. Just an old Packard turning left, trying to outrace an ambulance. And the ambulance driver, a daredevil, infuriated, refusing to give ground…

“Oh, God, we had a patient in the back,” Joey groaned, understanding everything in a rush. Perhaps he’d understood from the moment he started walking, but only prolonged the discovery, taking it in bits and pieces until he could accept the whole. “I told Sam his driving would be the death of him – him and our patients, too. Stupid – arrogant –
brainless
!”

Gabriel just stood there smiling, handsome as ever in his prison uniform, the only clothes – outside of pajamas – Joey had ever seen him wear.

“Sam lived. The patient, too. You went through the windshield. Broke your neck. Poor Sam’s inconsolable.”

Joey felt his anger drain away. That was another change that had come with age; he felt angry rarely and held onto it only with difficulty. What was he always saying to his students, his children, even his patients?
 
“Life is too short.”

“Poor Sam,” Joey sighed. “I don’t suppose I could get a message to him?
 
Tell him I’m all right?”

Gabriel’s hazel eyes gleamed. “What do you think?”

Jacky waddled over, quacking imperiously, and Gabriel withdrew a handful of corn from his pocket, scattering it over the yard’s scrubby grass.

“Why a duck?”

Gabriel shot him another grin. “Boyhood friend. I told you not to fear. Why are you shy of me?”

Joey sucked in his breath, dazzled by how alive he felt, how bright and real death had turned out to be. “Gabe. You never aged a day. I’m almost sixty.”

“Are you?”

The cell was just as Joey remembered it; bunk beds, a small table and two chairs. No toilet, only a steel bucket in the corner. No sink, only a water basin with flannel and a cake of hard yellow soap. A small rectangular mirror was fastened to the wall for shaving. Joey, facing that mirror, saw himself at twenty-nine: ginger-brown hair cropped short, face unlined, eyes still wide and long-lashed. Nude, he was better-formed than he’d ever appreciated in those days, chest and shoulders broad, stomach concave.

Gabriel was hard against him, whispering Gaelic to Joey, once-mysterious words he now understood perfectly.

“I’ve waited for this. It’s been days … days…”

“It’s been thirty years,” Joey heard himself reply in Gaelic. But that wasn’t right. Even during the busiest times of his career, even when his children demanded all his free time, even in the earliest blush of his affair with Marc, Joey had never been separated from Gabriel for more than a few days. Never in his heart.

Gabriel pulled Joey into the bottom bunk. Their lovemaking was delirious, inexhaustible, unending. He had no idea how long they’d been at it, or how many variations they’d enjoyed, feasting on each other like starving men. But suddenly Joey realized what was missing.

“Gabe. You aren’t smoking.”

“Don’t need it.”

“But … no. In a world where a duck needs corn, Gabriel MacKenna needs a Pall Mall.”

Gabriel grinned. “Ah, but I’m different in one respect,” he said, tapping his chest. “No part of me hurts anymore.”

Gradually Joey realized that no part of him hurt anymore, either. He wanted to worry for St. Michael’s, for poor guilty Sam and the often feckless Board of Directors, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even worry about Lily, his secret favorite among his three children. He’d loved them well and seen them grow up strong. They might miss their father, but they had no more need of him.

More lovemaking, violent and perfect except for occasional spasms of fear. When they interrupted Joey had no choice but to stop, pull away and shiver, hugging himself until Gabriel kissed and stroked him back to quiescence.

“Why does it keep happening?
 
Why do I get so afraid?”

“Because it’s a struggle, putting aside your humanity. Who you were on Earth. Here there’s only happiness, peace and pleasure. That’s unnatural on Earth. ’Tis an unnatural state for human beings, we weren’t designed for it.”

“I have to learn to tolerate heaven?” Joey laughed, surprised.

“There is no heaven. Nor hell, as you told me yourself. Those are just notions for human beings. Not always bad notions. But no more true than planet Earth being borne through the cosmos on the back of a great turtle.”

“Then what is this place?
 
Are we here together for eternity?”
 
Joey pressed himself closer to Gabriel. His body no longer was limited by a need for rest; already he wanted to make love again.

“This place is where we come to make the transition,” Gabriel said in English, in Gaelic, and in another, inhuman language Joey understood somewhere deep inside. “There is always someone or something here to greet you, to soothe your fears, to help you understand. For you, that person is me.”

Joey held Gabriel fiercely, loving him not in body or words but in pure essence. It was a trick he’d learned instinctively, sweeter and more terrifying than mere intercourse. “Oh, Gabe. You were okay, weren’t you?
 
You didn’t just have Jacky to greet you?”

Gabriel’s laughter was bright, brilliant, almost physical. No – it
was
physical, three-dimension, new and yet familiar. How had Joey failed to perceive that before?

“Of course not. The duck’s a pet. ’Twas Vera came to meet me, and stayed with me ’til I was strong enough to wait alone.”

Joey thought about that. “You were engaged to Mattie. Your other girl was Sheila. And of course you always fancied Marlene. Who was Vera?”

“In life, she was my mum.”

Joey stared at Gabriel.

“We had a lot to say to one another. John and I, too. But when I ready, Vera left. Then John, too.”

“Your father?”

Gabriel nodded.

“Where did they go?”

“We can’t know. It’s not a secret. We simply aren’t capable of comprehending, so we receive no explanation. Whatever comes next is unknown, Joey. Vera went into it alone. So did John. They were done with one another, and with me.”

“I’m not done with you,” Joey said, alarmed, holding Gabriel tighter. Soon they were making love again, at first in body, then more dangerously, merging their essences.

“It’s good. Scary, but good,” Joey breathed, no longer completely certain where he ended and Gabriel began. It was like the perfect merger of strings, woodwinds and brass into an orchestra, a unified sound far more than the sum of its parts.

“Joey. If you don’t choose to go now, soon, you’ll miss the chance to go alone.”

Joey took that in, bringing their essences close again, afraid and unafraid. He no longer perceived Gabriel in the flesh. And what he saw, he loved even more.