The Rebuilding Year (28 page)

“Ryan.”

“How could you?” He couldn’t tell if she was scolding him, or genuinely asking. “How could you want to…be with him?”

“I love him.” Plain, simple, and getting more certain every time he said it. Admitting the truth might have made this whole mess more complicated, but it made his goals simpler. Himself, and Ryan, and Mark, and a life.

“You can’t.” Cynthia groped for the arm of the wingback and then sat heavily. “How can you be gay? We were together almost twenty years. I would have known.”

“I didn’t know myself. I never looked at anyone but you. And then you were gone, and I looked around and there was Ryan, and we just fit. At first I thought we were just good friends, but then I realized it was more.”

“And you…and he…?”

“Sleep together? Yes, we do.”

She actually shuddered. John winced inside. “With Mark in the house? With
Torey
?”

“We are probably more discreet than you and Brandon are. You didn’t get pregnant without sharing a bed with your lover.”

“That’s different!”

“Not by much.”

“Of course it is. We’re married. We’re…normal.”

And we’re not allowed to get married.
“So you never slept with Brandon until you married him?”

She actually blushed. But then her spine straightened. “You can’t compare us. And I don’t want the kids staying in this house if you’re going to do disgusting things around them.”

“Jesus, Cynthia. Grow up. The most I’m going to do in front of the kids is kiss the man. We don’t…”

“You kiss him?”

“I love him. Of course I kiss him.”

“I can’t do this.” Cynthia dropped her head in her hands. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t think about this. I can’t imagine you and him and…”

“Well, don’t, for Christ’s sake. Do you think I like to imagine you and Brandon doing stuff?” He choked a laugh, as she looked up and glared at him, shaking his head helplessly. “We need to get back to Mark, and what’s right for him.”

“He can’t stay here. That’s final.”

“What are you going to do? Drag him back to California in handcuffs?”

“I need you to tell him he can’t stay.”

“But I want him to stay!” John tried to lower his voice. This was hard for her, he understood that. “He’s welcome here. He and Ryan get along well. He’s aced his high school classes this first week.”

Cynthia was just shaking her head back and forth.

“Cyn, he’s fifteen. He’s going to make his own decisions. And what I don’t want is him running off to busk on the street with his guitar somewhere, thinking he can make it on his own.”

“That Ryan is encouraging him to play the guitar.”

“He doesn’t need encouragement. He’s a musician. When was the last time you really listened to him play, Cynthia? He’s probably going to have a career in music. But if he stays with me, he just might finish school first, maybe even go to college. If Brandon tries to take his guitar away from him, we may never see him again.”

Cynthia shrank into the chair. “Mark wouldn’t do that. He’s just a kid.”

“He hitchhiked to get here.”

“He what? You said he came on the train.”

“And then hitchhiked. He’s independent, he’s angry, and he doesn’t always make good decisions.” John leaned toward her. “Cynthia, for his own good, you’re going to have to let him stay here, at least for now.”

“How long?” she demanded. “How long do you get to keep my son away from me?”

John bit his tongue hard to keep from saying,
maybe as long as you’ve kept my kids away from me.
“Until he’s ready. Until he decides living with you is right again. Maybe until he’s eighteen and goes to college. You’ll get visits, I swear, even if I have to drag him out to LA myself. He’ll come see his little brother or sister and visit you. But he’ll live here, for as long as he wants to.”

“To hell with that,” Brandon said from the doorway. “That kid is not living here.”

John looked up at the ceiling.
God give me strength.
He took hold of his temper by the skin of his teeth, and got ready to start the argument over again.
 

Chapter Fifteen

Ryan paused at the door of Mark’s room Wednesday evening. The kid had been sullen and monosyllabic since his mother and stepfather’s visit. He’d hoped that getting the living arrangements made official would smooth things over. But Carlisle was still threatening to go to court to enforce the custody order. The man hadn’t thought it through if he believed dragging a resentful teenager back to his house was going to make his life better. Ryan wasn’t sure if it was homophobia, possessiveness or a simple unwillingness to admit to a mistake. Whichever, the uncertainty was wearing on all of them.

Mark sat on his bed with the acoustic guitar on his lap. He wasn’t playing it, just staring off into space.

“Hey,” Ryan said. “Your dad called to say they had a tree come down in the quad with the wind this afternoon. He has to get it cut up and hauled, so he’ll be late. We could order pizza.”

“Not hungry.”

Ryan leaned in the doorway. “Anything I can do?”

“No.” Mark looked up at him through brown hair getting a little long and shaggy.
Suggest a haircut. Sometime when he doesn’t look like he wants to bite your nose off.
But Mark’s expression was already shifting to uncertain. “Ryan?”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you something? I mean, if I ask you a question can we talk about it without you, like, telling Dad?”

“Probably,” Ryan said cautiously. “Unless your safety is involved, in which case I can’t promise.”

“It’s not that. It’s…” He stopped, fingering the inlay on the guitar. His long finger traced the pale curves in the wood, round and round.

“Okay,” Ryan said when the pause had stretched out long enough. “I promise.” He went in and sat on the desk chair, and tapped the door shut with his foot. “Lay it on me.”

Mark groaned. “No one says that anymore.”

“Just being the father figure here.”

Mark nodded instead of laughing. “It’s…one of the guys in the band. What I said before. About the…problem I had.”

Ryan rummaged around in his brain for the first part of this conversation, and then remembered a week earlier. “The guy doing the drugs?”

“Yeah.”

“Mm. That’s tough.”

“I don’t want to tell Dad, because then he’ll make me quit the band, and we’re, like, awesome, most of the time.”

Ryan wanted to say John wouldn’t have a knee-jerk response to the news, but in the interests of keeping it real, he took a pass. “And when you’re not awesome? What do the other guys say?”

“See, that’s the problem. They don’t really see it. Because when we’re playing, he’s basically fine. A little spacey and absent-minded, but he plays okay. It’s when it’s just the two of us, writing songs, that he starts to…wander.”

“So this is Patrick we’re talking about?”

“I didn’t say that!” Mark protested.

Ryan knew who wrote the songs for the band, but okay. “So, one of the guys. Have you talked to him about it?”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “Like, ‘hey, buddy, that’s some mellow weed you’re on’. But he denies it. He says he’s just kind of tired lately.”

“And you don’t think that’s true?”

“No way.” Mark snorted. “He used to write these cool lyrics, you know. But more and more, they don’t make sense. The words just ramble. And then in the middle of working, he’ll wander off into some weird-ass conversation. Sometimes it’s like he’s not even talking to me. He’s on something.”

“He never offered anything to you?”

“Ryan, he won’t even admit he’s taking shit. So how would he be offering it to me?”

“Right. Okay.” Ryan gave it some thought. His mind wandered back to Alice, up a tree, wandering in mental space. “Does he seem…happy? Um, serene?”

“Kind of. Like, dissociated.”

“Good word.” Ryan nodded. “He said he worked in the same lab as that girl Alice, didn’t he?”

“The one in the tree that you tried to save? The one who jumped from, like, forty feet and almost made you fall out?” Mark had heard the short version from Ryan. Obviously, someone had also given him the long version.

“The first time I met him, didn’t Patrick say he worked with her?”

“Yeah, I think.”

“I wonder,” Ryan said slowly. “Patrick claimed Alice never did drugs. Now he says he’s not doing drugs. Maybe there really is something in the lab, some contaminant or something. Maybe he’s being drugged without knowing it.”

“Like on purpose?” Mark’s eyes were wide.

“No.” Ryan hesitated. “Well, maybe, but it’s not likely. I’m thinking some kind of accidental exposure.”

“So if it was accidental, then Patrick could just stop going into the lab, and he’d be fine. Right?”

“I don’t know.” Ryan ran a hand through his hair. “This is all hypothetical. Maybe it’s some recreational substance he and Alice didn’t want to tell anyone about. But the possibility… I wonder if we should tell Detective Carstairs.”

“You can’t!” Mark was on his feet. “You promised. You can’t tell anyone. I don’t want Patrick to get into trouble. He’s not hurting anyone.”

“Except maybe himself. Mark, you know Alice basically killed herself on the drug, whether she took it on purpose or not. Don’t you think for Patrick’s own safety…?”

“No,” Mark insisted. “I mean, yeah, I’ll talk to him. I’ll ask him if there might be something in the lab. I have to ask him, before I tell anyone.”

“I’m not sure we should wait.”

“Two days,” Mark said urgently. “No practice tomorrow. But Friday, I swear, I’ll talk to him. It’s been months since the girl…fell. He’s been fine so far. If I tell anyone, and Patrick gets busted for drugs, he’ll never forgive me. The whole band will never forgive me. I might as well just shoot myself!”

“Stop. Enough. You’ll have a life and a career, even if this band falls apart.”

Mark shook his head wildly. “No way. You can’t tell. God, Ryan, please, you promised.”

“All right,” Ryan said reluctantly. “Till Friday. Then you talk to Patrick. Carefully and safely, while the other guys are around. Don’t confront him with this while you’re alone with him, okay? Promise me.”

“What do you think he’ll do? He’s just…mellow.”

“Doesn’t matter. If you threaten to take away someone’s drugs, it can get ugly. Promise you’ll talk to him when the rest of the guys are there.”

“Okay. Jeez. I promise.”

“And then call me,” Ryan added. “Either way. If he’s doing drugs on purpose, we need to…at least talk about it. Maybe we can help him see it’s messing up the band. And if it’s not on purpose, then we need to tell someone about it.”

“Shit.” Mark sat back on his bed and picked at the strings of the guitar, a few tentative notes. “I keep thinking I’ve got stuff under control, you know. But there’s always something else.”

“I know the feeling.” Ryan stood stiffly. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re handling a series of tough problems pretty damned well.”

Mark’s eyes were bright, behind those shaggy bangs.

“So,” Ryan said. “Pepperoni pizza?”

“Sure,” Mark ran through a rapid minor line. “I guess I could eat.”

Ryan made the trek to his own room, and stretched out on the bed with the phone to order dinner. He could get in twenty minutes with his feet up before the food came. “So,” he said conversationally in the air, to the deity he wasn’t sure he believed in, “when I said I wouldn’t mind having kids, did I forget to say I’d prefer they didn’t come as ready-made teenagers?” The silence was his answer. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He was coming to love Mark, and Torey was a great kid, but their problems made him envious of Drew and his chocolate-pudding-on-the-carpet complaints. It would have been so much easier to start with toddlers.

John paused in his work at the end of a busy Friday and stretched, thinking about the coming weekend. It could only be a vast improvement on the last one. He’d thought Cynthia and Carlisle would never leave. They had talked Mark’s choice to death, and then started in on Cynthia’s visitation prospects. Mark didn’t want to go back to California at all. In the end, they’d agreed on a couple of months cooling-off period. Unless Carlisle went through with his threats to take the whole mess to court.

It had been hard to say goodbye to Torey. Part of John wanted to keep her with them too. That would be heaven, to have his kids and Ryan, all together again. But it wasn’t the right thing for Torey. A girl needed her mother. She had left eventually, gazing tearfully out the back of the rental car. God, parenting was the hardest job on earth. But finally dealing with Cynthia was a weight off his mind. Now he, Mark and Ryan had a chance to work out how to live together.

And in a few minutes he’d be going home to Ryan. Just a little more paperwork to do. It wasn’t a bad life.

John liked being in his office at the end of the day. Sure, it was a small space in a stuffy industrial basement, but he had campus maps on the walls, plant-care schedules, contractor numbers. On the big map, lines in green, yellow and red marked the walking trails he had refurbished, the ones in need of care, and the ones he was planning for the future. A big photo of the lilac hedge in full spring bloom lent inspiration for the coming spring. He was bending over his monthly budget report, when he was grabbed from behind. He smiled and turned in Ryan’s arms. “Hey, you’re still here.”