24 #2
“Not for weeks, maybe months. They have to do whatever reporters do. More sources, corroboration, I don’t know.”
It seems unfair that Nathaniel spent the first few months here terrified of getting found by the CIA, and now he’s done something that practically guarantees that he’s going to get found by the CIA, and face the consequences.
Nathaniel spends the afternoon in the patch of dirt that’s technically their backyard.
The door is next to the kitchen, and Patrick can go months without remembering that it is, in fact, a door, because there’s simply no reason to open it.
The yard contains several ancient and mostly decomposed cardboard boxes, some soda bottles, the spindly remains of a dead tree, bicycle parts, bare dirt, and whatever weeds can survive almost total shade and decades of use as a dumping ground.
“What are you doing?” Patrick asks when he brings Nathaniel some cold water.
“Cleaning it up.” Nathaniel drops something into a metal trash can he must have pulled off the street. It lands with a plink. “If Walt comes out here, I don’t want him to step on a nail or broken glass.” He picks up what looks like a tile and drops it in the bin. “Eleanor will be crawling soon.”
Patrick leaves him to it. The next time he looks out the kitchen window, Nathaniel has turned up a shovel from god knows where and is trying to dig out the dead tree.
By the time the sun sets over the roof of the building next door, the courtyard is clear.
Nathaniel doesn’t come in until Patrick’s closing the shop.
Patrick’s about to ask what Nathaniel wants to do about dinner when he sees that Nathaniel is clutching a blood-stained handkerchief in one hand.
“Let me look,” Patrick says.
“It was just a piece of broken glass.”
Patrick goes to the sink and turns on the tap. “Come on.”
Nathaniel’s hand is still curled into a fist. Some of the blood on the handkerchief is dried and dark, so he must have cut himself a while ago and kept working anyway.
Patrick pries his fingers open and puts his hand under the stream of water.
The gash is straight across his palm and there’s dirt in it, the idiot, but it doesn’t look deep enough to need stitches.
Nathaniel hisses when Patrick cleans the gash with a bar of soap.
“Sorry, sorry. Nearly done,” Patrick says. “Okay, I’ll be right back with some bandages.”
“Don’t bother. I need a shower anyway.”
While Nathaniel’s in the shower, Patrick finds the little jar of iodine he bought when Hector came home with a skinned knee.
“You don’t need to do this,” Nathaniel says when he comes out, a towel wrapped around his waist and a bloody washcloth in his fist. “I can do it myself.”
“I know you can,” Patrick says, even though it’s a pain in the ass doing anything to your dominant hand. “I like taking care of you.”
“You like taking care of everybody.”
He isn’t wrong, but he’s deliberately missing the point. Patrick pauses in dabbing on the iodine long enough to give Nathaniel an unimpressed look.
“Let’s go out to dinner,” Patrick says when he’s wrapped a length of gauze around Nathaniel’s palm a few times and covered it in tape.
“Stop acting normal.”
“How do you want me to act?” He lifts Nathaniel’s unbandaged hand to his mouth and kisses his knuckles.
“I really wish I knew.”
Nathaniel pulls his hand away and kisses Patrick on the mouth.
Patrick’s shoulders hit the wall, the towel rack pressing into his lower back.
In the past month, Nathaniel has figured out exactly how to turn Patrick on.
Now he deploys his tricks all at once: a thumb on Patrick’s nipple, a thigh between Patrick’s legs, a kiss that’s messy and insistent and sharp at the edges.
When Nathaniel drops to his knees, Patrick isn’t ready for it. He wants to tell Nathaniel that the tile will be too hard on his knees, but Nathaniel glances up at him and says, “Please,” and Patrick isn’t going to argue about tile floors.
There’s something about the whole setup that feels like penance, or at least penitence: Nathaniel on his knees, minutes after basically telling Patrick he should be mad at him. But Patrick is no stranger to using sex to obliterate everything that isn’t another person’s body.
Patrick pushes the hair off Nathaniel’s forehead, then traces the shell of his ear. “Anything you want,” he says, and flicks open the top button of his jeans.
* * *
The next morning, before he’s even had any coffee, Nathaniel announces that he has to run an errand and will be back before it’s time to open the shop.
Patrick makes coffee and putters around the empty apartment, then putters around the empty shop, Walt at his heels.
It’s too quiet and subtly wrong, like everything in the building got replaced with nearly identical copies.
It’s somebody else’s home, in some other dimension.
He goes upstairs to Susan.
“I want you to stay,” he says when she answers the door. “Even if you and Nathaniel are never okay again, I still want you to stay. I know I don’t have any right to ask, not after—” He hadn’t meant to say that last part, but now there’s no taking it back.
“Not after what?”
“After I left you. After I left you and Michael.”
Susan draws in a sharp breath. “You didn’t leave us.”
The version of the story that Susan tells herself is that what Patrick’s aunt and uncle did was as good as kicking him out.
And that’s true, in a way: they made sure he wouldn’t come back but they kept their hands clean.
He isn’t sure any of that matters. “You thought I was dead or in the hospital.”
Susan opens her mouth like she’s going to deny it, as if she hadn’t told him so at the time. “We knew there was a good reason you didn’t call us.”
“I didn’t call you for weeks.” Patrick can’t even remember that time without a hot wash of shame.
The whole time he’d been at Mrs. Kaplan’s, he’d known he should call, but he couldn’t make himself do it, didn’t know what lie he could possibly tell.
What if they’d seen his name in the paper?
What if they hadn’t? “He was so mad. So were you.”
“Not at you.” She scrubs the sleeve of her bathrobe against her eyes.
“That’s such a lie.”
“Patrick, I don’t know what you want me to say. I was mad at you. I haven’t been mad at you about that in ten years. As soon as I knew you were okay, it was obvious that something terrible must have happened and I could make a few guesses about what it was.”
“Michael didn’t have any idea.”
Susan looks at him for a minute, searching his face and finding something there that Patrick would prefer not to think about. “Michael forgave you. Or—no—he understood.”
“He never said anything.”
“The two of you never said anything to one another! Did you expect a heart to heart? God, it’s so shitty that you can’t be having this conversation with him.”
Her arms are folded across her chest and her eyes are wet. He can’t take it, so he pulls her into a hug. “The shittiest,” he agrees.
“Do you really want me to stay?” she says into his shirt.
“Yeah. It’s good,” he says, so severe an understatement it’s nearly a lie. “It makes me happy,” he adds, feeling like he’s standing over a pit. “I wish you were able to be in San Francisco with Michael, all of you together, but instead—”
“I hated living so far from you. So did Michael. He was sure we could lure you to San Francisco eventually.”
Patrick remembers all the comments about the food, the culture, the climate. He remembers Michael’s strangled attempts to explain that San Francisco is a great place for “You know. Men who…” accompanied by a vague gesture. Patrick thought these were pointed jabs, not sales pitches.
“What happens when you meet someone new?” Patrick asks, not sure it’s a question he’s even allowed to ask.
“There’s room here, don’t you think?” She pulls back and looks at him squarely.
“Look. You’ll be there for her first day of kindergarten and when she drops out of college and runs off with a painter.
You can bail her out of jail and hold her hand while she gets a tattoo.
If you want to be there, you’re there. Okay? ”
Patrick tries to say that he wants to be there, but all he can do is nod and look away.
Susan follows Patrick down to the shop. The door’s still locked but the lights are on, and when Patrick opens the door, he can hear Jefferson Airplane playing from the back. A warm breeze blows through the shop.
“He’ll be in the yard,” Patrick says.
“What yard?” Susan asks, but she follows him.
Nathaniel is in a t-shirt and jeans, digging a hole in the center of the empty space he cleared yesterday.
“I bet you bled right through the bandage,” Patrick says. “What are you doing, anyway?”
Nathaniel doesn’t look up. “Planting a tree. It’s depressing out here.”
The tree, if you can call it that, is two feet high and sad looking. “Where do you even buy a tree in Manhattan?”
“The answers to this and many more questions can be found in the Yellow Pages,” Nathaniel says, turning around. The little twist of a smile drops from his face when he sees Susan.
“I want to make a record,” Susan says.
Nathaniel’s expression is perfectly blank. “Do you.”
“I negotiated a pretty decent contract. Your name’s on it. All you have to do is sign.”
Nathaniel shuts his eyes. “Susan.”
Susan reaches into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out Nathaniel’s notebook. “There’s a song in here.”
“There’s a nervous breakdown in there,” Nathaniel says.
“Same difference. Are you working this morning?”
“No. I just need to fix this.” He holds up his hand, showing the bloody bandage.
“I have Band-Aids and mercurochrome upstairs,” Susan says. Nathaniel drops the shovel and follows her upstairs, brushing Patrick’s arm with his hand on the way out.
Patrick spends the morning typing up letters to prospective buyers. He keeps the shop door propped open so he can hear the music drifting down from Susan’s open window.