chapter 25
Gus, Blood Moon in October
She was hiding something from me.
I could tell by the way she kept leaning against her rake, taking deep, audible breaths. Her worried gaze bounced between me and the orange clouds to the west. Every time she’d open her mouth, she shook her head and went back to spreading compost around the broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower seedlings we’d spent the better part of the day planting in the winter garden patch.
The tomatoes, zucchini, and summer squash were still producing so much there was no one left to “gift” them to. Still plenty of green beans, too—at least on the plants the bugs were kind enough to leave us. The berries ripened in their thicket, and I couldn’t wait to eat my fill. I wanted to stuff Decca’s mouth full of their ripe sweetness, letting the juices run down her chin.
Fuck. Not this again.I couldn’t keep from lusting after my wife.
The sheer number of swollen orange pumpkins in the adjacent wattle-fenced patch promised a very festive night for trick-or-treaters. Decca had promised to make her famous pies for Thanksgiving. Swore they were so much better, not just from scratch, but homegrown, from a blend of Seminole, Blue Hubbard, and Sugar Pie pumpkins.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the texture and consistency of pumpkin pie was so gross it wouldn’t matter what type of pumpkin she used.
If these seed packets were correct, in 90 days, when the cruciferous veggies were ready for harvest and we were well beyond those frosts needed to sweeten the produce, we’d have some stinky, gas-producing, gross veggies to last through whatever witchy holidays she wanted to celebrate this winter.
And while I was by no means a veggie lover, I was proud of my accomplishments. I’d eaten the fruits of seeds I’d planted.
I was officially a garden nerd. The massive extent to which I’d thrown myself into research and study about vegetable gardening, hügelkultur, and soil health was somewhat concerning, not to mention, a weak substitute for other, more pleasurable activities.
“Ah, you don’t want to put too much on the new ones next to the beans.” I said as Decca pitchforked another pile of compost from the wheelbarrow.
Her hair must have snagged on a branch or bramble vine because one side of her ponytail stuck out sideways. A streak of rich soil highlighted the top of her left cheekbone and, with those bare feet and that loose black linen dress that highlighted her bralessness, she was a sexy Earth goddess this afternoon.
I wanted to pull up her skirt and bend her over on the potting bench.
I wanted to run my rough, splintered, filthy hands all over the pure white velvet of her skin as I took her from behind. I wanted to pin her against the wall of the garage and pull her legs around me as I buried my cock in her ripe pink cunt. I wanted her screaming my name as her orgasm left her shaking and limp around me. I wanted to stay out here until midnight, watch her ride me, writhing in the light of the moon, her arms wild and free above her head, the berry-stained peaks of her little tits bouncing while her sacred womanhood milked the fucking soul out of my body through my cock.
I swallowed and turned away. Partially to hide the guilty look on my face, partially to hide the swelling in my pants that had sprung up just thinking of plowing her field.
“Gus?”
“Um, it might be too much nitrogen.”
“Oh, good thinking. Because the beans…”
“Are nitrogen-fixers. Yeah.” I hid my face in shame and plunged my hands back into the weeds and crabgrass that were trying to invade the grape tomatoes.
I yanked on the deep taproot of a dandelion. I’d faced Decca’s wrath before when removing the dandelions. The BEES, Gus! Think of the BEES! But if I left them all to populate the veggie garden, soon there’d be no veggie garden. Besides, I needed to yank something, and it didn’t feel right anymore, jerking off to the thought of my wife when I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.
I dug deeper. Where was the end of this thing? I plunged the thin, serrated weeding knife into the hard soil between the rows, cursing at the monstrosity of this plant. Was this a new breed of dandelion?What if, when I finally pulled it up, the root came up looking like an ugly baby and screaming bloody murder? I adjusted the angle of my hand on the wooden handle, attacking backhand. Just a... few... more... jabs. The plant loosened, finally, but I was determined to get the whole thing.
“Gus?”
A ha! Almost there. Just a few…
One more stab into the concrete-hard dirt and… The knife slipped. Its dull serrations missed the root entirely.
I’d hit something else.
I saw the blood almost before I felt the impact—bright red oxygenated blood pooling into the dusty bark-brown soil, dotting that now-shredded taproot I’d been feverishly demolishing.
“Fuck.” I sat back on my heels, not looking down at my hand.
“Gus, oh my God.” Decca rushed over, crouching at my knees, pulling my bleeding hand into hers. “Can I look?”
I nodded. I hadn’t chopped off a finger, but this was no paper cut. The absence of a sudden sting coupled with all that free-flowing blood told me the damage I’d done needed more than a BAND-AID. I could feel the blood pulsing out of my hand, emptying me of every last drop. I couldn’t look. At least this was a beautiful place to meet the Lord. Memorial hymns ran through my head.
This was why I didn’t become a funeral director like the rest of my family. I couldn’t handle the sight of blood.
Decca pried the hori hori knife out of my other hand, throwing it away from me as though I’d intentionally used it as a weapon for self-harm. Hadn’t I, though? “Okay, let me help you up. We’re going to go inside and take a look. Wash up a bit. See if the bleeding slows.”
She said it so sweetly, I willed myself to be whisked away by her words. But her voice was still thick with our unresolved tension. “Come on. Up you get,” she said, firmer now, as she tugged my elbow.
She brushed the dirt off her dress and the bottoms of her feet as much as possible before dragging me into the kitchen and jerking my hands—my right cupped under my left to catch the slick, viscous blood that was threatening to upset my delicate stomach—under the stream of water, mottling the white enamel sink a Valentine’s Day medley of reds and pinks. I closed my eyes before my vision blacked out.
“This needs stitches. You might have nicked a tendon.”
I groaned. “You’re a doctor. Can’t you just sew me up?” I knew saying it was stupid. I wasn’t even that alpha-type guy who pretended never to feel pain. Hell, maybe those alpha male types really didn’t feel pain. It was only that I hated hospitals almost as much as I hated mortuaries. I went often enough as it was, giving blessings and holy oil to the sick and dying. I didn’t begrudge going then, but this felt like going into the office on a day off.
She blinked at me, her face otherwise deadpan. “A doctor of philosophy, but sure, I’ll stitch you. Except, damn it, I left my doctor’s bag back in 1880.”
I opened my eyes. One of them, anyway.
“There’s this thing called an Emergency Room we have here in the twenty-first century suburbs. They can sew your hand back together using anesthetic and it won’t hurt a lick. Even give you a shot of penicillin.”
“Enough, I’m going.”
“Keep that towel on it while I get my shoes. I don’t think you hit any major vessels, but you want to try to keep the blood flow as minimal as possible.”
She’d wrapped an old tea towel around my palm. It was clean, but soft and old. Probably one of her granny’s. Used for decades. Maybe even passed down from before then. An heirloom.
Now the blood would never come out.
Decca hadn’t thought twice about ruining the towel. Or dropping everything, literally in the dirt, to help me.
She returned, bringing her keys and my wallet. Her firm and capable hands positioned me so she could tie the cloth. It felt so… nice to have her worrying over me. Her hand squeezed mine as she raised it to my chest. Still holding. Not letting go. We stood so close I could pick out the rosemary greens from the squash vine greens in the striations of her eyes. I could map the fine lines etched across her lower eyelids and in the outer corners where she squinted when she laughed.
Then it was gone. The softness in her eyes morphed into something harsh and laced with pain.
“What were you thinking?” Her words bit.
“I was just trying to get that dandelion out.”
“It wasn’t a dandelion, it was a gobo burdock root, and it’s at least five feet deep. It wasn’t ever coming out with your little knife. No, Gus. I saw you. Saw the…” she took a breath, “change in you after you looked at me. For once, you looked at me like...” She stopped herself from finishing that statement and shook her head.
“Like what?” I pried. I had to pry. Maybe it would work one of these days. Maybe I’d push enough that we’d both let it all out. Whatever it was. Something else was in the room with us whenever we were alone. Hauntings of past misdeeds and of people gone and missed.
All our ghosts.
“You looked at me like we had a connection. Like you did before we were married, when you could actually stand the sight of me. Like a husband looks at his wife.” Her statement was like a rockslide. The smaller pieces of gravel shifting at the cliff’s edge before giving way to the tumble of the big boulders.
“Decca, I… I want…”
I had nothing to say. She was right. I was frustrated. I was so fucking sexually frustrated I couldn’t fuck my wife when I felt all kinds of feelings for her because I let guilt and shame eat me up until I was a selfish, impotent bastard. There was nothing I could say.
“What’s gobo burdock?” I asked.
“Ugh!” She screamed in my face. “Just get in the car, Gus.”
Twenty minutes later, I’d gotten through intake. My hand was throbbing, and by now I was glad I was here. Decca met up with me in triage after parking. Luckily, they weren’t very busy, so I could be seen right away. All I had to do now was wait—in silence and boredom, since I had forgotten my phone, and since Decca wasn’t speaking to me—for drugs, imaging, and for someone to stitch my still-bleeding hand back together.
“Decca?”
“Sof, hi!” Decca folded the fishing magazine she’d been reading while I had dozed off in the ER bed. She dropped the magazine on my legs and wrapped her arms around Bethany’s daughter.
George and Bethany followed Sofia into my room. From the looks on their faces, I knew they weren’t here for me. Suddenly, all the leftover drowsiness had burned off.
“What happened? Is Dad—”
“We brought Dad in,” George told me, calmly.
George was good at remaining calm. Me, on the other hand—my insides froze.
I sat up, needing to do something, rush somewhere. Except there was nowhere to go. Nothing I could do to help.
“He didn’t feel like getting out of bed this morning. Then this morning turned to this afternoon and this evening. He was having a lot of trouble breathing. We just thought it was better to be safe.”
“How’s he doing?” Decca asked.
George and Bethany exchanged a look. She shook her head, silently telling him not to tell me something. I already knew it was bad. Dad had Acute Myeloid Leukemia with one of the subtypes with the worst prognoses, so of course it wasn’t going to be good.
But there was still enough time. I had faith.
We all did.
“The doctors gave him a water pill and something in his IV to help his heart, but apparently, the medication used to treat his leukemia is known to cause heart failure,” George sank onto the bed, unbuttoning his suit jacket. Must have just come from a service. He looked tired. His dark under eye circles were even darker than usual. Even Bethany looked exhausted. Living in the coach house apartment, adjacent to the mortuary, George and Bethany were dealing with the brunt of Dad’s illness while keeping the mortuary thriving.
It was clear they needed help. I needed to help more. I could do… something.
Heart failure.The words were so final. So black and white. I’d seen them listed as cause of death so frequently in my brief stint as a funeral director, hearing them now was surreal. “So that’s what this is?” I asked. “Dad’s in heart failure?”
Decca clasped Bethany’s and Sofia’s hands as they listened.
George crossed his legs and clasped his hands. He sighed, looking up at Bethany, who made a disapproving face and bit her nail.
“When I went up to check on him after the graveside service this afternoon, he looked…” He shook his head, staring at his hands. “He looked how they look. When we pick someone up from the hospital. The edema… I thought…“ He shook his head. “But he’s pulling through. He’s doing great. Really. Joking with the doctors, watching the little TV too loud.” George smiled his big brother smile. The one that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
Damn. He was still doing that after all these years. Reassuring his kid brother that everything would be okay. Even when he knew it wouldn’t be.
“Jesus, George. Fuck. You should have called me earlier.“ I put my hand on his shoulder. “Seeing him like that…”
“It didn’t feel great,” he admitted. “I wasn’t expecting this complication.”
“Okay, so what do we do? We move on to the next treatment. Right?”
George exhaled a long, slow breath before looking at me. “I think he wants to stop, Gus.”
“N-No.” I shook my head. “No. We’re not going there. There are plenty of options available. He’s in his sixties. He’s still a young man. I just read about this clinical trial at the National Cancer Institute. Something with liposome-encapsulated something or other. Let’s get him in. You talk to him. Or… no, have Soula do it. He listens to her. We’re not giving up.”
Four sets of eyes bored into me like I was being the ridiculous one.
Dad had gone through the worst battle with cancer this past year. He hadn’t been able to catch a break. It was caught late. Had already metastasized. He never seemed to get any relief from his symptoms, even after two rounds of chemo.
On paper, it looked bad. Anyone with half a brain could see that.
But this was Dad. He couldn’t give up. He had grandbabies. Sofia, Athena, another one on the way. There was too much love in his life for him to throw it all away that easily.
Fuck.
This must be what it felt like to be one of those red and white bobbers on a fishing line. Half in the water and half out. Never quite seeing the light of the sun before getting plunged back under the murky depths of a lake. Getting dragged to the bottom when a fish took the bait, then rushing screaming up to the surface when an invisible force reeled you in.
Damn Decca for picking up that stupid fishing magazine. Damn this hospital for only offering fishing magazines in their ER waiting room. Damn me for being in this hospital, and damn Dad for getting sick.
“What’s going on with you? You going to be able to play tomorrow with that hand?” George asked. Bethany elbowed him hard in the side.
“Ow. Sweetheart, we’re finally playing a team that’s almost as bad as us. We might have a chance to win.”
That made me smile. There was a long time when George didn’t have anything for himself. Not hobbies, not a loving wife to nudge him when she thought he committed a faux pas, not even a personality. I never would have pegged George for a hockey player, but like everything else he did, he goalied with serious fervor.
“I’m sure this is nothing. They’ll wrap me up nice and tight. Don’t use my right hand much anyway.” I was looking at George while I was talking, but Bethany’s attention drew my focus to Dec. She was looking up at me, sharply at first, then she looked away, rubbing her lips together. What was that about?
“Mom, I can get an Uber.”
“Absolutely not,” Bethany told her daughter. “She’s got rehearsal, so we have to leave.” She hugged Decca, “Love you, Darlin’. See you tomorrow. Gus, I’m not hugging you with that bloody stump. You’ll get it all over my dress.”
She turned to leave, putting an arm around Sofia, but looked back at Decca over her shoulder. “How’d the lessons work out?” she asked.
Decca grunted.
“Talk to him,” Bethany sing-songed to Decca on her way out the door.
Decca grimaced, crossing her arms.
“Constantinos Smythe,” a woman came into the room with a wheelchair. “We’re ready for you in radiography.” Decca flopped the magazine onto the chair, helped me up, and grabbed the dilapidated canvas tote bag she used for a purse. It was probably her granny’s at some point, like just about everything else Decca used or owned. I doubted she’d gone shopping for anything in the past decade.
“I’ll meet you back here,” Decca said as I was rolled away. “I’m going to grab a coffee and find Raynie. I know how your mom likes to put a pot on whenever there’s a big deal happening. I’m sure she could use it now.”
I nodded. “I’m going to ask if they can swing me by Dad’s room.”
After X-rays, the nurse agreed to take me by Dad’s bed. The drape was drawn, but I could see between the crack. Mom in the guest chair, bent over her phone. Her reading glasses were at the tip of her nose but she squinted at what must have been some small text. Past her, Dad lay in bed, wrapped like a burrito in the thin white blanket, except for his feet in those compression booties that kicked on every so often to help circulation. He looked tired, he but wasn’t asleep. He was watching his wife, a contented smile on his face.
I didn’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to go into the room. I could blame it on not wanting to disrupt the intimacy of Dad’s moment, or wanting to let Dad rest after George and them had left. I could blame it on my hand and not wanting to concern my parents over my own trivial matter. Truthfully, none of those were why I couldn’t seem to make my hand reach up and pull back the curtain wide enough to pop my head in for a quick “Love you, Dad.”
It was because I didn’t want to go in there.
I didn’t want to see Dad like that, feeble and shriveled to half his former self. I didn’t want to see him hooked up to the tubes and monitors, yet another IV in his hand—even though I’d seen him much more medicalized during chemo treatments. I didn’t want to see that satisfied look on his face. The look of a life well lived and too-comfortable with its ending.
I wasn’t ready for it to end. I needed more time with him. I needed his few sparse but perfectly chosen words to tell me I gave a great sermon, or that I was being an asshole to Decca, or which car wax had the longest-lasting shine and where it was on sale. I needed those knowing looks he shot me when he knew before I did that I was itching to cause trouble.
Even when he couldn’t make a family meal, or a church service, or a holiday gathering because he had to run out on a house call, his presence was still with us. We were always okay with him being gone because the meals, the holidays, the services didn’t matter. He could celebrate when he came home.
Now, looking at him in this hospital bed, it was too easy to imagine a future where he would never come home again.
I backed away, the nurse looking at me warily, but she took my angry glance as a hint not to say anything. It only took a couple X-rays, a few hours, and layers of stitches to reconnect my severed tendon, until I realized I would not be playing hockey tomorrow night. There was no way all this bandaging could fit under a glove.
Decca was quiet most of the time, except for her calling out the many inaccuracies (and some accuracies) of the Bones episodes we watched on the hospital room TV. I reclined in the tiny bed, my good hand behind my head, watching my wife roll her eyes whenever they panned in with a wide shot of the theatrical autopsy room, or their 3-D tool that showed exactly what a victim looked like before she got all chopped up in the wood chipper.
“Who has the funding for that? Why don’t they turn some lights on? Oh! I had a case just like that. Wait… is that my case? No this show’s too old. My artist is the best of the best, but damn, I wish that technology existed in real life.”
On the ride home, I finally pushed her hard enough. I blamed the Oxycodone. “What are you supposed to talk to me about?”
“What do you mean?” She knew what I meant.
“Bethany said, ‘Talk to him.’ I assume she meant me. What are you supposed to talk to me about?”
She adjusted in her seat.
“Nothing. I forgot you have hockey.”
“I’m sure it’s not nothing. Hey, look, I can’t play anyway, right?” The emotionally mature man inside me winced. I’d meant that to sound casual, cool, so it wouldn’t come out like a dog panting after a bone she’d carried, which was how I felt.
Instead, it came out like I was only willing to give her the scraps of my attention.
I wanted to slurp those words back in as soon as they’d dribbled out of my mouth, but there was no coming back from that. I didn’t know what to do around this woman who was my wife, and with every step, I made a bigger hash of it.
Her lips pressed into a thin line and her hands choked the steering wheel.
“Go to hockey.”
“I didn’t—”
“Go to hockey, Gus. Even if you can’t play, you should be there for your team.” She didn’t take her eyes off the road, but she swallowed hard, subtly wiping her eye. Fuck. I was absolute trash at being married.
Okay. She’d win this round. Our communication was in failure. But that was today. It wouldn’t be for much longer. I hated that pained look on her face. I wanted to wipe it off and never let it darken her brow again.
But it wouldn’t happen tonight.
Her favorite holiday was coming up. She’d been excited about Halloween ever since we’d planted all those pumpkins in the garden. She’d gotten me excited to watch them get all big and orange.
I didn’t know much about Samhain from her side of the spiritual spectrum, but I knew it was an important day. The witch’s New Year. I had plenty of books to research what might make it great for her.
That’s exactly what I was going to do.