Chapter Twelve
Jethro
The always-stick-together rule had the unintended benefit of strengthening the lie of their marriage, with Eli known far and wide as the man who had melted the Ice Queen.
“How’s that popsicle taste, doc?” Duncan shouted one morning when they were coming out of the showers.
“Better than your sister,” Eli replied with a smile that had the rest of the men in the bathroom laughing.
It was only Samuel who felt his teeth clench, but he didn’t let it show.
He didn’t show anything to anyone, except maybe to Eli, but only when they were safely away in the closet.
He kept expecting things to go wrong. Eli was too beautiful, too generous, and altogether too nice for prison.
But people liked Eli, both prisoners and COs.
They liked his singing in the showers, they liked his strength out on the yard, and most of all they liked his health expertise.
Eli didn’t have access to his prescription pad or his equipment, but he was a good doctor with practical advice and an excellent bedside manner, and that meant becoming the hottest commodity in prison since the criminal defense lawyer who’d been released two years ago.
Samuel loathed it.
It wasn’t just the constant interruptions he hated, or even the potential for harassment the “patients” offered.
Often enough it was just sharing Eli that pissed him off.
Sharing his smiles, his laugh, his words.
But he didn’t spend all his time pissed off.
Not even the majority of it, and Rat liked to point that out.
“You’re writing to Hailey, aren’t you?”
The man was cleaning his shoes—the only thing he was fastidious about. Samuel looked up from his letter. He was up in his bunk while Eli was nearby doing some yoga. It was taking a lot of effort to keep himself from sneaking glances.
“Yeah. Why?”
Rat grinned and pointed at his teeth. “You smile when you write to her.”
His hand jumped to his face. There was only surprise on it, but he knew Rat was right.
How embarrassing—and potentially dangerous.
Especially when it wasn’t just writing to Hailey that was pulling those smiles.
Rat had caught him doing it with Nathaniel too.
He even wrote to Eli, sometimes, slipping his additions into the man’s mail pile just to see him laugh.
It was the power of those laughs that had him arguing with the warden again.
“I don’t understand why Norm can’t just set aside portions of vegetables for Eli before he starts cooking the rest of it,” he said for the third time. “It would only take him seconds, and it’s something he’s willing to do.”
The warden’s mouth was becoming thinner and thinner as the conversation dragged on. “I told you. We can’t create a precedent for special meal requests. Think about the kind of anarchy that would cause if people thought certain individuals were getting special treatment.”
“But it’s not special treatment. He has a disease . And it’s not like I’m even requesting a gluten-free meal. I’m only asking that those parts that are inherently gluten-free be set aside before they can become contaminated. He’d still be eating what everyone else was eating.”
But the warden shook her head. “I hear where you’re coming from, Fuller, but I’ve been in this business for a long time and I’m telling you it won’t end well. I know you care about Thompson’s health, but he sticks out too much already. You don’t want to give people more reason to resent him.”
He kicked her trashcan over before he left—an act of such astounding immaturity he wanted to smack himself for it—but it didn’t matter.
He was at another dead end, or so he told himself.
But the truth was, there was still one option open to him.
One he never would have resorted to even if he were hacking up blood in a ditch somewhere.
And so the guilt built. The letters helped, and the phone calls.
Eli was always happy to hand the phone over so that he and Nathaniel could have their little book club calls.
Happy when Hailey would call up gushing about the latest story he’d sent. So happy—except when he wasn’t.
It wasn’t easy to spot Eli’s pain. He was excellent at hiding it, but as time in the prison dragged on, he stood up from chairs slower and would rub at his joints sometimes when he thought no one was looking.
But Samuel was always looking. He knew the way Eli liked to stand under the water in the shower, letting it hit his neck and shoulders to try and get the ache out of the muscles.
There were so many things like that. Too many.
But the final straw to break his resistance was a strange one.
“Close your eyes and open your mouth,” Eli said.
Samuel lowered his book. He was hanging out on Eli’s bed again—at the man’s insistence.
“I can’t see your face when you’re above me,” Eli liked to say.
“And without it I’ll die of loneliness.” But he knew the real reason was the man wanting to keep him in easy access. Just in case. Always just in case.
“Why? Have you been experimenting again?”
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s not anything gross.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“Last time I didn’ t know you hated beets.”
“As if anyone under eighty could want them.”
But he closed his eyes anyway, his heart already hammering with how close the man was.
This time, what was pushed into his mouth Eli’s cooking.
It wasn’t the cafeteria’s cooking either.
It was a candy of some sort. A candy so sour he shot out of the bed and hacked it up into his hand with no thought at all for his dignity.
Eli had to hold on to the bed to keep himself from falling, already doubled over with laughing.
Samuel was outraged. “What the hell is this!”
“Oh Jesus. I can’t breathe.”
He grabbed hold of the man’s shirt and jerked.
Eli, who was already unbalanced from his laughter, came crashing down onto the bed.
Samuel used the element of surprise to straddle Eli’s waist, using one hand to grab both the man’s wrists, effectively pinning him to the bed.
“Beg for mercy,” he said, but Eli was still laughing.
It made it only too easy to shove the candy into his mouth.
Eli was okay—the first couple of seconds.
“Shit. Shit!”
He clamped his hand over Eli’s mouth, but the man broke the hold easily, pulled the hand away, and spat the candy out onto the floor.
“How is that FDA approved!”
Samuel pressed his hands to his face, fell back onto the bed, and laughed until he thought he would throw up.
It set Eli off again, and they didn’t stop until a CO demanded to know what drugs they were on.
“Here,” Eli said, holding out the package.
“Have one.” And Samuel thought his spleen would bust. His stomach was cramping, and he couldn’t understand what was so funny.
Two grown men eating sour candy in prison.
“Stop,” he gasped, “I’ll die.” And they did try to stop, but the harder they tried, the worse it got, and they couldn’t look at each other, couldn’t even listen to the other’s breathing without busting out again.
And Samuel didn’t know what to do. Could a person die from laughing?
It did eventually stop, as all things did, and then it was just the two of them, lying on the bed, shoulder to shoulder, grinning like demons, and he realized there was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do to help the man.
He sat up.
“Do you need to pee?” Eli asked. “I might have wet myself a little.”
He shook his head. “Phone call.”
He didn’t want to move. No, he wanted to lay back down and wrap an arm around Eli. Both arms. Hell, he’d throw in his legs too. He wanted to touch him. Maybe even to peel away his clothes and touch him skin-to-skin. The thought made his heart pound, but it wasn’t with the old fear.
He had to wait for Eli to sit up to scoot around him.
A more confident and less-damaged man might have climbed over him, but he couldn’t do that.
It seemed silly that he could be so timid after straddling him and forcibly pinning him to the bed, but that couldn’t be counted.
He’d been in the throes of some kind of madness before, and didn’t know that version of himself, the half-crazed laughing boy who could rough house with Eli as easily as a kid on a playground.
Eli followed him out of the dorm and down the hall to the phone station. “Did you forget to tell Jenny something earlier?”
He shook his head. He knew what he was going to do but wasn’t sure how he was going to do it.
He went to the back phone, the one all the way in the corner, and lifted the receiver.
Eli had stopped further down and was leaning against the wall.
The man always gave him space for phone calls, but was nothing like that with his own.
Whenever Eli spoke to anyone, he would pull Samuel in too and together they’d share the phone between them, and not just to Nathaniel or Hailey, either.
Eli was perfectly comfortable having him by his side when talking to friends and colleagues alike.
It meant Samuel was rapidly filling in the holes in his knowledge about Eli’s life, and he couldn’t help but wish he could even the field.
Did Eli wish he’d do the same for him? If so, he wanted to do it.
Wanted Eli everywhere and with everything.
But he didn’t know the first thing about breaking down his walls.
The receiver in hand, he took a breath and let it out as slowly as he could.
He was surprised at how easily his fingers found the little numbered squares.
He hadn’t dialed the number in years, but it came back to him with the same ease as dialing Jenny.
Then came the wait. It always took a few extra seconds for the pre-recorded message to play the usual warning.
An inmate was calling, was the recipient willing to accept the charges?
Jenny must have heard the message hundreds—no, thousands—of times.
But this would be the first time for anyone else from his previous life.
He hadn’t even thought of what he would do if no one picked up. Try again? Give up?
He didn’t have to wonder for long. The line connected.
“Samuel.”
There was no surprise in the voice, not much of anything, really. Then again, Jethro was the one who had taught him everything about hiding his true feelings.
“Hello, father.” Those two words were, perhaps, the most difficult he’d ever spoken. Worse, he didn’t know what to follow them up with. Did he ask the man how he was doing? Did he apologize? It was long past the time he could do anything like that. “I need your help.”
There was no pause. No shock. “Yes, I thought you might.”
He wanted to bury himself. He knew it was best to let his family pretend he’d never existed. It was what he’d vowed to do from the beginning. And now, to call after all this time asking for handouts…
He could feel the words clogging his throat. So many and all so impossible. He forced himself to swallow. He felt small again, a child. As stupid and pathetic as he’d been the day his father had broken into the bathroom. Eli , he reminded himself. This is for Eli .
“There’s a man here,” he found himself saying.
“A doctor.” And slowly, word by stumbling word, he gave his father a rundown of Eli’s situation.
He kept the words moving, afraid that if he stopped, he might not be able to start back up again, and that fear only made him sound jumbled and wandering, but his father said nothing, only listened, until he finally came to the point.
“He needs better food, and I can’t give it to him.
I thought maybe if the whole prison had the same choices… ”
“I’ll take care of it.”
He thought maybe the man was misunderstanding. He hadn’t yet explained his idea. Hadn’t even asked anything, really. But his father seemed to consider the matter over and done with.
“Is there anything else you need?”
Sometimes when he put too much peanut butter in his mouth at once, his throat would feel like it was coated with glue. The feeling he had now was like that, but worse. “No, I...no.”
There was a pause, and he could have filled that pause with any number of things. But all of it, every word in the overwhelmingly large English language, felt entirely useless to him.
“Is this man the reason Jennifer has moved out of the house?”
That didn’t really make much sense. Jenny had largely been living in the apartment near her office since the day she turned eighteen. But he knew what his father meant. “Yes.”
There was another pause, and he wondered if he could read his father’s displeasure in it.
“I should be able to implement the changes in a few days. ”
It was goodbye. He knew it and felt the relief it brought him. Still, he clung to the phone and tried to think of what to say. So much had happened since they’d seen each other in the courtroom. Too much. They were strangers now. “Goodnight, father.”
He didn’t know what his voice revealed. He didn’t even know what he himself was feeling. Maybe it didn’t matter. The line went dead.
He pulled the phone away from his face and stared at it. The phones were all so old. Whenever he used them, he couldn’t help but wonder about how many people had held the receiver in their hands. What had they felt? What had they talked about? And where were they now?
A hand touched his back, but he didn’t flinch. He knew that hand.
“You okay, puppy?”
He turned to him. He’d stared at Eli’s face so much he could draw every expression mood and line from memory alone.
“I’m hungry.”
Eli laughed, and the sound helped erode a little of the pressure inside of him. “Again? You must be going through a growth spurt.”
He wasn’t hungry. Not really. But he wanted an excuse to be taken care of that wouldn’t raise the alarm too much. But maybe Eli sensed something regardless, because he put an arm around his shoulders, and kept him close, even though it made walking more difficult.