23. Clark
Clark
Aknock at the door woke me. River was still attached to my side.
“Yes?” I called out, and River stirred.
Miguel poked his head into the room. “You boys taking visitors?”
River beamed and started getting up.
“Ouch,” I complained when he jostled me.
He looked back with a grimace. “Sorry!”
“I’m fine. Go. Kiss your boyfriend.”
Miguel stepped into the room, followed by Beau.
I was so fucking happy to see him. River slid off the bed and collapsed against Miguel, clinging to him for dear life. Miguel hugged him back, just as fiercely. I’d hidden it well, but I felt guilty for begrudging their closeness this morning.
Beau, however, hung back. Maybe it was all too much, but … fuck it. I held out my hand. Because I needed him. He rushed to take it.
I let out a relieved breath as he kissed each knuckle separately.
“You’re looking so much better already,” he said, his eyes brimming with tears. “Do they think you have a TBI?”
“Nope. My brain’s fine.” I arched a brow. Ouch. Wrong brow. “Relatively speaking, that is. It’s the low blood sugar that nearly killed me. Doc said I need a lot more of those DQ Blizzards.”
Beau lowered his head and scuffed the toe of his boot on the floor, like he’d just been convicted of a crime.
“What’s this look?” I squeezed his hand. “It’s not like you withheld food from me.”
“Yeah, but I saw the way you were eating, and I didn’t think it was my place to say anything. I should’ve said something.”
“I’ve already nagged him,” River said. Like he was proud of himself.
“Doesn’t mean I’m gonna stay quiet about it, though,” Beau insisted.
Why was I surrounded by stubborn men?
“I promise, I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I just lose my appetite when I’m stressed out.”
Beau nodded, taking my hand again, pressing kisses to my palm.
“Honestly, I blame it on the boy,” I said, keeping the bad jokes coming.
River, still hugging Miguel, stuck out his arm and flipped me the bird. Again.
“Miguel, that is a beautiful manicure you’ve given my son.”
The doctor and nurse slipped back into the room, pausing at our little tableau.
“Nice to see that you’ve got a good care team, Mr. Jensen,” the doctor said with a grin. “Your electrolytes are good, and your blood glucose has come up to low normal. I was about to sign your discharge papers.”
I nodded. “Good. Now, next thing is figuring out how we’re gonna get home.”
“You’re not driving,” Beau said, definitively.
The doctor held up his hand. “Why don’t you call the nurse when you have all your plans figured out, and then we can take care of the paperwork, prescriptions, and your instructions.”
“Great, Doc. Thanks.” After the doctor and nurse left, I gave Beau a pointed look. “Oh, really?”
“Yep,” he answered. “I’ll go with you. Between me and River, we’ll get you home.”
“Me too,” Miguel insisted.
“Guys…” I glanced around at each of them. “Isn’t this just dragging out the inevitable?”
Miguel put his hands on his hips and stood at the foot of my bed, staring me down. “The only thing that’s inevitable is that I’m figuring out a way to be in your son’s life, and you’re gonna have to be okay with that.”
“Miguel, I’m thrilled that y’all want to take this to the next level, I just… It’s so painful to be in a long-distance relationship. Are you sure you want that?”
“We won’t be long-distance for long,” River announced.
“Is Miguel moving to Chicago?” I asked.
“He doesn’t need to.” River smiled at Miguel. “Colorado State University is right down the road from Snow Creek.”
I checked my pain drip to make sure they hadn’t given me a hallucinogenic.
“What are you talking about? I’m sure Colorado State University is a lovely place, but it’s got nothing on the Art Institute.”
“Dad, I still can’t—”
“No,” I said, interrupting him. “You’ve wanted to be an artist your entire life. We’ve talked about the Art Institute for ages.”
“Yeah, Dad.” River shook his head. “Before.”
“Son, you will get your love of art back. I promise. I super, super promise. And, Miguel, you’re a great guy, but please, you can’t let him throw away his life like this.”
“Dad,” River repeated, his voice steady. “I am not throwing away my life. And I am not giving up on art.”
“Then… What about the Art Institute?” I asked, confused.
And a little panicked, if I was being honest.
“We can visit the Art Institute in the summer, Dad. But this whole thing has taught me that I don’t want my entire livelihood to be dependent on something that is so tied to my emotions. And yeah, you’ve always supported my art, but you’ve always told me that I should make smart choices.”
“Yeah, like going with one of the best art programs in the country. That’s a smart choice.”
“Dad, have you ever bothered to look at the median salary of an artist?”
Pfft.
“Son, you know you don’t need to worry about that. I’ll supplement.”
River heaved a loud sigh. “No, Dad. I need to be my own man, and I need to make my own money, and I need a life that makes sense for me.”
“But, River…”
Beau cleared his throat. “Do you mind if I ask a question, River? I know this is super personal family stuff, but may I ask you something?”
River’s answer was immediate. “Of course.”
I bit my tongue and nodded, even though I didn’t want to.
“You said a couple of times that this has to make sense for you,” Beau said, choosing his words carefully. “I think your dad is worried you might be throwing your opportunities away on a teenage fling.”
River’s expression darkened, and Beau held up his hand.
“But if you’re talking about making smart choices, then maybe you’re thinking beyond just your relationship with Miguel? Can you say a little bit more about that?”
I knew that Beau was right to ask questions instead of flinging accusations.
Something I definitely should have done.
My head hurt, my arm was throbbing, and I didn’t really wanna be having this conversation right now, but we were already in the middle of it.
So, I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then another.
But River knew me a little too well to let it slide. “Dad, we can wait until you feel better.”
My jaw tightened. “I won’t feel better until I hear you out.”
River rolled his shoulders and then sat on the bed next to me, taking my hand.
“Art isn’t just about painting, Dad. It’s about emotions. It’s about politics. It’s about the world around us. It’s about a world we can imagine for ourselves.”
I nodded along, listening to the passion in his voice, wanting with everything I had to tell him to pursue his dreams at full throttle because of it. Who gave a shit about money? I could take care of the money.
Why didn’t he want to follow his dreams?
“Would it surprise you to learn that I actually have been creating art this entire time?”
I drew my chin back. “You’ve been painting? I thought you said—”
Shaking his head, he said, “Remember how I didn’t know if I could go back to full color with my style? That I could maybe introduce a little here and there, but it was too much right now?”
“Of course. You’re allowed to integrate,” I answered automatically, repeating my earlier words.
“That’s what happened with my art, too.” He dashed away a tear. “I just didn’t want to tell you because I knew it would make you sad.”
My chest contracted, and I thought back to the beautiful painting hanging in my bathroom at home. The idea that he wouldn’t be able to paint like that again … it killed me. It absolutely killed me.
Which meant my son knew me even better than I’d predicted.
I looked to Beau, unable to explain how he’d become an anchor point for me in such a short amount of time. Something about the way he was looking between me and River, like he understood both of us. And he had asked me to listen to my son.
So, I listened to my son.
“In what way, River?”
“I couldn’t paint. But I had to do something with my hands.” He sniffled loudly, his tears flowing a little more freely. “The only medium that really made any sense after the accident was charcoal.”
Charcoal?
I hadn’t seen him use charcoal at all in the months since the accident.
“No colored pencils or anything?”
“I couldn’t do it with color, Dad. I don’t know why.” He pressed his lips together, his chin trembling. “It’s just … color hurts. It really fucking hurts.”
I squeezed his hand. “I’m so sorry. My sweet boy, I am so, so sorry. I hate that you’ve lost color.”
“But I’m proud of what I’ve been able to do with shadow,” he said, tears sparkling in his dark eyes. “Can I show you?”
“Of course you can show me.”
“Some of the earlier stuff is real disturbing, though. You don’t have to look at that.”
“Show me everything.”
River pulled his phone from his back pocket, then worried at his lip.
“Are you sure you don’t wanna recover a little bit? We don’t have to be in the hospital for this.”
“Show me,” I insisted, needing to see what he couldn’t share with me before.
He sniffed again, then navigated to some kind of cloud account. Where he’d stored digital photographs of his art.
He scrolled for a few moments, then held the screen to his chest. “If it’s too much, it won’t hurt my feelings if you skip ahead to the lighter stuff.”
“If you can take it, I can take it.”
He took a deep breath, letting it out as he handed me his phone.
I shared a glance with Beau, who sent me an encouraging nod as he gripped River’s shoulder. He was here for both of us.
I turned the phone over.
The first piece took my breath away.
It was a picture taken of a page in a thick, spiral-bound sketchbook.
At first glance, it looked like a bunch of angry strokes of nearly black charcoal on white paper. So much charcoal that the high-quality paper curled up at the edges.
The strokes, however, had a sense of direction. I followed the flow of the charcoal to a spot of negative space in the lower right-hand corner of the piece. There, doubled over in agony, was a rough sketch of a person. Being attacked by the dark on all sides.
“If it’s—”
“It’s not too much, Riv.” I gestured to my tears. “Good art moves you.”
He seemed to accept that, and I scrolled to the next one. Another snapshot of his sketchbook, this page another depiction of the darkness that was attacking my son. This time it seemed to pull him under, as if into a deep, dark sea.
I almost couldn’t breathe.
I thought I knew. I mean … the black clothing, the endless tears… I thought I knew.
And yet my son, my precious, precious boy, had depths that even I hadn’t yet touched. That he’d wanted to shield me from his pain… I—
I was glad we both had therapists on speed dial.
I felt like such a bumbling fool, dragging him out to Colorado, trying to fix a thing so dark and vast…
This isn’t about you.
I kept scrolling.
As I flipped through the pictures, though, two things were happening at the same time. The artwork itself improved from piece to piece, almost from the beginning. Rough, angry, hurt sketches slowly gave way to precision. Secondly, and much more slowly, the darkness began to lighten.
The character in his pieces, still little more than a rough sketch, began to stand up to the darkness.
Eventually, the darkness receded. I realized, belatedly, that in each piece was a hidden date.
Like a grief-stricken ‘Where’s Waldo’ with numbers.
I scrolled back, finding and putting together the dates with the various, usually awful milestones.
The day he got home from the hospital.
His first day of physical therapy.
His last day of physical therapy.
The day he took the GED.
The rough character in his pieces became more refined until the sketches became recognizable as self-portraits. The portraits themselves morphed from pretty good to stunning in their detail.
Soon, I started showing up in his art. I gasped at the last piece, done only in charcoal, of my face. If you’d told me he’d taken a black-and-white photograph, I’d have believed you.
“Son, these are extraordinary. You are an extraordinary artist.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I have a long way to go, but I’ve been following a bunch of charcoal artists online.”
I bit back the desire to once again beg him to reconsider art school. Instead, I asked, “What’s next?”
“Well,” he said, his voice shaky.
I grabbed the remote for the bed and adjusted it so that I was sitting up a bit more. Hoping he could see that if it was important to him, it was important to me.
“I…” He bit at his lips. Miguel rubbed his back. “I realized that this was kind of a form of therapy for me.”
His eyes flicked to mine, as if to see if I understood.
“I get that,” I said, adding certainty to my voice, even though I was far from certain. “It’s clear as day, your progress from the earliest, darkest days till now.”
“And if it can be therapy for me,” he said, straightening, almost as if preparing for a battle, “then maybe it could be therapy for other people too.”
I’d started scrolling through the gallery again as he spoke, but his words stopped me in my tracks. I looked up from the screen to find him locked in on my reaction.
“Art therapy?” I asked, as if feeling the first rays of dawn. “Do you want to be an art therapist?”
A fat tear rolled down his cheek. He nodded. “I wanna be an art therapist. I wanna help people the way that art helped me.” He sniffed, huffing out a laugh. “And bonus, I don’t have to starve.”
“You were never going to have to starve,” I insisted. “But … not many people are willing to take their pain and use it to help other people like this.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “Look at Miguel. Look at Beau. They both had shitty families. And they make sure that teenagers feel seen and heard, and even loved. All sorts of people take their pain and do wonderful things with it.” He took his phone from my hands. “I just wanna be one of those people.”
I pulled him down and kissed his forehead. “Then you are already one of those people. You amaze me.”
Miguel closed the distance, kissing River’s temple. Proud. Less than two weeks, and he was proud of my son.
I could’ve reasonably told River that following his heart all the way out to Colorado was short-sighted. Illogical.
But River’s brilliant smile through tears? Six months ago, I didn’t even know he’d ever be able to smile like that again. I’d have given any body part you asked of me in exchange for the brilliant smile lighting up his face at that moment.
Somehow, the Art Institute had become my dream instead of his. His dreams had changed, and they were leading him out of the darkness. I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to support him in finding the light again.
River looked to Beau, then back to me. He raised a brow.
I followed his line of sight and saw the man who’d changed so many things for me. And he was sad. Sad because he knew he was about to lose me.
River crossed his arms. A dare.
Well … shit.
Maybe it was the morphine, but I had a feeling I was about to turn my life upside down.