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He compares the feeling of waking up in the hospital to taking a nap longer than what you had expected. Mouth dry and fuzzy, eyes so bleary it’s almost painful to open them any more than slivers. Then comes the adrenaline that spurs on the rabbit’s chase of trying to think about who found him. It was his dad, most likely; Jack was hanging out with his old Lima friends and Mom was futzing around with PTO nonsense until well into the night. What had transpired between them both after the last run-in with a veritable cavalry of Hummel’s and Hudson’s took away the last rope Dave clung to in order to have some sort of connection with Paul.
Dad’s cologne, the way his thighs were trembling from where Dave was awkwardly splayed across them, and his hands – was he washing dishes before he thought hmm, wonder if I should check up on my closeted gay son who’s just been harassed at school? Of all the maybes that run through Dave’s mind that last one was a definite nay-be. Dad could have had a gun to his head and still wouldn’t have washed a single dish. It was sweat, nervous sweat, my-child-is-dying-and-no-one’s-around-to-help-me sweat. Dave didn’t think he was ever one to garner any sort of concern. Big enough to play sports, smart enough to get past the NCAA regulations. You couldn’t have a better Lima football player if you grew him in Columbus.
That is, if he wasn’t queer. Dave still plays it over and over in his mind, the bubbling of the paint around the letters spelling out fag and in a fleeting moment of sardonicism, he laughs. Of all the things they could have written on that locker – he wasn’t without his own self-identified flaws – they chose the three-letter one that has an FBI hate crime case open and shut in a blink. Not that he’d breathe a word to anyone outside of medical professionals about it, and those ones specifically had to keep their fucking mouths shut.
Down the hall an assortment of doors open and shut, encourage the scuffle of feet onto the freshly waxed floor, and Dave imagines there being others like him in those rooms, and that the ones lying in the beds with bandaged wrists have families that love them, psychiatrists that don’t say a thing as they scribble down orders and crank out prescriptions, friends who’ve already started the online fundraisers for the medical bills and have plates of freshly baked goods waiting for them at their respective cookie-cutter subdivision houses.
Much to his surprise, Dave could go for seeing his mom about now. Not the fleeting kisses on the cheek and side embraces they’ve had so far since he started high school and, ultimately, his life as a young adult. He’s loathe to sound like a toddler cousin from a few years ago, but he wants his mommy, and when he’s just about ready to give into the urge and press the call button wedged between the mattress and the bed frame, the door opens.
Dad.
Or, what’s left of him. Dave doesn’t have to scrutinize a thing to conclude that there hasn’t been a moment’s rest or a second spent under running water with soap to know that the last few days for his dad have been anything but traumatic. Dad’s face does that awkward scrunching thing again and his steps towards Dave’s bed are almost timid, as if he’ll wake up if he gives his mind the implication he’s relieved beyond measure to still have his oldest boy.
So Dave cries too, partly because he’s a contagious crier. Once it’s in the air or on the shirt collar it won’t be long before he’s blubbering like a baby too, and his dad holds onto him once again, but no way like that fateful night. Now Paul’s chest and belly heave with his sobs and for someone who’s bouncing back from a nearly-successful suicide attempt Dave’s feeling mightily guilty right now. When he tries to speak for the first time since being extubated it comes out as a godawful croak. “No, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Paul shushes him and looks down at where he holds Dave’s head to his chest. Though they’re the only two in the room Paul feels like he’s being shunned in front of millions for having, silently, given the green light for Dave to solve his turmoil with a belt flung upon a rafter.
The last time Paul was in this hospital for a reason other than a workplace injury and whatever bone Dave happened to break on the football field was, well, the day Dave was born. He about didn’t make it – Diane managed to get Jack dropped off with their babysitter before driving herself to the hospital – but in the end he got to do all he’d done the first time around. Without all the related horror and nausea, of course.
And Dave, such a beautiful baby, healthy and strong. If the nursery that day had held an NFL draft, the newest Karofsky boy would have gone first round, easy. While Jack was tall and lithe like his mother, Dave looked to be his equal in stature but a prospective beast in any contact sport. Pudgy little hands that coiled around Paul’s finger when he touched them. Newborn feet and toes that couldn’t stay underneath the receiving blankets for too terribly long. Diane teased him horribly for being so attached to Dave from day one. The picture she prized the most on their living room mantel was Dave, about six months old or so, under Paul’s chin. Both are looking right at the camera as if they were interrupted practicing a tango.
Come to think of it, Paul can’t remember a time after that when he and Dave were ever that proximate to each other. Everything was slaps on the back, handshakes, arm around the shoulder at every grade school graduation ceremony. It slowly became cliché for fathers to hang onto their sons once the boys entered kindergarten. Paul was an exception for a moment, letting Dave hold onto him on the very first day of school for as long as he liked. And if that span of time was most of the morning and nearly into craft time, Paul obliged without once mentioning the job he was now four hours late for.
Up to now Paul’s been to work maybe three times in two weeks. He doesn’t sleep, eat, anything that’s not frantic internet searches for anything that can validate the gremlins in his mind that hiss you’ve done this, and not even one says anything of the sort. In fact, they make it sound like as if his son’s near-death was a good learning lesson for both father and child, when in fact, Paul can’t see it as anything other than the opposite – Christ’s most tempestuous examination, one Paul never studied for or attended class to learn the background. He had no gay friends that he was aware of. The only real exposure was the Hummel boy, and all Paul felt then was anger at the thought of his son tormenting someone else for no concise reason.
The reason, of course. Dave was jealous. He saw Burt and Kurt together, loving father sticking to his guns and loving his gay son openly, bravely, proudly. Dave didn’t think he’d ever have that. He ran through every possible chaos scenario, deprived himself of luxuries he knew for sure would be gone the minute he outed himself. Paul piles on the self-loathing when he realizes Dave wasn’t sulking considering his expulsion and subsequent enrollment in another school. So close but so far away, Dave was dissolving from his own grief. Not that Dave didn’t want to talk to him, he didn’t know where to begin. Paul never let him know where it is he’d like his son to take it from when he came to his father with an issue. Eighteen years after that early morning chat he and his newborn son had in the nursery, they were breaking apart and settling in for another lengthy conversation about something decidedly more morose.
Dave’s hand is on Paul’s face when they look at each other for the first time in days. Both share winces of equal severity at the condition of the other. Paul breathes in once, twice, trying to get to the point where he can say a word without breaking down again. “Bet you didn’t think I’d be the one to find you, that you’d get away with it like you’ve with everything else,” Paul says and instantly he regrets ever having come here, giving Dave the impression that there was something for him to feel sorry about. It doesn’t seem to be the case by the way Dave’s face loses any color it had earlier.
“But dads have a sixth sense. It happened every morning after I sent you off to that new school, when you woke up after a hundred thousand good days and made each one that came after seem like they were ones so terrible you’d choose death. I blamed you for all I didn’t know like you were the chief expert who was supposed to saddle his own issues and deal with your own father’s incompetency at the same time.” Dave wipes his face with the back of his hand and by the way he trembles the pulse ox monitor clipped to his fingertip almost comes off. He hates that it had to come to this but no revelations were ever stumbled upon in any of his other successes. It took him nearly breaking every time – sports, school, Kurt – to bring his father to his senses.
Paul knows it as if he and his son speak psychically in between murmured phrases. He leans against Dave on the bed with his son’s hand still tangled in his own and so, so blessedly relieved to be having this conversation with a live, warm body who looks a fair amount like him, handsomer, young, full of potential that was very nearly lost.
Fleetingly, Paul remembers the kindergarten entry exam he had to subject Dave to. “Nowadays lawyers don’t write much – dictate to an assistant who types it out – so you can imagine the level of shit I was in when you got to kindergarten and couldn’t hold onto a pencil.” Dave can’t help it, he laughs even though it sounds awful. “So I start training myself right alongside you, I’ve got the manuscript paper with the dotted lines and the fat pencils that are barely sharpened. One moment you’re taking every letter of ‘David’ and writing it ass-backwards, the next, you’ve got your whole name – first, middle, last – on the paper for your teacher to see. I’d just gotten down the basics, things I’d need to be read clear on official forms. You went above and beyond. When I’d be dressing a docket for court you’d sit in my lap and hold onto whatever part of the pencil you could, so you could help me out with my penmanship. I carried one of those stupid Ticonderoga pencils in my pocket until you graduated from middle school.”
“My handwriting’s still the same in quality, if that’s any consolation,” Dave chokes and again takes a hand across his face to quell the flow of tears. But he gets it, the gist of the whole anecdotal trip back to the time in life where all Dave had to be concerned with was how to write something he already knew. So as one of them was learning something new entirely, one was working off what he had that seriously needed to be revised. The sigh of relief he makes loosens his entire body from head to toe.
From there they spend the next half hour talking about what led up to what they’re collectively called the meltdown, as if Dave was a nuclear reactor and Paul the scientist tasked with keeping its levels fair. Paul remembers an article he read about people identifying concrete times in their past where it affirmed their gay identity, so he inquires as to which figure Dave found himself attracted to that let him know. “This is going to explain a good deal of my brief obsession with 1970’s television and all those questions I asked you and Mom, but… Chevy Chase.” Paul groans playfully, seeing now the aging member of TV specials and not the heartthrob his son saw in old Saturday Night Live episodes. “I mean, most of the male cast members on there did it for me at the tender age of fourteen, but I had my heart set on being Mrs. Chevy Chase until I realized he’d been married for fifteen years and had three children. I couldn’t be a stepfather.”
Partially crying with the relief of feeling an emotion other than sorrow, Paul laughs, a boisterous sound that only gets louder when he sees the color in Dave’s cheeks rise after he finishes speaking. “Like I’d let that horse’s ass marry into this family,” Paul sputters as he reaches for tissues in a box on the nightstand. He dabs at his eyes as he imagines a world in which a man twenty years his senior is married to…and he stops it right there. “I don’t even think you got past the Not Ready for Prime-Time Players, there was so much eighties potential just waiting for you. Charles Rocket, what a jawline. Dennis Miller, he’s keeping Suave and VO5 in business. Kevin Nealon, nice boy. And you pick Chevy…good grief.”
“Another guilty pleasure…Tom Hanks.” Paul’s noise of disbelief is louder than the one before and Dave’s laugh echoes it heartily. If it takes them finding common ground in this through attractions to the same and opposite sex, then so be it. Dave figured he was going to be stranded at sea forever, envying the ones who rowed by or sailed into the sunset with their loving families and beautiful significant others. He’s not to the boyfriend part yet, but he’s at least staked himself out a raft and grabbed ahold of his dad to man the watercraft with him.