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Owen helps him out of the SUV. TK doesn’t need him to, he was shot in his chest not his legs, but his father doesn’t ask whether he needs help. He just jogs around the front end of the vehicle and opens the passenger’s side door and takes TK’s elbow like he’s an elderly relative instead of a 26-year-old man who definitely does not need help getting out of a car.
“My legs still work, y’know,” TK tells him petulantly, as Owen leads him toward the door.
“You were in a coma,” Owen points out.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Your mother,” Owen says as he flips over keys on the ring and locates the correct one, “informed me in no uncertain terms that if I did not take the best possible care of you while you’re recuperating, she would personally fly down here and slice my nuts off with a rusty nail file.”
TK snorts. “Colorful.”
“Right?” He unlocks the door and pushes it open.
Thankfully, he doesn’t guide TK inside. He lets TK follow in after him like he’s aware TK isn’t a child. He even lets TK close the door behind them.
“Okay.” Owen claps his hands together. “I stocked the fridge, I got all your favorites. I moved my TV into your bedroom, in case you want to watch a movie or something. Oh and I left a sleeping mask on your dresser, the doctor said sleep is healing and I thought you might want to nap. Are you hungry?”
TK closes his eyes for a moment, biting back a sarcastic comment or two. Instead of answering, he goes toward the couch and lowers himself gingerly onto it. His wound is localized but it sort of makes his entire body hurt.
“Should we watch Aladdin?” Owen asks, following TK into the living room. “We watched it on repeat when you had the Chicken Pox.”
“I was five,” TK says.
Owen breaks into a highly tone-deaf rendition of Friend Like Me, complete with dorky dad dancing, and TK groans. “You are no fun,” Owen informs him.
“Yeah, well. I got shot.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to complain that I’m trying to help you and use that as an excuse to get out of singing Disney songs with me.”
“Sure I am. Because I got shot.” TK grins at him, and laughs when Owen rolls his eyes.
“Fine.” He goes to the kitchen and gets a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. He brings it over and hands it to TK, who takes it and takes a long sip, if only to keep Owen from nagging him.
“Delicious,” TK says.
“I am thrilled to see a coma didn’t damage your sunny demeanor.”
It’s TK’s turn to roll his eyes.
For about 10 minutes, Owen leaves him alone. He putters around in the kitchen; TK thinks he’s probably just opening and closing drawers in a lame attempt to make himself appear busy so that it doesn’t seem like he’s just biding time until he can check on TK again. TK grinds his teeth about it and picks up his phone, opening Instagram to try to distract himself from the annoyance of it all. He scrolls absently with his thumb, over stunning Marjan selfies and work-out videos from a trainer he follows and an ad suggesting an apparently revolutionary new kind of yoga mat.
He pauses as he passes by a post from Carlos’s account. It’s rarely updated, Carlos is entirely too mature for social media, but two days ago he posted a picture of a sunset from what TK can assume is the backyard of his townhouse. The caption is simply a blue heart emoji. It’s generic and emotionless and TK chews for a moment at the inside of his cheek before he swipes his thumb to scroll past it. Carlos had been at the hospital. TK was unconscious at the time so he doesn’t remember it, but his father had told him about it. TK hadn’t asked too many questions. He’s not sure he wants further information about what that looked like. Carlos is such a giant question mark right now; a cavernous pit of tension and confusion and TK isn’t sure he has the energy to deal with any of it.
He presses the button on the side of his phone, sending the screen to black. He tucks it back into his pocket, and rearranges himself on the couch. His skin feels prickly, and TK clenches his jaw because he doesn’t like what that sometimes means.
Owen comes back over, with another water bottle.
“Here you go, son,” he says, his voice laced with phony pep and optimism. TK knows him well enough to know when his dad is putting on airs.
“I’m not even halfway done with this one,” TK tells him flatly.
“You heard the doctor! You can’t overhydrate. If your – ”
TK interrupts. “Don’t tell me what color my pee should be, again.”
Owen ignores him, and reaches toward the other end of the couch.
“What?”
“You need a pillow,” he says.
“I’m fine!” TK asserts. He knows it’s useless. As he says it, he sits up, wincing as the motion hurts his wounded shoulder.
“No. You look uncomfortable.” Owen supports TK’s back and tucks the pillow underneath him. “The last thing you need is a stiff neck.”
“I said I’m fine. Do you really plan to hover over me like a mother hen for the next three weeks?” TK thinks he might actually go insane if that’s the case. His father is overbearing enough on a good day; he does not have any interest in experiencing Owen Strand in the headspace of my son just got shot.
“They said you might heal up in 10 days. But yeah.” Owen shrugs, a poor attempt and playing it off as if he’s capable of being casual about it, and TK sighs and rests his forehead on his knuckles, elbow propped up on the arm of the couch. “I talked to Deputy Chief Radford, he said to take as much time at home as I need.”
“Dad, that’s crazy.” TK sighs again. “You should get back to work.”
“What are you gonna do about food?”
“You said you stocked the fridge. And I got a delivery app on my phone.” TK does his best attempt at a sincere expression, because if he doesn’t get his father out of the house in the next five minutes TK’s pretty sure he’s going to start screaming. “I’ll be okay, I promise.”
“You sure?” Owen says suspiciously.
“I’m sure. You could probably make next shift.”
“Alright. I’ll go get changed.” He stands up, and TK sends a quick burst of gratitude up towards whatever God or deity might be real and listening. “Listen, TK. You’ll be back in no time. Two weeks or less.”
He walks off toward the stairs, and TK mutters, “Yeah, we’ll see.”
He digs his teeth into his lower lip, worrying the flesh between them, and then leaning down to rest his head against the arm of the couch. The position hurts his shoulder, but he doesn’t move. He just lets the pain wash over him, lets it filter down into long-forgotten places and reignite sensations he’s worked hard to keep dormant.
As much as he’s grateful once his dad is gone, TK thinks it might be worse once he’s alone. There’s absolutely nothing to do and nothing holds his attention, and he’s never been good at being idle. The place is spotless, TK searches in vain for some dust or a dish to wash but finds nothing. He puts in a load of laundry, even though it’s only a pair of jeans and a few shirts and a handful of socks and underwear and is barely enough for the Light setting on the washing machine. He gets onto the floor in his bedroom and tries to do a sit-up. He knows it’s a stupid idea before he even starts, but apparently he needs to figure that out for himself, and he certainly does. He pays for that boneheaded thought by spending a full minute lying flat on his back and breathing through the pain with a damaged lung. It’s a fitting metaphor, he thinks bitterly, as he stares up at the ceiling.
Back on the couch, TK kicks his socked feet up onto the coffee table and reclines, crossing his arms over his chest and squeezing his molars together. He counts the minutes as they pass by, sitting in tense silence and tapping his foot.
Why did you want to be a firefighter? his therapist had asked him once, a month ago.
Because they help people, TK had answered. She’d nodded and jotted something down on her notepad. Half of TK would give anything to get his hands on those notes. He’s such a disaster, he’s sure they’d be a highly entertaining read. The other half of him wants to break into her office and steal them just so he can burn them in a metal trash bin so they can never see the light of day again.
It wasn’t the truth, what he’d told her. He knew she didn’t believe him, but she hadn’t pressed, and he hadn’t offered anything further by way of an explanation. The truth, if he’s calculated enough to admit it to himself, is that he’d wanted to be like his dad. His father was a hero. Everyone told him so. Even if TK hadn’t already thought it himself, it would have been entirely impossible to escape it. People informed him over and over and over, even before the towers fell.
The truth, he thinks with a sour burn of something like indigestion expanding in his esophagus, is that TK had believed, perhaps erroneously, that if he followed in Owen’s footsteps, his dad would care about him the way he cared about them. The people at his firehouse were his family. Owen said that all the time. TK sat in a cramped Manhattan apartment with his mom and listened as his father kissed her cheek and said he had to go, because they were his family. As if TK was a neighbor or a pet, something to be patted lightly on the head and given a treat and then left behind.
He lets his head tip back against the top of the sofa cushion. He can feel the clothes he’s wearing against his skin, coarse and scratchy all of a sudden. The folds in his jeans are uncomfortable against his legs. His arms are itchy, and TK scratches them roughly with blunt fingernails but it doesn’t help. The itch is in too deep, he can’t get to it just by touching the outer layer of his skin.
TK wouldn’t have picked this couch. He wouldn’t have picked the color of the walls, or the fabric of the chairs, or the style of coffee table. This isn’t his home. He lives here, but it’s not home. His dingy apartment in New York never really felt like home, either. It always felt temporary. Like a holding cell, like a place for TK to keep himself and bide his time while he waited to find the place he was really supposed to be. He’s never really belonged anywhere.
He likes Carlos’s couch. It’s stylish, it’s comfortable, and there are good memories attached to it. Suddenly TK can smell him, even though he isn’t here. The deodorant Carlos uses, the scent of his shampoo, the musk underneath that’s just him. The glands in TK’s throat tighten and he presses the heels of his palms firmly into his closed eyes. He can’t do this. He can’t think about the taste of Carlos’s kiss, the way his hands feel on TK’s hips, the softness of his skin, that mole behind his ear. Carlos had insisted it was okay and that it wasn’t the same, but TK knows better – he knows he just replaced one addiction with another. And this one is far worse, because at least when TK was using heroin to blur his problems he was only hurting himself.
Talking to his dad’s new girlfriend doesn’t help. All she manages to inform him is that he’s questioning the direction of his life, which he already knew well enough. He briefly considers calling Dr. Schwartzman. His deal with his dad was four months with a therapist, and that deadline has come and gone, and she had offered to keep seeing him but TK had brushed it off. I’m healed, Doc! he’d joked, and she’d just smiled at him sadly and watched him walk out the door.
He’s not healed, not anywhere close, but TK can’t ever seem to outgrow the defiant, angry teenager that still lives inside him and he’d promised his dad four months. Four months of spilling his guts to a stranger, waiting for her to judge him after every confession, being even more annoyed about it when she was understanding instead. Four months of vacillating between taking her advice because it was good advice, and purposely not taking it as if that were some sort of principled stance rather than just a manifestation of the very self-destructive tendencies she had immediately diagnosed. Owen had said four months, and TK had given him four months and not a day longer. A lot can be said about him, most of it unflattering, but he keeps his word.
So he doesn’t call her. It’s the middle of the day, anyway. It’s not like she would answer. She’s likely with other patients, people who are much stronger than TK. People who are sitting willingly on her couch, talking to her, taking her advice, letting her help them. TK wonders what she would say if she knew what happened to him this week. Probably a whole lot of shit he wouldn’t want to hear.
By the time night falls, TK has officially upgraded the level of his crisis from restless to unhappy to meltdown. He’s pacing, and the sound of a car driving by outside startles him as bad as if it had been an explosion, and he’s still itchy and he can’t scratch it out. He digs his fingernails into the inside of his right elbow until he draws blood and it doesn’t make any difference.
The person he sees in the bathroom mirror is both unfamiliar and, at the same time, entirely too familiar. TK knows this person. He knows him intimately. He sees the manic look in his eyes, the mess of his hair, the way his cheeks are drained of color and he looks ill and exhausted. The mirror in his bathroom in New York had a large crack right down the center of it, from the top right corner to the bottom left. He always had to stand to one side a little bit, to see himself clearly. One time, TK had purposely run the tip of his middle finger along that crack, hoping it would slice into his skin and drawing patterns in blood on the glass once it had.
“You wanna do this? You really wanna be a junkie again?” he asks quietly, challenging his reflection. “You want that life? Waking up in rain gutters and not knowing where you are? Hiding the bruises on your arms? Trading your ass for pills to tide you over until your next paycheck?”
He licks his lips. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, but this isn’t a movie, so the TK in the mirror doesn’t come to life and kindly talk him out of anything.
TK pulls his shirt off, grabbing the back of it and tugging it up and over his head. He isn’t careful enough about it to keep his injury from smarting as his arm moves through the sleeve. The skin around the bandage is still discolored, purples and greens stained on the expanse of his chest. His ribcage still hurts when he inhales too deeply, bones bruised from life-saving CPR on the way to the hospital. He assumes that, he doesn’t know it. He wonders who it was. He wonders if it was his dad, or Paul or Judd or Marjan. They’d visited him in the hospital after he woke up, with tinny bright voices and pasted on smiles, and hadn’t included him in discussions of any lingering trauma they were experiencing from seeing their colleague bleeding out in a hallway.
Carefully, he peels back the bandage. The tape sticks to the hair on his chest, and he winces as that stings. The stitches underneath are clean and even. The swelling has gone down even since yesterday. It’s still red but it’s healing. Healing. TK is so unfamiliar with the concept.
He brushes over them with the pad of his thumb, lightly. Then he breathes a few times through his nose, in and out, as he tries to convince himself not to press in against the wound. It would hurt, to dig his fingers into it. He wants that a little bit. TK has a complex relationship with pain, after so many years of it being the only thing he could make himself feel. He’d never talked to his therapist about that. He never told her that he dug steak knives into the skin on his thighs. He never told her he let people use him, and gritted his teeth and begged them to go faster, harder, when his body wanted them to stop. Maybe he should have, but it’s too late, now. Four months are up, and he’s as cured as he’s probably going to get. She did her best. He’s just beyond repair.
TK replaces the bandage with a clean one, carefully taping it back down to his skin and then pulling his shirt back on. He leaves the bathroom and heads for his bedroom, sitting heavily on the end of his bed and clasping his hands in his lap, squeezing them together until all the color drains from his fingers. When he stops, it’s because he feels the ghost of gentle, careful hands touching his own, coaxing him to relax and telling him in a soft, kind voice, that it’s okay. TK never invited him, here. TK never introduced him to his father, he never told Carlos the name of his high school or his birthday or how he takes his coffee. He doesn’t know any of those things about Carlos, either. But he knows that if Carlos were here, he would get onto his knees on the carpet and rub comforting hands up TK’s itchy forearms and gaze at him with those eyes, those glassy brown eyes that TK could so easily have drowned in.
It’s okay. I’m here, you’re okay, Carlos would murmur. TK can hear it just as crystal clear as if he actually were here. TK can’t go to him. He wants to shoot his veins full of poison and up until five days ago he would have gone to Carlos instead; used him instead. But he can’t do that, this time. And he hadn’t really realized how much he’s come to depend on it, until now.
TK winds that up like a length of rope, pulling the thoughts back down into the places where he hides things within himself because he can’t sling-shot them into the sun to get rid of them.
Everything feels scratchy and tense and wrong. TK slides his hands along the tops of his thighs and tries to breathe, tries to iron the moment out to smooth, but it stays wrinkly. He gets up, making a split-second decision because overthinking things has never done him any favors, and heads downstairs. He grabs a coat and his keys and steps out into the cool night air. It hits his skin and the haze dissipates just a little bit.
It's a long walk, but to TK it feels incredibly fast. His strides are quick and purposeful, every single one of them tugging at his injury as his heels pound into the pavement, and in no time at all he’s in a parking lot, staring at neon lights and listening to music and laughter. The moon is bright. His breath turns to fog in front of his face, and his hands ball into fists, squeezing them tight enough to wince at the dig of fingernails into his palm. He watches a man and a woman get out of their white sedan and head for the entrance. He’s wearing cowboy boots and a sweatshirt with a superhero on it, and he holds the door for her. It shuts behind them, and TK clenches his teeth.
He takes a step, and then two, and then retreats. This was never his trigger. He avoids alcohol because he has an addictive personality and enough latent mental illness to fill a grain silo and it always just seemed safer, but it was never his vice. Smack is illegal, though. TK never used to care about that, but if he gets caught with something elicit he’ll be arrested, he might be fired, and that would blow everything up a little more than he’s looking for. He’s not sure he could face the shame, if Carlos found out he’d been booked for possession.
Another step. Another, and another, and then something invisible pulls him back, like someone a few yards behind him has him on a toddler leash and is drawing him away from a busy intersection. TK growls in frustration, out loud, startling a passer by on the sidewalk. He bends over, resting his hands on his knees and dropping his head. Seemingly without his brain asking it to, one hand reaches around the back of himself to pull his phone from the pocket of his jeans, and his thumb is navigating to his contacts and scrolling until he finds the number.
“Hi, TK!” his mom’s voice answers, her tone cheery but laced with something else underneath, like she’s putting it on for his sake. “How’s my sweet boy?”
“I’m outside a bar,” TK says right away, not giving himself the opportunity to second guess it. “I wanna drink.”
“TK!” she cries, instantly upset, and TK’s stomach churns, rolling somewhere caught between humiliation and fury.
“Please don’t lecture me, okay?” he grinds out from between clenched teeth. “I’m not drinking. I just wanted to, but I’m calling you instead. Can I have some fucking credit for that?”
Gwyn sounds for a moment like she’s holding her breath, but then she lets it out and says, “I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m sorry. I’m so proud of you for calling instead.”
“Thanks,” TK mumbles.
“What’s going on, honey?”
TK sniffs and rubs roughly at his face with his free hand. “Everything is messed up.”
“You got shot this week,” she points out, with a no shit lilt to her voice. Sometimes it’s a little eerie, how much TK gets from her. “And you were in a coma. Of course everything is messed up.”
“No, that’s …” TK blows out a breath that makes his lips flap together noisily. “I mean, yeah. That, too.”
“I still can’t believe any of this,” Gwyn mutters, sounding mutinous. “I could ring your father’s neck. I should never have let him take you away from me.”
“He didn’t take me away from you. He took me away from Manhattan, and – bad memories. This isn’t Dad’s fault.”
“He let you get shot!”
“He didn’t let me get shot. How was he supposed to stop it, leap in front of me like Superman?”
“I would have,” she asserts angrily, and TK rolls his eyes and then laughs a little.
“Yeah. Okay.” He signs again and scrubs his hand over his hair. He drops himself down, landing roughly on his backside on an uneven curb in the parking lot. His injured shoulder aches but he doesn’t wince this time. He’s getting used to it.
“How are you feeling?”
“I don’t know. Like I got shot, I guess.”
“Are you in pain?”
“I was on Morphine in the hospital. They wanted to give me …” TK doesn’t say the word out loud because even just thinking it makes him feel clammy. It makes the churning in his stomach worse, the incessant itching along his skin so much more intense. “But I turned it down. So I’m on alternating Tylenol and Advil, which. I guess it’s helping as much as it can.”
“I’m so sorry. But I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah.” TK digs the toe of his shoe into the dirt underneath his feet.
“Why are you outside a bar?” she asks softly.
TK’s shoulders tighten, and he forces them back down. “I wasn’t even talking about the hole in my chest when I said everything’s messed up. That’s how bad shit is. I got shot and that’s not even what I was talking about.”
“How did you get there?”
“Walked.”
Her no-nonsense mom voice makes another appearance as she quips, “Walked. Fresh out of the hospital. With a bullet wound in your chest.”
“Yep,” TK intones humorlessly, daring her. “You wanna yell at me about that?”
“No, I don’t wanna yell at you,” she says, in a much kinder tone. “I want you to call an Uber, or cab. I want you to go home, I want you to be safe.”
TK swallows. His throat constricts and it’s painful. It makes him feel like a little kid every time she says things like that.
“And once you’re there, I want you to call me back,” she continues. “And tell me everything.”
TK closes his eyes and just breathes. It feels a little bit like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff with a devil and an angel on each shoulder, one daring him to jump and the other trying to coax him back to safety. Everything feels razor thin and fraught, but she says his name again, imploringly, and TK agrees, “Okay.”
He stays on the curb until the car arrives. It isn’t long but TK feels each second tick by like dripping molasses. There’s broken glass near the wooden base of a streetlamp. It glints in the light, blue and aqua, and TK counts the pieces. There are 17. The car is red, when it pulls up slowly in front of him, a young man with blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses rolling the window down and sticking his head out to ask, “Are you TK?”
“Yeah,” TK answers.
There’s a pause, and TK can feel discomfort billowing between them before the kid awkwardly says, “Uh … do you still want a ride?”
“Yeah,” TK repeats. He pushes himself up off the curb and walks over, wrenching the back door open and putting himself into the car while the shoulder demon whines at him to get back out, to go into the bar, to put enough whiskey into his stomach to end the life of someone whose liver isn’t as well-versed in the art of metabolizing toxins.
TK sits in silence in the back seat of the car, the light from every streetlamp burning his eyes and every bump in the road jostling him and causing him to clench his teeth. He mutters a listless thanks to the driver before he gets out onto the driveway of Owen’s house, and he doesn’t turn the lights on after he goes inside. He locks the door behind himself and goes right upstairs, climbing into his bed still fully clothed.
His phone screen is bright in the dark room. There’s a text from his mother. It says I love you, and TK wants to hurl the device at the wall.
He doesn’t. He presses her number, because he said he would call her back and if he doesn’t she’ll probably call the police.
“Are you home?” she says, instead of hello.
“Yes.”
Gwyn exhales. “Good. I’m proud of you.”
“Could you not be?” TK asks rudely.
“Nope. Sorry, you’ll just have to deal with it.” Gwyn is quiet for a moment, giving TK the space to talk, but when he doesn’t, she asks, “Are you going to tell me?”
TK rolls onto his back and blinks up at the shadows on the ceiling. “I met someone.”
“So soon?”
“I know. I didn’t plan on it.”
“Alright. So what’s the problem?”
“Me. I’m the problem.” TK bumps his forehead a few times with a closed fist and then rests the back of his wrist against it. “He’s nice, and fun, and he likes me. I think he likes me a lot more than he’s admitted, because he knows about my shit and he’s trying not to scare me away.”
TK hasn’t spoken that aloud, before. He’s known it all along, but had thought maybe if he never said it, he could somehow keep it from being true.
“What shit does he know about?”
“All of it, basically. Not all the gritty details, but the gist.”
Gwyn’s voice sounds surprised. TK can picture what that would look like on her face. “You told someone you just met? About the relapse, about all of it?”
“Yeah, what’s the confusion?” TK snaps, and then instantly feels badly for being so impatient. He’s still itchy, and it’s making him mean.
“Honey, how long did it take you to tell Alex about your past?”
TK sighs, and finally gets her point. And she isn’t wrong. “I never really told him, I guess. He knew I didn’t drink, and maybe guessed some other stuff, but we never talked about it.”
“And you told this boy right away? Wanted him to know you?”
“It wasn’t … exactly that. But yeah, I did tell him. “
“And you think that doesn’t mean anything?”
“I guess I never thought about it like that,” TK admits. Think about it now, the shoulder demon suggests. Fuck you, the shoulder angel replies.
“What’s his name?”
TK shakes his head. “No.”
“What, do you think I’m gonna try to find him on Facebook?”
“I think that’s exactly what you’re gonna do.”
Gwyn huffs. “Fine. Don’t tell me. But I still don’t understand what the problem is.”
“The problem is, I’m me. You know me, you know I’m just gonna hurt him.” TK shuts his eyes again, against the burn of tears that threatens, aching deep in his skull. He’s never cried over Carlos and he is not about to start now. This was always their trajectory, always the road they were heading down, and TK is so stupid to have let himself think even for one single second that there might be a fork up ahead and a different path he could take. “I think I have to end it. I shouldn’t have let it get this far. I shouldn’t have let him keep thinking there was a chance I might get my shit together and suddenly become boyfriend material. He deserves better than me, and the longer I string him along, the longer it’s gonna take him to find it.”
“What if that’s bullshit?”
“It’s not.”
“Well, I say it is!” she says emphatically, sounding upset. Her voice rasps over the words. “I don’t think anyone deserves better, because I don’t think there is better.”
“Mom.”
She barrels on, ignoring his protest. “You’ve been through a lot of really difficult things in your life and you’ve decided that means you’re a bad person but I think you’re wrong. I think you’re handsome, and funny, and brave, and the sweetest boy in the whole world.”
“I’m not,” TK says, sniffling and rolling back onto his side so he can press his face into the pillow. His voice comes out muffled. “I’ve hurt people. You don’t know everything.”
“We all hurt people, TK. And we all get hurt. There’s nothing more universal than that. And I’m not going to sit here and let you insult my son. Just because somebody broke his heart and he’s decided that means he’s not worth loving.”
TK doesn’t answer her. A tear or two slips out past his defenses and he wipes them angrily away.
“Do you want to keep talking?” she asks softly.
“Not really.”
“Get some sleep, then. Call me in the morning.”
“Okay.”
“I love you,” she says firmly.
“Yeah,” TK mutters, and doesn’t return it. He does love her, he just can’t bring himself to say the words right now.
He hangs up the phone and drops it onto the mattress, and he curls into a ball in his jeans and tries not to get dizzy over the way his entire life feels like it’s tumbling over the edge of that cliff he’d convinced himself not to jump from.