Eden

“What do you want from me? Pat says. “I know what I want from you, but what do you want from me?”

“You turned your back and walked away like nothing ever happened,” Rob said.

“I know.”

“I don’t want you. Not anymore. That’s in the past,” Rob said. “But I want… an apology. I want you to own what you did. Maybe I want to own what I did.”

“What you did?”

“Which was not be there and not not be there. Not commit to it and not walk away from it. Just let myself be passive. Isaiah says a lot about that, about not being passive. I’ve been passive for too long. I should have called you out a long time ago.”

“Are you coming back to town?” Pat said.

“Yes. Probably.”

“To stay?”

“That’s more of a maybe.”

“We could get together.”

“For what?” Rob said. “That’s what people say when they don’t mean it, but want to make folks happy, and I don’t need you to make me happy.”

“But we could sit in the same room,” Pat explained, “and mend what’s fucked up between us.”

“That’s what we’re doing now.”

“True,” Pat said.

“Are you fucking Josh?”

“Yes. I don’t know. I mean, I have. I mean… you need to ask him.”

“Are you with him, because it looked like you were checking out Frey’s nephew.”

“Shit’s complicated.”

“It usually isn’t.”

“I’m not going anywhere and neither are you. We need to mend something. We need to make the way we’ve been… better than it has been.”

“Yes,” Rob said. “Yes, you’re right of course.”

“I feel so thin and stretched out,” Pat said. “I feel like I never stopped feeling the way I did that night after the car crash. Like I just kept getting stretched out and more and more damaged and now, just now, I’m starting to be alright.”

“I think that’s the way Josh felt,” Rob said. “Maybe that’s why you found each other.”

And then he said, “But why have I felt that way too?”

Pat said, “I don’t know, Rob. We were best friends once.”

“I know.”

“And now we’ve all been broken and fucked up and then broken and fucked up each other. Maybe we can help put each other back together again?”

Rob nodded. He suggested:

“Maybe it’s the only way we can get put back together again.”

Epilogue

Frey speaks

I thrill, I rejoice. I rejoiced all this morning before the boys arrived. I was loading up the laundry bag with Rob, but for a moment I thought we were packing up to go home, and I wasn’t entirely sure where the home was, and it didn’t matter, because we would be together.

And I have known many men, I have loved and been loved and made love to by many men, but I have not made a life with one yet, and at the age of forty-fill-in-the blank, to be making a life with a man, to be making a life with this one man, who I do love, is a thing I can hardly believe. I thought I was long past this. I feel like Saint Elizabeth, long past bearing. I feel like the morning prayer. I feel like when the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her that Elizabeth, long past childbearing, had at last conceived, and can it be that, with this young boy, this young red haired man sleeping next to me, I have finally conceived… love?

There is a feeling I can only call closethat happens when I wake in the middle of the night.

When the boys have gone to sleep, and Rob sleeps and Vigils is not for some time, I put on my shoes to go outside. The whole world is naked tonight. I have always called Calverton, the country, then coming to Rob’s town I thought, now this is the country. But here, we are finally in the country. Here, the air is different. Tonight there are no stars, but tonight the sky is more real.

I am going to do something foolish. Vigils is an hour off. Here is the bank where Logan and Kenny made love. My bare feet press into the grass, trying to absorb some of the essence of their love. And then I am taking off my clothes. I am in love with and weary of the man breasts that are just shy of being boobs, the fat on the sides where no six pack ever was, amazed that this body has known so many lovers and is loved so much right now. I am completely naked.

I don't know if it's my certainly that no one will come, or if I just really don't care. But I am here naked and walking in the water, and it’s colder than ever, and my whole body is alive and my nipples are hard and pointed up, and I want to go down and down and down and it's so good and so terribly chilly and I can hear my mother singing a song from her childhood, from the days before she was Catholic.

Wade in the water… wade in the water children…wade in the water… God's gonna trouble the waters…

And my God, I know beyond a doubt that there is a redemption and I am saved, though not in any way that any priest ever meant. I am not alone. We are not alone. Anigel is here, and Sister Saint Solesme and her mourning for Agatha who became Saint Clew, and secret loves, loves that grow from nowhere and may go nowhere, and leave a black path like fire that heals and destroys. Rob is here. DJ is here. These sorrowful hopeful boys who came with my nephew are here. Kenny and Logan twisting together are here. Salvation is me here in these waters. There are no divisions here, and here is the certainty for the very first time that none of the doubts, the fears, the horrors that once assaulted us and may even one day return… none of them… matter.

THE END

I hope you enjoyed. Next will be a new short story and beginning ofThe People in Rossford