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April reflects on what Justin, and others, have given her.

April Showers

LaVieEnRose



I guess the first thing I need to tell you is that I have a lot of friends, and there's no way to say that without sounding like a jerk. But it's true, and it's something I need to get across for this story to make sense. 


I’m in a band; I play bass. We’re not any good, and we’ve given up trying to actually get gigs anywhere and it’s hard to find a place to practice so we hardly ever even play anymore, to be honest, so it’s kind of a band in name only,  but it still means I have a family here. Mackenzie, Jonah, Tommy, Deja, and me. 


I came to the city for college, where I did two years before I started getting steady freelance work and dropped out, and Mackenzie and Tommy collected me in one of our intro classes, and I met Deja through work—she’s a model—and Mackenzie dated Jonah for a hot minute and then we adopted him, so we’ve all been tight for a few years now. They’re good friends, real friends, the kind you can FaceTime without warning and show up at each other’s apartments. The kind that stays with you in the hospital after you have a seizure on a train platform.


That’s what I’m trying to explain: I already had good people. I wasn’t searching for anything.


Justin found me anyway.


**


"Do you ever feel haunted?" I asked Justin one time, writing back and forth on a piece of paper, like we usually do when it's just the two of us together. I can sign a little to him, but I don't really understand much of what he says back unless he signs really, really slowly and just uses the same twenty signs over and over. Writing is easier.


"There are cultures who say epileptics are cursed," Justin wrote back. "Possessed by evil spirits."


"Not that really," I said. "I just feel sometimes like I have this like...weight of every sick person who came before me inside of me. Like they're all counting on me for something."


I felt absolutely crazy spelling this out, but Justin read it and nodded a little.


"That doesn't really go away," he wrote.


"Do you know what they want?"


"Not yet."


**

My friends didn't drop me when the seizures started. Not when I had the first one on the subway platform. Not when I had one while I was at work, photographing a fashion show. Not at Deja's birthday party. Never. They supported me and shielded me and treated me the same way they always had. "Nothing's changed," they reassured me, while I was cycling through meds that made me zombified or manic and nothing in-between, while I was throwing myself into learning a new language. "Nothing's changed."


They're good friends. They're still my friends.


But the issue is that I changed.


**


Justin's friends were good to me right off the bat. One of them was a doctor, and even though neurology wasn't her thing she knew a lot just from being close to Justin, so she answered a lot of questions I had at the beginning. His Deaf friends were patient with me and complimented my signing. Brian, his husband, was snarky in a way that took be a little to get used to, and at first I thought he didn't like me, but then I had a seizure at his house one time and he insisted I sleep over there and checked on me during the night and got me a neurologist appointment for the next day and I realized, oh. 


But I wasn't close to any of them the way I was to Justin, until one day I came by to meet him for lunch like we'd planned and Evan answered the door. 



"Oh hey!" he said, clearly not expecting me, but bright and shiny just the same, like he'd been every time I'd seen him. But he also looked just the slightest bit panicked. "Did you have plans with Justin?" He's Deaf, but the way he talks and lipreads you wouldn't even know, which is probably a bad thing to say, but there it is.



Anyway, it was clear where this one was going. "Yeah. It's okay, really." 


"Yeah, he was up all night with trouble breathing and he's being feeling so shitty today, and he just fell asleep like half an hour ago--" 


"Really, it's okay," I said. "We have a policy about not apologizing for this stuff." Justin's idea, after I felt horrible cancelling plans one day when I was zonked out on the new meds and couldn't get myself out of bed. "We have to apologize to enough people," he'd said. "Let's shave the list down a little."


"You came all the way out here," Evan said. "Have lunch with me."


"You don't have to--" 


"Brian's not here and Justin's asleep," he said. "I'd be all by myself otherwise. Keep me company?"


It was a little awkward, but I'd come all the way out to Flushing and I was hungry and the few conversations I'd had with Evan at that point had been nice, so I figured what the hell. We ate finger foods at the coffee table in the living room, and Evan poured iced tea and stretched his legs out on the carpet.


I could hear Justin coughing, sounding strangled and miserable. This was before the saga where he broke his ribs and then got pneumonia, so I wasn't as well-versed on how bad his lungs are as I am now. "He's been having a lot of trouble breathing lately, hasn't he?" he said. Last time we'd gone out to a movie, we'd had to take a cab the two blocks back to the subway station because Justin couldn't catch his breath enough to walk that far.


"He has all this scarring from when he had pneumonia last year," Evan said. "He's always had asthma but he used to just use his inhaler every once in a while and he'd be fine. Now his lungs are already like this--" Evan held his hand up in a fist, almost closed. "So anything that sets them off at all is a big problem."


"It's so fucked up," I said. "That the meds ended up totally screwing him over like that. They're supposed to help."


Evan shrugged and popped an olive into his mouth. "Meds are what killed my kidneys, too. It happens." He softened a little. "It doesn't mean it's going to happen to you."


"It's not that," I said, and it wasn't. "It's just not fair."


We talked about other stuff then, mostly Justin and this show he had coming up. It was so clear that Evan just worshipped the ground Justin walked on, which I thought was really sweet considering they'd been together for a long time. My longest relationship lasted all of six months so I don't really have much to go on in that area, but...I don't know. The way Evan lit up when he talked about Justin--even when he had been talking about Justin being sick--seemed rare and important.

 

 

But then again, that was also, I was realizing, just Evan. He got excited when I talked about a shoot I'd done and bounced up and down when he realized there was leftover apple pie we could share. He was in kidney failure, sick as hell, and smiling at me and inviting me into his little world.


If I'm haunted by sick people, I'm haunted by that too. And that's rare and important and it's something you need to understand.


**

Justin can't smoke, obviously, but Brian always gets us edibles for when I sleep over. We lay on our backs on the porch with our heads together, texting each other back and forth. The stars looked like they were moving just a little, like diamonds catching the light.


Am I allowed to hate healthy people? I said.


Justin laughed so loud when he read the text. "Oh God, she really is one of us," he said, and I reached behind my head to put my hand over his mouth.


I typed, It's not that I HATE them really, it's just...


You don't have to explain, he typed back. 


And that's it, really, isn't it?


I didn't have to explain. That's the point.


** 


 Brian had pulled me aside when Justin and I started getting close and told me that I needed to understand that at some point or another he was going to get really sick. That that was just reality, that it was always lurking around a corner, and I needed to start preparing myself for it now or it would just be worse for Justin when it happened and I wasn't ready.


And I listened to that, I did, but still, when Justin got pneumonia it was horrible. He had a tube down his throat for a while, and even after it was out he was just stuck in this never ending fight to breathe. His fever didn't go down for ages, and for a while I wasn't even allowed to visit him in his room. No one but Brian was. Not even Evan.


So I'd sit in the waiting room with Evan and he'd smile a little when I arrived and show me pictures Brian had taken of Justin in his hospital room and ask me how I was doing. He'd tell me about how Brian would sneak him into Justin's room when the nurses weren't looking, and how he and Justin would Facetime while Evan was having dialysis, even though Justin couldn't stay awake for more than ten minutes in a stretch, at first. I could tell Evan was trying to keep me calm and I hated that he thought I needed it, and hated even more than he was right. 


"How do you get used to this?" I asked him one day, finally.


"What other choice do I have?" he said.


After Justin was home from the hospital, I had a seizure one time while I was visiting him. I woke up in his bed with him, and I started crying, like I usually do after seizures, and he squeezed my hand while Martha licked my arm.


"Does it ever stop feeling this fucking awful?" I sobbed, and Evan, who I hadn't really realized was there, interpreted it for me.


Evan was getting worse. No one had told me. Nobody needed to.


"No," Justin said softly. "Not really," and Evan bent over and kissed my cheek.


**


And my friends, my good friends, thought it was crazy.


"I know he's helped you and everything, but you don't owe him something this big," Jonah said.


"This isn't about Justin," I said, though of course it was, but it also wasn't. It was about Brian. It was about Daphne and Emily and Derek. 


It was, of course, about Evan. 


"It's about my family," I said, and I got a blood test.

 

Chapter End Notes:

Thank you to Meg, Anita, Sam, Parker, Cotton, Cesy, Britt, M, Mary, Nair, Tami, Cher, Julie, Hannah, Deborah, and Abby for supporting this series! For updates and such and such, follow me at twitter.com/LaVieEnRosefic.

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