Sleeping with Ghosts

LaVieEnRose

I was maybe starting to freak out a little when Brian and Justin came in to my hospital room, and I reached out to them like a life preserver. Justin was wearing his red jacket and he looked like he was ready to go apple picking or something. God, I'd missed him today.

He hugged me for a long time, and I dug my fingers into his back and pushed my face in his shoulder. "Hey, hey," he said in my ear, and I pulled back to look at him. "You're okay," he said.

I took a deep breath. I am so fucking scared, I said. I'm not like Justin, having major fucking medical procedures every half minute. I take my meds and I sit in a chair for dialysis and that is it. Not exactly major surgery. There was the thing with my arm, but that wasn't...this. Martha put her front paws up on the bed and I scratched her head. 

You are going to do amazing, Justin said.

What if this is a mistake?

It's not a mistake, Brian said, pseudo-bored.

I could be okay on dialysis for who knows how much longer--

Not, Brian said. Not much longer.

--and now I could die on the table. I could go in there and never wake up. Right now. Today.

Yeah, and Justin could have a seizure at any moment and hit his head on the floor and there goes him. You don't impress me.

Justin rolled his eyes. You are not going to die on the table, he said. It's a very safe surgery. Statistically--

Look what you've done, Brian said. Now he's going to Encyclopedia Brown us to death.

Oh my God, shut up, Justin said, and Brian smirked and pulled him in under his arm.

I watched them.

Don't, Justin said. Don't look at us like that.

Like what?

Like you're memorizing our faces. Like this is how you're going to remember us when you're in heaven or some shit like that. I refuse to be memorable.

You're insane, I said.

Good. More of that.

The doctor came in then, and a handful of nurses, and everything got really serious really quickly. Brian and Justin stepped out of the way while they messed with my IV and talked me through the procedure one more time, and I knew I should be watching the interpreter but I kept looking back at Justin, under Brian's arm. Trying to be brave.

What if I didn't see him again? 

What if there wasn't a heaven? 

Adam always said...

You are safe, Justin said, just as they injected me with a sedative, and this beautiful golden light surrounded me and I closed my eyes and nodded.

I barely remember the operating room, the table, the rabbi who said a prayer before they put the mask over my face. But I remember leaving Brian and Justin in that hospital room, their eyes on me, Brian's chin resting on top of Justin's head and his hands on his shoulders.

"Don't you dare," Brian said to me, and I nodded as they pushed me away, and I repeated it to myself as the surgeon put the mask on me and told me to count backwards from a hundred.

And I fell asleep.

**

I'm at a cafe, and he sits across from me with his ratty hair, a cigarette, track marks, and that goddamn smile.

"About time you got here," he says. He looks like a blond wolf, but not in a scary way. Just scruffy, wild. 

"I thought I'd given you plenty of time to clean up," I say.

He grins. "Never."

Somehow I know that I can't touch him, that if I reach across the table and put a hand on him he'll be gone. But I want it so badly that it feels like a sixth sense, like there's the sound of him and the smell of him but there's also just Adam, under my skin like the people Brian told me about who get magnets implanted in their fingertips so they can feel electricity. Adam. Adam. Adam.

"You look beautiful," he says to me.

"I feel like I'm glowing."

"You are."

"How come you never sign to me?"

He shrugs a little. "You can't picture it."

"I guess not." He was always so terrible. But I can read his lips like it's nothing, could probably pick his voice out even in a crowd just from remembering how it rumbled in my ear when we made love. Evan. Adam.

"God, I miss you so much," I whisper.

His eyes glitter at me. "So what is this, then?" he says, teasing. "Life-saving surgery?"

"I know."

"We were supposed to live fast and die young," Adam says.

"No. We were supposed to grow old together."

"Yeah." He nods a little bit. "Yeah, that too."

I don't know how to explain how it feels to live your life--a life you love very much--without someone who's simply supposed to be there. Adam and I were a done deal from the night we met at that party. Everyone knew it, we knew it. We loved in the screaming, blistering way, but we started to calm down, too, made the home, the family, cooked dinner together. We would have gone the distance, is what I'm saying. And we were supposed to.

It is that Adam and I are not together, and then it occurs to me that I could get up and move from my spot in front of him and take the empty spot in the booth beside him. Sit on his side. Touch him.

It occurs to me that I could do that, and that's how I know what that would mean.

"So what," I say. "You're here to collect me?"

"You brought me here," he says. "I just wanted to see you."

I close my eyes and take a deep breath through my nose, inhaling smoke and leather and drugs I can practically taste. "God. God, I miss you."

"You know you can see me anytime."

"I know." I dream about him all the time, but this is different; we both know it. This isn't going to get twisted and ugly and scary, end with the needle in his arm and his blue skin. He's not the one in control this time.

"So why now?" Adam says.

"You know why."

Adam looks at the empty space next to him.

"A part of me did want to die," I say. "During all of this. The kidney failure, the dialysis...a part of me did think, maybe I'll just die and then I'll get to..."

"You can see me anytime," he says again.

"I can look at you like you're an exhibit in a zoo," I say. "It's not the same."

He watches me steadily. "And yet here you are. Saving that life."

"You know why," I say, suddenly shy. As if there's any question that this is what Adam would have wanted for me. To be loved.

He looks around. "Why here?"

"It's where I came on our first date," I say. I hadn't realized until I said it. "After I met him at the gallery that day."

"I bet you got a chocolate croissant."

"I did."

He smiles at me.

"He understands," I say. "All this shit I've been through, he gets it. You never had to be sick. Well. Except for the heroin."

"Are you angry?" he asks. "It's my fault. Squeaky clean when you met me."

"I'm not angry," I say. "If I were healthy I never would have had him." I watch the way his fingers tangle with his teaspoon. "You seem different."

"Yeah?"

"You're usually angry."

Adam did not want to die.

He watches me with just a hint of a smile on his face.

"You are," I insist. "I remember when I found out I was positive, when I was so sick, you were screaming at me. Telling me you were scared, and you needed me. Cursing at me."

"Ah, the good old days. Remember that fight we had in the village that time?"

"God, I almost left you right there."

He laughs, and God, I can't hear it, but I almost can, because he's laughed in my ear so many times, biting my neck and grabbing the skin above my hips. Adam. Evan.

"What's it like?" I ask, because I can't not anymore. "I've been so close to it for months now and I still don't know what it's like."

"Being dead?"

"Mmm."

He shrugs. "It's whatever you think it is. This is your cafe. I'm just here because you brought me here."

"Come home with me, then."

He laughs.

"I mean it," I say, because I'm asleep and the floor is moving and it seems the smallest bit possible. "Come home. You can stay with us. Everything will be perfect."

"They don't want me."

"Of course they want you."

He looks at himself. At the track marks.

"You might have to change a little," I admit.

"I don't change," he says. "I'm dead."

My stomach feels cold. "Yeah. I know."

He sips his coffee--he puts so much cream in it that it's practically just milk--and I take a moment just to memorize every inch of him, how his skin creases at his knuckles, his dirty fingernails, his incredible green eyes, everything.

It's just excruciating.

"I need you to be okay so badly that it destroys me," I say. "I walk around all day worrying about if you're okay, which is so fucking stupid because you're dead. And I still worry that you're not okay because I don't know how to not worry about someone I love this much."

His eyes are soft. "Do you think I'm okay?" he says gently.

"I don't know. You seem different, I told you."

"I couldn't just leave you here the way you were," he says. "Of course I tried to get you to come. You were half-dead already."

"You could argue I'm half-dead again now."

He shakes his head slowly.

"So what," I say. "You don't want me anymore?"

He shrugs carelessly. "I'm at peace."

I laugh. I can't help it. "You can't be at peace. You are a lot of fucking things, but you are not at peace." He is a flurry of movement, energy, ideas. Hands where they shouldn't be and oh God, where they should. But never peace. "You have never been at peace as long as I've known you."

But he says, "And you've never been taken care of before."

I blink. I swallow and search for something to say and realized a detail that isn’t right. “You don’t have a cookie.”

“What?”

“Whenever we’d go to a cafe. I always get a chocolate croissant, you always get a peanut butter cookie.”

“Not anymore.”

“I thought dead people don’t change.”

“I don’t,” he said. “You do.”

I understand. “Justin’s allergic.”

He nods. 

“You’re looking after Justin,” I breathe.

And Adam reaches across the table and takes my hand. And he doesn't disappear. And I feel the warmth of his fingers and my insides feel like I'm on a rollercoaster.

"It’s time for you to go back there now," he says to me. "And you tell him I said..." He pauses, then hesitantly brings his hand to his chin. Thank you.

**

I still felt fingers in mine, but now they were squeezing, rubbing circles on the back of my hand. Opening my eyes felt impossible, and it took a few tries, but then there he was, that rush of gold light and then Justin, in his jacket, those blue eyes.

You did it, I said to him.

He smiled indulgently, brushing my hair off my forehead. I didn't do anything. You did it all. 

No, I said. I saw Brian now, and Martha. But Justin. Justin. You did it. Adam knows you.

Justin nodded, still so warm, calm.

He loves you, I said.