Miracle

LaVieEnRose

A lot happened my first few weeks home from the hospital. Or I guess...one big thing happened, and you’d think it would have been dramatic and awful but it was so quiet and soft. So before we get into it...I guess that’s what I want you to know, that we’re okay. But I also want you to know that there isn’t a miracle at the end of this story. There isn’t a magic fix. Not everyone can just have surgery and get better.

Anyway.

I had to stay in the hospital for a day longer than they’d estimated, and it felt like a lifetime. I cannot tell you how good it was to be home. I kept sleeping upstairs with Justin and Brian because the first night when I tried to go down to the basement Brian rolled his eyes and shoved me towards the bedroom, but having my space in the basement again for my easel and my snacks and my clothes and shit, after a week of living out of a bag in a hospital room, was great. I don’t know how Justin deals with those long hospital stays. I guess in a way he doesn’t, and I guess in a way that’s what this story’s about.

I felt pretty okay by the time I was discharged, better than I had in the weeks before surgery, definitely. The meds I had to take made me super sick so I was throwing up every day, but my doctors promised my body would adjust to them. My incision was still sore and in general I was still really tired, but other than that things were definitely looking up. I wasn’t just walking around feeling like I was dying all the time, so that was nice. And I also felt...it’s stupid, since it was just a dream, obviously, but I kind of felt like...closure, I guess. Adam loved lasagna, I said casually during dinner one night, and they both dropped their forks.

So I was good. Brian was doing well too; I could tell having the surgery behind us had really calmed him down. He was taking some time off of work just as I was going back and was deep into research mode instead, looking up clinical trials and stuff for Justin. He’d spend most evenings on his laptop, occasionally looking up to ask Justin if he was allergic to such and such drug or if he’d already tried whatever physical therapy technique. The answer was always yes.

Which was maybe why Justin wasn’t so good.

I didn’t really notice at first, for a lot of reasons, the largest few being that I was distracted by my own shit, that Justin struggling is a subtle kind of a monster, and that it was winter, and he always has a hard time with depression in winter. Brian and I are used to keeping an eye on him once it starts to get dark early in the day, and he has one of those lamps that’s supposed to cheer him up and as soon as there’s a sunny day we’re always bundling him up and shoving him outside to soak it up. He was going to his therapy appointments and taking his meds, so it didn’t seem like there was really anything to worry about.

It didn’t seem like it was getting worse.

**

Brian decided to take advantage of his time off and my recovery to go to Pittsburgh for a long weekend to see Gus. We were both invited, obviously, but it would have been my first time meeting all the Pittsburgh people and that just sounded like a lot when I was still recovering, and Justin said he had to work on an art piece which is what Justin usually says when he's making an excuse to get out of something, and I could tell Brian was kind of worried about it, since Justin usually jumps at the chance to visit Gus.

Try to get him out of the house, he said to me. Take him out for dinner one night, or something.

I can take him to Deaf synagogue with me.

If you must.

We'll be fine, I said. His breathing's been solid for like a week now. I'm getting better every day. We're fine.

He gave me a look while he zipped his overnight bag. Nothing pisses off Brian Kinney like getting caught worrying.

It was kind of funny having the house to ourselves, me and Justin, because we'd both been too sick to be left alone together for a long time now. Brian left and we made popcorn and ate it on the floor cushions and watched movies and used Martha to dramatically re-enact the scenes and were generally way louder and more annoying than we'll ever be when Brian's around, but we make each other laugh. We made out for a long time, but he kept shifting positions in this way where I could tell he was in pain and couldn't get comfortable, so I figured I'd, well, lay him down and stretch him out. We started slipping out of our clothes, and that's when I noticed a neat row of cuts, maybe two days old, on the inside of Justin's arm.

A thing you need to understand is that Justin is perpetually injured. Seizures will do that. It's rarely anything serious, but he's always dotted with bruises and we have a whole collection of splints for when he dislocates various things. Scratches and cuts aren't common, but they're not unheard of. We do our best to keep the house safe for him but, well. There's no magic fix, like I said.

This didn't look like that. I knew exactly what this looked like, even if I didn't think I'd ever seen it before.

So it's not that I didn't know what it was. It's that I really, really didn't want it to be that.

I caught his wrist between my hands. What happened?

Martha, he said immediately. Startled her when I picked her up. My fault.

It's not that I believed him. It's just that I really, really wanted to.

Okay, I said, and I pressed my lips against his neck.

**

I thought about that a lot while Brian was gone, and I watched Justin really closely, but he seemed fine. Maybe a little annoyed with me eventually. Why are you babysitting me? he said. You're the one who just had surgery.

'Just' is kind of overstating things.

After Brian came home, I thought about saying something about a thousand times, but I just…didn’t. I told myself that Brian must have seen them if they were still there—it’s not like Justin spends much time clothed when Brian’s around—and that if they weren’t still there then that was proof enough that I was overreacting and it was nothing to worry about.

Everything kind of went to shit the third night after Brian got back. We'd had dinner and there was a movie on that no one was watching, and everyone was kind of stressed because Brian was in a bad mood and Justin wasn't feeling well and everything just felt tense and uncomfortable. I was on the couch with Justin, who was in the middle of an awful allergy attack that was making him kind of crazy, so I was trying to simultaneously distract him and remind him to breathe. Brian was in the armchair radiating silent waves of fury because he'd spent the past two weeks trying to get Justin enrolled in this clinical trial for...something, and now he'd just been rejected because he had a history of, you guessed it, bad allergic reactions.

I didn't really understand what Brian was doing, if I was being honest, because every time I'd looked up lung scarring the internet said the same thing. It's permanent. There's no treatment for it. That's it. I'd asked Justin about that and Justin had just shrugged and looked away and said, Let him try.

Now Justin sneezed six times and hit the arm of the couch in frustration. Bless you, Brian signed without looking up from his laptop. Justin clawed at his eyes until I took his hands away.

"How's his breathing?" I asked Brian. I had my hand on Justin's back to try to feel it, but it's still hard for me to tell sometimes.

"He's fine," Brian said, still staring at the screen, which didn't seem at all accurate, but...okay.

Justin watched Brian for a long minute and then waved for his attention. Maybe there’s something with lasers.

Brian blinked at him. What?

Lasers. Like removing the scar tissue with— He sneezed and rubbed the base of his throat. Yeah. Lasers.

You really think I haven't looked into lasers?

Justin shrugged.

Christ, it's the first thing I checked. There are no trials on it. There are no trials with anything except shit you don't qualify for because you're too fucking sick for them to bother trying to cure.

Maybe--

You can't help with this, Brian snapped. You have no idea what I've already tried. I will figure this out.

Justin chewed the inside of his cheek, and I said, “Brian,” softly. Sternly.

Brian just typed for a while, glaring at his screen like he hadn’t heard me, but eventually he sighed and spared Justin a glance. Sorry, he said, so short it was barely a sign.

It’s fine.

It’s just a lot—

Yeah. A lot of pressure. He stood up. I get it, he said, and he walked to the bedroom with his head down, Martha at his heels.

Brian ran his hand down his face, and I put the movie on pause and got up.

Brian said, What, you’re storming out too?

"I'm not storming out. Neither was he. He can't breathe."

Brian looked down and said, Yeah. Go.

So I followed Justin into the bedroom and closed the door behind me. He was sitting on the side of the bed looking completely wrung out, counting out pills with one hand and pulling at his sternum with the other.

I pulled the chair up to the bed and curled up on the seat along with some of Justin's dirty clothes he always throws there. Drives Brian crazy. Can I do anything? I said.

He looked up at me with a small, rueful smile and shrugged one shoulder.

Yeah, I said. Yeah, I know.

It just means so fucking much to him, Justin said. It's so important to him that...God. I feel like such an asshole saying this. He closed his eyes briefly, and then signed it all in a rush. It feels so personal to him that I'm okay that he loses sight of the fact that this...this is not actually about him. This does not belong to him. Me being sick is not a story where he's the main character. God, I'm the fucking worst.

I didn't really know exactly what he meant, so I just listened. It's so rare Justin will open up about being frustrated with Brian in any way that I'm always really careful not to do anything that could be construed as shutting him down when he actually does it. Obviously it's normal for them to get frustrated with each other sometimes, but Justin....I don't know, it's like he thinks he's not allowed to complain, I guess because of everything Brian does for him. He thinks he's supposed to just sit around being grateful all the time, and God, how fucked up is that? It's not like he asked to need anything.

But he shuts up and he measures his words and he just....takes it out on himself.

So I guess that was my line of thinking when I said, Come on, let's get you to sleep, and took his arms to help him out of his shirt. And turned them over, casually, with a glance so quick he wouldn't see.

There were more cuts there. Fresh ones, maybe a day or two old, almost up to the inside of his elbow this time.

God, I had no idea what the fuck to do. But I knew I wasn’t going to figure it out in a split second standing right there, so I just pretended I didn’t see and pulled a sweatshirt over his head and felt fucking awful. Like every second that I was letting him exist like that, letting him believe nobody knew that he was hurting himself, I was letting him down. Maybe because I was.

It’s not like Justin and I were new. I was supposed to know at this point how to reach him. But this was new, and…God, the shit he’s asked to weather. If this was helping him, maybe I should just let it be? All treatments have side effects, right?

Yeah, sure, except a. knowing our luck if he kept this up he’d end up getting tetanus and die and b. Justin was hurting himself, and I couldn’t logic my way into making that okay.

So I chatted to him about...I don't know, something, mostly just to distract him while I assessed his breathing. I can’t hear it, obviously, but I’ve gotten pretty good at telling how he’s doing by watching him for a few breaths and seeing how fast they are, if they’re even, how much he moves his shoulders. It still seemed pretty sketchy, so I asked him if he thought he should be on oxygen tonight and he nodded heavily and set it up. I just stood by--he can do it himself, obviously, but he's never really loved being alone--and then kissed him and pulled the covers over him. He put his arms around my neck when I started to stand up, so I stayed for a moment, just kind of resting my lips against his.

He kissed me finally and let go. You're so good to me, he said, but like it made him sad.

It's not very hard, I said, and he nodded a little and kissed me again.

I watched him shift around in the bed for a little while he tried in vain to find some position that didn't hurt him, and then eventually turned off the light and went back to the main room. Brian was out of the chair now, loading the dishwasher in an angry sort of way. I leaned against the counter and watched him.

There was no way, there was just no way, that Brian hadn't seen those cuts.

He was avoiding looking at me.

"We need to talk," I said.

Fabulous.

I scratched at the marble countertop until he sighed and put the dish down.

Okay, he said. What?

"I think you need to back off," I said. "With this miracle cure thing. I don't think it's helping."

Of course it's not helping, he said. I haven't found the solution yet. No one said the process was going to be a fucking party.

"What I'm saying is I don't think the process is worth it for him. He's falling apart."

No, he was falling apart when you were in the fucking hospital and he was a mess thinking he couldn't be fixed. You weren't there. I promised him I would find something. He was practically begging me.

Yes, because he wanted the solution, not this fucking...parade of one disappointment after the other. You're not listening to me.

Okay, well I don't know what the fuck either of you expected from me.

This isn't about you.

These things take time, Brian said. If the solution were easy, obviously we would have found it by now. But there's new studies, and case reports, and doctors in fucking Bangladesh I have to talk to--

"I don't think he can do this anymore."

He'll do what he needs to do.

Have you seen those cuts on his arms?

Brian thinks of himself as this master of human relations, but God, he's a terrible liar. He gives everything away in his eyes in an instant.

"He's not okay," I said. "He's hurting himself."

He turned back to the dishes. I have it under control.

"You have it under control."

He nodded a little.

"Okay, and that means...what? Are we taking him to a doctor? Does his therapist know?"

It means, Brian said. That I have it handled.

"Well, it's worse than it was a few days ago, so it doesn't really seem handled."

I will take care of it.

"Oh, so without me."

He didn't say anything.

"This is such bullshit! Why is it that the second something gets serious with him, that's where my little Justin privileges end? I've been here way too fucking long to be treated like....like you're doing me a favor by giving me access to him. I am not a guest."

Brian worked his jaw. That is not how I treat you.

"You knew this was going on and you didn't talk to me about it--"

Sounds like you knew too. Could really say the same thing about you, couldn't we?

"I didn't want to freak you out."

He gave me a look like, and?

"Yeah, and when I realized it was something that we needed to be freaked out about, I came to you. When exactly were you planning to talk about this with me?"

"Jesus Christ!" Brian said. It's a couple cuts! The amount of fucking pain he's in all the time, we just decide that's okay, that's fine, but he gets to control a tiny bit of it and we're going to make that a huge problem?

So when you said you were going to handle it, what you meant was that you were going to completely ignore it. Got it.

It's a few cuts! he said. Haven't you ever done it?

No, I haven't. And the problem isn't the little cuts, fucking obviously, it's that he feels like making them. That he's already in this horrendous amount of pain and he thinks he should be in more.

Brian didn't say anything.

Doesn't that upset you?

Something flashed in his eyes. Don't you ever, he said. Don't you ever try fucking tell me how I feel about Justin.

It is so goddamn exhausting sometimes, Christ. Playing along with this shit.

God. Fuck you, Brian.

**

In a strange twist, it was actually Justin who ended up bringing it up, though I guess he didn't really mean to. But at breakfast the next morning, he either didn't notice the terseness between me and Brian or pretended not to, and he calmly told Brian that he wasn't going to be applying for a clinical trial they'd been discussing.

Brian pinched the bridge of his nose. And why the fuck not?

Because I don't want to go through all that testing and exposure just to get rejected again. Last time I went through one of these I got sick and then I didn't get in.

That doesn't mean it's going to happen again.

They're looking for otherwise healthy people with lung scarring. They're not going to take the immunocompromised epileptic. It's a needless risk. I'm not doing it. He got up and brought his plate to the sink.

Brian very much did not look at me. Or Justin. He stared down at his plate and took a deep breath, then finally got up and started helping Justin clear the table. We'll find something else then, he said, with this kind of forced brightness that was very not-Brian. No big deal.

Justin leaned against the sink. I think I'm done.

I was so fucking proud of him for going out and saying it, I can't even tell you.

Brian shook his head a little. We'll find something.

I don't think we will. At this point it's just false hope.

You've said that before.

I don't need to be fixed, Justin said. I've told you that a thousand times.

Yeah, when you're not crying into your nebulizer that you can't get a lung transplant.

Don't be a dick. I'll adapt. I've adapted and adapted and adapted and I will adapt to this too.

Brian grabbed his arm and turned it over and said, Is that what this is? Is this adapting?

Justin had sleeves on, so there wasn't really anything to see, but it still stuck and kind of hung there between us in the kitchen.

Justin calmly took his arm back and signaled for Martha. I'm going to go get some work done at the studio, he said.

Yeah, Brian said. You do that.

**

Justin had a seizure at about 3 AM that night and woke up the next morning with a migraine. It didn't seem too awful at first, and Brian and I kind of orbited each other, getting him meds and cold washcloths and taking Martha out, but it got worse as the day went on. By early evening we had all the lights off in the house and the curtains drawn in the bedroom, and I stood by the door and watched Brian sit on the bed, a hand hovering over Justin, scared to touch him. Justin was curled up and sobbing, his arms wrapped around his head. I watched his shoulders shake against the mattress. He only cries like that for migraines.

Brian got up eventually and very slowly closed the bedroom door behind him. He walked over to the table by the couch and turned on a lamp so we could see each other a little.

Are we taking him to the hospital? I said.

Brian shook his head a little. I don't think I can do that.

I understood, obviously--Justin of course hates the hospital anyway, but they're a special kind of hell with a migraine--but I was still surprised Brian went out and said it. Yeah. Okay.

He swallowed and looked down, and I could see his eyes shining a little in the lamp light. He took a deep breath and said, I can't fix it.

"Okay," I said. "That's okay."

He nodded a little, his chin shaking, and I reached out and touched his wrist. He nodded again, harder this time, and when I hugged him he clung, his fingers digging into my back, his face in my shoulder.

"I know," I whispered. "I know, you love him so much."

He pulled back and wiped his eyes and said, And I know that you...I fucking never meant that you don't love him, that you shouldn't get to--

I know.

I just... He tried to catch his breath. I don't know....you know. The words? He looked at me kind of desperately.

"...the words."

For this stuff. That I. You know. He took a shaky breath in. That I feel.

Brian. "Okay." I pushed his hair out of his eyes and kissed his cheek. "Okay. That's okay."

I'm supposed to fix him.

"No. You are supposed to stay. That's it."

Okay. Okay. I'll stay.

"Good. That's really good. I love you."

He nodded, and I pulled him in and held him for a long time.

**

We kept the lights dim the next day, but Justin was feeling a lot better. We ended up all napping together midday since we hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the night before, we we all woke up around the same time and just lay there, draped over each other, reaching out every so often to check our phones or run a few fingers down each other's arms.

It was quiet, and then Justin sat up and picked up his hands. I just can't fucking believe how disappointed I can still get, he said. After all this time. Every time I think, okay, there cannot possibly still be a part of me clinging to this stupid hope that...there's going to be a miracle, and I'm going to...I mean, if not get all the way better, at least back to how I was before. And then it turns out, nope, there it is. Every time I think I've come to terms with the fact that I can't get better I find some new, stupid part of me that can't stand one more minute of not being better.

I just can't even fucking imagine, Brian said. I just have no idea what it feels like.

Justin shrugged a little, nodded. I appreciate that.

Brian reached out and played with Justin's fingers. After a long moment, he said, I don't think there's a solution out there.

I know.

Maybe in a few years they'll come up with something new or something, but... Brian shook his head. I don't think I can fix you. I don't think I can make you feel better.

Justin breathed out. Thank you.

Brian kept holding Justin's hand and gently turned his arm over. He wasn't wearing sleeves this time.

That doesn't mean you get to make yourself feel worse, Brian said. That's not the deal.

Justin chewed on the inside of his cheek. I know. I'm sorry.

I kissed his cheek.

I'm talking to my therapist about it, he said. We're working on it.

You need to be happier, Brian said. That one I can do.

I don't know if that's true either.

Brian shook his head. Not going to work this time. I'm not giving up on that one.

Justin's eyes were warm. Okay. He put his arm around my shoulder and tugged me into him, and I cuddled into his side, watching Brian.

Why do you do it? Brian said, small. I never asked.

I wish I knew, honestly. It just...makes sense, somehow. Something else to think about, I guess.

Well, Brian said. That we can do. He reached over to me and pulled both of us into him.

There's not a magic cure. But there's the three of us.

There is still some kind of magic.