She hadn’t needed Nancy Drew to track me down. She’d dialed my mother’s number and an automated voice provided the forwarding number, repeating it twice in case she didn’t have a pencil in hand. What’s surprising isn’t that she’s found me, but that she’s come looking.
Bobby’s wife sounds shy and awkward when I answer the telephone, introducing herself as if she were a stranger, as if I couldn’t possibly have any recollection of having spent the past Easter in her home. She apologizes for intruding; she feels terrible about bothering me. She’s calling from the Pride of Carolina Motor Lodge on the strip highway outside Chapel Hill. Her voice is tired and raspy. She says Bobby refused to come down from Watauga County; his son is dead as far as he’s concerned. The doctors told her the cuts were deep and plastic surgery might not hide the scars. She’s worried JR will have to wear long sleeves, even in the heat of summer. The television bleats in the background, noise to keep her company.
“JR asked me to call you,” she says, assuming, incorrectly, the boy and I have struck a special friendship, that I’d been sought after and my advice solicited as his only flesh-and-blood relative who’d been to college. She has it all wrong. Robert, not JR, has asked her to call. That much I know. What I don’t know is how Robert knew to ask for me. Did he figure it out on his own? How? Had someone told him? I ask what she wants me to do. Can you come to the hospital? she asks. I’ll meet you in the lobby tomorrow at two, I say.
The hospital is like every other, with walls painted neutral colors and spit-polished floors. The simplest question-room, please, of Robert Calhoun-seems to overwhelm the red-smocked old woman volunteering at the reception desk. The computer denied access to any information, referring her to confidentiality protocols. Flustered, she excuses herself and dashes off to find help.
“Andy.”
I spin on my heels and stand face-to-face with my cousin Bobby’s wife. She’s aged since my mother’s funeral. She’s missed her appointment with Lady Clairol and hasn’t slapped on any makeup to brighten her dull pallor. She’s not making any efforts to put a best face on things. Meeting is even more awkward than the phone conversation. She asks if I’ve eaten. I lie and say yes since hospital food still haunts my dreams. We walk to the locked unit. She introduces me to the unit clerk, then excuses herself. She’ll meet me in the lobby after visiting hours, knowing we “boys” want to talk. I listen for subtext, insinuation, innuendo, in her comment, and hear none. All she cares about is that her damaged son has asked for me and I have come.
Robert is embarrassed by his circumstances, but happy, genuinely happy, to see me. He doesn’t seem so different from the boy I shared a bed with last spring. He hardly looks to be a danger to himself, bandaged wrists notwithstanding, and no one would ever believe he’s a threat to others. He doesn’t seem to belong here, locked away with the agitated, the obsessed, the haunted, the irredeemable. After hello, I grope for words, appalled by the question that finally tumbles off my lips.
“What have you been up to?” I ask.
“Oh, not a lot,” he answers.
We sit knee to knee, talking about inconsequential things. I stumble from one faux pas to another. He squirms when I ask how he likes school. He wants to talk about me, wants to ask about when I was eighteen, his age.
“Did you ever do anything crazy? Really crazy?”
I tell him about hitchhiking alone to D.C. to see the Stones. He’s impressed. “Yeah, they were great, it was great, best night of my life,” I say, lying.
A hip-hop psych tech, not much older than Robert, announces that visiting hours are over. Robert grabs my arm and asks if I’ll come back tomorrow. He doesn’t tell me why he wants to see me. I don’t have to ask.
“If you like.”
“I’d like,” he says. When I shake his hand, he grabs and squeezes me, then breaks away quickly, not knowing how I might react, not trusting that I won’t push him away. He’s unsure of the world these days.
He’s quiet when I return the next day, absorbed in a television movie. But when I stand up to stretch, he grabs my elbow, not letting me wander from the sofa. At the end of visiting hours, he asks if I’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe, I say. My minimum-wage obligations back in Charlotte are looming. Please, he says, hopefully. Sure, okay, I assure him. If Barnes and Noble won’t accommodate me, I’ll take my skills across the street to Borders.
Bobby’s wife isn’t the type of woman comfortable with tears, but the events of the past few weeks have broken her down. I’m not that comfortable with emotional outbursts either and, if truth be told, I would rather she not start crying when I tell her I’ll hang around a little longer. She’s overwhelmed by what she thinks is my kindness and generosity. I let her believe my motives are selfless. Why should I tell her the truth, that I’ve failed everyone around me, my wife, my father? Christ, I couldn’t even be at my mother’s bedside when she died. Now they are all gone and I’m alone and, if not entirely unloved, then, at least, unneeded. What twist of fate has dropped this kid in my lap? Why now? Bobby’s wife has it all wrong. Kindness and generosity have nothing to do with it. I’m doing this for me.
Besides, I genuinely like the kid. I knew the bare bones of the story. He’s eager to talk, but reluctant to be the first to speak. On my third visit, the charge nurse makes a special dispensation so Robert and I can have a little privacy. We sit quietly in his tiny room. He fidgets on his mattress and offers to change places with me.
“That’s okay. The chair’s fine,” I say. He looks at me and sighs. I’m going to have to make the first move. I make it easy for him to open his heart and pour out his soul. I confess I know all about WrestlerJoc and OnMiKnees4U, about Cary, about whom I had been both wrong and right.
“Cary, Cary, Cary,” he repeats, feeling a rush of liberation just being able to speak the forbidden name.
Cary wasn’t the dreaded predator I feared and ended up being pretty much the package presented over cyberspace-twenty years old, in the throes of first love and infatuation, the type of boy on whom Robert had harbored secret crushes since junior high. Still, just like I predicted, he ended up smashing Robert against the rocks of reality by abruptly announcing he really was straight, was only really comfortable with girls, that being around Robert now made him feel a little creepy. Maybe Robert shouldn’t call or hang around his dorm, and probably he shouldn’t acknowledge him if they happened to run into each other on campus.
This sudden change of heart happened after (and, as he will realize when he’s a little older and wiser, because) Robert, emboldened by the power of true love, placed a classified ad in The Daily Tar Heel, participating in some phenomenon called National Coming Out Day by sending a public mash note using his real name to the Love of His Life, a man, yes, a man, he identified only by the initials CAL. In a gentler, kinder world, Robert would have been allowed to quietly retreat to lick the wounds of rejection, and, over time, learn to love Cary less and less.
But, of course, fate would intervene in the form of Mandy’s older brother, the beneficiary of a UNC wrestling scholarship, who clipped the disgusting announcement from the paper, folded it, and tucked it in his wallet, saving it to share with his bitter little sister when he went home for Thanksgiving. Little sister, drunk and betrayed, threw the crumpled piece of paper in the face of my cousin Bobby when he answered the door.
To say he beat the boy to a pulp wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration. Robert crawled back to Chapel Hill that night with a black eye and facial abrasions and a sharp pain in his rib cage where his father kicked him for good measure after knocking him to the floor. The dormitory was empty except for a couple of Chinese kids who didn’t speak much English and kept to themselves anyway. By the time halls started to fill up again on Sunday, the swelling had gone down and he told anyone who asked about his eye he’d been in a car wreck, nothing broken, just knocked around a bit.