Tim Murphy - Christodora

Her brows knitted close together, appraising him. “I think we better go to the ER,” she said. “I’m worried about leaving you alone.”

“I need to tell you something.”

“What?”

“You know the kid? Your friend’s kid you mentioned who ran off?”

“You mean Mateo?”

“Yeah.” Oh God, he thought, this was the point of no return.

The rich lady’s face darkened. “What about him?” she asked.

“I was with him out here. We were, um, partying — getting high — together.”

She stared at him, baffled. “What? You — you guys are friends?”

“Uh—” He was stammering, shaking. “We would get high together in New York. At my place.”

“Oh my God,” the rich lady said. She stepped back slowly, her hand over her mouth. “You got him into heroin? In your neighborhood?”

“No!” he said, startled.

“You came out here and found him?”

“No! I didn’t even know he was out here. He texted me and told me to come over.”

“What? Come over where?”

“To a — to a girl’s house.”

“When?”

“Like, two days ago.”

“That’s when he disappeared. Well, where, where? Where is the house?” She was panicking now.

“I don’t know, I don’t know! It was near the church.”

“What church?” Her voice was rising now, attracting the attention of the others. At the edges of his vision, Hector saw the bear Vinny walking back toward them.

“The big modern church.”

She threw up her hands, as if to say, That’s a big help. “Was he okay?” she asked. Vinny stepped up to her side, put an arm around her.

“We were all high. I called the ambulance.”

“Did they come? What happened?”

He felt like she was going to hit him. He stepped back a pace or two. “I saw the ambulance pull up and I drove away.”

Her hands flew to her mouth again. “Oh my God!” she cried, walking away from him, aghast.

“Sh-sh-sh, it’s gonna be okay,” Vinny said, taking her in closer. Hector shrank before him — a shame he’d tamped down for years rose up from his chest and seared him in the face.

“Just explain to me what’s going on,” Vinny said, looked from the rich lady to Hector and back again.

The rich lady gasped in a long breath, took Vinny by the elbows. “A friend’s son who was staying with me,” she managed to say. “I have to make calls to see what happened to him.” She was already rifling through her big expensive leather bag, pulling out her iPhone, a little notebook, a pen. She turned abruptly to Hector. “How could you not have said something when I first told you about Mateo?” she pleaded.

She walked away toward the picnic tables where the meeting had been. Hector felt like his head was on fire with shame. He began weeping.

Vinny put a hand on his shoulder. “I think you better let me take you to the ER,” he said. “What’s your name again?”

Hector managed to say his first name.

Vinny stared at him a bit funny. “Are you Hector Villanueva?”

Hector looked at him, startled.

“I was an activist, too,” Vinny said. “In San Fran. I remember we met at a conference, like, twenty-two years ago. In New York.”

Hector looked at him blankly. “We did?” he asked. This was the last thing he needed right now. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts!

“Look,” Vinny continued. “It happened to me, too. It’s just trauma, that’s all. Don’t hate yourself — it’s not worth it. We went through enough already.”

Hector looked at Vinny dead level in the face. “Sweetie, I have had enough of this life. I’m ready to wrap it up.”

Vinny gripped his arm around Hector’s shoulders and steered him about, walking him toward the rich lady. “You need to go to rehab and get sober,” Vinny said. “Everything else works itself out.”

“I’m not going over to her,” Hector said.

“You don’t have to,” Vinny said. “Wait here and I’ll talk to her.”

Hector turned away while they talked. Should he run? He didn’t have the energy to run. Anyway, they’d just call the police, reporting a man who’d said he was suicidal. In a moment, Vinny returned and introduced him to some Asian dude from the meeting, a middle-aged guy named Foster wearing a Black Flag T-shirt. Foster at least spared Hector the treacly smile and merely whopped him lightly on the back by means of hello.

“Come on,” Vinny said. “We’ll take you to the ER at Cedars.”

He walked with them toward the parking lot. And what — what the fuck was this? Two LAPD cops were charging straight toward them across the lawn. They’re coming for me, Hector immediately thought, then he thought, No, they’re not, then he thought, Yes, they are . And they were. One of them asked him if he was indeed Hector Villanueva. He nodded his head.

“You’re under arrest for possession of drugs,” one said, cuffing him. “We also need to talk to you about the death of Carrie Janacek.” They started walking him toward their cop car, Vinny and Foster following behind.

“I don’t know that name,” he said, but he felt his stomach plunge.

“It’s the girl you fed with drugs two nights ago in Westlake,” one of the cops said. “After you left, she OD’d.”

The ground seemed to slant forty-five degrees as they were walking. In years of partying, nobody had ever died at a scene with him. He could barely even remember that girl except for those final moments when the four of them had been fucking on a couch.

“Is the kid okay?” Hector asked.

“Which one?” asked one of the cops, the woman.

Oh, that’s right, he remembered. That twink from Palm Springs had been there, too. “The, uh — the Latino one.”

“He’s where you’re going, along with the other kid,” said the cop. “MCJ.”

“What’s that?”

“The jail.”

They arrived at the cop car, and he was pushed gently down in the backseat. He looked back up at Vinny and Foster.

“I’ll tell Drew,” Vinny said. “We’ll work on getting you out. Try to get some rest, okay, Hector?”

The cop car drove off. Hector closed his eyes, went to lie down in the backseat.

“Sit up, sir,” the woman cop said from the front seat. “We need to see you.”

He sat back up. He couldn’t even care about what would happen to him. The only thing he wanted was to curl up into a fetal position as soon as possible and go to sleep and hopefully never wake up.

Hector walked back into the apartment, fully a widower. He took off his suit and tie in the living room, then stumbled into the bedroom, pulled a flannel shirt of Ricky’s from the dresser and wrapped it around his neck to deeply inhale its scent, got under the duvet, curled up in a ball, and wept. The worst part of the day had been all that time right alongside Ricky’s parents. To have never even met them until earlier that year, when they came to visit Ricky in New York City for the first time because they knew that the end was nearing, to have only really known them as these Catholic Republicans from Reading, Pennsylvania, who, Ricky told him, were responsible for certain intractable elements of Ricky’s own personality — Jim and Cathy, Jim and Cathy — to not particularly like them because of what he knew was the stone silence on the other end of the line whenever Ricky, so bravely and brazenly and effortfully nonchalant, ever mentioned to them his being gay, having a boyfriend, fighting the epidemic.

Then to suddenly have to be right beside them for hours, days at a time. Then the moment during the service when Cathy finally broke down — when she began to quietly weep and turned, imperceptibly, timidly, to her husband, who either truly didn’t notice or frigidly pretended not to notice. Hector couldn’t take it. He put an arm around this small, inconsequential woman, this narrow, Hummel-collecting woman who’d never been anywhere or known anything but who nonetheless had produced Ricky for him — how could he not be grateful, owe her something? He put his muscular arm around her and she crumpled into it, turned in to his chest like it was the soft, understanding place she’d been searching for for the past several months and soaked his suit front with tears, while he brought her into his other arm and freely indulged, crying with her, full of a white-hot rage at Jim, who stood there stoically and pretended not to notice.