Brothers

Sensitive Content: Language, allusion to violence, hospital

“A sight for sore eyes.” Steven said, leaning over the hospital bed. The heart monitor beeped by his left ear in a steady rhythm. 

“Hey, keep it in your pants there. Between you and these nurses I’m like James Bond.” Jim didn’t say so much as he wheezed. Like the words were robbing him or strength.

It was a stark contrast to the man's strong intonations that had always seemed to carry across O’Malley’s bar, or from the couch in the living room to the kitchen counter, from his living room window, or even across his cut lawn and to neighbors on their evening strolls. How we doing this evening? 

Steven huffed a laugh in response to Jim’s joke, ran his hand through his thinning hair. After all these years, it was still Jim, even now, even in this circumstance, who was attempting to lighten the mood. 

Steven held back the thought that shattered his brain: that it may be one of the last times he would be able to do such a thing. 

“Well I’ll be sure to tell Dee to tell those nurses to keep their hands to themselves.”

Jim’s eyes sharpened. “Don’t you dare.” 

Steve put his hands up in surrender, the jacket he was wearing still stained from the coffee he spilled last week when heading to the construction site on the corner of Smith and Main. “James Bond it is, then.” 

Jim nodded, a mischievous smirk lifting one side of his lip. His eyes looked like they were submerged in two black swamps, his head half-covered in gauze and his chest wrapped in a way that Steven thought looked like a mummy, except for the tubes sticking out of his stomach. Steven was no doctor, but he’d seen enough construction injuries over the years to know when something was bad, and when it was really bad. 

He swallowed the “really bad” on the tip of his tongue and pulled up a chair.

Steven sat, hands folded like an ogre over his wide legged posture. He still had his work boots still on, and some flowers he grabbed from CVS on his way over now sat awkwardly in his lap. He didn’t even know why he really got them. Since when did he and his high school best friend exchange flowers, of all things? It was just, what do you bring someone who just got in a life-altering accident? Something told him the healthcare professionals probably wouldn’t love the idea of a pack of cigarettes and a case of beers. So he smoked one in the parking lot outside before grabbing the flowers from the passenger seat and coming in.

Jim stared at the television mounted to the wall. Family Feud was on mute. 

“That cigarette smell you got on you is tempting right now.” Jim said, eyes on the screen. “Odds they’ll catch me smoking if we crack open a window?”

“Yeah, not sure that would fly.” 

“Come on. Better to ask for forgiveness, right? Also, what’s it gonna do, kill me?” Jim threw his head back – as much as he could manage– into the pillow, chuckling to himself. The sound was more like static on an old tv - the kind with the antennae Steven had grown up shifting left and right as his mother instructed him on Sunday nights. 

“Jesus Jim.” 

The two of them sat there. The hospital lights glared a little too bright above them. Steven’s boots did an awkward shuffle on a tile that squeaked as he tried to readjust and get comfortable. 

Two men. Twenty one years. Hundreds of crumpled up napkins on sticky bar top tables. Uncomfortable ties that had scratched at their shaved necks when their moms had made them attend Christmas services. McDonalds coffee drive throughs on winter mornings. Jim at the high school gym, staying late to create plays for the Friday game. Steven in the stands, or helping out on Saturday practices whenever work allowed. 

Two friends, with seemingly infinite time. Seemingly unending opportunities to bust balls or get so shit-faced even their bud Rich at the station couldn’t “in good consciousness” give them a pass for their hell-raising.

Jim’s monitor beeped. Steven didn’t believe in signs, but if he did, he thought that was a horrible one. A countdown of sorts.

Time was not, as it turned out, as infinite as it led them to believe, which was another lie– another crime Steven would add to his growing list.

He wondered what his Father would say in this situation if he was still around, if anything. The man wasn’t known for his grand speeches. Steven could see him at their kitchen table now, in the same jacket Steven now wore, fanning out his newspaper and glancing at his son. Slowly, he’d push himself up to grab the keys where they sat in the walnut key holder that hung by the door - the one he carved for mom’s 50th. He would have grunted a small let’s go. Would have taken Steven for a long drive with no music on the radio. 

Steven had always liked the silence of those rides. How his father knew he often needed space like that to think, or just be, when life got to be a lot, but also that he needed company to do it. Like his father was giving him permission. And they’d go to the lake, and he’d park the truck and grab the fishing poles, or simply get out of the car, and they’d walk until Steven felt he had it in him to say anything at all.

He thought of the way his father’s footsteps sounded like crunching fall leaves on those walks. 

It was funny, the way a person could miss a sound, almost like it was the person who made them. Steven wondered, for a moment, what sounds of Jim he’d miss. He pushed the thought away. 

Not yet. He thought. Don’t think like that. 

Jim was still here and with a life of his own yet to live.

Kids to raise. A home. A wife. 

Deanna. 

Where was she? Steven wondered, physically stopping himself from spinning his head around to the door to peak to the far ends of the hallway.

“Steve,” Jim interrupted his thoughts. “I gotta tell you something.” 

“Hm? Yeah, what’s up?” 

Jim took a deep breath. “Nice flowers.” He shifted his eyes to Steven, drilling into them into his own.

“What?” 

“Nice flowers. Her favorites.”

Steven stiffened. Laughed. It came out hoarse. “Oh? Damn. These were the first ones I grabbed, to be honest.” 

Jim didn’t blink. Didn’t move. “Honest. Huh.” 

“Yeah.” Steven felt small all the sudden. Heat from nowhere poured into his ears and burned up his cheeks. He squirmed around in his seat like a kid holding his bladder. A nurse pushed some sort of rolling computer contraption past the door. Its wheels squeaked.

“Speaking of,” Jim said, his words like tiptoes on a hardwood floor. “Fuck it. I’m not gonna bullshit. I mean–I am dying.” 

“Jesus Jim,” Steven huffed. “Don’t–” 

“--Can you let me finish? Thank you. Like I said. I’m dying. The nurses are all giving me that look. You know, like, the oh boo fucking hoo, we’ll let this guy cuss and ask for cigarettes and flirt and shit because he just got his ass handed to him by some soccer mom who dropped her phone between her seat and thought that was more important than looking at the damn road, and now this loser is – damn. Damn it.” Jim bit his lip. His throat constricted. 

Steven had never, in all his years, seen his friend this way. 

But then again, he’d never seen him on his deathbed, either. 

“But you know, maybe I deserved it–”

Steven protested, but Jim cut him off. “--No, no, don’t give me that. Don’t come in here and act like I’m suddenly some hero saving kittens. You don’t even know that half of it….” He trailed off. “She didn’t either. Maybe that’s why. Karma’s a bitch and all that.” 

“Jimmy, what do you even mean ‘don’t know the half of it’?’ What are you saying?” 

Jim didn’t answer for a moment, instead shook his head no ever so slightly as he stared at Steve Harvey on the tv screen, who pointed to the Family Feud board for the speed round at the end of the episode. The contestant shook out his muscles and bounced on the balls of his feet. In the final round, the stakes always rose. 

“Jim?” Steven prodded.

“It means I read it, damn it!” Jim cried out. “I read the letter. I know everything, ok? I know all of it.” 

The air froze. The world muted itself.

Steven didn’t breathe. He didn’t move. 

The monitor beeped. Time bended in on itself, shrouding Steven in a funnel of inescapable memories. 

There was Deanna, age fifteen, sneaking Steven a pack of cigarettes from her Dad’s store. 

Deanna, waiting in line for movie tickets with her friend Sam from debate club. Deanna’s brown, Italian hair curling in the spring humidity. Steve’s adolescent stomach doing backflips. 

Deanna, chin on her knees as they sat on Hickory Boulder behind the baseball fields, crying to Steven about her college acceptances, and knowing she wanted to go but not if her Father could afford her leaving when he needed help at the store. 

The phone calls he’d sneak to the telephone booths to make, scrounging up his week’s loose change, just to hear how her uni classes were going. 

Deanna, three years later, sitting at the edge of the bar with her newly cropped hair–city glow emanating from her. 

Jim’s eyes honing in on her…

Steven shook the memories away. 

Jim rolled his eyes. Even gave a resigned smirk. “Don’t act shocked. It’s not like you were subtle. I mean, I’m literally on my deathbed, and your first thought is to bring me my wife’s favorite flowers. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist.” Jim paused, quieted into contemplation. “My best man. Saying all that, right before my wedding. Jesus, you left the thing in our apartment. Did you really think there wasn’t a chance I’d find it? But she’s the best thing that ever happened to me. The. Best. Thing. I know I don’t deserve–I know I didn’t deserve her, but I don’t regret what I did. I’d have done it over and over, even if it meant that karma would get me here– don’t care.”

“But, you know, now I’m dying and I just know that God or whatever is gonna bring this shit up when I stomp up there and ask to get let in to the pearly white gates–I mean, it’ll be one of the things–and I’m at this point where like, I don’t want to hold it back any more. And….I want to know my girl will be taken care of.” 

Steven leaned forward then. His elbows on his knees, his eyes following the outlines of the tile floor like they were PacMan paths. 

“Look at me. Stevie.” Jim prompted. 

Steven heard his father’s voice then, for a reason he couldn’t quite understand. He looked at his friend, now mere inches from him as he leaned over. His face was grave and pale, but more authoritative than he had ever seen in all their years of small town debauchery. “You love her. That much I know. But she doesn’t. Get that through your head. I took my lighter and I burned that note.”

Burned. 

Burned it down before she read it. 

Steven let the words meld into him and settle in his bones. All those years, he thought she read his profession, and ignored it. Resented him for it, and he came to accept that he was never the one, that it had been laid to rest. 

But it hadn’t. It had never even been a discussion. Just ashes, in a heap of things left unsaid. 

Jim grabbed Steve’s wrist. “I took that from her. And I didn’t care–hell I still really don’t. And now I need your word. That when I’m gone, you’re gonna take care of our girl.” 

“Give me your word. She’s–she’s gonna need you….”

“Jim, I–I’m. I’m sorry.” 

“Prove it.”

Steven shook himself awake, and grabbed his friend’s wrist right back, the two men then locked in place and time, staring at each other. “I will.” 

He already had. But that was something he couldn’t even admit, not even to himself, just yet.

Jim breathed, and the breath was ancient, like it was one he’d been holding in since before he was born, before he was even on this earth. Like gods from ages past came down and infused him with a divine wind that he had no idea he was even capable of holding for such a long period of time. “Okay.” He whispered. 

He let go of his oldest friend. His grip had been so tight it left urgent imprints around his wrist. He leaned back into his hospital bed. “Okay.” He said to the ceiling. Then, he said the word again. Over and over To the ceiling. To the sky. To his best friend, who he knew had not only loved his wife, but had loved his wife before he himself had even known her name. “It’s all gonna be okay.”

Steven swore. Nothing was okay. Not the lies, or the past. Or the way he could feel his friend, or whoever this man was, letting himself fall away. Not the decision he now had to make about Deanna, even though it felt like an impossible proposition.

Yet, as he looked at his friend, and a small part of him, deep inside, the part that he had pushed down with the regrets of a lover never coming to pass, smiled. 

The thing that wasn’t okay the most? That a part of him wasn’t sorry at all. 

Steven willed a tear to fall from his cheek. Strings of half sentences sputtered out of him, apologies, or explanations, or ones even the universe couldn’t decipher in terms of truth. 

Jim didn’t hear any of it. He just stared at the white ceiling, noticing that the little holes in the panels looked a little like the coral of a worn seashell he collected as a kid when he would walk the beach. He repeated his final words. 

Okay. 

Okay. 

Okay.

….The next time the monitor beeped, it did so for a good long while.