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.
Thirteen. Darkest Hours (1992)
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.
After the service, the three of them and the siblings and Ricky’s closest friends had lunch at a midtown restaurant. Hector was so grateful whenever one of the siblings or the friends would make a lame joke about how Ricky, with his white-trash sweet tooth, would insist they all get the chocolate-marshmallow-goo-covered dessert. After, Hector had walked Cathy and Jim and the siblings to their hotel, then taken the subway back to the Bleecker Street apartment. He had lived there virtually alone on and off for most of the past year, with Ricky at St. Vincent’s.
Eventually, he determined that he couldn’t weep anymore or continue on in such a state of acute grief and agitation. He took a Valium, chasing it with a glass of white wine from a bottle that had been in the fridge, half empty, for several months. It tasted sour, but he sat with it at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the Valium to kick in. When he felt blurry, he took the bottle back to the bedroom with him and walked around the room, gathering up more stuff of Ricky’s — a pilly sleeveless T-shirt from an old Whitney Houston concert, a pair of white gym socks, a photo from Fire Island, a red jockstrap, Ricky’s astrology book, Ricky’s ironic Strawberry Shortcake snuggle doll — and brought them all into bed with him and held them in his arms until he passed out.
Seven hours later, the phone beside the bed half woke him. An hour later, it woke him fully and he reached over and answered it with a cobwebby hello.
“Hector?” It was a woman’s voice. He grunted an affirmation. “It’s Issy.”
Ysabel. He hadn’t seen her in — what? — four, five months. A veil of shame descended over his semiconsciousness. “What’s up?” he grunted.
“Are you okay?” She sounded timid, small.
“I just woke up.”
“I just wanted to call and say I’m sorry I didn’t come today. I’m not feeling well.”
“I know, Ava told me. Don’t feel bad.”
“Did everything go okay?”
“Yeah, it went fine, thanks. You can ask Ava about it. I took a Valium when I got home and I’m just waking up from it.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding mildly chastised. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s okay.” Hector sat up in bed, realizing that, half stoned, he’d surrounded himself with Ricky’s stuff before passing out. The framed photo of Ricky clattered off the bed and he reached down to pick it up. “How are you doing, Issy? You’re not in the hospital still, are you?”
“No,” she said. “I stabilized. I’m with Ava. At Judith House.”