Tommy was out of the bedroom and down the hall when Mason told Sully. “Actually, Dad said put out the silverware and it’s great to have two kids to boss around. But,” Mason shrugged, “as long as he’s in the kitchen he might as well take care of the dishes.”
“Mason!”
“You heard him,” Mason said. “It’s just like family. Now, back to you and Chris.”
“What?”
“What’s the real reason you haven’t done him yet? You’ve been back together for three weeks.”
“He’s been at McCleiss.”
“He comes home every weekend.”
“Are you going to hound me until I give you an answer?”
“Yes.”
“I told you,” Sully said. “We’re taking it slow. After everything that happened the last time I—”
“Oh, that’s horseshit!” Mason said. “It would be nice if it was true, but... I’m not quite the virgin Tommy is. I see the look on your face when you talk about Chris. You should have ripped his clothes off and went to town a long time ago.”
“Sully rolled his eyes and then motioned for Mason to sit on the bed with him.
“You remember Justin?” he said urgently.
“Justin Reily your summer sexual playmate?”
“Goddamn, Mason,” Sully said with enough irritation to realize he might have gone too far.
“I was just joking.”
“Not about that, all right?” Sully said. “Really, not about that.”
“Okay.”
“Well,” Sully said. “I was worried because... I felt sort of weird about being with Chris so soon after Justin. I wanted a break period. And then when I started thinking about starting stuff up I realized that what I was really worried about was passing something onto Chris. I was...”
Sully bit his lip and said, “We never used any sort of protection. I just… didn’t bother with Justin. But I knew he’d done this with other people. So you see I don’t know what I might have.”
Sully blew out his cheeks.
“I went and got tested and I’m really just waiting till the results come back. I sort of feel dirty, like I won’t be clean again until I find out if I’m safe for Chris. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this dumb before.”
“Well,” Mason said. “I can see why you didn’t share that with Tommy.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I bet you could. I bet you can trust him with a lot.”
“Yes, Mase. But not right now. And not even Bailey because of all the shit in his life.”
Tommy came back into his room saying, “Do you want lemonade or pop?”
“You don’t have to make lemonade,” Mason said.
“I want to. But I want to know what everyone else wants before I go ahead and—”
“I want lemonade,” Sully told him, but it was only to get rid of Tommy. Tommy left and Sully turned to Mason.
“I don’t even know if I can open the results when they come, Mason. What if it’s… I don’t know. I don’t even know what to do about STDs. What if it’s HIV? What if it’s AIDS? I don’t know what I’m walking around with.”
“What if it’s nothing, Sully?” Mason said. “Now stop this, all right?”
Sully put his face in his hands and pulled them through his hair.
“Just...I always said I didn’t believe in God. I act like that sometimes. But it’s not true. What if—?”
“God is not punishing you,” Mason said, tiredly, before Sully could get it out of his mouth.
“I’ll be glad when this shit is over,” Sully said.
“Are you going to tell Chris?”
“No,” Sully said sternly. “Listen—and I’ve got to put this around to all the guys—as far as Chris is concerned Justin Reily never happened.”
“Chris left you. Chris betrayed you. If you were with someone else then you shouldn’t have to—”
“Mason!” Sully snapped.
Mason raised a dangerous eyebrow.
“Just,” Sully tried to calm down. “Just respect me on this, all right?”
“I always do,” Mason said.
Sully was tired after his confession. He sighed again and said, his hand on Mason’s knee a second, “I know.”
Right before Tommy Dwyer went to Catholic school, his grandmother had given him a copy of Macmillan’s Bible Stories for Children. It wasn’t one of those tacky Bibles put out by a church. It was classy, high end, put out by a mature New York company with beautiful, lush illustrations and Tommy went through all of the pictures again and again long before he could read. He learned the Bible the way the men in the Middle Ages had, through the pictures. He knew every story by the time he was seven, and it was at that time his mother used to sit him down into front of the TV. She had gotten saved and serious about Jesus. This didn’t last, but while it did she watched the PTL network everyday and sent her money off to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. You couldn’t blame Tammy Faye. She hadn’t known. Nobody knew. Hell, even Blaire Warner from The Facts of Life was there.
And Tommy got to watch all the programs that came on that station: Superbook where the kids and a robot went back into a Japanime Old Testament world. The Flying House where some kids a robot and a flying house went into the New Testament. These kids apparently didn’t go to church because they were always surprised by how the adventures they were in turned out. And there was Gospel Bill and the Bible Bowl. And Bible Bowl was so old it must have been in reruns. There would be a commercial right in the middle where a girl who was a little too sexy would talk about her Bible Bowl tee shirt and a boy with feathered hair would talk about his Bible Bowl Tee shirt and they would say, “Bible Bowl Blue for boys, Bible Bowl Red for girls,” in this sort of Southern drawl. But then, after all, they were form Oklahoma.
Tommy wanted this world. He loved Jesus. He loved God. He loved the Bible and he didn’t know why anyone else wouldn’t. Mason was saved. At that time Addison probably was too. Actually Mason never said he was saved. But... he knew the Lord. So Tommy got on his knees in front of the television and invited Jesus into his heart.
Tommy was eight. It was only a year later when he noticed the difference between his mother’s Bible and his. His mother had a real Bible. Tommy was a little hurt to realize he’d never read the real Bible, but also excited. There were other stories, other things that he had never known. His Bible wasn’t complete. There was more to learn. And so, at eight, Tommy, was very clever but everyone didn’t know this because all of his efforts had been bent on the Bible, began to read the Bible. The real Bible.
He began with the Good News Bible. It was simple to read and had fanciful pen drawings with bits of Scripture under them. Now he had worked his way up to an old Revised King James with a leatherette cover that was peeling, a pink tassel and lots of highlight and marks made by his mother from when she’d still been a Christian.
He always stifled the fact that it wasn’t fair. His mother, and his brother had been saved for a while. They’d been serious about Jesus and Tommy didn’t know how it worked out for them because they weren’t now. He was all alone in this pursuit. No one cared about God. No, that wasn’t true. Mason did and...
The odd thing was that this year while Tommy’s faith had been steadily crumbling a thought had been occurring to him. He had always believed in his faith. His faith, his way of seeing things had always been important. His world, what he had built for himself. And suddenly it was cracking, cracking fast. The way things had been explained to him, the way God and life and right and wrong were supposed to be was falling apart.
But that did not mean that God was falling apart.
Every morning Tommy started his day the same. Since he’d been fourteen. He got a cup of coffee—he’d graduated from drinking it heavily milked down to drinking it almost black—and in the early, early morning, still yawning he got on his knees, prayed a bit and then opened his Bible and began to read. He picked one passage and underlined it and decided to memorize it that day. A verse a day. This verse he would look at over and over again, say over and over again, fill up his journals with his reflections on it. God must always be present. Why wouldn’t he be? What else was worthy of being present?
His arm still hurt. It still throbbed in the form of a cross, all up and down him. While he read the Bible he tried to ignore the residual stinging from the tattoo artist’s needle. He tried to push out the face of Adam the tattoo artist and the smell of Nag Champa, the sound of that music.
And then he stopped. He was reading the beginning of the book of Joshua:
Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass, that the LORD spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying,
Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel.
Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses.
From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.
There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.
Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them.
Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.
This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.
Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.
Tommy closed his eyes and let the stinging sting, like a needle in his flesh all over again, smelled the incense from that day, realized he might have been smelling it because Mason was currently burning it in the next room. He felt the sting again and the bitterness in his mouth. He tasted the coffee and he blinked.
He saw the room.
He would be turning eighteen. He’d been saved for over a decade. And it had all been about heaven, very far way, taken on the word of another. For a very brief second, by complete accident he had slipped into something.
He closed his Bible and folded his hands. He was feeling. He was like a tree in spring. He was full of life. So this was life. He sipped the coffee. In joy he crossed himself. He didn’t dare say anything. To say the prayer in his heart would ruin it.
For the first time in his life, Tommy Dwyer was completely, unequivocally, happy.
“Mason! Sully, we’re glad you’re here!” Jack began, and then his voice changed when he said: “Balliol.”
“Don’t get excited,” Mason and Sully had sat down next to Jack Butterfield, and Balliol had motioned for Butterfield to get up and find another seat. “I’m just here for moral support.”
He looked at his friends.
Jack Rapp—Mason looking between him and Butterfield thought this might be one confusing year—looked nonplussed, and then he smiled and said, “Well, then... I want to welcome everyone to first meeting of the year for the Saint Vitus Lance. Mason, Sully, meet Mr. Mascacent, out Faculty Advisor.”
Allan Mascascent was in his mid forties and gave them an awkward wave, then said, “But only the advisor.”
“Our editor,” Jack gestured to him, “is Chris Parr. He’s the man with the plan.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Balliol whispered to Mason. Sully pretended he hadn’t heard him.
Jack introduced Sully and Mason to everyone else on the staff and everyone else to Sully and Mason. To Balliol’s way of thinking they were all wasting a great deal of time and so he asked:
“As an outsider... a civilian, so to speak, how do you all do this?”
“I do sports,” Jack Rapp said. “And that includes quiz bowl and debate team.”
“That’s a broad definition,” Balliol commented and a few people around him laughed.
Rapp shrugged and said, “Donnie covers all the stuff like campus ministry and charity work... Blood drives. Brian does all the school spirit things. you know carnivals, Winter Ball, Fall Dance. And Ben does the school plays and stuff.”
“Everyone else,” Donnie pointed around at people like Will Jacobs and Stephen Cunning, “sort of works under us covering whatever needs to be covered. You know?”
Mason looked at Sully, and then Sully put his hand up and said, “Exactly what will we be doing?”
Jack thought about it and said, “Well, we’ll be handing out all the various assignments and if one of those sort of matches up with what you’re close to then you should approach that editor.”
“We’re not close to anything, though,” Mason said. He looked around and told them. “This is our one extracurricular activity. We are antisocial. Anything we covered we’d be horning our way into.”
“Well,” Mr. Mascacent said. “You don’t really want to horn your way into anything. We’re a school after all. This is more like a news letter to let people know what’s going on in the school.”
“Can I say something?” Balliol asked.
No one was sure whom he was talking to, so no one said anything. So Balliol spoke.
“The Lance is a rag.”
After he’d let that bomb drop he said, “I’m sure most school papers are. But the Lance is what I know, and it’s a rag. If it were a newsletter it would be called the school newsletter, Mr. Mascacent. But it’s a paper, and a paper aspires to be journalism. Am I right? Only journalists are supposed to go for the story, the real story, and horn in a little bit. Just like Mason said. I’ve read the Lance for three years. There are no stories, and it’s not because there are no stories to tell. It’s because no one looks for them.
“Now, I’m not saying expose all the corruption inside the school, or find out all the dirt on the teachers. One, that couldn’t be printed and two, who cares anyway? But there are plenty of things going on in Cartimandua, and in the world that we would be able to cover, to inform the student body about. And we’re not.
“Now,” Balliol continued, warming to his subject, “Jack has asked Mason, who is well read and—as far as I know—a competent writer and Sully, who’s main thing is writing, who is the greatest writer I know—to be part of this staff. I can’t believe you did it so they could write about bake sales and blood drives. If you’ve got any sense you’ll turn them loose and let them come back to someone with whatever they find. And, I’ll bet you this, what they find will be a damn site better than anything these...” Balliol looked over them, “junior editors have come up with in the last three years.
“And I’m finished, and that’s all.”
Balliol was breathless, but now they all were. Privately, Sully was sure that, for once Balliol had gone too far. There was a strange look on Mr. Mascacent’s face, but then after all, he’d just bee dressed down by a seventeen year old. For a moment, Sully thought of saying: “Forgive my friend, he’s a billionaire with a dying father.” But at that very moment Mr. Mascacent said:
“It seems to me that we might have found our new editorial advisor.”
“Where?” Balliol said, looking behind him.
But then Mr. Mascacent began to clap. Clap. Clap. Slow Clap. And both Jacks joined him, and then Brian and then all of the editors and then Sully and Mason looked at him with horrible smiles and did the same.
“Shit,” Balliol said. “Shit.”
The truth was Sullivan Reardon hadn’t been completely honest with Mason, and he was counting on Mason’s virginity when he left parts out of his story.
Sully had thought that being tested would involve needles and sending off to some far off place for results. In fact he’d seen that happen in a movie. He was actually disappointed when, after having found a Planned Parenthood he took the Number Six to, they sat him down, put a cotton swab in his mouth, ran it around and told him they’d be done in about a half hour.
“Could I come back for it later?” Sully asked.
“You mean you’ll be back in a half hour?” the woman at the clinic said.
“Uh, I’m busy,” Sully told her. “I… could you send them to my house?”
The woman looked like she was about to say something, and then Sully watched her face change and she took out a pen and paper.
“All right, hon, where do you live?”
And Sully told her, and then after he’d left he wished that he’d given her someone else’s address, but he didn’t know who he could tell this too, and he counted on Tina Reardon’s lack of interest in the mail.
For the better part of the second week of the school year, Sully told himself to worry about Balliol and Balliol’s father. Balliol had thrown himself into the newspaper and was turning into a taskmaster. That was where his stress went. Sully’s went to Balliol and he diverted it from his own concerns.
But why worry about Mr. Balliol dying when you could be the one to go?
That wasn’t true, Sully pushed the thought away. Even if he had HIV, that didn’t kill you anymore. Not necessarily. At most he could be inconvenienced. And the other STDs, they left signs. He’d been too scared to look up much on the Internet, but Mason had said, “They leave signs, so you’d know if you had one.”
But Mason didn’t really know did he?
So every day Sully went to the mailbox, hoping his mother hadn’t emptied it before and he looked for the envelope. And then when it came in, he stuffed it into his jeans. He felt it against his thigh, but he didn’t dare open it. Fear, prickly and heavy sank down through his body. He trembled a little and then shook it off. It was nothing. He was fine. Nothing was going to happen to him. In fact, there wasn’t even a need to open the letter. He felt fine.
That night Chris called
“I’m coming home for the weekend,” he said.
“You come home every weekend. Of course you are.”
“Do you want me to stay with you? We don’t have to do anything,” he added.
Sully wasn’t excited at the prospect of doing anything. He was sick at the idea of what might be in the envelope. He could be free and clear or...
“Of course you can stay here for the weekend. Mom would love to see you. You know I told her?”
“Told her what?” Chris said, though the moment he asked was them moment he knew.
“That I was gay. And.… Everything.”
“Oh, God, Sully! You didn’t tell me that?”
“But she just... put it out of her head. She chose not to believe. I thought, well fuck it. She’ll find out one day though, I’ll bet.”
“You mean you told her and—”
“I told her and she just blocked it out Chris. It was in a really bad moment. When I thought I wouldn’t be going back to school.”
‘What?”
“That’s another story. Speaking of story, I need a story for the newspaper.”
“Why don’t you come out?”
“You’re nuts!”
“That would be a story.”
“That would be the end of my writing for the paper.”
“Not if Balliol’s the advising editor. That, by the way, is some shit I cannot believe.”
I see it everyday, and I can’t believe it either. He’s like a taskmaster. I used to think he was so driven because he was taking his mind off his father, and that when his dad....”
Neither one of them said anything. And then Chris said: “Dead.”
“Yeah,” Sully said. “When that happens, he’ll ease up. But I actually think he’ll be even worse.
“That’s so shitty. His dad dead and everything. I mean, it hasn’t happened yet but... I hate that. I really hate it.” Maybe it was more than John Balliol dying, but when Sully thought about it his head hurt and eyes got hot and heavy. Everything just seemed to be worse.
“My Mom, when it happened,” Chris began. “I don’t know what Dad knew, but I didn’t know she would die for sure. I mean, to the last moment I thought there was a chance. I don’t know if it’s better or not this way for him. When she died... she didn’t even look like herself, Sully.”
“I’m sorry,” Sully said. “I can’t... put that together. My mom... sometimes she might not be much. I mean she is, but we don’t always get on. But... I can’t imagine….
“What was she like, Chris?”
“Oh, she was really nice, and really pretty. She looked like me.”
Sully laughed and Chris laughed too.
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, I have a picture of her and I realize I look more like her than Dad in some ways. Like my eyelashes. Her face was sharper than Dad’s too. She had my eyes. When she opened and closed them those lashes would just brush over her cheeks.”
Sully thought about Chris’s eyes, and the lashes over them. How he used to stroke his cheek when they were alone. Thinking of Chris melted something in Sully again.
As if he picked up on it, Chris said, “I hope this is the weekend we can start things up again. I love being with you, Sully. But I miss... being with you.”
When he said that it was like something warm was under Sully’s clothes, across his body, reminding him of what he hadn’t experienced in a long time, what was so different from the brief affair with Justin. He missed Chris’s body next to his.
So all of the feelings went swirling through Sully. The fear, the frustration at not being able to talk to anyone mingled with desire for Chris when he got back on Saturday. The fear kept on building even as Friday turned into Saturday.
Chris called Friday night from a party to say he was leaving. He wouldn’t be drinking much alcohol because he wanted to drive. He was going to meet up with Mercurio midway and then they’d all go out Saturday night.
Sully knew that Chris would want to stay the night at his house. He would. And Sully knew that Chris would want more. His first week back, Sully had gone to the public library to do research, and they were in stacks where no one ever came when hand holding turned to fooling around and then Sully reminded him that they were, sort of, in public.
“I want us to be together so bad, Sully.”
“I’m... not ready yet,” Sully said. And then it had been true. Those first days, like the day the two of them had gone swimming together, images of Chris pushing him out of the house, telling him to go away, kept creeping up. He let them go but he couldn’t shake the bad feeling. That’s what they’d talked about the last week before Chris went away.
“I’m not trying to guilt you,” he said. “I’m sorry for being such a baby. But... when we got together, that was a big moment for me—”
“It was a bit moment for me too—”
“I was really open and when things ended it hurt, Chris. So, I’m not ready to be open like that again. Which makes me sound like a punk. But...”
But this was before Sully had gone to get tested. It was only after Chris left that Sully realized that his hurt and fear over their first parting did contribute to his reluctance to start up anything physical. But that was only a part of it. Now he wanted to spend the night with Chris. He could hardly even remember what it had been like. He was eager for it, but eagerness hurt because all of the desire was mixed in with the fear of—what if they couldn’t? What if something was wrong with him?
There is nothing wrong with me! There wasn’t anything wrong with...”
And then there was that. It was funny. Sully hadn’t felt especially guilt ridden when the affair with Justin was going on. But suddenly he didn’t want to remember that he and Justin had been a... Something.
Saturday afternoon, when he got to Mason’s house where he and Tommy were going to wait for Addison before going to Balliol’s they got the phone call from Balliol.
“Dad’s really bad,” Balliol said in a clipped way. “We’re all going to the hospital.” And then he added, voice still businesslike. “This could be it.”
It was Sully who’d got the message and he thought: Only Lincoln Balliol would say, about the death of his father, “This could be it.”
They all sat around the house feeling bad and Sully, watching the news, said, “Did you hear about the virgin who killed himself?”
“What the hell kind of joke is that?”
“No,” Sully motioned to the television in the kitchen.
“Thirty-five year old Kirk McGrath of Clarenceville reportedly jumped from the Tower Building in downtown Clarenceville to his death last night after making sexual threats.”
There was an old black woman in thick pearl rimmed glasses saying:
“It was crazy! It was just crazy! He said if he didn’t—” the word was bleeped out—“then he would kill himself. He would just kill himself.
“And then he did it.”
The reporter continued, “Kirk McGrath was discharged from a Roman Catholic seminary two years earlier for psychological problems. According to sources he began to complain that if he was unable to lose his virginity he would end his life.”
Sully put a hand to his mouth and laughed.
“Easy for you to laugh,” Mason said, leaving the kitchen and going to his room.
“Easy for me!” Sully said back, following him.
“Because you don’t have to worry about it. That will probably be me in a few years, jumping off of buildings cause I can’t get laid.”
Sully shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He put his jacket on the bed.
“Sullivan, can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Did you get your test results back? I mean...?” Mason shrugged, waiting for Sully to answer.
“I did. Yes,” Sully said.
“And?”
Sully didn’t answer right away.
“Oh, God!” Mason began.
“No,” Sully cut him off. “Not, oh God. I just... haven’t looked at them yet.”
“What?”
“I’ve been...” Sully began. “I got them out of the mail on Monday, and I’ve been sort of... keeping them near me. You know—”
Mason cocked his head dangerously. “Are you serious?”
“What?” Sully looked at him.
“You’ve been carrying around this test with you for the last week?”
Sully didn’t answer.
“Sully—”
“That test could have… anything on it.”
“And if does have anything then the quicker you take care of it the less the anything could kill you. What are you going to do, keep the test in your blazer until... until something happens to you? If it does happen to you?”
“Well, that’s my decision, isn’t it?” Sully’s voice was suddenly harsh.
Then Mason did what he normally did.
He did the unpredictable.
In a second he snatched Sully’s jacket and before Sully could process what was going on Mason streaked down hall with it.
“Mason!” Sully swore. Then he leapt up and sped down the hall, his longer legs gaining on Mason.
“Mason!”
The back bathroom was open. Mason flew in. Suddenly Tommy was tossed out with a look of shock on his face, and the door slammed shut.
“Mason!” Sully screamed. “Open the door!”
There was only silence on the other side of the door and Tommy just looked at Sully, confused.
“Go to your room,” Sully told him.
Tommy obeyed. Sometimes that’s what you did.
“Mason, open the door!” Sully shouted, suddenly furious and full of little kid anger, violent anger that didn’t care what poor Tommy locked in his room across the hall thought.
And then suddenly, a slip flew under the door and Mason said, placidly: “It’s nothing. You’re fine.”
Sully stood on the other side of the door, the slip of paper at his feet.
When Mason opened the door Sully punched him the shoulder.
“You didn’t have a right to do that!” he said. “You shouldn’t have done that. That wasn’t funny.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Mason said, rubbing his shoulder. “Or I would punched you back by now.”
Sully’s eyes were shining and suddenly he put his face in his hands and started sobbing. And then he turned around. Slumped against the wall, the discarded piece of paper by him.
“I’m sorry,” Mason told him, sitting down on the floor. “But even if you hate me, someone had to open that for you. You’ve had it for the better part of the week and you’ve been terrified. Everyone can see it in you.”
“You still shouldn’t have done it, Mason,” Sully’s wiped his eyes and tilted back his head, sucking back mucus. “That’s my life on there.”
He didn’t cry too much longer. He just started sighing at last. And then he said, “I have to wash my face.”
“One of us should let Tommy out of his room.”
“Tommy come out,” Sully called.
When Tommy came out and saw what Sully looked like he said, “What’s wr—”
But then the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” Tommy said.
Sully looked at Mason.
“Mason, am I a faggot?”
“What?” Mason looked at his friend, Sully with a pinched red nose, bloodshot eyes.
“It’s just… That’s the second time in a year Tommy’s seen me sobbing outside of a bathroom, and I feel... I feel like I cry too much, like I cry all the time. I... I used to be a sissy. I mean people called me one and I thought, maybe I’m gay. That’s fine. But I’m not a sissy. But...”
Mason touched his shoulder and said, “You don’t punch like a sissy.”
Before Sully could respond he turned in the direction Mason was looking.
It was Swain beside Tommy, but she didn’t look beautiful. Her hair was undone and she was in a tee shirt and jogging pants. She touched Mason’s hand as she looked at Sully.
“Things are worse. We took Uncle John to the hospital because he got real bad. And then we brought him back to the house. He was supposed to have... I think the doctor said he’d be around until Christmas... But that would have been a bad Christmas.”
“And now?” said Sully, who after his own scare sounded balanced and sane. “How long does he have now?”
Swain shrugged. “The doctor says tomorrow or tonight.”