Fic: Not Dead, Only Sleeping (3/4)
Part One
Part Two
He stays in Jersey for another week, takes Deirdre to visit with Frank and Jamia and Krista and Ray. There are days where his mother takes the baby for the whole day, and they come back with new clothes that he never would have thought to buy for her. There's better lasagna, and it's still sort of loud, dingy, and grey outside in a way that Pittsburgh can't manage. He wants to miss it more than he does.
Gerard manages to find a night when they can all go out, minus Bob, hit some local diner that Mikey didn't know he missed until he took his first bite of a chicken parm sandwich. Ray sits next to Gerard, and he tells Mikey about the tour that Brian has planned for them, before he launches into a long discussion on how much the new X-Men book is completely lame and he was losing all faith in Marvel. Bringing the Marvel Zombies into mainstream was a dumb move.
Mikey grins and knows that Gerard secretly agrees but he'll argue it with Ray because someone has to show loyalty to the X-Men. It's not like they're talking about Spiderman or Superman.
"How is Pittsburgh?" Frank asks as Gerard makes a point about how awesome it is that Rogue actually removes one of the zombies' curses and zombifies herself.
Mikey looks away from the way Ray's hair is bobbing and shrugs. "It's all right. It's not Jersey." It's sort of the point, really, because he can remember taking Alicia to this diner before they were engaged.
Frank nods like that makes sense. "Yeah." He picks at the salad he ordered. It's just tomatoes, green peppers, and cucumbers on bag iceberg lettuce, but it's hard to eat vegan in a diner like this one. "I don't think I could ever leave this place."
"I didn't either." Mikey takes another bite of his sandwich and reaches across the table to steal a chicken tender from Gerard's plate. Gerard's too busy arguing to notice.
"You gonna move back?" Frank looks over at the counter, at the fake jukebox in the corner that doesn't work. It almost sounds like Do you want to come back, but no one wants to push that with him.
"I don't know. Maybe." He wants to say no, because of what happened in the cemetery, how he keeps thinking about the grave marker that he hasn't really seen and how he left her flowers with a seven-year-old who should be forty.
Frank nods and spears a tomato. It's hard not to notice the way he's sort of vibrating next to Mikey, now that he's concentrating on it. "Anyway," Frank says, and his lips quirk up into a quick smile. "I have tell the band something.
"Dude, Rogue is totally awesome, don't even lie. Now that she's not superpower chick, she kicks so much more ass because she's one of the ones who reminds you that being different and special isn't always going to be easy and you have to fight through it," Gerard snaps.
Mikey rolls his eyes and steals a fry from Ray. His are already gone. "What?"
Frank smiles at his salad, and then he looks at Mikey, giving him the blinding grin that reminds Mikey of just coming off stage, soaked in sweat with his heart pounding, when they knew that the show was awesome and there is no arguing with how the fans were screaming. "Jamia's pregnant."
Mikey grins and kicks Frank's ankle under the table. "Dude," he says. Frank beams at him again, and he wonders, hopes, that he looked like that when he first told them all about Alicia being pregnant. He can remember the feeling, when he concentrates, the way everything sort of rose up and felt like he was floating.
He goes to steal another one of Ray's fries and gets stabbed in the hand for it with a plastic fork.
The subject turns away from X-Men and onto the new album from Taking Back Sunday, the first tracks that Gerard is going to have to let him listen to, and he's laughing at one of Gerard's lame jokes by the time someone approaches the table and says "Excuse me?" in a soft, hopeful, and slightly apologetic way that he's almost forgotten.
***
He goes to see Barbara the day after they get back into the city. He hadn't called her the entire time, not since right before the party when he wasn't sure that he wanted his brother in his house to pass judgment on how he was living his life, before he remembered that he was being stupid because his brother was still Gerard.
It's a long visit, longer than usual because there's so much crowding in his head that he doesn't know where to start. He picks Frank because it's easiest, the best memory that he has because of the conversation that they had on the phone after the diner, the best and worst things about being a father and how he knows without question that Frank's as ready for this as anyone can be (tells Frank that he doesn't think you can be ready, because there's no way to know what it's like to have someone there who will always need you). She laughs and nods. Mikey knows there's a picture of her own three children on the desk.
After that, he does tell her about what Pete said and the visit he made to the cemetery to try and see the hole. Barb doesn't comment on how he can't call it Alicia, which is good because that's not Alicia, not there, not anymore. She doesn't say anything because he knows that he's not all right, not yet.
There are things that he doesn't want to tell her, the two fights he saw start between Gerard and Lyn-Z, one over the phone where one of them hung up on the other before the not-quite-screaming could finish, the way his mother looked at him when he said that he wasn't sure if he could come back up for Christmas, the awkward conversation he had with Bob on Ray's cellphone.
He tells her about taking Deirdre to the park that he always went to as a child, how she loved the swing and slides but had no patience for the jungle gym unless it was empty. Deirdre is outside now, in the waiting room with one of the secretaries who always loves to watch her when he has his sessions. She coos over how well-behaved she is.
Barb looks as him and says the first thing in the session that makes Mikey widen his eyes and thinks he's screwing up without meaning to again. "She probably needs to socialize, just a little. Maybe you should consider putting her in a daycare so she can be around her peer group."
He blinks and wants to say that he was never really in daycare, not beyond staying with his grandmother, but he had an older brother to watch out for him and teach him everything he needed to know. Deirdre won't get that.
He wouldn't exactly say he's well socialized, either. When he talks to Gerard later that evening and tells him that, and they both laugh for more than a minute even though it's not particularly funny.
***
On their fourth wedding anniversary, Mikey lets himself take the day off. He takes Deirdre to daycare and turns off his Sidekick for three hours. He watches the videos of Alicia trying to get Bunny to walk and remembers again that he needs to have the dogs driven down, especially now that Frank's own family is going to expand. Five dogs and a baby would be too much.
He doesn't call Gerard or his mother. He thinks about it and picks up the phone to do it, but he decides to lay in his bed instead. Mrs. Simmons calls in the evening, checking to make sure he's all right. She wants to see Deirdre in the summer, maybe for a week or so, and he offers his two empty guest rooms. It's still too early for Deirdre to take the plane alone, and one trip to Missouri was enough.
Pete calls after nine, after he's fed Deirdre spaghetti out of a can, given her a bath, and set her into his bed. They talk for fifteen minutes about basses and the new song that Pete's working on, how Mikey thinks he needs to just take the crib down and set up a real bed in Deirdre's room.
Mikey takes her out to Ikea the next day, and they look at beds that she probably won't sleep in.
***
He doesn't want to go to Ray's wedding, except that he gets a polite phone call from Krista almost-asking him to come up for it. She offers him their guest room and says that she doesn't care how much noise Deirdre makes through the night. It's already April, and there's a week left until he's hitting another anniversary. He wonders when his year won't be broken up into reliving the worst moments (and best memories) of his life, but he doesn't tell Krista.
Mikey says he'll consider it, but the thought of putting Deirdre into a pink taffeta dress seems like something he should want to see before she's too old for those things and starts to fuss. It's Ray, too, who won't ask him for those sorts of things and will just make understanding noises if he has to beg out because it's so close to the anniversary.
They end up taking the train up the day before the wedding, and Deirdre loves twirling in her pink taffeta. Mikey doesn't take the looks Ray's cousins send him, Krista's sisters, and only dances with Deirdre, except for the dances where Lyn-Z and Jamia cut in and send the baby off with their partners and the two dances that Bob offers to let Mikey sit down and collect his breath.
He sits on the side and watches Deirdre smile at the family she can't have in their new city, people that are too far away to see everyday. He doesn't go to the bar and sticks his hands in his pockets and wishes that there was a way to show Alicia the huge smile Deirdre has plastered to her face when Bob lifts her above his head.
***
Mikey's not sure when Ms. Henders stops being a neighbor that brings him food and starts being someone who invites him over to her house for Sunday meals. He usually brings food from the store, still can't really cook more than macaroni and food out of a can. It's usually some sort of desert or rolls if she asks.
She opens the door with a smile, every Sunday, and calls him Michael even though she knows his own family calls him Mikey. He lets her, though, because she doesn't press about the difference.
Her yard is smaller than Mikey's, more flowers that begin to bloom in early spring because the weather spikes into the seventies and the flowers are confused. Ms. Henders lets Deirdre play in the garden, and Mikey helps her pull weeds out of the grass.
After dinner, pot roast and carrots with mashed sweet potatoes on the side, Ms. Henders pours them both cups of coffee. "I talked to my granddaughter today," she says carefully. She has granddaughters and sons across the country, five children scattered to the edges of the country. Only one actually lives in Pittsburgh, a divorced son that she doesn't talk to because he "has no respect for women."
Mikey nods and adds sugar and cream to his cup. Her coffee is stronger than anything he's tasted outside the end of tour, when coffee is left to age on the burner and turns to sludge overnight. "How is she?"
"Oh, she's doing very well. She's going to UCLA in the fall." Ms. Henders smiles and watches Deirdre for a minute, where she's sitting with two tractors and a wealth of plastic cups. "I mentioned you."
His eyebrows raise, and he can feel the first inklings that something is wrong. No one in Pittsburgh asks him if he's "Okay," or wants to know what it's like being in the shadow of such a dynamic older brother. "Oh?" he says, and it's not as casual as he wants it to sound.
"We were talking about parenthood, and she said that she thought it was unfair that there were only single mothers, and I said to her, 'Heather, that is not true. Michael Way is a single father, and he does just fine with his little girl.'" Ms. Henders stirs in a spoonful of sugar. "She seemed very interested to know if you played the bass guitar."
He doesn't answer for a minute. He has pictures, posters, for My Chem in the attic or put up in the guest room, places in his house that Ms. Henders has never been. "I see." He doesn't want to answer. He likes his solitude.
"I told her that I didn't think you did." Ms. Henders smiles. "You don't seem much for the rock and roll lifestyle." She smiles at him, warm and inviting.
He sighs and drains his mug. "Not anymore," he says. The basses, his and Alicia's, are locked away in the attic, and he intends to leave them there to grow dusty.
***
Mrs. Simmons comes to the house for a month in July, and she walks around, making approving noises on how everything is decorated. There are some of Alicia's clothes in the closet, but there are only two toothbrushes in the bathroom and two hairbrushes. There's no makeup lying around, and his bedroom walls are still painted white, but the dining room is blue and he has stencils to paint the kitchen cabinets.
They agree on letting Mikey go to Jersey, to visit for most of the month. Jamia's had the baby, and he wants to go back and see the guys, while they're on their month-long hiatus because Frank was not touring while Jamia was ready to pop, hasn't been touring since she hit the third trimester, and after six months of touring, even the guys needed a break. It's still hard not to call them his band
He tells Mrs. Simmons that Deirdre usually sleeps with him (doesn't tell her that it's more of an always, unless they fall asleep together on the couch) and that he hasn't put up her IKEA bed yet. It has ladybugs on the frame, but even that's not enough to break their routine.
Mikey tells Ms. Henders that he's going to New Jersey and that his mother-in-law is watching the house on their last Sunday dinner, because he doesn't think the tradition is going to carry over while Mrs. Simmons is visiting. She laughs and nods while Mikey tries to lug the watering can over to the dried rose beds. He's lost almost all the muscle he ever gained from playing bass and working out after the Paramour, and he was never all that strong to begin with.
Three days later, he's in a New Jersey airport where Gerard and Bob are waiting. Gerard always looks the same, but Bob seems thinner, hair buzzed short again. It's strange to be able to climb into the back of Gerard's car and be called a mother-fucker before Bob pulls him back out and takes the backseat for himself.
He doesn't ask where they're going, just lets Gerard drive through the familiar streets. There are only about three places he'll go, anyway, and Mikey's pretty sure that they're going to go to see Frank first. Gerard talks to Bob about the last show they played and explaining things to Mikey so he can laugh at the ridiculous things the fans did. Gerard loves the fans, cares about them, but sometimes even he has to roll his eyes at the marriage proposals.
Max Anthony Iero (Max from Jamia's grandfather, who was actually a Maxwell but neither of them are actually that cruel) is almost six pounds and less than twenty inches, and he can feel the force of Frank's grin from across the lawn when they get out of the car. He's not actually holding Max, but he's bouncing on the balls of his feet, eyes shadowed and there's just the hint of the bone weariness starting to show.
Frank's smoking outside, three puffs and then he flicks it into one of the planters that doesn't actually appear to hold anything but old cigarettes. "I have to stop, quit, soon," he says before he leads them all inside.
Jamia is in the living room, eyes half closed while Max sleeps on her chest. Mikey wants to tell her how beautiful she looks, all half-dazed eyes and soft smiles with that weird sort of shimmer new mothers get to their faces. Even Alicia had it, right up until the end, and he can't swallow around the memories.
Gerard squeezes his hand before he moves closer to the baby with soft words. He says everything that Mikey can't, and Bob stands silent next to him before Jamia hands Max over to Gerard. Bob is sort of ridiculous about babies, too patient and his marshmallow center shows through.
"You were right," Frank says next to him, hands in his pockets. He's still grinning like it's Christmas and Halloween and the band has eighteen sold-out shows and his family is coming on tour, too. "It's just..."
Mikey feels the itch to call Deirdre, even though he said goodbye to her in the airport less than five hours ago, her blue eyes wide at the prospect of facing time without him around. She hugged him tighter than she could remember and almost yelled, "Come back too soon, Daddy," into his ear. He didn't bother to correct her.
"It gets better," he says, still quiet. Bob's holding Max now, and Gerard is talking to Jamia. "It gets harder, but it's still just awesome when you start to see them be real people and make decisions for themselves. Deirdre decided yesterday that she doesn't like marinara sauce."
Frank laughs. "Shit, dude, you might need to keep her out there." His eyes are bright. "I think she'd starve if you moved her home."
He laughs at that, and he looks at Frank out of the corner of his eye. "About the dogs," he says carefully because Deirdre discovered how awesome dogs could be at the park two weeks ago and he misses having his menagerie. The cats aren't the same, don't like to spend long hours curled up on your lap with you scratching their ears.
"Dude, they're your dogs," Frank says and he nods. "It's probably a good idea. We're not going to have a lot of time for all of them now."
He smiles, already wondering when he can find the time to turn in his plane ticket so he can come back on the train with their carriers. "All right."
Mikey nods and takes the baby with sure hands when Bob offers him. He still has trouble understanding how cells can remember and divide into something so perfectly constructed, with eyelashes and toe nails. It's maybe the closest thing to a god that he's ever tried to feel.
He holds Max and remembers Deirdre being this small, smaller, with closed eyes like a newborn kitten's and scratches of dark hair. Max's bald comparatively, and he smells different, eyes already too dark a blue. His mother said dark, dark eyes on a baby usually meant they were going to be brown-eyed and when he looks between Frank and Jamia's tired smiles, he thinks that's about right.
Mikey calls Deirdre before he even leaves the house, and Mrs. Simmons puts him on the line with a laugh about him being too attached. She's excited to hear that Uncle Frankie has a baby and that his name is Max, and she wants to come up and see him soon. Mikey promises for her birthday, even if he's pretty sure that the band is going to be on tour again.
Mikey asks when they're in the car, sky already too dark. Bob is smiling in the backseat, and Mikey keeps looking back at him.
"When is Frank going back on tour?" Gerard asks as they make the left into the alley behind his house.
Bob shrugs. "Probably after Christmas." His smiles sort of softens again. "We're doing Asia. And South America after the break, and then it's just a couple of American shows before we break for the holiday." Bob and Ray are still the ones to ask about touring itineraries, the only ones who always seem to know what is going on down to the minute.
Gerard nods and glances over at Mikey. "We're getting ready to start the next record." His hands are gripping the steering wheel, and he's pretty sure that Gerard doesn't notice. "Hiatus starts next March, and we hope to have it ready by November."
"Meaning Ray will be kicking out our ass if we don't have it set by November," Bob adds.
Mikey nods. He waits for some sort of sting to happen, for him to resent that they're going to make a new record that he won't be part of, but it doesn't come. It's just like Pete talking about his own band, something separate that he doesn't associate with. It hurts more to think that's how he feels about the band now than it does to think that he's not going to be on the new release.
He almost spends the month with Gerard, but Bob gives him a spare keycard and says that if things get too noisy, he can always use the company.
Mikey doesn't understand why until the third day of his visit, when he actually looks and sees the dark hollows under Gerard's cheekbones that he doesn't remember and wakes up to a sharp, steady hiss coming from the other room, where Lyn-Z and Gerard were watching television, that he understands.
In the morning, he hugs Gerard longer than he probably has to and lets his older brother rest his head on his shoulder while they play Mario. He doesn't ask where Lyn-Z is, and they order pizza for dinner.
***
He goes home, even though he doesn't like to think much about Pittsburgh being home now, in the beginning of August, having talked to Deirdre every day, and can hardly stand to be in Jersey because she's too busy playing with Gramma and telling him about the new skirt they bought at the store. She stains it with markers the next day, and he tells her that he isn't mad because clothes are just clothes.
Mrs. Simmons (please, Mikey, Kathleen. For the love of God.) meets him in his car outside the train station, and he has an extra bag filled with things for Deirdre. She's at daycare, still went twice a week because Mrs. Sim--Kathleen agreed with Barbara that it was a good idea to have her go and see children her own age. The dogs are quiet in the back seat, staring out dolefully from their carriers.
It's a half hour's drive back to the city and back to Deirdre, and they sit in silence for most of the way. Mikey's head is still too full of the way Gerard didn't smile when they got to the train station and got him ready for the train back. For a cold moment, he wanted to bring Deirdre there and stay until whatever was wrong shook out and make sure Gerard wasn't alone for most of it.
After the first week, he spent his nights in the hotel with Bob, getting his ass kicked at Guitar Hero IV and Halo and not minding too much. It was fun, good to be back with Bob, and Mikey'd still be back at Gerard's house before ten to stretch out on the couch and watch movies he'd seen a hundred times.
He didn't talk to Lyn-Z when he was there, and she didn't try to catch his eye. There was never anything loud or hissed during the day. The only thing that was off was how Gerard clung to his side and insisted they go out to the park every day and remember when they were ten and seven and they would lay on the swings on their stomachs and pretend to fly.
Mikey can't tell Kathleen any of that and twists his wedding ring instead, worrying on his lip. Ms. Henders would probably be all right with listening until he could make his appointment. She probably would be, hand him gardening shears and tell him to prune down the foxglove if he wanted to sit and talk.
"Mikey," Kathleen says as they go through the tunnels. She drives the speed limit, hands carefully at ten and two. "You still wear your ring." Her tone is gentle, but she looks down at his hands with an expression that reminds him too much of Alicia.
He shrugs and looks at the window, watching the lights pass by. He doesn't know how to respond to it because he can't look at his finger and not see the ring. He wears it in the shower and when he's cleaning the sink.
"Mikey," she says again, and he can't not look at her. "It's been almost three years." There's something tight in his stomach at how she says it, like it's bad that he spends every night at home or in his elderly neighbors garden and that he can't go a day without calling his daughter. "If you're ready to move on, we, Mr. Simmons and I, wouldn't mind. You're always going to be part of our family." It sounds rehearsed, like she wrote it up a few nights ago and has to memorize it by rote.
"Thank you," he says because he doesn't know what else he can say.
"Alicia would want you both to be happy, too," she says, and it's the last thing either of them say until they're at the daycare picking Deirdre up.
***
He doesn't take the ring off, but he pulls up the college courses that University of Pittsburgh offers. There are a few that look mildly interesting, History of Rock Music and Philosophy in Modern Novels, and he spends half a day on the phone with his old school in New Jersey and Pitt's registrar to see if he can take them, twice a week, when Deirdre's in daycare.
It's not really going back to school, he tells Barbara at his next session. It's something to do. He can only walk the dogs around the neighborhood so many times before he starts to think that maybe he's going a little stir crazy, locked up in the house with two empty guest rooms and the white walls of his bedroom. Kathleen finished the stencils in the kitchen, and now almost everything is settled.
Barbara thinks it's a good idea, like he thought she would, and he still finds time to call Gerard where ever he might be that day, listens to him ramble about the way he almost, almost, almost beat Bob at Guitar Hero (and was promptly beaten into the floor on the six rematches that Bob called). He sounds normal over the phone and Mikey doesn't want to ask about Lyn-Z, so he talks about school instead, how expensive books are--even if he can afford them more readily now than he could at nineteen.
Gerard makes him promise to tell him how the novel class goes before he has to go and make a Starbucks run with Ray.
***
One of Mikey's favorite things about not being a rock star is that he doesn't worry about phone calls at four AM. The world respects that he has a toddler who is finally sleeping in her own bed, usually, unless it storms in the middle of the night, and he needs to be awake and functioning by nine because children don't care if their parents sleep. Sleep is boring.
So it's strange at four AM when his cellphone, Sidekick traded in for something a little more adult and a little sturdier because he doesn't text as often as he used to, goes off on Alicia's side of the bed and he has to roll just a bit to grab it before it goes to voicemail.
"Hello?" he says, and he expects it to be Gerard or maybe Ray, telling him that Gerard needs him to call right the fuck now. His eyes are too sleep-distorted to actually try and read the caller ID, Lasik or no.
It's not Gerard. "Hey, Mikey, it's me." Pete's voice is high and sort of fast, words tumbling out. "I'm sorry to call so late, but hey, you're in Pittsburgh and I need someone in Pittsburgh to do a huge favor for me. Like huge-huge. None of us can get there until they finish checking things out, and then it's like another two hours and we'll have to rent a car, and--"
"Pete," Mikey says, even if his stomach is lodged in his knees because there's a thread in the conversation that he doesn't like. "Pete, slow down."
Pete breathes hard through his nose and almost laughs, releases nervous tension. "The bus went through a guardrail in fucking Pennsylvania, Mikey." He knows exactly what he means. He's watched the guardrails warp and tilt backwards as they took too-narrow highways, through the mountains that you wouldn't expect between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The bus always seemed to sway on the potholes. He doesn't miss that. "They had to life-flight."
He knows that his guys aren't on tour in America, he knows, but he has to ask anyway. "It's not Gerard, though?" It doesn't make sense that Pete would be the one calling him if it was, but he can't keep the imagine from forming behind his eyes, his brother with needles in his arms and blood in his hair that isn't done artfully for a photo shoot.
"No, no, it's not even mine. He shouldn't be alone, if things go wrong, before," Pete breaks off, breathing too hard to keep going. He's talking too fast for Mikey to break in and ask who else it is, if it's not Gerard or Patrick.
He closes his eyes and tries not to imagine what the accident must have been like. Before he took medication, it was one of his nightmares, shooting shit with the guys and then there's a squeal of tires and they're falling without seat belts or anything to hold onto. "What hospital?" he asks. He hasn't been back to a hospital since Alicia, not when Deirdre fell down the stairs and not when he tried to off himself without meaning to.
Mikey grabs sweatpants and an old tour shirt from his dresser before he realizes that he's doing it. Pete's one of the few people he'll go to a hospital for, even if he gets the stupid refrain from that song on Infinity on High stuck in his head every time they talk.
"Presbyterian, I think, in the OR. It's in like--"
He knows where all the hospitals are in the city, the weird stretch of sick people between Downtown and Bloomfield. "I'll ask my neighbor, Pete. She's lived here forever." He can't take Deirdre to the hospital, not to see friends that he hasn't talked to in years probably die.
"Okay. All right. I'll be down as soon as I can, but it's going to be a while." Pete sighs, and Mikey can picture his whole body sort of sagging with it, looking like his 32 years for the first time. He hangs up without saying thank you, and Mikey goes over to Ms. Henders' house barefoot. It's September, a few days until he turns 31, but the dew on the grass is already starting to frost.
He rings the doorbell and wishes that he had her number on emergency contacts, so he didn't have to see her fly down the stairs in her nightgown, grey hair cascading over her shoulders and longer than he thought. "I have a friend who was in an accident," he says when she opens the door, instead of saying hello because it's too early-late for pleasantries. "Can you come over and watch Deirdre or can I bring her here?"
Ms. Henders is pale under the porch light. "Is everything all right?" she asks, and she disappears to get a jacket and slippers.
He can't answer the question because he doesn't know, not that he has any hope of a sunny outcome. "They had to life-flight one of them. They're at Presbyterian. Do you know how to get there?"
She rattles off directions as they cross their lawns together, and he tells her where he keeps the emergency numbers and the fire extinguisher, that she's welcome to use either guest room if she wants, and what time the animals and Deirdre expect breakfast.
"I'll call as soon as I know anything," he says as he grabs tennis shoes from the basket by the door and jams his feet into them without socks. He almost doesn't grab a jacket, but Ms. Henders calls him back and pushes his old "MIKEY" one into his hands with a harried look that reminds him too much of his mother.
***
He doesn't know what to expect when he hits the hospital, doesn't have a name to offer. He tries to call Pete while he's parking his car in the underground lot, but his phone is off and Mikey has no idea what bands were supposed to be in the area at all. It's been months since he's looked up anyone's touring itinerary--Brian usually just emails it to him--and he feels out of place, staring at the board in front of him. There are three different units of operating rooms, different color-coded units, and he wishes that he hadn't cut Pete off.
Mikey tries Pete one more time before he looks through his phone and almost calls Saporta until he realizes that Gabe could be the one on the table and he really should have gotten the name.
He picks the operating floor closest to the ER, closest to where the elevator to the roof should be, and everything's sort of dim. His head is swimming in memories that he doesn't want to dwell on: when Alicia came into the bedroom and was vomiting blood, when they had to bring her back when she wasn't awake, and how the lights were never, ever bright enough, soft and dreamy like something good would happen if he would only sleep.
Going past the nurses' station is easy. He looks like he has a purpose, eyes scanning the long rows of chairs for something he should know. He doesn't see any one from Fall Out Boy, none of Joe's crazy hair or Patrick's hats. There's a group of Asian women and a blond man that doesn't even look familiar, white hair starting to streak his mustache. There are other families, two more groups, and then a boy folded at the end, arms around skinny knees and bloody jeans. He's too close to the exit, close enough to run.
Mikey goes to him and puts his hand, tries to stop it from shaking from the memories, on the boy's arm. "Hi," he says, carefully.
The boy looks up, and it's not a boy at all, just Ryan Ross, eyes older than they should be and the first lines of mid-to-late twenties around his eyes. "Hi," he says back. He's still as skinny as Mikey remembers, in all the two times he met him before he stopped talking to Pete and Gerard starting poking fun at the band with their flowers, circuses, and weird punctuation. There's a long cut on the side of his face that's been stitched closed, and two of his fingers are in a splint.
He sits down and doesn't offer anything else. He takes his hand away and waits for Ross to fill him in on what's happening. It's a waiting game, and he twists his ring around his finger too many times to count before Ross licks his lips and says, in a dry, quaking voice, "It's Spencer."
Mikey nods and tries to remember which one Spencer is. He doesn't want to say, "That's your drummer, right?" because he's familiar enough with the genesis of this band to know two of them were best friends, and the other two joined in, leaving Chicago and Mormonism for paisley scarves and headbands. There's some sort of dark story in between the lines that he's forgotten with time, and it's all sort of too much to make sure that Spencer is just the drummer.
He leans back in his seat and tries to count back from a hundred, something to calm the quake in his stomach because he's supposed to be here so Ross isn't alone.
Two doctors come out of the back, and they walk right to the waiting families. The first time is good news, and the second isn't. Mikey gives up counting at thirty-three and starts to chew on the cuticle of his thumb.
"How'd you get here?" Ross asks after the Asian women go down the stairs, behind the doctor to collect the personal effects.
Mikey shrugs. "I live here."
Ross unfolds his legs, shoes slapping hard against tiled floor. "So you quit and just... moved out here?"
He looks at Ross from the corner of his eye. "Yeah. Just moved out here." He puts a lot more Fuck off into the words than he should when someone's looking at him with too large eyes and their possible-drummer-possibly-dying a few rooms over.
"I heard about Alicia." Ross doesn't apologize and draws his legs back up. He doesn't talk again, hands linked around his knees and fingers turning white under the strain.
Another hour passes, and no one has come out to see them. Mikey's not sure if time is bad or if time is good, not in this instance. Pete should be here soon, and then he can run back and not have to remember the way his feet sound on hospital linoleum.
"Thanks for coming," Ross says when it's almost seven in the morning. He rubs his face, and his eyes are red around the rims. Mikey hadn't noticed him crying.
"Pete didn't want you to sit alone," he says. He watches the second hand make another revolution around the clock. "And I live here." I'm the only one who could get here.
"Yeah, I get that. Spencer's like..." Ryan shifts and looks down at his shoes. "It's almost like if you were here for Gerard." He looks up to gauge Mikey's expression, and he's not sure that he's doing much more than raising an eyebrow. "Just... Spencer's been there for a lot of shit for me, and I won't lose him."
Mikey looks at his too-young face. There's something fragile in the way he holds his shoulders, something that reminds Mikey of the canary Grandma Elena used to keep, but he recognizes the tone of voice, the way he says won't instead of can't.
If he was Gerard, he'd hug Ross for that little declaration, that need to protect someone that's larger than his whole being. But he's not Gerard, nowhere near it, so he just claps his hand on Ross' shoulder and writes his number down on a scrap of paper when Pete finally shows up, just after eight o'clock with the one of the other guys in Ross' band. He thinks it's Walker, by how old he looks, but he's walking with an air cast and one of his arms in a sling. No one can look young under those conditions. He doesn't ask where the last one is.
Pete's just got a bruise over half his face, one eye almost completely swollen shut, and he still walks Mikey back down to his car, leaving the other Panic member to comfort his own. "Thanks," he says when Mikey unlocks his car door. His right arm is wrapped up in a blue cast.
Mikey shrugs. "You'd do the same for one of my guys."
"Yeah, I guess." Pete scratches his head with his left hand before he pulls Mikey in for a ginger hug. Mikey doesn't really return it because he can smell hospital in Pete's hair. He wants out of the parking lot, back home where he can scald the smell off of him and throw the clothes he's wearing out.
Pete presses a kiss to Mikey's cheek when he pulls away. He starts and steps back from Pete, wary now.
"Just saying thank you, Mikeyway." He doesn't smile when he says it, and he moves back from the car so Mikey can slide in, throw it in reverse, and get the fuck out of there.
***
He tells Gerard about it, a week later and after he's checked E! Online to see that "Panic's Drummer May Make Full Recovery." He has three text messages on his phone from a number he doesn't recognize, five from Pete, and he talks to Gerard in the middle of the night when both of them should be sleeping. His brother is somewhere in Texas, almost one in the morning there, and Mikey is willfully ignoring the time difference.
"It's good that you went, though," Gerard says when he's done laying it all out and explaining how he wants to be pissed at Pete. "Sucks what happened."
"Yeah." He has an Aquaman in his lap that he's been, supposedly, reading since he put Deirdre to bed, instead of just looking at the first few pages and trying to figure out why he bought it. He knows that it's good that he went to the hospital and tried to help, despite everything. Barbara told him three times that it's a step in the right direction.
Gerard coughs. "But you're okay, though? I don't need to come out there?" His brother's tone is more casual about it than it would have been a year ago, when he still felt like he was made of cracked porcelain.
The ache is still there, the ripped out spots where he's still raw to the touch, but he can breathe around it now, can almost stretch onto Alicia's side of the bed. He looks up at the walls, still blank. There are posters and an old sword in the basement that he should tack up.
"It wasn't as bad." He only spent thirty minutes in a Starbucks recollecting himself after he left the hospital, before he grabbed a few pastries and went back to the house with promises that everything was probably going to be all right. If Ms. Henders thought it was weird he wouldn't stay until he knew, she didn't say.
"Good," Gerard says, and they switch over to talking about the comic that Mikey has in his lap, how the story is progressing too rapidly and Gerard's thoughts on the pencils. They talk more about music and comics now, almost as much as they did before they had a band and wives. If it's a bad sign, Mikey doesn't concentrate on it.
***
Time passes more quickly when he gets into school again. He has things to half-fill his days rather than flipping through his DVD collection and watching the same twenty movies in a loop. His History of Rock Music class is too big for anyone to really give a shit about his name, and the syllabus tells him that the chances of them actually discussing music after 1985 is pretty slim.
Philosophy in Modern Novels isn't even a third of the size, and he introduces himself as Michael. There's a girl one seat to the left and one behind him with a MCR patch on her bookbag. He doesn't want her to turn around and see him. He doesn't mention Jersey, just that he's recently re-enrolled after more than a decade out of school.
He still doesn't answer Pete's text messages, and Pete still doesn't bother calling. Ross does, eventually, and Mikey answers despite the fact that it's almost midnight. It's mostly a rehashing of things that he could have looked up on the computer, that Smith's pulled through but he's going to be stuck in Pittsburgh for a while, is probably looking at months of physical therapy. Their tour is canceled. Urie's fine.
They don't talk about the accident, and Mikey doesn't ask what kind of therapy Smith could need for months.
It feels like the days have only really been a few hours, and then Deirdre's three. He's not sure how it happened. She's learned to track things on the calender, and he wakes up that morning before the sun has even risen with his daughter's spindly arms wrapped too tight around his neck, her knees half-way on his chest, and a whispered, "Daddy, Daddy, it's my birthday, Daddy," in his ear.
"I know," he croaks before gently pulling her arms away from his neck and settling her on the bed beside him and not on top of him. She has his sharp angles, pointy elbows and knobby knees, and he's just old enough now that they're uncomfortable pressing against him.
It's the first birthday that they're doing small, just the two of them and Ms. Henders over for cake. He's blowing off a day of class to take her to the Children's Museum, and there's an ice cream cake in the freezer with a dancing rabbit that supposed to look like something from Lisa Frank but mostly looks possessed to him.
She lets him sleep for maybe another ten minutes before she's whispering again, "Daddy, can we call Uncle Gee and tell him about my cake? Daddy, can I call Grandma Simmons?"
It's a good day, with chocolate chip waffles and too much syrup and walks with the dogs. They get to the museum, and Deirdre tells anyone who will listen that it is her birthday. He buys her Mister Roger's Neighborhood puppets, Henrietta Pussycat and Daniel Tiger.
It's only after lunch, when they hit an exhibit about families, that her hand tightens in his. They don't really talk about Alicia. There's pictures in the living room and a photo album that he'll look through with her, but he doesn't know how he's supposed to tell a three-year-old that her mother died before she could even know her. Barbara says she's not really old enough to understand death yet, anyway.
When they hit the third picture of a little girl and her mom, Deirdre rubs her face against his leg and he asks her if she wants to go home. He carries her the entire way to the car.
***
He doesn't visit Smith in the hospital, but when Ross asks him to come and grab coffee with him, on Halloween when he's sent Deirdre off to school with a pink ninja costume in her knapsack and half of the campus is dressed like a vampire, he agrees.
They meet halfway between the Student Union and the hospital, one of the half-dozen coffee shops on Forbes Avenue. The barista is wearing a nurse outfit as she takes his order for a double-shot-espresso.
Ross isn't wearing a costume, but it probably helps his case for not getting recognized, two scarves wrapped around his neck despite it being barely below sixty degrees. He's drinking tea. They get a few looks, mostly whispered from behind girls' hands and most of them are pointing at Ross.
"Spencer can go back to Vegas in a week," Ross says like the girls aren't there. He smiles, soft and tentative but not happy. "They think he's going to be okay, and he might walk again."
Mikey nods. "That's good."
Ross looks down and dumps another blue sugar packet into his tea. When he looks up, he manages to look fifteen again, too big eyes and half-bitten down smile. "I wanted to thank you again--"
"Don't mention it."
"Pete said..." Ross sits up a little straighter and shakes his hair into his eyes. It's grown out since the accident, almost into the scene bangs that even Pete eventually cut. He takes another drink of his tea that would probably kill a diabetic. "I just don't think you get it."
Mikey shrugs and doesn't correct him. He's been in bad places, thought Gerard was going to vomit out something vital and that if he slept, he'd wake up an only child, that the one time he did let himself sleep, he almost did. He doesn't think that Ross gets it, either, that there's always something worse waiting around the corner.
Ross gets another tea and orders Mikey another coffee without being asked to do it. "I don't think we're going to tour anymore," he says when he sits down, and he looks Mikey directly in the eye, all the bashful teen stripped off so he can see how old Ross feels behind unfashionable bangs and scarves.
Mikey stares back at him and wonders how old he must look before someone comes over with a camera phone and a battered copy of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. He almost doesn't sign it, and he probably wouldn't have--probably would have lied and said that he wasn't Mikey Way at all--except that Ross was watching him from over his tea.
***
On November 7th, he's cleaning the living room (mostly just scooping toys up and shoving them into the corner and running the vacuum without cleaning out underneath his couches) when the doorbell rings and Gerard's standing there despite the fact that he's only on a two week hiatus and should be in New Jersey. It's raining, Gerard's hair plastered down to his forehead, and there's a roller suitcase behind him, a duffel slung over his shoulder.
"Hi," he says, and he's not smiling. The hollows are back under his cheeks, lines under his eyes deeper.
Mikey takes the duffel because it's lighter and tries not to sigh. He has two guest rooms, and Gerard takes the one with Alicia's old college bedspread, where there are splotches from hair dye and weird stains that she couldn't even explain.
He digs out his X-Box without being asked and makes popcorn, Gerard's favorite movies pulled off the shelves so they can flip through them easier.
Ms. Henders takes Deirdre that night, and they're up until almost five in the morning, when Gerard lays down on top of him, still too heavy but somehow comfortable and whispers, "We're separated," into Mikey's Anthrax shirt.
The third anniversary comes and goes without him noticing, except for the moments at night when he wakes up from a nightmare and reaches out to touch her, because she always could talk him through it. He's too busy with a toddler and minding his older brother.
Mikey hates November.
***
They go to New Jersey for Christmas, and it's awkward. He and Gerard are both back in their old house, both on top of each other. He takes the foldout couch in the living room, and Deirdre sleeps in his old bedroom until almost five-thirty when she uses her pointy elbows to best advantage to try and wake him up.
Gerard sleeps on the other couch, the one with poking springs that still smells like baby vomit three years later. He ends up being the one that grabs Deirdre off of Mikey and keeps her entertained with Disney movies. Their mom comes down stairs in her robe around seven o’clock, bleach stains on the collar, and it's so much like their old Christmases that Mikey has to blink.
Deirdre opens her gifts in ten minutes, and then she picks the one toy (a pink horse) that she's going to play with. She shuns the rest, setting up a tea party with her older toys and the horse. She eats her chocolate chip pancakes in front of the television.
No one asks Gerard if Lyn-Z is going to show up, and his brother spends most of his time smoking in the kitchen, head bent over his sketchpad. Mikey calls the guys, Ms. Henders, and Pete to wish them a good holiday. He puts Deirdre on the phone with Kathleen and Mr. Simmons, and she tells them all about her Christmas presents for twenty minutes until she snaps the phone closed, hangs up without saying goodbye.
There are fifty other names in his address book, people that he hasn't talked to in years, and he texts them instead. Half of them text back, with emoticons and badly spelled messages that all seem to amount to "it's good to hear from you."
Their dad shows up at half-past five, and Deirdre launches herself at him with a too-loud "Pop-pop," and no one reminds her about indoor voices.
Lyn-Z calls him a little after eight, just as his mom is trying to convince Deirdre that it's really time for a tub. She's down the block, at one of the little drugstores with grating over the windows that never closes. "Do you think you could come down here?" she says, voice quiet.
They haven't talked since before November, but he agrees anyway.
She almost looks the same, except for the way her shoulders slope and her hair seems lank. It's sort of wrong that she doesn't have lined eyes and hollow cheeks, not like Gerard does, or that she isn't chain-smoking while she’s waiting for him. She's almost the same with jeans under her thick winter parka. She's also holding a cardboard box, one of the ones that's usually for holding paperwork.
"I don't know how many more chances I'm going to have to talk to you," she says when he gets there. There's no snow on the ground, just crushed down salt in case they do accidentally get an ice storm. "But I wanted you to have this stuff. It was Alicia's."
He wants to tell her that everything will work out, but she looks the same and he doesn't think that Gerard's chain-smoking is related too much to how much he misses her. He takes the box, and it's taped shut.
"She gave those to me and your mom before she," Lyn-Z stops to lick her lips. "It's just videos and pictures and stuff, for you and Dee."
He nods and doesn't shake the box like he wants to.
"I don't know if your mom wants you to have them yet, but I just... You're going to watch them eventually, and Dee will want to see her mom." She sticks her hands into her pockets. She's still wearing gloves. There's no way to know if she's still wearing her rings. "Merry Christmas, Mikey."
Her car is parked across the street, and he watches her drive away before he goes into the drugstore and rips the tape off the box. There are videos, a fat CD wallet full of DVD-Rs and two memory cards in their plastic cases. Alicia's video camera and charger are in there, too, and he bites down on his lip hard enough to taste blood when he looks at everything and knows that he could hear her again.
***
He waits until they're home to watch the first one. It's the longest ten days of his life, three more days in Jersey and then a week in Missouri with Alicia's family. There's an extra suitcase full of Deirdre's Christmas haul before they tumble into their house at ten o'clock at night.
Deirdre goes to bed without fighting him, and he opens his own suitcase and takes out the plastic bag he filled with her videos, her photographs. The first one in the album is labeled "For you both," and he flips past it until he finds one that's for just him. His fingers shake when he puts it into the DVD player and figures out how to make it work.
It's the old bathroom, the sink littered with pots of eyeshadow and three different kinds of foundation that always looked the same. The Hello Kitty shower curtain is pulled straight. Alicia's hair is frizzy, brown roots just starting to show under the black hair dye. "Hey, Mikeyway," she says in her softest voice, the one that used to whisper into his ear when they were almost asleep. "It's good to see you."
He sits on the floor, too close. Her eyes are bluer than he remembered. Her skin is yellow, and he tries not to place it in a general time line, the time before and after they knew she wasn't going to make it.
"So," she says, and the camera shakes as she adjusts her hold on it. She's sitting on the toilet, and he can't make out how rounded her stomach is through the billowing of her black t-shirt. "I hope you never have to see this..." He stops hearing her, stops being able to pick out individual words because he's watching her talk and she's there in front of him.
Mikey almost touches the television screen, before he can remember that it will still be cool glass and he won't be able to feel the heat that came off her skin during the pregnancy. He doesn't see the frost of uremic crystals, and he dates the video without meaning to do it, does the thing he was trying to avoid.
She's five months along, more than half-past, when she still acted like everything would be all right, and he could leave her for hours at a time. He would record and piss around, and she sat at home and made videos that she didn't want him to see.
He closes his eyes and tips his head back as she says, "I don't know what's going to happen, but I love you, and I want you to be happy." There's a quaver in her voice. He doesn't have to look at the screen to know she's crying, and his eyes are burning before he finally gives over to it.
The video is only ten minutes long, and she cries for too much of it. He calls Gerard as soon as it's over and lets his brother talk him down until his limbs are heavy from grief and he sleeps on the living room floor.
Part Four
Directory Post
Part Two
He stays in Jersey for another week, takes Deirdre to visit with Frank and Jamia and Krista and Ray. There are days where his mother takes the baby for the whole day, and they come back with new clothes that he never would have thought to buy for her. There's better lasagna, and it's still sort of loud, dingy, and grey outside in a way that Pittsburgh can't manage. He wants to miss it more than he does.
Gerard manages to find a night when they can all go out, minus Bob, hit some local diner that Mikey didn't know he missed until he took his first bite of a chicken parm sandwich. Ray sits next to Gerard, and he tells Mikey about the tour that Brian has planned for them, before he launches into a long discussion on how much the new X-Men book is completely lame and he was losing all faith in Marvel. Bringing the Marvel Zombies into mainstream was a dumb move.
Mikey grins and knows that Gerard secretly agrees but he'll argue it with Ray because someone has to show loyalty to the X-Men. It's not like they're talking about Spiderman or Superman.
"How is Pittsburgh?" Frank asks as Gerard makes a point about how awesome it is that Rogue actually removes one of the zombies' curses and zombifies herself.
Mikey looks away from the way Ray's hair is bobbing and shrugs. "It's all right. It's not Jersey." It's sort of the point, really, because he can remember taking Alicia to this diner before they were engaged.
Frank nods like that makes sense. "Yeah." He picks at the salad he ordered. It's just tomatoes, green peppers, and cucumbers on bag iceberg lettuce, but it's hard to eat vegan in a diner like this one. "I don't think I could ever leave this place."
"I didn't either." Mikey takes another bite of his sandwich and reaches across the table to steal a chicken tender from Gerard's plate. Gerard's too busy arguing to notice.
"You gonna move back?" Frank looks over at the counter, at the fake jukebox in the corner that doesn't work. It almost sounds like Do you want to come back, but no one wants to push that with him.
"I don't know. Maybe." He wants to say no, because of what happened in the cemetery, how he keeps thinking about the grave marker that he hasn't really seen and how he left her flowers with a seven-year-old who should be forty.
Frank nods and spears a tomato. It's hard not to notice the way he's sort of vibrating next to Mikey, now that he's concentrating on it. "Anyway," Frank says, and his lips quirk up into a quick smile. "I have tell the band something.
"Dude, Rogue is totally awesome, don't even lie. Now that she's not superpower chick, she kicks so much more ass because she's one of the ones who reminds you that being different and special isn't always going to be easy and you have to fight through it," Gerard snaps.
Mikey rolls his eyes and steals a fry from Ray. His are already gone. "What?"
Frank smiles at his salad, and then he looks at Mikey, giving him the blinding grin that reminds Mikey of just coming off stage, soaked in sweat with his heart pounding, when they knew that the show was awesome and there is no arguing with how the fans were screaming. "Jamia's pregnant."
Mikey grins and kicks Frank's ankle under the table. "Dude," he says. Frank beams at him again, and he wonders, hopes, that he looked like that when he first told them all about Alicia being pregnant. He can remember the feeling, when he concentrates, the way everything sort of rose up and felt like he was floating.
He goes to steal another one of Ray's fries and gets stabbed in the hand for it with a plastic fork.
The subject turns away from X-Men and onto the new album from Taking Back Sunday, the first tracks that Gerard is going to have to let him listen to, and he's laughing at one of Gerard's lame jokes by the time someone approaches the table and says "Excuse me?" in a soft, hopeful, and slightly apologetic way that he's almost forgotten.
***
He goes to see Barbara the day after they get back into the city. He hadn't called her the entire time, not since right before the party when he wasn't sure that he wanted his brother in his house to pass judgment on how he was living his life, before he remembered that he was being stupid because his brother was still Gerard.
It's a long visit, longer than usual because there's so much crowding in his head that he doesn't know where to start. He picks Frank because it's easiest, the best memory that he has because of the conversation that they had on the phone after the diner, the best and worst things about being a father and how he knows without question that Frank's as ready for this as anyone can be (tells Frank that he doesn't think you can be ready, because there's no way to know what it's like to have someone there who will always need you). She laughs and nods. Mikey knows there's a picture of her own three children on the desk.
After that, he does tell her about what Pete said and the visit he made to the cemetery to try and see the hole. Barb doesn't comment on how he can't call it Alicia, which is good because that's not Alicia, not there, not anymore. She doesn't say anything because he knows that he's not all right, not yet.
There are things that he doesn't want to tell her, the two fights he saw start between Gerard and Lyn-Z, one over the phone where one of them hung up on the other before the not-quite-screaming could finish, the way his mother looked at him when he said that he wasn't sure if he could come back up for Christmas, the awkward conversation he had with Bob on Ray's cellphone.
He tells her about taking Deirdre to the park that he always went to as a child, how she loved the swing and slides but had no patience for the jungle gym unless it was empty. Deirdre is outside now, in the waiting room with one of the secretaries who always loves to watch her when he has his sessions. She coos over how well-behaved she is.
Barb looks as him and says the first thing in the session that makes Mikey widen his eyes and thinks he's screwing up without meaning to again. "She probably needs to socialize, just a little. Maybe you should consider putting her in a daycare so she can be around her peer group."
He blinks and wants to say that he was never really in daycare, not beyond staying with his grandmother, but he had an older brother to watch out for him and teach him everything he needed to know. Deirdre won't get that.
He wouldn't exactly say he's well socialized, either. When he talks to Gerard later that evening and tells him that, and they both laugh for more than a minute even though it's not particularly funny.
***
On their fourth wedding anniversary, Mikey lets himself take the day off. He takes Deirdre to daycare and turns off his Sidekick for three hours. He watches the videos of Alicia trying to get Bunny to walk and remembers again that he needs to have the dogs driven down, especially now that Frank's own family is going to expand. Five dogs and a baby would be too much.
He doesn't call Gerard or his mother. He thinks about it and picks up the phone to do it, but he decides to lay in his bed instead. Mrs. Simmons calls in the evening, checking to make sure he's all right. She wants to see Deirdre in the summer, maybe for a week or so, and he offers his two empty guest rooms. It's still too early for Deirdre to take the plane alone, and one trip to Missouri was enough.
Pete calls after nine, after he's fed Deirdre spaghetti out of a can, given her a bath, and set her into his bed. They talk for fifteen minutes about basses and the new song that Pete's working on, how Mikey thinks he needs to just take the crib down and set up a real bed in Deirdre's room.
Mikey takes her out to Ikea the next day, and they look at beds that she probably won't sleep in.
***
He doesn't want to go to Ray's wedding, except that he gets a polite phone call from Krista almost-asking him to come up for it. She offers him their guest room and says that she doesn't care how much noise Deirdre makes through the night. It's already April, and there's a week left until he's hitting another anniversary. He wonders when his year won't be broken up into reliving the worst moments (and best memories) of his life, but he doesn't tell Krista.
Mikey says he'll consider it, but the thought of putting Deirdre into a pink taffeta dress seems like something he should want to see before she's too old for those things and starts to fuss. It's Ray, too, who won't ask him for those sorts of things and will just make understanding noises if he has to beg out because it's so close to the anniversary.
They end up taking the train up the day before the wedding, and Deirdre loves twirling in her pink taffeta. Mikey doesn't take the looks Ray's cousins send him, Krista's sisters, and only dances with Deirdre, except for the dances where Lyn-Z and Jamia cut in and send the baby off with their partners and the two dances that Bob offers to let Mikey sit down and collect his breath.
He sits on the side and watches Deirdre smile at the family she can't have in their new city, people that are too far away to see everyday. He doesn't go to the bar and sticks his hands in his pockets and wishes that there was a way to show Alicia the huge smile Deirdre has plastered to her face when Bob lifts her above his head.
***
Mikey's not sure when Ms. Henders stops being a neighbor that brings him food and starts being someone who invites him over to her house for Sunday meals. He usually brings food from the store, still can't really cook more than macaroni and food out of a can. It's usually some sort of desert or rolls if she asks.
She opens the door with a smile, every Sunday, and calls him Michael even though she knows his own family calls him Mikey. He lets her, though, because she doesn't press about the difference.
Her yard is smaller than Mikey's, more flowers that begin to bloom in early spring because the weather spikes into the seventies and the flowers are confused. Ms. Henders lets Deirdre play in the garden, and Mikey helps her pull weeds out of the grass.
After dinner, pot roast and carrots with mashed sweet potatoes on the side, Ms. Henders pours them both cups of coffee. "I talked to my granddaughter today," she says carefully. She has granddaughters and sons across the country, five children scattered to the edges of the country. Only one actually lives in Pittsburgh, a divorced son that she doesn't talk to because he "has no respect for women."
Mikey nods and adds sugar and cream to his cup. Her coffee is stronger than anything he's tasted outside the end of tour, when coffee is left to age on the burner and turns to sludge overnight. "How is she?"
"Oh, she's doing very well. She's going to UCLA in the fall." Ms. Henders smiles and watches Deirdre for a minute, where she's sitting with two tractors and a wealth of plastic cups. "I mentioned you."
His eyebrows raise, and he can feel the first inklings that something is wrong. No one in Pittsburgh asks him if he's "Okay," or wants to know what it's like being in the shadow of such a dynamic older brother. "Oh?" he says, and it's not as casual as he wants it to sound.
"We were talking about parenthood, and she said that she thought it was unfair that there were only single mothers, and I said to her, 'Heather, that is not true. Michael Way is a single father, and he does just fine with his little girl.'" Ms. Henders stirs in a spoonful of sugar. "She seemed very interested to know if you played the bass guitar."
He doesn't answer for a minute. He has pictures, posters, for My Chem in the attic or put up in the guest room, places in his house that Ms. Henders has never been. "I see." He doesn't want to answer. He likes his solitude.
"I told her that I didn't think you did." Ms. Henders smiles. "You don't seem much for the rock and roll lifestyle." She smiles at him, warm and inviting.
He sighs and drains his mug. "Not anymore," he says. The basses, his and Alicia's, are locked away in the attic, and he intends to leave them there to grow dusty.
***
Mrs. Simmons comes to the house for a month in July, and she walks around, making approving noises on how everything is decorated. There are some of Alicia's clothes in the closet, but there are only two toothbrushes in the bathroom and two hairbrushes. There's no makeup lying around, and his bedroom walls are still painted white, but the dining room is blue and he has stencils to paint the kitchen cabinets.
They agree on letting Mikey go to Jersey, to visit for most of the month. Jamia's had the baby, and he wants to go back and see the guys, while they're on their month-long hiatus because Frank was not touring while Jamia was ready to pop, hasn't been touring since she hit the third trimester, and after six months of touring, even the guys needed a break. It's still hard not to call them his band
He tells Mrs. Simmons that Deirdre usually sleeps with him (doesn't tell her that it's more of an always, unless they fall asleep together on the couch) and that he hasn't put up her IKEA bed yet. It has ladybugs on the frame, but even that's not enough to break their routine.
Mikey tells Ms. Henders that he's going to New Jersey and that his mother-in-law is watching the house on their last Sunday dinner, because he doesn't think the tradition is going to carry over while Mrs. Simmons is visiting. She laughs and nods while Mikey tries to lug the watering can over to the dried rose beds. He's lost almost all the muscle he ever gained from playing bass and working out after the Paramour, and he was never all that strong to begin with.
Three days later, he's in a New Jersey airport where Gerard and Bob are waiting. Gerard always looks the same, but Bob seems thinner, hair buzzed short again. It's strange to be able to climb into the back of Gerard's car and be called a mother-fucker before Bob pulls him back out and takes the backseat for himself.
He doesn't ask where they're going, just lets Gerard drive through the familiar streets. There are only about three places he'll go, anyway, and Mikey's pretty sure that they're going to go to see Frank first. Gerard talks to Bob about the last show they played and explaining things to Mikey so he can laugh at the ridiculous things the fans did. Gerard loves the fans, cares about them, but sometimes even he has to roll his eyes at the marriage proposals.
Max Anthony Iero (Max from Jamia's grandfather, who was actually a Maxwell but neither of them are actually that cruel) is almost six pounds and less than twenty inches, and he can feel the force of Frank's grin from across the lawn when they get out of the car. He's not actually holding Max, but he's bouncing on the balls of his feet, eyes shadowed and there's just the hint of the bone weariness starting to show.
Frank's smoking outside, three puffs and then he flicks it into one of the planters that doesn't actually appear to hold anything but old cigarettes. "I have to stop, quit, soon," he says before he leads them all inside.
Jamia is in the living room, eyes half closed while Max sleeps on her chest. Mikey wants to tell her how beautiful she looks, all half-dazed eyes and soft smiles with that weird sort of shimmer new mothers get to their faces. Even Alicia had it, right up until the end, and he can't swallow around the memories.
Gerard squeezes his hand before he moves closer to the baby with soft words. He says everything that Mikey can't, and Bob stands silent next to him before Jamia hands Max over to Gerard. Bob is sort of ridiculous about babies, too patient and his marshmallow center shows through.
"You were right," Frank says next to him, hands in his pockets. He's still grinning like it's Christmas and Halloween and the band has eighteen sold-out shows and his family is coming on tour, too. "It's just..."
Mikey feels the itch to call Deirdre, even though he said goodbye to her in the airport less than five hours ago, her blue eyes wide at the prospect of facing time without him around. She hugged him tighter than she could remember and almost yelled, "Come back too soon, Daddy," into his ear. He didn't bother to correct her.
"It gets better," he says, still quiet. Bob's holding Max now, and Gerard is talking to Jamia. "It gets harder, but it's still just awesome when you start to see them be real people and make decisions for themselves. Deirdre decided yesterday that she doesn't like marinara sauce."
Frank laughs. "Shit, dude, you might need to keep her out there." His eyes are bright. "I think she'd starve if you moved her home."
He laughs at that, and he looks at Frank out of the corner of his eye. "About the dogs," he says carefully because Deirdre discovered how awesome dogs could be at the park two weeks ago and he misses having his menagerie. The cats aren't the same, don't like to spend long hours curled up on your lap with you scratching their ears.
"Dude, they're your dogs," Frank says and he nods. "It's probably a good idea. We're not going to have a lot of time for all of them now."
He smiles, already wondering when he can find the time to turn in his plane ticket so he can come back on the train with their carriers. "All right."
Mikey nods and takes the baby with sure hands when Bob offers him. He still has trouble understanding how cells can remember and divide into something so perfectly constructed, with eyelashes and toe nails. It's maybe the closest thing to a god that he's ever tried to feel.
He holds Max and remembers Deirdre being this small, smaller, with closed eyes like a newborn kitten's and scratches of dark hair. Max's bald comparatively, and he smells different, eyes already too dark a blue. His mother said dark, dark eyes on a baby usually meant they were going to be brown-eyed and when he looks between Frank and Jamia's tired smiles, he thinks that's about right.
Mikey calls Deirdre before he even leaves the house, and Mrs. Simmons puts him on the line with a laugh about him being too attached. She's excited to hear that Uncle Frankie has a baby and that his name is Max, and she wants to come up and see him soon. Mikey promises for her birthday, even if he's pretty sure that the band is going to be on tour again.
Mikey asks when they're in the car, sky already too dark. Bob is smiling in the backseat, and Mikey keeps looking back at him.
"When is Frank going back on tour?" Gerard asks as they make the left into the alley behind his house.
Bob shrugs. "Probably after Christmas." His smiles sort of softens again. "We're doing Asia. And South America after the break, and then it's just a couple of American shows before we break for the holiday." Bob and Ray are still the ones to ask about touring itineraries, the only ones who always seem to know what is going on down to the minute.
Gerard nods and glances over at Mikey. "We're getting ready to start the next record." His hands are gripping the steering wheel, and he's pretty sure that Gerard doesn't notice. "Hiatus starts next March, and we hope to have it ready by November."
"Meaning Ray will be kicking out our ass if we don't have it set by November," Bob adds.
Mikey nods. He waits for some sort of sting to happen, for him to resent that they're going to make a new record that he won't be part of, but it doesn't come. It's just like Pete talking about his own band, something separate that he doesn't associate with. It hurts more to think that's how he feels about the band now than it does to think that he's not going to be on the new release.
He almost spends the month with Gerard, but Bob gives him a spare keycard and says that if things get too noisy, he can always use the company.
Mikey doesn't understand why until the third day of his visit, when he actually looks and sees the dark hollows under Gerard's cheekbones that he doesn't remember and wakes up to a sharp, steady hiss coming from the other room, where Lyn-Z and Gerard were watching television, that he understands.
In the morning, he hugs Gerard longer than he probably has to and lets his older brother rest his head on his shoulder while they play Mario. He doesn't ask where Lyn-Z is, and they order pizza for dinner.
***
He goes home, even though he doesn't like to think much about Pittsburgh being home now, in the beginning of August, having talked to Deirdre every day, and can hardly stand to be in Jersey because she's too busy playing with Gramma and telling him about the new skirt they bought at the store. She stains it with markers the next day, and he tells her that he isn't mad because clothes are just clothes.
Mrs. Simmons (please, Mikey, Kathleen. For the love of God.) meets him in his car outside the train station, and he has an extra bag filled with things for Deirdre. She's at daycare, still went twice a week because Mrs. Sim--Kathleen agreed with Barbara that it was a good idea to have her go and see children her own age. The dogs are quiet in the back seat, staring out dolefully from their carriers.
It's a half hour's drive back to the city and back to Deirdre, and they sit in silence for most of the way. Mikey's head is still too full of the way Gerard didn't smile when they got to the train station and got him ready for the train back. For a cold moment, he wanted to bring Deirdre there and stay until whatever was wrong shook out and make sure Gerard wasn't alone for most of it.
After the first week, he spent his nights in the hotel with Bob, getting his ass kicked at Guitar Hero IV and Halo and not minding too much. It was fun, good to be back with Bob, and Mikey'd still be back at Gerard's house before ten to stretch out on the couch and watch movies he'd seen a hundred times.
He didn't talk to Lyn-Z when he was there, and she didn't try to catch his eye. There was never anything loud or hissed during the day. The only thing that was off was how Gerard clung to his side and insisted they go out to the park every day and remember when they were ten and seven and they would lay on the swings on their stomachs and pretend to fly.
Mikey can't tell Kathleen any of that and twists his wedding ring instead, worrying on his lip. Ms. Henders would probably be all right with listening until he could make his appointment. She probably would be, hand him gardening shears and tell him to prune down the foxglove if he wanted to sit and talk.
"Mikey," Kathleen says as they go through the tunnels. She drives the speed limit, hands carefully at ten and two. "You still wear your ring." Her tone is gentle, but she looks down at his hands with an expression that reminds him too much of Alicia.
He shrugs and looks at the window, watching the lights pass by. He doesn't know how to respond to it because he can't look at his finger and not see the ring. He wears it in the shower and when he's cleaning the sink.
"Mikey," she says again, and he can't not look at her. "It's been almost three years." There's something tight in his stomach at how she says it, like it's bad that he spends every night at home or in his elderly neighbors garden and that he can't go a day without calling his daughter. "If you're ready to move on, we, Mr. Simmons and I, wouldn't mind. You're always going to be part of our family." It sounds rehearsed, like she wrote it up a few nights ago and has to memorize it by rote.
"Thank you," he says because he doesn't know what else he can say.
"Alicia would want you both to be happy, too," she says, and it's the last thing either of them say until they're at the daycare picking Deirdre up.
***
He doesn't take the ring off, but he pulls up the college courses that University of Pittsburgh offers. There are a few that look mildly interesting, History of Rock Music and Philosophy in Modern Novels, and he spends half a day on the phone with his old school in New Jersey and Pitt's registrar to see if he can take them, twice a week, when Deirdre's in daycare.
It's not really going back to school, he tells Barbara at his next session. It's something to do. He can only walk the dogs around the neighborhood so many times before he starts to think that maybe he's going a little stir crazy, locked up in the house with two empty guest rooms and the white walls of his bedroom. Kathleen finished the stencils in the kitchen, and now almost everything is settled.
Barbara thinks it's a good idea, like he thought she would, and he still finds time to call Gerard where ever he might be that day, listens to him ramble about the way he almost, almost, almost beat Bob at Guitar Hero (and was promptly beaten into the floor on the six rematches that Bob called). He sounds normal over the phone and Mikey doesn't want to ask about Lyn-Z, so he talks about school instead, how expensive books are--even if he can afford them more readily now than he could at nineteen.
Gerard makes him promise to tell him how the novel class goes before he has to go and make a Starbucks run with Ray.
***
One of Mikey's favorite things about not being a rock star is that he doesn't worry about phone calls at four AM. The world respects that he has a toddler who is finally sleeping in her own bed, usually, unless it storms in the middle of the night, and he needs to be awake and functioning by nine because children don't care if their parents sleep. Sleep is boring.
So it's strange at four AM when his cellphone, Sidekick traded in for something a little more adult and a little sturdier because he doesn't text as often as he used to, goes off on Alicia's side of the bed and he has to roll just a bit to grab it before it goes to voicemail.
"Hello?" he says, and he expects it to be Gerard or maybe Ray, telling him that Gerard needs him to call right the fuck now. His eyes are too sleep-distorted to actually try and read the caller ID, Lasik or no.
It's not Gerard. "Hey, Mikey, it's me." Pete's voice is high and sort of fast, words tumbling out. "I'm sorry to call so late, but hey, you're in Pittsburgh and I need someone in Pittsburgh to do a huge favor for me. Like huge-huge. None of us can get there until they finish checking things out, and then it's like another two hours and we'll have to rent a car, and--"
"Pete," Mikey says, even if his stomach is lodged in his knees because there's a thread in the conversation that he doesn't like. "Pete, slow down."
Pete breathes hard through his nose and almost laughs, releases nervous tension. "The bus went through a guardrail in fucking Pennsylvania, Mikey." He knows exactly what he means. He's watched the guardrails warp and tilt backwards as they took too-narrow highways, through the mountains that you wouldn't expect between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The bus always seemed to sway on the potholes. He doesn't miss that. "They had to life-flight."
He knows that his guys aren't on tour in America, he knows, but he has to ask anyway. "It's not Gerard, though?" It doesn't make sense that Pete would be the one calling him if it was, but he can't keep the imagine from forming behind his eyes, his brother with needles in his arms and blood in his hair that isn't done artfully for a photo shoot.
"No, no, it's not even mine. He shouldn't be alone, if things go wrong, before," Pete breaks off, breathing too hard to keep going. He's talking too fast for Mikey to break in and ask who else it is, if it's not Gerard or Patrick.
He closes his eyes and tries not to imagine what the accident must have been like. Before he took medication, it was one of his nightmares, shooting shit with the guys and then there's a squeal of tires and they're falling without seat belts or anything to hold onto. "What hospital?" he asks. He hasn't been back to a hospital since Alicia, not when Deirdre fell down the stairs and not when he tried to off himself without meaning to.
Mikey grabs sweatpants and an old tour shirt from his dresser before he realizes that he's doing it. Pete's one of the few people he'll go to a hospital for, even if he gets the stupid refrain from that song on Infinity on High stuck in his head every time they talk.
"Presbyterian, I think, in the OR. It's in like--"
He knows where all the hospitals are in the city, the weird stretch of sick people between Downtown and Bloomfield. "I'll ask my neighbor, Pete. She's lived here forever." He can't take Deirdre to the hospital, not to see friends that he hasn't talked to in years probably die.
"Okay. All right. I'll be down as soon as I can, but it's going to be a while." Pete sighs, and Mikey can picture his whole body sort of sagging with it, looking like his 32 years for the first time. He hangs up without saying thank you, and Mikey goes over to Ms. Henders' house barefoot. It's September, a few days until he turns 31, but the dew on the grass is already starting to frost.
He rings the doorbell and wishes that he had her number on emergency contacts, so he didn't have to see her fly down the stairs in her nightgown, grey hair cascading over her shoulders and longer than he thought. "I have a friend who was in an accident," he says when she opens the door, instead of saying hello because it's too early-late for pleasantries. "Can you come over and watch Deirdre or can I bring her here?"
Ms. Henders is pale under the porch light. "Is everything all right?" she asks, and she disappears to get a jacket and slippers.
He can't answer the question because he doesn't know, not that he has any hope of a sunny outcome. "They had to life-flight one of them. They're at Presbyterian. Do you know how to get there?"
She rattles off directions as they cross their lawns together, and he tells her where he keeps the emergency numbers and the fire extinguisher, that she's welcome to use either guest room if she wants, and what time the animals and Deirdre expect breakfast.
"I'll call as soon as I know anything," he says as he grabs tennis shoes from the basket by the door and jams his feet into them without socks. He almost doesn't grab a jacket, but Ms. Henders calls him back and pushes his old "MIKEY" one into his hands with a harried look that reminds him too much of his mother.
***
He doesn't know what to expect when he hits the hospital, doesn't have a name to offer. He tries to call Pete while he's parking his car in the underground lot, but his phone is off and Mikey has no idea what bands were supposed to be in the area at all. It's been months since he's looked up anyone's touring itinerary--Brian usually just emails it to him--and he feels out of place, staring at the board in front of him. There are three different units of operating rooms, different color-coded units, and he wishes that he hadn't cut Pete off.
Mikey tries Pete one more time before he looks through his phone and almost calls Saporta until he realizes that Gabe could be the one on the table and he really should have gotten the name.
He picks the operating floor closest to the ER, closest to where the elevator to the roof should be, and everything's sort of dim. His head is swimming in memories that he doesn't want to dwell on: when Alicia came into the bedroom and was vomiting blood, when they had to bring her back when she wasn't awake, and how the lights were never, ever bright enough, soft and dreamy like something good would happen if he would only sleep.
Going past the nurses' station is easy. He looks like he has a purpose, eyes scanning the long rows of chairs for something he should know. He doesn't see any one from Fall Out Boy, none of Joe's crazy hair or Patrick's hats. There's a group of Asian women and a blond man that doesn't even look familiar, white hair starting to streak his mustache. There are other families, two more groups, and then a boy folded at the end, arms around skinny knees and bloody jeans. He's too close to the exit, close enough to run.
Mikey goes to him and puts his hand, tries to stop it from shaking from the memories, on the boy's arm. "Hi," he says, carefully.
The boy looks up, and it's not a boy at all, just Ryan Ross, eyes older than they should be and the first lines of mid-to-late twenties around his eyes. "Hi," he says back. He's still as skinny as Mikey remembers, in all the two times he met him before he stopped talking to Pete and Gerard starting poking fun at the band with their flowers, circuses, and weird punctuation. There's a long cut on the side of his face that's been stitched closed, and two of his fingers are in a splint.
He sits down and doesn't offer anything else. He takes his hand away and waits for Ross to fill him in on what's happening. It's a waiting game, and he twists his ring around his finger too many times to count before Ross licks his lips and says, in a dry, quaking voice, "It's Spencer."
Mikey nods and tries to remember which one Spencer is. He doesn't want to say, "That's your drummer, right?" because he's familiar enough with the genesis of this band to know two of them were best friends, and the other two joined in, leaving Chicago and Mormonism for paisley scarves and headbands. There's some sort of dark story in between the lines that he's forgotten with time, and it's all sort of too much to make sure that Spencer is just the drummer.
He leans back in his seat and tries to count back from a hundred, something to calm the quake in his stomach because he's supposed to be here so Ross isn't alone.
Two doctors come out of the back, and they walk right to the waiting families. The first time is good news, and the second isn't. Mikey gives up counting at thirty-three and starts to chew on the cuticle of his thumb.
"How'd you get here?" Ross asks after the Asian women go down the stairs, behind the doctor to collect the personal effects.
Mikey shrugs. "I live here."
Ross unfolds his legs, shoes slapping hard against tiled floor. "So you quit and just... moved out here?"
He looks at Ross from the corner of his eye. "Yeah. Just moved out here." He puts a lot more Fuck off into the words than he should when someone's looking at him with too large eyes and their possible-drummer-possibly-dying a few rooms over.
"I heard about Alicia." Ross doesn't apologize and draws his legs back up. He doesn't talk again, hands linked around his knees and fingers turning white under the strain.
Another hour passes, and no one has come out to see them. Mikey's not sure if time is bad or if time is good, not in this instance. Pete should be here soon, and then he can run back and not have to remember the way his feet sound on hospital linoleum.
"Thanks for coming," Ross says when it's almost seven in the morning. He rubs his face, and his eyes are red around the rims. Mikey hadn't noticed him crying.
"Pete didn't want you to sit alone," he says. He watches the second hand make another revolution around the clock. "And I live here." I'm the only one who could get here.
"Yeah, I get that. Spencer's like..." Ryan shifts and looks down at his shoes. "It's almost like if you were here for Gerard." He looks up to gauge Mikey's expression, and he's not sure that he's doing much more than raising an eyebrow. "Just... Spencer's been there for a lot of shit for me, and I won't lose him."
Mikey looks at his too-young face. There's something fragile in the way he holds his shoulders, something that reminds Mikey of the canary Grandma Elena used to keep, but he recognizes the tone of voice, the way he says won't instead of can't.
If he was Gerard, he'd hug Ross for that little declaration, that need to protect someone that's larger than his whole being. But he's not Gerard, nowhere near it, so he just claps his hand on Ross' shoulder and writes his number down on a scrap of paper when Pete finally shows up, just after eight o'clock with the one of the other guys in Ross' band. He thinks it's Walker, by how old he looks, but he's walking with an air cast and one of his arms in a sling. No one can look young under those conditions. He doesn't ask where the last one is.
Pete's just got a bruise over half his face, one eye almost completely swollen shut, and he still walks Mikey back down to his car, leaving the other Panic member to comfort his own. "Thanks," he says when Mikey unlocks his car door. His right arm is wrapped up in a blue cast.
Mikey shrugs. "You'd do the same for one of my guys."
"Yeah, I guess." Pete scratches his head with his left hand before he pulls Mikey in for a ginger hug. Mikey doesn't really return it because he can smell hospital in Pete's hair. He wants out of the parking lot, back home where he can scald the smell off of him and throw the clothes he's wearing out.
Pete presses a kiss to Mikey's cheek when he pulls away. He starts and steps back from Pete, wary now.
"Just saying thank you, Mikeyway." He doesn't smile when he says it, and he moves back from the car so Mikey can slide in, throw it in reverse, and get the fuck out of there.
***
He tells Gerard about it, a week later and after he's checked E! Online to see that "Panic's Drummer May Make Full Recovery." He has three text messages on his phone from a number he doesn't recognize, five from Pete, and he talks to Gerard in the middle of the night when both of them should be sleeping. His brother is somewhere in Texas, almost one in the morning there, and Mikey is willfully ignoring the time difference.
"It's good that you went, though," Gerard says when he's done laying it all out and explaining how he wants to be pissed at Pete. "Sucks what happened."
"Yeah." He has an Aquaman in his lap that he's been, supposedly, reading since he put Deirdre to bed, instead of just looking at the first few pages and trying to figure out why he bought it. He knows that it's good that he went to the hospital and tried to help, despite everything. Barbara told him three times that it's a step in the right direction.
Gerard coughs. "But you're okay, though? I don't need to come out there?" His brother's tone is more casual about it than it would have been a year ago, when he still felt like he was made of cracked porcelain.
The ache is still there, the ripped out spots where he's still raw to the touch, but he can breathe around it now, can almost stretch onto Alicia's side of the bed. He looks up at the walls, still blank. There are posters and an old sword in the basement that he should tack up.
"It wasn't as bad." He only spent thirty minutes in a Starbucks recollecting himself after he left the hospital, before he grabbed a few pastries and went back to the house with promises that everything was probably going to be all right. If Ms. Henders thought it was weird he wouldn't stay until he knew, she didn't say.
"Good," Gerard says, and they switch over to talking about the comic that Mikey has in his lap, how the story is progressing too rapidly and Gerard's thoughts on the pencils. They talk more about music and comics now, almost as much as they did before they had a band and wives. If it's a bad sign, Mikey doesn't concentrate on it.
***
Time passes more quickly when he gets into school again. He has things to half-fill his days rather than flipping through his DVD collection and watching the same twenty movies in a loop. His History of Rock Music class is too big for anyone to really give a shit about his name, and the syllabus tells him that the chances of them actually discussing music after 1985 is pretty slim.
Philosophy in Modern Novels isn't even a third of the size, and he introduces himself as Michael. There's a girl one seat to the left and one behind him with a MCR patch on her bookbag. He doesn't want her to turn around and see him. He doesn't mention Jersey, just that he's recently re-enrolled after more than a decade out of school.
He still doesn't answer Pete's text messages, and Pete still doesn't bother calling. Ross does, eventually, and Mikey answers despite the fact that it's almost midnight. It's mostly a rehashing of things that he could have looked up on the computer, that Smith's pulled through but he's going to be stuck in Pittsburgh for a while, is probably looking at months of physical therapy. Their tour is canceled. Urie's fine.
They don't talk about the accident, and Mikey doesn't ask what kind of therapy Smith could need for months.
It feels like the days have only really been a few hours, and then Deirdre's three. He's not sure how it happened. She's learned to track things on the calender, and he wakes up that morning before the sun has even risen with his daughter's spindly arms wrapped too tight around his neck, her knees half-way on his chest, and a whispered, "Daddy, Daddy, it's my birthday, Daddy," in his ear.
"I know," he croaks before gently pulling her arms away from his neck and settling her on the bed beside him and not on top of him. She has his sharp angles, pointy elbows and knobby knees, and he's just old enough now that they're uncomfortable pressing against him.
It's the first birthday that they're doing small, just the two of them and Ms. Henders over for cake. He's blowing off a day of class to take her to the Children's Museum, and there's an ice cream cake in the freezer with a dancing rabbit that supposed to look like something from Lisa Frank but mostly looks possessed to him.
She lets him sleep for maybe another ten minutes before she's whispering again, "Daddy, can we call Uncle Gee and tell him about my cake? Daddy, can I call Grandma Simmons?"
It's a good day, with chocolate chip waffles and too much syrup and walks with the dogs. They get to the museum, and Deirdre tells anyone who will listen that it is her birthday. He buys her Mister Roger's Neighborhood puppets, Henrietta Pussycat and Daniel Tiger.
It's only after lunch, when they hit an exhibit about families, that her hand tightens in his. They don't really talk about Alicia. There's pictures in the living room and a photo album that he'll look through with her, but he doesn't know how he's supposed to tell a three-year-old that her mother died before she could even know her. Barbara says she's not really old enough to understand death yet, anyway.
When they hit the third picture of a little girl and her mom, Deirdre rubs her face against his leg and he asks her if she wants to go home. He carries her the entire way to the car.
***
He doesn't visit Smith in the hospital, but when Ross asks him to come and grab coffee with him, on Halloween when he's sent Deirdre off to school with a pink ninja costume in her knapsack and half of the campus is dressed like a vampire, he agrees.
They meet halfway between the Student Union and the hospital, one of the half-dozen coffee shops on Forbes Avenue. The barista is wearing a nurse outfit as she takes his order for a double-shot-espresso.
Ross isn't wearing a costume, but it probably helps his case for not getting recognized, two scarves wrapped around his neck despite it being barely below sixty degrees. He's drinking tea. They get a few looks, mostly whispered from behind girls' hands and most of them are pointing at Ross.
"Spencer can go back to Vegas in a week," Ross says like the girls aren't there. He smiles, soft and tentative but not happy. "They think he's going to be okay, and he might walk again."
Mikey nods. "That's good."
Ross looks down and dumps another blue sugar packet into his tea. When he looks up, he manages to look fifteen again, too big eyes and half-bitten down smile. "I wanted to thank you again--"
"Don't mention it."
"Pete said..." Ross sits up a little straighter and shakes his hair into his eyes. It's grown out since the accident, almost into the scene bangs that even Pete eventually cut. He takes another drink of his tea that would probably kill a diabetic. "I just don't think you get it."
Mikey shrugs and doesn't correct him. He's been in bad places, thought Gerard was going to vomit out something vital and that if he slept, he'd wake up an only child, that the one time he did let himself sleep, he almost did. He doesn't think that Ross gets it, either, that there's always something worse waiting around the corner.
Ross gets another tea and orders Mikey another coffee without being asked to do it. "I don't think we're going to tour anymore," he says when he sits down, and he looks Mikey directly in the eye, all the bashful teen stripped off so he can see how old Ross feels behind unfashionable bangs and scarves.
Mikey stares back at him and wonders how old he must look before someone comes over with a camera phone and a battered copy of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. He almost doesn't sign it, and he probably wouldn't have--probably would have lied and said that he wasn't Mikey Way at all--except that Ross was watching him from over his tea.
***
On November 7th, he's cleaning the living room (mostly just scooping toys up and shoving them into the corner and running the vacuum without cleaning out underneath his couches) when the doorbell rings and Gerard's standing there despite the fact that he's only on a two week hiatus and should be in New Jersey. It's raining, Gerard's hair plastered down to his forehead, and there's a roller suitcase behind him, a duffel slung over his shoulder.
"Hi," he says, and he's not smiling. The hollows are back under his cheeks, lines under his eyes deeper.
Mikey takes the duffel because it's lighter and tries not to sigh. He has two guest rooms, and Gerard takes the one with Alicia's old college bedspread, where there are splotches from hair dye and weird stains that she couldn't even explain.
He digs out his X-Box without being asked and makes popcorn, Gerard's favorite movies pulled off the shelves so they can flip through them easier.
Ms. Henders takes Deirdre that night, and they're up until almost five in the morning, when Gerard lays down on top of him, still too heavy but somehow comfortable and whispers, "We're separated," into Mikey's Anthrax shirt.
The third anniversary comes and goes without him noticing, except for the moments at night when he wakes up from a nightmare and reaches out to touch her, because she always could talk him through it. He's too busy with a toddler and minding his older brother.
Mikey hates November.
***
They go to New Jersey for Christmas, and it's awkward. He and Gerard are both back in their old house, both on top of each other. He takes the foldout couch in the living room, and Deirdre sleeps in his old bedroom until almost five-thirty when she uses her pointy elbows to best advantage to try and wake him up.
Gerard sleeps on the other couch, the one with poking springs that still smells like baby vomit three years later. He ends up being the one that grabs Deirdre off of Mikey and keeps her entertained with Disney movies. Their mom comes down stairs in her robe around seven o’clock, bleach stains on the collar, and it's so much like their old Christmases that Mikey has to blink.
Deirdre opens her gifts in ten minutes, and then she picks the one toy (a pink horse) that she's going to play with. She shuns the rest, setting up a tea party with her older toys and the horse. She eats her chocolate chip pancakes in front of the television.
No one asks Gerard if Lyn-Z is going to show up, and his brother spends most of his time smoking in the kitchen, head bent over his sketchpad. Mikey calls the guys, Ms. Henders, and Pete to wish them a good holiday. He puts Deirdre on the phone with Kathleen and Mr. Simmons, and she tells them all about her Christmas presents for twenty minutes until she snaps the phone closed, hangs up without saying goodbye.
There are fifty other names in his address book, people that he hasn't talked to in years, and he texts them instead. Half of them text back, with emoticons and badly spelled messages that all seem to amount to "it's good to hear from you."
Their dad shows up at half-past five, and Deirdre launches herself at him with a too-loud "Pop-pop," and no one reminds her about indoor voices.
Lyn-Z calls him a little after eight, just as his mom is trying to convince Deirdre that it's really time for a tub. She's down the block, at one of the little drugstores with grating over the windows that never closes. "Do you think you could come down here?" she says, voice quiet.
They haven't talked since before November, but he agrees anyway.
She almost looks the same, except for the way her shoulders slope and her hair seems lank. It's sort of wrong that she doesn't have lined eyes and hollow cheeks, not like Gerard does, or that she isn't chain-smoking while she’s waiting for him. She's almost the same with jeans under her thick winter parka. She's also holding a cardboard box, one of the ones that's usually for holding paperwork.
"I don't know how many more chances I'm going to have to talk to you," she says when he gets there. There's no snow on the ground, just crushed down salt in case they do accidentally get an ice storm. "But I wanted you to have this stuff. It was Alicia's."
He wants to tell her that everything will work out, but she looks the same and he doesn't think that Gerard's chain-smoking is related too much to how much he misses her. He takes the box, and it's taped shut.
"She gave those to me and your mom before she," Lyn-Z stops to lick her lips. "It's just videos and pictures and stuff, for you and Dee."
He nods and doesn't shake the box like he wants to.
"I don't know if your mom wants you to have them yet, but I just... You're going to watch them eventually, and Dee will want to see her mom." She sticks her hands into her pockets. She's still wearing gloves. There's no way to know if she's still wearing her rings. "Merry Christmas, Mikey."
Her car is parked across the street, and he watches her drive away before he goes into the drugstore and rips the tape off the box. There are videos, a fat CD wallet full of DVD-Rs and two memory cards in their plastic cases. Alicia's video camera and charger are in there, too, and he bites down on his lip hard enough to taste blood when he looks at everything and knows that he could hear her again.
***
He waits until they're home to watch the first one. It's the longest ten days of his life, three more days in Jersey and then a week in Missouri with Alicia's family. There's an extra suitcase full of Deirdre's Christmas haul before they tumble into their house at ten o'clock at night.
Deirdre goes to bed without fighting him, and he opens his own suitcase and takes out the plastic bag he filled with her videos, her photographs. The first one in the album is labeled "For you both," and he flips past it until he finds one that's for just him. His fingers shake when he puts it into the DVD player and figures out how to make it work.
It's the old bathroom, the sink littered with pots of eyeshadow and three different kinds of foundation that always looked the same. The Hello Kitty shower curtain is pulled straight. Alicia's hair is frizzy, brown roots just starting to show under the black hair dye. "Hey, Mikeyway," she says in her softest voice, the one that used to whisper into his ear when they were almost asleep. "It's good to see you."
He sits on the floor, too close. Her eyes are bluer than he remembered. Her skin is yellow, and he tries not to place it in a general time line, the time before and after they knew she wasn't going to make it.
"So," she says, and the camera shakes as she adjusts her hold on it. She's sitting on the toilet, and he can't make out how rounded her stomach is through the billowing of her black t-shirt. "I hope you never have to see this..." He stops hearing her, stops being able to pick out individual words because he's watching her talk and she's there in front of him.
Mikey almost touches the television screen, before he can remember that it will still be cool glass and he won't be able to feel the heat that came off her skin during the pregnancy. He doesn't see the frost of uremic crystals, and he dates the video without meaning to do it, does the thing he was trying to avoid.
She's five months along, more than half-past, when she still acted like everything would be all right, and he could leave her for hours at a time. He would record and piss around, and she sat at home and made videos that she didn't want him to see.
He closes his eyes and tips his head back as she says, "I don't know what's going to happen, but I love you, and I want you to be happy." There's a quaver in her voice. He doesn't have to look at the screen to know she's crying, and his eyes are burning before he finally gives over to it.
The video is only ten minutes long, and she cries for too much of it. He calls Gerard as soon as it's over and lets his brother talk him down until his limbs are heavy from grief and he sleeps on the living room floor.
Part Four
Directory Post