aterovis_bleedinghearts.pm6 (33 page)

When Dash was two years old, Judy got a call from her sister, Janice, who was pregnant and wanted Judy to come back and help with her two other children, Todd and Gilly, until she had the baby. All her pregnancies had been difficult and she’d lost a baby in between Gilly and this pregnancy. Judy agreed and flew back, bringing Dashel with her. While she was there Tom, Janice’s husband, raped Judy. She immediately told Janice, who begged her not to report it. Judy agreed for Janice’s sake but left on the next flight. It wasn’t long before she realized she was pregnant. She called Janice and told her.

A month later Janice showed up on her doorstep. She had lost her baby and now she had an offer for Judy.

She wanted to take Judy’s baby and raise it as her own.

The baby was Tom’s anyway, Janice had argued, and besides, they could give him so much more than a single mother with a waitress income. Judy reluctantly agreed, and Janice stayed with her until the baby was born.

Janice named him Jacob, and when she took him home she told everyone that she had given birth to him while she was in California staying with her sister.

Judy kept a close eye on things, dropping in unex-pectedly and calling often. She had begun to culture her psychic image, purposefully exaggerating when she was around Tom to scare him into believing she was more powerful than she was. It must have worked be-283

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cause he never laid a finger on Jake, even though he routinely abused Todd and Gilly, sexually and physically. Eventually Janice had Jamie and after waiting so long for another child of her own, she became fiercely protective of him, protecting him from Tom’s abuse.

In the aftermath of the devastating fire and the even more devastating revelations, Tom committed suicide by shooting himself. Two days later, Janice took an over-dose of a prescription sleeping medicine and died in her sleep. Asher’s parents took in Jamie, and Jake was given into Judy’s custody since she was his birth mother.

In the space of just a few days, Jake had lost one entire family and gained a new one. The transition had not been a smooth one, and he had been spending as much time with a psychiatric therapist as his physical therapist. We’d all been in counseling since that night. It turned out that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; I was having flashbacks that would lit-erally cripple me with fear until they had passed. As I went for twice-weekly counseling sessions, though, these episodes came farther and farther apart.

We were all hailed as heroes by the local media, and the story even made it to the national level. Dan Rather interviewed us all for a special episode of 60 Minutes. It was almost more excitement than I could handle, and I was very relieved when the hoopla died down and things began to return to some semblance of normalcy.

I was thankful for the president’s latest gaffe, since it diverted the media’s attention elsewhere. Bad news sells better than good news, it seems.

All the attention from the press did, however, serve one very positive purpose: it spawned a special investigation into the police department and its alleged mis-handling of Seth’s murder case. Charges of misconduct and homosexual prejudice sprung up from militant gay 284

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rights activists all over the country. In the process, a level of corruption was discovered that led directly to

— surprise — dear old dad. He was forced to resign amid flying accusations as all his underlings scrambled to drop the whole ball of wax in his lap, and he was now facing more charges than his lawyer could keep up with. I was ashamed to admit that I felt a certain amount of grim satisfaction at all of this. I had more than a few conversations on the subject with my counselor.

On a happier note, Steve did move in with Adam, Kane, and me; that was one transition that came off without a hitch. Mom decided to stay in Pennsylvania with Aunt Kathy, but she agreed that I could stay with Adam and Asher at least until I graduated.

After Christmas Judy, Dash and Jake planned to fly back to California. Jake told me that while part of him didn’t want to leave, he was looking forward to starting over in a new place where there weren’t ghosts from his old life waiting around every corner.

Perhaps the happiest note of all, at least as far as I was concerned, was that Asher and I were closer than ever. It seems that facing death together brings people together in a way nothing else can. I was beginning to think that maybe Asher was right, and true love does conquer all. I was definitely sure that we could conquer anything that life could throw in front of us...as long as we faced it together.

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low 30s and now we walked comfortably in short-sleeved shirts. It was an idyllic scene, except for one thing — we were in a cemetery. We’d come to plant a flower on Seth’s grave.

Wordlessly, we knelt down in a small semi-circle in front of Seth’s simple granite headstone and Adam dug into the soft earth. Then he shook the plant out of its pot and placed it lovingly into the hole, filling it in and watering it with the small jar of water we’d brought.

It was a bleeding heart. It wasn’t blooming yet, but it would in time, just as we would heal in time.

Still without speaking a word, we stood up and started to leave. I paused and turned back to the grave as Adam and Kane went on.

“I chose the right path, didn’t I, Seth?” I whispered, and then turned and walked away.

The End.

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Josh Aterovis is a twenty-something starving artist from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he lives with his partner. Already a successful Internet author with many international readers, Bleeding Hearts is his first published book. He has won numerous awards for his writing and his book’s web site: http://

www.steliko.com/bleedinghearts. He has written two more books in the Killian Kendall series and is working on the fourth. Aterovis is a pseudonym meaning Black Sheep in Latin.

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