Last Chance

Chapter 6:

Joel used to go to church every Sunday with his family and after he stopped seeing them we’d go to a church that accepted gay people. After he got sick we stopped and Joel stopped wearing his gold cross. I think he’d given up on God because God hadn’t made his parents understand and God hadn’t healed him when he prayed. Maybe he disliked God for taking him away from me, too. We got up at 9:00 am the next morning, Jamie was gone already, I assumed off to school.

We ate breakfast together. We bundled up and got in the car and drove to the middle school to visit Joel’s friends and his former students. They’d graduate from the school next year. We were hoping Joel would live till then but that was a year and a half away.

We went into the front office and the office staff was all smiles when they saw him. Some of them hugged him and wished him well before we went to see teachers and his former students. Since it was the beginning of the school year we weren’t interrupting much in terms of classes and everyone was happy to see Joel. The kids, especially.

Joel was one of those teachers who encouraged students to do better and try harder. We stayed through lunch. I played basketball with some of the kids since Joel wasn’t really in shape to anymore. He watched us from the sidelines with a smile. I was terrible at basketball and often passed the ball off to the kids for them to score because despite being taller I couldn’t score to save the game. He laughed whenever I did try and failed and so did the kids, it didn’t bother me like it did in high school, it was all in good fun now. Some of the less coordinated or interested students were standing off to the side talking to Joel. I passed the ball off to the students playing and went back to Joel.

“Luka,” one of the students, Alex, I think starts. “Can students come to the funeral?”

Joel smiled sadly at me.

“As long as you’re respectful well you’re there, sure,” I reply.

“We will be,” they promise.

“I’ll make sure to tell the school when it’s happening, they can announce it to them or send home a newsletter or something,” I continue.

I bite my lip. I hate talking about Joel’s death this much. But I know funerals offer closure for people and having your teacher dying for two years, you might need closure for that. Some people keep in contact with their teachers, Joel was that kind of person. He talked to his old teachers from high school and middle school at teacher conventions and all that. He knew how important a good teacher was, and how students could suffer if the teacher was just there to get their paycheck and had no interest in what they were actually teaching.

Joel could see that I disliked the funeral talk.

“I think it’s time we go,” he mentioned.

“Aww,” many of the students sigh in unison.

“We’ll visit again. Don’t worry. But we should let you get back to your classes and it’s been a long day, I’m tired. I’ll see you around,” Joel finishes.

Joel and I say our goodbyes to the students and staff and get back in the car to drive home in the snowfall. When we arrived home the house was still empty, and Jamie was still at school. I made Joel more tea and some soup since his stomach was doing backflips. I worked on the computers I had to fix well he ate. I fixed the second one and set it aside to be picked up the day after tomorrow.

“We need to go shopping,” I informed Joel.

“Do you have a list?” he asks.

Joel used to write up lists when we went shopping because he hated forgetting things but since he’d been put in the hospital I’d been the one doing the shopping and I never made lists and I always forgot things.

He got up and got the notepad from the counter and a pen. He sat down across from me and the computer I was fixing and asked me if we needed certain things and I’d answer yes or no.

His phone rang and his face contorted when he looked at the caller ID.

“Who is it?” I ask looking up from the computer.

“Charlotte,” he answers. Jamie’s mother.

She decided the worst time to call. Jamie wasn’t here.

Joel answered.

“Where is he?” you can hear Charlotte question from across the table.

“Right now?” Joel asks. “At school.”

“Tell him he has to come home,” she demands.

Honestly, her name should have been Karen instead of Charlotte.

“After what you did? No. Also, he's practically an adult,” Joel replies.

“He’s a minor. He’s supposed to do what we tell him,” Charlotte complains.

“Not when you reject who he is. Even if he were to come back now, he’ll just leave in a few months when he turns eighteen anyway, because then you’ll have no power over him,” Joel continues.

“You mean he won’t want to come back because you’ve told him what he is, is okay,” she continues.

“What he is, is okay. He’s not hurting anyone, he loves someone like I love Luka,” Joel replies still calm and level-headed.

“You’re sick. It’s killing you and you can’t see it. Luka poisoned you and now you’re poisoning Jamie and all those kids at that school you worked at,” she hisses.

Oh, the irony in that sentence. I wasn’t even sure Charlotte knew what he was actually dying of. She probably thought it was AIDS because that’s how little contact Joel had with his family other than me trying to tell them.

“Loving Luka isn’t killing me. Cancer is,” he replies becoming disinterested in his soup, I couldn’t blame him.

“You want to know why you got cancer? Nobody else in our family has it. It’s because of him, because of Luka. It’s against God’s will,” she exclaims.

“God loves everyone, Jesus sacrificed himself so we didn’t have to suffer. I’m just unlucky,” he comments and hangs up on her.

I watch him debate whether or not to throw the phone across the kitchen but he finally sets it on the table with a clatter. I get up and come over to his seat and kneel down in front of him. He leans his head against mine and stares into my eyes. He wraps his arms around my neck.

“I love you,” he whispers.

Joel was one of the strongest people I’d ever met and it hurt me to see that strength whittled down to nothing by things like that. He’s fought to be his own person all his life, fought to love me for about half of it and fought to beat the cancer growing inside him for the last years and none of his family could give him a break.

“I know, I love you, too,” I reply quietly.

His phone starts ringing now and you can feel Charlotte’s irritation through the vibrations.

“Do you want me to talk to her?” I ask.

He was tired and trying to eat and the cancer made it hard enough to eat as it was, never mind the stress from Charlotte. He nodded quickly turning back to his soup. I picked up his phone and went into the living room away from him so he could eat in peace.

“Yes?” I answered.

I figured if I let her get all she had to say out maybe she’d actually listen afterward.

“How dare you hang up on me,” she shouts.

She hadn’t even noticed I wasn’t Joel. Joel and I sound very different but I guess she wouldn’t know that either considering we’ve never met.

“Maybe if you were nicer I’d consider staying on the line,” I retort.

“Nicer? My child is gone. I don’t know where you live, therefore I don’t know where he is,” she carries on.

“I told you he’s at school right now, you know where that is, don’t you?” I comment.

Not that I actually wanted her to go to the school to get Jamie. Not that he’d go willingly either anyway. I highly doubt he’d ever go back to their house unless they changed their tune.

“Don’t mock me!” she exclaimed.

“I’m just stating facts. And he’s not your child. Don’t talk about him like he’s four. He’s almost an adult, he knows who he is more than you ever will because he was willing to discover and explore himself, whereas you want him to deny everything he is,” I throw back.

“You will realize one day how big a mistake it was to marry someone you couldn’t have children with, you will never understand what it is to be a parent or the worry and concern we have for their well-being,” she continues.

She still hadn’t realized I wasn’t Joel. How could she say that to her own nephew? Or to anybody? We could have adopted or had a surrogate. We were waiting till we were older, wiser and stable. We were only twenty-six. It wasn’t that we couldn’t have kids together, it was more that we wouldn’t get to.

She could call the police and they technically couldn’t do anything because Jamie was here of his own free will, if anything they’d understand his frustrations with his parents because all teenagers have disagreements with their parents. They’d just tell her to cool off and that he’d come back eventually, but I wasn’t sure he would, especially, when he already had a boyfriend. High school love doesn’t always last but he loved this guy now, he knew that. It was real and the guy loved him otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed with him through his closeted and coming out experience.

“Joel’s f*****g dying. You do realize that, right? He won’t get to have kids. He would love to have kids. But you’re throwing away the relationship you could have with your kid over who they love. They didn’t hurt anybody. They didn’t kill anybody. They love someone. Don’t you remember what it’s like to be in love?” I exclaimed.

I knew Joel could hear me, but I didn’t care at this point. I wanted to make Charlotte listen, for her to see how much pain she was causing Jamie. How much pain Joel’s parents had caused him all over the stupidest thing. Maybe if I wasn’t the best person in the world it would have made sense, but even then, nobody is. I cared for him, if I didn’t I would have left him years ago, probably when he got sick or something. I’d never thought about leaving him though.

“It’s not love, it’s a sickness. It kills, it’s killing Joel. Joel’s dying because of you. Jamie will die, too. I’m trying to save him,” she storms ahead once she’s realized she isn’t talking to Joel.

“You won’t save him. If anything, you’ll kill him faster. Millions of teens are rejected by their parents every year and the third leading cause of death is suicide, what percentage of those suicides do you want to bet are kids who tried to come out and got rejected whether by parents or peers?” I questioned.

“All those kids are sick, too. They have a mental illness,” she rambles on.

I don’t know how Jamie tolerated this lady before he came out.

“It’s Jamie’s choice to come back to you or not. But from experience, I don’t think he’ll come back,” I finish before doing the same thing Joel did and I hung up on her.

I shut the phone off. If anyone who needed to get hold of Joel were to call, they’d call me too, because they knew I was with him. I left the phone on a side table in the living room before going back to the kitchen.

“She change her tune?” he asked.

I shake my head.

“We tried,” he replies with a shrug.

I wish I could do more than try. I wish I could get their parents to accept them so they didn’t waste what little time they had left with Joel and so they didn’t waste the life they could have had with Jamie. Their parents would never get to see them marry or visit any grandkids they could have had all because of boys that were in either of their lives.