The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

May - Gold (Part Four)

            Gerard began to sleep a lot. While Jasmine and I were at work, he would sleep during the day, usually waking up when he heard me come home or at least when he smelled us cooking dinner, would be up for a while with either one of us after that, and then he would fall back to sleep for most of the night. Jasmine had read that this was a symptom, and I told her to stop reading. Everything was going to end up being a symptom if we kept doing that. He wasn't going to be able to just be if we kept reading into every little thing he did and categorized it. She had apologized, and so had I because I knew I was doing it too. I tried to comfort her, and she did the same with me, but we usually turned away from one another and tried to not bring it up anymore. Our relationship became weaker as it became stronger. Because we were both in love with him now, things were completely different. We split ourselves apart in order to take care of him. In the morning when I left early for work, Jasmine was usually up in his room. She would greet him with breakfast and talk with him to see how he was doing, and then it was my turn at night. Her classes usually took up her time in the evening, or otherwise she was with Hilda. Hilda became an invisible balance beam of support, redeeming herself in my mind from before, especially now that I had accepted the diagnosis. Hilda had done this with her father, after all, and had been able to maintain distance from the event long after it was done; when I couldn't stand to be around anymore tears with Jasmine, Hilda was there. I grew to like her. We nodded respectfully to one another anytime I saw her in our front hallway, and at one point, I shook her hand and thanked her. At nights, she had Jasmine and comforted her, while I got to have the house alone with Gerard. I would bring him his dinner and we would talk or paint the rest of the night. He was still working on drawing Jasmine, and if they had had a sitting that morning, he would usually show me.

            He was alert and attentive most of the time. I would sometimes forget there was anything wrong with him at all. We would lie together and read a book or just fool around with some paint and he would be so healthy, so normal. I was praying for normalcy for once and then congratulating its arrival. But then he would try to get up and need me to show him where his supplies were (if he had not already labeled them), or he would call a paintbrush "the hair thing" and I would be reminded again of why Jasmine and I were so sad when we weren't around him. They were small things, location issues mostly, and the loss of a specific type of vocabulary. If he did not use the word on a regular basis, it seemed to go, along with some concepts, too. He seemed to lose his specificity with events, words, and timelines, but he was still there, and still very present. He was just not exact anymore. I tried to not think about the loss of certitude that was already happening, and tried to think about what he did know, what he was able to communicate even if it was with this new mixed up language. And I knew that he did still know who Jasmine and I were, and he was still able to show love and affection for us. That fact was enough of a small relief to keep us both going. With one another, we were despondent, turning away more often. It wasn't that we were mad with one another. It was just that through seeing Jasmine's body, I also saw Gerard's and the same thing happened with her. We were both so deeply and irrevocably in love with him that when we were together, even alone, it felt as it our love for him was the only thing that linked us. It consumed us; it was all we could think about.

            Also, when we were together each of us was reminded about the baby that was inside of Jasmine, that was half of each of us, and that we had wanted so badly so she could meet Gerard. I began to realize slowly, day by day at work when I talked to Mikey (if I talked to him; we had a silent period between us for quite some time since he had been angry with me for tricking him at the drugstore, but eventually forgave me because everyone had been thinking what I had gone and actually done), that the parenting job that we had intended on being a triangle arrangement had gone back to a coupling. We didn't know how long Gerard would live to begin with, but now there was another extenuating factor weighing against us. He would be lucid for awhile, we hoped, to at least have the parenting arrangement we had first envisioned for some time. I didn't know how Mikey handled it with five kids and only two adults. Having one baby and three adults seemed manageable, but not when one would forget where the diapers were. I mostly pushed those thoughts from my head. I didn't want to think about things until it got to that point, so I tried to do that. Mikey gave me some less than enthusiastic advice about baby sitters and a good day-care program that the workplace sometime subsidized for parents, but I could tell that he was also trying not to think about his ailing brother, his first child, and finally being an uncle to have that precarious responsibility suddenly shift. I stopped bringing up the issue, for the time being, and tried to talk to Mikey about work instead. Like Jasmine, he perked up when busy. It was how he handled things, and got as far as he did. He told me more about the company and a merger that had happened recently which really shouldn't have (some jargon I didn't quite understand), but he was sure it would be good for the firm. I nodded, drank coffee on break, and then went back to my desk.