Photo credit: Torontovore
[Being the seventh installment of Robert J Wiersema's original holiday tale of the ghostly and the miraculous. To read the previous installment go here; to read the first go here.]
Graham tuned the car radio to the all-news station before he drove out of the parking lot behind the hospice.
The snow was still coming down, thick, heavy flakes that seemed to plunge through the air. The streets were a mess, little more than slushy, icy ruts that veered and followed earlier skids, lined with white humps of parked cars and the occasional walk-away: cars driven deep into snowbanks, or spun 180 degrees, or hopped up onto sidewalks, their owners nowhere in sight.
He hoped it would be better once he got to the freeway; he was counting on it.
“Damn it, Dustin,” he muttered.
He and the nurse had called the police the from hospice’s phone. Graham had ended up arguing with them for several minutes: with the snow and the holiday, a 35-year-old man catching a bus wasn’t much of a priority. It was only when Graham had stressed – again – just how sick Dustin was, and that he was prone to having delusions, that the police officer took him seriously.
Seriously enough to take notes, anyway.
“I’m gonna have to go out there,” he told the nurse as he hung up the phone.
“To Henderson?” she had asked, glancing at the front doors, the storm. “What about–”
He shook his head. It was just a little snow. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I don’t really have a choice.”
Not when it came to Dustin.
It had been just the two of them for so long. Dustin was eleven when their parents died, and even after their Aunt Natalie took them in, moving them from the house in Henderson to an apartment in Vancouver, Dustin looked to his big brother for everything. Which was okay. More than okay, in fact: looking after Dustin gave Graham something to focus on, had probably kept him from going off the deep end.
He had stayed in Vancouver for university to stay close to Dustin. He was the first to his feet when his brother’s graduating class was announced, the first person Dustin told when he came out (though it hadn’t come as much of a surprise), he held him as he cried or accompanied him on benders when relationships fell apart.
The freeway on-ramp was a mess of half-frozen slush and wind-driven snow. Graham clenched his teeth, only releasing his breath and relaxing his white knuckles on the wheel once he was merged onto the Trans Canada.
It wasn’t so bad: the plows had been out, and the asphalt was grey and crunchy, but drivable. That was something.
He had no real idea where he was going. Neither of them had spent much time in Henderson after the accident: too many memories, too much pain. Their lives were elsewhere. He had no idea why Dustin would want to go there, no idea where he would go.
Graham figured he would stop at the police station, make a formal report. There were a few old family friends they hadn’t seen in years: he’d check with them. He would swing by the old house, see if Dustin had come by there.
Oddly enough, he wasn’t that worried. He knew he should have been, but it was Henderson: someone would take Dustin in. He’d be okay.
Well, not okay.
Dustin hadn’t been okay for a long time. Not since before Stan had died.
Graham had driven Dustin to the funeral, had held him close as he sobbed, insensible.
It was a small, quiet ceremony. Intimate. That was only right.
Stan had been the love of Dustin’s life. They were perfect together, close and calm, wildly funny, perfectly matched.
When Stan got sick, Dustin gave up everything else to care for him. He spent months at his bedside,cared and fed and cleaned him, watched TV with him, and read to him when his vision started to fade. And at the end, he spent almost two days just sitting, holding his hand, though Stan probably couldn’t even feel it.
“I just wanted him to know I was there,” he said, after Stan was gone. “I wanted him to know, right up to the end, that he wasn’t alone.”
It was after the funeral that Dustin told Graham he was sick, that he had been hiding it while he cared for Stan. “But it’s not so bad,” he had comforted his older brother. “Not yet, anyway.”
Dustin was never anything but strong, Graham thought to himself as he turned up the road report on the radio. He’d weather this, too.
He tightened his fingers around the wheel and leaned forward. The snow was heavier again, the wind cutting across the freeway, shuddering the car.
The radio described the driving conditions as hazardous. Police were urging drivers to stay at home, “unless it’s an emergency.”
Graham tightened his grip, and he drove into the storm.
[Return tomorrow for the eighth and final installment of "Just Like the Ones He Used to Know."]
