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Chapter Six - "That You'll Find a Way Through It All"
"What the hell do you want?" I demanded, the minute my foot hit the driveway.
"You might want to hear him out," Kathy urged me.
"And then again, I might want to mount his head on a spike on Hollywood Boulevard. At the moment, I'm going with the latter."
Justin placed a hand against the small of my back, trying to calm me.
"You sick bastard," I heard Nick call from behind me. "Who the hell do you think you are, showing up here? The sheer, unmitigated gall that you have amazes me. Do you have even the slightest inkling of how much restraint it's taking for me not to choke the breath from your lungs?"
"Hello, Nick," he said, averting his gaze.
"Fuck you," came Drew's reply as he joined us.
"Guys,...," Kathy began.
"I'm not interested in anything he has to say, other than goodbye," I quickly interrupted. I started to go back into the house before adding over my shoulder, "Unless it's `I'm dying.'"
"I'm dying," he quickly added.
"Good," Nick told him. "Can't think of a soul who deserves it more."
"Guys!" Kathy shouted.
"It's alright, Kathy," he told her. "I deserve every bit of this and a lot more. There's nothing they can say or do that I haven't earned."
"How about we forgive you?" Drew said. "That would be something you haven't earned, and it's something you're not going to hear either."
"Damn it, stop!" she pleaded. "I've listened to what he has to say for the last two hours. I'm not saying forgive him or anything of the sort. I'm not even advocating that. I just want you to hear what he has to say."
Nick and Drew paused to take their cues from me. Still facing away, I nodded to Justin.
"Come in, Mr. Hunter," Justin told him. "Say your piece, then get out of everyone's lives."
Quietly, we all entered the house leaving him and Kathy outside.
I sat on the couch and pulled my legs against me. "You said you're dying, Mr. Hunter. Forgive me if I don't consider that bad news."
"JC!" Kathy exclaimed.
"Kathy, please," he quietly pleaded. "I've rehearsed this scene a thousand times. I don't need you to shield me from what I deserve."
"What you deserve?" Nick asked, incredulously. "You deserve to be in Matt's spot, occupying a box in the ground, where you, unlike him, would not be missed."
Virtually ignoring the attack, David continued. "My liver is failing, Mr. Chasez. It has been for a long time. When I learned of it several years ago, I started trying to reach out to Ma...."
"Don't you dare say his name," I said calmly. "You gave up that right. Remember?"
He nodded. "I know. That's why I wasn't doing it for myself, at least not entirely. I came to grips a long time ago with the fact that I ruined my life and very nearly ruined his. I've never had the courage to ask for his forgiveness, because I don't deserve it. I'm not entitled to it, and it wouldn't be fair to even ask him, you, or the girls for it."
My jaw clenched at the word "fair." "Your time, and my patience, Mr. Hunter, are very nearly exhausted. If you have a point, get to it."
"Please, bear with me for just a moment," he literally begged. "I've come to you to plead on my son's behalf."
Now I was confused. My anger was almost replaced by curiosity.
"When Ma....your aunt," David began, turning to Nick and Drew, "gave birth, she became very withdrawn. She had post-partum depression, long before such terminology existed."
Nick nodded. "Mom said something about that once." Drew looked at his brother in surprise. Apparently, this was the first he'd heard of it.
"I cheated on her," he confessed, avoiding eye contact. He added simply, "A nurse at the hospital on base at the time."
I rolled my eyes in disbelief. His twisted sense of irony seemed to know no bounds.
"When things got better between ... your aunt and I, I ended the relationship. I didn't find out until over five years later that she had become pregnant. All of the sudden, I had another son."
"Hope you did better by this one," I said simply, standing and walking over to the fireplace.
"I didn't," he said. "At least not at first. I supported him and his mother financially. I rarely even saw him until...."
"Until you walked out on Matt," I finished for him.
He nodded. "My family seemed to be crumbling around me. My wife was gone, and my son was dying. I didn't know how to react."
"So you turned to your other family?" Drew asked.
"Yes," David answered. "Barely a teenager, my son needed a father."
"And Matt didn't?" Nick demanded instantly.
"Of course he did," he replied, "and he deserved a better one."
I placed a calming hand on Nick's shoulder and shook my head. "Please continue, Mr. Hunter, and quickly."
"My son, Michael, is your age, Mr. Chasez. For a project in school, he researched his family tree. When he accessed some old public records, he found out about his brother. He demanded an explanation, and when I gave it to him, he hated me for it."
"Good for him," I said calmly.
"He despised me for what I'd done, and rightfully so. He carried the burden of guilt for me that I had never had."
"So what made you try to worm your way back into Matt's life?"
"When my son was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease," David answered.
"No," Drew interrupted, "that's when you walked out on your son."
I could see him wince. "That's when I walked out on my first son. The old adage about not learning from the mistakes of the past held true. They've known for years that there's a genetic risk factor for most cancers. I found out which side of the family Matt's illness sprang from. Here I was, about to lose a son to the same disease that nearly killed the first one."
"How dare you!" I exclaimed. "What makes Michael so much more important than Matt? What made you want to rush to his side instead of casting him out into the world alone? Tell me!"
"I'd grown up," he said simply. "I had changed."
"Congratulations," I said snidely.
Ignoring me, he kept going. "I had tried to get in touch with Matt when I had been diagnosed with cirrhosis a few years earlier for my own interests. When Michael was diagnosed with cancer, I tried to get in touch with him so that he could tell me how to do it right this time."
"Which he did," Kathy interrupted. "Matt would never agree to meet David, but he finally started keeping in contact with him."
"I know," I told her. "I know something else, too. Something Mr. Grow-and-Learn probably didn't tell you. He asked Matt to have the girls tested as bone marrow matches. I didn't know for whom at the time, but I saw the paperwork."
Kathy spun on David with a ferocity I'd rarely seen. She slapped him so quickly, I thought the violent momentum would snap his neck. "You bastard!"
"It's true," he confessed. "In my desperation, I'd even asked if any of the stem cells that had him were still available."
"I should kill you now!" Nick lunged, barely held in check by the rapid reflexes of Justin and Drew.
I was seething. I walked back over and sat down into one of the chairs. "You should really consider speaking more quickly, Mr. Hunter."
"Michael found out," he said shamefully. "He was livid. He said that he had already taken a father and a life away from Matt, and he wasn't about to take anything more from him."
He just shook his head. "I didn't know what to do."
"Well," Drew demanded, "what did you do?"
"I didn't do anything," he answered. "Matt did."
"The girls were tested," I said. "So was I. Matt never told me why. He asked us to be placed on the national bone marrow registry as potential donors."
"None of you were a match," David told me.
My eyes narrowed in realization. "He gave you the stem cells, didn't he?"
He could only nod.
"There's more," Kathy added, still fuming with anger. "I didn't put the pieces together until just now."
"The stem cells that remained were not enough. His disease was as unresponsive to chemotherapy and radiation as Matt's was."
Looking at Kathy, a virtual light bulb went off in Justin's head. "Ashley?" he asked.
Kathy nodded, and David continued, facing her. "The cord blood that remained from your son's birth saved my son's life."
"Congratulations," I said sarcastically. "I'm glad it saved him, I truly am, but what does that have to do with anything, especially now?"
"I'm sorry for the timing," he said, "but my time is growing short. When Michael found out that Matt had been responsible for his saving grace, he hated me all the more for it. He felt even more guilty. He threw me out of his hospital room and out of his life."
"So what?" my eyes widened with anger. "You want us to patch us your relationship with your son before it's too late?"
He just smiled and shook his head. "It's already too late. My years of alcohol abuse have now left me with a few weeks or months to live. Of course I would like to see my son again." He paused as a tear rolled down his cheek. "I would like to see both of my sons again, and my grandchildren."
"You said grandchildren, not granddaughters," Justin noticed.
"Michael has a seven-year-old son of his own--Dylan--that I've barely seen," David explained. "I've accepted the fact that they'll never be a part of my life, but I don't want my surviving son to be punished for the sins of the father."
"What are you saying?" I asked him.
"I'm asking you, and the girls, to forgive him, so that he can get on with his life."
"I don't know that I can do that," I told him calmly.
"I don't know that you should," Nick said coldly.
His head fell in resignation. "Thank you for listening, at least. I won't bother you again."
He walked out the front door, leaving all of us in stunned silence.
Finally, Drew was the first one that spoke. "Do you think all of that was really on the level?"
"Yeah, I do," I told him.
"So do I," Kathy agreed.
"Do you think this Michael guy is the one who's been following us?" Nick asked.
Kathy looked at him as if he'd grown another head. "The guy who's been what?"
"Another story for another time," I told her, "but no, Nick, I don't. He said Michael was my age. The guy at the gas station looked maybe twenty."
She cocked her hands on her hips and turned red. "Somebody tell me what's going on."
"Some guy that followed us all the way here from Memphis," Justin explained. "We saw him at like a half-dozen different gas stations."
"Are you sure he was following you guys?" she asked.
"Two or three times I would have bought as the coincidence that he was on his way to L.A. and just happened to run out of gas the same time as us, but not that many times," he replied.
"So what are you going to do?" she asked me.
I stood without a word and started for the stairs. "I'm going to bed. I told Johnny I'd get to the studio tomorrow to finish those tracks for Justin."
"Don't worry about it, Josh," he quickly told me.
"I need to," I explained. "I need to get back to my life. One that David and Michael Hunter and our mystery man on the motorcycle aren't a part of."
With that, I headed up the stairs and shut the door behind me.
The next day, true to my word, I began forcing myself back into the daily grind. Everyone had called to let me know they'd made it home safely. Kathy went to the label for a face-to-face with Johnny and to get working on the mounds of stuff that had been gradually building, awaiting her return. Since we weren't doing all that much at the moment, Melinda offered to be resident baby-sitter for Ashley, allowing him to stay nearby.
It genuinely felt good to be back in the studio, but my mind tended to wander. I'd asked Justin to lay down some new vocals for a track I just didn't feel was working. I apparently wasn't even remotely paying attention when he finished, because he walked over and pounded on the glass. I was so startled that I dumped half of my venti cup of coffee that I'd stopped at Starbucks to get into the mixer board. My lack of focus had probably just cost me a million bucks or more.
Mentally scolding myself, I just broke down. In a maelstrom of emotions, I cried, I screamed, and I just prayed for some kind of release. Justin sent everyone out immediately and came in, clutching his arms around me. He told me it was too soon. I just wanted to know if there would ever be a time when it wasn't.
TO BE CONTINUED
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The song "Hanging on for Dear Life" was written by Jon Lind and Brock Walsh.