Saddled, chapter 26 (Patreon)

When Clive pulled into the hospital, he checked his phone again. Getting a call from John’s mother had sent his imagination into overdrive, so he had his assistant reschedule his meetings and had headed over. He worried that something was wrong with John, and since Elena had asked him to cancel any contract time this week so she could send John for some therapy, he had cause to worry.

He headed straight to the volunteer desk. “Excuse me. I need the room number for Beverly Michaud.”

The receptionist’s smile vanished. Usually people only disliked Clive after he gave his name. “Can I see identification please?” She was perfectly professional, which usually meant something was horribly wrong. Clive’s stomach knotted.

“Sure.” Clive pulled out his wallet. Maybe she was dying. If that was the case, Clive was not the person who should be here. If Elena’s meddling kept John away when his mother needed him, Clive was going to make her pay. 

The woman checked his identification and typed something into the computer before offering him an overly polite smile. “The nurse’s station on the eighth floor can give you that information.”

Clive stared at her. This was the sort of subterfuge Clive expected when visiting a star, not a homemaker from Maine. However, being aggressive with the staff was unlikely to get him anywhere. 

“Thank you.”

“Elevators are to your right.”

Clive offered her a polite nod before heading that way. Maybe someone famous was in the hospital and the staff wanted to keep reporters out. Or the hospital could have a paranoid administrator. Clive walked faster. The answers to any questions, including the one about why Mrs. Michaud would call and ask for him, were on the eighth floor.

Clive tapped his foot as the elevator rose slowly. Families got on and off, and finally the doors opened on eight. Clive came out and found a security guard standing near the window, looking vaguely in the direction of the elevators. This was too much of a coincidence.

Never one to pussy foot around a problem, Clive walked straight over to the guard. “Is there a problem with Mrs. Michaud that you feel a need to guard her from visitors?”

The guard’s eyebrows went up. “Mr. Davidson?”

“Yes. She called and asked that I visit, but I’m wondering what else is going on.”

The security guard started shaking his head. “There’s no problem. We were just checking to make sure you were the person on Mrs. Michaud’s visitor list. She’s in 842 to your left.” The guard smiled and walked away, leaving Clive just as unsettled as ever.

This whole visit was starting to take an ominous tone as if Clive were metaphorically walking into the dark basement right after someone announced the house had ghosts. He had definitely been spending too much time on script revisions for The Uninvited.

Clive checked the number posted to the side of the door before he knocked. “Come in,” a voice called. Clive had expected Mrs. Michaud to sound frail. She was in an experimental program for what would otherwise be a fatal cancer, after all. He eased around the corner, surprised when he found a stout and relatively healthy looking woman sitting in a chair watching a judge show. She had thinning white hair and the hospital’s peach nightgown made her look wan, but she didn’t look in any immediate danger of dropping dead.

“Mr. Davidson!” she said in a delighted tone before standing and offering her hand.

Clive shook it. “Mrs. Michaud, it’s nice to meet you. How are you?”

She sat again. “I’m tolerating the treatment with a minimum of bodily fluid leakage.” Her irreverence and strength reminded Clive of John.

“Hopefully that will continue.”

She smiled. “Please, sit.” She was in the only armchair, which left a plastic folding chair in the corner under the television. Clive sat while she turned the television off. “Logan said you work in Hollywood and Broadway.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Clive wanted to demand answers, but his parents had raised him to have some manners.

“Please call me Beverly.” She folded her hands. “I’ve tried to get John to bring you over, but you may have noticed that my son is stubborn.”

“You wanted me to visit?” Clive was definitely confused.

“I know you’re romantically involved with John.” Beverly’s tone chided him gently.

“I don’t know who told you that,” Clive said. He would prefer to avoid directly lying.

“No one.”

Clive frowned. “But…”

“I love Logan, but I am the first to admit he has a mean streak. A wide one.” Beverly sighed dramatically. “When he insisted that John had to bring his friend, I knew he would only do that if it embarrassed John. I feared that you might be black and Logan was assuming I would be uncomfortable with John having a black friend. When the children were young, I was not enlightened.” Her grimace spoke of guilt, and Clive understood. The world changed faster than young people understood, and sometimes Clive looked back at how he had treated people in his own past, and the guilt gnawed at him. 

“I think all of us learned some bad habits when we were young,” he said.

She smiled at him. “But you’re a perfectly respectable man, so that means whatever embarrassed John, it’s not visible. Homosexuality is the most obvious choice, and you didn’t rush to deny it.”

Clive crossed his legs and considered her. She had tricked him into confirming her suspicions. Sometimes Clive had a bad habit of making assumptions about women of a certain age. His own mother had been undereducated and his father had sheltered her from the world. It had left her far too soft to play head games. Beverly was not like his mother. “You’re a dangerous woman.”

She gave a delighted laugh. “Thank you. My children think of me as helpless. I want you to know that I support any form of love John has found.”

“I don’t think John would want us talking about this,” Clive said. He didn’t want to risk pushing even further into John’s life. As it was, he feared John would never forgive him.

“If you’re going to make it work with John, you have to be willing to make him unhappy,” Beverly said. “He’s so much like his father that I sometimes wonder if that man managed to clone himself. They share the same strength, but that makes them inflexible and in some ways, brittle.”

Clive definitely didn’t have a right to hear this. He tried to interrupt. “Beverly—”

“You can’t let him dig in too much,” she said, her voice firm. “The largest fight I ever had with my husband was over Fawn’s name. Albert had dug in and insisted on naming the poor child Matilda. Matilda Maude Michaud. She wouldn’t have survived middle school with an ounce of self-esteem intact. When he was out on the boat, I went into labor and by the time he got to the hospital, I had filled in the birth certificate Fawn Matilda.”

“And you believe John would fight over a name,” Clive said. If they were dating that would probably be true, but John would never trust Clive enough to disagree without worrying about losing his paycheck.

“I know he would. John and Kevin are both too much like their father, but John manages it by pushing everyone away because they can’t live up to his standards. I have no doubt you know how Kevin manages.” Her gaze skittered away, and Clive was bothered by how the pain altered her face.

“Many strong people turn to drugs when they don’t know how to cope with life,” Clive offered.

She nodded. “I know. I still feel like I failed him. He’s a good man, but the same perfectionism that makes John prickly makes Kevin miserable.”

“Many addicts find their sobriety again.”

She looked up at him with watery blue eyes. “He’s forty two. I don’t believe in magical cures anymore.”

“I wish I could help,” Clive said. He knew people at some top-notch rehabilitation clinics, but he didn’t have the right to get involved. Elena might help. Clive made a mental note to talk to her about it.

“If you want to help someone, focus on John,” Beverly suggested. “He called every agency in three states and pulled strings I didn’t know he had to get me into this program. I now suspect you were involved in that.” 

Clive didn’t correct her, but he suspected Elena to be the string puller in question. For a ruthless criminal, she did have a soft center. “He lets me help less than you think.”

“Another bad trait he inherited from his father. But I need a favor.”

“I’ll help if I can.”

She leaned forward. “I need you to get John away for a week or a long weekend. Take him out on the boat or just get him out of this hospital.”

“What? Why?”

“He’s coming here every day, and I’m about to enter the rough part of the treatment. My luck with bodily fluids is likely to end, and I can’t have him here every day. Fawn has her family to distract her and Logan is Logan. Of all my kids, he’s the one I worry about the least. Even when he was fourteen and I tried to change him, I couldn’t. He’s strong enough to weather this no matter what happens.”

“Beverly.” Clive stopped. He had no idea what to say to her. His relationship with his own parents had been as complex and difficult as anyone else’s, but he had never watched them suffer.  One minute he was exasperated with how often his mother called him; the next, their car slid off a road in a rainstorm and they both died in the accident. He didn’t know how he would have dealt with a lingering illness. And it had been different with his wife. There had been an emotional barrier born of resentment that had crept between them.

Clive finally said, “John is independent. I don’t have that much influence on him.” That’s the only explanation he could offer. He wasn’t a boyfriend and he didn’t know how to get through those prickles his mother had described him as having.

“You can try.” He voice trembled a bit. “John is going to tear himself to pieces, and I don’t want to watch that. So I don’t care if you have to borrow anesthesia from the hospital and drag his unconscious body out, but make him take care of himself. He’ll never do it on his own. He’ll insist he’s fine until he drops dead of a heart attack.”

Clive had to admit she was right about that. “I can offer to take him to my house up north—get him out of your way for a few days.”

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to worry about him, but until Logan told me about you, I didn’t think he had anyone else who could knock sense into him.”

“He’s more likely to knock sense into me,” Clive said. “I’m not the catch you seem to think. I’m a workaholic, bad-tempered and utterly incapable of maintaining a relationship. Cancer took my wife before we got around to a divorce, but we had been headed that way and were just too damn stubborn to admit it.”

“I’m sorry.”

Clive shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I’m older than I look. But I guess I’m warning you that neither of us has a good track record with relationships. I’m not sure you should put so much faith in me.”

“I put my faith in God. I’m asking you to distract my son.”

Clive call Elena and offer a similar sum as he’d paid for that first weekend. She would jump at the fees and John would as well. To get money for his mother, he would do anything. That plan made Clive feel like a horrible person because he wanted the excuse to touch John, to hold him and control him and run his hands over that strong body. Guilt and decency told him that John needed time and space to recover. He might need Clive out of his life altogether so he could feel safe again. 

It made Clive feel like a hypocrite that Beverly’s request was giving him the excuse to indulge his own possessive and base nature. “I’ll invite him to my place in Maine. I’ll really try to get him to take a little time for himself.”

Beverly’s smile made Clive feel like a first rate asshole. “Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me. I may not be able to get him to leave,” Clive said. If Elena cared about her assistants, she should order Clive to back off. “In fact, I probably won’t be able to. I’m sure you know he’s a little stubborn.”

“All my children are stubborn,” she said. “If I could get them to eat fiddleheads, you can get John to take a few days off.”

“We’ll see,” Clive said. “I really will try.”

“It’s all you can do,” Beverly said. 

Clive didn’t want to overstay his welcome, especially when Beverly was ill, so he stood and offered her his hand again. She took it without getting up. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Beverly. Your son has a lot of you in him.”

“Poor child,” she said. “Truth be told, I’m even more obstinate than Albert was.”

Chapter 27: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-20707456 

Chapter 28: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-20726684 

Chapter 29: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-20848455