“You like little girls now?” he says to Ethan.
“Go!” Ethan screams. “Ivan! Leave!” His face is wet, nose pouring snot and blood, all the color drained right out of him.
Ivan kicks my leg, hard. And then he finally walks out the door, slamming it behind him. I scramble to latch the lock. Push a chair against the door, and then I run to Ethan. He’s holding his face, sobbing so hard. I think maybe it will hurt if I hug him but worry it might be worse if I don’t.
“I’ll call the police,” I say.
“You don’t really think the cops are going to want in on a fight between a couple of queers, do you?” Ethan says, sniffing and wiping his face with the back of his hand. Blood smears across his cheek.
“Hospital?”
“I don’t want anyone to see me like this. I don’t want to go out there. I don’t want—” His face wrinkles. It hurts him to cry and that makes him cry harder. You can see it—how it hurts.
“Okay. It’s okay,” I say over and over because I have no other words. I run to the bathroom and get a washcloth. Soak it under the faucet and bring it to him. He’s crying so hard his whole body trembles.
I clean his face. Wash the blood from his hair the best I can. And then we sit on the floor in the middle of all the smashed groceries and I hold him and tell him everything will be okay, because that’s what I always wished someone would tell me whenever I got hurt.
“I shouldn’t have tried,” Ethan says. “I knew better. But he was here when I got home. He still had the key, and I missed him. I didn’t realize he was drunk. I let myself hope.”
* * *
When he’s stopped crying, I slide the refrigerator against the back door in the kitchen. My hip aches when I push. I pile more furniture in front of the front door and check every window latch. We sleep in Ethan’s room, with my arms around him, the TV on like a night light, my buck knife hidden under the mattress, just in case.
The next morning, I get up before Ethan does to clean the tomato sauce and blood and broken glass off the carpet the best I can. I call Robert and ask him to help me change the locks.
Ethan cries when he wakes up. We hear him all the way downstairs. I bring him a wet washcloth. His nose is swollen and bruised. The cut on his cheekbone is thick and crusted over. It’s hard to tell where one bruise stops and the next one starts. He holds his stomach. Tries to stop crying. He can’t. I kiss his forehead and clean his face. When I change the bloodied pillowcase, Robert sits on the bed and lets Ethan rest his head in his lap.
Robert has some Percocet left over from a back injury last year, so we give that to Ethan and I get him more ice for his nose and hold his hand. When he falls asleep, we go down to the kitchen and pull together something for him to eat. Scrambled eggs, yogurt, and canned peaches, because it will be easy on his jaw. We wake him up. He looks at us and chews when we tell him to, but he’s not really there. I’m sure it’s easier not to be.
* * *
“I wish you’d met Rodney,” Robert says while we’re cleaning up the breakfast dishes. He’s wiping the juice tumblers with a bright blue sponge that squeaks against the glass. “Ethan and Rodney were like the romance you always dreamed you could have, you know?” He stacks the glasses gently in the drying rack. “They were so happy. It made everyone around them feel better to know there was love like that in the world.” When he scrubs the frying pan, dried yellow flakes of egg fall into the sink like leaves.
“Why did they break up?” I ask, swigging the rest of my coffee, handing my mug to Robert to wash.
He puts the mug down and it clanks against the porcelain sink. “I don’t know why I thought you’d know about that.”
“I just got here. I’m basically a stranger.”
“This,” Robert says, waving his hand toward the living room, where the blood on the rug will never come out all the way, “this makes us not strangers.”
He picks up the mug and wipes it down with the soapy sponge. I’m convinced he’s not going to tell me what happened, and then he says, “Rodney died in a car accident about four years ago.”
I think about how Ethan’s eyes look older than the rest of him, and the weary way he carries himself to bed at the end of the day.
“They were going to adopt a kid,” Robert says. His eyes are red. He doesn’t try to hide it. “This little girl from Mexico. She was beautiful. They got pictures in the mail. They were planning their trip to pick her up. And then, Rodney was on his way home from work. A tractor-trailer…”