Chapter 7: Giving Thanks

Oceano, California
November 21, 2000

It was 7:45 PM. Jake had just finished guitar and sing time with Caydee. He had only recently gotten to the point where he was able to hold up his end of the singing part without getting winded. Their final number had been a duet of sorts, the song Shoot High Aim Low by Yes, with Caydee singing John Anderson’s lyrics while Jake sang Trevor Rabin’s. They sang in decent harmony for the chorus hook. Laura even got in on the action, playing her flute—which she had become quite proficient with since acquiring—for the guitar solo and the fills. It was by far the most complicated and technical piece that Caydee had participated in so far, but she carried her parts quite well and with reasonably correct lyrics.

“Do ‘nother one, Daddy!” she said when they wrapped it up. “Rollin’ on the River!”

“If you and Daddy do another song,” Laura told her, “I won’t have time to read you a story before lights out.”

“Awww,” Caydee pouted, but it was a good natured pout. She hugged and kissed Jake, being careful to stay on his left side. “Daddy feeling better ‘night?” she asked. This was a nightly ritual.

“A little bit better than last night, Caydee girl,” he told her, giving the same answer he always gave. And it was mostly true. He was slowly healing little by little. Very slowly. The bandages on the right side of his chest had all been removed and all of the sutures and staples had been pulled as well. The incisions themselves had all knitted back together and the skin was not red or puffy anymore. But there was still pain. Pain in his ribs when he breathed or moved his torso, pain in his armpit when he raised or lowered his arm, pain in the back of his shoulder when he bent over, and, worst of them all, the persistent pain in his chest wall around the gunshot wound scar. It ached all the time regardless of whether he was moving or sitting still. He really wanted to get off the pain pills and he had weaned down to some degree, but he still could not get through a day without taking at least two doses.

Even worse than the pain, however, was the weakness and lack of energy. He wanted to sleep all the time. Walking from one part of the house to another was exhausting. This was a difficult thing to face for a man who, up until being shot, had routinely run twenty miles a week and worked out at least twice a week in the gym room next to his office. He had not so much as taken a walk since being released from the hospital. And he had not even entered the gym room.

“I love you, Daddy,” Caydee told him. “Sleep tight. Get all healed.”

“I love you too, Caydee girl,” he told her, giving her another kiss. “And I’ll try.”

Laura led Caydee off to her room to read her the nightly story. Jake slowly got up from the couch and picked up his guitar with his left hand as he was not supposed to lift anything over five pounds with his right. He carried it over to the bar and set it down on one of the chairs. He then made his way behind the bar, pondered what he wanted to drink for a few moments, and then pulled down an unopened bottle of Rowan’s Creek 12-year-old bourbon that he had bought for $250 in a high-end Cincinnati spirits shop while on the Millennial Tour. He put some ice in a glass, cracked the seal on the bottle, and then poured himself a triple shot. He returned the bottle to its place and then walked back from behind the bar, picked up the glass with his right hand and the guitar with his left, and continued his journey to his composition room.

He had not been doing much composing in here lately. The pain pills and the fatigue and the pain itself made it difficult to concentrate on coming up with new material. He did play his guitar in here quite a bit though. He still had to have ninety-minute long infusions of antibiotics pumped into the PICC line in his left arm four times every day. He and Laura had settled on 8:00 AM, 2:00 PM, 8:00 PM, and 2:00 AM as the best times to run the doses (it was important that they be spaced exactly six hours apart, apparently). For the 2:00 AM dose, they stayed in the bedroom and would sleep while the pump was running. For the morning dose, Jake would sit on the couch in the entertainment room, read the paper and maybe watch some TV or listen to some music. For the afternoon dose, he would return to the bedroom and usually take a nap as it ran. For the evening dose, however, he liked to go to the composition room and spend some time strumming his guitar. The act itself was soothing to his mind, even if he was not coming up with new compositions, and it kept him in practice better than the Caydee guitar-sing sessions did. It also kept the calluses on his fingers maintained and the muscles in his hands and fingers in proper tone for their most important job.

Laura came into the room at 8:05, now dressed in her nightshirt for the evening. She carried the portable IV pump and its portable IV pole with her in one hand, a medical basin with all the supplies she would need to hook him up in the other. She set them down on the table in front of the composition couch where Jake was sitting.

“Ready to hook up, sweetie?” she asked him with a smile.

“Always,” he said, returning it.

She extended the IV pole and set it on its stand next to the couch. She then attached the small pump and plugged it into a power strip that was usually used for amplifiers. She turned the thing on and, while it went through its self-checks, she pulled out one of the bags of Vancomycin that they kept in the refrigerator and a single-use IV tubing set that was packed in a clear plastic wrapper. Laura was now quite adept at this particular job. She spiked the tubing into the bag of vanco and then hung it on a hook at the top of the pole. She squeezed the little drip chamber just below the plug-in point until it was half full of the clear liquid from the bag. She then opened the valve on the tubing and watched as the liquid flowed by gravity through all three feet of it and began to drip out the tip. She closed the valve and then handed the distal end of the tubing to Jake, who knew to hold it a few inches upstream to avoid contaminating the end that would plug into him. Laura then opened an alcohol prep and fished the end of the PICC line out of the little gauze pouch attached to his bicep where it was stored when not in use. She spent a full fifteen seconds scrubbing the hub where the tubing would plug in. They had been instructed that this step was sacred to the process if Jake wanted to avoid a blood infection from the invasive line. Once the hub was sterile, Jake handed her back the tubing and she screwed the tip into the hub.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s get the motor running.” She clipped a cartridge near the top of the tubing into a receiver on the pump and closed the little door. She then pushed a button that said “Start Infusion” on the front of the pump. Unlike hospital pumps, this pump was pre-programmed to only infuse 250 milliliter bags of Vancomycin over ninety minutes. It was capable of doing nothing else. The screen asked if Laura was sure she wanted to start the infusion and she pushed a button marked “Yes”. The pump began to make a soft whirring sound. Drops began to slowly form and fall in the drip chamber. The medicine began to infuse into Jake’s body. A light on the pump turned green, indicating that all was well. A timer started and began to count down from 1:30:00.

“We’re rolling, sweetie,” Laura told him.

“You should have been a nurse,” Jake told her affectionately.

She shook her head. “They deal with too much gross stuff,” she said. “Blood, puke, adult pee, adult poop. Not for me. I’d rather blow the horn.”

“You do blow a good horn,” Jake told her with a smile.

She chuckled a little and then gave him a saucy look. “As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be adverse to blowing some horn right now,” she told him.

Jake’s smile faded a bit. “Uh ... well, Meghan is still up, isn’t she?”

Laura shrugged. “The door closes, sweetie. And Meghan would never come in here while it was closed.”

He sighed. “Uh ... yeah, I suppose.”

Her saucy smile turned sympathetic. “Not in the mood?” she asked quietly.

“Sorry,” he said. “I know I haven’t been up to my normal level lately. The pain and fatigue are kind of draining.”

She leaned over and kissed him gently on the lips. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she told him. “I still love you even if you are only fucking me a few times a week or so and I always have to get on top. Things will go back to normal as you get better.”

He was grateful for her understanding. “I’m damn sure going to make up for lost episodes once I get my strength back,” he told her.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she told him. “How’s the pain right now? You haven’t had a Vicodin since this morning.”

“It’s up there,” he told her.

“Want me to get you a pill?”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, almost ashamed of himself for being weak. “I guess I’d better.”

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

She disappeared for about four minutes and then came back with one of the white oval pills in her hand. She handed it to him. He took it from her and put it on his tongue, tasting the now-familiar bitter taste of the pill. He was pretty sure, at this point, that he would be able to identify Vicodin in a blind taste test of similar looking pills without a problem. He washed the pill down with his bourbon and settled into the couch.

“Thanks, hon,” he told her.

“Anything else you need right now, sweetie?” she asked.

“I’m good,” she told him. “I’m gonna sit here and let the pill go to work while I do some strumming on the guitar for a bit. I know how to pause the pump and unhook if I need to go take a leak or get another drink.”

“All right then,” she said. “I’ll close the door on my way out. I’m gonna go upstairs and read for a bit. If I fall asleep you’ll be able to unhook and flush?”

“I can do it,” he told her.

“All right,” she said, leaning in and giving him another kiss. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Love you,” he told her.

“Love you too,” she returned.

She left the room, closing the door behind her. She then went upstairs to their bedroom and closed that door as well. She peed and then tossed her panties into the hamper, leaving her only in her nightshirt. She then got the book she was currently working her way through—it was the hardcover first edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, her second reading of it since it had come out earlier in the year—and set it on the nightstand next to her side of the bed. She did not open the book just yet. Instead, she opened the drawer on the nightstand. Inside of that drawer was a vibrating dildo and a vibrating clitoral stimulator. She took out the dildo and put it to work. Her mind thought of the last interlude between her, Jake, and Celia as she slid it in and out of her body and drove herself toward a nice orgasm.

Jake sat on the couch and idly strummed his guitar while he waited for the Vicodin to kick in. He did simple melodies and chords from the vast collection of tunes he had accumulated in his head over the course of his life, hardly thinking about what he was doing. He played Reo Speedwagon’s Time For Me to Fly for a bit and then switched to Behind Blue Eyes by The Who. From there he transitioned into Blind Faith’s Can’t Find My Way Home and then switched up to Bourgeois Tag’s I Don’t Mind at All. He did none of his own material and he did not sing the lyrics to the tunes, though he did occasionally hum them. Every once in a while, he would sip from his drink.

Finally, when the timer on the pump read 00:55:00, he felt the swimmy head sensation of the Vicodin kicking into gear. As it did so, his various aches and pains faded down considerably (though did not go away). The tradeoff was that his concentration and focus faded down with them. But he was used to the sensation by this point so he took another healthy sip of his drink and then settled in to play some more guitar.

He upped the complexity a bit now that the pain was tolerable. He also started to sing the lyrics, keeping his vocal cords in practice. He played and sang War Pigs, one of Caydee’s all-time favorites, and then Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress, one of his all-time favorites. He strummed absently for a few minutes, lost in the alcohol/Vicodin high, and then began to play Suite Madame Blue, another of his all-time faves. From there, while the timer on the pump kept moving backwards and the antibiotic kept infusing into his bloodstream where it was only doing a half-assed job of killing the MRSA so far, he started playing around with some of his own material. He concentrated, not on his solo tunes, but the older Intemperance tunes, tunes he had not played in some time.

He started with Point of Futility, from the very first Intemperance album, the song he had composed while still playing clubs in Heritage, California, the song about his breakup with Michelle Borrows, his first serious girlfriend. It was rough playing it at first. The muscle memory was still there, but it was buried deep and he had to dust it off a bit. Even the lyrics poured slowly, hesitantly out of his mouth. God, he thought nostalgically, how long has it been since I last played and sang this song? The last Intemperance tour? Eleven years ago? Has it really been that long?

He finally managed to grind out the complete tune as it had first been composed. He sat back and thought for a moment, remembering being up on stage with Matt, Coop, Nerdly, Darren, singing that song for three or four hundred people in clubs, singing it up on stages before tens of thousands, hearing their cheers. He smiled as he thought about it. Those had been the days. He had been looking forward to playing all the tunes again, to going out on tour as Intemperance again, but fucking Jenny Johansen had put a major snag in the plan. How long will it be until I’m healthy enough to even rehearse for a tour? he wondered. At the glacial pace his body was healing, it would be months, maybe longer.

He sighed and then began to strum the guitar again. After a few moments he grabbed a G chord and began to play the opening for I Am Time, one of Intemp’s biggest hits. This one he had played more recently—it made regular appearances at guitar-sing time because Caydee liked to play Matt’s harmonic parts—and it poured smoothly out of him. He put a little flair into the guitar, strumming more aggressively, playing at the same tempo as the actual recording instead of the slower tempo of the acoustic version. As always when he played music like this, his troubles and worries slipped away from him, the pain faded from his mind much more effectively than the Vicodin and the alcohol could ever hope to accomplish. He was in the groove now.

After Time, he took another sip from his drink. It was now almost gone and he could feel that he was going to have to empty his bladder soon. But he did not want to stop playing just yet. He strummed some more, playing with different opening chords and melodies until his brain latched onto what it wanted to play to completion. After a few minutes of this, he found himself strumming out the melody for his tune Dark Matter. He smiled as he got into it. Dark was a song he had originally composed for one of his solo CDs but he had ended up dropping it from the project. He and the band had started to work it up—with Nerdly playing the piano parts instead of Liz—and then Jake had come to the realization that it was not a Jake Kingsley solo tune they were playing with but a classic Intemperance genre tune. He had not wanted what would be perceived as an Intemperance rip-off on one of his progressive rock genre solo CDs.

It was a damn good tune though. If Intemperance ever did do it, it would be one of the best fucking songs in the catalogue. He strummed it out a little more, repeating the opening over and over without advancing into the heart of the song. Oh well, he thought with a little bit of longing and regret, maybe some day it will be heard. If I can heal up and get this tour together and pull it off, and if me and Matt don’t kill each other or irreparably damage our relationship, and if we can still work together in a composition atmosphere, maybe we can put out a new Intemp CD.

He shook his head a little. A good thought, maybe, but there were so many variables in the equation, so much time that would have to pass before something like that could occur, it did not even bear thinking about right now. He played through the opening and began to sing out the lyrics now, deep, thoughtful lyrics that made an analogy between the unseen matter of the universe and human interaction and socialization in the modern era. As he played and sang, he kept thinking about what he and Matt and Nerdly could do with the tune, how good it could be. And Dark was not the only song that fit in this mold. He had two or three others that he had composed melodies and lyrics for before deciding they were not worthy as Jake Kingsley solos, that only Intemperance could do them justice. He wondered if Matt had such tunes as well. Probably. It seemed an intuitive thought.

And then was when his fingers jangled to a halt on the guitar, when the lyrics to Dark died in his throat.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered as a proverbial lightbulb flared to life above his head.

The next day, which was the day before Thanksgiving, Tom, Mary, Stan, and Cindy arrived at the Kingsley house after driving six hours from Heritage. They had large suitcases with them as all planned to stay until after Caydee’s birthday on December 1. Cindy and Stan would stay with the Nerdlys in their house while Jake’s parents would stay with Jake and Laura.

Caydee greeted them excitedly, getting and giving lots of huggies and kissies. After putting their luggage in the guest suite, Tom and Mary fussed over Jake a little. It was the first time they had seen him since he had been shot. Mary declared he looked like he was losing weight (which he was, he was down eight pounds since the shooting) and Tom and Stan wanted to see his scars. Jake showed them. The wounds were now completely closed but still looked fresh.

“They don’t look infected,” Mary commented.

“On the outside, they’re not,” Jake said. “The infection is on the inside.”

“Are you still having pain?” asked Cindy as she reached over and touched the bullet wound scar with her finger.

“Yeah,” Jake said simply. “It’s getting better but it’s still there.”

They sat down in the entertainment room. Laura played host and poured everyone some red wine. There was a tray of snacks that she had prepared on the main coffee table (Elsa had left for Orange County earlier in the day) and Caydee, now given permission to do so, immediately began to munch on them.

“Leave enough for the guests, Caydee,” Laura told her.

“I will,” Caydee said haughtily at this questioning of her character.

Mary took a sip of her wine—her son always served the best wine. She then looked at him. “Do you have all the groceries you need for tomorrow? The stores will be a madhouse today, but they’ll be closed tomorrow.”

“We have everything,” Jake said. “I have two fifteen pound turkeys that are brining in the garage. I’ll do one on the grill and you do the other one in the oven, just like before. We have ten pounds of potatoes, all the ingredients for Cindy’s homemade stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and fresh corn. Before she left on vacation, Elsa made us a half gallon of her gravy, pumpkin pies, cherry cream cheese pies, and some of that green bean casserole.”

“It sounds like you’re covered all right,” Mary said. “How many are going to be here?”

“It’ll be quite a crowd,” Jake said. “In addition to all of us and Bill, Sharon, and Kelvin we have the LA people. They’ll be arriving by helicopter at ten o’clock tomorrow. Paulie, Obie, and Tabs, naturally, and Celia is going to join us too. Eric the violinist will be tagging along as well as Massa Wu.”

“Massa Wu?” Tom asked. “Who is that?”

“He’s the other violinist we use,” Jake said. “The one who played for me on the last tour. He and Meghan have a little bit of a thing going.”

“Oh yeah?” Mary asked. “Is it serious?”

“Nobody really knows,” Laura said. “Not even the two of them. They talk mostly on the internet with those chat boxes. Sometimes they talk on the phone. They haven’t actually seen each other in person since coming off tour except for one time when Meghan rode down to LA with us for the quarterly meeting. They went to a movie together. They do talk every day though. They’re probably talking to each other on the computer right now.”

“Interesting,” Mary said. She rather liked Caydee’s nanny and wished the best for her.

“Oh, and Celia asked if it was okay if the helicopter pilot could join us,” Jake added. “I told her that was fine with me.”

“The pilot is going to join us?” Tom asked.

“He doesn’t have anything else to do,” Jake said. “He would otherwise spend Thanksgiving sitting around at the airport in the pilot lounge waiting for it to be time to take everyone home.”

“Oh ... I guess that makes sense,” Mary said. “Doesn’t he have his own family though?”

“Apparently not,” Laura said. “Celia told me about him the last time we talked. He’s divorced and his family lives in Wyoming. That’s why he put himself available to fly on Thanksgiving. He gets twice his normal pay for working the holiday.”

“She seems to know a lot about him,” Mary said. “Is there a romantic angle there?”

Jake and Laura looked at each other, a little startled. That thought had honestly not occurred to either of them. Celia Valdez dating a pilot? Absurd. But ... was it really? It wouldn’t be the first time she had gotten involved with a pilot, or even the second time.

“Uh ... I don’t think there’s anything like that going on,” Laura said. “Ron, that’s the pilot’s name, lets her sit in the cockpit when they fly even though it’s against regulations. That’s why she asks for him when she needs to go somewhere by helicopter.”

“I see,” Mary said thoughtfully. She hoped this information was wrong. She did not approve of the relationship her son and daughter-in-law had been engaging in with the beautiful singer. She did not approve one little bit. She had heard from Pauline that Celia had broken the sexual part of the relationship off, which Mary thought was wonderful news. She truly loved Celia and thought she was a strong, powerful, intelligent woman as well as a master musician and composer. But being in a sexual relationship with Jake and Laura was just wrong. It was wrong for society and it was wrong for Caydee to be exposed to. If Celia had a little romance going on, that would be a very good thing in Mary’s book.

The conversation turned from a possible Celia romance to the presidential election that had taken place two weeks before. They still did not know who the next president of the United States was going to be. It all came down to the vote count in Florida, where, as of the last recount, Bush was 537 votes ahead of Gore—in other words, too close to call for sure. Everything was now mired in legal issues and courts about whether dimpled ballots and hanging chad should be counted or disregarded. Jake had been paying very little attention to the whole affair—he simply did not care who the next grand poohbah was going to be because they were all corrupt and dishonest—but his parents and Nerdly’s parents were very much involved.

Tom and Mary were both diehard liberals. Stan and Cindy were both staunch Republicans. How they had managed to remain best friends with each other over the years was a mystery to Jake. They engaged now in a friendly little argument about the dimpled ballots and the hanging chad. Tom and Mary thought they should be counted since the intention of the voter was clear on such ballots (and there was a theory that Democrat voters would be more likely to not push the little punch thing hard enough to separate the chad, though there was no actual logic behind this supposition). Stan and Cindy were of the opinion that such ballots should not be counted because the Florida election laws clearly said they should not be (and their man Dubya was currently ahead by 537 votes and they wanted to keep it that way). Jake took the opportunity to get up and pour himself another glass of wine. Soon it would be time for his two o’clock Vancomycin dose and the nap that went along with it.

Jake was able to perform his husbandly duty that night after everyone went to bed. Laura still had to get on top and be careful not to put weight on his right upper body, but they still got a lot of mutual enjoyment out of the act. Jake licked her to two orgasms before she mounted him and she managed to squeak out one more while she rode the pony. Jake shot a pent up load into her and it overflowed, running down onto the sheets.

“I guess I’ll have to wash the bedding tomorrow,” Laura said with a giggle as she cuddled into Jake’s body.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said, kissing his mouth and tasting her own juices on his lips. It was a wonderful taste, almost as good as tasting Celia’s juices there. “It was worth it.”

They slept. At 1:55 AM an alarm went off, waking them.

“It’s that time,” Laura said sleepily.

“Yep,” Jake agreed, just as sleepy.

Laura got up and put her robe on over her naked body. She slipped through the door and walked through the dark halls to the kitchen, where she pulled a bag of Vanco out of the refrigerator. She walked back to the room, where the IV pole and pump had already been set up. In less than five minutes she had Jake hooked up and the pump running. She made sure there was an alcohol prep and a 10-milliliter saline flush on the nightstand where Jake could reach it.

“Thanks, hon,” Jake muttered, already half asleep again.

“Love you, sweetie,” she said, kissing him and enjoying the stale vaginal juice taste once again. Within five minutes, she was back asleep as well.

An hour and a half later, the pump began to beep steadily, signaling that the infusion was complete. Laura stayed asleep. Jake woke up and sat up in bed. He turned off the pump and then awkwardly disconnected the tubing from his PICC line (he had to use his teeth to steady it so the tubing could be unscrewed). He then screwed in the saline flush, pushed it into the PICC, and then unscrewed it and threw it in the garbage can. He tucked the PICC line back into its little holder. Another wave of antibiotics hit the battlefield against a stubborn and formidable enemy.

Laura got up and showered at 7:00 AM and then left the room to get Caydee up. Jake stayed in bed another thirty minutes, not sleeping, just lying there feeling his aches and pains. Finally, he struggled into the bathroom and popped a Vicodin. He then shaved and showered and got dressed for the day.

His mother had gotten up early and was making breakfast on the stove, scrambling some eggs with sausage and cheese. Laura was making toast and Caydee was buttering the slices and putting them on a platter. Jake hugged and kissed everyone and then poured himself a cup of coffee. Meghan and Tom came staggering out a few minutes later, drawn by the smells of the kitchen.

About the time that Jake finished his coffee and began to eat breakfast, the pain pill kicked in, leaving him feeling dopey but dampening down his aches and pains considerably. He was even able to help with the dishes.

“Well,” he said when the cleanup was complete, “I guess I’d better get the Weber going if we’re going to have dinner at three. Who wants to help me?”

Meghan volunteered to help. They went out on the deck and Jake directed her to build a pyramid of charcoal briquets in the bottom of the grill. He then saturated them with a considerable amount of lighter fluid.

“Now we light it?” Meghan asked.

“No, we let it soak in for about fifteen minutes and then we light it. If you do it too soon you just burn out the outer layer of the fluid and they’ll peter out. If it soaks in you’ll get a good ignition that will last.”

“Makes sense,” she said thoughtfully.

Once the coals were burning, Jake returned to the kitchen. He sent helper Meghan to the garage refrigerator to retrieve the two turkeys that had brined for sixteen hours and had been removed from the brine and rinsed last night. While she was doing that, Jake poured a large amount of pecan wood chips into a stainless steel bowl and then covered them with water. These saturated chips would create a fragrant smoke to flavor the bird.

“Here you go,” Meghan grunted, putting the birds down on the kitchen island cutting board. “Two big-ass turkeys.”

“Which one is mine?” his mother asked.

“Take your pick,” Jake said. “They’re both fifteen pounders.”

She made her pick. While Jake prepped his turkey his way, Mary did her bird her way. Jake’s way was to make garlic butter and rub it all over underneath the skin. Mary’s way was to inject a combination of broth, butter, and bourbon into the meat and then cover the skin with a combination of herbs and spices she had perfected long ago. The brining process would make the meat of both turkeys juicy and flavorful.