Celia's Puppies by Claudia Hall Christian Page B

That’s how I was when the Fey
team found me.
    “ I’m laying there, mostly
crazy, and I hear this: ‘Damn, Michael, I didn’t know you even
WANTED to be a priest.’”
    “ What?” the interviewer
asked.
    “ Priests lay like that
before the alter when they are ordained. Guess you’re not
Catholic.”
    “ No,” she said.
    “ Makes it less funny
then.” Mike smiled.
    “ What happened
next?”
    “ I tried to roll over but
I was in pretty bad shape. Their medic put me out. That’s all I
remember until waking up on the plane home. They knocked me out in
the hospital. I had a couple surgeries. The moment I could move, I
was out of the hospital and caught a plane to LA.”
    “ Did you know he was
alive, Val?”
    “ No,” Valerie said. “I had
alienated a lot of people with my… insistence on searching for
Mike. I think they wanted to have him… in hand and healthy before
they told me.”
    “ I flew to LA and watched
Entertainment tonight. I waited outside the Ivy and…” Mike
shrugged.
    “ I fainted when I saw
him,” Valerie said. “We spent a month together. I
tried...”
    “ I was insane,” Mike said.
“God, poor Val. I was still in bandages from the surgeries, bruised
up, AWOL and a complete mess.”
    “ I wasn’t much better,”
Valerie said. “He left about a month later. Checked himself into
the VA. By the time he came back, I was publically engaged to
Sean.”
    “ We have an interview with
Sean where he says that he’s gay,” the interviewer said. “His
mother had terminal cancer.”
    “ Sean thought his mother
would die at peace if she knew he was ‘over’ his gayness. He told
her it was a phase and we were getting married. She died a couple
days later,” Valerie said. “It’s not the most politically correct
thing to do, so Sean and I hid it.”
    “ That’s what he said,” the
interviewer said. “He also said you did the same thing for his
partner a few years later.”
    Valerie nodded.
    “ But Mike saw those
engagements as a betrayal...” Valerie said. “Of course.”
    “ We had a lot of push,
pull,” Mike said. “I didn’t have a job or a life. I camped out in
the garage of this place.”
    “ Your studio,” the
interviewer said.
    “ Not then. It was a
garage. No running water, no heat. I camped there, went to therapy.
Delphie, the woman who lived here, in the Castle, had no idea I was
in the garage. Valerie and I saw each other probably twice a month.
Valerie would come see me or I would go there,” Mike said. “Val was
like an obsession. When she was gone, I thought of her constantly.
When she was here, I couldn’t stand myself.”
    “ It was the same for me,”
Valerie said.
    “ Then Val’s brother, Jake,
moved back to Colorado,” Mike said.
    “ Jake’s a spark.” Valerie
beamed. “He gets fires going. He got Mike working on the Castle and
playing hockey again. The studio was covered in these drawings of
me. Jake bought paints and left them for Mike. After a few
missteps, Mike picked up oil painting like he was born to it. The
first completed canvass is the one that’s in the
museum.”
    “ I’d drawn the image so
many times, it was like just getting it down,” Mike said. “Once I
started, I didn’t stop.”
    “ What about
Wes?”
    “ Mike and I fell into a
rhythm of seeing each other a week a month and some weekends,”
Valerie said. “But we struggled. I became enamored with Wes. Wes is
so normal, so slick. Mike and I had a fight about him, then Wes
sent a car for me.”
    “ A car?”
    “ An Aston Martin,” Valerie
said. “Mike was furious. He threw me out of the house, told me
never ever to come back.”
    “ I’m a real asshole,” Mike
said. “You don’t have to wonder why she left.”
    “ I deserved it,” Valerie
said. “I walked the edge, never committing to Mike or anyone for a
long time. I couldn’t stand losing him again. It would kill me.
Just kill me. I couldn’t have Mike and I couldn’t be away from him.
I went back