In Another Land
Part FiveAndy had been driving home from Wayne Manor, rushing to get there before Dick got home. He and Bonnie had planned a big cookout in celebration—all their friends would be there and the word had gone out to a lot of kids in the gym as well and they all knew Dick had scored in every event he'd entered at the Junior Championships. They'd blown the budget on steaks and chicken for the grill, a cake had been ordered and the speakers were set up outside for music.
Christ, working for Wayne was a damned two edged sword, if you asked him. Sure the guy paid well and it would probably lead to more high paying work, but the man was a closed book, cold as ice—and that damned butler of his—he man hadn't so much as smiled once since the work began. The first day Wayne had shown him around, the day he got the contract, the man had left for five minutes to take a phone call and Andy had started through the first floor to see what kind of woodwork he'd have to match. Things like that made a big difference on pricing. He'd gotten to the pantry and was checking out the wainscoting when Alfred had found him, just about gone white and instructed him, in no uncertain terms, that he was to leave certain rooms undisturbed, thank you. After what was obviously a whispered conversation between Wayne and his hired help, the job was suddenly changed to an addition for the garage and the stables instead of the update to the kitchen and laundry room.
Whatever. If Wayne didn't want him inside his fancy house that was fine with him cause God knew the money was still pretty good. A garage or a kitchen made no difference to him. Work was work and he was almost half through with the job. Wayne seemed pleased and he was already talking about what else he wanted to be done to the place.
When Andy got to the top of that rise, the one with the big curve, he saw that the truck, the big one delivering the double load of slate tiles for Wayne's garage roof, was in the middle of the road and straddling the line.
With less than three seconds to react, he had no chance and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Bonnie had received a call from the local ER saying only that her husband had been in an accident. She had gone over immediately. When she'd arrived a doctor told her, as gently as she could, that they had done everything they could and—apologetically—asked if she knew someone she could call. When she didn't understand what they were asking her, the doctor asked, gently, if she knew someone who would be willing to identify the body. In shock, she called a friend, an RN who would be used to these sorts of things. Karen had arrived within twenty minutes, hair wet from the shower and Bonnie overheard the ER doctor say something about 'brain matter was being cleaned off the victim'.
A local funeral home was called, no autopsy had been requested and Bonnie was taken home.
Tests showed that Andy had neither alcohol nor drugs in his blood stream.
That was four hours ago.
Word was going out already, food and people were arriving for both for the party and the funeral, friends were in and out and Dick just happened to walk in during a lull in the visitors.
"Mom?"
Something was really wrong. He looked around, finally finding her curled into herself on the couch in the den.
"Mom? What's going on?"
"It's Dad..."
Dick never had any clear memories of the next few days after that. For the rest of his life there were gaps in those days, just as there were from the days after his real parents had died.
She told him what she knew of the accident, that the truck driver was tired from a long day and hadn't slept much the night before because of hauling the tiles in from the quarry on a rush order. The man survived with a broken arm and was expected to make a full recovery.
Dick knew that Andy was dead, that he'd been killed instantly in a head on collision with a truck and that Karen, Bonnie's nurse friend met Bonnie at the hospital so that she wouldn't have to ID the body, which was pretty messed up from comments he'd caught.
He vaguely knew that he missed school and that there was a large group of his classmates and kids he knew from the gym and the neighborhood at the service, though only a few went back to the house afterwards.
He remembered that someone measured him then bought him a black suit and tie to wear and that Bonnie was wearing a black dress he'd never seen before.
He knew it was a high mass and that the church was filled to over flowing and that there was standing room in the back.
He saw the flowers and thought the mingled smells were nauseating. He thought that the church was too hot and he had trouble breathing, though he managed not to pass out and he remembered how hard Bonnie held on to his arm and his hand, though neither of them cried. Later he noticed the bruising on his bicep where she had clung to him.
Dick thought, during the receiving line as he was hugged and his cheek was kissed by crying friends that it hurt too much to cry but that maybe later he'd get around to it, when he was feeling better—well, when he was feeling again.
All these little scenes and thoughts—they were all like flashcards or slides, disconnected and disjointed in no particular order. Like snapshots in an album which belonged to someone else and which he hadn't really participated in but had merely watched as a stranger, detached and uninvolved.
A week later he returned to school and he found it sort of interesting that no one knew how to talk to him or what to say. He noticed that kids would watch him out of the corners of their eyes and teachers pitched their voices lower when speaking to him, probably in an effort not to upset him.
He was called down to guidance and gently told that if he wanted to talk, they were there for him but he just answered that he was probably going back to the same therapist he'd gone to the last time his parents had died. He'd been through this before—he'd be alright.
Really.
The counselors had repeated that they were there and he thanked them, never going back other than for schedule changes and the usual things any student deals with.
One of the few things he did notice was that the house was quiet now. The TV was kept of, the radio wasn't used, he didn't play any of his music and he and Bonnie didn't talk all that much. The few things they said were subdued and the conversation would die after an exchange or two, lapsing back into silence. They kept to themselves, each in their own room and each with their own thoughts.
He did, finally, hear Bonnie crying one night sometime in the second week after the accident, after he was in bed and she was in her own room. The walls were still thin and he could hear her. From then on he heard the crying every night and would cover his head with his pillow to block it out.
He didn't cry.
He loved Bonnie and they both missed Andy but they simply couldn't connect, as they had been able to do so easily when he was still there. They argued a lot about stupid things; the garbage or the lawn.
Dick's grades suffered, knowing that Andy would be disappointed and that Bonnie was worried, but his schoolwork just didn't matter to him.
He didn't care.
He didn't go to the gym either and one day about a month after the funeral, Sergei came to the house to check on him, finding Dick in the back yard. He was sitting in one of the old Adirondack chairs and had one of Andy's old sweaters on against the chill.
They talked, but not about gymnastics or Andy. Sergei told him about how he'd felt when he'd left Russia for the US, how lonely he was and how he'd missed his family but had kept working anyway. He told Dick how his mother had died from cancer before he could get back to see her or to bring her over for a visit and his family was still angry about that. For a while they just sat quietly together. Finally Sergei got up to go; he had to run a class in a little while. "You come back when you're ready. It's okay."
Dick watched him go. He didn't want to go back.
He stopped returning calls from his friends and rarely went out.
He failed all of his mid terms.
Bonnie made him go back to the therapist and he did as he was asked and though he spent the required time in the sessions, he was apathetic and uncommunicative. He took the antidepressants and went through the motions of following the psychologist's instructions, but his heart wasn't in it this time.
There was also the worry about money now, more than ever. Andy's company was a one-man band in that he owned it himself with no partners. He had done almost all of the major work of getting jobs himself and had all the contacts. Bonnie had neither the time nor the expertise to pick up the slack and so the business quietly folded. The open contracts were given to other companies and the outstanding fees would be split, but wouldn't be enough to last for very long. Without Andy's income, they were falling back into the hole they had been climbing out of. Andy's life insurance had lapsed when they were in bad shape financially last year and there was a second mortgage on the house which had to be paid in addition to the first and the car payments.
One day Dick rode his bike down to the local bank and insisted to the manager that he wanted to use his personal account to make payments on the loans. He had that five thousand dollars from mowing lawns and Christmas and birthday money and all the rest, and though he knew it was just a drop in the bucket, it was all he had. The manager reluctantly agreed, but insisted that Bonnie had to know. Dick threatened to find a lawyer for breeching client confidentiality and though the manager knew it would never hold up in any court, let it go. The boy's mother would find out soon enough anyway.
It took care of two months worth of payments.
Next Dick tried to find out if there was any way he could crack the trust fund that had been set up for him when his other parents, his real parents had died. He was told that it was in the care of a trustee and would stay there until he was eighteen.
Who was the trustee?
Mr. Wayne had been appointed by the state following a suggestion from Andrew Porter. The money was being managed by Wayne's investment advisors as a college fund for the future.
Fine. He could work with this. Maybe.
When he called Wayne's home number he was told that Mr. Wayne was overseas. Asking whom he could speak to about the trust, he was given Lucius Fox's number. Mr. Fox, though quite kind, was adamant that the trust wouldn't be broken, though he would be happy to extend a loan to Mrs. Porter if things were as dire as Dick portrayed them.
No, thanks. They'd handle it on their own. No, there was nothing else he could do for them.
About a year after Andy's death, when Dick was almost sixteen, Bonnie began to come out of her fog and started noticing things. The last year had been a nightmare, but she'd thought they were starting to slowly pull out of it when she became more fully aware of the changes in Dick. His grades, for one thing. She had hoped that the nosedive was temporary, but it had been a while now and he still seemed to just be going through the motions in school and even that, just barely. But—he'd lost his second father to violent death in just seven years, that would shatter anyone, let alone an intelligent, sensitive youngster like Dick.
Oh, he was still mostly a good kid, polite and all, still mowed lawns and helped around the house and did whatever he could to make things easier for her. They had stopped the constant bickering, but he was different and she was worried—in fact, she was becoming frightened.
He'd dropped a lot of his old friends and he spent a lot of time alone in his room with the door closed. He rarely used the beloved gymnastic apparatus out in the back yard Andy had built for him.
She'd found out that he'd paid the bills for a couple of months, of course, and had tried to talk to him about it but he refused to accept anything back or even discuss it. When she had opened another account for him and replaced the money there, he saw the bank statement and told her that he wouldn't take it. He wanted to help her and he knew that right now she needed the money more than he did. He was upset about that, insisting that he wasn't a child, he could help and was adamant about contributing his share.
He was depressed and God knew he had enough to be depressed about, but it seemed like it was more than that and she was frightened for him and sometimes she was afraid of him, as well.
It wasn't that he'd ever done or said anything to make her think he would ever hurt her—in fact he was more protective of her than he'd been before Andy's death, it was just that he was so—different.
She'd smelled marijuana on him a few of times when he'd come it and she saw his eyes. He was using and she was terrified that he would find stronger things to take away the pain. She tried to talk to him about it, but he would either deny everything or simply storm out. He was larger than she was now, close to six feet tall and he was strong from the gymnastics and all the yard work he was still doing. While Bonnie didn't believe that he would ever harm her, nor had he ever threatened her, he was intimidating just by his size and mood.
She called his therapist, asking if she had any suggestions and the woman said she would talk to Dick, try to find out the extent of his use and they would take it from there. A week later the doctor called and said that though she couldn't beak patient confidentiality, she should know that there was a bigger problem than just the pot and she should talk to Dick, maybe get him tested and see what all he tested positive for.
One day, in the middle of all of this, Bruce Wayne called her at work during her lunch hour.
Bruce Wayne was calling her about her son. God, this was beyond belief. Didn't the man have enough to keep him busy?
"Mrs. Porter? Forgive my interrupting you like this, but I've been concerned that Dick hasn't shown up at my place the last few weeks. I depend on him to help Alfred and if he's not here—well, Alfred is getting too old to do everything himself and Dick is the only one he accepts any assistance from."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Wayne. I'll speak to him this evening about it and have him call you."
"Thank you, I'd appreciate that. Mrs. Porter, I don't want to pry, but how is he adjusting? I, forgive me, Alfred thought he noticed some changes in his behavior and attitude the last few times he's been over."
No kidding. "It's been difficult for him. He stopped going to the therapist almost three months ago and—Andy's death, Dick blames himself. He insists that since Andy was driving to welcome Dick home from that big gymnastics meet, it's his fault. If he hadn't won, Andy wouldn't have been on that road then, he would have just worked till the end of the day like usual and he would have gotten home in one piece." She stopped herself. Why in the name of God had she just blathered all this to a man she barely knew?
"Does he really believe that?"
"Oh, God...I don't know. Maybe. He hasn't set foot in the gym since that day, I do know that."
"He's taking drugs, isn't he?"
"...Yes."
"I could try to talk to him if you'd like. I don't know him as well as some others, but he did stay here when he was first orphaned and, well, I like the boy. I'd hate to see him get into real trouble."
The drug tests—which had infuriated Dick— proved positive for marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy. Dick didn't even bother to deny his use, insisting he could stop whenever he wanted. He said it helped and please leave him alone. From then on he refused to engage at all and she was starting to believe that the only solution was that she might have to send him to some clinic or rehab—which she couldn't even begin to afford at $30,000 a month for the good ones and no guarantees. Suddenly his poor grades didn't seem to matter as much as they had a few months before.
"Maybe when he goes over to your place this weekend, Mr. Wayne. I'll make sure that he's there, but he's, Dick is hurting and I don't know that he'll listen to you. Please try, but, well, I don't know."
"Mrs. Porter, Bonnie? Please call me Bruce and I'll try."
The next Saturday Dick was in Wayne's twenty-car garage cleaning up a case of oil, which had somehow fallen from a shelf. A couple of the quarts had broken open and there was a puddle of 10-W-40 on the concrete floor.
"How's that coming?"
Dick had a pair of headphones on, listening to Eminem while he worked and was startled when Alfred tapped him on the shoulder. He let the 'phones hang around his neck. "It's okay. I'll get it. If you have some cat litter it will help soak this shit up."
Alfred nodded and got a bag out of a cabinet, raising his eyebrow at the language.
"Thanks." He went back to working while the old man pretended to change an air filter. He thought he could smell pot on the kid, but with all the oil wasn't completely sure. He also had a runny nose.
"We were wondering where you were the last few weeks—were you alright?"
"Oh, yeah—sorry. I forgot to call. Something came up. Sorry."
"How is school coming along this year? What are you now? A junior?"
"Sophomore. It's fine." He was flunking half his classes and had either a 'D' or a 'C' in the rest. He used to be high Honor Roll.
"You know that your Mother and Mister Wayne are concerned about you, don't you?"
Dick looked up from the oil mess, not in the mood for one more lecture. "Did he ask you to say something? That's why Bonnie had a bug up her ass for me to come here today?"
Alfred stared Dick down about his language. "She's worried about you. She knows about the drugs and it scares her."
Dick glared at him. "I don't fucking believe this—what? It was on the local news or something? I told her, it's fine. She shouldn't worry. I'm..."
"You're what, young man?"
"I'm just ducky."
"You've had a rather stressful year, she knows that—but this won't solve it. It won't solve anything and you're smart enough to know that."
"They make me feel good, okay?" Dick stood up, wiping his hands on a rag. "I have to go now."
"Dick," Alfred put his hand lightly on Dick's arm. The boy stopped, glaring and pulling his arm free. "What would it take to get you to stop using? If things had worked out differently you might well have ended up living here—Master Bruce and I like you and we don't want you to go down that road any more than your mother does. There must be something you think might be of help."
Sure. Bring back my father—either one of them, in fact. Hell, bring back both and his mother for good measure while you're at it. "I have to go."
"Dick, please. What would help? What is it you want?"
Still angry but in better control of himself, Dick looked somewhere in mid space, not focusing on anything other than his own thoughts. "What is it I want? You really want to know?" Alfred nodded, yes, he did want to know and yes, he did care. "I want Andy to walk through the door with some dumb joke he heard on the site today and I want people to stop fucking asking me how I am all the time and then not giving a rat's ass about the answer." He looked over at Alfred, met his eyes and Alfred was struck again by the amazing color, even though they were a little bloodshot. "I want my Mom to stop crying all the time. I want her to be happy again and I don't have any idea how to make that happen. I don't want Mom upset and I know she is about this—and I want to be able to do gymnastics again" He paused, then, "I'll stop. Today. I won't use anything anymore." He seemed to make some kind of decision. "I want my parents to stop dying. That's what I want...I'll throw out what I have and I won't get more. Okay?"
That was much too easy. "Dick..."
"I promise, alright? I do, you can come with me. I'm quitting now, this is the end of it."
"It's not that simple."
"Sure it is. I don't want Mom to have any more shit to deal with than she already has. I'm done with it. I was thinking about this anyway, you just said it out loud. It's finished."
Alfred was dubious, but maybe...unlikely, but maybe. No. Not possible, not this easily. No. "If you need any help with this—whatever you want, whatever you think will work..."
"Yeah, I know. I'll call you." He turned back to the mess on the floor. "Was there anything else?" Alfred shook his head. "I'll finish this."
No, too easy, he agreed too fast. This wasn't the end. Even if Dick had meant what he'd just said about quitting—no, this was too fast and too easy.
When Dick got home later he made good his promise and did, indeed, throw out his stash, flushing it while Bonnie watched and promising that he wouldn't use drugs again. He apologized and said how he knew that Andy would have been disappointed and, hell; he'd never wanted that. He'd bring his grades up, too. It wasn't that hard. He knew he was smart and he knew how to study. He'd do it. It would all turn around starting today.
He swore to her that this was it. He promised.
About a month later Batman happened upon a group of kids making a score under one of the underpasses at two in the morning.
Caught in the bust was Dick Grayson. He tested positive for cocaine when he was arrested.
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