I took a chair by the door and waited. About fifteen minutes later, the ICU door opened and she stepped out, walking slowly, her head hanging like she had a bag of rocks tied around her neck.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Ms. Jones?”

“No,” she said. “My name is Letitia McBride.”

“I’m sorry. But was your name Jones? Are you Lawrence’s sister?”

She nodded, hesitantly. McBride was, I surmised, a married name.

I got up and introduced myself. “Lawrence is a friend of mine. I came by to see him, but they won’t let me in, not being a relative and all. I understand you flew in from Denver? The nurse told me.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Do you mind my asking you how you know my brother?”

Maybe, when your brother is gay, and a man you don’t know approaches you and says he’s his friend, you need a bit more information to understand the nature of the relationship. I obliged, telling her I was with The Metropolitan and had been doing a story on Lawrence, but that in the short time we’d hung out, we’d become friends. And that I had been the one who found him and called 911.

“Thank you,” she said, and reached out and touched my arm. “The doctors said if he’d been found any later, he would have lost too much blood.”

“How is he?”

Letitia McBride’s lips pursed out, she breathed in deeply through her nose, and her eyes moistened. “He’s hurt real bad,” she said. “They say the next day is critical. He’s a fighter, you know? And he’s fighting now, more than he ever has before.” She blew her nose into a tissue. “My baby brother.”

I tried to smile.

“Our mother, she drove a bus for the city, worked all kinds of shifts, some right through the night, and our dad, he wasn’t home much because he was working two, three jobs, trying to make enough to support us. They loved us, we never doubted that, but we were on our own a lot, and I always looked out for him, making him dinner, making sure he got to bed on time. One day, this big dump truck smashes into our mother’s bus, back end came right through the window, and we lost her. After that, Dad, he had to work even harder to support us, and I was looking after Lawrence all the time.”

“Is your father still alive?”

She shook her head. “He passed on, oh, ten years ago now. Lawrence was never able to tell him.”

“Tell him?”

“About being different,” she said, looking at me cautiously.

“About his being gay.”

She nodded. “Maybe, if it was now, attitudes are different, you know?”

I nodded.