by Nick Lake
All this time, I’ve been waiting for her to ask again, about what I was doing out of the library, and eventually she does.
Why did you go outside early? she says. I TOLD you eight o’clock, like always.
I stare at her. I was there, like, four minutes early. I was just—
You should just do what I told you. You’re still a child. You do what your mother says. And I say you wait for me at eight o’clock EXACTLY. Do you think I say these things for fun? No. I say them because—
I’m not a child.
What?
You said I was a child. I’m not. I’m seventeen.
You’re a child under the law, she says.
I glower at her.
She closes her eyes for a long moment. I’m sorry. I know the car came up on the sidewalk. But … that’s why you have to be careful, Shelby.
I didn’t want the car to hit me!
No, she says. No, of course not. But someone else might have seen it in time, or heard it, you know. You’re special, Shelby. You’re in your own world. That’s why you need to be careful. That’s why you need me.
I know, I say.
A pause.
Is it a boy? she says, suddenly.
What? I say, wrongfooted.
The book. It’s not a library book. I’m still wondering where you got it.
No! I say, all horrified. And I’m not totally lying. I mean, there is a boy, of course. But he works for the library. So in a way, it kind of is a library book.
She looks at me, hard, like: spill.
Okay, there’s a boy, I say.
She raises her eyebrows, like: spill more.
He works at the library, I say. His name is Mark. He’s nice.
Now Mom is almost shaking with fear and anger. Boys and men—those are the things you have to watch out for the most. In her version of the world, they’re like wolves and we’re like sheep; they’re circling us all the time, looking for weakness.
He’s NICE? Everything I’ve ever taught you and you tell me he’s— Wait.
Mom is fixing me with this very odd look, her brow furrowed, like she doesn’t understand something.
What? I ask. What is it?
When you came out of the ER …, she says. I … I wanted to understand what had happened. I went down to the library. The police were asking questions.
Oh, right, I say. So you met him. What is it, the tattoo?
Now she’s looking at me as if she’s sorry for me, or as if she thinks I’m crazy, which I guess amounts to the same thing.
What? I say, more insistently now.
Shelby, honey, she says. There was no man at the library when I went down there.
Chapter 8
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to sleep in a hospital bed, but it’s pretty much impossible. There’s always someone coming in to check on you, or people walking up and down in the corridor—or running, sometimes, which is more worrying. You get those shadows of moving feet in the crack of light under the door, flickering, like a movie projector, except the pattern draws your eye without meaning anything.
There’s a meditation trick Mom taught me where you focus on your breathing, try to subtract everything else from your consciousness, and I try that for a while until I realize I’m thinking about Mark, and how Mom says he doesn’t exist. Which is, to say the least, a disquieting development.
A nurse comes and takes my blood pressure.
I press the button to feed more painkillers into my IV but I guess I must have already done it recently, because nothing happens. I don’t remember though.
The moon shines into the room. I told them not to close the curtains—I like seeing the world out there. It makes me feel less like the next flood has come, and this hospital room is the only thing saved; just floating on its own through dark water.
I try to think about the crash, and the coyote, but the images slip away from me, fish in a pond, flitting under cover when your shadow creeps over them.
Instead, the picture that keeps coming to me is of a park, one dusty summer when I’m, I guess, ten, maybe just turned eleven. Mom and I are walking to a clear patch in the middle, the grass brown and dying. There aren’t many people—it’s a weekday, presumably, and Mom isn’t working right then. I can see a couple of men ambling around, one of them with a dog on a lead. I don’t look at them—I know these men will bundle me into a van if I’m not careful, chop me up into dog meat, or worse. Mom is never specific about what actually happens in the van, which only makes it more scary.
So: I keep my head down, and I don’t meet those men’s eyes. Ever. Mom is holding my hand but you can never be too safe, that’s a thing I know; a thing I have been told, over and over.
Just once, I see something that makes me feel sad, instead of scared. It’s a family, all out together; I think they’re going to have a picnic. The dad has the younger child, a girl, on his shoulders, and she’s laughing. The other kid, a boy, is walking along kicking a soccer ball, chatting to the mom, who is smiling like there’s a light inside her and she has to let it out. In fact all of them are smiling, and this is what gets me, squeezes my heart—
I think, I would like that—a brother, a dad.
But instead I’m on the outside, and even though it’s so hot, the feeling is a cold one, the feeling of looking into a brightly lit room that you’re locked out of.
I shiver, and I look away from the family.
There’s a shimmering haze at the edge of the park and the sun is white above us, in a cloudless sky. Mom is sweating in the heat—her hand is clammy around mine, slippery but strong, like being held by a squid. I know she doesn’t want to be doing this and I feel guilty and warm inside, at the same time.
When we get to the empty part, Mom puts down the bag she’s carrying and takes out the ball and the bat. I don’t know if this is the first time I play—it’s my first memory of it, anyway. But I must have got the idea of batting from somewhere, so maybe it isn’t the first time.
Anyway.
So Mom hands me the bat and then she walks a couple dozen paces away. It’s a softball and Mom is overweight, not athletic at all, so when she throws it, the ball falls short and she shrugs her shoulders at me, moves closer. Seeing her try to pitch to me, the effort she’s putting into it, makes me feel again that strange mixture of pleasure and shame.
Closer up, she does better—the ball comes at me flat and I swat at it, miss. The next one I hit—it lofts into the gauzy summer air, arcs over Mom’s head, and bounces on the dried-out grass; twice, three times.
Mom shuffles off to get it. She’s not quick, but she doesn’t complain, and when she comes back she just throws again, and I swing.
That all you got? she says with a smile when she brings the ball back.
I smile too, and the next one, I hit harder, almost to the edge of the park, where the low suburban homes start. The air is so dry that it’s like breathing in sand. Mom’s hair is dark with sweat when she brings the ball back, yet again.
But she keeps going: the ball flying, a slow parabola in the shining summer sky; and Mom going to get it, as fast as she can manage, despite her size.
And my heart? My heart swells till it feels like it’s going to burst out of my chest. Because there’s my mom, my unfit, sports-hating mom, chasing after the balls I’m hitting, throwing to me over and over, the perspiration running down her in rivulets.
I’m only a kid, and I guess when you’re a kid you just think about yourself most of the time, you don’t think about your parents or how much they love you, but on that day, in that memory, I know it—I see it blazing out of my mom’s every moment, this fierce love.
I don’t know how long we kept that up, the batting. I know that in my memory, it doesn’t end, and that makes me think we were there for hours, but it could have been a half hour. I don’t know—I don’t remember leaving the park, I just remember the joy of the bat meeting the ball, the perfect, mathematically precise track of the ball through th
e sky, and my mom bringing it back, again and again.
And thinking about it is good, because it makes me feel less mad about Mom fussing over me, and Mark, and the horrible fear that I saw in her eyes when we spoke earlier in the hospital room. I picture the park that day, and it makes my anger and my guilt abate, slowly.
And then my breathing slows, and I’m conscious of it, but in a dim and distant way.
And I look out the window and I see that the sun is coming up, a glow on the horizon. The contrail of a jet plane above catches the low light and is set on fire, a perfectly straight streak of electricity, and I’m aware that I haven’t properly slept all night.
I press the painkiller button:
Click, and a warm rush.
6…
Chapter 9
There isn’t much time for worrying about Mark the next day, because I go into the OR early for my operation. I don’t get general anesthesia this time—they just knock my leg out and go to town. There’s a kind of screen to stop me seeing what they’re doing; not that I’d mind, I’m not squeamish.
I don’t exactly know what they’re doing. Something to do with the bones in my foot. One of them needs to be moved, I think, back to its proper position.
Whatever it is, it takes a long time. I figure the architecture of the body must be pretty complicated down there; lots of ligaments and tendons, twisting and stretching without me knowing, to accomplish the simple task of walking.
That’s the main thing I worry about: what if they screw something up? What if I don’t walk again, with or without a CAM Walker?
But I try not to let it get to me. And anyway there’s another thought swirling around in there, in me. Where did Mark go?
When I’m wheeled back to my room, I’ve got stitches down from my ankle to nearly my toes. There’s going to be an impressive scar.
But I don’t mind about that. A scar is nothing to me. I mean, I already have a whole lot of them. They stretch from my waist right down to my knees—pockmarks, streaks, like a meteor storm, like the surface of the moon. I was two when it happened: I didn’t hear my mom shouting to me to stop, and I pulled a pan of hot oil from the stove, spilled it on myself. I was wearing a shirt that protected my stomach, but my legs were bare.
My dad was already dead—he passed away when I was tiny. So it was all on her, and she’s never let go of the guilt of it. Sometimes, when she looks at my legs, I see the tears in her eyes. Not even just when she sees the scars.
At the same time, she hates it when I feel embarrassed by them. She wishes I would go swimming with her. Mom says the scars are part of the story of me.
I say, in that case, the story of me is a freaking horror story.
I’d recommend at least a week’s bed rest, says Dr. Maklowitz.
But she could leave, right? says Mom.
Of course. If necessary. We’ll have to train her in using the CAM Walker before we can discharge her, though. And of course we’ll need a follow-up appointment to make sure everything is healing okay. Say two months?
So, a couple of hours later, the hospital pharmacy brings me my CAM Walker. A nurse shows me how to put it on—it’s exactly like an enormous, ugly boot. My one is white, just to add to the storm trooper vibe. There’s a sticker on the back of it that says PROPERTY OF PHOENIX GENERAL.
The nurse makes me practice walking on it, up and down the hospital room, until she’s satisfied that I have mastered the art of WALKING. Then she shows us how to take care of the stitches, tells us about covering them up with a plastic bag if I’m in the shower or something.
Then she sends us to the hospital pharmacy with a prescription for some hardcore painkillers—high-dose codeine, which Mom explains is a derivative of morphine, only not as strong. We walk down a blank corridor, its walls marked here and there with suspicious stains. It reminds me of a recurring dream I have, which freaks me out a bit. The child crying, the need to get to it, to save it.
Finally we arrive at the pharmacy. There are two counters, with what looks like bulletproof glass protecting the people walking behind it. Actually it probably is bulletproof glass. Phoenix is like the meth capital of America after all.
We go to the first counter and hand over the prescription sheet. The woman behind the counter—she has a faint mustache—hands a ticket with a number on it through the little slot that’s open at the bottom of the glass. It says 496 on it. I look up at a screen where the number 451 is displayed.
It’ll be a half hour, says the woman.
A full hour and a half later, our number comes up on the screen and we go to the second counter, where a tall young man in glasses hands us two bottles of pills.
Taken these before? he says.
I shake my head.
There’s sixty milligrams in each tab, he says. No more than six in one day. You may find they constipate you a little.
Ugh, I think. Super gross.
You find the pain is getting too much, try elevating the foot, he says. Then he nods at us and goes to grab some drugs for another patient.
Mom holds my hand to steady me and we walk back down the corridor, then take an elevator to the main reception hall. There are doctors going back and forth, having fast conversations, nurses running. A couple of receptionists are working on the phones and also trying to deal with walk-ins.
Mom leads me to the coffee table area with the magazines, then, weirdly, seems to wait till the place is especially busy before walking us up to the counter. There’s a Mexican girl there, and she holds up a hand to us as she finishes a conversation on the phone. She says something in Spanish, then turns to us.
Yes?
We’d, ah, we’d like to pay, says Mom. She hands over some paperwork. She’s all nervous again, folded in on herself, as if holding something important under her chin, which she has to protect.
Credit card?
Actually … uh … Dr. Maklowitz and me, we agreed a cash discount. Ten percent.
The girl nods. She shuffles the papers and keys something into the computer beside her. Paramedics rush in, a guy on a gurney hooked up to tubes, and run down the corridor, and she doesn’t even look up. She’s pretty—long black eyelashes that flick up from the screen.
ID, she says flatly.
Whose? says Mom, her hands fluttering, fidgeting. My daughter’s?
Both of you.
But …, Mom kind of stammers. But we’re paying cash. She’s uninsured, you guys know that already.
I can’t take a cash payment without ID. And we need ID for … Shelby, for our records.
Mom is flustered. I’m not surprised, if she’s got ten thousand dollars in her purse. She roots around in there for a second, then looks back at the girl. I don’t exactly carry around her birth certificate, she says.
The girl shrugs. You can bring Shelby’s when you come for the follow-up. But I need to take yours now.
Mom does this apologetic hand-opening thing. I just don’t—
I lean into her field of vision. Your driver’s license, I say. You keep it in your purse.
Mom smiles, though it almost seems like she grimaces first. Oh yes.
She takes out her license and hands it over, and the receptionist enters her details, then holds out her hand and Mom takes a surprisingly small wad of cash from her purse and gives her that too. But I guess if it’s hundred-dollar bills, you don’t need that many.
The receptionist prints Mom a receipt using one of those really old-fashioned printers that spit out thin pink paper, with holes down each side. It’s long—I guess it lists all the stuff that was done to me.
Uh, thanks, says Mom, but she’s already turning around, holding my hand, maneuvering me out of there in my slow hobbling way.
The girl gives a brisk nod and answers the phone.
In the parking lot, Mom takes a small black unit from her purse that I slowly recognize as a car key. She presses a button and the lights of a gray sedan flash.
Since when do we have a car? I ask.
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Since I rented one, says Mom. The weird thing is—that whole looking-down shtick of hers, the nervousness, she’s doing it with ME now, as if I’m making her anxious by asking questions.
It’s enough to freak me out pretty seriously. Um, where are we going? I ask. What’s the deal? Why are you acting so weird?
We’re going on a trip, says Mom. A vacation.
A vacation? We never go on vacation.
Well, we are now.
Fine, I say.
She won’t meet my eye. It’s going to be a long vacation.
I put my hands on my hips—or try to, because I’m a little unbalanced by the CAM Walker, so as a maneuver it is pretty doomed to failure, and instead I do an ungraceful little jerky dance. Mom, I say. I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me what’s going on.
She says nothing but helps me into the front seat, adjusts it so that I have enough room to stretch out my leg, then takes my hospital bag and puts it in the back seat of the car. I turn and see that there’s a load of other stuff in there too—bulging suitcases, piles of Scottish landscapes.
Mom? I ask again. Why have you got, like, all our stuff in the car?
Mom takes a deep breath. Okay, she finally says, looking up at me. There’s something I haven’t told you. See … ah …
Yes? I say, impatient.
It’s your father. He’s not really dead.
Chapter 10
Mom is driving pretty fast, north out of Phoenix, on three-lane blacktop.
Sitting beside her, looking at her flapping mouth as she tries to explain, I am silent. Inside, though, I am thinking, WHAT THE HELL? We pass a Motel 8 and I barely see it, it’s as if all objects and things have gone transparent, and there is only this insane new fact in the world, disguised by glassy fake motels and gas stations and streetlights, a thin watery covering over insanity.
I can imagine what you must be thinking, she says.
Oh yeah? I think.
I know this must come as a shock, she continues. I know it’s a lot to take in.