by John Fulton
Lying on the concrete foundation, I felt waves of pain roll over me and cold air move through my throat and into my lungs. Noir whimpered above me and licked my face. “No,” I said. Speaking hurt. Half of me was abuzz with hot pain. I struggled to my knees, pushing myself up with the arm that seemed to work. My other arm was bent in a strange way so that the palm of my hand pointed away from me. I tried not to look at it. Looking at it made it hurt more. The first steps were nearly unbearable. When I concentrated and breathed and walked slowly, the pain eased a little. Whimpering, Noir walked at my side. “No. No,” I said for some reason. I heard a car rush by, and then another. The air was gray and I thought maybe it was snowing lightly, though I only half registered this fact. At one point, I looked around and knew from the cars and houses that I had gone too far down the hill and had passed our duplex. Finally, at my front door, I could not work the key into the lock, and so, like a stranger, I rang the doorbell.
“Steven,” my father said. Usually when I arrived home, my father would not lift his face from his math textbook to look at me. He often tried to seem busy with his schoolwork when my mother and I were at home. That afternoon, he dropped his notepad on the entryway table and let me in. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What happened to you?” He touched my shoulder and I screamed. “Oh, God,” my father said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“I got lost,” I said. “I didn’t know where I was.”
My mother was running for the phone. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“We can’t call an ambulance,” my father said. “We can’t afford a bill like that.”
“Look at him, for God’s sake,” my mother said. She held the phone in her hand but wasn’t dialing. They were both looking at me now.
“We’ll drive him ourselves,” my father said.
“How did this happen?” my mother asked me. She came at me with a washcloth she’d just run under the water. “Stand up straight,” she said. “Stand up so that I can take care of this cut.”
“I can’t,” I said, trying to stand straight. “It hurts too much.”
“Jesus.” I saw the fear in her face. She bent down and wiped at my mouth. Her perfume was almost acidic and turned my stomach. Because she had to wear the scents she sold at work, she often smelled harsh and floral.
“Ouch!” I yelled. The blood on the cloth scared me. I hadn’t thought I was bleeding that much.
“Your arm,” she said, “what happened to your arm? What happened to his arm?”
My father bent down, gently lifted my red parka, and looked inside. “I think he’s dislocated his shoulder,” he said.
“It was an accident,” I said, knowing I could not become a snitch. “I fell.”
“Who did this to you, Steven?” my mother asked. “Your sister already told us you were having an argument with someone. Who were you arguing with?”
“No one did anything to me,” I said. “Where’s Jenny? What happened to Jenny?”
“Let’s get him in the car,” my father said.
“I want to come,” Jenny said. She was crying and curled up in the fat green TV chair that we had bought from Deseret Industries and that smelled faintly of cat piss, so faintly that we had all decided to believe it wasn’t cat piss and never mentioned it to one another.
I yelped. My father had touched my injured arm again. “I’m sorry,” he said. He was trying to stand me up and turn me toward the door.
“Let me walk myself,” I yelled, even though talking hurt. Each word seemed to push against a tightness in my chest. There were two spots of blood on my white tennis shoes. “Am I bleeding a lot?”
“Not a whole lot,” my father said.
“He is,” my mother said. “Look at him. Somebody did that to him.”
“You’re not helping,” I heard my father whisper to her. He looked at me. “It’s just your lip. It looks like you cut your lip a little.”
We were outside now. The air was gray and the snow had begun falling in heavy sideways sheets. My parents walked on both sides of me, their arms out to catch me if I fell. “It hurts to talk,” I said.
“It hurts him to talk,” Jenny said, her voice panicky.
“I’m not injured too badly, am I?” I had to whisper. If I whispered, the pain wasn’t as bad.
“No,” my father said. “No, you’re not.”
I didn’t remember getting in the car. I remember only opening my eyes and seeing that I was in the backseat with Jenny’s hand in my good hand. “I’m sorry for running,” she whispered.
“Running from what?” my mother asked. My father was outside brushing a thin dust of snow away from the windows. “You tell me what happened,” she said. I squeezed Jenny’s hand as tightly as I could to let her know that she’d better not say anything, and she didn’t. When my father sat down in the car, my mother looked at him and said, “He needs an ambulance, Billy. We need to call an ambulance.”
“He’s fine,” my father said.
“He is not fine,” she said.
“You’re scaring him,” he said. Then he whispered in her ear. “He might be in shock. The best thing to do is to keep him talking.”
“I hate this,” my mother said.
“I can hear you,” I said. It hurt less to talk now that I was sitting and speaking in a very soft voice. “I’m not in shock.”
“Good,” my father said. “That’s what we want to hear.” He was driving now and trying to look at me in the rearview mirror while he kept an eye on the road. “I want you to keep talking to me. I want you to tell me how you are. How are you?”
“Okay, I guess.” If I concentrated, I could keep the pain at a distance, like a sound you hear at night in your bed that grows farther and farther away. When I looked down at my injured arm, it didn’t seem to be my arm. It felt unnaturally attached to me, awkward and foreign.
“He’s staring at his arm,” Jenny said to my parents.
“Look at me,” my father said, by which he meant that I should address him in the rearview mirror. I did. “Good boy. Now speak to me, Steven. Tell me something. Anything.”
“Where’s Noir?” I asked. I couldn’t remember at that point whether he had followed me home or not. I remembered only hearing him yelp soon after I had hit the concrete.
“He’s fine. He’s back home. What else would you like to talk about?”
“Could we talk about our house?” I asked. “Could we talk about moving up the hill?”
“Of course we could,” he said. In fact, the house was one of his favorite topics of conversation.
“When are we moving up the hill?” Jenny asked.
“Soon,” he said. “The times are pretty good just now. There’s a lot of activity going on, and we’ll be able to take advantage of that. As soon as I’m a certified accountant, we should make our move. No more than a year, a year and a half maybe.”
“Please,” my mother said, “let’s not go through this. Steven is hurt, for God’s sake.”
“We’re not going through anything,” my father said.
“No more about the house,” she said.
“It will have three stories, right?” I asked. My father nodded. “It will be up on Green Hill or Lemon Circle?” I asked, referring to two of the nicest streets above our duplex, streets where the kids who had hurt me that day probably lived.
“Sure,” my father said. “Those are both possibilities. Or we’ll take one of the new ones they’re building now. Those look promising.”
“And it will have a trampoline and swimming pool in the backyard?” Jenny added.
“No,” my father said, surprising me because we had always planned to have a swimming pool and trampoline and because I had assumed that great plans—at least in the realm of dream—never had to change. “The trampoline can stay. But the swimming pool is inside the house now … just off the living room. What’s the use of an outside pool in a place where it snows five months of the year?” He gestured to the world outside our
car, where the snowfall had become so thick that you could barely see the ghostly outlines of the mountains in the distance. “It will be enclosed and climate-controlled so that you kids can swim in the middle of a blizzard if you want. We’ll be able to enter it from the living room or kitchen through sliding glass doors. A deck will lead from the pool out onto the backyard where you can sun yourselves in the summer or just sit and drink Cokes and listen to music with friends.”
I looked over at Jenny, who was smiling and who clearly liked the sound of the new pool as much as I did. “My room,” she said (and I knew very well what she was about to demand since she had done so many times before), “will have two large windows and will be far away from Steven’s, all the way down the hall from his, and right across the hall from a bathroom.” Then she said, “My bathroom.” I usually snapped back at her for her nasty possessiveness and her desire to escape me, but Jenny and I had been in cramped quarters for as long as we could remember, and that afternoon I understood her wish for her own space, for two windows and a bathroom all her own. I wanted that, too.
“Of course,” my father said to Jenny. “You will have your own bathroom. Steven will have one, too. I will have one and your mother will have one. And,” he added, “we will also have a guest bathroom. Five bathrooms.” He lifted his hand from the steering wheel and put out five fingers, wiggling them a little for emphasis. I imagined these bathrooms, my mother’s done in pink colors with little pink seashell soaps beside the sink, Jenny’s done in purple with seashell soaps of that same color, my father’s bathroom and my bathroom in marine blue or in rustic earth colors, though I didn’t know much about how bathrooms should look. I knew only that there would soon be five bathrooms where there was now only the hurried and shameful privacy of one.
“How are you feeling, Steven?” My mother had turned around and I could see from her face—tired and worried—that she didn’t believe a word my father had said and that she was in no mood to pretend that she did.
“Fine,” I said. “Great.”
“Great,” she said, laughing a little. “How could you feel great?”
“I just do,” I said.
My mother said something odd then. “You don’t have to feel great for our sakes, you know. You’re allowed to feel however you feel.”
I didn’t understand her and neither did my father. “Why are you telling him that?” he asked. “He’s doing just fine and you’re telling him he shouldn’t be.”
“He’s hurt, Billy,” my mother said, “and we’re acting like nothing has happened.”
“We’re not acting like anything,” my father said. “We’re just making conversation.”
“We’re talking nonsense. We’re talking about bathrooms we don’t even have.”
“I like to talk about them,” I said. “It makes me feel better to talk about them.” My parents were too angry to continue speaking, and whatever spell I had been under, whatever state of mind had kept the pain away, was broken now. I looked down at my lap and saw again how my palm and forearm were turned up at a wrong angle. My upper arm was swollen, and I moved the ice bag that—though I didn’t remember it—my father must have given me farther up on my shoulder. I felt a stabbing pang, then another and another. “Jesus,” I said, trying to concentrate and keep the pain away.
“We’re almost there, kiddo,” my mother said.
“A minute ago,” my father said, “he was just fine. And now, no thanks to you, dear, he’s in agony.”
“Please,” I said, “please don’t argue.”
They were quiet for a while, and I was glad since the pain now demanded all my concentration and made the tears come to my eyes, though I managed not to sob or make any humiliating childish noises. I just let the tears fall and held on to my arm and was thankful for the silence until my mother turned around again and said, “Please, Steven, tell us how this happened. We know you didn’t fall. Who did this to you?”
“I fell,” I said. “It was an accident.”
“Jenny,” my mother said, “what happened to your brother?” I looked at my sister and tried to tell her with my eyes, full of tears or not, that if she said anything I would hurt her, I would make her life miserable.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said, looking down in her lap.
“Jenny,” my mother said.
Jenny looked up. “Why don’t we believe in God?” she asked.
There was a silence in the car. “Because we would rather not believe something just to make ourselves feel better about the world,” my father said. “Because we’re not afraid of the truth. Because what we have is what we see in front of us, and that’s good enough.” We had heard our father’s lectures on this subject before whenever we asked this question. He had always felt strongly about his atheism. He seemed to feel that he—and his family—were stronger because of it.
My mother turned around and looked at Jenny. “Why are you asking?”
“Because that’s what the boys who hurt Steven wanted to know.”
“Shut up!” I yelled, even though my lungs felt as if they would shatter. “Shut the fuck up.” I wanted to kick her, but I didn’t have the strength.
“They were Mormons,” my sister continued, having decided to betray me completely. “Kids from our neighborhood. Kids who live up the hill.”
“Shut up!” I was crying out loud now and hated her for reducing me to sobs.
“Did you hear that, Billy?” my mother said. “The Mormon kids. Those little brats. When we’re done at the hospital, I’m going to find them. I’m going to go to their houses.”
“No, you’re not,” I said.
“Damned if I’m not. Look at what they did to you.”
“Please don’t,” I said. I looked up at the rearview mirror where I met my father’s eyes and thought I saw that he understood me, that he knew that his son could not become a snitch.
“No one’s going over to anyone’s houses,” he said. “Let’s just get to the hospital. We’ll think about the rest later.”
My mother turned back around in her seat. “We’ll see,” she said under her breath. I knew then that my father would do what he could for me. We were all quiet again, and I hoped it would stay that way until we arrived at the hospital, though finally Jenny sighed. “I wish we went to church like everybody else in this city. I wish we believed in God.” She was writing her initials over and over again in the steamed glass of her window.
“We believe in ourselves, Jen,” my father said enthusiastically. “We’re not afraid of the fact that we have no one and nothing else to rely on. People don’t get anywhere thinking that something out there is going to make life better. You think that way”—he cleared his throat—“and you never have to look at yourself and see who’s really running your life.”
Jenny didn’t answer him. None of us did except for my mother, who laughed bitterly at his remark.
“I’m not joking, Mary,” he said. I could tell by the way he leaned into the steering wheel that he was irritated and maybe even hurt. “Please stop writing on the window, Jenny,” he said. “That makes a mess. And who do you think has to clean it up?”
“Okay,” she said, and stopped.
* * *
The hospital was called The Richmond Clinics, a huge, newly constructed building with white siding and hundreds of large windows that emanated a bronze light in the dark snowfall. “Don’t let him slip,” my mother said as we walked through the snow-covered parking lot. I could stand up straighter now, though I found that hunching over reduced the pain and made breathing easier. The blood on my face had dried, and my lips and cheeks felt stiff and swollen. A series of black glass doors that read EMERGENCY slid open for us, and signs for check-in led into a brightly lit waiting room with rows of padded chairs and tables, where a few old people sat quietly reading. There were almost no signs of other people’s emergencies except for a small boy who sat beside his parents holding a white compress stained with blood to his head. “What’s wron
g with you?” he asked my sister when we sat down across from him.
“I’m just fine,” Jenny said. She took off her puffy winter coat, which she did right away whenever she entered a place because she hated to appear fat. She wore a pink sweater and white Levi’s, clothes that looked new and expensive despite the fact that my mother had bought them secondhand. For some reason, clothes always looked new when Jenny wore them. She was a pretty girl with long curly hair that reached the small of her back. She made sure a strand or two hung down the side of her face, aware that this gave her what she called “girl appeal,” which meant something like sex appeal, though as a fourteen-year-old freshman in high school, she hadn’t yet developed. She was still too flat to need bras and didn’t have much shape in her hips. All the same, she acted like an adolescent girl, sealing herself away for hours in the bathroom, arguing with my mother about how a young girl should wear her hair, and reading women’s magazines, one of which she picked up now and opened while she talked to the boy across from her.
“They’re going to have to use a needle,” the kid said. “I need stitches and I might have a concussion.”
“Ouch,” Jenny said, though she didn’t of course really feel his pain. She’d just said that to be a charming, conversational girl, which she often tried to be. On the front of her magazine, a woman looked out at us, her eyes blue and hungry, and her hair flung back and wind tossed. “My brother’s hurt, too. He did something to his shoulder. He dislocated it, we think.” TWENTY TIPS FOR GIRLS WITH THIN LIPS, the front of her magazine said. I understood then why the woman on the cover was pursing her red, glossy mouth into a whistle; she was showing the world how full her lips were, how full a woman’s lips should be. The kid asked what dislocating a shoulder meant and Jenny did something fancy with her fingers and made a popping sound with her mouth to illustrate the idea. “It’s when your arm gets pulled out of joint.”
The little kid looked at me, his eyes swollen from tears, and I think he saw in my face exactly what I saw in his: the fear of what had happened to us and the fear of what would soon happen—the needles, the stitches, the doctors and nurses using incomprehensible words. I also knew that Jenny, unhurt and determined to be pleasant and social while also fingering through her magazine, did not understand the first thing about our fear, and I wished that she were hurt, too, cut or stung or poisoned or anything that would keep her from saying the terribly kind and untrue thing she said next. “You’ll be okay, I’m sure. You won’t even remember it happened to you tomorrow.”