Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt

  Isabelle glanced out the window, the booms of thunder so loud they seemed to crack open the sky. “We’ll find him,” she said.

  They left a note for Sam at home. They drove to the places Sam loved: the beach, where the sand was wet and heavy; the diner, which had closed because of the weather; the playground, which was deserted. They couldn’t find him anywhere.

  Charlie called home every few minutes. They went to the police with a photograph. “He’s severely asthmatic! He’s nine years old!” Charlie screamed.

  The officer looked at Charlie. “We’ll get right on it,” he said.

  They got back in the car, the rain drumming against the windows. Charlie dialed one hospital after another, and with every call, his voice seemed more faded. He couldn’t let go of Isabelle’s hand. “Do you have a nine-year-old boy there, an asthmatic?” Charlie cried into the phone and Isabelle moved closer to him, trying to hear what the voice on the other end might be saying. Charlie nodded yes, and he listened.

  “He’s okay,” Charlie said, finally, hanging up the phone. “They have him. He’s in an oxygen tent. Cuts and scratches, but he’s okay.”

  “Let’s go. We’ll be there in five minutes,” she said, but he shook his head.

  “I’ll drive you home. I can’t think straight. I’ll call you.”

  “Charlie, please! Let me go with you! Don’t you think I’m worried, too?”

  A sheet of rain poured across the car. The windshield wipers squeaked. “I know you’re worried, but he’s got to be furious with both of us. It’s better if it’s just me right now.”

  He put one hand on her shoulder and she felt a shiver of cold. She looked out the window. The streets were empty. “Why? Why is it better?” she said quietly.

  His whole body seemed to be shaking. “Isabelle, my son is in the hospital! I can’t have a conversation about this now. I’ll call you when I can,” he said. And then he started the car, and the whole way to her place, neither one of them spoke. When Charlie dropped Isabelle off, he pulled away almost immediately and she was left standing in the soaking rain.

  SAM WOKE UP with a thick plastic oxygen tent around him and his arm glowing with pain. Doctors ringed his bed. He turned his head away from the light. “You’re one lucky boy,” one of the faces said. Sam bit down on his lip so he wouldn’t cry, because after all that had happened, how could anyone in his right mind ever say that Sam was lucky?

  “Oh, yes,” said another face. “I’m Doctor Stamper. The school janitor found you. He knew who you were and he knew what to do. He drove you here. We gave you something for your asthma and the oxygen should help, too. But this arm! Your arm’s been hurt before, buddy, hasn’t it?”

  For a moment, Sam was back in that day, his mother wheeling around the car, yelling at him to get back inside the car. “I fell,” he lied.

  “Looks like some of these cuts are right at the same spot,” the doctor said. “Now what’s the chance of that happening, I ask you?”

  Dr. Stamper patted Sam’s shoulder. “Your father’s coming,” he told him. Then he reached under the plastic and gave Sam a shot, making him woozy. The room was floating. He kept craning his neck, looking around for his dad.

  He slept off and on, but he didn’t dream, and every time he woke up, it was a shock to be back in the hospital. And then the door flew open and there was his father, soaking wet, and there was no Isabelle. There was no Mom. It was only then that Sam began to cry as if he would never stop.

  His father drew a chair close beside Sam and took his hand. “I’m so sorry,” Charlie said.

  “Mommy’s dead!” Sam wailed, “She’s not coming back!”

  His father swallowed. “I know,” he said.

  “I thought I could talk to her, just one more time! I thought I could see her!”

  His father moved in closer, so that Sam could see the droplets of water sparkling on his skin. “You know that isn’t possible.”

  “You and Isabelle lied to me!”

  His father rubbed Sam’s hands between his. “This is all my fault. I should have told you that I was seeing Isabelle,” his dad said. “I should have let you know what was going on.”

  “Do you like her more than Mom?” Sam blurted.

  His father gave him a pained look. “Sam, no one can replace your mom for me.”

  “Then why did you like Isabelle that way?”

  “I was just trying to move on. I was trying to make you and me happy again. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. “

  Sam struggled to sit up in bed. “Nelson …” he said, pained.

  Charlie looked surprised. “Nelson is at home.”

  “He’s okay?” Sam could hardly dare to believe it.

  “Of course, he’s okay.”

  Sam tugged himself up further, wincing. “No, no, rest,” his father said.

  “I have to tell you something,” Sam said.

  Sam told his father everything about the day of the accident. It all spilled out of him—how he had hidden in the car that morning with his mother, how it was surely his fault because if he hadn’t had asthma, she wouldn’t have stopped. “She wouldn’t have died,” he said.

  His father looked as if he were frozen to the chair. “She wasn’t taking you?”

  “I hid! And then I had an attack and I spoiled everything!”

  His father looked dazed. “It’s not your fault,” his father said, but his skin had no color and he wouldn’t stop looking at Sam as if he somehow didn’t know him. “None of it is your fault,” he repeated.

  But it was his fault. Of course it was his fault, and then there was nothing left for Sam to do but tell his father more of the story. How he had seen Isabelle at the accident, how he had thought she was an angel and how sure he was that she would know where his mom went, that she would let him talk to her.

  “But Mom’s dead!” Sam’s voiced tore from his lungs, flooding with tears. “She isn’t coming back! She’s dead! She’s dead! And Isabelle can’t help us talk to her!”

  Charlie moved his chair closer to the bed, stunned. “You thought Isabelle was an angel?” He took Sam’s hands in his. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell Isabelle?”

  “You wouldn’t have believed me. And the books I read said you’re not supposed to tell, you’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Kiddo,” Charlie’s voice was pained. “Isabelle isn’t an angel. She’s just a person, like you and me. She doesn’t have any secret knowledge and she can’t bring your mother back in any way. No one can.”

  “But I saw—she had a halo! I heard wings!”

  “Sometimes you think you see things that aren’t there,” Charlie said quietly. “Sometimes you wish for them to be there so much, you believe that they are.”

  Sam stared down at the hospital sheets, threading his fingers tightly together. Then he looked back up at his dad.

  “Do you hate me for the accident?”

  Then, to Sam’s surprise, his father climbed up onto the bed and lay beside him, just outside the oxygen tent, but still so close that Sam could smell the soap he used, right through the plastic sheet. Charlie wrapped as much of Sam as he could in his arms and rocked him. “I love you,” he said. “Wherever you are, whatever you do. I’ll always love you.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Isabelle rode the elevator up to the children’s ward. What a horrible thing, a children’s ward of a hospital. How could anyone work here and not have their heart broken every day? The walls were painted with brightly colored murals of animals. The staff all wore smocks with teddy bears on them, and though everyone was smiling, Isabelle still felt affronted.

  Sam shouldn’t be here. Not in this place.

  She was tense and worried. Charlie had called her only once, rushed and apologetic. “I’ll call you back,” he promised, and when he hadn’t, she called the hospital herself.

  “We can only give information to family members,” a stern voice said.

  Isabelle protested but the voice was unmove
d. She hadn’t wanted to call Charlie, but she couldn’t just sit around, so she grabbed her jacket and now here she was.

  She rounded a corner, toward Sam’s room, and saw Charlie in the waiting room. He looked terrible. His hair was lank, his clothes rumpled. When he saw her, he glanced at her as if he didn’t know who she was.

  She sat down beside him, and when she touched his arm, he looked at her. “What are you doing here?” he said wearily.

  “I came to see Sam, I came to see you.” Something about him seemed suddenly missing to her. If she touched him right now, she wasn’t sure he wouldn’t dissolve under her fingers.

  “You can’t see him. He’s in an oxygen tent,” Charlie said.

  “Then I’ll sit out here with you. I love him, Charlie, and I love you.”

  Charlie met her eyes and for a moment she thought he was going to stand up and take her into his arms, but instead, he sank lower into his chair. “He looks so little in that bed.” He half shut his eyes. “I haven’t slept, I can’t eat. His asthma’s getting worse and they don’t know why. All I keep thinking is that if we hadn’t been together, this wouldn’t have happened. That it was my fault.”

  Isabelle touched Charlie’s hand, but his fingers didn’t reach for hers. “Please don’t shut me out of this.” She pulled up a chair and sat beside him.

  He shook his head. “I’m not shutting you out. I just don’t have a lot of room right now for anyone but Sam.”

  “Charlie, please.”

  “He told me he thought you were an angel, that you were some link between him and his mom so he could talk to her, that you could make her manifest so he could see her.”

  “What?” Isabelle started. “I never told him anything like that!”

  “The day of the accident. He said you had a halo of light, that it looked like the pictures of angels in books. He said he heard your wings.”

  “Oh my God. I wish I had known. I wish he had told me!”

  Charlie swallowed. “He told me something else about the day of the accident. April wasn’t taking him. He hid in the back of the car to surprise her. She was leaving both of us. Both of us!”

  Isabelle felt herself dissolving. She tried to touch Charlie again, but he moved back, almost apologetically. She was about to try to pull him back to her, when a doctor came into the room. “Mr. Nash? Could you come in Sam’s room for a moment, please?”

  Charlie stood up, but when Isabelle stood up and started to follow him, he stopped and touched her shoulder. He cupped her chin, just for a moment, before he let her go again. “Please. I’ll call you when I know something,” he said.

  All that day, Sam seemed to get worse. They gave him nebulizer treatments and started him on prednisone. By supper time, though, his breathing had calmed, and by late evening, he was sleeping, his small chest rising and falling. Charlie sat by his bed. He thought of April, the way some crackpot had told her that children with asthma are souls uncertain about staying here, and so she had climbed into Sam’s bed and whispered to him not to leave.

  Charlie took Sam’s small hand in his. “Stay,” he told Sam, just as a nurse whisked into the room.

  “Go home,” the nurse said.

  “No, I should stay.”

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning. Sam is out for the night and all that’s going to happen if you stay is that you’ll be a mess in the morning. Go get some sleep. You won’t be any good to your son if you get sick, too.”

  The nurse shooed him, the way she might a dog. Charlie slowly got up and walked to his car.

  Then he drove. The whole world seemed to have emptied out. The streets were dark and there were only a few cars on the road. Occasionally he saw someone walking. A man with his head bent low, crying. A couple with their arms slung about each other. The only people out were either miserable or in love.

  Charlie thought about going home, sleeping on the couch because to get to his bedroom he’d have to walk past Sam’s empty room and he couldn’t bear that. He thought about Sam, so tiny in that hospital bed, and then he thought about Isabelle and felt a tug of yearning.

  He wanted to talk to her, to touch her face, to just be with her. He thought of the curve of her neck, and how she leaned forward as if she wanted to scoop up every word. And then he thought about how he had been so short with her at the hospital. He had seen the way her whole body flinched, and though he had ached to hold her, to tell her it was all right, it didn’t feel right.

  He parked in front of her apartment and buzzed.

  “Charlie?” Her voice was soft with sleep.

  “Please …” He couldn’t get the words out. He rested his face against the door and then she buzzed him up. By the time he got to the top of her stairs, she was on the landing, walking toward him in her robe, then resting her head against his shoulder.

  They lay spooned together on Isabelle’s bed, Charlie’s head against her shoulders, her heart beating against him. Then she turned to face him, taking his face in her hands. She kissed his nose and then each of his eyes. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “Try to sleep.”

  When he woke, she was still beside him, still in his arms, her eyes open. “You slept,” she said. “I’m so glad. I watched you.”

  “Then you didn’t sleep,” he said, kissing her.

  They both got up slowly. He had forgotten how much he loved just seeing her move, the slow, easy way she lifted up her hair and knotted it, the way she tilted her head when she listened to him.

  She was making them French toast, squeezing juice. He grabbed his pants from the living room floor and pulled out his cell to call the hospital.

  “We tried to call you last night,” the doctor said. “Sam’s not doing well.”

  His heart jammed. Had he been so involved with Isabelle that he hadn’t heard his phone from the other room? “I’ll be there right away.”

  “It’s Sam,” he said to Isabelle, reaching for his clothes. Why did he leave the hospital? How could he have been so stupid? He didn’t have to listen to that nurse. He could have stayed. He could have been there when Sam got worse. His son didn’t have to be alone and scared. He could have been home to get the call. But instead he had gone to Isabelle.

  He was lacing his shoes when he noticed that Isabelle had turned the burner off, that she was standing there, helpless.

  “I know I can’t come with you,” she said, her voice sad.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I can,” Charlie said, and then he grabbed his jacket and was gone.

  ALL THAT WEEK, she waited for Charlie to call. Isabelle told herself he was at the hospital, he was busy with Sam, and when he was home, he must be exhausted. But sometimes, too, she wondered why she couldn’t go through this with him. Why did they have to deal with it as if they were on separate coasts of the country?

  She thought about how April could have driven away without her son. Isabelle had driven away from a husband, too, but Luke had been cheating on her. He had fathered a child with another woman. She could understand leaving a husband like that, but a son? How could you leave your own child? She thought of April in her red dress, shrouded by fog, staring at Isabelle as if she knew what was coming, and then Isabelle leaped up and grabbed the phone, calling the hospital to ask about Sam.

  “Discharged,” said a rushed voice, and Isabelle felt a shock of pain because she hadn’t known, because Charlie hadn’t thought to tell her.

  She called Charlie. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve just been so overwhelmed that I haven’t had a second. It’s all I can do to take care of Sam,” he said. “He’s still not doing so hot, but at least he’s home.”

  “I could help you.”

  There was that funny silence again. “I want to see you,” he said. “I know you’re worried, but every time I pick up the phone, I think about what it might do to Sam. I feel like I’m padding on this very thin layer of ice and I can’t even see the cracks.”

  “We ca
n protect him together.”

  “I saw him being born,” Charlie said. His voice sounded far away, and she gripped the receiver tighter against her ear. “Some fathers don’t want to go into the delivery room, but I did. I saw him curled up, as tiny as a minute. I heard his first cry. When he came home, I used to sleep beside him, even though April was worried I’d smother him. I just loved staring at him. Having a child is, well, it’s just profound. Even as they grow, you just stop and look at them and you keep thinking in absolute wonderment, Where did you come from? How is it possible you’re here?” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry, I have to go. I have to get Sam’s medicine. I’ll call you later,” he said, and then hung up.

  Isabelle curled up in the sheets. She thought about Charlie tending his son, about the way he’d look at Sam with pure amazement that he existed, and then she thought about all the babies she would never have. All the names she had picked out. They were ghost babies.

  And there was Sam.

  And right now, she didn’t have either one.

  All that week, Isabelle called to get reports about Sam, but it was always the same. Sam was wheezing. Or Sam was on a new medication or having to use an oxygen tank. And then he began to do better, to respond to the medication. “He’s turned a corner,” Charlie said finally, and she could hear the relief in his voice. “He’s back to normal.”

  “Can I come by, then?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Charlie said. “Sam refuses to even talk about you right now.” He was quiet for a moment. “It was such a close call,” he finally said.

  She wrapped her arms about her body, stung. “At least he’s better,” she said. “At least he’s going to be fine.”

  SHE WENT OUT for a walk, and when she came home, there were two messages on her answering machine, Michelle and a wrong number. Nothing from work. What was she going to do if she couldn’t get some income? How would she live? She picked up the paper and scanned the help-wanteds. She knew she wasn’t exactly old, but she wasn’t twenty, either, and she didn’t have a college degree. The kinds of jobs she’d be competing for might not even want her—not that she truly, deeply wanted them herself. Photographing pots and pans for a department store, where the most creative thing she might do would be to put a plastic banana in a glass fruit bowl, or spread a robe across a well-made bed—that wasn’t for her. She scanned the ads. She could work at Sears, but it would be Beautiful Baby all over again, and they paid even less and didn’t offer full benefits, and how could she afford that?