by Rob J. Quinn
The screen door flew open again and Mr. Taylor came out pointing the barrel of his shotgun ahead of him. He saw his boat flipped over in the middle of the yard and thought he noticed someone running in the field toward the firehouse.
“You little bastard!” he hollered. “I told you not to touch my goddamn boat!” He took aim.
“Shit,” Red said in an exasperated whisper, realizing Mr. Taylor thought Billy was the one running away.
Red quickly pushed the wave at the barrel of the shotgun just as it went off. The shotgun somersaulted to the ground. Red froze, listening for any sign that Jennifer had been hit. Mr. Taylor stood in stunned silence, looking at his hands.
Sirens wailed to life in the distance. Red heard his mom’s footsteps rushing down the hall.
The lights from three police cruisers kept flashing through the upstairs windows in the front of the house. Ignoring his mom’s orders to stay in bed when she checked on him after she was awakened by the gunshot, Red eased across the hall into his brother’s room to peek out front. It seemed like the entire neighborhood was assembled at the edge of their driveway except for the neighbors who had congregated in Rick and Dana’s backyard for a better look.
Hearing the front door open and close, Red tried to move quickly and quietly back to his room. The combination wasn’t his strong suit and he knew it. Closing his bedroom door, he scrambled onto his bed and resumed looking out the window. The familiar sound of Scott bounding up the steps two at a time told Red that his brother was coming upstairs even before he saw their parents were still on the patio.
Scott swung the door open and said, “What’re ya doing?” in a hushed but urgent tone, trying to startle his brother.
Red managed not to spasm, though he felt his heart rate spike, despite anticipating his brother’s dramatic entrance. “You really want to startle me right now?” he asked.
“Good point,” Scott said, realizing an accidental push from the wave could send him through the hall. “So what the hell happened? Somebody said Mr. Taylor almost shot Billy and he hid under his boat.” As he spoke he looked out the window over Red’s shoulder.
“Comfy?” Red asked, looking back at him.
Scott had clearly noticed the boat on its side in the middle of Mr. Taylor’s yard. “What did you do?”
“Relax, Dad,” Red said sarcastically. “I had to do it. Billy was fighting with Jennifer and he was going to get shot by Mr. Taylor.”
His brother’s look told him much more explanation was needed.
“They were messing around by the boat. She told him to knock it off, and I even heard a couple slaps. Then Taylor came out and told him to get lost and leave her alone.”
“So?”
“They started yapping at each other, Jennifer actually tried to get Billy to leave, the old man kinda threatened him and went inside.” Red shrugged. “They always said he had a gun. I looked back to see if Mom and Dad were up. All of a sudden Jen screams. I look back outside and she’s fighting Billy off again.”
“And you pushed the boat on him.”
“Started with the cover, but I figured it wasn’t gonna hold him.”
Scott laughed a little. “What’re you, Super Crip? Saving the girl?”
“Shut up,” Red groaned. “I was helping Billy too. And the old man. He probably would have shot ’im and he’d be going to jail.”
“Super Crip saves the day,” Scott teased.
Red rolled his eyes.
“Well,” Scott said, changing his tone, “any problems?”
“Yeah,” Red said, looking back at his brother wide-eyed with a nod. “Mr. Taylor really does have a shotgun. He came out pointing it. Almost shot at Jennifer thinking it was Billy running away after messing with his boat. I knocked it out of his hands just as he fired.”
“I meant you, Einstein,” Scott said, his sarcastic tone returning. “Any fainting spells? I thought you weren’t going to do it anymore.”
“Oh,” Red said. “No, I was fine. I didn’t have a choice anyway. I couldn’t just let it happen. Besides, I never said I wasn’t going to use it.”
“Super Crip, spanning the backyard to protect the innocent against teenaged mischief,” Scott said in his best imitation of a movie announcer.
“Whatever,” Red said, shaking his head but still laughing.
They both went back to paying attention to the slowly calming scene outside the window. Billy sat on the edge of the boat with a police blanket draped over his shoulders. Red thought he looked even more bewildered than when the cops first discovered Billy under the boat. Mr. Taylor was in handcuffs talking to officers on his patio.
It wasn’t long before the boys’ parents came back inside. They mostly tried to get both Red and Scott to go to bed, but the brothers managed to pull a few details out of their parents. Police found fragments of the bullet Mr. Taylor had fired in the grass as if it had exploded when the gun went off. Damage to the end of the shotgun seemed to explain why it had shattered, but Mr. Taylor didn’t know when or how the barrel had become dented.
“Just as well his shotgun misfired,” Tim said. “It’s probably going to keep him out of jail tonight. He finally started saying he shot into the ground to scare the kids off after the guys coached him about five times on what to say.”
“What about Billy?” Scott asked.
His father shrugged. “Seems fine. Looked like a deer in headlights when they brought him out from under the boat. Claims somebody put the boat on top of him. Taylor can’t explain it either.” Tim looked at his youngest son. “You see anybody do it?”
Red shook his head. “I heard Jennifer with him before Mr. Taylor and him started yelling.”
“Well, thank God no one was hurt,” his mom said. Mary fixed Red’s covers and practically escorted Scott and her husband out of the room. “Now we all need to get some sleep.”
The three of them laughed, but no one put up a fight. After his mom turned out his light and closed the door behind her, Red finally felt some heaviness in his eyes.
Chapter 14
The nurse showed Red into the exam room to wait for the doctor. His mom walked in before he got himself onto the table using a step stool.
“They said it was okay to come back,” Mary asked as much as said.
“Oh, sure, honey,” the nurse said in her southern twang, cracking the chewing gum she’d been working on all morning. “He did just fine. The doctor should be right in. Can I get y’all anything?”
Red thought he could read his mom’s mind as she politely thanked the nurse, assuring her that they were fine. Sitting in a chair next to the exam table, Mary put the book she had brought with her to pass the time reading into her purse. Red watched as the nurse turned in her two-inch heels, which weren’t quite as tall as her hairdo that he assumed had been tamed from the type of beehive hairstyles he’d see in reruns of shows from the 1960s and ‘70s. The tight skirt barely touching her fifty-something thighs was almost as difficult to forget as the perfume that lingered after she left any room.
“Doesn’t exactly instill confidence, eh?” Red said, after the nurse closed the door behind her.
His mom swatted him on the leg and “Ssssh-ed” at him despite smiling. “At least you don’t have to sit in the waiting room for two hours,” she said. “Every move I make the chair creaks like it’s about to shatter. And the receptionist is about 102 and feels like she has to make conversation but can’t hear a thing you say. If she said, ‘What’s that?’ again I was gonna tell her to turn up her hearing aid.”
They both laughed, though they quickly tried to stifle it. “Yeah, this place doesn’t exactly scream ‘cutting-edge medicine,’” Red said, looking around the room. The walls were in desperate need of a paint job, and the charts of the human body and diagrams of various minor maladies like whiplash that hung on them seemed like they had been there for decades judging by the clothes and hairstyles of the people depicted. Even the empty bulletin board on the wall to Red’s right s
eemed old, with a couple large holes in the felt cover and badly frayed edges.
On their previous visit his mom guessed that the exam rooms had originally been the dining room, divided in two when part of the house was converted into a medical office. There was barely enough room for the door to open without it hitting his mom on the knees as she sat. Red suddenly wondered how someone who had to use a wheelchair ever got into the room. Or down the hallway, he thought. It was so narrow people had to walk single file. Thinking about it more, he wasn’t sure someone using a wheelchair could get in the front door. No way my power chair would make it.
“I’m just glad you weren’t moanin’ and groanin’ about coming here this morning,” Mary said. “You usually don’t like missing school.”
Red smiled, knowing that a few days earlier, he would have been less than thrilled at the thought of spending the day going to Dr. Scheinberg’s office for another treatment. The hour-plus drive to York started before the bus would normally pick him up for school, so he didn’t even get to enjoy sleeping in on a school day, and the next day he still had to go through the aggravation of catching up on what he missed in each class. Plus, he and his mom spent most of the time in the car driving to the doctor doing a poor job of not thinking about Red getting an experimental combination of drugs injected into his brain.
Red’s dad heard about Ferdinand Scheinberg from a customer back in June, but Mary had insisted on talking to their family doctor about the treatments before scheduling Red for the initial evaluation. Their physician was skeptical, but agreed to do some checking upon Mary’s request. After a few weeks, he reported back that Scheinberg was treating patients with an experimental drug known as RS3, which he had been able to learn was a mixture of brain-enhancing chemicals and steroids. He added that none of the drugs should have any harmful effects when used in typical ways and standard amounts. However, he stopped short of endorsing the treatments, which he said he didn’t know much about despite his best efforts to find information, and he made it clear that he had only heard of Scheinberg in passing. In the end, though, Red and his parents decided to move forward with the treatments.
In July, they made the trip to York for the evaluation, and, after they met with Scheinberg to discuss the treatment he was offering, Red’s first injection was finally set for August. On the morning of the appointment, Mary could tell Red was just going along with her efforts to downplay expectations. The possibility of seeing his cerebral palsy improve excited all of them, including his brothers, but his parents feared the disappointment Red would experience if the treatments didn’t work.
Knowing her son better than anyone on Earth, Mary was convinced that the lack of results so far coupled with missing a day of school, was going to make for a difficult morning. Instead, he was up before she went to wake him, and she didn’t have to hustle him along once.
A nervous energy woke him up an hour before he needed to start getting ready. Questions filled his head. What would the second shot bring? Would he be able to do more with the wave? Would he have other powers? Was it really a power? Would another shot reverse his new abilities? Should he tell the doctor what had really been going on the last few days? Should he tell his mom?
“So, how’d it go?” his mom asked.
Red shrugged. “Same as last time,” he said, holding the edge of the table with both hands and rocking his feet back and forth. He was happy to be almost done, but knew the shot still loomed. “Just a bunch of general questions, then the coordination tests.”
The testing routine was already becoming familiar now that he’d been through it three times. He took the same tests when he arrived with his parents for the initial evaluation and a meeting with the doctor to learn more about the treatments. When he came with his mom about a month later, the visit followed the same program with the added step of receiving his first treatment at the end of the appointment after meeting with Scheinberg in the exam room.
Almost immediately after arriving at the office, Red would be taken into a back room to do some cognitive tests administered by one of the nurses. The tests weren’t intended to be difficult—they included basic mathematics, reading comprehension, and questions involving general knowledge, such as the name of the current president. He figured they were just comparing the results to his initial testing to make sure the injection from the previous visit hadn’t missed the mark and done any damage.
The coordination drills that followed started out just as simple, but became progressively harder. After the first two appointments, Red had complained to his Mom about having to do the tests, calling them “stupid” and saying that he was being treated “like a child.” This time around he didn’t mind them as much. He could feel the wave begin to stir as he put together a child’s puzzle and played catch with the nurse with a beach ball while attempting, and mostly failing, to stand on one foot. In fact, he began trying to do the tests without the wave as much as possible, thinking that would be a truer test of whether or not his cerebral palsy was improving.
His mom got off the chair and sat beside him. “Do you . . .” she started to say, holding the u sound for a second, “think it was any easier?”
Again, he shrugged, but he was happy his mom had asked. “Not really,” he said. “But it’s kind of like I know something is going on.” The words were out of his mouth before he thought about what he was saying. He quickly tried to backtrack. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe I just want to think that.”
“No, no,” his mom said, not trying to hide her surprise, “that’s great. If you think it’s helping, that’s great. I was worried it wasn’t really helping.”
He felt he’d already said too much, but he couldn’t let her think the treatments might be improving his cerebral palsy. “Mom, I don’t think it’s helping the way we thought it would. I mean, I don’t feel like I’m more stable or like I have better control. It’s just . . . it’s like I have more strength or something.”
The look on her face told him she was about to ask more, but they heard the doorknob turn.
Dr. Scheinberg entered the room, looking down at a clipboard through half glasses perched on the edge of his nose. He flipped through a couple pages after closing the door behind him. Sitting on the examination table, Red could look down on the fading tan of his bald crown, which was surrounded by a surprising amount of curly, mostly gray hair. He shared a quick smile with his mom, the silence extending to an awkward length as it had on previous visits when Scheinberg first entered the room.
“So,” the doctor said, emphasizing the s and practically cutting off the oh, “how’s my best patient?” Only after he finished the greeting did he look up at Red. His smile, buried in wrinkles, seemed genuine enough.
“Pretty good,” Red offered nervously.
“Yah?” Scheinberg said, his best effort to emulate the casual version of “yes.”
After the initial evaluation, Red’s mom had suggested the doctor’s accent was German, though they’d never asked.
“Tests look good, everything good, from what I see,” Scheinberg said. “But you must tell me, yah? How do you feel?”
“Okay,” Red said. “I can’t say I feel any changes with my cerebral palsy or anything, but, you know, okay.”
The doctor nodded as he shined a little light that he retrieved from his pocket into Red’s eyes. “Yah? Good. Patience, huh? We get there. We get there.”
“You said you were feeling more strength though,” Mary interjected. “You mentioned it just before Dr. Scheinberg came in.”
A wry smile came across the doctor’s face as he noticed his patient’s eyes dart over at his mom. “Mother’s always a good source of information, yah?” he said. “Don’t be dismayed. Teenage boys might not like it when their moms share, but this is important to know.”