The Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

  He had half a mind to tell her about the things he had heard, but decided this wasn’t really the appropriate time. Instead, suddenly dumb with fatigue, he leaned into her, allowed his head to rest against her arm, listened to her breathe. For a while, his eyes were closed. He didn’t sleep, not exactly, but he came close enough to sleep that he could almost forget where he was, briefly convince himself that the whole night might be a dream, that the belly of the ambulance was really the belly of his bed, that any minute now his mother would nudge him awake and it would be another Monday like any other. But not like any other, not really, because he would remember this dream and when they sat down to cornflakes in the kitchen he might say something to his father — hey, Dad, try to not get killed today, okay? — to let him know it mattered, mattered a lot, to have him around.

  It was a little after four A.M. when a chorus of shouts came from the rescue workers. Paul lunged to his feet, still half dreaming, took one step and tripped over the stretcher and toppled to his knees. His mother was climbing out of the ambulance without looking back; he heard her feet smack on the wet grass and he crawled frantically after her, certain in his stupor that his father’s body was at this moment being dragged from the rubble, torn and lifeless, and goddammit if he was going to let his mother have this to herself, protect him from this moment that was as much his as it was hers.

  The rain had slowed to a light drizzle. About two hundred people, apparently also roused by the shouting, were stretching the yellow tape taut, craning their necks, jostling their neighbors aside for a better view. All the rescue workers were running around to the west side of the house, away from the hole they’d been digging in the rubble.

  “Over here!” a voice shouted. A fireman, his face obscured in darkness, was waving his arms wildly.

  Paul stumbled after his mother, his heart thudding madly.

  “Here! They’re here!”

  A floodlight trembled, swung, steadied. Then, slowly, a shadow unfurled across the wide lawn.

  Chapter Three Eighty-five trillion feet above Paul’s thudding heart, a satellite spun slowly, gathering and unscrambling images and returning them to earth. Face waxen in the glare of the TV lights, arms and chest covered in blood and grime, the unscrambled Sonny Tucker appeared more dead than alive, more ghost than man, to the hundreds of thousands who sat transfixed in the glow of television screens. Thanks to the miracles of twenty-four-hour live news and a sleepless and bored nation, men and women in living rooms across the country had watched the dramatic rescue of young Ian Finch unfold through the night and into the early morning. Hearts across America wrenched at the sight of wrinkled photos from The Casey Weekly archives: Sonny as a young boy suiting up alongside Captain Sam at the station house, Sonny as a teenager sitting in the driver’s seat of Engine 14. And who could blame them for watching, for wrenching, for briefly setting aside their own stories for another story, a fairer story, a braver story, decidedly a better story? There on that box in front of the couch, playing out before them, were all the elements of legend and distraction — a dire situation, a courageous man, a helpless victim, a frightened wife, a loyal friend, an innocent child — a story both familiar and affirming in days when so little else is, constructed from the very myths we most long to believe. Viewers listened, enchanted, as the mayor of Casey (who owned the sporting goods store as his real job, and loved nothing more than the chance to act like a mayor) relayed with heavy heart and heavy voice the saga of the brave Tucker men. Townspeople Sonny hardly knew had taken their turns before the cameras during those tense hours of waiting, some with tears streaming down their cheeks, the crumbled house over their shoulders a testament to certain tragedy. They spoke of Sonny as if he were already dead, already ascended to the right hand of his father. And yes, of course, there was the matter of Ian Finch, the poor boy trapped inside. But information on Ian was scant, vague; much to the frustration of the various media, his only mention in the Casey High yearbook was on the brief “not pictured” list following the sophomore class photos. When asked about him, citizens of Casey narrowed their eyes and shook their heads. So the focus, nearly all the attention, swerved toward this Sonny (Sonny! a man named Sonny!), who by all accounts had the makings of a star. By the time Monday afternoon papers hit the stands, he was no longer merely Sonny Tucker the fireman; he was Sonny Tucker the hero.

  Standing beside his mother’s car outside the front entrance of Casey Hospital, Paul was dazed from lack of sleep, bewildered by the brief slip of time between devastation and relief. Once again fortune had smiled on his father; he had risen from the dead, emerged from the Neidermeyer tomb shrouded in a legend even Captain Sam had never known the likes of. Paul half expected his father to be actually glowing when he passed through the sliding doors of the hospital and into the throng of reporters and well-wishers that awaited him on the sidewalks outside. But instead — when the doors moved aside to reveal the hero — the hero tucked his chin to his chest and bolted for the open door of the Honda, ducked and dodged the chattering crowd as if he were a felon being transferred from one prison to another. He hardly spoke on the short ride home, stared out the rain-streaked window at the passing town as if he had never seen it before, absently fingering the fresh stitches that zigzagged above his left eye. He’s tired, Paul thought. But couldn’t he at least look a little satisfied? Every minute or two Laura would pat his thigh and say “You okay?” and Sonny would seem startled at the interruption of his thoughts, then gulp, blink, and nod. When they got to the house he staggered into the bedroom without a word.

  “Is he all right?” Paul asked his mother.

  “Pretty banged up,” she said. “But nothing broken. I told —”

  She stopped herself, but he could see it on her lips, see her nearly speak the words she knew by heart: I told you everything was going to be fine. She was a wonder, he thought, and in the vulnerability of his exhaustion he suddenly disliked her intensely. It was a shocking and unpleasant feeling, made all the more unpleasant by the fact that it didn’t immediately disappear, but instead soured like an aftertaste on his tongue. It was as if the night had never happened, as if she had never pronounced him dead, sitting there in the rain with her arrogant certainty. Had she really forgotten?

  She took a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator and poured a glass. “Take this to him,” she said. “Talk with him for a few minutes before he sleeps. It’ll make him feel better.”

  He took the glass without a word and started down the hall. He was exhausted; his knees wobbled as he walked. But he would say something great to his father, something tender but funny. Maybe they would talk for a while and then he would casually stretch out in his mother’s spot and they would sleep through the day side by side so that when he woke with a start, thinking he was still in the belly of the ambulance, he would feel his father breathing beside him and know at once that everything was okay.

  At the open door of their bedroom Paul stopped cold, his breath caught at the edge of his throat. His father was curled on top of the yellow bedspread, buck naked, his pale skin purpled with deep bruises.

  “Dad?”

  Paul took a few tentative steps toward the bed. His father’s hands were swollen pink and balled into fists against his closed eyes. His elbows and his knees touched; his feet were linked at the ankles. His mother had once shown Paul a foggy ultrasound image of him in her womb; but for his hair, his father bore all the marks of a fetus, something newer and nakeder than Paul had ever seen. He quietly set the glass on the bedside table, then unfurled the afghan that lay at the end of the bed and draped it carefully over his father.

  “Sleep good,” he whispered.

  Then he turned out the light and left.

  Lying in bed, the house quiet, the shades pulled to block the noonday sun, Paul waited to fall asleep. He’d been awake for over thirty hours; his eyes were dry and itchy, his hands so clumsy with exhaustion he’d barely been able to brush his teeth. His father was dead to the world, and
now his mother too; she’d fed the dogs, taken the phone off the hook, then flopped on the couch and passed out with her shoes still on.

  But every time Paul closed his eyes he was bombarded with flickering images of the day and night before — nothing he could actually fix on, just blurred pictures with backward colors (green sky, blue grass, black house) and morphing faces: his father, his mother, Ben, Phil, the penciled face of Ian Finch. It made him seasick, the constant movement, and again and again he was forced to open his eyes just to keep himself from throwing up.

  Finally he gave in. He opened the shades, sat on the floor and picked quietly at his guitar. He had bought the guitar the summer before at the church rummage sale for six dollars. He’d clearly overpaid; the guitar’s neck was broken, and thus the instrument had remained intact only by the good graces of three weathered strings. But his father had helped him superglue it back together, and they’d replaced all the strings, so it was fit enough for Paul since he couldn’t really play anyway. He’d wanted the guitar because Black Phil had once told him that, every six months or so, Captain Sam would borrow somebody’s guitar at a picnic or a party and just start playing. Nobody knew how he did it. Nobody ever heard him practice. He’d just pick the thing up and somebody would name a song and Captain Sam would play it. Didn’t matter what it was, didn’t matter if it was a year old or a hundred years old. It had sounded like a lie to Paul, a big fat firehouse lie, but his father had confirmed it. Of course it’s true, his father had said with a shrug. The old man could do it all.

  • • •

  That night, the night they found Sam dead in the bedroom closet on Dogwood Avenue, the town went mad. Grown men wept and drank all night and into the next day; stores closed; people spoke in whispers. Sonny had rushed home from State College, having every intention of returning to school once his father’s affairs were in order. But — as the story went — the moment Sonny walked into the station, felt simultaneously the stunning absence of his father and the breathtaking sensation of home, he knew that he would never again leave that place, not for a job, not for a woman, not for anything. The choice, it seemed, had been made for him, all other options slammed shut in an instant like wind-blown doors. With no captain to order him otherwise, he left Casey for the final time — to Pittsburgh, for twelve weeks of training at the fire academy. It’s in his blood, people in Casey said. It’s fate. It’s meant to be.

  Laura disagreed. For one month, they ran up an enormous phone bill with nothing but arguments. Paul imagined his father’s words: I have to do this. It’s who I am. And then his mother, enraged: It’s not “who you are” . . . no one single thing can be “who you are.”

  Finally, resigned to their separate ways, they broke up. Following her graduation she got that job in Philadelphia, the one she had planned on, and went about saving the disadvantaged youth of America one algebra problem at a time. And then (it was she herself who’d told this part of the story, to a roomful of people on their tenth anniversary, after she’d had several glasses of champagne) on a sticky morning in mid-June, the school year over and an empty summer stretched out before her like a drained lake bed, she woke with the absolute certainty that perhaps comes only once in a lifetime, the utter, untarnished certainty that she had made a terrible mistake. In an hour her car was packed and she was on the road to Casey. She had not spoken to Sonny in over a year; for all she knew he was married, or dead. But she was young; life was ripe and beckoning and she was out of her mind, totally unlike herself. Paul liked to imagine her blasting down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a beautiful young girl with the face of his mother, the radio blaring, her hair wild in the wind. When she reached town four hours later she stopped the first person she saw and demanded directions to the fire department. When she arrived Sonny was in the driveway of the station, standing on the roof of the engine, spraying it with a heavy stream of water. He looked down at her dubiously, thinking that — surely — there was a reasonable explanation for her presence, that — surely, surely — she was not here . . . for him?

  “Hey,” she said, squinting into the sun above him.

  “Hey,” he said, gazing down.

  Tumbling to the pavement, he lost his grip on the hose; it spun and flipped and sprayed water over both of them, but they hardly noticed.

  “Lieutenant Tucker has definitely left the building,” Ben whispered, returning to the kitchen after a quick peek into the master bedroom.

  It had been almost twenty-four hours since they’d arrived home, and Sonny had yet to stir from his curl under the afghan. It was Tuesday, mid-morning; Ben had come to the house hoping for breakfast and found himself smack in the middle of the circus that was taking over Willow Lane. It had taken him fifteen minutes to get the thirty feet from his pickup truck to the front door of the house. News vans lined the block, and the front lawn was crawling with reporters desperate to get word from someone — anyone — with the current status of Sonny Tucker. They had already exhausted the neighbors’ limited knowledge, and were anxious for firsthand information.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” Laura said. “I didn’t think it was even possible to sleep so long.” She had been scrambling eggs for almost an hour, nonstop. What Ben and Paul were unable to eat was heaped on a white china platter beside the stove, turning dark and rubbery. But she kept at it, as if Sonny’s return to the world depended on how many plates of eggs awaited him.

  Ben gulped from his coffee mug. “He was up for near two days, Laura. He’s pooped.”

  She dismissed this with a wave of her spatula. “He’s been up for two days before. He’s never —”

  “He’s never spent six hours underground,” Ben interrupted. “Never hacked off a kid’s foot before, right?”

  Paul shuddered at this thought, set down his fork. He hadn’t seen Ian Finch as he was carried across the Neidermeyer lawn, surrounded as he was by the paramedics, but he’d caught a brief glimpse of the trail of dark blood left between the house and the ambulance. Word had spread in seconds — foot was pinned . . . he had to amputate — and although no one had yet gotten the full story from either Sonny or Ian the scenario seemed clear: Sonny had lost the inflatable in the collapse, Ian had been near death, Sonny had been forced to use his ax to remove Ian’s foot so he could drag him to safety in time to save his life. Paul thought of his father’s fingers wrapped around the ax handle, the blade against flesh and bone, what it must have felt like, for both of them.

  “He was so weird yesterday morning,” Laura said. “You should have seen the face he had on. It was like he didn’t know who we were.”

  “Hell of an ordeal,” Ben said. He shook some salt onto his eggs. “I’m thinking he’s probably a little freaked out. Shit, I’m a little freaked out. Aren’t you?”

  “Sonny doesn’t get freaked out,” Laura said. “He’ll be fine. By tomorrow he’ll be back to his old self.”

  The clamor of voices from the front yard made it difficult for Paul to believe that any of them would be back to their old selves, not tomorrow and not ever, and sitting there at the kitchen table he found himself vaguely exhilarated by this thought. In fact, everything about that morning — the fact that he wasn’t at school, the buzz on the lawn, the phone off the hook, Ben at the table, even the heap of cold eggs on the counter — was nearly thrilling in its novelty. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, the principal of Casey Elementary had declared to a stage full of students at Paul’s fifth-grade graduation, and Paul had spotted his parents in the audience, rolling their eyes at this simplistic sentiment. But today, for the first time ever, it seemed to almost make sense.

  “Were they really making bombs?” Paul asked. “In the basement?”

  “They were too stupid to make bombs,” Ben said sourly. “We found some small explosives, crap left over from the Fourth, bunch of M-80’s all wired together in some half-assed way.”

  “Casey terrorists,” Laura said with a smirk, cracking an egg expertly on the side of the skillet. “
Their weapon of mass destruction . . . firecrackers.”

  Ben shook his head. “Listen, they’d a done some damage at the high school with that shit. Just because they’re stupid doesn’t mean they’re harmless. More power in half-assed than you might think.”

  “How’d they blow up?” Paul asked.

  Ben shrugged. “Who knows? I’m thinking Finch or one of the other idiots left a cigarette smoldering, set it off, blew out one of the supports. House was pretty shaky anyway. Wouldn’t of —”

  Sonny shuffled into the kitchen. He was wearing boxer shorts and a ripped undershirt and his face looked like it had been crushed by a steamroller. He shuffled to the refrigerator and opened it, then stood there staring at its contents for several seconds, apparently oblivious to anyone else in the room.

  “Good sleep?” Ben asked cheerfully.

  Sonny looked at him blankly, then at Laura, then at Paul. Paul smiled, briefly considered introducing himself to break the ice, break his father’s dead gaze into a grin.

  “What day is it?” A low rumble, hardly a voice.

  “Tuesday,” Laura said. “You slept through Monday.”

  He took the plastic jug of orange juice from the refrigerator, slowly unscrewed the cap, took one sip, frowned, slowly rescrewed the cap, then replaced the jug on the shelf.

  “Want some breakfast, honey? I’ve got eggs here, if you want them.”

  “Good eats,” Ben said, slapping his stomach. “Bet you got some appetite, huh?”

  Sonny shook his head slowly. “Not really. Not so much.” His voice was flat and distant, as if he were mumbling in his sleep; he appeared slightly perplexed by his own words.

  “You’re famous,” Paul said suddenly, hoping this would startle him back into himself. “There’re a whole bunch of people outside who want to talk to you.”

  Sonny looked at him, cocked his head to the side. Had this been a comic strip, Paul thought, the phrase does not compute would surely have appeared in a bubble over his father’s head. “Outside? Outside where?”