by Susan Perabo
“In the yard,” Laura said. She handed Sonny a plate of eggs which he looked at briefly and then set on the counter. “Don’t worry about them. Just some reporters. You don’t have to talk to them until you’re ready.”
But Sonny was already headed toward the front door. Apparently, Paul thought, his father had forgotten he was in his underwear. Or maybe he just didn’t care. He swung open the door, looked puzzled, then intrigued, then slightly pleased. People were shouting. The pop-ping of flashbulbs glimmered in his eyes.
“Mornin’,” Sonny said, then yawned widely and scratched his bare stomach through the gaping hole in his undershirt.
“Clothes!” Laura shouted at Paul. “Go!”
But Ben had already taken hold of Sonny’s shoulders and gently eased him back from the door. He kicked it closed and smiled at Sonny.
“I’m thinking you’re a little loopy there, old boy.”
“Maybe so,” Sonny answered airily. He considered something for a moment, then said: “What day is it?”
Ben laughed. “How’s your head? You wanna sit? Wanna go back to bed?”
“You want some breakfast?” Laura asked.
“Wanna watch TV?” Paul asked, and now it was his own voice that was nearly unrecognizable, embarrassingly squeaky. “We could watch a movie or something.”
Sonny touched the stitches on his forehead, swallowed with effort. “What’re they doing out there? What do they want?”
“They want you,” Ben said. He flipped a corner of the tear in Sonny’s undershirt. “Not exactly dressed for the occasion.”
“You’re a hero,” Paul said. “You’re all over the news. Everybody knows what you did.” Snap out of it, he wanted to add. Stop looking like you have the stomach flu. Stop looking like a retard. Stop looking like one-hundred-and-six-year-old Mr. O’Mally, who gets his picture in the paper every year on his birthday, every time with that same baffled expression on his face, gazing idiotically at his chocolate cake.
“What I did?” Sonny echoed, mystified. “What’d I do?”
Ben grinned, shook his head. “Just a little frontline surgery, buddy. Took off the kid’s foot and dragged him outa the house. That’s all. Coming back to you now?”
Sonny was silent. He rested his eyes momentarily, then opened them again with what looked to Paul like a hint of comprehension. “Where’s Ian?”
“Hospital,” Ben said. “In Hershey. But our little Nazi’s doing just fine. You saved his life, Sonny. That’s why all those folks want a piece of you.”
“Oh, stop it,” Laura said. She stepped forward and took hold of Sonny’s fingers, and he looked down at her hand as if it were a foreign object that might cause him harm. “Nobody’s getting a piece of you right now but me and Paul,” she said gently. “We’re going to have some quiet time, just the three of us, till you get yourself together. Then you can talk to them if you want.”
Sonny bit his lower lip until it turned white. “I wanna see Ian.”
“All right,” she said. “After you feel a little stronger.”
He shook his head angrily. “No. No. I want to see Ian now.” And then, to Paul’s utter disbelief, his father’s eyes bubbled over with tears and just like that he was crying — bawling, really — standing there in his underwear in the middle of the living room. His lips trembled uncontrollably and his knees gave way and then he was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking, sobbing in violent, ghastly spasms. Paul had seen his father cry only once, a couple years before when their dog Ginger was put to sleep, and then it was just sniffles and little tears in the corners of his eyes as they left the vet’s office. It was nothing like this, and all he could do was stand there and stare at this thing on the floor, his mouth agape.
“Oh, Sonny . . .” Laura dropped to her knees, wrapped her arms around his head and held him tightly to her chest. “Everything’s okay. We’ll go see Ian right now, if that’s what you want. Whatever you want, honey, that’s what we’ll do.”
He didn’t respond, and she looked up at Paul and Ben uneasily. Now she was shaking too, and starting to cry a tiny bit herself in a bewildered sort of way. Paul felt the lump of tears in his own throat; suddenly the day didn’t seem so thrilling anymore.
“Honey, oh, honey . . .” his mother said softly, rocking his father back and forth as if he’d just tumbled off his tricycle. “Honey, it’s okay. You’re all right, you’re okay . . .”
Paul felt Ben’s thick fingers circle his bicep, a gentle tug and then a more urgent one. He allowed himself to be steered out of the living room and led down the hall to his bedroom. Ben quietly closed the door, then slumped back against it, let out a long sigh.
“I’m thinking they need some alone time,” Ben said softly. “Why don’t you and me just hang out here for a few?”
Paul sat down on his bed. His palms were pooled with sweat, and he rubbed them hard against the quilt beside his thighs. “What’s wrong with him? Is he sick or something?”
Ben sat down on the floor in the middle of the room, picked up Paul’s guitar and absently plucked a few strings. “He ain’t sick,” he said. “Your dad’s been through a lot, sport. Had a big scare down there, and this happens to guys sometimes. Even to brave guys like Sonny. It’s happened to me a time or two, I can tell you that.”
“He’s crying bad,” Paul said. Like a baby, he wanted to add, but he decided it was too cruel to say. He picked at a hangnail on his pinkie, worrying and peeling until dots of blood appeared along the soft flesh of his fingertip. What did he know of what his father was feeling? Who was he to judge? “He’s never been like that before,” he finally added. “All . . . crazy and stuff.”
Ben nodded thoughtfully. “Hard to see your old man shook up, huh? I tell you what . . . you’ll never forget it.” He set the guitar across his lap and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “I remember my dad — he was a cop, you know — he came home one day and went out to the backyard and sat down at our picnic table and started crying like a baby. My mom wasn’t home and I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I just kept going out there with stuff and giving it to him. I took him his Winstons and a can of pop and a box of crackers and some baseball cards and a couple toy trucks until finally there’s this whole circle of stuff on the table meant to cheer him up and he’s still sitting there bawling like the world’s coming to an end.”
“What was wrong with him?”
Ben shook his head. “Who knows? After a while I come out with my Duncan yo-yo and he’s sitting there right as rain eating the Triscuits like nothing ever happened. It just happens to guys sometimes, a little crack in the old foundation.”
Okay, Paul thought. It made sense, didn’t it? Just a crack in the old foundation, like when he’d peed in his bed. He was pretty much fine after that, right? A little crack, but it wasn’t like he was broken forever. He looked up at Ben. “So you think he’ll be okay? Really?”
“Really,” Ben said.
The Wickeds were up against the wall, again; in this month’s installment, bounty hunter Roy Wicked had to transport the decapitated head of a vampire halfway across the country, to the Creek of Eternity in rural Kentucky, before the head woke up and realized what was happening. Paul’s eyes scanned quickly from frame to frame; he always had to keep one hand covering the next page to prevent himself from skimming ahead. He could lose himself completely in The Wickeds, which was especially important on this afternoon. The adventures of Roy Wicked were more familiar, more comforting, than the state of his father.
Ben had taken him to Dewey’s, bought him a couple Butterfingers and half a dozen comic books, which Paul devoured in his room while his father began the process of sealing the crack in the old foundation. From what Paul could tell, this process included a full hour to shower and another hour to dress. It was mid-afternoon before they were on the road to Hershey. The trees that lined the highway were dark orange and brown; the brilliant peak of reds and yellows had p
assed the week before, and only the remnants of color remained. Sonny, clean but quiet, carefully traced the scratches on his hands and wrists, as if following a line on a map from home to someplace he’d never been. Laura drove, filled the silence with small talk and innocuous questions that Sonny responded to with a shake or nod of the head. Finally, desperate for something that resembled actual conversation, she persuaded Paul to tell her the whole plot of The Wickeds’ most recent issue, then spent the remainder of the trip explaining to him why none of it made any sense.
“Why doesn’t he just put the head in a bag and take a plane?” she asked. “Why does he have to hitchhike?”
“It’s a story, Mom,” Paul groaned. “Just a story.”
Sonny’s cuts and bruises had been treated at Casey Hospital, which really wasn’t so much a hospital as a twenty-four-hour clinic. It was fine for a broken nose, a gash on the head, minor burns, a shoulder popped from the socket. But if you really needed a hospital — if you had a nameable disease, or needed heart surgery, or your foot had been hacked off with a pry ax — you made the hour drive (or in Ian’s case, the twenty-minute airlift) to Hershey Medical Center.
The lobby at HMC was crowded with reporters, but Sonny plowed a path through the middle of the melee and the three of them silently rode the elevator up to ICU, which was closed to all media. Paul thought his father’s skin looked yellow — not happy yellow like sunshine and bananas, but ugly yellow like piss or homemade applesauce — in the bright hall as he made his way to Ian’s room, a full stride ahead of Paul and Laura. Without a word or look back to them he pushed open the door of the ICU unit and disappeared.
“Well, then,” Laura said. “I guess that’s that.”
What had she expected? Paul thought. That they would all go in and say hello to Ian, stand around the bed cooing and tending like family? He hated Ian Finch, hated him as much as it was possible to hate someone who had no face and no voice, only a name and a bewildering effect on his father. Paul leaned against the wall and listened to the squeak of the wheels of the medication cart as it made its rounds from room to room. He had been here only once before, in second grade, to visit a classmate who’d been shot in the shoulder while deer hunting with his grandfather. The whole class had come by bus to visit. They sang “Waltzing Matilda” to the wounded boy, then took turns fooling with the bed controls.
His mother was sitting on the floor with her legs tucked under her, reading the hospital newsletter without a shred of interest. About every ninety seconds she looked at her watch. Once she even tapped it and held it to her ear. Finally, after more than a half hour had passed, she folded the newsletter and put it in her purse, stood up.
“You hungry?”
“Nah,” he said.
“How about a Coke? You want a Coke? Let’s have a Coke.”
They left word with a nurse that they’d be in the snack bar. The snack bar was small and crowded, smelled of glazed doughnuts, strong coffee, and lemon Lysol. No sooner had they sat down with their drinks at the only available table when a half-dozen reporters circled them.
“Where’s Sonny?”
It was a motley crew: familiar Ed Baines from The Casey Weekly, the tiny woman from the Harrisburg station, a fat man with dark ovals of sweat under his arms, three other eager faces, pens poised.
“He’s with the Finch boy,” Laura said.
“What’re they talking about?” This from Ed Baines, the only truly local newsman. Thirty years putting out a paper that consisted mostly of wedding announcements, high school sports scores, and farm show results. Now, Paul thought, for the first time in ages he was getting a story people would actually read.
Laura set down her Coke. “I wouldn’t know,” she said deliberately. “Since I’m sitting here.”
“Hey, Paul,” the sweaty man said. It was strange that someone he didn’t know knew his name, and he felt a surge of significance. “How’s it feel to have a hero for a dad?”
Paul shrugged. “Feels good, I guess.”
“Were you scared when he was trapped down there?”
Again he shrugged. He wished he could say something smart, something clever, but nothing leapt to mind. “Not really. I knew he’d be okay.”
He looked at his mother and she smiled at him gently. “Give us some space,” she said, not even looking up. “Okay?”
They wandered off, in search of Sonny, Paul supposed. Laura reached forward and rubbed something off his chin with her thumb.
“You did well,” she said.
He shrugged, sucked down the last of his Coke, stifled a small burp. “Is Dad okay?”
“He will be,” she said. “He’s just a little frazzled right now. I think maybe talking to Ian will make him feel better.”
Ian, Paul thought. Ian, Ian, Ian. Just thinking the name produced an unpleasant taste, jammed somewhere up in his sinuses. Why would talking to a loser like Ian Finch make his father feel better? Paul scratched grooves in his Styrofoam cup, fighting twinges of jealousy.
“Think Ian Finch is really a Nazi?” he asked.
Laura shook her head. “I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Think they were really gonna blow up the high school?”
“Paul,” she said sternly. “No one is going to blow up the high school. Not Ian Finch, and not any of his goner friends. I don’t want you worrying about things like that.”
Paul glanced around the snack bar. The reporters had disappeared, but most of the tables were occupied. A stooped old man nibbled at some french fries. A nurse was writing on a paper napkin. Two young girls were coloring a place mat with bright crayons while their mother stared out the window, holding a coffee cup against her cheek as if she were cold, or had a toothache. Paul turned back to his mother.
“What do you think they’re talking about up there?”
Laura set down her cup and pursed her lips. “You’re as bad as those reporters,” she said. “How would I know what they’re talking about? It’s between them, right?”
Paul fell silent again, watched the two little girls draw purple faces with jump-rope smiles and circle eyes. Were they waiting for their father too? Was he sick, injured, in surgery? Was he dead already?
“What’s taking so —” Paul started.
“Let’s go, then,” Laura interrupted, snatching her purse. “We should be upstairs when he’s ready to leave. We can warn him that the vultures are circling.”
But they were too late. When they turned the corner to the elevators, Sonny was standing in the middle of the hallway surrounded by two dozen reporters and photographers. Paul experienced a moment of mortified panic, horrified by the thought that his father might start bawling again, this time in front of the whole world. But when he craned his neck to see over the reporters it was clear to him that his real father had returned, had replaced the frightened, dazed man who had woken up in their house just hours before. His shoulders were square, his chest full, his smile broad.
“I had a hell of a sleep, I’ll tell you that,” he was saying. “Probably best night’s sleep I’ve had in my life.”
“How’s Ian doing?”
“Ian’s all right,” Sonny said. Then he lowered his voice. “He’s lost a foot of course, and that’s a trauma, a sad thing for anybody and certainly for a young man. But otherwise his health is good, and his spirits are high.”
“How’s it feel to be a hero, Sonny?” Ed Baines shouted gleefully.
Sonny considered. He brushed a wayward blond hair from his forehead, wiped a phantom spot of saliva from the corner of his mouth. “There are lots of heroes today,” he finally said. “Ian’s one of ’em — he never gave up, not for one minute. And there’re about a hundred firemen and police officers who deserve your thanks as well. We were all doing our jobs; I just happened to be the guy little enough to squeeze through that hole.”
Now he looked over their heads, caught sight of Laura and Paul. “And now I think it’s time for me to go home with my family. I’ve got two d
ays’ worth of eating to do.”
For the return trip, it was Sonny who drove. He rolled down the windows, turned up the radio, and pushed eighty on the turnpike. Paul sat in the backseat feeling his breathing return to normal, maybe, he realized, for the first time in forty-eight hours. He’d almost forgotten what it was to breathe, to really breathe, to have breath rise without thought or concern.
“Slow down, sweetie,” Laura said as they zipped past an eighteen-wheeler, but she was smiling when she said it. She had let her hair down and it whipped in the wind. One hand rested on Sonny’s knee; the other gripped the passenger-side door.
“No time, no time!” Sonny shouted against the howl of the wind. “Who wants to slow down? Paul? You wanna slow down?”
“No!” Paul shouted.
They went home — home, it really was, now, still, again — and took the phone off the hook, gobbled up a pot roast one of the neighbors had dropped off. After dark, in front of the TV, Paul looked up from his spot on the floor and saw his parents wrapped together on the couch, sleepy and comforted. Only then did he allow himself to close his eyes.
Sonny was scheduled to be interviewed on Good Morning America the following morning. The crew — two cameramen and a young reporter — arrived at the house at six a.m. to set up their makeshift studio in the living room. By seven, nearly every resident of Willow Lane was gathered on the Tucker lawn, some in their bathrobes and slippers, battling the shrubbery and each other to get a good peek through the front windows. They were making such a racket that one of the cameramen finally had to go out and tell them to settle down.
Paul was astonished by the difference a day had made in his father. It was as if after beginning the day before about three full notches below his normal self (the crying, the dead eyes, the twitchy lips) he had at some point rocketed blindly past this normal self and was now three full notches above it. He was practically dancing around the living room prior to the live telecast, so light on his feet as he flitted from person to person that Paul doubted he’d be able to sit still on the couch for four seconds, much less for the four minutes they’d allotted his segment.