“I don’t know.”
“Bee?”
“Hurry,” I said.
“You have so much to answer for,” she said, but I heard her pulling things together into a bag. “I’ve been beside myself.”
“He’s hurt, Mom.”
“Is there a doctor there? I need to speak to whoever is in charge.”
“We’re in the waiting room. No one’s here right now. No one to talk to, I mean.”
“I will be there as fast as humanly possible. Can I reach you at this number?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You answer the darn phone if I call, do you hear me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Bee, didn’t I tell you he isn’t strong enough for this kind of thing?”
“You don’t even know what kind of thing it was,” I said. “Mom, just get here.”
She didn’t say anything. I heard her doing something that made her bracelets clink. Her breathing went away from the speaker, then returned a second later.
“I’m packed. I’m checking out and coming down there. Do not move. Stay right where you are.”
“We will,” I said.
“Tell him I love him.”
“I haven’t seen him yet.”
“Are you saying he’s dead, Bee?”
Her voice went up and teetered somewhere.
“I don’t know. He wasn’t breathing.”
“Oh, Lord. Not Tommy,” she said.
“Hurry.”
“You call me instantly if you hear anything,” she said.
“I will.”
I heard a door close. Then she started walking. I heard her heels.
“This is really irresponsible behavior on your part. Inexcusable.”
“I agree,” I said. “I hate myself right now.”
“You should not encourage him.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“He looks up to you.”
“Hurry.”
“Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Just hold on.”
She didn’t hang up, though. She didn’t talk, either. I listened to her go to the front desk, throw her key card into someone’s hand, explain in a single statement she was checking out, then continue on, her heels like hammer blows across the tile floor. I heard the bag on wheels she pulled behind her, then heard it change pitch as she made it onto the cement walkway outside. Maybe then the phone did something to draw her attention, because she clicked off.
“Did you really see a shark?” Little Brew whispered to me.
We were sitting in the waiting room. I wore a towel around my waist and a T-shirt on top, and Little Brew wore his baggy shorts and nothing else. None of us had changed because we expected to hear something about Tommy any second. The air-conditioning felt cold. Ty had gone out to park the van in a different place. He thought he would get a ticket if he left it where he had first parked it. A coffee machine sat on top of a small refrigerator, which hummed and bumped now and then. It felt as though the day had gone to stay somewhere else and we were left to wait for it.
I nodded about the shark.
“What a freaky day,” Little Brew said, shaking his head. “A crazy day.”
“It was dark, not white. People say they’re white sharks, but they aren’t. They’re dark on top. Tommy said they suntan.”
“I never knew that,” Little Brew said.
“Tommy knows everything about sharks,” I said.
Little Brew nodded. Something inside told me I should keep talking about sharks. If I did, somehow their power would pass along to Tommy.
Ty came back a few minutes later. He had moved the van, which he told us about in more detail than we needed, simply to keep the silence from closing in on us. Little Brew said I was serious about seeing a shark, and Ty nodded. He sat down and tapped his feet a little. A line of sand had collected in the hairs along his calves. More crystals of sand or salt ran under his right eye.
“Ollie reported your sighting,” Little Brew said, his skin raised in gooseflesh. “Some of the other guys ignored the warning, but that was just a macho thing. Ollie told people on the beach, too.”
“Good,” I said.
“They’ll probably clear people out and send a chopper over,” Little Brew went on. “Some folks on the beach thought the whole thing with Tommy was a shark attack. They got it mixed up.”
“Okay,” Ty said, which was his way of telling Little Brew to be quiet.
We sat for a while. No one spoke. A boy with a round belly and a cast on his leg limped past and pushed through a double door. A nurse came by carrying a tray with a handkerchief over it. No one was supposed to see what was under the handkerchief. Somewhere deeper in the building a drill ran for a minute or so, the sound going high like a dentist finding a cavity. When the sound cut off, a dog began barking out in the parking lot. The drill sound kept jumping around and ricocheting in my skull even after it had shut off.
I stood. I walked to the double doors. It had been too long. I pushed through the doors and walked straight ahead. I wasn’t sure where to go. I passed a nurses’ station and kept going. Someone moaned in one of the rooms. A spine of fluorescent lights hung overhead.
“Miss?” a female voice said, but I kept going.
I had to keep walking. If I didn’t keep walking I would crumple. Tommy was somewhere in the hospital wing and I had to find him. An orderly pushing a large machine came at me from the other direction. We nodded at each other. And the woman who had called Miss called it again. This time I heard quick footsteps follow the word. But I had found Tommy’s room. I knew Tommy was inside because the orange life jacket lay on a wheeled tray outside the door. The straps had been cut. The jacket was opened like a trout filleted and spread on an iron skillet.
The sight of the life vest stopped me. I didn’t dare move forward or look away. Suddenly the woman who had said Miss grabbed my elbow. When I turned, I saw a large woman with too much makeup and hair the color of rusted oil barrels.
“You can’t be in this area, sweetie,” she said.
“My brother’s in there,” I said. “In that room.”
“We’re doing everything we can,” she said, squeezing my elbow a little to get me going.
But I snapped away and took the few steps I needed to look into Tommy’s room. I spotted him almost at once, his face framed by the shoulders of three or four doctors squaring around the bed. They had strapped something into his mouth and the sheets had been pulled up to his chin. Before I could do anything, I heard my mother call to me.
“Bee?” she said.
She came down the hall quickly, her heels whacking the tile. I turned and fell into her, sobs coming from deeper than anyplace I knew about. She put her arms around me and held me. The boy with the cast limped by but didn’t look. He kept his eyes forward and concentrated on walking.
The changing light in the waiting room, shadows tracking the hours across the floor. Venetian blinds, dusty gray-green, moving slightly in the breeze from the air conditioner. Two slats crooked. The television off and silent. Mom and the boys, her annoyance palpable. Her greeting and awareness of them short and curt, her deep, final sigh, whispering What were you all thinking? Time passing. The swinging doors popping open, drawing our looks, then swinging closed with someone new on the other side. A nurse, a patient, not Tommy. A buzz from a fluorescent lamp. The scent of coffee and sugar. The short, tight click of an electric clock against the wall and a fly, leisurely ticking along the windowpane.
Finally, a voice confirming our name, asking my mom and me to follow. Ty onto his feet. Little Brew squeezing my hand and nodding encouragement as I left him. A nurse walking on white shoes, a colorful smock, a blood-pressure gauge tucked in her hip pocket. The squeak of her sneaker tread when she rounds the corner almost athletic, almost winter nights in a gym with snow falling outside and girls yelling and screaming with their pom-poms. Almost that.
Dr. Shemp was tall and thin and tilted his head when he talked
, as if his thoughts rose from his shoulder and he sucked them in and gargled them out again. He held a BlackBerry in his right hand and a clipboard tucked under his armpit. His office had old leather chairs that made saddle sounds whenever you switched your legs or changed positions. A fish tank, quiet and comforting, bubbled behind him.
“He’s in rough shape,” Dr. Shemp said, pushing back in his chair and putting the BlackBerry on his desk as we came in. He gestured for us to sit down. “But at this point we expect him to make it. He swallowed a lot of water and it becomes complicated with his condition. But unless he experiences a reversal of some sort, he should be fine in a few days.”
“Can we see him?” I asked.
Dr. Shemp pursed his lips as if he had never been asked such a question.
“Not yet. Let him rest and we’ll see how he looks in the morning. He’s had a close call, you understand. He should never be allowed to attempt something like that again.”
He glanced at me. Then he nodded in understanding with my mother.
“Is that it, then?” Mom asked.
“More or less,” Dr. Shemp said. “Given his cystic fibrosis, he’s a lucky boy. That’s rough water out there. I don’t think he’ll suffer any long-term effects, but you can never be sure. You’re from New Hampshire, correct?”
“Yes,” Mom said.
“He’ll have to fly, then, but I recommend you schedule an appointment for him as soon as you get back. Maybe you should call from here, or, if you like, our office can take care of that. He needs to be seen at least once more as a final check.”
“Did he die?” I asked. “Was he dead?”
Dr. Shemp didn’t answer.
“We understand,” Mom said, reaching over to touch my hand. “Can we at least peek in on him? We’ll probably go out for something to eat, but we’re going to stay here.”
Dr. Shemp shrugged and said, “Wouldn’t hurt, I suppose, but please don’t wake him or try to communicate. Rest is what he needs right now.”
We stood. Dr. Shemp stood also. He didn’t extend his hand and he didn’t come around the desk. We waited a second, then went out. My mother turned to me and we hugged. I felt weak and shaky.
“He’s okay,” she said. “He’s going to be okay.”
“I’m so sorry, Mom.”
“I know you didn’t mean it to turn out this way.”
We kept hugging for a little while. When we stopped, Mom ran her hands over her eyes. She had been tearing up.
“We need to tell Ty and Little Brew,” I said. “They’re waiting to hear.”
“Okay,” Mom said, reaching out to rub my arm. “You go ahead and I’ll peek in on Tommy.”
I hurried to the waiting room. Ty hadn’t moved, but Little Brew had figured out a way to get comfortable in the straight-backed chairs. He had his legs up and was reading a National Geographic. I crossed the room and smiled at Ty.
“He’s going to be okay,” I said. “The water got in his lungs, but he’s going to be all right.”
Ty stood and hugged me. Little Brew did, too. Then Ty seemed to lose all strength and sat back down. He covered his face with his hands.
“I thought I’d killed the kid,” he said from under his fingers. “I can’t believe it.”
“He’s okay,” I said and put my hand on his shoulder. “Tommy’s a fighter.”
“Snow Pony,” Little Brew said, making his voice funny.
“Snow Pony,” I said.
“I can’t believe it,” Ty said again. “I would never have forgiven myself.”
“I guess we were nuts to let him try it,” I said. “I don’t know what we were thinking. We were crazy.”
“We were thinking he wanted a charge,” Little Brew said, his voice level. “You can’t go blaming yourself when things don’t turn out the way you want them to. He was stoked to do it. He didn’t hesitate.”
“I know,” I said, “but we should have known better. I should have known better.”
Ty stood back up.
“Can we see him?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “The doctor says he needs complete rest. Mom is looking in on him now.”
Ty hugged me again, hard. Then I hugged Little Brew, who held on to me. The warmth of his body became the center of almost everything and I didn’t want to let him go. He kissed my cheek and pulled me closer. We had been through too much in too short a time. We held each other in the middle of the waiting room. Over his shoulder I saw a light rain begin to fall in the parking lot.
TOMMY SHARK FACT #10: Tommy found a video on YouTube of a surfer in Australia being attacked by two great white sharks. He has watched it so often that he can do the play-by-play of the attack without even glancing at the video. An Italian tourist happened to be filming the surfers when a great white rose on top of a wave, grabbed a whole surfboard, and tossed it backward into the trough or valley created before the next wave. What astonished Tommy and other researchers was that the whites seemed to cooperate: a second great white was waiting in the trough. The surfer sustained a bite on his left arm, but it wasn’t critical. The sharks seemed to recognize that a human is not their preferred mammal. They disappeared and the surfer made it to shore without further injury. Authorities closed the beach for a couple days, then reopened it. The YouTube video appeared on something called SharkWatch. Tommy receives e-mail alerts from a dozen shark Web sites and is a subscriber to the Inter national Shark Attack File, a database in Florida that records and analyzes shark attacks around the world.
Tommy also tracks accounts of people feeling “sharky” or “predator-aware” just before being attacked or approached by a great white. He says that if he had the chance to research things, he might concentrate on that. According to him, the warning prickle we get along the neck may be one of our oldest, most instinctive reactions. He tells the story—from The Devil’s Teeth, his favorite book—about an urchin diver named Joe Burke who was stalked by an enormous female great white off the Farallones. The female approached and showed aggressive interest, but what Burke later reported was a sense of cunning. The shark would disappear, then try to sneak up on Burke. Burke hid out against a pile of rocks on the bottom of the sea, but each time he left the rocks the shark reappeared. It unnerved Burke not only because this went on and on, but because the shark seemed to be enjoying it. Finally becoming nervous about his air supply, Burke climbed into his urchin basket and signaled to his partner on deck to haul him up. As he rose through the water, the shark circled, looking, so it seemed to Burke, for a way to ambush him. Burke felt connected to the shark in a prey-predator minuet, and it surprised him to discover that he knew where the shark was likely to appear an instant before she did.
I kissed Tommy’s forehead. He didn’t wake. My mom sat on a small chair next to the bed. The medical staff had taped a ventilator into Tommy’s mouth. The ventilator made a small wheezing sound as it breathed with Tommy. I looked over at my mom.
What we both understood, I think, was that we would meet again like this. We knew it. The day would come when we would stand on either side of a hospital bed, Tommy between us, and that would be a different day. That would be a day without end, a day of losing Tommy, and the look that passed between us communicated that as surely as if we spoke it aloud. I watched my mom’s eyes fill and for a second I imagined what it must have been like when the doctors first delivered the news about Tommy. The world had to change the minute she learned he had CF, and she had watched the symptoms progress. And since then the world had never come back to level for my mom.
Our eyes stayed on one another’s for a ten count, then whatever had passed between us disappeared.
“Hungry?” my mother asked.
“Starving,” I said.
“So that was the famous Ty Barry?” Mom asked, a menu spread out in front of her. “He’s a handsome boy. And his brother is an absolute knockout. He’s movie star material. I’m sure you didn’t notice, though.”
I smiled. She smiled, too.
We sat in a diner somewhere north of Redwood City. It was the first place we came to when we drove away from the hospital in her rental. According to the back of the menu, the owners of the diner had bought it from somewhere in Indiana and had it reset out in California. They had aimed for authenticity, but they had tried so hard to get all the details correct that it seemed phony in its accuracy. The diner’s name was Calamity Jane’s. It had a lot of air-conditioning.
“Ty Barry was the guy who was attacked by a great white,” I said. “He was on a surfboard.”
“Some kind of hero to Tommy. I know about him.”
She looked for the waitress, who was busy delivering food to another booth. Mom turned her attention back to the menu. She liked eating out. She always studied the menu, but never ordered anything exotic.
“Ty’s been terrific to Tommy,” I said. “He admires him. He’s not just stringing him along. He likes Tommy.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Mom asked.
She caught the waitress’s eye and the frazzled waitress raised a finger to say one minute. A page of her order book hung outside the pocket of her apron and flapped whenever she moved quickly.
“Tommy doesn’t have any friends, Mom,” I said. “Kids his age just see a scrawny little egghead. They call him E.T. They don’t have the patience they need to get to know him.”
“He’s got some friends. He’s friends with Larry Feingold.”
“Larry’s a loser, Mom. He’s a Dungeons and Dragons geek. Tommy doesn’t even like playing with him. With Ty and Little Brew, Tommy feels like he belongs to a group. They call him Snow Pony.”
“Snow Pony?”
I decided I couldn’t quite explain it. I also knew Mom wasn’t going to see it my way, exactly. She was hungry and wanted the waitress and it annoyed her to have to wait. Things my mom didn’t want to look at closely had a way of glancing off her. Sometimes she reminded me of a snow-plow, sharp and pointed, with curls of snow on either side of her. She didn’t mean to ignore things around her, but she was too intent on driving ahead to see how she affected people. And right now she wanted to eat.
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