“Maybe in a little while,” she said.
“Pretty girl,” said Mr. Castro.
“Thank you. Say thank you, hon,” Cindy said, a little too loudly. Then Christopher Menendez threw up, and Mr. Castro took him to the men’s room.
“Oh, my Lord, please don’t put him in my car on the way home,” Cindy said.
“This was a bad idea,” Mike said.
“No it wasn’t,” I said. “This is just one of those things that sounds a lot better before and after than when you’re actually doing it.”
“That’s what I like about her,” he said, turning to Cindy. “Most women would say, yeah, it was a bad idea, let’s get out of here. Or they’d say, no, it was a great idea, we’re having a great time, and you’d know it was bull. Instead she said what she just said, which happens to be true and accurate.”
“That’s what I like about her, too,” Cindy said, in a voice that sounded as though she was playing the ingénue in the school play.
“Ferris wheel and then call it a day?” Mike said.
“Sure,” I replied.
Cindy looked at her manicure and then at Mike’s back as he plowed through the crowds to the place by the bumper cars where he’d told the boys to assemble after their fifth go-round. She rubbed the nail on her index finger with a frown as though she’d found a flaw in the finish. Chad was splayed in the stroller fast asleep. “I’m not going to say anything,” she finally said.
“Good,” I said.
Both of us lapsed into the tired silence of adults who have been with children from morning to night. It seemed to me heroic that someone like Mike Riordan or Mrs. Bernsen did this every day, and with good humor. Even now, as he stood at the back of the group waiting for the Ferris wheel to empty, I could see that he was bantering with the boys, keeping them in line without hectoring them as I would have done. The Ferris wheel filled with children just before our group made it to the head of the line, and it began to spin slowly, a blur of smiles and antic waves to the parents and friends below. It was only late afternoon but the lights were already on around each rim, two circles of blue lights in the lengthening, darkening day, heavy clouds settling over the fields so flat around us.
I looked down. Chelsea’s face was tipped back, her mouth a little open, watching the other children go up and around, and I thought I saw in her eyes the kind of sadness you sometimes see, as a nurse, when a child in a wheelchair watches other children run. And then there was something else, wonder and shock, too, and a tearing noise I thought at first was the sound of one of the rides, until I looked up and saw that one of the cars of the Ferris wheel was half hanging in the air, and dangling from it was a child, making a high-pitched noise, something like a cry, something like heavy breathing, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.
I ran forward, dragging Chelsea with me, and saw that another child had already fallen to the packed dirt at the side of the Ferris wheel, a boy in blue shorts and one of those buzz cuts Robert kept begging for. “He’s dead,” Chelsea whispered as I knelt next to him, adults and children surging around to see. There was a terrible scream, and I heard the noise as the second child’s body hit something and then she fell, remarkably, only a few yards from the other.
“All right,” I cried, half turning, and in that instant I was myself again, Frances F. Benedetto, RN, taking no shit in the emergency room. “Here’s the deal. This child can go under, big time, or I can help him. But to help him I need all of you to move back.”
“Oh my God,” a woman started to shriek, in a familiar timbre. “Oh my God!” Mike came up behind me, and I said, “Tell Cindy to get ahold of Mom or Grandma or whoever the hell that is and take her someplace and calm her down. Tell Cindy to lie to her. Tell her I’m a doctor. Tell her the kids are fine. Do you know CPR?”
“Yeah.”
“No, I mean really know CPR. Not one class at the Y.”
“I really know CPR.”
“Then come right back.” I looked up and raised my voice. “I need a tie or a scarf,” I called. Then, looking around at the women in T-shirts and frayed shorts, the men in jeans and singlets, I added, “Or a belt. A belt would do it.”
CPR, done by someone who knows how to do it, is like a calisthenic, like push-ups or leg lifts, a series of quick, synchronized, monotonous movements. Mike did it just right. The boy, who was probably concussed, began to wheeze and moan. The little girl had a compound fracture of the left leg, the bone poking jagged and white from just above her knobby, scabby little knee. But the tourniquet kept down the bleeding. She was in shock, staring straight up at the sky, whispering to herself, “Mommy, Mommy.”
“You’re okay, sweetie,” I whispered back. “You broke your leg.”
“I tried to hold on,” she said.
“I know.” Two ambulance attendants wheeled a gurney over in a cloud of dust. “I’d figure on a couple of busted ribs,” I said. “Luckily the car they were in wasn’t that far up. If they’d been at the top—” I shrugged.
“Nice work,” one of them said. There was blood on my dress and my hands.
In the hospital I’d learned that there are really two kinds of people in the world, people who go hard and efficient in times of terrible trouble, and the ones like, it turned out, Grandma, who scream, shriek, go limp, sink to the floor, become patients themselves. PITAs, we called them in the ER, short for Pain In The Ass. All of the adults with me had fallen into the take-charge group. Cindy had managed to convince the grandmother that the children would be fine and to get her to breathe into a bag and drink an orange soda. Mr. Castro had rounded up all the boys and taken them to a tent filled with video games at the back of the fairgrounds.
And Jason Illing’s father had taped the whole thing. While we were dropping off the boys, explaining to parents what had happened and assuring them that all of us were fine, he went to the local news station and sold a copy to them. Six months of being careful, dying my roots, talking about goddamned Delaware, feeling my breathing quicken at the sight of a patrol car and feeling it slow as my son slept silently in the next room. Six months, and that idiot, that moron, that fool maybe ruined it with his sorry little Sony, that he loved to hoist on the palm of his hand. “Weighs less than a sack of sugar,” he liked to say.
We went to Cindy’s house, where she brought out tortilla chips and salsa, perhaps in a salute to Mr. Castro, and beer in deference to the aftershock of the day’s events. When we turned on the television, we were the lead story on the evening news, and there I was in the center of the film clip, a red flag to Bobby’s bull.
The fear I felt as I watched was worse than it had been while I worked over those children. There was the little girl, her leg bent at a horrid acute angle, and there was Beth Crenshaw, using a brown leather belt as a tourniquet. You could scarcely see my face, except for once when I turned to look back, straight into the big eye of the camera. I was glowering the way I always did when I concentrated, so that a nursing professor had had to take me aside once and tell me that it was important not to look as though I was going to throttle the patient while I was threading an IV line. I could imagine someone watching the television news, someone channel-surfing in a motel room at Disney World or in the living room of a time-share in Delray, some cop’s wife, some friend of Ann’s from Sodality at St. Stannie’s, seeing me in that instant and saying, “My God, that woman looks a lot like Bobby Benedetto’s wife, doesn’t she?” I closed my eyes and let my face fall forward into my cupped hands.
Bobby, I could hear them saying, I saw Fran on the news in Florida. Some little town up north, what was the name? At a carnival ride, taking care of some kids, a terrible accident. What’s Fran doing in Florida? Lakota, that was the name of the place.
“You didn’t look so bad,” Cindy said, patting my arm. “Considering.”
What a ghoul Illing was. He’d panned the crowd and come to rest on Chelsea, her eyes dilated, her mouth ajar. But the terror I’d seen there for a moment was gone, and in its place was a great over
whelming calm. Probably anyone else watching would have thought the child was in shock, but I had no doubt that she was at peace, having seen that she was not crazy or strange but in fact prescient, correct, that the world was indeed as frightening as she had always believed and that it was possible for children to eat funnel cake, stand in line, wave to their friends, and then simply fall out of the sky. And the look on Robert’s face, when the ambulance finally wailed off down a dirt track and into the distance with a dust cloud behind it, was just as easy for me to read. He might as well have said it aloud: Daddy was right. Daddy was right.
“Are you okay?” I’d asked him in the car on the way to Cindy’s house, and he’d nodded. Of course. Of course. He’d seen worse without ever admitting to fear, giving way to nightmares. The blank eyes again, the blank stare. My heart sank. It was like he’d traveled back in time, to a place where he wouldn’t let himself feel a thing. “Those kids who fell will be fine,” I’d said.
“I know,” he’d said.
When I went upstairs to use the bathroom I found him in Chelsea’s bedroom, Cindy bent over him, her arm around his shoulders. Sobs shook him and made it hard for him to talk, so that the words came out in the funny little burbles he’d babbled as a baby. There were tears and dirt mingled into a streaky mess on his face, and a wad of tissues in his hand. Cindy patted his back twice and then slipped past me and out of the room. She patted me, too, on her way out, and I took her place next to Robert and held him as he sobbed some more. Finally he managed to say, “It was just so scary. It was so scary.” I held him and rocked him and my heart was so light, laughing almost inside me, because my boy knew to be afraid, to be frightened, to cry at blood and guts and pain. It was like he was normal. It was like something was alive inside him, something that could see terrible things and know them for what they were. It had been a real accident, this one, but he hadn’t even used the word. He could tell a bad thing when he saw it, and I admitted to myself that I thought he’d lost that simple gift forever, until that moment.
Later, when Mike took us home, the telephone was ringing. “Let it go,” I said, “let it go.” But Robert picked it up, then handed it to me. “Irving and I saw you on the news,” Mrs. Levitt said. “Next time you are being a hero, don’t wear a dress so everyone can see your tushie. Your fanny. Ah, you know, your rear end.”
“I know what a tush is, Mrs. Levitt.” Mike Riordan was standing in the doorway, laughing.
Robert had gone upstairs. I could hear the water running. “He’s fine,” I said to Mike. “He’s upset.”
“It’s good for him to get it out now. Better than bottling it up, you know?”
“I know,” I said. “I know.” He stood up and moved to the door. “You were good today,” I added.
“So were you,” he said. “You were great. Unbelievable. Plus I’m happy to hear you know what a tush is.”
“I’m sorry I was so snotty about the CPR thing. There are just a lot of people who think they know how to do it from watching TV.”
“I was a community ambulance volunteer for five years.”
“I didn’t know that, see.”
He took a step toward me, with a funny little embarrassed smile, and took my face in his hands. Then he kissed me, very softly, the way a boy I’d liked in eighth grade who had braces top and bottom had once kissed me, as though he was afraid something harder would hurt me, or him. There were footsteps from upstairs, and he dropped his hands and moved away, toward the door.
“Boy,” he said.
The phone didn’t ring for three days, and when it finally did my hand lingered over it as though I was afraid the receiver would give off an electric shock. My heart pounded as I listened to the electronic tympani: clink, bang, rattle, buzz, buzz, clink. I was surprised that it had taken so long for Patty Bancroft to come looking for me. I had become her bad child, her prodigal daughter, the kind of person, like Maeve Banning at Queen of Peace, who always wound up in the principal’s office, in the hot seat.
“Maeve Banning,” Sister Eucharista would say over the intercom after morning prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance, “please come to the office.” And we’d scarcely look up. Maeve Banning, the mothers would whisper, would wind up—well, you know. She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. Grace told me she was a lawyer now, a partner in a big law firm, helping corporations stay out of trouble.
I was Patty Bancroft’s Maeve Banning. I made unauthorized phone calls. I wound up on the evening news.
“Elizabeth?” she said.
“Beth,” I said again. She could never remember that that was the name I went by, and suddenly it occurred to me that it might be because they made us all Elizabeths, that huddled in apartments and small houses and trailer parks around the United States there was a great community of Elizabeths, like one of the medieval religious communities, committed to poverty and obedience. And silence, of course. Patty Bancroft was our public face, our voice, our leader. You could tell that she enjoyed that, that it made her feel good, to have gone from being powerless in her own home to being powerful in the world. I realized that that was what had always bothered me about her, that she enjoyed her work so much.
“We’re working on relocating you to another part of the country,” she said. “Perhaps next week, if we can set the arrangements in motion.”
“What?”
“I gather that you were on television. That was a very, very foolish thing to do. And that your picture was in the newspaper. The impulse to be a Good Samaritan must be deeply ingrained in someone from your professional background, but I beg of you, not just for your own sake but for the sake of your own child and many others, don’t yield to it in a public place ever again.”
“Next time I see a kid bleeding to death I’ll remember that.”
“There’s no point in sarcasm. You’ve only made things difficult for you and your son. Someone will let you know next week about the relocation.”
“My name wasn’t on TV. My name wasn’t with my picture in the newspaper.”
“That’s not the point.”
“We’re not leaving. I’m not uprooting my boy again.”
“I’m afraid that’s the price you will have to pay. It is not unusual for us to move one family three or four times during as many years. Particularly if they call attention to themselves or are not assiduous about breaking off their ties with the past.”
“Let me tell you something about myself, Mrs. Bancroft,” I said. “I like to take care of my own business. I’m someone who’s made her own way all her life.” And the moment I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I knew that my feeble minimum-wage jobs had only been a pathetic hedge against the unpredictable life my parents made for Grace and me, a life of settling but not settling down, of moving around but not up. And my life outside of the home we shared, Bobby and I, had been a stage set, a sham. The real Fran Flynn hadn’t been the woman everyone saw in the hospital, in charge, in control. She’d been a punching bag, a marionette. And now I was one of Patty Bancroft’s puppets, a woman scared to run around the block, scared to let her son go alone to soccer games, a woman who’d take what she could get.
“Let me ask you this,” Patty Bancroft said. “Do you want to stay alive?” It was her trump card; I could tell by the way she said it. The fact that Patty Bancroft and Bobby Benedetto so often said the same things, so often made me feel the same about myself, made me hate Patty Bancroft at that moment, no matter how much good she’d done me and Robert. But she was playing out of her league when she conjured up the worst that could happen. I’d heard it all before. I’d heard it from the master. I’d heard it when he found the card of a matrimonial lawyer in my pocket two years before I left. He’d driven across the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge from a wedding reception at 2:00 AM dead drunk, snaking the car in and out of the lanes while I held onto the edge of the seat, the sullen gray of the water framed by the slender silver cables that held the roadway miraculously aloft. “You want to get home alive, Fran?” Bobby
had said over and over, like there was a right answer and I hadn’t gotten it yet. The next morning he made me waffles for breakfast. Waffles and pancakes, that was all he could cook. But he made good waffles, even hungover and pissed off. Death threats and Belgian waffles with bacon. What a life.
“What I’d like,” I said to Patty Bancroft, “is to start paying rent on this apartment. I don’t like being a charity case. I’d like to pay my own phone bills. I’m putting some money away. I don’t need handouts anymore. I need the name and address of the landlord.”
She was quiet for a long time, and for some reason I thought she was on an airplane, flying over her empire, the hidden world of women who had ceded the right to speak for themselves, even fend for themselves, to a woman who took the podium and the microphone to speak for them, fingering her pearls. Patty Bancroft talked about herself wherever she went, of how she had been married to a prosperous banker in a town in Indiana, of how he mostly beat her about the body, not on the face, so that no one ever saw when she was wearing a suit to a country-club lunch or a cocktail dress to the club for dinner. I’d realized, hearing her tell it at that hospital, that it sounded less like a life than a story. If Patty Bancroft had ever been a victim, it was long, long in the past. She enjoyed being on top. The way I was enjoying, at that moment, demanding custody of my own life for the first time since I started living it.
“I appreciate everything you’ve done,” I added, “but we like it here. My son is settled in, I have a little bit of money put away. Just tell the landlord to come see me and I’ll pay for this place.”
“You make me very nervous, Beth,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. But I’d heard that before, too. I’d heard that from Bobby. “I don’t know if you understand this,” I finally said to Patty Bancroft, “but I can’t worry anymore about how I make other people feel about me. I have to worry about how I feel about myself.”
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