by Tony Abbott
Mom was propped up on the bed when I finally went in. She was looking out the window at the sky. Her foot and ankle were in a cast. A plastic bag with her clothes folded into it sat on the single chair. Tubes dripped into a thing taped on her wrist.
She saw my reflection in the window and turned.
“Jeff.”
There was nothing but us leaking and blubbering for a few minutes, like Tom and I did last night. She gently touched my ear and face and asked if I was all right. “Yeah,” I said. Moving the clothes bag, I shifted the chair closer to the bed and sat and told her what had happened. How I met Tom at our empty house, our dumb journey, everything up until Rich’s mother picked us up.
“No police.” I snickered. “They couldn’t catch us.”
She sank into the pillow, closing her eyes as she did. Her eyelids were wrinkled and darker than I thought they would be or should be. Had I never really looked at them before? Maybe I hadn’t. Maybe they get like that when things don’t go the way you want them to.
When she didn’t open her eyes for a minute, then another, I listened to the beep of her heart monitor and just looked at her face, trying to take it all in. Grandpa’s last words came to me then. It goes fast. And only in one direction.
If that was true, where was this moment on my timeline? Could anyone tell me? Mom, do you know?
No answer, just beep… beep.
She must have gone to sleep because of the medication.
“Okay, Mom. I’ll come back later. Maybe we can talk then.” I got up, shaking.
“Don’t go,” she said quietly. She reached for me, and I sat back down.
“They’ve been to see me,” she said. “The Department of Children and Families. We have a case number. We are an actual case now, Jeff. In the system. We held them off for a good long time, didn’t we? DCF, the marshal, the town. Mr. Andrade. You know he came here last night. How did he know? But he came. With flowers!”
I swallowed back a thing in my throat and she shook her head once. “It’s been a while coming, hasn’t it? You know it has, Jeff. We both know I’m a lousy mom.”
“You aren’t!” I said. “Mommy, I love you, and it’s going to be okay. It’ll get better. It will. Bit by bit, it’ll get better. The job. You. I’ll be better, too. I promise. We’re like seeds.”
Her eyes were brimming as she nodded and tried to smile through her snuffling, and she finally did smile. “You’re a good boy,” she said. Then the tears that had been waiting rolled down her face and chin and neck and I tried to dry them with the edge of her pillow but couldn’t.
“The best,” I said.
“Pretty darn close.”
They came to get her up and wheel her to the place where she’d have some tests. Everything takes so long in a hospital. She held my hand in hers until a nurse pushed her wheelchair away through some doors. She was scared. I was scared watching her go.
I love you, Mom.
Maybe I said that out loud, but I probably didn’t have to.
CHAPTER 43
WHAT HURTS TOO MUCH
I went back to Tom’s house and stayed a second night. The cot wasn’t as comfortable. I didn’t sleep, rolled around a lot, but I found I didn’t care about that and I knew it was okay that I didn’t care about everything. Caring hurts.
The next morning, Mom’s discharge day, Mrs. Bender was back. She had driven home during the night. She turned from the sink and smiled when I came down, hugged me for a long time, said some stuff and asked some, and started listening before I answered. I liked that Tom’s father never talked much unless it was to push things forward. Mrs. Bender said if they’d known what was going on, Mom and I could have had Thanksgiving with them, which I was surprised to hear was only six days ago. It seemed weeks.
I must have said something back to her, but I really don’t remember what.
Tom was all about showers now, and if nobody yelled at him, he took his time, so I ate breakfast with his mom. When he finally came down, I went back up to the room and packed up the little junk I’d brought with me. I was going somewhere, I just didn’t know where yet. Mr. B must have come in then, because on the way down the stairs I heard them all talking softly in the kitchen. It seemed private so I sat on the bottom step and waited.
“I mean it,” his mother was saying. “For a while anyway. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. If someone needs something different, we’ll get something. We can get whatever they need. He can go to school without worrying.”
“I don’t understand.” That was Tom. “‘If someone needs something different.’ What?”
“Like this, Tom. An agreement,” his father said. I heard paper rustling.
“A legal thing your father found online,” she went on. “The Gardners did it with Kevin. His parents signed it. Jeff’s mother might if she understood it wasn’t forever.”
“It might solve some problems,” his father added. “Quite a few…”
Tom was quiet for a while, reading I guess, then stood up, then sat down again, or something that sounded like that.
“Are you saying there’s a way he can stay with us? Isn’t that a foster thing?”
My throat tightened.
“Not exactly,” his father said. “It’s us, people he knows, not a strange family. I mean, we’re strange. But maybe not to him. So much.” He was trying to be funny, like I remembered him being, to get Tom to laugh. I didn’t hear if he did.
“What do you think?” his mother said softly. “Sharing that way.”
“I think it would be great,” Tom said. My chest fluttered when he said that. “It would be great but I don’t know if he would do it. I was… I was pretty crappy to him. Last year. And… I mean… he knows that. We talked about it a little, but he doesn’t talk much. It’s still there. It’s still a thing.…”
I tried not to listen any more. It was private. When I heard Tom push his chair I hurried back upstairs, to be there when he came in.
His eyes were wet as he told me what they’d been talking about, but he couldn’t find the right words. He said everything in such a clunky way, full of “I don’t know exactly” and “sort of” and “well, I mean,” that I thought maybe I hadn’t understood what I’d overheard, after all. My throat, already choked up, wouldn’t let anything through.
I finally mustered enough breath to say, “Is English really your first language?”
“Ack! Let them tell you!” He nudged me downstairs into the kitchen. His parents were still talking, low, to each other. “Tell him,” Tom said. “What we said. The plan.”
They told me. “Guardians,” they said. They showed me the agreement. “It’s an option sometimes,” they said.
I’d live with them, they said. Not permanently. Just until…
Watching Tom’s eyes and face go through a bunch of expressions, I wanted to laugh, but it came out as a sob. “You can’t even afford it! An extra person to feed?”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Bender said. “That’s nothing you have to think about, ever—”
“But Tom told me about your job and all,” I said to his father.
Mr. Bender shook his head. “That’s not an issue, Jeff. It never will be. You being here will be a good thing. Especially for Tom. He’s, well, you know. Really needy.”
“Hey!” Tom said. Then he cracked a face at me. “Besides, what’s to afford? You can eat what I don’t want.”
“Tom—” his mother started.
“Except I’ll lick everything before you even get it,” I said.
“Boys…”
“You’re so funny, go stand up on your TV.”
“I’ll stand on your head instead.”
“Boys.”
CHAPTER 44
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Things moved pretty quickly after that.
Mr. and Mrs. Bender found an attorney who did a lot of stuff I never saw. The attorney had her own agreement that was a few pages long, but Mom didn’t trust it or lawyers and wanted to
use the simple one Tom’s father had found online so she could write in all the information herself. The attorney was okay with that.
It’s called a temporary guardianship agreement, and for a single page it says so much.
Through the phone company, the lawyer tracked down my father in Jacksonville. Both she and my mother talked to him. He sent something called an affidavit, which he downloaded from the Internet and signed: James R. Hicks. Paper dad.
He agreed to let me make the decision. I could live with him or with the Benders. It wasn’t really a question.
The lawyer also arranged that Medicaid would pay for rehab for my mom. That’s medical care the government gives to people who have zero money. The lawyer talked with the school people, and it turned out that going to school while living in another town wasn’t a crime because even though we tried to hide it we hadn’t done it for more than three months. It was only four and a half weeks since we’d left our house. It seemed twenty times that long.
I was there with everyone around a big table in the lawyer’s office the morning before Mom went into rehab. She’d been staying the last week at the shelter, in the single women’s wing. I couldn’t imagine how it made her feel to be back there without me.
A copy of the agreement was sitting at each place. Tom sat next to me. The document was simple. I read it a few times. It was practically nothing, but it meant everything:
I hereby grant temporary guardianship of , of whom I have legal custody, to .
I watched Mom read it from top to bottom, then over again, holding the paper down with both hands on the lawyer’s table like it would blow away, then sliding her fingers away as if she wanted it to. The lawyer gave her an ink pen, after taking the cap off and sliding it on the other end. I saw all these little things happen.
My mother put the pen tip on the page and slowly filled in our names.
First Jeffrey A. Hicks. Then Mr. Robert Bender and Mrs. Emily Bender.
There was also a place to mark the beginning and ending dates that I would live with them. My mother froze over that, looked at me for a long time, then at the calendar the lawyer had brought over, staring at the blank squares as if she were trying to understand another language.
What would the end date be?
Did anyone know when we would be together again?
“Or, the next line,” the lawyer said, glancing at all of us, one by one. “We can use that as well. It might be simpler.”
Mom read the next line, and I followed her eyes, already knowing what it said.
For as long as necessary, beginning on .
“It’s December fifth,” said the lawyer.
It was my life in numbers and scratches of ink. Mom’s, too. For however long a time, she wouldn’t be my mother, she wouldn’t act as one. It was a hole in her life with me. Someone else would take over. Maybe she felt this was the real prison sentence. She wasn’t fit to be my mother right now. Forget about me—how did that make her feel?
Her pen hung in the air, quivering.
I came around the table and hugged her and kept my head on her shoulder until she gently wiggled away so she could scratch in today’s date and the year.
For as long as necessary, beginning on December 5…
Below that, she signed, then printed her name slowly, smudging it accidentally on her palm. She licked off the ink, somewhere between laughing and crying at the silliness of it.
The attorney read the paper over, handing it to Mr. and Mrs. B, who read and signed it, then to a man with a blue bow tie who wrote stuff at the bottom and pressed a seal on it. They did the same with all the copies.
“Done?” Mom said.
The lawyer nodded, smiling at my mother and me. “Done.” She reminded me a lot of the shelter lady. She was as professional. And as sad.
Mom kissed me, then looked around the table. “Thank you. Thank you all.”
Mom went into the rehab clinic at three PM. Their sidewalk was shoveled clean and salted. It was a decent place, as good as Medicaid would pay for, and it wasn’t bad. Lots better than the Sidespot. I smelled cafeteria food from the lobby, and it smelled better than at school, too. We hugged and cried for minutes. The lady there was kind to me, to all of us. She asked if I wanted hot chocolate. I said no. She was the head doctor. Everybody was kind. Everybody was nice.
CHAPTER 45
BROTHERS
On the first day I felt okay enough to go to school, I went looking for Hannah. I found her at her locker. She didn’t go away, which she totally could have, but listened, her eyes welling up, while I poured it all out in a sloppy, soupy goop.
“I’ve been in a shelter. My mom drinks. She’s in a program now. I’m living with a friend. I just want to—can I—I was such an idiot to you and I know you didn’t mean to—or anything, I was such a jerk.…”
She was looking at me so intently and not saying anything and I wondered if she’d ever guessed that I’d wanted to touch her face in the library that day.
“Look, Hannah,” I said, “the point is can I—can I…” I nearly couldn’t get it out. “Can I buy you lunch sometime?”
She swept her arms around my back and pulled us together and put her chin on my shoulder. I remembered the girl on the train hugging the boy whose aunt had died and how it wasn’t for real. This was for real.
A long few seconds later, she was looking at me again.
“I was such a jerk to you,” I said.
“What? No. I’m sorry. It’s just, I talked to your friends.”
“My friends?”
“Josh. And Colin. From class? They said something might be going on. That you weren’t—that something wasn’t right. You didn’t eat. I’m so dense. I didn’t mean, my gosh, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I should have just told you”—she wiped her cheeks—“that whole Carly thing, it was so insulting—”
“No. Hey. It was nice. It took effort. And four dollars. You’re so cool. To do that. To think that way.”
“I didn’t want to lie,” she said. “I just didn’t know how to do it.”
“It’s okay, really. I try not to lie so much anymore either.”
“So much?”
“Yeah, sorry. But look. This time, this time I promise to eat the pudding—”
At that she cried into her hands and made a sound like a little muffled yelp. I won’t tell you what sound I made, but when we finally calmed down, the hallway was empty and the bell had rung twice and I was telling her about Jano and Tad. And finally I told her about Tom.
Mom’s cell phone rang a couple of times that night. I didn’t recognize the number, so I didn’t answer it. I couldn’t talk to her friends, if she had any left. I couldn’t form the words I’d have to say.
The next day, or the day after, the temperature went down, more snow came. The big flakes falling made me remember Rich, who I hadn’t seen since the night he and his mother found us. I called him.
“Hey,” I said. “Look. Part of what I wanted to say in the car that night was thanks. Thank you for, you know, everything. All the things you did. Everything.”
“That’s okay,” he said. His voice was low.
“But I wasn’t,” I said. “I wasn’t okay. I was an idiot to you. To everybody. Lots of times—”
“Nah.”
That word. It meant something else now.
“So, anyway, maybe we can hang out sometime?” He didn’t answer right away. “If your mom says okay, I mean.” I waited. “Or not, if she doesn’t. You know, whatever.” I was ready to hang up.
Then he said, “Sure. Cool.”
We left it open.
The next day a voice mail from my father showed up on the phone. He wanted to know how Mom was, where she was, for how long, and so on. I waited a couple of days before I had the stomach to hear his voice.
“So, I’m with the Benders for a while,” I said to him, pacing the backyard patio outside the kitchen window. It was three days after he called and late afternoon and dark and cold. �
�But I guess you know that.”
“I’m sorry about this whole business,” he said. “Life does that sometimes… gives you… never mind. It’s good news, though. You used to be friends with the boy there.”
“Tom. Yeah. We’re friends.” I looked up at the window of the room we were sharing now. “So, is that it? I mean, you called. You can’t talk to Mom. You got me. I won’t be able to visit her until next week, so that’s kind of all the news, so…”
There was a pause. “Not quite,” he said. I really wanted to hang up on him. “There’s something you—a thing I need to tell you. It’s about Erica.”
“She dumped you, too?” I was channeling my mom now.
“No, no. Jeff, no. We’re getting married. No date yet. But believe it or not, that’s not really why I called. She—well, we—had our first ultrasound. You know what that is?”
I didn’t answer. He thought I was so stupid.
“I guess you do,” he said. “Well, it’s all good, everybody’s healthy. We went back and forth about wanting to know, but she won. It’s a boy.”
“A boy,” I said, wondering what I felt about it, if I felt anything. “Okay.”
“A boy. Your brother. Jeff, you’re going to have a brother.”
My hands shook.
“His name is Jolyon. Jolyon Hicks, huh? That’s what we’ve named him.”
“Jolyon? Joe-lee-on. Jolyon. I guess that’s cool.”
“Yeah? You like it? Jeff and Jolyon. You have to come down.”
Jeff and Jolyon. I thought of Jano and Tad.
“It’ll be months, of course, but you have to meet him. And he has to meet you.”
Jolyon Hicks. The name was bigger than he was. I liked it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. I don’t know when. But yeah, okay, I will.”