Mr. Ross put his arm around her shoulders. Outside the door, Ralph Carver pulled his head back like a turtle with-drawing into its shell. David saw this and might have hated his dad a little for it. He couldn’t remember for sure, one way or the other. What he remembered was looking down at Brian’s pale, still face with the misshapen bandage seeming to bear down on it—the waxy ear, the cut with its red lips drawn together in a smooch by the black thread, and the eyes. Most of all what he remembered was the eyes. Brian’s mother was right there, crying and screaming, and those eyes didn’t change a bit.
But he is in there, David thought suddenly, and that thought, like so much that had happened to him since his mother had told him about Brian’s accident, did not feel like something that was coming from him but only some-thing going through him . .. as if his mind and body had turned into some sort of pipe.
He is in there, I know he is. Still in there, like someone caught in a landslide.., or a cave in…
Debbie Ross’s control had given way entirely. She was almost howling, shaking in her husband’s grip, trying to pull free. Mr. Ross got her headed back toward the red chairs, but it looked like a job. The nurse hurried in and slipped an arm around her waist. “Mrs. Ross, sit down. You’ll feel better if you do.”
“What sort of God lets a man forget killing a little boy?” Brian’s mom had screamed.
“The kind that wants that man to get loaded and do it again, that’s who! A God who loves drunks and
hates little boys!”
Brian, looking up with his absent eyes. Harking to his mother’s sermon with a waxy ear.
Not noticing. Not here. But…
Yes, something whispered. Yes, he is. He is. Somewhere.
“Nurse, can you give my wife a shot?” Mr. Ross had asked. By then he was having a hard time keeping her from leaping back across the room and grabbing David, her son, maybe both of them. Something in her head had broken free. It was something that had a lot to say.
“I’ll get Dr. Burgoyne, he’s just up the hail.” She hurried out.
Brian’s dad gave David a strained smile. There was sweat trickling down his cheeks and standing out on his forehead in a galaxy of fine dots. His eyes were red, and to David he looked like he had already lost weight. David didn’t think such a thing was possible, but that was how he had looked. Mr. Ross now had one arm around his wife’s waist and his other hand clamped on her shoulder.
“You have to go now, David,” Mr. Ross said. He was trying not to pant, and panting a little anyway.
“We’re… we’re not doing so good.”
But I didn’t say goodbye to him, David wanted to say, and then realized it wasn’t sweat trickling down Mr. Ross’s cheeks but tears. That got him moving. It wasn’t until he got to the door and turned back and saw Mr. and Mrs. Ross had blurred into a whole crowd of parents that he realized he was shortly going to be crying himself.
“May I come back, Mr. Ross?” he asked in a cracked, shivery voice he barely recognized. “Tomorrow, maybe?”
Mrs. Ross had stopped struggling now. Mr. Ross’s hands had ended up locked together just below her
breasts, and her head was bent so her hair hung in her face. The way they looked made David think of the World Federation Wrestling matches he and Bri had also some-times watched, and how sometimes one guy would hug another guy like that. Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, David thought for no good reason at all.
Mr. Ross was shaking his head. “I don’t think so, Dayey.”
“But—”
“No, I don’t think so. You see, the doctors say there’s no chance at all for Brian to . . . to- to His face began to change as David had never seen an adult’s face change—it seemed to be tearing itself apart from the inside. It was only later, out in the Bear Street Woods, that he got a handle on it … sort of. He’d been seeing what happened when someone who hadn’t cried in a long time—years, maybe—finally couldn’t hold back any longer. This was what it was like when the dam burst.
“Oh, my boy!” Mr. Ross screamed. “Oh, my boy!” He let go of his wife and fell back against the wall between the two red vinyl chairs. He stood there for a moment, kind of leaning, then folded at the knees.
He slid down the wall until he was sitting, hands held out toward the bed, cheeks wet, snot hanging from his nostrils, hair sticking up in the back, shirttail out, pants pulled up so you could see the tops of his socks. He sat there like that and wailed. His wife knelt by him and took him in her arms as best she could, and that was when the doctor came in with the nurse right behind him, and when David slipped out, crying hard but trying not to sob. They were in a hospital, after all, and some people were trying to get well.
His father was as pale as his mother had been when she told him about Brian, and when he took David’s hand, his skin was much colder than Brian’s had been.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” his father said as they waited for the world’s slowest elevator. David had an idea it was all he could think of to say. On the ride home, Ralph Carver started to speak twice, then stopped. He turned on the radio, found an oldies station, then turned it down to ask David if he wanted an ice-cream soda, or anything.
David shook his head, and his father turned the music up again, louder than ever.
When they got home, David told his father he thought he’d shoot some baskets in the driveway. His
father said that was fine, then hurried inside. As David stood behind the crack in the hot top that he used as a foul line, he heard his parents in the kitchen, their voices drifting out of the open window over the sink. She wanted to know what had happened, how David had taken it. “Well, there was a scene,’ his father said, as though Brian’s coma and approaching death were part of some play.
David tuned out. That sense of otherness had come on him again, that feeling of being small, a part instead of a whole, someone else’s business. He suddenly felt very strongly that he wanted to go down to the Bear Street Woods, down to the little clearing. A path— narrow, but you could ride bikes along it if you went single-file—led into this clearing. It was here, up in the Viet Cong Lookout, that the boys had tried one of Debbie Ross’s cigarettes the year before and found it awful, here that they had looked through their first copy of Penthouse (Brian had seen it lying on top of the Dumpster behind the E-Z Stop 24 down the hill from his house), here that they had hung their feet down and had their long conversations and dreamed their dreams . .. mostly about how they were going to be the kings ofWestWentworthMiddle School when they were ninth-graders. It was here, in the clearing you got to by way of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that the boys had most enjoyed their friendship, and it was here that David suddenly felt he had to go.
He had bounced the ball, with which he and Brian had played about a billion games of Horse, one final time, bent his knees, and shot. Swish—nothing but net. When the ball returned to him, he tossed it into the grass. His folks were still in the kitchen, their voices still droning out the open window, but David didn’t even think about poking his head in and telling them where he was going They might have forbidden him.
Taking his bike never occurred to him. He walked, head down, the bright blue EXCUSED EARLY pass still sticking out of his shirt pocket, although school was over for the day by then. The big yellow buses were rolling their homeward routes; yelling flocks of little kids pounded past, waving their papers and lunchboxes. David took no notice. His mind was elsewhere. Later, Reverend Martin would tell him about “the still, small voice” of God, and David would feel a tug of recognition, but it hadn’t seemed like a voice then, or a thought, or even an intuition. The idea his mind kept returning to was how, when you were thirsty, your whole body cried for water, and how you would eventually lie down and drink from a mudpuddle, if that was all you could get.