She raised her eyebrows. “Thanks,” she said.
Walter spent the night under observation. Carl spent the night in the hallway, drinking bad coffee from a paper cup. They were running some tests and awaiting results. Dr. Newman was still on duty, and at times he could hear her cool, clear voice giving orders and asking questions, and the sound of it was oddly soothing to him, reminding him of his office and his work. He closed his eyes to focus on it. Other people waited near him, flipping through magazines or whispering softly together. They were all quiet, dazed-seeming. A woman came through and began searching around all the seats, saying, “My bag. I know I left it around here somewhere.” Then a man came and put his arms around her and led her away, glancing back guiltily over her shoulder as if the bag were a shameful or deeply personal subject, not to be discussed. He heard one of the nurses say, “Dr. Newman!” and Dr. Newman say, “In a minute!”
Walter was asleep, wheezing rhythmically. The other patient in the room was groaning in pain, a sound as distant and constant as traffic. It didn't seem to be keeping Walter up. Carl wasn't sleepy, but he slipped into a kind of a trance in the hallway, slouched in his seat. He didn't know what to do except sit and not sleep, sit and be vigilant. Whatever happened, he would be awake and present for it. He thought about when his mother died, and someone — a teacher — came and said to him, “Your mother is dead,” and it seemed like because it had happened off stage, out of his sight, that it could not be real or true. He tried to feel sad but couldn't. He kept trying to grasp the fact of it, and would sometimes repeat to himself, “My mother is dead,” and though the words would make him cry, he still didn't really feel it. The fact was too big. It defeated him. The days around the funeral passed in a blur of dark mystery, adults wearing black, speaking in whispers, the sense of being pressed in by crowds, the smell of unfamiliar food. Instead of grief he developed a sense of irritation and injustice, of being unfairly put upon. More than anything he wanted to find someone to complain to, maybe a teacher or someone else at school. He wanted to say that if only he'd been given more information, more evidence, more time, then he would have been better prepared.
PROCEDURE: patient will be informed as to the likely future developments in his condition.
Early in the morning the shifts changed and new nurses came on, pouring themselves cups of coffee and bustling around the station. He was looking down at the floor when he saw Dr. New-man's brown shoes.
She sat down beside him. “You should have gone home and slept,” she said.
“Why?” he said.
She laughed shortly, on the exhale. “Because you look tired.”
“So do you,” he said, and she did. The skin under her eyes had turned bluish and looked wrinkled and taut. She had pulled her hair back in an elastic band, but a few strands had escaped it here and there. He noticed that she was carrying a chart, and knew it must be Walter's.
She cocked her head in the direction of his room. “Let's go talk to your uncle.” She took a step, but when he didn't follow she paused and looked at him, waiting.
“Please,” he said. Meaning, Please be a good doctor; meaning, Help him. Dr. Amanda Newman stepped back and put her hand briefly on his arm, and the touch of it was shocking to him— though not as shocking as when, in the days to come, she began to say his name at the beginning of her tapes: “Hello, Carl. This is a preliminary report on …” and he would listen, fascinated, to this part, the intimacy of these four letters spoken by her clear voice, his name, for minutes at a time, before he could move on.
“Let's go,” she said.
He followed her to Walter's room and they went inside, and Walter looked first to her and then to Carl, who saw his uncle's worried eyes go tranquil because he was there.
“Hi, Walter,” he said.
“ 'Lo,” Walter said, and coughed with the effort. He lay stolid and unmoving, his arms exposed above the sheet. The skin there was blotched and veiny. The other patient thrashed uncomfortably in his bed while his visitor, a younger woman, tried in vain to quiet him. Dr. Newman began to explain that Walter could go home, that there would be observation and additional medication.
As she spoke, Carl saw the cool black letters of her report unfurling in his mind.
ASSESSMENT: the heart labors.
He stood still with the revealed truth of it — that in the end, the real end, Walter was not going to be fine — and a pain bloomed hotly in his chest, as if his body were offering Walter's sympathy of its own kind. The tape in his head clicked and rewound, whirred all the way back to childhood. What he heard then was Walter's voice, smoke-tinged and hearty; what he smelled was Aqua Velva and tobacco and sweat. They were standing in the doorway of the living room, looking in at it, Walter behind him. He felt Walter's big hands pressing a bit too hard on his shoulders, the weight of them forcing him to slouch, and he was eleven and his heart flew up when Walter said, “From now on, son, this will be your home.”
Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student
He did not have friends. He was silent much of the time. He picked his nose, and when told to stop he would remove his finger slowly and stare at the snot, seemingly hypnotized, then put his hand in his pocket without wiping it. He had bad dreams: for one whole year he woke, white and crying, from nightmares about snakes. The next year it was clouds. He couldn't explain why the clouds frightened him and just shook his head, trembling and sweaty under the covers. Although his mother, Rachel, made an effort to find the nicest clothes she could within the budget, the same clothes that other kids were wearing, as soon as he put them on they drooped and sagged, changing from their store-rack normalcy into something disheveled, misshapen, patchlike.
Sometimes his eyes looked blurry and unfocused, but when Rachel took him to the eye doctor, his vision tested fine.
For his eighth birthday, he asked for piano lessons. Rachel and Brian, the father, looked at each other, then back at him. The three of them lived in a two-bedroom apartment. They had one bedroom, and he had the other. In the kitchen there was only enough room to stand up, and so in the living room, cramped together, were the dining table and chairs, the couch and the TV. Rachel and Brian both worked but, between credit-card debt and car payments, were barely making the rent. And there was something else. Rachel was pregnant; she was the only one who knew. She'd been pregnant once before, since Kevin, but didn't keep it. This time would be different. At night, with her eyes closed, she breathed in deeply, and at the innermost point of her breath she felt the baby, tight and insistent and coiled. It wanted to be born. “Kevin,” she said, “since when do you want to play the piano?”
“Since now.”
“Listen, buddy,” Brian said. He motioned Kevin over the couch, and he stood between his father's legs. “I don't know if you've noticed, but we don't have a piano.”
“The teacher does.”
“But you have to practice,” Brian said. “That's part of taking lessons — you spend like an hour a week at the teacher's or whatever, then you go home, and you have to practice. Like homework.”
Kevin looked up at him, his eyes both wary and blank. Rachel saw that he hadn't thought of this. Where did he get the idea for piano lessons in the first place, if he didn't even know that practicing was part of it? It was a mystery. Her son came to her and, wordlessly, placed his hand on her knee.
“It's okay,” she said. “We just have to think about this.” She felt Brian staring at her. She knew what he wanted: for Kevin to play hockey, stickball in the street, be more of a boy, be more like other boys. But somehow, she knew, it was already too late.