They won’t let her ride in the ambulance to the emergency room. The rule is only family. When she offers to call my parents, Mr. Lassiter says there’s no need. He’ll drive over in the Whaler to let my parents know I’m on the way to the hospital while one of the squad people fills out the report. My parents can pick me up at Riverside ER. That’s not a scene I’m relishing. Mr. Lassiter and the squad driver move ten steps away, their voices raised and their hands moving in time to the volume. It doesn’t look like anyone’s too keen on the idea of the paperwork.
“Couldn’t you just take me home in the Whaler?” I ask.
“Hospital is protocol, once the squad’s been called in.”
Meredith slips out of sight as the ambulance tech motions everyone clear from the ambulance doors. I hear the boat’s engine spit water. Then it’s over. The doors shut, the rescue squad van streaks off, and all I can think is that Meredith has to walk home alone, knowing she’s just kissed the biggest loser in Essex County.
Much to Mom’s surprise I don’t get pneumonia. She makes three loaves of banana bread and delivers them to Mr. Lassiter, the rescue squad, and the Rilkes. I’m not allowed to go with her, even to Meredith’s. Mom says it’s because I’m under doctor’s orders to stay off my ankle. My foot is buried in a splint contraption, a blue-gray wrap laced with little pickets of hard plastic that line up on my ankle to keep everything stiff. It’s not broken, just sprained from being twisted by my sandal catching on the balustrade on my way over.
In spite of everything, Meredith calls Monday night. Thank you, Mack, for giving her our number. It always strikes me as incredibly idiotic of the cell phone companies not to print a directory of numbers so more people would use their phones and more minutes would be charged. I mean, if they’re in it to make money and all.
“You left your backpack on the bridge,” she says.
“Valuable salsa and chips.”
She laughs. “I liked them.”
“How was the first day of school?”
“Okay. Bev introduced us around and Mack said to tell you Stepford-Hanes graduated to the high school and is still wearing those amazing skirts.”
“Oh, great.”
“Who is she?” When Meredith’s voice tightens, I’m right back there on the bridge with her shouting choruses of “Glorious.”
“Just a teacher. English nine. She’s okay.”
Meredith breathes loudly enough that I can hear the relief through the receiver. “I guess your parents aren’t going to let you come to classes this year?”
“They haven’t said—right now they’re blaming it on the ankle thing—but they’re still looking into possibilities for… the other, deciding. It’s complicated.”
“Last year this kid at Albemarle got hurt playing soccer, and he was unconscious. His parents refused to let the rescue squad take him. It turned out they were Christian Scientists. They don’t believe in germs or medicine. Supposedly Christ heals you.” She’s talking fast, as if she’s afraid someone’s going to tell her she has to get off the phone. “The kid already had had like six concussions. But this time he was bleeding in his brain. The state filed charges against his parents.”
“For murder?”
“No, he didn’t die. For child abuse, or something like that. A kid has rights too.”
“So you think I should sue my parents to let me go to school?”
“It’d be more fun if you were there.”
Her argument makes perfect sense to me. Somehow, though, I don’t think it will sway my parents.
Lying on the couch with my foot propped up on pillows, I try to think what Holden would do. Okay, it’s a stretch to draw parallels between a kid who’s been kicked out of school for making a conscious choice not to do his schoolwork and a kid who’s been kept away for something totally beyond his control. HC was the first to admit he hadn’t followed the rules. Still, I’m damned if I know what rules I broke.
My parents, not being rule followers themselves, try hard not to be rule makers. I’ve heard their conversations with Joe. Stuff that most kids don’t talk about with their parents. Even beyond the substance-abuse thing, which, as you might expect, my father is particularly vocal about with his kids.
Being in the middle, though, is different. You listen more than you talk. Joe’s mistakes have all been hashed over in front of Nick and me. The one advantage to being younger, I know a lot of things thanks to Joe that he didn’t know ahead of time. With The Disease though, knowing things ahead of time is starting to feel less like an advantage.
When Mom and Dad first told me about the leukemia, we’d been to a bunch of doctors for tests, blood work, scans, a physical exam where they did things I can’t mention to anyone. No one would go through that kind of stuff if they weren’t sick. I don’t think my parents had any idea how sick I was. I sure didn’t. Once I heard the word cancer I put my hands over my ears and started humming like a brat having a temper tantrum. Not my best moment, huh?
I guess maybe it was a nervous reaction, like people who laugh during a robbery instead of fainting. Of course, Dad let Mom calm me down. Then, almost as if they had planned the whole thing, he talked all around it like he does, about mixed-up cells and the science of it, how they were experimenting, making breakthroughs every day, and how sometimes they get it wrong. It was like he was helping me with another homework assignment, that’s all. But I wondered if they had known ahead of time what the tests showed, if they had secret meetings with the doctors before they decided to tell me.
I got what Dad meant, though. What he really wanted was for me to think I shouldn’t lose any sleep over it. But that convinced me more than ever that the whole thing was a setup. The conversation arranged when Nick was out; Mom and Dad sitting together on the couch, the way coaches try to prop up a losing team with a psych-up when they know the talent is missing. I’d have to have been an idiot not to recognize how serious it was.
The only reason Dad didn’t finish the monologue was because Mom put her hand over his mouth and cut to the chase.
“The doctors don’t know everything, Danny. We can fight this.”
Dad’s eyes closed and he sank back against the cushions like he had a headache so humongous he couldn’t hold his head up any longer. Mom kept looking at me, the magic disappearing son. When I didn’t fall apart, she laid her head on Dad’s shoulder as if she was already wiped out from the effort of it all. A race well run. Another brilliant parenting accomplishment.
I just stood up and walked out, humming again to drown out their pleas for me to stay, to hear them out. We were living in the Jeanette Drive house then, before Mom’s epiphany about the houseboat. I walked right out the front door and left it open. Screw them, screw the mosquitoes. Down the block, down the next block.
It was one of those summer nights when bugs swarm the streetlights, the buzz so loud you can’t hear yourself think. Their tiny wings beat so furiously, as if they’re desperate to be transported to another world. The kind of night when even though you can see people talking in their cars, they’re like mimes. It’s impossible to hear their words with the windows up and the air conditioners running full blast. They’re drowning in their own little worlds while scraps of their lives—a wave, a nod, a glance out the window—fall into the night like shards from a cracked mirror and splinter into smaller and smaller pieces until you have to pull your hands back to avoid getting cut.
Just remembering makes me sweat again like I did that night. The collar of my T-shirt, ringed with sweat, clung to my shoulders and neck. Walking and walking, putting the leather down hard and not paying the least attention to where I was going. I don’t even remember crossing Route 17, but I must have because I ended up blocks away at the high school baseball field. It was totally empty. No cars, no people, just the overhead spotlights glowing like spaceships. The team must have quit playing minutes before I got there. I sat in the middle of the field, out past second base, and yanked out clover as the lights faded. Until it was too dark to see my fingers or the grass.