He himself had never taken out anyone but his mother’s friends’ daughters, pallid little girls who needed to be escorted to their own private-school dances and didn’t know anyone else to ask. He bought them wrist corsages and steered them swiftly, correctly, around the floor in their dresses like layers of pastel toilet paper, their small wired bosoms pressing lightly into his chest, his hands against their backs feeling the rows of hooks that might conceivably be undone; but no, that would be too embarrassing. Though he’d sometimes felt his crotch tighten during the joyless foxtrots (he stood out the few chaste rock numbers the hired band would attempt), he hadn’t liked any of these girls, though he tried to make sure they had a good time. He had even kissed one of them goodnight, because he felt she was expecting it. It was three years ago, when he was still wearing bands on his teeth. So was the girl, and when he’d kissed her harder than he’d intended, their teeth had locked painfully together, at her front door, in full view of the entire street. Anyone watching would have thought it was a passionate embrace, but he could still remember the panic in her eyes, though he’d repressed her name.
Rob turned Jordan right, onto the Nature Walk that ran in a meandering oval through the small woods behind the boys’ cabins. It was paved, like all the other walks. The trees were labelled, and there was a little glass case at the far end of the oval where Bert the Nert, who was a nature buff, put a new exhibit every day. He’d taken Jordan on the Nature Walk several times before, stopping to read the labels on the trees, pointing out chipmunks and once a stray cat. Hardly anyone else seemed to go on it. He liked to wheel her along through the trees, whistling or singing songs to her. He wasn’t shy about his voice when there was no one else but her, he even sang songs from Bert’s repertoire that stuck in his throat when the assembled children sang them, led by red-faced Bert, his master-of-ceremonies smile, and his energetic accordion.
“Your name is the name of a famous river,” he told her. He hoped she would be pleased by that. He wondered if her parents had known about her, about what she was going to be like, when they named her, and whether they’d felt later that the expensive-sounding name was wasted because she would never match it, never sip cocktails on a terrace or smile like Grace Kelly in cool lipstick. But they must have known; it said in her file that it was a birth defect. She had one brother and one sister, both normal, and her father was something in a bank.
Sometimes, thinking of the catastrophe ahead of him, his failure and his flight, he thought about taking her with him. That was her clinging to his neck as he scrambled up the boxcar (but she couldn’t cling!), she was with him in the hotel room when he woke up, sitting in her chair (how had he got her there?), looking into his eyes with her icy blue ones, her face miraculously still. Then she would open her mouth and words would come out, she would stand up, he would somehow have cured her… Sometimes, very quickly (and he would repress it immediately) he would see both of them hurtling from the top of a building. An accident, an accident, he would tell himself. I don’t mean that.
Rob crooned. He was heading for a bench, there was one up ahead, where he could sit and they could have their game of chequers.
“Hey, look at this.” It was Bert’s glass case. “Shelf fungus, “ he read from the typed card. “There are several species of shelf fungus. The shelf fungus is a saprophyte which feeds on decaying vegetable matter and can often be found growing on dead trees. You can write your name on the bottom with a stick,” he said. He used to do that at the cottage, without removing the fungus from the tree, and it gave him pleasure to think of his name growing in secret, getting a little bigger every year. It was hard to tell whether or not she was interested.
He found the bench, turned Jordan to face it and unfolded the board. “I was red last time,” he said, “so you get it this time, okay?” There was one chequer missing, on her side. “We’ll use something else,” he said. He looked around for a flat stone, but there wasn’t one. Finally he pulled a button off his shirtsleeves. “That okay?” he said.
Jordan’s hand moved yes. He began the laborious trial-and-error process of determining how she wanted to move. He would point at each chequer in turn until she signalled. Then he would point to each possible square. They could get through a game a lot faster now that he was used to playing this way. Her face would fold and unfold, screw itself up, twitch, movements he found distressing in other CP children still, but not in her. Concentrating made her worse.
They had hardly gone through the opening moves when the bell sounded from the main building. That meant the Play Period was over and it was time for the afternoon group activities. Jordan, he knew, had swimming with the rest of her cabin. She couldn’t swim, but someone held her in the water, where her movements, they said, were more controlled than on land. He himself was supposed to help with Occupational Therapy. “Mud pies,” the boys in his cabin called it. They liked making obscene statues out of clay in order to shock Wilda, the OT instructor, who wanted so much to be able to tell them they were being creative.
Rob put his shirt button into his pocket. He took out the notebook they used and marked down their respective positions. “We’ll finish it tomorrow,” he told Jordan. He wheeled her along the path in the same direction they’d been going, which would get them back sooner, since they were three-quarters of the way around the oval already.
To the north side of the cement path there was a clearing, a stretch of grass and across it the silver of water: the stream that was always there, usually a sluggish trickle but swollen now by last night’s rain. Rob thought, She’s probably never felt grass before, she’s probably never had her hand in a real stream. He suddenly wanted to give her something that no one else ever had, that no one else would ever think of.
“I’m going to take you out,” he told her. “I’m going to put you down on the grass, so you can feel it. Okay?”
There was a hesitation before she signalled yes. She was looking into his face; perhaps she didn’t understand. “It’s fun,” he told her, “it feels nice,” thinking of the many times he had sprawled on the lawn of the back garden, eight or ten years ago, chewing on the white soft ends of grass blades and reading the almost-forbidden Captain Marvel comic books.
He unbuckled the straps that held her in and lifted her thin body. She was so light, lighter even than she looked, a creature of balsa wood and paper. But tough, he told himself. She could take it, you could see it in her eyes. He put her down on the grass, on her side, where she could see the flowing stream.
“There,” he said. He knelt beside her, took her left hand and put it into the cold stream. “That’s real water, not like a swimming pool.” He smiled, feeling magnanimous, a giver, a healer; but she had closed her eyes, and from somewhere a curious sound, a whine, a growl… her body was limp, her arm jerking; suddenly her leg shot out and her foot in its steel-crusted boot kicked him in the shin.