“Do you want to know what happened?” I say.
“He got hit with a batting cage, you said.” Ann produces a business-size envelope from her trench coat pocket and moves back a step toward the admissions desk, indicating I should come with her. It is another release form. I am releasing my son into the world. Too early.
“He got hit with a baseball, in a batting cage,” I say.
Ann says nothing, just looks at me as if I’m being overly fastidious about these large-scale events. “Wasn’t he wearing a helmet of some kind?” she says, inching back, drawing me on.
“No. He got mad at me and just ran in the cage, and stood there for a couple of pitches, then he just let one hit him in the face. I put the money in for him.” I feel my eyes, for the third time in less than twenty-four hours, cloud with hot tears I don’t want to be there.
“Oh,” Ann says, her envelope in her left hand. One of the Oriental micro-nurses looks up at me in a nose-high, nearsighted way, then goes back to charting. Tears mean nothing in the emergency room.
“I don’t think he wanted to put his eye out,” I say, my eyes brimming. “But he may have wanted to get whacked. To see what it felt like. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”
“No,” Ann says, and shakes her head, staring at me.
“Well, I have, and I wasn’t crazy.” I say this much too loudly. “When Ralph died. And after you and I got divorced. I’d have been happy to take a hard one in the eye. It would’ve been easier than what I was doing. I just don’t want you to think he’s nuts. He’s not.”
“It was probably just an accident,” she says imploringly. “It isn’t your fault.” Though she is meticulous, her own eyes go shiny against all effort and instinct. I am not supposed to see her cry, remember? It violates the divorce’s creed.
“It is my fault. Sure it is,” I say, terribly. “You even dreamed about it. He should’ve been wearing protective eye covering and a suit of armor and a crash helmet. You weren’t there.”
“Don’t feel that way,” Ann says and actually smiles, though bleakly. I shake my head and wipe my left eye, where there seem to be too many tears. Her seeing me cry is not an issue in my code of conduct. There is no issue between us. Which is the issue.
Ann takes a deep unassured breath, then shakes her head as a signal of what I’m not supposed to do now: make things worse. Her left, ringless hand rises as if by itself and places the envelope on the green plastic admissions counter. “I don’t think he’s crazy. He just may need some assistance right now. He was probably trying to make you notice him.”
“We all need assistance. I was just trying to make him do something.” I am suddenly angry with her for knowing but knowing wrongly what everybody’s supposed to do and how and why. “And I will feel this way. When your dog gets run over, it’s your fault. When your kid gets his eye busted, that’s your fault. I was supposed to help manage his risks.”
“Okay.” She lowers her head, then steps to me and takes one sleeve again as she did when she gave me one small kiss and talked me into agreeing for my son to fly to Yale. She lets her face go sideways against my chest, her body relaxed as a way for me to know she’s trying — trying to slip back between the walls of years and words and events, and listen to my heartbeat as a surety that we are both now alive, if we’re nothing else, together. “Don’t just be mad,” she says in a whisper. “Don’t be so mad at me.”
“I’m not mad at you.” I am whispering too, into her dark hair. “I’m just so something else. I don’t think I know the word. There’s not a word for it, maybe.”
“That’s what you like, though. Isn’t it?” She’s holding my arm now, though not too tight, as the nurses behind us politely turn their faces.
“Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes it is. Just not now. I’d like to have a word now. I’m in between words, I guess.”
“That’s okay.” I feel her body grow taut and begin to pull away. She would have a word for it. It’s her precise way of truth. “Sign this paper now, won’t you? So we can get things going? Get him all fixed up?”
“Sure,” I say, letting go. “I’ll be glad to.”
And of course, finally, I am.
Henry Burris is a dapper, white-thatched, small-handed, ruddy-cheeked little medico in white duck pants, more expensive deck shoes than mine and a pink knit shirt straight — in all probability — from Thomas Pink. He is sixty, has the palest, clearest limestone-blue eyes and when he talks does so in a close, confidential South Carolina low-country drawl, while keeping a light grip on my wrist as he tells me everything’s going to be all right with my son. (Zero chance, I now believe, that he and Ann are playing sexual shenanigans, owing chiefly to his height, but also because Henry is famously attached to a highly prized, implausibly leggy and also rich wife named Jonnee Lee Burris, heiress to a gypsum fortune.) Ann has in fact told me, while we waited together like old friends in an airport, that the Burrises are the touchstones for everyone’s glowingest marital aspirations there in otherwise divorce-happy Deep River; and likewise in New Haven, where Henry runs Yale-Bunker Eye Clinic, having given up Nobel Prize-caliber research in favor of selfless humanitarian service and family time — not an obvious candidate for a roll in the hay, though who’s ever not a candidate?
“Now, Frank, lemme tell ya, I once had to perform a procedure just like the one I’m going to do on young Paul when I was down at Duke twelve years ago. Visiting Professor of Ophthalmology.” Henry has already drawn me an impressive freehand picture of Paul’s eye but is spindling it now like an unwanted grocery store circular while he’s talking (secretly condescending, of course, since I’m his friend’s second wife’s first husband and probably a goofball with no Yale connections). “It was on a big fat black lady who’d somehow been hit in the eye by some damn kids throwing horse apples right out in her yard. Black kids too, now, not a racial matter.”
We are on the back lawn of the hospital, out beside the blue-and-white square landing pad, where a large red Sikorsky from Connecticut Air Ambulance is resting on its sleds, its rotor gliding leisurely around. From out here, a modest hilltop and perfect setting for a picnic, I can see the shaded Catskills, their hazy runnels plowing south to blue sky and, in the intermediate distance below, a fenced cube of public tennis courts, all in use, beyond which I-88 leads to Binghamton and back up to Albany. I can hear no traffic noise, so that the effect on me is actually pleasant.
“And so this black lady said to me, just as we were about to shoot her up with anesthetic, ‘Doctah Burris, if today was a fish, I’d sho th’ow it back.’ And she grinned the biggest old snaggle-tooth grin, and off she went to sleep.” Henry rounds his eyes out wide and tries to suppress a whooping laugh with a phony mouth-shut grimace — his usual bedside performance.
“What happened to her?” Gently I free my wrist and let it dangle, my eyes drawn helplessly back to the copter thirty yards away, where Paul Bascombe is right now being professionally on-loaded by two attendants, in advance of waving good-bye.