Later, he remembers an ambulance and the voices of the town comforting him. The feeling of being nowhere — between land and sea, life and death, asleep and awake — everything fuzzy at the edges, and coursing through him a great sense of relief, a feeling of flight. Being pulled out, spirited away. He surfaces only briefly from this nowhere and is disappointed when he wakes the next day, fully conscious, in a hospital room, covered in casts.
People talk. They say he and Kenny were playing chicken with the cars. They pass it along as fact and it reaches his mother, who gets very upset. He doesn’t find out about the talk until later, but when he does, he silently agrees with the worst things said, even though he has been told they are not true. He never remembers what happened, but a man from the next town gets arrested for driving with heroin and alcohol in his system. He never finds out what happened to this man.
Katherine comes to the hospital with the others and she brings him books. He reads them — all of them — but which ones, he won’t remember, except for the tale of children who pass through a wardrobe into a world of unimpeachable good and terrible evil, of ice queens and lions; he will remember that one always. Like in so many of the other books she gives him, there is a magic door to step through — a gurgling spring with water that enchants a family into immortality, a golden ring that turns an ordinary Hobbit boy into the hope for all good in his world, a wardrobe that allows children to escape an unhappy house — some ordinary everyday object that acts as a portal into a world humming with wonder.
Because he can’t move yet on crutches, a bed is set up in what his family calls the Backroom. It is a TV room at the end of a long open space that extends from the kitchen and the dining area. The room is two stories high and has a loft with books and games that one can access by a wooden ladder. The far wall of the Backroom has an enormous window that looks out onto an old maple tree that scrapes against the pane and the side of the house. Beyond that, a lawn. And beyond the lawn, the woods. The bedrooms of the house are up the stairs and away from him, and at night he is very much alone. The tree scratches the window, sounds crack from the woods, and a red light blinks on the smoke detector like some kind of evil bead. He will read more and more during this time. Retreat further into himself and feel, in the small bed at the bottom of the large windowed room, breakable.
Friends come and stay the night, teachers bring homework. His mother plays nurse and is attentive to his casts and the physical therapy he’s supposed to do every day. She brings him food and wipes his face, and during the day, when she is around, he feels safe. There is a part of him that wishes this time at home with her would last forever. A month or so later, he returns to school, on crutches, and while he’s relieved to be able to move again, he’s also a little resentful that his old life has resumed, that no one is fussing over and looking out for him.
But before he gets home, before he leaves the hospital, in fact on the first day he gets there, the nurse brings him a bedpan that he is meant to pee into. He is immobile, cannot get himself to the bathroom, and in a flash sees the broken bones as something good, something lucky. A way to somehow shatter the always pattern of fiddling and jumping and upset and relief. Newly thirteen, and there is a little crack in what has up until now been an immovable door. There is, miraculously, hope. He pees into the bedpan and it feels like he’s pissing a thousand shards of glass but his hands don’t fly to his penis. While he is in the hospital he is able to pee without touching himself, every time.
A year and a half later, chubby, hairless, too pretty, and often mistaken for a girl, he goes to Australia as an exchange student. Between that time and the time in the hospital, there are many moments of triumph when he stands before a urinal and pees without the old ritual. There are also many setbacks, times when he has to retreat into a stall and wrestle with himself for nearly an hour. It goes on like this until the spell that will forever remain a mystery to him begins to fade. It starts when he is still in Australia, when hair finally arrives under his arms and crotch, when muscles gently bloom under his baby fat and inches happen, height happens. These developments occur so quietly and incrementally that he doesn’t notice them until he comes home and is at once aware that the energy around him has changed, that people react to him differently. And as all these prayed-for things appear and happen, his old nemesis quietly slinks away. He returns after six months in Australia and never again, not even once, panics before a toilet.
It will all be forgotten: every locked door, every hour he fretted in bathrooms, every flight into the woods where no one could see. It is not until he is twenty-six years old that he remembers that he ever struggled. And then, when he finally does, he remembers it all.
There will never be any explanation for his childhood affliction. Nothing beyond theories, some commingling of psychology and pediatric diagnosis, but nothing concrete or definitive.
Katherine and he will date and kiss and go out and not go out and avoid each other and have dramatic reunions all through grammar school, high school, college, and after. She will go to Scotland to an illustrious university in an ancient town by the sea and read a trilogy by a great Scottish writer about a girl and her family — about everything — that she will quote from often. She will eventually drop out and drift to Montana. A few years later, he will go to a university in Scotland in an ancient city — this one in the hills and not nearly as illustrious — and read that same trilogy and never in his life stop quoting from it. Boyfriends and a husband of hers will refuse to let her see him. Girlfriends and boyfriends of his will eye her warily. As adults they keep their distance. They write many letters. He reads all the books she ever cared about. He carries her opinions and interpretations around as if they are his until at some point, sometime after Scotland, he begins to find books of his own and to shape, slowly, opinions of his own. He graduates from her and both know it, she long before him.
But before that happens, the summer before he goes away to a small college on the eastern shore of Maryland, they drink a bottle of very expensive wine from one of two cases his mother is holding for a dear friend in a bitter divorce. They eventually finish off both cases and find out years later that it was very expensive indeed. They drink that first exquisite bottle of wine, with a griffin on the label, as they sit on a mountain called Indian. She throws pebbles into his shorts until it is clear that she wants him to take them off. She takes hers off, too, and he does the thing he had not done before but she had. It feels like a miracle that it is happening at all, but that it is with her makes it feel blessed, meant to be, but also something like incest. For years he will think it happened in a field her father owned, one night on the way to a play. But it will be her memory, her story, they agree on.
Uptown
How can he be here? How? I look back through the peephole again and again, and each time I am hoping that the paranoid fantasy that Noah is at the other side of the door has vanished and there is no one in the hall. But each time I look, there he is. And not alone. A large man in a heavy tan coat is standing behind him. He is talking into a cell phone and I’m sure he’s a cop or a DEA agent.