“No. Not at all.”
“But that’s where you went when you were attacked outside this building that other time?” Tim said. “You told me you’d been to a museum library.”
She said nothing, gazing at him steadily. If he got angry, this might be over. Her heart beat harder.
“You lied to me.”
“Yes. I should not have. But you keep me on such a tight leash, you hem in my movements every minute, you check up on me… I’m not a child, and I resent being monitored constantly.”
“It’s my job to keep you safe. I’m doing my fucking job.”
He was right. Before she could think what she wanted next, he said, “Ah, Marianne, let’s not claw at each other. We’re both just tired. Come to bed.”
His solution to everything. But she went, from remorse at having lied to him or from obligation or from sheer confusion in her own mind. Not from desire. For the first time, the sex between them didn’t work, and they ended up lying in the bed with a foot of sheet between them, neither saying anything, both alone with their thoughts.
The tree was really old.
Colin leaned against its trunk, listening, although what he really wanted to do was put his ear to the ground and listen to everything down there. But that would look weird to the other kids on the playground. It was a pretty small playground, because the Healy School was squished between big New York buildings. The playground had this tree by itself near the fence, a bunch of littler trees where the third-grade girls sat with their teacher, a basketball concrete where the third-grade boys were jumping and shouting, and some slides and stuff. The rest of the first-graders were on those. Only two classes got recess at a time because there just wasn’t room. People had to wait their turn.
Maybe if Colin snuck behind the tree and lay down, nobody would notice him. There were bushes near there, too. The ground was muddy and cold and he would get his clothes dirty, but he really really wanted to listen to the tree and bushes. He slipped behind the bushes and lowered himself to the ground. It hurt because ever since Paul kicked him yesterday, Colin’s belly had pain in it. Nonetheless, he pressed his ear hard against the muddy soil.
So much was going on down there! Clicks and rumbles and high-pitched sounds and low-pitched sounds. Some of them he’d heard before, but he didn’t know what any of them meant. They weren’t real sentences, of course, but they must mean something, like when thirsty plants made noises to want water. But these plants weren’t thirsty; it’d rained really hard last night. Also, the tree branches above him were making noises. So many interesting sounds…
And then another one. Colin, flat on his stomach, raised his head. That hurt his belly, too. He saw black boots.
“Hey, Jenner. No school guard here now.” Paul spoke very fast, like the words were bursting out of him. “That guard called my father, you know? You got me in trouble for sassing back and it’s your fault, you piece of shit.”
The tree branch above them made another sound.
Paul raised his boot to kick Colin.
Colin rolled to one side—it hurt his middle to do that!—and Paul followed him. Colin lay still and squeezed his eyes shut. Now now NOW…
The dead branch on the old tree cracked with a noise anyone could hear, and it hurled down on Paul. He screamed.
People rushed toward them, kids and teachers and a security guard. Then there were sirens and an ambulance and police—not a school guard but a real New York cop, with a gun—asking Colin questions. He kept his hands over his belly while he answered the questions. He said he and Paul were playing, and did not say that Paul had kicked him once before and was going to kick him again. What if they found out that he made Paul move to stand under the tree branch just before it was going to fall? They might put him in jail! Nobody must know what really happened, not any of it, not ever… Paul was not moving. “Concussion,” somebody said, and Paul was taken away in the ambulance.
Colin clutched at his teacher’s hand. She looked down at him, surprised and concerned, but he did it mostly because his legs felt so wobbly. Still, the pain in his middle was less now.
Don’t let Paul die, Colin thought. If that happened, Colin would be a murderer, just like on TV. Don’t let Paul die!
But…. don’t let him come back to school soon, either.
“Colin, what’s wrong?” Grandma said.
They were eating dinner, Grandma and Tim and Colin and Jason, and Jason was talking about some clay maps that his class was making in school. Or maybe not clay but something else. Colin couldn’t listen very well and he couldn’t eat either.
“Hey, buddy,” Tim said, “do you feel all right?”
“I’m… good.”
Jason said, “You don’t look good.”
“I’m…” Colin threw up all over his dinner plate. “It hurts!”
“What hurts?” Grandma said, jumping up. “Tim, he’s sweating like a pig!”
Did pigs sweat? Colin didn’t know. He started to cry, and everything got fuzzy except the picture in his head of a pig, sweating tears.
Icy needles pierced Marianne’s gut as the ER doctor ran her hands over Colin. “What is it?” Marianne said. No no no, I can’t lose Colin too—
“Spleen. It’s been bleeding for a while. Did he injure it in the last twenty-four hours?”
“No! Not that I know of!”
“Grandma! A boy—” Colin fainted.
The next half hour was a blur. Then, as if it had all happened in a moment, Marianne found herself standing outside an operating room while a different doctor, dressed in blue scrubs, spoke to her in rapid sentences.
“The spleen appears to have been damaged sometime in the last few days and was slowly bleeding into itself until it stabilized. Did he complain of pain yesterday or this morning?”
“No, but he was pale and sort of weak-seeming, and then he seemed to get better. Is—”
“It takes a fairly hard blow to cause spleen injury.”
He was looking at her with suspicion. All Marianne could do was shake her head.
“The initial blow caused the spleen to rupture. The peritoneal cavity is filling with blood. The operating team is going in to take out the spleen, and he is receiving a blood transfusion. He should survive this, and the effects on his life will be minimal, but you should know that we are obligated to report this to the child-protection people.”
It barely registered. “But he’ll be all right? He’ll be all right?”
“We’ll certainly do everything we can.” He disappeared into the operating room. Marianne staggered to a chair in a waiting area and dropped into it, her eyes fastened to the door through which the doctor had disappeared. Tim took her hand.
It was the worst hour of her life. Ryan was damaged, Noah was gone, Elizabeth was furious at her—but they were all still alive. Marianne sat unmoving, scarcely breathing, as if her own motionlessness could keep Colin from leaving her. Jason sat pressed so close to Tim that he seemed to want to blend into him. If either of them spoke to her, she didn’t hear. Her eyes remained trained, unblinking, on the door through which the surgeon would come.
He did, eventually. “Mrs. Carpenter? Colin will be fine.”
Marianne could move again.
“We removed the spleen. He can function normally without it, although he may be more than usually susceptible to certain types of infection for the rest of his life. He can go home in a day or two. You’ll get discharge directions.”
“Let me see him.”