Читать книгу The World of Normal Boys - K.M. Soehnlein - Страница 10

Chapter Three

The next day, after school, he goes to a place that he has been warned against. At the east end of the reservoir, where he regularly rides his bike on Sunday afternoons, is an unpaved road. You’d hardly notice it driving a car; its entrance is a sharp right turn past some high trees just where the main road loops left. At school Robin has overheard kids mention a hidden pond at the end of that road—they call it the Ice Pond and talk about it as a place where every illicit thing happens, a place where adults don’t venture. Robin mentioned it once to his mother, who dismissed it as local lore: “Oh, just another one of those fabled lovers’ lanes.”

“You should hear the stories about what goes on there,” Robin told her, immediately regretting the wondrous tone of his voice.

“What’s the big interest?” she asked, staring suspiciously.

“No biggie.”

“I suggest you stay away. I’m sure it’s positively seedy. Soused-up, hormonal bullies trying to impress their girlfriends.”

The story that Robin cannot forget, that compels him this early October afternoon to steer his ten-speed impulsively down the road toward the Ice Pond, was whispered just a few days before, in the locker room after his phys. ed. class. Donny Meier and Seth Carter were talking about a contest: the two of them and a couple others drinking beer and then trying to knock the cans off a stump with the force of their piss. Donny saying, “That was really fucked up,” and Seth saying, “We should do it again, for a goof,” and Donny agreeing, “Yeah, we gotta get Danniman to come along again. He’ll probably put a hole through the can.” And then they both laughed, and Seth said, “Long Dong Danniman,” and Donny said, “Aw, man, that’s fucked up.”

Robin usually ignores locker room conversations. He can rarely find a way into the back-and-forth of them, the language and rhythm that boys his age all seem to understand instinctively. He does not give himself a reason that this one is different, but simply lets the picture form: the boys, their pants around their ankles, the elastic bands of their underwear tugged beneath their dicks. He hears the air split by the hissing streams, the ruffle of piss on dry leaves, the ping as cans are struck and topple. Donny Meier’s laughing mouth, and Seth Carter’s brown bangs feathered across his excited eyes, and Billy “Long Dong” Danniman with it in his hand. He lets this picture form and then, when he gets to what he most wants to see, snaps it off guiltily.

He speeds toward the pond as if outrunning a pursuing authority. The dirt road is just wide enough for a car to get through, with crisscrossing tire treads layered deep. In the stillness of the woods, his bike’s chain is loud as a motor. The wheels kick up pebbles and stiff clumps of dirt that smack him in the back—each nick almost pleasurable, a small hardship to reinforce the adventure of this unplanned ride.

He reaches a clearing strewn with litter: empty beer containers, mangled newspapers, cast off, soiled clothing. No cars—he is relieved, and vaguely disappointed. He dismounts, sets his bike on its kickstand in the soft, trodden earth and follows the edge of the pond toward a place where granite boulders are piled as high as his shoulders. In the charred remnants of a campfire, a piece of ripped, colored foil gleams among the cigarette butts, the word “Trojan” embossed upon it. He’s only ever heard of Trojans; he scans the ground for what was once inside this wrapper, not sure exactly what a rubber even looks like. Seeing nothing that fits the description, he pockets the wrapper, a souvenir of his visit.

Water laps at the silty shore; crows squawk from treetops. All else is silence. Robin removes his shoes and socks, lets his feet dangle from a rock into the pond. The water isn’t icy at all—it’s warm, soothing. He hikes up his pants and glides in to his ankles, the pond’s bottom soft as mashed potatoes. Do the kids who hang out here ever go swimming? He conjures up late-night skinny-dipping parties, the sexual laughter of older teenagers, a bonfire glowing upon wet bodies and aluminum beer cans and foil Trojan wrappers. Todd Spicer might come to a party like that.

He is gripped by the sudden, terrifying notion that someone is watching, but scanning the pond’s perimeter, he sees no one. Not a soul. The rarity of this solitude makes him giddy—when is he ever completely alone? And then, before even comprehending the action, he is back on shore, impulsively tugging off his clothes. He wades into the water, naked, mud squishing up through his toes. He holds his balance and keeps walking, pausing, with a gasp, when his balls hit the water’s surface. He doesn’t want to get his hair wet—doesn’t think he could explain it to his mother later—but he lowers himself down to his shoulders.

He touches his dick under the water, grabs it between his fingers, wiggles until it stiffens. He hops up and down, careful at first not to slip, and feels his hardness cutting through the water. A quick fear of a fish biting him there makes him stop, and then he laughs at the thought—Yeah, right, like Jaws lives in the Ice Pond. He laughs out loud, his laughter surrounding him, free and unleashed. The sound fills the air for a few moments—all he can allow himself before fear of discovery closes in again.

He makes his way back to the shore, hiding himself behind the boulders, and shakes himself off like a dog. His dick is still hard—with his hand he presses it against his belly, then looks around again, expecting someone to be nearby. He is still alone; he rubs himself some more, letting the warmth build underneath his palm until it travels through his body. He keeps at it until the friction is too much and just as he thinks he should stop—What am I doing? Someone might drive up—he finds he is so weak against his own will that he can’t not continue. He looks at the mud streaking down his legs and the beer cans around his feet, he thinks of the pissing contest, Donny and Seth and Long Dong Danniman—longer than himself, longer than this thing in his hand—their pissing contest happened right here, at the Ice Pond. They stood side by side, as he’s seen them in the locker room, pissing next to each other the way he and Jackson have done at home, crossing streams into the toilet. He sees himself doing that with Todd Spicer—standing right here, feet planted in the garbage and the Trojans, their streams crossing, the two of them with their things in their hands, Todd without underwear, just his skin and his bushy hair under his open fly and his hand shaking out the piss, his strong hands, his arms with their definite muscles, shaking the piss out of his thing right next to Robin, making him shiver and gasp—Robin is gasping, he is standing but it feels like falling, falling through thick humid air. He braces his back against the rocks behind him and watches the pink tip of his dick open up and shoot out something that is not piss. It lands on the garbage at his feet—a wet, white shower on the char-black ashes.

He has a moment of stunned disbelief that he let this happen, out here where anyone could see. Sweat trickles down his ribs. He breathes deep, he feels as if he hasn’t breathed for hours, that time has bent around him. Disbelief gives way to shame: he hurries back into his clothes and onto his bike, his untucked shirt flapping as he pedals away.

On the dirt road a car is approaching, a guy at the wheel, a girl snuggling up next to him. Robin panics—just a few minutes earlier and they would have seen him!—and loses his grip on the handlebars, skidding to the side, his wheel grinding into a spindly bush. The driver stares at him quizzically as he passes. Robin snaps a branch from his spokes and continues his escape, all the way home imagining that guy and girl discovering his white goop on the ground amid the garbage. He imagines that they could read the splatter like tea leaves and discern what he was thinking while it happened. They could chase him down and have him arrested for being a pervert in public.

All that is left is the embarrassment of returning with a secret. The leaves above him are shiny with diamonds of light breaking through, the sun falling lower in the sky, stretching across the front yard as he turns into the driveway. He’s rehearsing a quick speech for his mother, something designed to spare him too much explanation—I rode into town to play Asteroids—when he recognizes Uncle Stan’s car in the driveway.

As he swings open the screen door, his mother stands at the counter, an oven mitt on one hand and a glass of wine in the other.

Stan’s voice carries above the clamor of the nightly news from the living room TV set. “Come on, Dottie. If it’s ready, let me have a piece now.”

Dorothy faces Robin, but raises her voice loud enough to carry to the living room. “I thought your uncle came over to apologize for his boorish behavior last night, but he seems to be doing nothing but barking orders.”

“I’m hungry,” Stan says.

“Well, if your son wasn’t keeping my son out playing through dinnertime, maybe we’d be able to sit down and eat.” She turns off the oven and leaves a tray of lasagna on the stove. “And where have you been?”

“Nowhere. Just riding my bike.” A chill moves along his skin, and he wonders if he’ll catch a cold from having been naked in the water. Or if maybe he did something bad to himself by touching his thing like that.

Dorothy flicks her head to the side in exasperation and throws up her hands, sloshing liquid over the lip of her glass. “Fine, everyone just run around and play while I try to get dinner ready. Don’t offer any help. Fine. ”

“Where’s Ruby?” he asks.

“I sent her out to fetch Larry and Jackson. I think they’re at the playground.” She glances at the clock on the stove. “She should have been back already.”

Smelling the lasagna, Robin realizes how hungry he is. “Well, if it’s done, maybe we should just start.”

Dorothy sighs at last and gulps down a mouthful of wine. Robin watches her throat move above the soft depression between her collarbones. Her chest is flush. He has a flash from the night before—her skin was ghostly white then, her face a morbid contortion as the vomit dripped from her lips. “Do you still feel sick?”

“Just fed up,” she says. “I’m trying to make dinner and no one’s around. Your father’s coming home late. Here, bring your uncle some dinner and let him eat in there by himself. What do I care anyway?” She takes off her apron and picks up her purse. “I’m going to have a cigarette.”

“Really?” He’s stunned—smoking at home! He’s only ever seen her smoke in the city.

She pulls her Pall Malls from her purse and walks to the screen door. “Everyone else is doing what they want.”

Robin follows her with his eyes; through the screen door, she looks grainy, like a newspaper photo. Taking a drag of her cigarette, she raises her nearly empty wineglass and calls out, “Clark MacKenzie, you poor excuse for a family man, where the hell are you?”

Robin carries the lasagna and a fork to his uncle. “I’m so hungry I could eat a pigeon at a Chinese restaurant,” Stan says, spearing the fork into the pasta before Robin’s fully let go of the plate.

Robin’s own appetite seems to have instantly disappeared. “Where’s Aunt Corinne tonight?”

“She’s at one-a those meetings again, getting brainwashed into selling vitamins,” his uncle blurts out angrily. “There’s a load of quackery if I ever heard of it. Not to mention a conspiracy to undermine the American family farmer.”

Robin scowls. Uncle Stan is always putting Aunt Corinne down. For years, she was sort of quiet, almost mopey at times. If you asked her for anything she complained that everyone took from her and no one gave back—the way his mother sounded a minute ago. But lately she’s been in a better mood. She’s started selling vitamins, and it seemed to make her happy to have something to do besides wait on Stan and Larry. She’d even begun wearing streaks of pink and purple blush on her cheeks. “For contour,” she told Robin, “to thin out the face.”

Robin has come to like his aunt; he feels the need to come to her defense. “I read in Time magazine that researchers are discovering vitamins and other nutrients are more important than anyone ever knew.” It was actually his mother who read the article and told him about it, and as he parrots back her words he worries about Jackson’s accusation that he talks too much like her.

“Well, if you look at who’s selling vitamins, it’s all Jews. Like that guy Goldberg who got my wife hooked. You get all the nutrients you need if you eat three square meals a day. My mother never took vitamins and she’s a hundred years old and big as a house.”

The fact that Stan is actually his mother’s brother, that they were created by the same chemistry, is always a difficult leap for Robin’s imagination to make; he tends to think of his uncle as a weird neighbor who shows up for a free dinner from time to time. He tries to picture his mother and Stan growing up in the same house—Nana’s old place on Route 7, near Northampton. Robin can still remember it, back when Grampa Leo was alive: the front porch with the broken railing, the dusty pantry under the staircase, where you could hide and jump out at someone to scare them, those smelly chicken coops in the backyard with the crusty turds along the edge. Dorothy tells a story about Stan as a child, peeing into the coop and a chicken taking a nip at his wiener. It is one of the few stories he has heard his mother tell about their childhood.

He squints his eyes at Stan, looking for a physical resemblance at the very least. The nose, maybe: it’s a good nose, really, not too big but definitely not a pug like Larry’s. And the cheekbones have that same curve as on his mother’s face, enough to create a decent smile without looking like a chipmunk. He could even imagine that Stan was a handsome guy before he grew up and his stomach bloated from too much beer and his face got rubbery around the jaw.

He watches the lasagna piling up behind Stan’s thin lips, mush shoveled in upon mush, suddenly fascinated by the grotesqueness of it all.

“Your mother just doesn’t know how to get it right,” he is saying as he chews, “with the spices and everything. I tell you, I’m a lucky SOB, having a mother who cooks for a living. Only time I ever see my wife in the kitchen is when she’s raiding the fridge. Women today, terrible cooks.”

“Aunt Corinne makes that Jell-O cake for my birthday. That’s pretty good,” Robin says. “With the different colors and the Cool Whip holding it together.”

“Yeah, you and that Jell-O cake. Damn thing would fall apart after one bite. I’d say, ‘Corinne, how ’bout a pumpkin pie,’ and she’d say, ‘I’m making Jell-O cake. It’s Robin’s favorite.’ If it wasn’t for you and that Jell-O cake I might have had a decent dessert once and a while.”

Robin decides he has had enough and begins to stand. He spits out a phrase he has heard his mother say a thousand times, whenever he or his brother and sister complain too much: “I didn’t know I caused you so much grief.”

Stan drops his fork and leans forward. “Sit down, Robin,” he commands. “Let’s have a talk.”

Robin buckles under the authority in Stan’s eyes and lowers himself onto a chair.

“You, Robin, are the kind of kid who’s been mollycoddled all his life and thinks he’s better than everyone else. I knew a kid like you when I was growing up. Dodo Scanlon. Donald, but we called him Dodo. Which is funny, now that I think about it, ’cause a dodo is a bird, and you’re named after a bird, so there’s something to it.”

“Dodo Scanlon?” Dorothy is suddenly in the doorway, her voice trembling. “Dodo Scanlon was a little genius whose life became the ninth circle of hell thanks to you. You and that bunch of greasers you associated with! Stan, you just don’t know when to stop—”

Stan interrupts, his voice smug. “At least I know when to stop drinking.”

“You bastard.” A curtain of silent tension descends upon the room. Robin’s head is spinning; it feels as if he’s on a playground, waiting for the punches to fly. He wants to speak up, to help his mother, but before he comes up with anything to say or do, Dorothy’s gaze meets his. “I think,” she says, “you should go fetch your brother and sister.”

Summer has made one last defiant appearance. The evening air is warm, the streets bruised with orange light punching through the empty oaks. Robin heads toward the playground. He makes a path between the sidewalk and the curb, kicking up leaves as he goes. The ones on top are dry and crisp and flutter to his side; beneath these, a slick layer has already been flattened into the dying grass.

He walks down Bergen Avenue, where he has lived for nine of the thirteen years of his life, past the Delatores’ and the Feeneys’, past the house where Mr. Kelly, whose wife died last year, lives, past Mrs. Lueger, who is sweeping her cement stoop as she does every night before her husband comes home from work. Robin waves to Mrs. Lueger out of habit, and she waves back without a word. He watches her turn her gaze across the hedge, trying to catch a look at the young couple next door, who are laughing over a flaming hibachi at the back of their driveway. Robin doesn’t know their names; they are new to the block. Everyone refers to them as The Hippies. They have friends who ride motorcycles. A few days before, Robin heard Mrs. Feeney announce that she is sure the couple smoke dope, to which Mrs. Delatore responded: “They’re probably growing it back there.” There has been a lot of talk about drugs lately; in group guidance, Robin has sat through several films depicting teenagers who were “slipped a mickey” and wind up throwing themselves from open windows or losing their minds into a trippy haze of colors and wild sounds; even the ones who try to return to regular lives are always at the mercy of acid flashbacks.

He turns left onto Hopkins, crosses Kickmer and then Whalen and then Tully. The streets of Greenlawn are all named for local men killed in wars. Every year the names are read at the Memorial Day rally in the park. He turns down Lester, takes it to the end, where the woods begin. There is a broken concrete path that cuts between the old oaks and winds into the playground behind Crossroads Elementary.

The school is an orderly brick building, one story high with a flat roof, tucked between the street and the woods. He has spent more time in this building—kindergarten through sixth grade—than any place except home, but in the three years since he’s gone to school here everything, he realizes, has changed. The building is so small. The windows are low to the ground, the doors, painted green, look quaint, like doors on a clubhouse. Crude, construction paper goblins and witches and pumpkins are taped to the windows. He remembers creating such things himself. It didn’t change, he realizes. I changed. He sticks his hands in his pockets and fingers the sharp foil edge of the Trojan wrapper. He is unexpectedly struck by the notion that he was a child here, that he is not a child, not in the same way. He wonders, how did this happen? I didn’t plan for it.

The sun is now quite low in the sky, a blood red disk licking the tops of trees and houses. Across the playground, almost in silhouette, is the slide. With the asphalt ground, its two legs form a triangle: on one side the ascending ladder, on the other the metal trough. Ruby is in a dress on the tiny platform at the top, gripping the handrails, Jackson stands at the base of the ladder, and Larry leans upward from the mouth of the chute, yelling, “Ruby MacKenzie, slide on down!” As Robin gets closer he can see that Larry is wagging his tongue at her and wiggling his butt in the air like an excited puppy ready to pounce.

Ruby pivots to climb back down the ladder, but Jackson, at the bottom, is an obstacle to her escape. “Come on, Ruby,” he says. “Time’s a-wastin’.”

“I mean it,” she says.

“No way,” Jackson says. “Only one way up, only one way down.”

Larry lets out a “Woo-hoo!”

Robin calls across the playground, “You guys.” And then louder when they don’t respond, “It’s suppertime.”

“Move it, Ruby,” Jackson says, then steps onto the ladder.

“No fair,” Ruby yells. “Get off!” Jackson takes another step. Ruby sees Robin approaching. She calls to him, “Make him cut it out.”

“Jackson, get off,” Robin says.

So many years of recess on this playground have imprinted certain rules in Robin’s head, and one of the first ones is that you can’t get on the ladder until the person before you slides down. The ease with which Jackson dismisses this concept angers Robin, not because he cares about the rule so much but because Jackson cares about it not at all. He is nagged by Jackson’s carefree attitude, more so by the way it intimidates him.

“Get out of the way, Larry,” Robin says.

“Shut up. I’m not doing anything.”

Jackson is now halfway up the ladder. Robin reaches up and swats his leg. “Jackson, get off.” But Jackson continues his climb, one step at a time. Then Larry, on the other end of the slide, begins walking up. The metal is too smooth for his shoes to get a grip so he drops to his belly and begins slithering up toward the top.

Ruby yells, “I’ll jump over the side. I mean it.”

“No, no, don’t jump,” Larry snarls, continuing his upward slither. “Let me rescue you.” He is about halfway to her, his chest at the point where the slide bulges.

“We’re eating dinner, cut it out,” Robin says. “Get off the ladder, Jackson. Cut it out, Larry.”

He hates the sound of his own voice. He knows that they won’t listen to him. He makes another grab for Jackson, which sends Jackson scampering to the top. Jackson pauses long enough to smirk at Robin and wave his fists above his shoulders, like a weightlifter flexing his muscles.

Robin’s exasperation is at its limit, and he does something he doesn’t want to do—something he thinks is exactly what Jackson wants him to do, which makes it even worse—he gets on the ladder himself. He scurries up the steps and reaches out for Jackson’s leg. Jackson hops up one final rung, forcing himself onto the landing right next to Ruby. He circles his arm around her neck and hisses back toward Robin. “One false move and she’s dead.”

Ruby shrieks. From the other side, Larry grabs her by the ankles and she shrieks again. Robin thinks they might really push Ruby off. He improvises a karate chop into Jackson’s shinbone. Jackson yelps and loosens his grip enough for Ruby to free herself. She squats down and pounds her fists into Larry’s head.

“Everyone go down the slide,” Robin yells. “Now!” He hears the command in his words—his voice at last has some authority to it—but he knows it is too late. Ruby is twisting out of Larry’s grip and leaning back into Jackson, and Robin is trying to hold Jackson in place and reach toward Ruby at the same time, and then Ruby and Robin are both squeezing Jackson between them. Disorientation overwhelms him—the sky is darkening above and the pavement blurs way down below and the four of them, somewhere in the center of it all, compress tighter in struggle. No one is speaking, their throats release only grunts. Robin grabs the denim of Jackson’s pants in his fist and feels him wriggling away, feels the material pull across his fingernails, senses the intent in Jackson’s escape. He tightens his fist but now there is nothing to hold, he senses Jackson lurching away from him, away from all of them. Robin makes a lunge at Jackson, and then Jackson is being pulled upward, his legs rising, his body slipping across the metal curve of the railing, arcing into the wide empty dusk. Jackson is flying.

There is a gasp. Then a sucking whoosh. Then a collision, a stone split open.

Stillness.

Robin looks at Ruby, at her amazed eyes, her mouth straining against silence. He looks at Larry, who is sliding backwards on his belly. He looks into the air where he last saw Jackson. The only place left to look is down.

The wrinkled red and blue stripes of Jackson’s shirt, the back of his shirt.

A curve of skin—Jackson’s neck, very white against the ground.

His face in profile, an open eye, the shell of his ear.

His legs are stretched apart from each other. It is all twisted up, it is not making sense to Robin.

Larry is there, down below. Larry breathing loud, his breath is a chain pulling sounds back into the night—cars moving in the street and crickets chirping and a distant door slamming shut. Larry shoves Jackson’s shoulder and Jackson’s torso rolls sideways but his head stays the same. There is a terrible new noise: the sound of knuckles cracking. Not knuckles. Jackson’s neck.

“Get up,” Larry says. And then louder: “Get up!”

“Stop!” Ruby cries out. “You’re hurting him!” She slides down to the ground.

Alone on the platform Robin’s confusion dissolves, and he grasps at last what has happened. He begins the climb down the ladder, but each step seems to take an eternity so he leaps out, into the air where Jackson just flew. For a moment he believes he’ll hurt himself, and then he obeys an instinct that says bend your knees for the landing. His feet smack, his knees rush into his armpits, his palms screech along the blacktop. The ground burns into his skin.

Larry is repeating, “Get up, get up,” and Ruby is yelling, “Leave him alone,” and finally Robin speaks in a hollow voice. He says, “Be quiet.” And they are.

Larry runs away. Ruby runs away. Robin calls after them, “Go tell somebody what we did.”

It is just the two of them on the playground for a long time.

This much registers: Jackson is breathing. Robin kneels next to him, watching his body inflate and subside. He brushes his fingertips along the back of Jackson’s neck. The spine is not right, he can tell from the way the skin pulls. He says aloud the words he has heard on TV shows: It’ll be all right. Hang in there. You can make it. He says, Don’t die, and then thinks, No more Jackson. No more dragging him home for dinner. No more having to apologize to strangers for Jackson saying the wrong thing. No more Jackson bouncing around on his bed practicing new curse words. They’ll plant a cherry blossom tree in front of the school like they did for that girl who had leukemia. They’ll write about this in the Community News. They’ll ask me questions.

He is sure he will be blamed.

He wonders if an unconscious person can read minds. He thinks, Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me, Jackson.

A wet ribbon of blood draws from Jackson’s mouth, inching along the ground. Robin dips his index finger into the tip of the stream and it pools around the nail. He puts this finger in his mouth—the taste of a nosebleed. A grain of stone from the playground floor is mixed in with the blood, he pushes it between the tip of his tongue and the back of his teeth. He remembers his own jump to the pavement, checks his hands. There is blood there, too.

It’ll be all right. Hang in there. You can make it. Don’t die. A faint groan travels up from somewhere inside of Jackson. A sob through mucus. His breaths continue, eerie. Wind moving through a cave.

The pavement pushes up into Robin’s knees. He feels it. The hard ground is everything, there is nothing else beneath. No soil, no tangled roots, no Indian bones, no fossils, no magma, no core of the earth. He could not dig down to China. The earth is nothing more than a solid slab of playground.

He puts his fingers in Jackson’s hair, lifts his hand, lets the hair drop back against the skull.

“Don’t touch him!” Dorothy is screaming from the car window. She is speeding onto the playground. The vibrations of the auto reach him first, then the headlights. Jackson looks sicker in the blinding glow. The car seems to roll even after Dorothy jumps out of it. She is hurtling toward them. The place is filled with new smelts—exhaust fumes, scorched tires, the tobacco and wine on Dorothy’s breath.

The ambulance siren cries into the night.

They wait in the hospital, sitting on chairs covered in fuzzy brown material that scratches Robin’s legs and ass through his pants. They entered through the emergency room and then into intensive care. There is a nursing station nearby where the sounds of muffled phone calls can be heard. The sheer amount of activity in the building—two car accidents, a heart attack and Jackson all within the same hour—shrinks the walls around them. Nurses appear from around corners and out of doorways and pass by on their way somewhere else. Robin follows everyone with his eyes.

Jackson is being operated on. A specialist has been called in from New York City. The first time Robin sees a doctor in aqua blue scrubs, face mask and a shower cap he thinks, That must be the specialist. On General Hospital, doctors wear long white coats, their full hair combed neatly. Then he sees another man dressed like this, going a different direction. Later, another. He doesn’t know who anyone is, which ones might have seen his brother’s body, which ones might know the story of the fall. He had tried to explain to his mother in the car but she only listened for a few minutes before making him stop. He tries to picture the surgery. He thinks of a game he owned a couple of years back called “Operation.” A cartoon body with tiny removable body parts. Take out wrenched ankle, the card said. If you touched the skin with the tweezers the game honked at you.

He sits on a chair next to his mother, who clutches his hand in hers. Across from them, Ruby is laying her head in Clark’s lap. She hardly blinks, as if she might be sleeping with her eyes open. His father is crying. He has been crying the entire time, not making a sound, wiping his wet cheeks again and again. Robin is amazed by this sight. He wants to ask questions, but those tears are what keeps him quiet. He looks so handsome, Robin thinks. They both look like new people, so beautiful and serious in their tragic faces.

A man dressed all in white is there suddenly. He is young, with a helmet of blow-dried hair and dark bars on his sleeves. “Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie,” he says in a delicate voice.

His father says, “Yes, Doctor?”

The man smiles. “Oh, I’m the nurse,” he says. “Dr. Glade would like to speak with you. Come with me.”

Robin gets up to go along, but his mother motions for him to stay. “Watch your sister for a minute.”

“Where are you going?”

Dorothy holds her finger to her lips. “Shhh ...”

The man who is a nurse smiles at Robin. As they walk away, Robin hears a siren from down the hallway, toward the parking lot. He imagines that they have left him and Ruby behind to be arrested by the police. You killed your brother, they will accuse. You have the right to remain silent.

The nurse returns and comes over to them. “You must be Robin and Ruby,” he says. “I’m Harold.” Ruby sits up. Robin nods, fearful.

“I hear you got a little scratched up, too,” Harold says to Robin. “Let’s see.” Robin turns his palms face up and lays them on Harold’s outstretched hands, which are warm, a little callused. His own palms are streaked with cuts, some already scabs. There is a film of blacktop powder embedded in his skin. “Why don’t we clean things up a bit?” He motions for them to come with him.

Ruby crosses her arms in front of her. “I’ll wait here,” she says.

“Let’s stick together, OK?” Harold says. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out hard candies wrapped in cellophane. They each refuse.

“I’m staying here for my mom and dad,” Ruby says.

“Come on, Ruby,” Robin pleads.

“No.”

Robin thinks of her at the top of the slide, trapped between Jackson and Larry. He thinks none of this would have happened if she had just slid down into Larry and kicked him. “Don’t act like a baby,” he snaps.

She bursts into loud sobs—her body instantly convulsing. Harold motions to an older woman in white at the nursing station. “Would you keep an eye on Ruby while I clean out Robin’s cuts?” Harold asks.

Ruby’s stare implores Robin to stay, but he feels the sudden urge for an escape. He follows Harold toward an examining room. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and Ruby heaves herself into the lap of the other nurse. “Good girl,” the nurse says. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a hard candy wrapped in cellophane.

The examination room is cold and bright with a black window facing the parking lot. Harold pats his hand on an examination table. The paper crinkles as it gives in to Robin’s weight.

Robin’s hands sting under the antiseptic; he squeezes shut his eyes and bites down on his teeth. Harold is talking about something but Robin doesn’t hear the words. When the bandages have been taped down, he looks up and Harold is smiling.

“How come you have stripes on your uniform?” Robin asks him.

“They give these to the male nurses to identify us.”

“Why? Don’t they already know that you’re a guy?” Robin asks, and Harold laughs. It seems like a real laugh, a laugh that they share.

“Any other questions?” Harold says, lifting him back to his feet.

“Yeah, about a million. Like, about my brother . . .”

Harold pauses, wiping off his instrument table. He sighs. “I’ll take you back out to your parents.”

When he comes back into the waiting area Dorothy is there. “Your father took Ruby home,” she says. “I need a cigarette.” It is the most she’s said to him since they got here.

She walks him out to the parking lot and is lighting up before the automatic doors swing closed behind them. Neither of them has a coat, and the temperature has dropped, so they hurry to the car and sit inside with the heat on and the windows cracked to let out the smoke.

“Jackson is not doing well. He suffered a neck injury.”

“He’s going to live?”

“So it seems.” Robin watches her to try to understand what this means, but she is silent for a while. She inhales. She exhales. Smoke hits the windshield and then flattens out around her. In the momentary glow from the ember, he sees the lines at the corner of her eyes, around her lips, across her forehead. She doesn’t look beautiful now.

She says, “I want you to tell your sister this is not her fault.”

He doesn’t say anything, and then she says, “She told me it was her fault and I don’t want her thinking that way.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“And I want you to tell Larry it is not his fault.”

“OK.” He says this less quickly.

“It’s not anyone’s fault,” Dorothy says, as if convincing herself. “It’s not . . . it’s just something that makes no sense.”

“OK.”

“I need you to be strong for me, Robin. You’re so much stronger than the others.”

“I guess.”

“You are. You are. This is going to be difficult.” She puts out her cigarette in the ashtray, stubs it over and over until every speck of flame is extinguished. Then she pinches the butt between her fingers and throws it through the crack in her window.

“Is Dad mad?” Robin asks.

“He’s very concerned,” she says.

“Very concerned?”

“Yes, dear. He’s waiting to see—”

“—If Jackson’s going to die.”

Dorothy leans back in the seat, focuses her eyes into the rearview mirror. She pokes at the corner of her eye as if flecking something painful from it. She says, “I don’t think it’s that bad. We don’t know how bad it is.”

He hears her impatience with him, which makes her words less convincing. It makes him angry with her, and when he speaks again there is spite in his voice. “He could have brain damage or turn into a vegetable or a retard with a crooked body spilling his food on the floor and shitting in his pants.”

“Good Lord, Robin, enough! We don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.” It sounds like an order.

He asks, “Are you mad at me?”

“No, of course not. Of course not.” Long pause. “Of course not.”

“I wish Jackson didn’t go up that slide,” he says.

She is silent.

“I wish I didn’t go up after him,” he says. “I thought they were going to push Ruby off.”

More silence.

He asks, “Is this God’s will?”

Dorothy leans forward and sighs in exasperation. She says, “Robin, I said I want you to be strong.”

“OK,” he says. He thinks, I have never been that in my life, ever.

In the dark Jackson’s empty bed is a gaping hole, a vacuum. Robin stands next to it staring, unblinking. The blanket ripples, as if covering boiling liquid. He holds his breath, throws back the cover, steps back in fear. The sheets are flat and still, pictures of superheroes frozen in action. He crawls onto them and sniffs Jackson’s smells: gassy and dirty and a hint of syrup. He gets up again and smoothes everything back in place.

His parents take turns at the hospital all night, coming and going in shifts. Robin does not want sleep. Downstairs his father sobs in waves, Robin feels them through his feet. His mother paces back and forth between the living room and the kitchen. The fridge swings open again and again, he knows she is getting drunk on white wine. He goes to the window, needs air, his throat is dry. His hands are itching under the bandages, it hurts to push up the sash.

There’s a piece of rock stuck way back in his throat, rotating its sharp edges. He coughs. He keeps coughing until his mother comes upstairs.

“Have a little of this.” She tilts the glass to his lips. It’s sweet and bitter—perfect. “Try to sleep, Robin.”

“I will.”

She kisses him good night on the lips and he pushes his face into hers until their noses mash and she pulls away. “Give me more wine,” he says. He finishes it off, a couple of gulps.

He dreams he is a woman with scarlet flowers in her hair. A woman in a dress with pieces of glass stitched into the wool. His sister letting the hem out, him tripping on the edge, cuts on his feet. When he wakes he is on the floor. He gets up to pee like any other night and then remembers the whole day. In the bathroom he tries to force out vomit, his finger down his throat. Just a few sour burps. He rips the bandages off his hands. The skin beneath is whiter, edged by a thin, gummy line from the tape. Back in bed he dreams again. Sharp-fanged dogs snapping in the air in front of him. His fingers weaving through their rough coats, grabbing on, tearing off chunks of hairy flesh. Running. The pitch of sirens.