My Life Next Door

“I can’t drive.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Okay.” He turns to Andy. “I’ll take her to the hospital and then be back to help you…uh, do whatever…except change diapers.” He jabs his index finger at Patsy. “Don’t you dare poop.”

“Pooooooop,” Patsy says, in a small, subdued voice.

Before we get to the ER, Tim insists on skidding to a halt at a Gas-and-Go to buy cigarettes, scrabbling in his pockets for cash.

“We don’t have time for this,” I hiss. “Plus, it’s bad for your lungs.”

“Got ten bucks?” he rejoins. “My lungs are the least of our problems at the moment.”

I shove a handful of bills at him. Once he’s gotten his fix, we head off again toward the hospital.

There’s no sign of Mrs. Garrett. Or Alice. But Jase is sitting in one of the ugly orange plastic bucket seats in the waiting room, hunched over, heels of his hands against his forehead. Tim gives me an u

I slip into the seat next to Jase. He doesn’t move, either not noticing or not caring that there’s someone next to him.

I put my hand on his back.

His arms drop and he turns to look at me. His eyes are full of tears.

Then he wraps himself tight around me and I wrap around him. There we are for a long time, not saying a word.

After a while, Jase stands up, goes over to the water fountain, splashes water on his face, comes back over, and puts his cold, wet hands on my cheeks. We still haven’t said anything.

A door bangs. Alice.

“Head injury,” she tells Jase grimly. “He’s still unconscious. Maybe a subdural hematoma. They really can’t tell how serious right now, just containing. There’s a lot of swelling. Definitely a pelvic fracture—bad break. Some ribs…that’s not a big deal. It’s the brain stuff we won’t know about for a while.”

“Hell. Hell,” Jase says. “Alice.…”

“I know,” she says. “I don’t get it. Why was he walking on Shore Road so late? There aren’t any meetings out there. Not usually.”

Shore Road.

Shore Road.

It’s like some awful fog clears and I can see Mom driving home from Westfield, taking the uncrowded route along the river. McGuire Park. By the river. Shore Road.

“I’ve got to get back in there,” Alice tells us. “I’ll be out when I know more.”

I’ve never spent any time in hospitals. The waiting room fills up with people who appear desperately sick, and people who seem to be as calm as though they are waiting at a bus stop to travel on to a destination they don’t really care about. The small hand of the clock moves from two to three to four. Some of the bus stop people get called in before the people who look as though their time on earth is measured in milliseconds. Jase and I sit there as the monitors murmur. Doctor Rodriques. Paging Dr. Rodriques. Dr. Wilcox. Code blue. Dr. Wilcox.

At first I lean on Jase’s shoulder, then he bows his head and it dips lower and lower. By the time Alice returns, his head is in my lap and I’m nodding over his curls.

She shakes me forcefully, startling me back from some confused dream about Shore Road to this room with fluorescent lights and the weight of Jase in my lap and the catastrophe of everything.

“Mom says you two should go on home.” Alice pauses to swig from the bottle of Coke in her hand, then holds it against her temple. “He’s got to open the store. We can’t stay shut for a day. So he needs a few hours sleep.”

“What?” Jase jolts awake. “Huh?” He usually seems older than me, but now, his hair a mess and his drowsy green eyes hazy, he looks so young. Alice’s eyes meet mine, hers imperative, saying take care of him without uttering a word.

“Go home. We don’t know anything yet.” Alice polishes off her Coke in a few long swallows, and arcs it into the blue plastic recycling bin, a perfect basket.

The light rain is still falling when Jase and I go out to the van, droplets of soft mist. Jase tips his head to the sky, which is clouded over, impossible to see the stars.

We don’t say anything on the drive home, but he reaches out one hand from the steering wheel, tangling it with mine, holding on so tightly, it almost hurts.

The Garretts’ house is still lit like a birthday cake when we pull into the driveway.

“They can’t all be awake, still,” Jase mutters.

“They were pretty scared,” I say, wondering how much chaos there’ll be when we get in. Leaving Tim in charge? Perhaps not the best idea.

But the house is silent. The kitchen looks as though an invading army came hungry and left swiftly, cartons of ice cream, bags of chips and cereal boxes and bowls and plates stacked everywhere, but no one’s stirring.

“You could have mentioned that this kid never sleeps,” Tim calls from the living room. We go in to find him slumped in the easy chair next to the pulled-out sofa bed. Andy’s sprawled out on the bed, long tan legs in a V, George gathered in her arms. Duff, still in his clothes, lies across the bottom, Harry curled in a ball on the pillow under Andy’s outstretched leg. Safety, as much as could be found, must have lain in numbers.

Patsy’s fingering Tim’s nose and pulling on his bottom lip, her eyes wide-blue open.

“Sorry, man,” Jase says. “She’s usually good to go at bedtime.”

“Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to this kid? That is one fucked-up story. How is that a book for babies?”

Jase laughs. “I thought it was about babysitting.”

“Hell no, it’s addiction. That friggin’ mouse is never satisfied. You give him one thing, he wants something else, and then he asks for more and on and on and on. Fucked up. Patsy liked it, though. Fifty thousand times.” Tim yawns, and Patsy snuggles more comfortably onto his chest, grabbing a handful of shirt. “So what’s doin’?”

We tell him what we know—nothing—then put the baby in her crib. She glowers, angry and bewildered for a moment, then grabs her five pacifiers, closes her eyes with a look of fierce concentration, and falls very deeply asleep.

“See you at the store, dude. I’ll open up. ’Night Samantha.” Tim heads out into the dark.

Jase and I stand in the doorway for a few minutes, watching Tim’s headlights light up, the Jetta backing out of the driveway.

Then the silence gapes between us.

“What if Dad’s got brain damage, Sam? A head injury? What if he’s in a coma? What if he never wakes up?”

“We don’t know how serious it is yet,” I say. It can’t be bad. Please don’t let it be bad.

Jase bends over, pulling off a sock. “His head, Sam? No way that’s good. Mom and Dad don’t have health insurance for themselves. Just for us kids.”

I shut my eyes, rubbing my forehead as though that’ll erase those words.

“They dropped it last spring,” Jase tells me softly. “I heard them talking…they said only for a few months, they were both healthy, young enough, nothing pre-existing…it wasn’t a big deal.” He drops his second sneaker with a clunk, adding, under his breath, “It is now.”

I swallow, shaking my head, nothing to say for consolation, for anything, really.

Straightening, he reaches a hand for me, drawing me toward the stairs.

His room’s gently lit by the heat lamp in Voldemort’s cage, a faint red glow that barely illuminates the other cages and nests, redolent with the earthy plant smell and the tang of the clean sawdust in the animal cages, scored by the soft whirring noise of the hamster wheel.

He turns on his bedside light, takes his cell phone out of his back pocket, turns up the volume on the ringer, drops it on the bedside table. He moves Mazda the cat, who’s sprawled in the middle of the bed with her paws in the air, to the bottom. He goes over to his bureau, pulls out a white T-shirt and hands it to me.

“Sam,” he whispers, turning to me, a beautiful, bewildered boy.