Brawler

by Neil Connelly

  When I was just six, Grandpa Anderson, the man I was named after and the original owner of the Camp Anderson compound, died in this very building. So hospitals have been near the top of my list of things I absolutely hate for a long time. The past year of my life hasn’t done much to change this. But that day I swallowed my fear of white coats and hypodermic needles for Daniel’s sake. I didn’t trust my mother any more than she trusted me.

  “Hey, Andi,” Daniel said, “if Superman and Jesus had a battle, who’d win?” He didn’t lift his face from the comic.

  “Superman and Jesus are both good guys,” I said. “They wouldn’t fight.”

  Daniel turned a page. “But what if they did? What if Lex Luthor brainwashed Superman and made him evil and he was knocking down a church or something. You think Jesus could stop him?”

  I pictured Jesus holding a green chunk of Kryptonite, standing over a genuflecting but still-undefeated Man of Steel. I knew that Jesus preached peace and love, but He went nuts in the temple that one time, so I figured He had a good fight in Him. Strange, but I always liked Jesus better when He was acting more like a person and less like a god.

  “Superman’s make-believe,” I told Daniel. “You know that.”

  “Sure, I know. And Jesus is for real. Right?”

  I was quiet. Though he was just six, Daniel had a way of asking things like this all the time, and you never got used to it. It wasn’t just “Do fish get colds?” or “What happens to the sun at night?” He wanted to know if people had their own beds in heaven, why God made villains, where the angels in his dreams went when he was awake. This curiosity made him seem old and wise, despite his innocent brown eyes, despite the freckles that spotted both cheeks. When he was little, I would pretend to count those freckles, telling him each one was from an angel’s kiss.

  Picking up on my hesitation, Daniel repeated, “Right?” Now he was looking deep into my face. Explaining my thoughts on Superman was a lot easier than explaining my thoughts on Jesus, which had changed quite a bit over the years. Besides, why would I share my doubts and complicate his perfect faith?

  I stood up and crossed to the doorway. The hall was empty, just shiny tiles and an abandoned gurney. Over the loudspeaker, a voice asked Dr. Armstrong to report to Radiology. There was a Code 76.

  I turned back to my brother. “If Lex Luthor brainwashed Superman into being evil and Jesus showed up, he’d unbrainwash him back into his normal self and they wouldn’t have to fight.”

  Daniel considered my solution and nodded his head. “Awesome.” He folded up the comic book and set it on the cushion where I’d been sitting. “Hey, Andi, how come there aren’t any fish in the fish tank?” He hopped down and walked over to an aquarium set in the wall beneath the staticky TV. I hadn’t noticed the absence of fish until Daniel pointed it out, and even when I joined him for a closer inspection, we couldn’t see any signs of life in the murky water. I wondered if they got the water from Paradise Lake, a thought that made me scan the surface for floaters.

  “Maybe they’re microscopic fish,” Daniel offered.

  I smiled down at him. “Could be they’re on their fishy lunch break.”

  “I think they’re just invisible.” Daniel laughed, and just like always the sound made me relax a bit. Once his laughter fell away, the only sound was the low bubbling murmur of that aquarium filter. We stood there, quiet for a long time, I guess. Finally, still gazing into the empty water, my brother said, “Hey, Andi, how come you’re mad at me?”

  I knelt down and cupped his shoulders, wondering how long he’d been waiting to ask this particular question. “I’m not mad at you, Little Man. Nobody’s mad at you.”

  He stared at the gray carpet. “Well then, how come you’re mad at Mom?”

  I winced. In the two days since the birth of the Abernathy baby, my mother and I had avoided each other altogether. Mostly she stayed in the main cabin and I did routine maintenance around the grounds, replacing a busted window in Cabin One, trimming back some rhododendrons trying to take over Cabin Three. Daniel had tuned in to the tension and kept to himself, rereading his comics and constructing a Lego spaceship from a kit my mother picked up for him at Cohler’s. Finally, I made up a diplomatic answer. “We just don’t always see things the same way.”

  Daniel rocked on his heels. He lifted his face so his brown eyes came into mine. “You guys are fighting about that baby girl.”

  It was always hard to hide things from Daniel, and even harder to lie outright to him. “Mom loves you and I love you. That’s all you need to worry about.” After a pause, I added, “Just remember, you ain’t special, right?”

  It’d been three years since I uttered this phrase, a kind of magical incantation I spoke with the same reverent tone I once reserved for solemn prayer, but Daniel seemed to recall it and nodded earnestly. “I ain’t special,” he repeated, just like he used to. He looked a little sad.

  You might think I’m a crappy sister for telling my kid brother that kind of thing, but before you judge me, you better hear about Mrs. Bundower. She was a sweet lady and the best seamstress in town, always the first choice for a wedding veil or a prom dress. (She made the one Michelle Kirkpatrick wore the night she deliberately drove her car off the cliff at McGinley’s Cove.) When Mrs. Bundower’s heart started going bad, everybody felt miserable. This was the summer after Daniel got rescued but before the fish died, so the people at the Universal Church of Paradise were still asking Daniel for favors with God. But even all those prayers didn’t slow her steady decline, and finally she ended up at St. Jude’s.

  The night my mother said she wanted us all to visit, I didn’t think too much of it, figuring Mrs. Bundower just wanted some company. At that point, I was convinced that she was going to recover. But when we walked into that dim room up on the fourth floor, Mrs. Bundower was still and gray, and I knew she wouldn’t be getting better. Her eyes were open, but they were locked on the ceiling above her with no sign of recognition. Her head sat like a heavy stone, hard and deep in the pillow. The worst thing of all was how with every breath her jaw twitched as she sucked for air. It wasn’t like the way a runner tries to catch her breath after a sprint. It was more like the way a fish washed on the rocks gasps — open-eyed, trying to fight off the inevitable.

  Chief Bundower sat with his forehead pressed to the metal rail of the bed. I guess he’d seen enough of that face. He thanked my mother for coming, gave the latest report from the doctors. I remember the phrase, “Try to keep her comfortable.” Sylvia Volpe stepped from the shadows behind the Chief to greet us. Daniel walked right over to Mrs. Bundower, just across from the Chief. He climbed up on a step stool, reached through the metal railing, and took one of her skeleton hands between his. I didn’t like him touching her. The five of us prayed silently for a while, and I tried hard not to think of what Mrs. Bundower was or wasn’t feeling. I hated the raspy wheezing of her breath and the look of her face, so, like the Chief, I just closed my eyes. That’s why I didn’t see Daniel till it was too late.

  After a while, Mrs. Bundower stopped breathing, and that silence made me look up. Everybody focused on her and on the Chief’s muffled sobbing. Volpe draped an arm over his shoulder, and my mother said, “I’m so sorry. I’ll go get someone.” She stepped into the hallway.

  When I looked to see how Daniel was reacting, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The flesh of his face was pale white and coated in a sweaty sheen. His hands were still locked around the dead woman’s, and they were trembling, like he was trying to push something from his healthy body into her sick one. “Daniel,” I said. “Let go.”

  His eyes popped open and he didn’t seem to know who I was. I reached down and tried to pry his fingers free. “She’s gone,” I said.

  “Gone to her just reward in heaven,” Volpe corrected.

  Daniel still didn’t seem to understand what had happened. He kept blinking his eyes, like he was trying to wake up. Even after I got his hands free, he was still a zombie. I wiped
the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief and tried to get him to drink some water. Finally I shouted, “Little Man!” and he came around. He looked at Mrs. Bundower’s corpse and tore out of the room.

  It took me nearly fifteen minutes of jogging around the corridors, even checking the parking lot, but finally I noticed the cracked door of a broom closet just down the hallway. Daniel was huddled up on the floor in the dark, and he wasn’t crying at all, but his body was shaking and his eyes were wide.

  “I didn’t pray good?” he asked me.

  I settled down next to him. “You prayed great. Sometimes people just die.”

  “I didn’t pray for her to die.”

  “God doesn’t always do what we pray for.” Now I had an arm around him.

  “But I’m special in the eyes of the Lord. God smiles upon me.”

  He was only repeating what he’d been hearing up at the UCP for weeks, but real fear took hold of my heart. What does it lead to, when a three-year-old thinks the world is defined by his desires? That good fortune is his to give, that death is a result of his failure? This had to stop. I took my brother’s face in my hands, my palms pressed to his cheeks, and I aimed his eyes into mine. “Now you hear this. You ain’t special. Got it? You’re the same as everybody else. You ain’t special.”

  “I ain’t special.” I could tell the idea comforted him some, though I don’t doubt that he wondered if I was lying for his benefit. But I decided right then and there in that broom closet, that for his own good, I would stand against those trying to make my brother into some kind of junior miracle worker.

  Of course, three years later, by the day we were back at St. Jude’s to see the Abernathys’ baby, a lot had happened. There were the fish and my dad, the ice storm. So I hadn’t had to tell Daniel he wasn’t special for quite some time. Hearing him repeat it to me in the visitors’ room, looking into the empty aquarium, I realized I wasn’t quite sure I fully believed it myself. I mean, I knew he couldn’t do miracles, but Daniel did seem different. Without thinking it through, I asked him a question that’d been keeping me awake at night. “How’d you know the baby was going to be a girl?”

  He shrugged his bony shoulders and wandered back to his comic book on the chair. “I dunno. I just thought it was gonna be a girl and it was.”

  I nodded. He did have a fifty-fifty chance, after all. “What made you sing like you did?”

  His eyes roamed the space over my head and then he looked at me. “I thought Mrs. Abernathy would like it. Didn’t she like it?”

  “Sure she did, Little Man. It was nice what you did.” I felt the weight of Daniel’s anxious stare, so I added, “You did a great job. A super job.”

  But my reassurances weren’t enough to make him smile. He chewed on a fingernail until I told him to quit.

  “Hey, Andi,” he said. “How come you didn’t want me to go to Mrs. Abernathy’s house?”

  I knew I couldn’t answer him, so I walked over to the picture window looking out across the parking lot. A red van slid into a handicapped spot. On the roof was a tiny satellite dish and on the side were letters I knew too well: WPBE. The Scranton television station, the same one that tried to rise to glory on my brother’s rescue in the fairy fort, had broadcast a short piece the night before about the birth of the Abernathy baby. I hadn’t seen it, but Gayle told me it was pretty lame. Now here they were, coincidentally at the very same time Daniel was in the building.

  I turned and grabbed Daniel’s hand to lead him toward the hallway. He dropped his comic and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “We got set up,” I said. I wasn’t sure if it was by Volpe or my mother or both. The hallway only had one exit, and the double set of elevators was down close to it. I worried we might run into the news crew, so I pulled Daniel toward the only good hiding place I could find: the ladies’ room.

  “Gross!” he said. “I ain’t going in there.”

  I shoved him through the swinging door. “Get into a stall and stay put till I come for you. Do it.”

  No sooner had the bathroom door stilled than someone appeared in the hallway. But it was no newscaster. The middle-aged man emerged from the chapel, dressed in a black suit with a narrow tie, like he was going to church. He was thin as a scarecrow, and stubble dotted his sunken cheeks. His eyes, nervous and red, gave me the impression that he was terribly sick, and I wondered if he was in fact a patient. He didn’t say anything at first, and when his roaming stare finally fell on me, he blinked like he was just coming awake.

  “You that Miracle Boy’s sister,” he said, half a question and half a statement.

  “No,” I said. “You got me mixed up with somebody else.”

  Scarecrow scratched at his leg, clawing at his pants like he had an itch that wouldn’t be satisfied. “I mark you for a liar, girl. Time was when I studied you and that boy up at the church by the lakeside.”

  It had been a long while since I’d been at the UCP. I searched my memory for this thin stranger’s face. He kept talking. “I saw him again on the TV. Came here to see for myself the baby girl he helped birth. People around here are talking, saying that baby girl was dead and the boy brung her back to life. Like he claims to been brung back hisself.”

  “My brother never said that,” I told him. “Other people made that up.”

  His face shifted and I realized I’d slipped something of the truth. He walked closer. “I wonder if your brother’s a liar like you are.”

  My eyes fell to a fire alarm on the opposite wall. “My brother went upstairs,” I said. “You got no business here.”

  He tilted his head and considered me. “My business is the Lord’s business. I am His servant and I test for Him the wicked and the just. I ain’t fixed yet on which your brother is, but the truth will come before me. If he is anointed by God, I have need of him.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew I didn’t like it. “He’s just a little boy,” I told him. “He’s not special.”

  “A common charlatan?” he said. “A perpetrator of hoaxes? Then his charade must be exposed to the cleansing light.”

  I was ready to leap across the hall, yank that fire alarm, and hopefully flood the floor with evacuating patients and hospital personnel. But then the doors at the far end of the hallway split open, and a lady reporter with red hair and a bulky man with a camera started toward us. Scarecrow walked away, calm as you please, like we’d just chatted about the weather. I was going to yell, “Stop that guy,” but I was scared myself, and just glad that he was gone.

  Neither one of the WPBE folks recognized me. They looked inside the visitors’ room and seemed puzzled. “Hey,” I said, suddenly inspired. “You looking for the Miracle Boy?”

  The redhead beamed a perfect TV smile and nodded. I said, “He’s up on the third floor with the Abernathy baby. I heard the two of them were speaking in tongues.”

  The instant the elevator doors opened, they rushed in and disappeared. I was ready to be gone from that hospital. So I ducked into the ladies’ room, found Daniel pinching his nose and holding one hand over his eyes, and dragged him out into the hallway. The doors to the second elevator were just closing, and my mother, Volpe, and Mr. Abernathy stood in the visitors’ room doorway, looking around. They’d passed the news crew going up. Mr. Abernathy was holding the baby.

  “Expecting somebody?” I said.

  My mother seemed confused, but Volpe gave me a knowing look. Daniel strolled into the visitors’ room and said, “How’s that baby girl?” Mr. Abernathy bent down and tilted the bundle, angling the exposed face. When Daniel peeked inside, his eyes went wide with wonder.

  Volpe circled me and got to the far side of Daniel. A camera with a long lens hung around her neck like an oversize piece of jewelry, and she lifted it and began snapping pictures. “The poor thing has been sleeping all day,” she told us between shots. I just about snatched the camera from her hands, and I should have. Daniel called me over to see the baby, but I stayed where I was, arms cro
ssed.

  Mr. Abernathy rocked gently and smiled at my brother. “Say hello to Miracle Danielle Abernathy.”

  I thought Miracle sounded like a name for a racehorse, but I didn’t say so. I turned to Mr. Abernathy and Volpe. “Listen, I don’t know who’s telling what kind of stories about Daniel, but you need to keep it to yourselves.”

  Without looking at me, Mr. Abernathy said, “Grace is simply sharing the truth with people. Why shouldn’t she?”

  “Well,” I said, “your wife’s version of reality isn’t always the most reliable.”

  Everybody went dead quiet and instantly I wished I had the words back.

  My mother sighed. “Oh, Ann.”

  “I’m sorry,” I offered.

  But Mr. Abernathy just shook his head. For the first time he faced me, looking across his shoulder. “I recognize that you’ve had some difficulties in your life. But that hardly gives you the right to be cruel.”

  I swallowed and looked at the busted TV. “I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m just trying to take care of my brother. Look, there was just some skinny nutjob in the hallway trying to find Daniel. He was spouting off about the UCP and testing Daniel, whatever the hell that means.”

  Daniel, clearly spooked, turned at this. I didn’t say anything more for fear of really freaking him out.

  “And where is this man now?” Volpe asked skeptically.

  I looked at my mother to see if she believed me. She asked Daniel, “Did somebody scare you?”

  “Andi made me hide in the ladies’ bathroom.”

  You can imagine how this went over. I said, “I don’t care if you believe me or not. It happened.”

  Everyone stared at each other for a few tense moments, then Daniel leaned in to the baby and said to me, “She’s so tiny. Come see.”