by Will Weaver
“Okay, we’ll stay,” her mother says.
They sink onto the couches. Stare at one another. Sarah leans closer to her mother. “Did you have any trouble with”—she lowers her voice—“our ‘address’ thing?”
“None,” her mother says. “I brought it up right away, but they didn’t care as long as we had an insurance policy number.”
“Do we?” Sarah asks dumbly.
“Yes, dear,” her mother says, smoothing Sarah’s hair. “That’s what parents do.”
“I know, I have helmet hair,” Sarah says, and leans away from her mother’s touch.
“It’s not that bad,” her mother says.
In the women’s room she draws up with a jerk before the mirror. “Helmet hair” is an understatement. Some of her hair is wet and matted; some of it sticks out as if she has a giant tumor. It could use washing, too. With nothing else to do, she decides to take advantage of the hot water, liquid soap, and a hand dryer on the wall. She washes her hair in the sink, scrubs her face, and douses her armpits. When she returns to the lobby, her parents are tipped against each other on a couch and look half asleep. For some reason Sarah is not tired. She settles in with a Celeb magazine and catches up on entertainment gossip. Once she glances up at the soft whirk-whirk-whirk of a squeaky wheel on a janitor’s cart, then returns to the magazine. Her main thought is how insane most women’s magazines really are: All they do is make girls and women feel bad about themselves so they’ll go out and buy beauty products.
“Sarah?” a boy’s voice asks.
She looks up, startled. Pushing a sweeper, which he has paused in midstroke, is a dark-haired kid in white hospital pants and shirt. It’s Ray.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MILES
ALL HAIL KING MORPHINE, OR whatever the injection was. After the doctor pokes the inside of Miles’s right arm, the pain in his ankle recedes. Leg grows longer and longer—carries his ankle away with it. Ten, twenty, fifty feet long—one amazing leg that stretches off the bed, down the hall, and through the door outside, where it disappears into the falling snow.
He’s suddenly warm all over. Warm from the inside out. Floaty. He hears snatches of songs, trippy psychedelic bands from the 1960s … great time to have been alive … annoyed that he missed it. But he’d be like, a hundred years old right now. No, not one hundred. More like … He can’t do the math. Concentrates, but he can’t make the numbers stay still. Can’t make them stay in columns that he can add and subtract. The numbers float around like lazy black flies—he grabs at them.
“Try to stay still,” a woman’s voice says; her hands press his arms back down to the blankets.
“Headache,” he mumbles.
“I would think,” she says. “You cracked your helmet. You need to buy a better one next time.”
“Where am I?” Miles asks.
“The hospital. You had a snowmobile crash.”
He squints from side to side. Something about the room—maybe it’s the smell—reminds him of Mr. Kurz’s little room at Buena Vista Convalescent Home. The nurse leans over him and shines a penlight in his eyes. “Can you follow the little light for me one more time?”
“Sure,” Miles says, as if it’s no big deal; but it takes all his energy to keep up with the slowly moving light. So easy to lose interest. Think of other things. He tries to focus and jerks his eyeballs back to the light.
“Concussed for sure,” the nurse murmurs to someone else.
“Let’s get some more X-rays,” a man’s voice says.
Miles can’t see much of anything after the light beam clicks off; he closes his eyes. Floats in the warm bath of the painkiller. He can smell himself—he’s overheated and suddenly wringing wet under the blanket. The same odor as Mr. Kurz’s overly warm room at Buena Vista: old wool, sweat, woodsmoke.
“Hi again,” a cheerful voice says above Miles, and the spotlight shines in his eyes. “Could you tell me your name and date of birth?”
He shakes his head to clear it, but the fog doesn’t go away. He works his lips to bring up the right words. “Name and birthday?”
“Yes.”
“Miles Kurz. February 29, 1920.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SARAH
“SARAH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING here?” Ray asks.
“My brother!” she says. A sob rises halfway in her throat.
Ray is silent. It’s as if he knows better than to ask certain questions in a hospital emergency room.
“Snowmobile accident. He has a broken ankle. Concussion maybe—but he’s going to be all right,” she says quickly.
“That’s great,” Ray answers just as quickly, with a glance around the emergency room lobby. “I mean, not great that it happened.”
Sarah nods and manages a small smile.
“But great that he’s going to be okay. And great to see you! Jeez—,” he begins with a pained looked on his face.
Sarah glances over to her parents, both of whom are watching. “This is Ray. From school.”
They wave wearily.
Ray quickly steps over and shakes hands with them. “Ray O’Keefe. Sorry about the accident, but the doctors here are really good.”
“Thanks,” Nat and Artie say.
Ray returns and doesn’t make a big deal about meeting her parents, which reminds Sarah of why she likes him: He doesn’t think twice (or ten times) about things. He is not, like most eighth graders, terminally self-conscious.
“How long have you been here?” he asks.
“A couple of hours.”
He glances to the far side, then tilts his head that way; Sarah follows his squeaky sweeper. There’s a corner where they’re sort of alone—at least out of sight of her parents.
“So,” he begins with his killer smile.
Sarah can only smile back. He always makes her warm all over; her skin glows as if she’s in the sauna. “So why’d I disappear from school?” she asks.
“Mackenzie said you were a Traveler,” Ray says. “She blabbed it all over school.”
“Great,” Sarah mutters.
Ray waits. “Well, are you?” he asks. “I mean, not that I care.”
Sarah hesitates—and then in a rush she tells him everything. Well, not everything, but the big things: about being from Minneapolis, about living in a cabin outside of town.
“I knew there was something interesting—something different about you.” Ray says.
“I’m going to finish eighth grade through the Alternative Education Center. I pick up my packets once a week, take them home, turn them in the next week. It’s pretty boring, but at least I don’t have to put up with Mackenzie and her friends.”
“I knew that, too,” Ray says.
“Knew what?”
“That she and her gang were not your crowd.”
“Yeah, well, now I don’t have any crowd,” Sarah replies.
“Except me,” Ray says. He leans closer and touches her clean hair; he lifts it as if to feel its weight.
She swallows; her throat starts to close up.
“So Miles is going to be here a few days?” Ray asks.
“Looks that way.”
“How are you and your family going to do this? I mean, will you commute to your cabin? Stay in town?”
“I don’t know,” she answers.
“How about tonight? Are you hanging here?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Rays says. “I get off at ten.”
“So?” Sarah says. She regains her wits now that Ray has stopped playing with her hair.
“So, I don’t know,” Rays says. “Maybe we could hang out.”
“Here?” Sarah says.
“No,” Rays answers quickly. “There are places. Like Dave’s Pizza. It’s not that far away. You’re probably hungry; we could bring some pizza back to your parents.”
“Do you always pick up hungry, vulnerable girls in the emergency room lobby?”
“It’s my speciality,” Rays says.
“Okay.
I’ll talk to my parents,” she says.
“But I need to keep working right now,” Ray adds. “I’ll see you back here in a couple of hours?”
She returns to her parents, says nothing for a while, and pretends to read a magazine while Ray sweeps the floor. When no adults are looking, he plants the sweeper with one hand, then pirouettes around it as if it’s a prop in a cheesy dance musical. Sarah giggles.
Her mother blinks. “What?”
“Nothing,” Sarah answers. Across the lobby, Ray now works the sweeper in routine strokes, though with a glance toward Sarah.
“Tell me about this Ray,” Nat says.
Sarah colors slightly; her mother has great radar. Sarah gives her the full story—about school, how they met on her first day. “And he wants to get a pizza with me when he gets off work,” she finishes in a blurt. “We’d bring some back to you....”
“Pizza sounds great,” her dad says; she didn’t think he was awake.
The two hours until ten P.M. are longer than any day at the cabin. She goes into the bathroom twice to check her hair, and when she comes out the second time, Ray has appeared—with his father, and the two of them are talking to her parents.
“Oh God,” Sarah murmurs.
Ray’s dad is a normal-looking guy—tall and brown eyed like Ray—and wears the standard nurse’s outfit: loose blue pants and top, a stethoscope draped around his neck, a pager clipped to his waistband. “And this must be the mystery girl!” he says as she arrives. HERB O’KEEFE, his name tag reads.
“Mystery girl?” Sarah asks. Ray rolls his eyes in embarrassment.
“Well, Ray told me about this new girl in school—how she was there and made this, how shall I say, big impression on Ray, and then disappeared.”
“Big impression?” Sarah asks Ray.
“I have no idea what my dad’s talking about,” Ray says, which gets a smile from the adults.
“Anyway,” Herb says to them all, “if you need anything, have me paged; you’ve got a friend here at the hospital.”
“Actually, Sarah and I are going to go pick up a pizza for the Newells,” Ray says with perfect timing.
“Good idea,” Herb says. He shakes hands once more all the way around. “I work until midnight, so I’ll stop back and see you folks then.”
There’s a long moment of dead air.
“Well, I guess we’ll go, then,” Ray says.
Outside, the snow is falling heavier now.
“How far is it?” Sarah asks, her breath fogging in the chilly air.
“A few blocks,” Ray says.
“So let’s drive,” Sarah says.
“Drive?” Ray asks.
Sarah points to the snowmobile and hands Ray the cracked helmet. “It’s the only extra we’ve got,” she says. Ray puts on the helmet and climbs behind Sarah. His long legs clamp alongside her hips and keep her warm. His arms loop around her waist. Actually, higher—just under her breasts; even with her winter jacket on, she can feel them resting on his arms, and she knows he can feel them, too.
“You told me you were a city girl,” he says in her ear. “Where’d you learn how to drive a snowmobile?”
“I’m a natural,” she says.
“I agree,” he says, and holds her tighter.
Dave’s Pizza is warm, cheesy smelling, a bit dim, and totally 1970s with its booths and black-velvet wall art. She follows Ray to a corner booth; they sit across from each other, knees touching.
“Sorry again about Miles,” Ray begins.
Sarah winces. “We told him to be careful. It was his first day with the snowmobile.”
“I’ve never driven one,” Ray says. “We’re kind of a limited-spark-plugs family. My dad says that life is better the fewer the spark plugs you’re responsible for. We don’t even mow our lawn, which really annoys our neighbors.”
A waitress comes and takes their order. “There’s no pepperoni today,” she says before either Ray or Sarah can speak.
“But lots of cheese, right?” Ray asks.
The waitress stares.
Sarah giggles.
“How about sausage?” Ray asks the waitress.
“Yes. But you get it only on small- or medium-sized pies.”
“Okay, we’ll have two mediums with extra sausage,” Ray says.
“We don’t do extra sausage.”
Sarah holds back another giggle.
“Okay,” Ray says. “Then we’ll have three small pizzas.”
“With sausage,” the waitress says; she’s totally annoyed with them.
“Yes—if that’s okay with you,” he says quickly to Sarah.
“Sure,” Sarah says. “We’re all carnivores now.”
The waitress stalks off. And the pizza takes a long time to arrive, which is fine by Sarah. What else does she have to do? They talk about everything. She doesn’t know quite when it happened, but they are holding hands across the tabletop. When the pizzas finally come, they’re in three boxes—as if the waitress wants them gone.
“Let’s eat ours here!” Sarah says, squeezing Ray’s hands before she lets go.
“You sure?” Ray says. “You parents might be hungry.”
“Another half hour won’t kill them,” she says.
“Well, you’re the driver,” Ray answers.
“Yes, I am,” Sarah says, and leans forward to give him a quick kiss.
“Whoa!” Ray says.
It’s the best pizza date she has ever had, mainly because it’s her first one.
Ray eats quickly, as if he’s really hungry—especially for pieces of sausage. “Sorry,” he says, realizing that she’s watching. “We don’t get much meat, so I kinda pig out when I get a chance.”
“Your parents are vegetarians?” she asks.
“Sort of but not really. They’ll eat meat, but they have to know where it comes from. They won’t buy any meat that comes from a factory farm—which rules out meat from the supermarkets. We used to have a local farm connection, but that’s all screwed up now.”
“Do you eat venison?”
“For sure. A friend of ours was driving, and he saw a car hit and kill this deer. Another car stopped, and the two guys almost had a fight over the dead deer. But my friend got it, threw it in his trunk, took it home, butchered it, and then gave us some. I know roadkill sounds gross, but it was really tasty.”
“If you want more venison, I’ll get some for you,” Sarah says. Where that came from she doesn’t know; the words just fell from her mouth.
“Do you hunt?” Ray asks with surprise.
“Sure. It’s no big deal,” she says with a shrug.
“Sweet,” Ray replies. “You, I mean.”
She blushes, and they hang at Dave’s another half hour until Ray says, “We really really should get back to the hospital. My dad will be getting off soon, and your parents will be starving.”
“So you need a ride?” Sarah teases.
“Ah, yes. Please?”
“You have to hold the pizza box.”
“Which means I can’t hold on to you?”
“Sorry,” she says.
But Ray figures out how to do both. He wraps his arms around her and holds the pizza on her lap; she wishes his arms were free, like before.
At the emergency room entrance they hurry in with pizza—and her mother jumps up in relief.
“Sorry, it was really busy,” Sarah say.
“Right,” Nat says with a glance at Ray.
“If the pizza is cold, there’s a microwave in the little kitchen over there,” Ray says helpfully.
“Any news on Miles?” Sarah asks.
“He does have a concussion, the doctor said.”
Sarah sucks in a breath. “What does that mean?”
“We don’t know yet. He can come home, but for sure he’s going to have to take it easy—not do anything for a while,” her mother says. Her eyes are serious and slightly scared.
“Don’t worry, we can manage,” Sarah says quickly—with a
glance toward Ray.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MILES
NAPS.
Lots of naps, between which he reads old Garfield comics. They’re the only reading material he brought from home, and they’re just right again. Not too many words.
His naps stretch over many days. Naps like bear dens or little caves that he crawls inside. Sometimes he wakes to find Herb O’Keefe, the nurse, talking to him. Examining his ankle.
“How are you doing today, Miles?” O’Keefe asks.
“Great,” Miles answers. Today the annoying Ray O’Keefe is standing behind his father.
“Hey,” Ray says cheerfully.
Miles ignores him. Nat hovers in the background; his father is outside. The main part of the cabin is not big enough for everybody.
“Your dad’s out chopping firewood,” Nat says. “Either that or throwing his axe.”
“Cool,” Miles says. He sometimes hears his father’s axe: thoop! and then thoop! again, in a steady rhythm. Once he awoke and mistook the sound for his own heartbeat thudding in the pillow at only a few beats per minute, as if he really was a hibernating bear.
“Miles?” Herb asks.
“Hey,” he says, and refocuses. Best to be as normal and as cheerful as he can around Herb. When he’s honest about the headaches and the brain fog, the guy hangs around longer. Asks more questions. Miles is still wearing an ankle cast, though the soft kind with hook-and-pile straps to keep it tight. Using a cane, he has been able to move about the cabin and onto the front porch. He can’t ride the snowmobile, chop wood, or hunt—any sudden movements and his headache comes back like a needle poking deep inside his brain. His family has to do all the work now. The guarding, too.
“Christmas was good?” Herb asks, carefully opening the ankle brace.
“I don’t remember,” Miles says.
Herb glances sideways to Miles’s mother.
“Joke!” Miles says to them.
“Yeah, well …,” his mother says, and trails off. She suddenly looks older—there are gray threads in her hair—and her face is thinner, too.
Herb hasn’t laughed either. “So what’d you get?”
“Mean for Christmas?”
Herb nods as he carefully massages Miles’s ankle.
