by Paul Cleave
“I can’t . . . I don’t know . . . Oh my god, that was Erin,” his mother says. She moves towards the entrance, pushing the wheelchair. “I need to get in there.”
They can’t take the same emergency doors the paramedics took Erin through, so they go to the main entrance. They’re almost at the reception desk when his mom stops pushing him. She moves in front of the wheelchair and crouches down in front of him. He now knows what completely serious looks like.
“How did you know?” she asks.
“How did I know what?”
“How did you know that was Ben?”
“I . . .” he says, but doesn’t know how to answer. How did he know? He has never seen Uncle Ben before, and yet he knew that’s who it was without even thinking about it. In fact, until just now, he wasn’t even aware it was something he couldn’t have known.
“Joshua, how did you know?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I just did.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” she says.
He shrugs because he doesn’t know what else he can offer. Then he apologizes. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“You don’t . . . it’s not . . .” she says, and like Joshua, his mother can’t seem to find the right words. “We’ll discuss it later.”
A nurse lets them into a large corridor where doctors and nurses are scurrying back and forth. There are gurneys parked along the walls, and thin tire marks where some have skidded across the floor. There are patients lying in some of the gurneys, others are sitting in chairs, some are being spoken to and some are in the process of waiting. There are sets of double doors in various directions. Joshua doesn’t know what he’s looking at. There’s a nurse up ahead, and his mother approaches her. The nurse is wearing a green set of what his mother told him earlier are called scrubs. He wonders if that’s because the people who wear them are always scrubbing vomit and blood off them.
“The woman who was just brought in here,” his mom says, “Erin Murphy.”
“Are you family?”
“Yes,” she says, which is close enough to the truth. “What’s happened? Is she going to be okay?”
“The doctors are working on her.”
“Detective Ben Kirk came in with her. Where is he?”
“Follow me,” she says.
She leads them through one of the sets of doors and to a waiting room half full of people. Uncle Ben is pacing it, having an animated conversation on his cell phone, using the kinds of words Joshua’s parents would have grounded him for using. Ben sees them and wraps up the call.
“What happened?” his mom asks.
“Nobody knows. An accident maybe, or . . . We still don’t know, but Erin fell . . . she fell a long way . . . The doctors are doing what they can but . . .” He runs his hands over his face, then uses his palms to wipe at the tears that are brimming in his eyes. “They don’t know if she’s going to make it. It’s bad, Michelle, really bad.”
She steps in and hugs him, and Ben wraps his arms around her and holds on tight.
“She wouldn’t have jumped,” he says, as if somebody had suggested she had. He pulls back and looks at her. “She was happy. I proposed to her last night and she said yes, and . . . and she wouldn’t have jumped. I have to go,” he says. “I have to go and figure out what happened.”
“You need to be here for her,” his mom says.
“If somebody did this to her, I have to find them. I have to . . .” He stops talking. Joshua knows what it is his uncle needs to do, the same thing his uncle did to the man who killed his dad. “Can you stay here? Can you be here for her? I can’t be here . . . I can’t be, in case . . . in case the doctors can’t save her.” For the first time he notices that Joshua is there too. “Your eyes,” he says. “You can see.”
Joshua nods.
“That’s good,” Uncle Ben says. “Really good.”
Then he’s racing back the way they came, leaving Joshua and his mother in the waiting room.
EIGHTEEN
Over the following week, Joshua learns.
He begins with children’s books. A is for apple. B is for beach ball. It’s not like he didn’t know these things—he’s always been a good speller—but what he’s learning now is how to recognize the letters. How they look. The words they form. He’s relearning things he knows from a different point of view. There’s a tutor whom Dr. Toni puts them in touch with, who comes to see him every day. His name is Roger Lee, and Roger used to teach English before retiring two years ago. He retired young, at fifty-five, because both his parents died in their early sixties, he tells Joshua, and if the same thing was going to happen to him, he wanted to have at least retired first. So why does he tutor people now? That’s what Joshua asks him, to which Roger tells him there are two reasons—the first is that when you retire at fifty-five, it becomes difficult to fill your days, and the second is that he does it to help Dr. Toni as a favor to her, because Dr. Toni saved his daughter’s sight fifteen years ago. He comes in every day for six hours, and for Joshua it’s like being at school, only a far more intense version of it. He likes Roger. The guy makes him laugh with stupid jokes and he pulls faces and fakes heart attacks when Joshua gets something wrong, but he smiles and congratulates him too when things are going well.
Joshua likes learning, but he doesn’t like being at his mom’s parents’ house. It’s warm and stuffy, as his grandparents prefer it that way. Anytime he opens a window to let some fresh air in, they close it a few minutes later. It always smells like freshly baked bread and cookies, though, so it’s not all bad, and after six days of hospital food, every meal is a feast. His grandmother is always hanging around, offering him and Roger food, asking if she can get them anything, which after a while makes Joshua feel like she thinks he’s incapable of doing anything on his own. His mom tells him she’s doing this out of love and is trying to be helpful. But he knows even she’s getting frustrated with it, because he sees his grandmother doing it to her as well. His grandfather is never sure of what to say, so he often says nothing, spending time in his office doing whatever it is he does in there—even his mom has no idea. Some days Joshua sees him only around mealtimes.
“He probably sneaks beer in there and watches sports on his computer,” his mom tells him.
Joshua is too busy studying to get bored, which makes the days go by quickly. His mom goes back to work, meaning his grandmother dotes on him even more. He’s allowed to watch TV in the evenings, but they never put the news on. The first movie he watches is a Star Trek movie, and he can’t see the resemblance between Captain Kirk and Uncle Ben, not until he watches an old TV episode where all the men wear pants that are too short and all the women wear skirts that couldn’t get much shorter. He can see why his dad loved the show so much. He finds himself addicted to Supernatural episodes. In fact, he finds himself addicted to TV in general, and he no longer listens to audiobooks. He still reads when he can. He’s moving on from A Is for Apple to Zeddy the Zombie, a book about a teddy bear who, after being bitten by a zombie, comes to life with an appetite for brains, but it’s difficult when words are new to look at, and he manages only a handful of pages each day. Roger is impressed by his progress. He keeps telling him that he’s going to catch up with all the other students he’ll soon be studying with in no time. His other grandparents come over nearly every day to see him, and they bring books for him, and DVDs, and big smiles with which they try to mask the pain of losing their son. His grandfathers talk rugby and his grandmothers talk golf and he wonders if these are things he’s going to play, and when he sees rugby on TV he hopes not, but golf looks okay. Every time his mom comes home from work she gives him a hug, but she never matches the smile she gave him when the bandages came off. He’s listened to enough books and watched enough TV now to know that the shock of his dad’s dying has worn off, and the reality of having him gone is kicking in. She’s sad a lot of the time, and he wishes he could fix that. She’s sad for Uncle Ben and his girlfriend too. Erin has
been in a coma since the accident and nobody knows for sure whether she’ll come out of it. Some days he goes online and reads stories about his dad, and what happened to him, and he watches the footage from the funeral and it makes him cry.
A week into Joshua’s new life and he’s able to read at the same level as other kids his age—just not at the same speed. Some mornings he wakes up and watches the sun rise. He watches it set in the evenings. He calls William and Pete a few times, but they say they’re busy with school and homework. When he asks if he can come and visit, they tell him maybe later.
He misses them.
He misses his dad. He doesn’t know how he’s going to adjust to not having him around. Who’s going to take him to the beach, or tell him about girls, or laugh about some weird stuff that happened at work that day, about how they arrested some guy dressed in a clown outfit trying to steal cars, or how they arrested a guy who tried to rob a bar that turned out to be a cop bar. Who’s going to tell him what to do if some kid is picking on him at school? His mom will—of course she will—and Uncle Ben too—but it’s not the same.
It will never be the same.
After a week at his grandparents’ house his mom tells him that the news cycle has moved on, and that it’s time to finally go home. Other than driving to and from the hospital, he hasn’t been out in the car. Everything fascinates him. Other cars, other people, the roads, dogs being walked, cats sitting on sidewalks, prams being pushed, and mail being delivered. Stop signs, traffic lights, indicators, cars with dents in them, license plates, roundabouts. Big houses, small houses, old houses, new houses. Beaten-up gardens, dried-up lawns, weeds and flowers and pruned roses and sculpted bushes and leaves piling up in the gutters and brightly painted letterboxes and bark that looks fresh and bark that looks old. People see these things every day, but how often do they take the time to really see them as if for the first time? They don’t. Of course they don’t, and there’s no reason why they would.
His house is in a suburb to the north of the city called Redwood, where most of the houses are single-story homes built in the seventies and eighties, most of them brick or summer hill stone, and most of them well kept. He’s never known how it’s looked, but he has always known it’s slap-bang in the middle of Averageville, as his dad says—or used to say. Joshua has lived here his entire life—even his biological parents lived out here. He looks at every house they come up to as if it could be theirs, because it could be—he has no idea what it looks like.
They pull into the driveway of a brick house that’s been painted light brown and has a black concrete-tile roof. There’s an oil stain in the center of the driveway and weeds poking up from the edges of it. The lawn is ankle deep and there’s a knee-high fence out front and trees on the boundary to the left and right as tall as the house. The house was painted a few years ago, back when his dad remodeled the kitchen and they had new carpets put in. All of that combines to make a forty-year-old house look ten years old on the outside and only five on the inside. There are bay windows catching the sun to the north, and a deck leading from a patio out back.
He climbs out of the car—any balancing and dizziness issues disappeared later the same day his bandages were taken off—and follows his mom inside. Everything is lined up exactly where he remembers it all being, only now it’s like a magician has pulled back the curtain. He puts his hand on the kitchen bench. It’s solid and feels the same and it is the same, only in another way it isn’t. This is his home, he’s lived here since he was a baby, it’s familiar, but at the same time it’s like he’s never been here before.
“I want to see my room,” he says.
“It’s this way,” his mom says, then laughs. “Sorry, I know you know that. I don’t . . . I don’t quite know why I said it.”
“It’s okay,” he says.
“Go explore,” she says. “I’ll make you some lunch when you’re ready.”
He’s seen teenagers’ bedrooms on TV, and on TV the walls are covered in posters of musicians and athletes and movies, but he doesn’t have any posters in his room. There are framed photographs of him with his parents, and there are framed photos of his biological parents too. His mom showed him some of these a week ago. His parents were strangers to him, and he found it difficult to connect to the pictures in an emotional way. They were people he never knew.
The bedroom faces north. The sun is coming in and hitting the bed. There are no books in here, no TV, but there’s a radio and an alarm clock and a desk where he does his homework. Everything is straight and tidy and he tries to think about the last time he was here. He was packing his schoolbag and his dad was telling him to hurry up. He sits on the end of the bed and cries, and he knows his mom can probably hear him but she leaves him alone, which is exactly what he wants.
His second week out of the hospital has him spending more time with Roger. His reading speed gets faster, and he has no hesitation identifying the numbers or letters put in front of him. He finds more TV shows to become addicted to. He spends more time outside. He walks the streets in his neighborhood, his mom letting him go out alone, though reluctantly so. He goes to the park. One night his mom takes him to the cinema. The screen is so big and the action so loud and he loves every second of it. They eat at a restaurant the following night and the day after that she takes him into her work to show him around. He looks at the cats and dogs in cages and wants to bring every one of them home. She takes him to the cemetery where, for the first time this year, he can feel autumn approaching. His dad’s gravestone is newer than any of the others surrounding it. He holds his mom’s hand and neither of them says anything. There’s a giant oak tree ten yards away that stands over them like a sentry. There’s a small lake out to the right with ducks splashing about. The sun is out, and even though there’s a cool wind whipping through the graves, he thinks it’s a nice place to be buried. He thinks his dad would like it. He knows for a fact his dad saw people buried in other places—people found in shallow graves, in trash bins, in barrels in lakes. If you’re going to be dead, Joshua figures this is the place to be doing it.
His grandparents visit the house and his neighbors pop over, as do cousins and other uncles and aunts, as well as aunts and uncles who aren’t related to him but are close friends of his parents. Sometimes the phone will ring at home, and it will be a journalist wanting to write something about him, but his mom always says no, and thankfully the journalists don’t come to the house. His story is no longer a story, at least not for those who don’t know him.
His world keeps getting bigger.
As does his fear of school.
He’s nervous about his new school and hopes he’ll fit in, but he’s worried that it may not be possible if everybody knows who he is. With his first day approaching, he tries to convince his mom to have him homeschooled by tutors over the next two years. She lists reasons why that’s not possible, stopping once he admits he sees her point.
“You’re going to like it there,” she says.
“Nobody likes school,” he tells her.
“Well, then you’re not going to like it any less than anybody else.”
On the Friday before his return, she takes him to Christchurch North High, the same public school where she and his dad and Uncle Ben met when they were kids. It has a roll of nearly a thousand students from all walks of life, but no doubt he’s the first who used to be blind. The school is seventy years old, and Principal Mooney looks like he’s been working there the entire time. While his mom chats with him, a teacher by the name of Miss Franklin shows Joshua around. Miss Franklin tells him she was a student here not even ten years ago. She has blond hair tied into a ponytail and a pair of glasses she keeps adjusting and she has so much energy he keeps thinking she’s about to break into a sprint. She shows him the math block, the English block, the gym, the football field, the science labs, the hall, and the social studies block. She tells him that when she was here she was the captain of the netball team and the volleyball team
, and she ran track. She tells him she coaches now. School is out for the day, but there are some students milling around, some chatting in small groups, others making their way to the edge of the grounds, some stare at him, some ignore him. She shows him the swimming pool, where the water looks clear and perfectly still.
“Can you swim?” Miss Franklin asks.
“I can float,” he says. “If I fell off a boat I could doggy-paddle for five minutes before drowning.”
She laughs. “We can teach you how to do better,” she says.
“You mean you’ll get me to six minutes?”
She laughs again. “Maybe even ten.”
“The problem with swimming is I could never know what direction I was going in, or when the edge of the pool was on its way.”
She shows him the arts department, the languages block, the woodworking and metal shops. “You’re going to love it here,” she tells him. “The other students are all very nice, very accepting. Of course, like any school, it has its troublemakers, but you’re going to make a lot of great friends here.”
“Cool,” he says, because he thinks that’s what she wants to hear.
“There is one more thing, though,” she says. “You and your family have been getting a lot of media attention—”
“Not anymore,” he says.
“No, but . . . but yes, that may change, in which case if any reporters approach you here, you come and tell us, but what I was going to say is it means the other students, they’re all going to know who you are. A lot of them, or most of them, I guess, don’t read the news. I was the same at that age. But what happened to your dad, and to you, it’s not always being driven by the news. It’s driven by social media, and most of the students here let their lives be ruled by it. What I’m saying is, be prepared for that, and if it becomes a problem, or you need somebody to talk to about it, or you have any concerns at all, you come and see me, okay?”
