I wish we could make things happen faster. I don’t want to pressure Cole, but I keep on asking if he’s seeing Viola, and he’s been kind of cagey about it. I think maybe he’s not. If things work out with his plan, it will be great, but then she’ll leave for school right after. Maybe they can make something work long-distance or something. And if it doesn’t work out . . . well, I don’t want to think about that. I don’t think I could go off to Bucknell leaving Cole in the state he’s been in.
Chris doesn’t say anything today when I walk up to him in his driveway; he doesn’t even respond when I call his name. I start to reach out to shake him, and then I worry that would be the wrong thing to do, and I’m just about to run up to the house to get his mom when he finally speaks.
“Let’s go.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, glance up at his lopsided house—there’s no sign of his mother—and get him into the van. He doesn’t say a word as I secure his chair. “You all right today, Chris?” I ask. He doesn’t answer. “Buddy, can you just say something so I know you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.” I get into the driver’s seat, adjust the mirrors, and back out.
Five minutes into the drive, Chris still hasn’t said anything, and I decide that I’m just going to jump in. I have sort of a mash-up, something Sarah and I did in her shower that I’m going to tell him about, except I’m going to set it with Rosie in the showers in the locker room at school. He’s going to love it.
“All right,” I say, breaking the silence. “You want to hear one you haven’t heard? This is one I’ve been saving.” No response. “So,” I continue, “so it was after practice one day, last spring, and, um, I’d stayed late. I thought I was the only one in the locker room—”
“Shut up.”
“Sorry?”
“I said, shut up.”
I twist the rearview mirror down so I can see his face. He’s staring straight ahead, out the windshield at the road ahead of us. “What’s the problem, Chris?” He doesn’t say anything. The silence stretches on. “Dude . . .” I look back again, and I’m horrified to see that tears are pouring down his cheeks. “Shit, Chris . . .” I look around, spot a pharmacy, and start to pull into the lot.
“Not here!”
“Chris—”
“I said, not here! People here know me. Someone’ll come knock on the window or something.”
“All right, all right.” I pull back onto the road, drive another two hundred yards, and pull as far as I can onto the shoulder with my blinker on. I put the van into park and twist around to look at him. “What’s the matter, Chris?”
He’s wiping at his face with his one usable hand. I look around for a box of tissues but don’t see one. “I’m okay,” he says. “But I don’t want any more stories. And I can’t get you any more meds.”
I feel panic start to set in. “You don’t have anything else?”
“I have tons; it’s just that my mom noticed some were missing.”
“Oh, shit . . .”
“It’s okay. She convinced herself that she’d cleaned the old stuff out. But we’re done.”
“Okay, Chris, it’s cool . . .” He’s crying again, and I have no idea what to do. “It’s cool, Chris; I said it’s cool. You’ve kept up your end and all; we’re good.”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
He doesn’t answer. We sit in the van, traffic passing on our left, the air conditioning blowing. It’s hot outside, almost a hundred degrees.
“Can we just go?” Chris finally asks.
“Yeah, sure.” Not knowing what else to say or do, I turn away from him, put the car into drive, and pull back out onto the road. Five minutes later, we’re at the PT clinic. I get out, open Chris’s door, and look at him carefully. He’s stopped crying, but his eyes are still red. “Are you okay, Chris?”
“I’m going to say this once. And I don’t want you to tell anyone. And I don’t want to talk about it again.”
“Okay.”
“I went to the doctor.” His voice is shakier than usual.
“Yeah?”
“I always go to the doctors. Lots of them. But I went to see my physiatrist.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a rehab doctor.”
“Okay.”
“And, so, I’m eighteen now, and so I met with him without my mom.”
“Right.” I suddenly have a sinking feeling that I know where this is going.
“He asked me if I have any questions. Like, about . . . um, about the long, the longer term. We haven’t really talked about some things.”
“Yeah.” I want to put my arms around this kid right now. I want to pick him up out of his chair and hold him. “I’m sorry, Chris.”
“Don’t.”
“I am, man, I’m just—”
“I said, don’t. Just get me out. I’m going to be late.”
I get him out.
“No more stories,” he says once we get through the process. “I don’t need to know about that shit. It’s just pretending. It’s just a way of forgetting that it’s never going to happen to me.”
Without saying anything more, he drives down the sidewalk and in through the automatic door, leaving me alone in the parking lot. I lean against the front of the van and put my head back, closing my eyes, feeling the sun on my face.
I remember Chris from before the shooting. There was a day, not long before, a day when we got to go outside for recess for the first time after a long, cold stretch. I remember him running; there was still slush and ice all over the place, and we were all being careful about slipping, but he was fearless. He ran and ran, back and forth across the playground, like an animal that had just been let out of its cage, and he never once slipped. I remember the sun in his hair.
I wonder if he remembers it. I wonder if it was the last time he ran.
I want to go out to the lake, want to go back in and swim again, straight across, without Cole pulling me out this time. Just me and the water, deeper than anyone knows, and I’ll make it across or I won’t, one way or the other, no interference. There’s even a moment when I think I should take the van and just go, leave Chris here and drive out and ignore whatever families are there with their kids this morning, but then I realize that I’m slipping into sleep and that the sun is burning my face, and I shake myself awake. I feel dried out. Twenty minutes have already passed.
I push off of the van and walk the perimeter of the parking lot until Chris comes out, and I walk back to meet him. I open the van back up and wish that I’d started it five minutes ago to run the AC. I get him in, and we drive back to his house.
“You all right?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“You want to talk at all? About that appointment? With the physicist?”
“Physiatrist.”
“Right.”
“Not really. I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of doctors’ appointments. I didn’t think there was anything new they could tell me. I guess it never ends, though. I guess there’s always more shit.”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t want to talk. I wouldn’t either.
“You know, the bullet didn’t hit me in the spinal cord,” Chris says after a moment.
“What?”
“The bullet. It didn’t hit my spine. It didn’t hit any major organs. The surgeon told my parents it was the luckiest, most incredible thing she’d ever seen. Missed every single vital organ. Missed my spine. She said I should be dead, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand I’d be dead.”
“Then why . . . how’d it do this to you?”
“That gun was so powerful, the bullet was going at such a high velocity, that it just . . . it rippled. Imagine taking a bowl of Jell-O and slamming it down on the table. Imagine how the force would ripple through the Jell-O. Now, imagine that something really delicate was running through the Jell-O, something like a little kid’s spinal cord. Those w
aves, those waves of force, could damage it, right? Well, that’s what happened. That bullet hit me with such force, so much power, that even though it missed everything, it still shredded spine tissue. That’s why I can move this hand, because some of the fibers weren’t totally demolished.”
“That’s insane.”
He nods. “It’s beyond insane.”
“Do they think the PT can make it better?”
“No. I have to do the PT just so my body doesn’t rot underneath me.”
I was home, I think. I was home in bed when that happened. I was home reading a comic book when this kid’s body was turned into slammed Jell-O. I was drinking chicken soup out of a big mug when Sam Keeley came into our classroom and Chris moved his legs for the last time in his life.
“You know, Chris, crazy things happen,” I say. “I saw this thing on TV with special cells, these, like, stem cells, and—”
“Yeah. I know.”
Neither one of us says anything else.
I drive him home and get him out. He steers across his driveway, up toward his house, which still looks empty. I want to call something after him, want to tell him I’m sorry. Not just for trying to tell him the story. Not just for using him for the pills. For everything. Everything. For every time I’ve run out onto a baseball field. For every time I’ve touched a girl. For every moment that’s gone by for the last eleven years. I’m sorry for all of it.
I don’t say anything. I go home. My dad is waiting for me on the lawn.
“Matt. We need to talk.”
Dad’s wearing work clothes: his khakis and a shirt and tie that look like Easter-egg colors. He’s holding a baseball in one hand.
“What’s up?”
He tosses the ball up and catches it. “Where have you been?”
“PT. I took Chris to our PT.”
“I just heard from PT. Following up on an invoice. For sessions missed without twenty-four-hour cancellation. All the sessions, actually.”
When I was little, I thought my dad was the biggest guy in the world. All boys think that, I guess. I mean, I thought he was huge. Everything about him. His hands, his legs. And then I got older and he got smaller, and I started to realize something: my dad is the biggest fake, the biggest sellout in the world, and now I hear him talk on the phone to his clients and I want to knock him down, take the phone, and shout into it, “That’s not really him, you know!”
Dad does pharmaceuticals. Not the science stuff. He’s in legal. He tells insurance companies what they have to cover and what they don’t. It’s like a cost-benefit thing. If you don’t cover something, there are people who are going to wind up in the hospital, people who are going to die, but it might cost less than paying for the drug in the first place.
So, think about that. And then think about it for a guy whose kid has type 1 diabetes, and you’ll start to get some idea of what a fucked-up thing it is.
Dad tosses me the ball, underhand. I catch it.
“Throw it back to me.”
I underhand it back.
“No.” He tosses it to me again. “Throw hard.”
“You’re not wearing a glove.”
“Just throw it.”
I switch the ball to my right hand and flex my arm, bending it, touching the ball to my shoulder. Pain shoots into my fingertips. I shake my head.
“You can’t, can you?”
“No.”
“You haven’t been going to PT.”
“No.”
“Don’t the meds help?”
“I haven’t been taking the meds.”
“What the hell are you doing, then?”
I stare at the ball, the red stitching in the smooth white leather.
“I don’t know.”
I look up, and Dad’s standing right in front of me. I don’t know what I expect him to say; I’m basically expecting him to scream, and I realize at the very last minute that I’m actually bracing myself for him to hit me, even though that’s something he’s never done.
So I’m not ready for it—it’s the last thing I’m ready for, really—when he does what he does, which is put his arms around me. He pulls me into him like he hasn’t in years, in years and years, maybe not since I was a little kid, and he holds me tight and I feel something inside me starting to crack. I feel like it’s going to come up out of me, through my chest and throat and come spilling out, and I can’t allow that to happen, so I break away from him and try to say something and can’t do it, and I go into the house, leaving him standing on the lawn with the baseball dropped at his feet.
I go up to my room and close the door and lock it, leave the lights off, and I wait, but he doesn’t come after me. Then I go to my closet, open it, and dig through a pile of laundry, old magazines, and worn-out baseball gear until I get to the back.
It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at my collection. It’s in a big red metal box, and I dial the combination into the lock—the month and the day it happened—and I open it up and look inside.
There’s the class photo, all of us looking at the camera, me standing in between Cole and Andy. Cole looks nervous, Andy’s got his eyes closed, and I’m grinning like a madman. It was taken before and sent home at the end of the year, when all the other classes got theirs. Mom said they shouldn’t have sent it but they couldn’t not send it. She put it in a pile on her desk, and I took it when she wasn’t looking.
There’s the comic book I was reading that day, and there’s the little stone I took from the playground the one time they let us go back before they tore the school down.
And there is Cole’s little face staring out at me from the cover of the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and Newsweek magazine, and People, and from Rolling Stone eight years later, when they did a special on gun control after that shooting at the mall in Wyoming.
I reach into my pocket and dig out the item I’ve taken from Mrs. Ryan’s house. A little thing, taken from the closet in a room she never goes into. She wouldn’t care. I feel guilty anyway, though it’s hard to notice, because it’s a little bit of guilt dropped into an ocean of it.
I set the chipped chess piece, a pawn, down on top of one of the magazines, and I close the box, lock it, and carefully put it away. I have to go to work at Finn’s. I have to go and check on Paul; it’s been weeks since I’ve seen him. I have to call Cole and thank him for the other day, for the orange juice on my bedside table. I have to come up with a plan B on the drugs for Eddie. I have lots of things to do.
Still, I don’t move. I wait, though I don’t know what I’m waiting for, other than for this summer to be over, for life to move on, and for me to find out whether I’m supposed to be a part of it or not.
Thirteen
— Cole —
Very few things rhyme with “Viola,” especially if you don’t want to reference crayons in your poetry. Not that you have to use a simple rhyme scheme; I’m just saying that it’s not so easy. Still, I wrote fourteen complete poems about Viola before I got up the guts to talk to her. Now it’s eight months later, and I’m on my second Viola notebook.
I have it with me when I walk into the diner late on a particularly hot Thursday afternoon. It’s just past four, and I’m hoping to get about an hour of writing in, but the place isn’t empty. Two of the booths alongside the windows—right where I want to sit to keep an eye across the street—are filled with kids from school. No one I know well, but all kids I know well enough, so I go and sit with them, sliding onto a seat next to Hazel Marberry, who gives me a big, sad smile. It’s a known fact that Hazel wanted to go to the prom with me. My not taking her had nothing to do with her bad case of acne and everything to do with the fact that I simply wasn’t going at all. I wanted to go with one person, and she was going with someone else (which everyone knew was just as friends), so I stayed home. I wasn’t Hazel’s first choice anyway, so I don’t feel too bad. I was a supposedly safe second.
Across from me sit two guys, a kid na
med David and one whose name I forget but I know I had science with; and also a girl, Alex something, who I thought was cute sophomore year. The waitress comes over, and I order coffee and mozzarella sticks, then sit fiddling with my mug and looking out the window, wishing the diner had been empty so I could have sat in this booth alone, writing. I’m nervous, all keyed up, and I need to calm down. I can’t do it at home, where I’m alone, but I also can’t do it when I’m talking to other people, pretending to be interested in what they’re saying. For some reason I’m able to relax when I’m writing out in public, around people but not having to interact with them. That’s what I was looking for.
Instead, I’m listening to David talk about a party he went to last weekend in painful detail, acting like I wish I had been there when that’s the last thing I would have wanted. Some of the kids in the next booth turn around and are listening as he’s getting into the story, building it up so that it sounds like the most epic experience anyone could have had when it was probably a few dozen kids sitting around a basement drinking warm beer out of plastic cups. Predictably, he gets to the part where some of them were going outside to smoke and then someone had some pills. One of the kids in the booth behind him asks where they got them, and David says from Eddie. That’s not a huge surprise; everyone’s known Eddie’s been using since sixth grade and selling at least since eighth. He gets it from his two older brothers. There have been rumors about them for years, all about how they’re tied in to some hardcore gang in New York or the mafia or something, how they were involved in killing someone and how if you bought from Eddie, you had to get him his money right on time, or else. Typical high school.
Eddie. I’ve tied my hopes up in a guy who barely graduated, whose claim to fame is that he can get you weed and pills and (rumor has it) coke on demand, a guy who spends his days flying the family balloons around fairs all over New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. True, he did seem to know what he was doing on our practice ride. I would have liked to take Viola up right after that if I could have, but Eddie couldn’t make that happen. There needed to be a day when he was free, when one of the balloons wasn’t in use, and when the fairground was empty. Not many days lined up like that over the summer, but one did, and it’s tomorrow.
Every Moment After Page 20
