The Boy: A Novel

by Santoro, Lara

  Gripping the metal frame of her bed—her right eye pulsating madly, every inch of skin soaked with sweat—Anna lowered herself onto the bed and watched as the lawyer extended a piece of paper. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, “but a temporary restraining order has been issued against you. It was filed by her father in district court. It was an ex parte decision, meaning, it was granted in your absence. You may not see your daughter until we go in front of the judge sometime next week.”

  Esperanza had betrayed her. She had betrayed her.

  “On what grounds?” Anna asked, her voice a whisper.

  “That you’ll attempt to flee the country with your daughter before a custody suit gets under way. Apparently you’re in possession of your daughter’s passports. I understand she’s got two.”

  Anna looked down at her hands. There were bones there she’d never seen before, hard things coming up at hard angles in a fast-forming topography of pain.

  “Flee the country? My daughter is in a coma.”

  The lawyer’s eyes softened. “I wouldn’t take it too seriously. A temporary restraining order is a piece of cake to get in this state. All you have to do is ask for one. But at the next hearing he’ll have to show cause, and that won’t be nearly as easy.”

  He’ll have to show cause.

  How many times had Anna foreseen this exact sequence of events and gone over the complexities of smuggling Eva out of the country the minute she woke up? She had gone back and forth on the destination, then somehow settled on a Greek island. She would open a bed and breakfast and learn to make tsatsiki. Eva would leap into the high blue of the Ionian sea in summer and curl up against her in the glow of a fire in winter as, below them, rows of cypresses, rough mosaics of olive groves, pines, and firs, surrendered moaning to the violence of the wind. There would be no cars, no treacherous expanses of tarmac. Her child would grow up innocent, clothed in brine and honey, sea foam in her eyes. Letters would come by ferry with the new and the full moon.

  No one would know.

  “It should be pretty smooth sailing,” the lawyer was saying. “I mean, Jesus, your daughter is in a coma and you can’t even stand up . . .”

  Oh but I will. I will stand up. And if she wakes, I will take her with me.

  “. . . We’ll just need to turn in her passports, that’s all.”

  Anna felt a sudden chill, a cold compression of chemicals stripping her down to the primal impulses of fight or flight.

  “Her passports? I’m not turning in her passports.”

  The lawyer brought his client’s face slowly into focus. “You’re not turning in her passports? Is that what you said?”

  “It’s exactly what I said.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “I do. I do have a choice. My daughter is in a coma and I am physically incapable of engineering an escape. Surely you can find a way of proving that. Surely there’s plenty of medical evidence in support of that.”

  The lawyer’s eyes grew still. “Wait a second. Are you planning to take her out of the country if she comes out of her coma?”

  “No, of course not. It would be impossible.”

  “Any judge in this country can and will compel you to turn in her passports.”

  Yeah, but I’ll be gone by then. Long gone.

  “I understand that. It’s why you’re here. It’s why I hired you.”

  The lawyer leaned forward in his chair. “Let me explain something. There are laws in this country.”

  Anna pressed her palm over her bandaged eye.

  “Don’t talk to me about the law. The law is supremely malleable, besides which this system is backlogged. It’s sluggish and it’s backlogged. At the next hearing, if the judge asks for her passports, you’ll present a motion, and then another motion and another after that, until we go to trial.”

  “You can forget about lifting the restraining order then.”

  Anna laid both her hands on her lap. “I have no problem with that.”

  “You can forget seeing your daughter.”

  “I have no problem with that.”

  “Your call,” the lawyer said.

  As the door closed behind him, Anna returned to the realization she’d gained in a jail cell in some African country knee-deep in shit: never, ever, rely on the law.

  “You used to run a manufacturing plant in China.”

  Ree looked up and nodded.

  “Can you make me a map?”

  “Sure. What kind of map?”

  “From here to Eva’s room. With all the nurse’s stations and all the ways around them—nooks, alternative routes, whatever. So I can make it from here to there without being seen. She’s on the second floor. Room 276.”

  “Anna, there’s a restraining order.”

  “Make me a map.”

  “You’re all fucked up. You can’t even walk.”

  “But a good one, Ree, a really good one.”

  “I can make you all the maps you—”

  “Make me a map.”

  They pored over it together in the morning, Anna insisting for the first time on a cup of coffee and no drugs. That night—pain like a bayonet in her gut, adrenaline tensing every neuron in her brain—Anna glided like a ghost past nurses and janitors, past double doors, vending machines, around corners, down two sets of elevators and a long corridor, to a door with 276 on it. She pushed it open. Someone stood up. Anna closed the door behind her.

  She’d never seen a male nurse. This one was a colossus, standing nearly seven feet tall. He had almond eyes, cheekbones like razor blades, skin the color of dark chocolate.

  “I’m her mother,” she said. The nurse stood like a slab of granite.

  “Sixty seconds,” she said. “It’s all I’m asking for.” The nurse cast a glance at Eva, then motioned Anna forward with his chin.

  She approached against the glare of far too many monitors until she saw her—skin like chalk, bruises everywhere, Death stalking every breath with feral cool.

  “Talk to her.”

  Anna turned, her fist in her mouth.

  “Talk to her.”

  “Eva . . .”

  “Put your mouth against her ear.”

  Fighting a wave of nausea, Anna leaned down. “Eva, my love,” but then there were far too many tears and she began to back away.

  The nurse’s voice cut through the night. “Talk to her.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Talk to her.”

  Anna filled her lungs to capacity. She exhaled slowly. She brought her mouth to her daughter’s ear and talked. She talked of the dog and of the things they would do together, how she would buy a new Scrabble board and a fishing rod and a picnic basket so they could do the river in style, how they would, finally this year, set up a stand outside the house and sell apples from their tree instead of having the neighbors come and take them all, and how this time—this time—they would actually make jam and sell that, too, and the proceeds would go toward a bigger operation, a more clever money-making scheme, and she was trying to think of what that might be when she felt a rough hand tighten around her arm.

  “Go.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re out of time. Please.” The nurse pushed her toward the door. “Run.”

  “I can’t run.”

  “Run. Your legs will carry you.”

  She ran and her legs carried her.

  In her dream the next day, it was morning before school. Eva was standing by the door with no lunch box and no shoes. Hair matted, skin bruised, she stood against the light, hollow with longing. Anna opened her eyes. “She’s waking up,” she said.

  It took ten minutes for the nurse to come—a blinding infinity of time, seconds fastening with great leisure onto the back of other seconds to form minutes, minutes bleeding unthinkingly into other minutes, as the silence around her hardened into pure dissonance, pure pain.

  “My daughter.”

  “What about your daughter?”
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  “She’s waking up.”

  “Honey.”

  “No honey. Call downstairs and find out if she’s waking up.”

  She was. Her little girl was waking up. The sun hung low in the sky when a doctor Anna had never seen before pulled a chair up to her bed and said, “What we got today was a single response to a stimulus. The next step is a repetitive response, the one after that, a differentiated repetitive response.”

  “A differentiated repetitive response?”

  The doctor nodded.

  “What is that?”

  The doctor tapped the back of her hand with the tip of one finger. “Tap is a single response. Tap-tap is a repetitive response. Tap-tap-taaap-tap-taaap is a differentiated repetitive response.”

  “So you’re tapping?”

  “We’re tapping.”

  “That’s it? You’re tapping?”

  “No.” The doctor smiled. “Of course not. But for now, tapping is Eva’s only available response. The rest of her body is still immobilized.”

  Anna closed her eyes. “How long?” she asked.

  The doctor scratched his head. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I have a feeling it’s going to be quick.”

  Anna watched Ree settle by the side of her bed. “You should have been a cartographer,” she said.

  “Should have been?” Ree said, wiping her tears with the back of one hand. “There’s still time. There’s still time. Then I won’t have to cook. I’ll make maps instead.”

  Anna let go of a pale smile. “I was going to take her to Greece, you know.”

  “You were going to take who to Greece?”

  “Eva. I was going to wait until she woke up, then I was going to smuggle her out of the country and take her to an island in Greece.”

  “You speak Greek?”

  “No.”

  “You get these crazy ideas.”

  “I know.”

  “The craziest shit.”

  “I know.”

  “It could be some disorder.”

  “It could be.”

  “The poor girl. Stranded on some Greek island. So what’s next? A houseboat in Malaysia?”

  “I’m thinking apple jam in New Mexico this fall.”

  Mia came around later that morning with bits of people’s lives—the asking price of a property bitterly vacated by a friend, the improbable union of two people, the acquisition of chickens by someone in their yoga studio—a woman whose only prior distinction had been the purchase of a Porsche Cayenne SUV.

  “All these people getting chickens,” Mia said.

  Anna looked away. “Eva wanted chickens,” she whispered after some time. “And a garden, she wanted a garden. I said no to both.” It was Mia’s turn to look away.

  “Come,” Anna said, pushing the covers away.

  Arm in arm, they went as if for a walk to the vending machines, slipped around the corner to the back elevator and down to the third floor, where they changed elevators. They walked, talking of nothing, deflecting stares with their seeming absorption, and came to a stop only once they got to Eva’s room, Anna’s breath coming out fast and hard by then. Mia pushed the door open. The male nurse was gone, a short white thing stood squat and glum in a pair of white clogs instead.

  “Can I help you?”

  Anna stepped forward. “I’m her mother.”

  The nurse considered her for less than a second. “Ma’am, you’re not allowed in here.”

  “Just one minute. Let me talk to her for just one minute.”

  “Ma’am, there’s a restraining order against you. I can have you arrested.”

  “Some people . . .” Mia said, shaking her head.

  The nurse brought her hands to her hips. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  “Some people ought to stay home. Spare the world their presence.”

  “Me? Spare the world my presence? What about her? She nearly killed her child!”

  “Go home,” Mia said. “And stay home.”

  Anna woke up with a start in the middle of the night and didn’t even bother with her slippers. The nurse’s station was deserted as she ran past, somehow light on her bare feet. Someone did a double take on the second floor, not too far from Eva’s room, but Anna kept going and no one called out. She closed the door behind her. The male nurse stood up.

  “This one will have to be quick,” he said, so Anna lowered her mouth to her daughter’s ear and began to talk, with greater fluency, greater conviction this time, and a dim sense of a full emergence, a blessed surfacing. She’d learned from Mia that chickens could be purchased over the Internet and began debating the number the two of them could handle, the female to male ratio and, beyond that, the type of greens they might be able to grow. With each sentence came details of a new relationship to the Earth. The coop would have to be marked and fenced, the garden turned and watered. As she spoke, an idea began to form in her mind of all the things Eva might latch on to in the murkiness of her state and refuse to give up once fully conscious.

  Of course in the end Anna would have no choice but to tolerate the chickens. Of course she’d be the one cleaning the coop and turning the hard ground behind it with a shovel, monitoring the growth of things she’d then feel compelled to eat, but what a small price to pay—what a paltry sum, what a trifle—for the reconstituted dream.

  “Time’s up,” the nurse said.

  Anna straightened. She said, “I don’t know how to thank you—” but the giant had a finger to his lips, the door open already. She slipped past him on her bare feet.

  Dr. Roemer was there in the morning, surveying the damage with unmoving eyes.

  “I know I used the words ‘fuck you up real good,’ but I didn’t mean it literally.”

  “Where did you get that mask, Doctor Roemer? It’s like you’ve got a mask on. It’s like you put it on in the morning and take it off at night.”

  “I don’t remember where I got it. All I remember is it wasn’t cheap. How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s the kid?”

  “She’s in a coma.”

  “I mean the other one.”

  Anna shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “He must be hurting.”

  Anna’s hand flew to her eye.

  “Call him.”

  “No.”

  “Call him. Let him go.”

  He came into her dreams for the first time that afternoon. He had shaved parts of his head and he had a patch over one eye. “I’m the one who nearly lost one eye,” Anna told him. The boy slid the patch down his cheek. The eyeball was gone. In its place, a hole.

  She couldn’t remember his number, so she called Richard Strand.

  “He’s gone fishing in Alaska.”

  “Can you give me his number?”

  “My son’s number.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t remember my son’s number.”

  “No.”

  “But you remember mine.”

  She pressed the phone against her ear, unable to think of anything to say.

  “Go fuck yourself, Anna. And leave my son alone.”

  She crossed the room and parted the curtains. The Earth was stretched out before her, bearing no greater weight at any latitude than that of a sleeping child.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The moment Anna laid eyes on Eva’s father, she remembered they’d been cruel to each other many times before. It was only a matter of time before she came to a second understanding. They would be as cruel, as unloving, as uncaring this time around, with one big difference. They now had a child together, a child they both loved.

  She was at the window when he walked in, a creature from another planet: stiff-collared, clean-shaven, not a granule of dirt under his fingernails. They looked at each other for the first time in years, Anna in her hospital wear, her throbbing eye, her aching soul, Eva’s father in a suit cut on Savile Row. His shoes had a strange gleam, as if oxidized, his teeth a vague fluorescence
.

  “What toothpaste are you using these days? Or have you progressed to dentures already?”

  “You look smashing, Anna, just smashing. I’m taking her away, you know.”

  “Go for it.”

  “If it’s the last thing I do.”

  “Go for it. See how far you get.”

  Eva’s father smiled the tightest smile.

  “Only you,” he said. “Only you could be standing barefoot in the most extraordinary piece of clothing, having just put your own daughter in a coma, and delude yourself that nothing other than ruin, perfect ruin, perfect desolation, perfect bankruptcy on all possible levels, could visit you between now and the time your daughter wakes up and refuses to have anything to do with you. Only you, Anna. I should stand and applaud.”

  “You’re already standing, you fucking idiot. You want to sit down and try that again?”

  “Always a pleasure, Anna, always an absolute delight. We’ll be seeing you in front of the judge. Hopefully without a nappy on.”

  Late that evening the news came. The sun had been swallowed, a whole load of land bruised in the process. A white-coated trinity floated soundlessly into Anna’s room—a doctor, a nurse, and an ancillary figure with no discernible title or purpose.

  The doctor said, “Your daughter wants to see you. She wants to make sure you’re still alive.”

  Anna covered her face with her hands.

  “We know that there is a restraining order in place. We are here to escort you downstairs.”

  Heads kept turning, murmurs kept chasing her as Anna advanced, flanked on either side by crisp white coats. Doctors stopped and discreetly stared, nurses cupped their mouths and exchanged low whispers, orderlies wheeled things out of her way as, all around her, something seemed to build, a momentum meant to propel her forward, past whatever resistance the air might offer. They stopped just outside Eva’s room. Anna’s face was bone white, she had both hands clasped around the doctor’s arm.