by Harry Mazer
“I’ll be all right,” Mrs. Bright said. “Ben’s father is arriving tomorrow morning. We have lots to talk about.”
He tried to pick up her meaning, but her eyes were distant and cryptic. “Are you two . . . ?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Say a prayer, okay?”
“Will do,” Niko replied.
Together they pulled down Chris’s sweatshirt. He looked at them with a slightly preoccupied but tired expression, as if nothing had happened. “Mr. Hobbes gave me a B plus . . . ,” he said, his words dissolving into a yawn.
Niko and Mrs. Bright each hooked one of Chris’s arms over their shoulders and walked him slowly to bed.
August 3
MEMORY BOOK
Ben Bright
—page 5 —
I RemEmBR ThE zoo wERE
ThERE wER BIG FISH. I wAz A
little BoY.
I ATE ISKREam FroM A GUY IN
a TRUcK.
YEsTERDaY I TALKED To a MaN
ON THE FON aND HE Ws MY Da.
HE Is CMING ToDa.
I Saw a ShoW AbouT A TRAIN AN
I Was ON a TraIN WHEN I Was
HOM.
Ben sat up straight. They were always telling him to sit up straight. He held a manila folder in his hand tightly. He had worked all day on his project down at the common room. The therapist had helped him.
Dr. Larsen was talking to a bunch of people. Suddenly he ran into the hallway and then ran back in. “My boy, are you ready?”
“Yes,” Ben said. He had learned that if he did a few things Dr. Larsen recommended, people were more likely to understand him:
Plan out the exact words you’re going to say. Think about them before speaking.
Say only a few words at a time.
Try to hear each word as it comes out of your mouth.
He had been doing this for a long time. But lately people seemed to be responding better.
Mr. Bright poked his head in, smiling. “Heyyyy, Benny! ’Sup, my son?”
Ben smiled. He had glasses now, and they slipped down the bridge of his nose, but at least faces were easier to see. He let the man hug him and then handed the man the manila folder. “For. You.”
The man stared at him funny. “Wow! Okay! What’s this all about?”
“Birth. Day,” Ben said carefully.
The man opened the folder and looked at the card. It was a drawing of a baseball bat and a baseball. Also a car. Underneath it, Ben had drawn HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD! That was what they told him to do.
The man’s face calmed down. Then it got dark and he started to cry. “That’s beautiful. That’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Thank you, Benny.” He crouched down and put his arms around Ben. Ben could see Dr. Larsen standing behind the man, smiling. He pretended to hug the air and gestured at the man. He was telling Ben to hug the man.
Ben hugged the man who was his dad.
“You’re. Welcome.” He had almost forgotten to say it. Saying it was part of the plan.
“We’re going to get you home soon, Ben,” the man said. “The house is all set up for you. You’re going to feel so good. Chris talks about you all the time. Niko goes over there to help your mom. He’s been amazing to her. And Ariela’s almost finished her internship, so she’ll be free for a few days before she goes back to college. We’re going to have a huge party. A hero’s welcome.”
Ben nodded.
The man frowned. “Did you get all that?” He turned to Dr. Larsen. “Did I . . . ?”
“You’re fine,” the doctor replied. “What do you think of that, Benjamin? You’re going home soon. We have some excellent New York doctors lined up to help you.”
“Home,” Ben said. Home was a good place. He had seen pictures of it, and it looked nice. He wanted to be home. He wanted to have a father, too. Fathers and sons. Movies and TV shows had fathers and sons. He was happy he had a father. “You are. Father.”
The man looked at Dr. Larsen, who quickly said, “Yes, this is your father, Ben.”
Ben leaned forward. Sons knew their fathers. Sons loved their fathers. If you had a father, you loved him.
He had seen this man many times. He had seen the woman many times too. But he never saw them together, except in pictures. The doctors were going to let the two people take him out of the hospital, because they were his family. He thought he could remember his family sometimes. Sometimes he recognized a thing or two in the pictures. But they could have been anyone’s pictures. Even though Ben was in many of them, he couldn’t recall being there. He didn’t know this man.
If he didn’t know the man, then he couldn’t be Ben’s father.
“No,” Ben said.
The man blinked, then blinked again. “No?” he said.
“No.” Ben turned away. Maybe tomorrow his father would come.
“Ben, I have pictures. Pictures of you and me together.” The man was digging in his jacket pocket.
Ben turned back. The man was holding out photographs. The top one was the man and a little boy. “That’s me and you,” he said.
He flipped to another photo, and another. The boy got bigger. The last photo was the man and Ben. Their arms were around each other, and they were outside. He showed another photo. Also Ben and the man. Then he took out his phone and showed more pictures.
Ben’s head was hurting. He was tired of looking at pictures. The ones from the phone were shiny and hurt his eyes. Why didn’t he know this man? Why did this man scare him? Why did all these people scare him?
“No,” he repeated.
“Yes, Ben, yes,” the man said. “You’ll come home. It’ll all feel familiar. You’ll see. Just trust us, okay?”
Ben nodded.
Trust. Dr. Larsen talked about trust. Ben trusted Dr. Larsen.
Why wasn’t Dr. Larsen his father?
August 8
NikoP: sup?
ACruz: im tired. i was up till 3 troubleshooting the website.
NikoP: sux
ACruz: im scared 2.
NikoP: here we go again. school? afraid ur only gonna get b pluses this yr? hahaha
ACruz: with my courseload, if they give lower than an f, thats what im getting. g minus.
ACruz: & thats not whats scaring me u dbag. y do u think im scared or r u just being provocative for once?
NikoP: yeah i know. actually now im feeling weird that i have to go away to school right after he gts back
ACruz: 1 thing at a time
NikoP: fo shizz
ACruz: i miss him
NikoP: me too. cant wait. 2 more days.
ACruz: i mean i miss HIM.
ACruz: the way he was, i mean. the way he used to be.
NikoP: well hes still him
ACruz: that sounds bad, oh god i didnt mean it that way, please shoot me now. you know. just sayin
NikoP: i know. no ones gonna shoot you. i know what u mean & i think about that too.
ACruz: thx
NikoP: meant to ask, u ever hear from that guy?
ACruz: what guy
NikoP: the one i met when i visited. the cornhusker who was drooling all over u
ACruz: jared is a sweet considerate guy unlike u. i told him about ben & he was totally cool. he said he had a sense all along. thats how sweet he is.
NikoP: b/c hes still hoping to get in yr pants
ACruz: have i told u lately ur an asshole?
NikoP: i love you too.
August 10
Ben felt nothing as he was wheeled through the door. He was expecting to feel something. He had seen a movie where a guy had come home from war all injured and not knowing who he was, and then when he walked in the door he started crying and he knew who everyone was.
He recognized the man and the woman who were his mother and father. He had seen them so many times at the hospital. Also the guy who was his friend, Niko. The girl, Ariela. He was going to marry her, which was a good thing. She was pretty, but every time she saw him she cried. He liked girls who didn’t cry
so much. There was a girl in the movie, she had dark hair and a beautiful sad mouth and he liked her. He wondered if he would meet her. The movie was in New York. He was in New York now, too, but this place didn’t look the same. There were no yellow taxis. That movie had a lot of taxis.
Everyone was talking to him at the same time. There was a rug on the floor with a lot of patterns. He wanted to look at it, but people kept asking him to look up. They were standing next to him and taking pictures with their cameras. It was hard to hear the words with everybody talking, but a few times he heard Smile, and so he did. The problem was, smiling seemed to make people laugh very loud, so after three times he stopped doing it. He heard Remember me, it’s Wendy . . . it’s Jeannie . . . welcome back . . . you look great . . . all kinds of things like those over and over. So many people expected him to remember them. Maybe this was some kind of exercise. Dr. Larsen was always asking Do you remember this, do you remember that? He thought being home would mean less remembering because it would be full of things remembered. But it wasn’t. It felt cold.
He saw a couple of little children running in and out. They were cute, but they only wanted to look at him for a second and then run away. They were quiet, too, and quiet would be great right now. So it was too bad they didn’t stay.
He looked down and saw a piece of chocolate cake on a plate in his lap. The girl was digging in with a fork and holding it to his mouth. Ariela. He lifted his right hand and took the fork from her. He didn’t like the idea of someone else feeding him. Sometimes people tricked you. Sometimes they gave you bad drugs. He saw that on TV a lot. So he took the fork and fed himself and people began to applaud. He took another piece and they applauded again. The sound hurt his ears so he stopped eating. The woman who was his mom wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“Is this?” he said to her. “My. House?”
“I’m sorry?” she replied, kneeling and leaning her ear toward his mouth. “Say it again?”
“My house?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “This is your home. This is where you grew up. I’m here, and Daddy is here, and your brother, Chris, and Ariela and Niko and all your friends and family.”
“Oh.” Ben looked around again. So many smiles, so much friendliness. And loudness. He saw a big sign hanging over a piano. He knew the words. They were all words he knew. It said WELCOME HOME BEN! He saw balloons that said WE LOVE BEN! Everywhere he looked, he saw Ben, Ben, Ben. But none of the people were from the hospital. Dr. Larsen wasn’t there. These weren’t his friends. He didn’t know them. Dr. Larsen said this would happen. He said it might feel bad. It did. Why were they all so happy?
“Tired,” Ben said. “I am. Tired.”
“Okay, sweetie, this is pretty overwhelming, isn’t it?” the woman said. She went around behind him and began pushing his wheelchair further into the house. “He’s tired,” she explained. “I’m going to get him to his new bedroom.”
In the back of the kitchen, the man opened the door. The woman who was his mother placed the wheelchair next to another chair, which was attached to a metal track. She helped Ben switch chairs, and in a moment he was slowly traveling down a set of stairs on a motorized ride. It was soothing.
It was dark at the bottom of the stairs, but someone turned on a light. There was another wheelchair there, too, but Ben was tired of wheelchairs so he stood up and walked. It was a big room with a fat bed and a desk and a computer with a big screen and a TV and a big glass box with fish inside. “What?” he asked, pointing to it.
“Aquarium,” the man said. “Your fish have missed you. We lost Minerva, unfortunately. But look, Pedro Escobar is there, and he’s waving his whiskers at you.”
Ben stared back and wrinkled his mouth at the fish.
Ariela was crying. He stared at her too, but she only cried more.
He sat on the bed. It was soft and springy. It was the best thing he had felt in a long time. It smelled nice, too. This was a much nicer place than the hospital. “Soft,” he said. “Nice.”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“You like it?” the man asked.
Ben lay back. Someone had painted stars on the ceiling. “Sky,” he said.
He felt his eyes growing heavy. He was beginning to sleep. But then someone began to talk to him, right in his ear.
“It is the early autumn sky, western hemisphere,” the voice said. “You can see Orion’s Belt in the lower portion. The stars are phosphorescent, so you get the full impact when the lights are off. We can turn the lights off and you’ll see.”
Ben opened his eyes. A teenager was standing next to his bed. Ben examined his face. He had seen the face before. He was happy to see the face.
“I think he wants to sleep, honey,” said the woman.
Ben took the boy’s hand and smiled. The boy’s hand was warm. He wasn’t smiling. In the pictures he was never smiling either. Everybody in the pictures looked like a TV character, but the boy did not. The boy was inside. He was inside Ben.
“Chris,” Ben said.
August 10
“He only knew who Chris was,” Ariela said as she yanked the steering wheel onto Spruce Street, where Niko lived. “Not me, not you, not his own mother and father. Only his brother who, and I know I’ll rot in hell for saying this, doesn’t feel a thing about him.”
She pulled to a stop in front of Niko’s house. He was still collecting his thoughts after the party. He knew Ariela had stayed up troubleshooting the dance company’s website for the third straight night. She had been complaining of insomnia and anxiety for weeks, and she hadn’t stopped crying the whole time she was in Ben’s house, so Niko knew not to take everything she said tonight at face value. Still, he wasn’t exactly in peak Ariela-maintenance mode right now. “You can’t say Chris doesn’t feel a thing. That’s cruel.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But clinically speaking—”
“Chris wrote a poem about Ben.”
“A sestina. Months in the making. With Excel. Ode on a Spreadsheet.”
“You don’t write poems with that much dedication and passion if you don’t feel anything.”
“How do we know it’s not just a group of numbers that mean nothing to anyone but Chris?” She flung her head back against the driver’s seat headrest and groaned at the car ceiling. “Listen to me! What have I become? I am a monster. Please put me under the car.”
“Will you stop?” Niko said. “This is not about you. And you may think all this crypto-ironic-suicidal crap is funny, but I don’t, and when I hear it coming from your mouth, it just makes me want to call nine one one.”
“I’m not serious, Niko.”
“Well, I am,” Niko shot back. “I’m the one who has been here all year. I’m the one who’s been talking to Ben’s parents, one at a time, passing messages between them, repeating the same stuff over and over. When they’re away, I’m the one who drives to Chris’s school if something goes wrong. I mow the lawn and shovel the walk, I make sure the timers are working and no one’s broken in to steal the silverware.”
“Well, you marry him, then, if you’re so dedicated!” Ariela got out of the car, slammed the door, and began walking down the block.
Niko climbed out the passenger side. “Where are you going? It’s your car!”
“For a walk,” she shouted back. “With the hope that you won’t be here when I get back.”
“I live here!” He ran after her and tried to turn her around, but she spun back. “Ariela, I’m sorry. Here I am saying ‘it’s not about you’ and then going all martyr on you. Look, we’re all kind of strung out. I know how hard this is for you. It’s been a strange day. Can we have a truce?”
Ariela turned. Her eyes were red and far away. “Do you have ice cream? Or vodka?”
“We can mix them,” Niko said.
“Deal.” As they walked back toward his house, Ariela leaned her head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Hi, sorry. I’m Niko.”
Arie
la punched him in the shoulder. “Ben used to say that.”
“In his rare obnoxious moments,” Niko replied, “which is why I’ve taken to it so naturally.”
They walked up the front path and Niko unlocked the door. His parents had gone directly from the Brights’ house to a benefit dinner, so the place was quiet, empty, and dark.
Turning on the lights, Niko went into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and said, “There are a couple of beers.”
But Ariela was already in the living room liquor closet, pouring herself a glass of Mr. Petropoulos’s coveted Metaxa Five Star. “My dad will kill you,” Niko said.
“No, he’ll kill you,” she said, coming back to the table with at least an inch of golden liquid. “I’m a girl. I don’t drink.”
“He measures that stuff! He notices when it evaporates.”
Ariela shrugged. “Maybe he won’t mind. He’ll think you were manning up.”
“True.”
She took a slug. “Ben never liked to drink,” she said. “Ben was perfect.”
Above them, the fluorescent kitchen light hummed, and the refrigerator motor kicked in on a different note. Niko sounded out the two notes. “A tritone?”
“Perfect fourth,” Ariela said. “Maybe a little sharp.”
“‘Maria,’” Niko sang. The interval between Ma and ri was a singers’ mnemonic device for the dissonant sound of a tritone, exactly three whole steps.
“‘Here comes the bride,’” Ariela sang in return, the jump from here to comes being a perfect fourth, do to fa in a do-re-mi scale.
Neither exactly matched the gap between the fridge and the light, but Niko liked being with someone who knew the code.
Ariela suddenly groaned and slapped her forehead. “Oh my god, did we just sing those two melodies?”
“I liked it,” Niko said. “Was it good for you?”
“‘Maria’ and ‘Here Comes the Bride’? Is this what the last few days of summer are going to be like? One big Freudian slip after the other?” She swigged the rest of her Metaxa and went back into the living room. “I need another, quick.”
