by Jon Pineda
When he saw the last name on the chart, his throat closed. He backed away from the entrance to the operating room and tore off his gloves and then his mask. He did not feel the door at his back, did not realize he had turned and walked into the bright hallway, the artificial light. The floor shiny as ice.
He dodged bodies, ran past those being wheeled away. In the glass wall of the gift shop, pink and blue stuffed animals were stacked in a checkered pattern, a large, plush chessboard turned onto its side.
“Hello, Dr. Guzman,” someone said as he darted through the lobby. The automatic doors were not fast enough. He banged on them until they finally slid open.
Under the entrance awning, a young father was nervously securing an infant car seat inside a new minivan. The new mother was pushing herself slowly up out of her wheelchair. She was laughing at her husband, who was laughing as well. He was telling her, “Stop, stop, you’re making me mess up.”
. . . .
There, in the sun, Mario paused.
He hunched over, put his hands on his knees, and took a deep breath. A voice inside his head told him to call in Dr. Williams. She could take over. Yes, that made sense. She had more experience. Plus, he knew this family. It might affect his ability to do the best for them.
Some of the cold air from the hospital was still in his clothing. He raised up. His face was warm, his eyes wet. He realized he might cry out at any moment. Across the parking lot, the glaring windshields seemed to blink on and off. Little lights, eyes staring back at him.
There was no time to wonder where the owners of these vehicles were, if they had driven themselves here for a procedure. If they were even still alive. There was no time to think about his place among it all, where he fit in. No time for Janet. No time for Tammy. All he knew was there was a child in the building behind him who would almost certainly die if he didn’t turn around and go back.
There was no going back.
He didn’t know how much time had passed.
“Dr. Guzman?” one of the nurses said. “Are you all right?”
He looked at her covered face, her skin lit from the screen she stood next to.
Others appeared to him the same way.
He nodded.
When he was a boy, he had loved the feeling of disappearing into a day. He had loved the way he could run with the other boys from the neighborhood and play until the sky grew dark and the world was a cool blanket of air.
The world’s one job, it seemed then, was to wrap itself around you, and you tore it off, grappling. It wrapped around you each day, and again, you tore at it and tore at it until one evening the sky was no longer a covering comforting you. It was just an untouchable thing, like so many other things in your life, and the way back, once it became so, was lost. There was no looking back at the path. The path had been swept clean. The earth no different from the empty sky, all of it pressed into one indecipherable puzzle.
Often, he would sit in his room and study while he heard the familiar voices of boys racing past his house. Too many times to count, he would pray that the chains on their bicycles would snap. Not so that there would be an accident, but so that he could find his old friends outside his house, crouched beside the bicycles’ pedals. He would imagine himself running into the garage to bring out his father’s tools. Wrenches and grease. Pliers too. All of it he would use to find a way to make it right again, so that they could ride off from where he would be standing in the road, a smile on his face, his friends telling the others that he was not bad, that no harm would befall them for treating him as they used to treat him. He was still their friend. He was still a boy.
He had found a tear in one of the arteries.
Some evenings he would sit on the steps of the front porch and watch the others race down the street. They were so fast. He had tried to bring out his bicycle, to race too, but they were gone.
He wondered if that had ever happened. The boys vanished so quickly, they had made it a point to leave him. His part of the street grew quiet. He didn’t blame them. How could he blame them?
Whenever he thought he wanted to be part of the games, he would think instead of what was expected of him. The quiet books in his room, the endless words that waited to live inside his head.
That was the pact he had made with the sky and the empty streets of his childhood. Each night, the conversation of his adult self whispering to him, telling him that it was all going to be okay, that he was going to make it right, he only had to do something extraordinary, and for the rest of his life. That was it. There would be more emptiness because that was the way it was.
He remembered the feeling of emptiness. A hole in the landscape of who he was.
It was there for him each night he dreamed, there for him when he woke in the night screaming. His mother would come into his room and quiet him, and he would fall asleep hearing her sing, or what he thought was her singing. He didn’t know if it was his mother or the girl. Things he learned were meant to fill the days.
A seam had come undone inside the boy. It filled the screen with red. More gauze and siphoning. The red bloomed again. Someone called out a series of numbers. The speaker’s voice was even, almost calm, but the numbers suggested the blood pressure was dropping. He studied the screen, using it as a guide.
He could not get the bleeding to stop.
If he could get the bleeding to stop, it would be a start.
He felt padded gauze dab his brow. He realized he was sweating more than was normal for him. He had waited too long. The bleeding would not stop.
He wanted to go back to the moment. He wanted to stand among the machinery of that evening and listen to her squeal with excitement. Instead of taking aim, he would hold back. He would do everything the same as he had, except for one thing: the ball would never leave his hand. He would hold onto it. As long as he held the ball to his chest, he would never have to see the emptiness of his life. He would never have to run away.
Someone suggested they had lost him too many times, that it should be called.
“No!” Mario said. This wasn’t a game to call. He knew the boy’s parents were in the waiting room. He could feel them on the other side.
“It’s for me to say when this is over,” Mario said. “Does everyone understand that?”
Teagan had made everyone a gift—tulips of construction paper. She kept asking if she could give Micah the gift she had made for him.
“Then when can I, Tommy?” she said, but Tom did not answer her again.
Rachel had not yet arrived. Tom kept pacing, his face unchanged.
“Did you get her on the phone?” he asked finally.
His mother only nodded.
“Tommy,” Teagan said. “You go get Micah right now. You tell him Aunt Sissy said to come here.”
“Sit down,” Manny said.
“I can’t,” Tom said.
“I’m not talking to you,” his father said. “Sit down, Sissy.”
He walked over to Teagan to get her to take a seat in the chair next to them, but Teagan jerked away. When she did, most of the paper flowers tore apart. They fell to the floor. Tiny ovals littered the ground around her.
Teagan made to scream, but no sound came.
It was as if her voice had disappeared from her throat altogether.
Then a deep breath filled the void.
Tom looked at his sister; her face shuddered. It was obvious this one mess had devastated her. It was more than he understood. She threw her head back and wailed. A sound that came from somewhere inside her.
They could only watch.
When he walked into the waiting room, Mario spotted Teagan. She was standing in a corner and hugging herself. There were Mr. and Mrs. Serafino on the couch. They were much older, but he recognized them. Mrs. Serafino had her arm around a woman and was consoling her.
When Teagan saw who it was, she ran over to him.
“Look, Tommy, look,” she said.
Mario turned around. Tom regarded h
im.
He wanted to tell Tom he was sorry.
He wanted to tell Teagan most of all.
But now was not the time. That would come later. He would go to their house and tell them how it had happened, how he wished it had never happened. His entire life, it seemed, was hanging on this apology.
“The boy’s fine,” Mario said.
“What?” Tom said. “What did you say?”
He started crying.
They both did.
Where had the years hidden within him? He was still young, though not accomplished in a career like Mario. But there was still time, he thought. Time for everything. He could still see Mario’s face as he sat on Tom’s parents’ couch, trying to find the words to explain why he had run away that evening. Why he had let everything unravel as it had. And as for Mario’s uncle, there were no words. That was another kind of burden altogether.
Tom’s mother had made an appointment with a neurologist. His father was showing signs, worsening. Had been for years, now that Tom really considered it. More heartache ahead, of course, but at least his father was still here. As was Teagan.
He had told his mother not to worry; he would go to the center and get her. When he was signing her out for the day, she told him she wanted to see geese. She wanted to see flowers. Tom immediately thought of the botanical gardens near the airport. One could watch planes take off from a viewing platform. Micah would love it, he was sure. There was a field there, too, where Teagan and his son could play. He could watch them both.
Micah ran up and slapped his arm.
“You’re it!”
The boy threw off his windbreaker. Bright as the azaleas in the distance. He grabbed his Aunt Sissy’s hand and the two conspired to get away. There was his sister, and there was his son.
He smiled and unfolded his arms. It felt good to breathe. He laughed, watching their playfulness. Rachel would not have recognized him, not that such a thing mattered. People were allowed to change.
His son had just told him he was “it,” and his only job now was to chase after him. Micah and Teagan separated. There was Teagan running ahead, getting farther away. Micah held his arms out and started whirring across the fresh-cut grass.
Then came a giant shadow rumbling, the sky breaking apart.
Teagan brought her hands up and covered her ears.
They all three did.
Micah was grinning, catching his breath.
Overhead, people were being carried away from the city. Beyond clouds. Tom thought of the model airplanes he and his father had worked hard to put together. The one Tom loved the most, fastened with clear string to a hook on the ceiling of his childhood room.
How often had it simply spun on its own?
If he thought hard, he could remember the way it was. He could still see the string and then not at all. Though he knew it wasn’t gone entirely, woven as it was into a boy’s heart.
acknowledgments
Many people have helped me along the way, and I’m grateful for their presence in my life. If you want to know who the best agent in the world is, I’ll tell you: it’s Terra Chalberg. I’m especially indebted to Daniel Slager for his guidance and enthusiasm. Allison Wigen, Anne Horowitz, and the Milkweed Editions family have been amazing throughout this entire process. Others who’ve been supportive in the creation of this book include Ben Barnhart, Maurice Browne, Oliver de la Paz, Brian Flanary, Sarah Gambito, Fred Leebron, Joseph Legaspi, John Moore, Nick Montemarano, Alan Michael Parker, and the luminous souls at Elliot’s Fairgrounds in Norfolk, where, for countless evenings, I wrote portions of this manuscript. And for my wife, Amy, who waited up for me.
Jon Pineda is the author of the memoir Sleep in Me, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a Library Journal “Best Books of 2010” selection. He is also the author of the poetry collections The Translator’s Diary, winner of the 2007 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and Birthmark, winner of the 2003 Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Virginia with his family.
Interior design by Connie Kuhnz
Typeset in Minion Pro
by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services
