Child of My Right Hand (29 page)

Of course, none of it, nothing, is an accident or unconnected. Not the American race laws of the 1920s, and the Nazi eugenics of the 1930s. Not those very same race laws, and the cross burned on our lawn. My affair with Marla and her calling in Nick Fleming, fueling his rage, and the girl, Tina, kissing Simon that way. It is all connected. And I find myself wishing, if Simon is never going to be better than this, if he is always going to lie there silently, then let him die, and let that boy Nick Fleming be blamed. Let him pay the price. Let them try to call that an accident.

After a moment, when I realize what I've been wishing for, I hurry from the room and head for the bathroom, leaving Genna, Sweets, and Lizzie in the waiting room. The doctors have promised to call if there's any change. Go home, they say. Go home.

I relieve myself, wash my hands, and examine my face in the glass. Did I mention they canceled the Sunday matinee, and that on Monday, there was a school assembly with grief counselors? Ms. Cherry delivered a card the whole cast signed, and the guidance office sent one with hundreds of signatures. We assume it was organized by Marla, who left a message on my office machine, but has not called or stopped by the hospital. Flowers arrive every day, and someone from the Drama Boosters took a picture of Sir Harry and Lady Larken on stage, and blew it up to the size of a poster. We've taped it up over Simon's bed. According to Peter's mother, there's been only one discordant note, spray-painted in the boys' bathroom: Ding-dong, the fag is dead.

Assholes.

I've always hated blowers, so I dry my palms on my pants, then start back towards the waiting room. It's not far, but I am so tired, it feels as if I am trapped inside someone else's sleeping body. When I enter, the small room is empty, and it takes me a moment to realize what this means. Genna and Sweets would never leave together unless there were news. I move towards the door to Simon's room, suddenly finding myself in Schrödinger's box. Until and unless I open that door, nothing has happened. Simon is neither alive nor dead.

Genna's voice calls from the other side. “Jack, Jack. Come here!”

I extend my complicitous right hand and push the door open. Inside, I do not find Schrödinger's Rex, either mewing or on his back, legs stiff, but my extraordinary son, reaching for Genna and Lizzie, and past them, towards his grandfather, Sweets.

“Simon!” I cry, sorry to have missed even a moment. “Simon!”

He turns. He looks different. His face is so pale.

“Dad.”

His voice is a whisper, a croak, barely a voice at all inside the hospital gown, under all that gauze, but it is enough, it is a symphony, my son's voice.

I catch Genna's eye. She's smiling and crying at the same time. In a moment, I will be, too, complicitous in joy as in sorrow. And then he says it again.

photo by Lynda Koolish

Eric Goodman was raised in Brooklyn and holds degrees from both Yale and Stanford University. He is the author of three previous novels: High on the Energy Bridge, The First Time I Saw Jenny Hall, and In Days of Awe. Goodman has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has won several fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council. He resides in upstate New York and Oxford, Ohio, where he directs the creative writing program at Miami University.