Last December (17 page)

I wasn’t sure which way to go when I got to the hospital, because I could barely remember what it looked like from when we came in the ambulance. And I asked this woman at a desk where I could find my mother, and she pointed me to the information desk, and then I found out from another woman that Ma was in room 2286 and that I could take the elevator to get there.

And I started to walk toward the elevator, but something suddenly made me stop. It was a baby crying, and for some reason I thought it might be you, Sam. But it wasn’t. There was this father with his little baby wrapped in a bundle and the father had this look on his face that I can’t even really explain but it made me get a lump in my throat, a lump I couldn’t swallow down, and then, Sam, not even god with a small
g
or the smartest scientist in the world would have predicted what happened next.

Something about the person next to the father and baby caught my eye, because he was sitting there leaning forward, looking down at the ground, and it was Byron, with his greasy hair hanging like it was dangling over the Ms. Pac-Man tabletop, and his elbows were on his knees, and his fingers were drooping like the legs of dead spiders, and on his left wrist was one of those bracelets you get when you go to the hospital, and the other wrist was wrapped in bandages.

And I got this horrible horrible feeling, like when you feel like you are falling in a dream but this time I wasn’t waking up, and I was sure then that Byron had tried to kill himself by slitting his wrist, and I was sure that that’s what his letter to Karen had said he was going to do, and even though deep down I sort of guessed this might happen, I don’t think I really believed it until then, and I knew for sure that I could never ever do the same thing to myself, not in a million million years.

And as I stood there, completely unable to move, I heard a woman’s voice and it said, “Byron? It’s time to go,” and a lady walked over to him and she didn’t see me standing there, and Byron didn’t move a muscle, and I thought she must have been
his mother because her teeth were too big for her mouth, too, and I guess her voice sounded familiar from the phone call at the Donut Hole.

And she didn’t look anything like I imagined, she was just an ordinary mom and sort of nice-looking, and she bent down and put her arms around Byron’s waist even though he still didn’t move, and she just hugged her son hard, and then she stopped and put her mouth to his ear and started whispering, and she whispered and whispered and whispered unhearable things, and Byron was listening to her, I could tell, because his hands weren’t dead spiders anymore, they were slowly squeezing in and out.

And I’m not sure, Sam, because I’m not in Byron’s brain, but I kind of felt like that squeezing in and out of his hands meant that he had finally sort of surrendered, surrendered to his mother’s whispers, because her whispers weren’t nothing, Sam, they were something, even if they weren’t totally exactly what Byron wanted. And for the first time ever, I felt like I was meant to be exactly where I was, staring at Byron and his mother.

And I turned and walked toward the elevator and I didn’t look back, Sam, and I didn’t want to for once, and when I got to the elevator it was already gone, so I looked around and found the door to the stairs and I ran right up them, three steps at time, and I had a bit of a head rush when I got to the second floor, because the blood was really starting to flow back to my brain, because my heart was pumping in there like crazy, and my synapses were starting to really shoot again, and as I was looking for room 2286, I felt this warm feeling come over me, like when you step into a hockey arena and smell the ice.

And then, Sam, an idea snuck into my brain and I don’t even know where it came from, because it wasn’t caused by a synapse or a god or a theory, and that idea was the fact that for the first time ever, I really really really wanted to put my hand on Ma’s tummy and feel you kick inside. And I just surrendered to the feeling, Sam, and it was the good kind of surrendering, and the more I thought about it, the more that’s all I wanted to do, and I thought maybe Ma would let me put my ear to her tummy, too, and that I could listen to you inside her womb, like a tiny little miracle.

(March 3, 1983)

So, Sam, I just found my letter to you in the bottom of my desk drawer, and I have to admit that I sort of made a mistake about what synapses are. The day I visited Ma and you inside her tummy (you really did kick like crazy) she told me that she loved me and that I should go do my exams, even if I hadn’t studied for any of them. And my second one was science, and I TOTALLY made a mistake about synapses, because I got a 0 out of 5 on my nerve-cell diagram in my science exam. So a synapse is kind of like a gun instead of being like a bullet or a super-ball or whatever. What I should have been saying the whole time for
synapse
was
neurotransmitter
, because it’s neurotransmitters thatshoot between nerves cells that make them connect to make you do things like laugh or cry or scream at the top of your lungs. A synapse is like a little space between two nerve cells that allows the electrical signal to get passed along and shoot forward. I’m glad only you and Mr. Davis and Ma know that I got that wrong because it’s pretty embarrassing when you’ve basically spent a whole long letter calling yourself a sort-of secret scientist.

P.P.S. And one other thing. The thing Jenny was trying to tell me that I just didn’t want to hear the night everything happened
was actually really really important, and that is that her dad all of a sudden got a new job and she and her family had to move away in January, and Jenny didn’t even tell me, Trevor did, because Jenny and I sort of didn’t really talk to each other much after the party, and then something even crazier happened. In February, Judy, Jenny’s best friend, came out to lunch with me and Trevor, and I don’t know why but she suddenly seemed totally different, and she was actually really funny and sort of cute, because she has these little teeth (which are called incisors, Sam) that stick out a little on her top row, and I don’t know why but I find that totally cute for some reason. And the best thing of all is that Judy is basically totally in love with the Leafs and Mike Palmateer.

I’m going to stop writing, because you are sleeping in your crib next door, and I can now whisper things in your little ear even though you don’t understand English yet. I’m also going to put this away in my closet until you’re able to read, or maybe a little older than that, because I think maybe it’s important for you to know what happened to me and you and Ma and even Byron last December.

P.P.P.S. You already know this, Sam, but Ma and I were both sort of right all along, because you are a girl, and your name is Samantha, and I’m still Ma’s number one guy.

Love,

Your brother, Steven