My Life Next Door (30 page)

1:16 a.m.

What?

“Now?”

“Now. Please. Can you come now?”

I haul myself out of bed, yank off my dress, pull on shorts and a T-shirt, flip-flops, climb out the window, down the trellis. I glance quickly back at the house, but Mom’s bedroom lights are off, so I run through the light rain across the grass, to the Garretts’.

Where all the lights—the driveway, porch, kitchen lights—blaze. So out of the ordinary at this time of night that I stumble to a halt in the driveway.

“Samantha!” Andy’s voice calls from the kitchen door. “Is that you? Jase said you’d come.”

She’s silhouetted in the doorway, surrounded by smaller shadows. Duff, Harry, George, Patsy in Andy’s arms? At this hour?
What’s going on?

“Daddy.” Andy’s holding back tears. “Something happened to Daddy. Mom got a call.” Her face crumples. “She went to
the hospital with Alice.” She throws herself into my arms. “Jase went too. He said you’d be here to take care of us.”

“Okay. Okay, let’s go inside,” I say. Andy’s pulled back, taking deep breaths, trying to get hold of herself. The little ones watch, wide-eyed and bewildered. The frozen expression on George’s face is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to look at. All his imagined disasters, and he never imagined this.

Chapter Thirty-nine

In the light of the kitchen, all the children are blinking, sleepy and disoriented. I try to think what Mrs. Garrett would do to rally everyone, and can only come up with making popcorn. So I do that. And hot chocolate, even though the air, despite the rain, is stifling as an electric blanket. George perches on the counter next to me as I stir chocolate powder into milk. “Mommy puts the chocolate in first,” he reproves, squinting at me in the brightness of the overhead light.

This is no doubt a good idea, as I’m stuck with grainy lumps of powder I’m trying to mash against the side of the pot. Mom makes hot cocoa with some fancy chocolate shavings from Ghirardelli’s in San Francisco. They melt more easily.

“We don’t have any whipped cream.” Harry’s glum. “There’s no point to hot chocolate without whipped cream.”

“There’s a point if there are marshmallows,” George insists.

“Boob?” Patsy calls mournfully from the circle of Andy’s arms. “Where boob?”

“What if Daddy’s dead and they aren’t telling us?” interjects Andy. George begins to cry. When I pick him up, he snuggles his head against my shoulder, warm tears slipping on my bare skin. I’m reminded for a second of Nan crying in my arms, all
defenses down. And how she’s raised her shields so completely now. What could have happened to fit, strong Mr. Garrett: a heart attack, a stroke, a brain aneurysm—

“He’s not dead,” Duff says stoutly. “When you’re dead, policemen come to your door. I’ve seen it on TV.”

Harry runs over to whip open the porch door. “No policemen,” he calls back. “But, uh…Hi Tim.”

“Hi kiddo.” Tim shoulders his way into the room, hair soggy, wetness shining on his Windbreaker. “Jase called me, Samantha. You go to the hospital. I’ll hang here.” He flips me the keys to the Jetta. “Go,” he repeats.

“I can’t drive.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Okay.” He turns to Andy. “I’ll take her to the hospital and then be back to help you…uh, do whatever…except change diapers.” He jabs his index finger at Patsy. “Don’t you
dare
poop.”

“Pooooooop,” Patsy says, in a small, subdued voice.

Before we get to the ER, Tim insists on skidding to a halt at a Gas-and-Go to buy cigarettes, scrabbling in his pockets for cash.

“We don’t have time for this,” I hiss. “Plus, it’s bad for your lungs.”

“Got ten bucks?” he rejoins. “My lungs are the
least
of our problems at the moment.”

I shove a handful of bills at him. Once he’s gotten his fix, we head off again toward the hospital.

There’s no sign of Mrs. Garrett. Or Alice. But Jase is sitting in one of the ugly orange plastic bucket seats in the waiting
room, hunched over, heels of his hands against his forehead. Tim gives me an unnecessarily hard shove and takes off.

I slip into the seat next to Jase. He doesn’t move, either not noticing or not caring that there’s someone next to him.

I put my hand on his back.

His arms drop and he turns to look at me. His eyes are full of tears.

Then he wraps himself tight around me and I wrap around him. There we are for a long time, not saying a word.

After a while, Jase stands up, goes over to the water fountain, splashes water on his face, comes back over, and puts his cold, wet hands on my cheeks. We still haven’t said anything.

A door bangs. Alice.

“Head injury,” she tells Jase grimly. “He’s still unconscious. Maybe a subdural hematoma. They really can’t tell how serious right now, just containing. There’s a lot of swelling. Definitely a pelvic fracture—bad break. Some ribs…that’s not a big deal. It’s the brain stuff we won’t know about for a while.”

“Hell. Hell,” Jase says. “Alice.…”

“I know,” she says. “I don’t get it. Why was he walking on Shore Road so late? There aren’t any meetings out there. Not usually.”

Shore Road.

Shore Road.

It’s like some awful fog clears and I can see Mom driving home from Westfield, taking the uncrowded route along the river.
McGuire Park. By the river. Shore Road.

“I’ve got to get back in there,” Alice tells us. “I’ll be out when I know more.”

I’ve never spent any time in hospitals. The waiting room fills up with people who appear desperately sick, and people who seem to be as calm as though they are waiting at a bus stop to travel on to a destination they don’t really care about. The small hand of the clock moves from two to three to four. Some of the bus stop people get called in before the people who look as though their time on earth is measured in milliseconds. Jase and I sit there as the monitors murmur.
Doctor Rodriques. Paging Dr. Rodriques. Dr. Wilcox. Code blue. Dr. Wilcox.

At first I lean on Jase’s shoulder, then he bows his head and it dips lower and lower. By the time Alice returns, his head is in my lap and I’m nodding over his curls.

She shakes me forcefully, startling me back from some confused dream about Shore Road to this room with fluorescent lights and the weight of Jase in my lap and the catastrophe of everything.

“Mom says you two should go on home.” Alice pauses to swig from the bottle of Coke in her hand, then holds it against her temple. “He’s got to open the store. We can’t stay shut for a day. So he needs a few hours sleep.”

“What?” Jase jolts awake. “Huh?” He usually seems older than me, but now, his hair a mess and his drowsy green eyes hazy, he looks so young. Alice’s eyes meet mine, hers imperative, saying
take care of him
without uttering a word.

“Go home. We don’t know anything yet.” Alice polishes off her Coke in a few long swallows, and arcs it into the blue plastic recycling bin, a perfect basket.

The light rain is still falling when Jase and I go out to the
van, droplets of soft mist. Jase tips his head to the sky, which is clouded over, impossible to see the stars.

We don’t say anything on the drive home, but he reaches out one hand from the steering wheel, tangling it with mine, holding on so tightly, it almost hurts.

The Garretts’ house is still lit like a birthday cake when we pull into the driveway.

“They can’t all be awake, still,” Jase mutters.

“They were pretty scared,” I say, wondering how much chaos there’ll be when we get in. Leaving Tim in charge? Perhaps not the best idea.

But the house is silent. The kitchen looks as though an invading army came hungry and left swiftly, cartons of ice cream, bags of chips and cereal boxes and bowls and plates stacked everywhere, but no one’s stirring.

“You could have mentioned that this kid never sleeps,” Tim calls from the living room. We go in to find him slumped in the easy chair next to the pulled-out sofa bed. Andy’s sprawled out on the bed, long tan legs in a V, George gathered in her arms. Duff, still in his clothes, lies across the bottom, Harry curled in a ball on the pillow under Andy’s outstretched leg. Safety, as much as could be found, must have lain in numbers.

Patsy’s fingering Tim’s nose and pulling on his bottom lip, her eyes wide-blue open.

“Sorry, man,” Jase says. “She’s usually good to go at bedtime.”

“Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
to this kid? That is one fucked-up story. How is that a book for babies?”

Jase laughs. “I thought it was about babysitting.”

“Hell no, it’s addiction. That friggin’ mouse is never satisfied. You give him one thing, he wants something else, and then he asks for more and on and on and on. Fucked up. Patsy liked it, though. Fifty thousand times.” Tim yawns, and Patsy snuggles more comfortably onto his chest, grabbing a handful of shirt. “So what’s doin’?”

We tell him what we know—nothing—then put the baby in her crib. She glowers, angry and bewildered for a moment, then grabs her five pacifiers, closes her eyes with a look of fierce concentration, and falls very deeply asleep.

“See you at the store, dude. I’ll open up. ’Night Samantha.” Tim heads out into the dark.

Jase and I stand in the doorway for a few minutes, watching Tim’s headlights light up, the Jetta backing out of the driveway.

Then the silence gapes between us.

“What if Dad’s got brain damage, Sam? A head injury? What if he’s in a coma? What if he never wakes up?”

“We don’t know how serious it is yet,” I say.
It can’t be bad. Please don’t let it be bad.

Jase bends over, pulling off a sock. “His head, Sam? No way that’s good. Mom and Dad don’t have health insurance for themselves. Just for us kids.”

I shut my eyes, rubbing my forehead as though that’ll erase those words.

“They dropped it last spring,” Jase tells me softly. “I heard them talking…they said only for a few months, they were both healthy, young enough, nothing pre-existing…it wasn’t
a big deal.” He drops his second sneaker with a clunk, adding, under his breath, “It is now.”

I swallow, shaking my head, nothing to say for consolation, for anything, really.

Straightening, he reaches a hand for me, drawing me toward the stairs.

His room’s gently lit by the heat lamp in Voldemort’s cage, a faint red glow that barely illuminates the other cages and nests, redolent with the earthy plant smell and the tang of the clean sawdust in the animal cages, scored by the soft whirring noise of the hamster wheel.

He turns on his bedside light, takes his cell phone out of his back pocket, turns up the volume on the ringer, drops it on the bedside table. He moves Mazda the cat, who’s sprawled in the middle of the bed with her paws in the air, to the bottom. He goes over to his bureau, pulls out a white T-shirt and hands it to me.

“Sam,” he whispers, turning to me, a beautiful, bewildered boy.

I sigh into his neck, dropping the shirt to the floor as Jase’s hands slip down the bend of my waist, pulling me close enough that his heartbeat sounds against mine.

What I’m imagining is true cannot possibly,
cannot possibly,
be the truth, so I hold on to Jase and try to pour all my love and any strength I have into him, through my lips and my arms and my body. I push away that whisper of “Shore Road” and Mom saying “Oh my God” and Clay’s steady voice and that awful thump. I fold them up, pack them away, wrap them in bubble wrap and duct tape.

We’ve been urgent together, in a hurry to feel all we can feel, but never like this, never so frantic. He’s pulling at my shirt and I’m gliding my palms up his smooth sides, feeling his muscles twitch with tension and response, his lips warm on my throat, my fingers in his hair, a little desperate and somehow a relief, some sense of the strength of life in this still night.

Afterward, Jase ducks his head, bending it heavily against my shoulder, breathing hard. We say nothing for a while.

Then, “Do I need to apologize?” he asks. “I don’t know what that…I don’t know why I…It helped, but…”

I slide my fingers slowly to his lips. “No, don’t. Don’t. It helped me too.”

We stay there for a long time, our heartbeats edging gradually back to normal, sweat drying on our skin, our breaths intermingling. Finally, without words, we climb into Jase’s bed. He urges my head to his chest gently, warm hand against my neck. In no time, his breathing evens out, but I lie awake, staring at the ceiling.

Mom. What did you do?

Chapter Forty

“Jase. Honey? Jase.” Mrs. Garrett’s voice is loud outside the hushed room. She rattles the doorknob slightly, but he’d locked it, so it doesn’t open. He springs up, at the door in a flash, his tall body silhouetted against the light, unlocking, but then opening it as little as possible.

“Is Dad…What’s happening?” His voice cracks.

“He’s stable. They did an emergency procedure—drilled something called a burr hole to relieve pressure in his skull. Alice says that’s standard. I just came home to change clothes and pump for Patsy. Joel’s there. We really can’t tell much until he wakes up.” Her voice is strong but full of tears. “Sure you can take care of the store today?”

“I’m on it, Mom.”

“Alice is going to stay with me, to interpret the medical-ese. Joel has to go to work, but he’ll be back tonight. Can you get Tim to help you out? I know it’s not his day, but—” Moving out into the hall, he bends to hug her. I always think of Mrs. Garrett as tall. With a shock, I realize she’s as small as me against her lanky son.

“It’ll be fine. We’ll work it out. Tim already said he’d open up. Tell Dad…tell Dad I love him. Bring something to read
to him. The
Perfect Storm
book? He’s been wanting to read that one forever. It’s in his truck.”

“Samantha? Can you stay with the kids?” Mrs. Garrett calls.

Even in the dim light, I see him flush. “Sam was just…” He trails off.
Poor Jase. What can he say? Dropping by? Helping me feed the animals?