The Boy (11 page)

A
strange breakfast tray came in on the morning of day four. It was bigger than usual and had things on it Anna could not place—a slab of something pink, a layer of something yellow laid up against the bank of something nearly orange. Off to one side, something white and creamy lay quiet in its hole. Anna pushed the tray away and closed her eyes.

“You’ve got to eat.”

Anna looked up. A nurse stood there staring.

“This?” Anna said. “You want me to eat this?”

“Honey, I don’t care what it is, you have to eat it. My job is to make you eat today.”

After the big move, when Eva was four, maybe five, and had broadened her food range, Anna would stand in the kitchen and make things like risotto. She’d make the broth from scratch, she’d fry the onions, she’d throw in the rice, mushrooms, fennel, bacon, wildly fragranced pepper, and over the course of many, many minutes, she’d turn the thickening mass lovingly upon itself until it gained the right consistency and taste. She’d sink butter and Parmesan into it, put the lid on, and wait a while before calling Eva out for dinner. She’d lower the plate triumphantly to the table, only to have Eva stare at it with deeply troubled eyes.

“I don’t like it.”

“You haven’t tried it.”

“I don’t like it.”

So Anna would sit down with a fork and the fixed intent of feeding her daughter the food she had just made. Tears would start to flow, rage would rise like a black tide in Anna’s heart, Paco would retreat to some corner of the house, and only by some miracle would Anna be able to physically remove herself, sit on the toilet with her head burning in her hands, then come back and say, “You’re going to bed without dinner.” Until one day in October when the leaves were turning and the world was on fire, someone walked into her kitchen and said, “What are you doing feeding her risotto? What are you doing feeding her spinach soufflé? Feed her bread and butter. Feed her macaroni and cheese. Feed her cheese sticks. Feed her hot dogs. The day she asks for risotto, feed her risotto.”

“I want to go back in time.”

“What, honey?” asked the nurse.

“I want to go back in time.”

Hospitals occupy the coldest penumbras. Beneath the punctuality of bedside checks, of pills administered in a paper cup, underneath the orderly insertion of catheters and intravenous feeds, lies a stream of unuttered cries and broken dreams: the home run no one will witness, the first ascent no one will record, the eternally postponed walk at the end of the garden, in the shade of trees.

At night, a pall descends and much of the pretense is lost. For every mended bone, there are two that will never heal, not the right way, anyway. For every remission, two quiet deaths. These are the numbers, they’re low moans in the night.

Anna had been a sick child, she’d become familiar with the smell of hospitals very early on, but somehow, just before adolescence, every disposition toward illness had vanished and she’d been spared even the discomfort of a cold. Sickness had been a world inhabited by others, a region occasionally populated by friends and relatives, never by her. In the diseased silence of the hospital at night, Anna remembered the fear that had crowded her childhood, the dread of those early years, when she’d come to understand the triumph and tragedy of a body without a shell, eyes without real casing, skulls without plate.

Richard Strand came with flowers. He sat where Esperanza had.

“How’s Eva?” he said.

“In a coma.”

“I know. Any news?”

“No news.”

“Is there anything . . . ?”

“No,” she said, knowing what would come next.

“Anna . . .”

“No.”

Richard Strand rose to his feet. “But it’s not his fault.”

“I know it’s not his fault, but my daughter is lying in a coma downstairs, and that’s all I have time for.”

“He’s going crazy, Anna. My son is going crazy.”

“I don’t give a fuck about your son, Richard.”

Richard Strand stood at the foot of her bed, half flesh, half stone, as if held on invisible strings. Then his lips tightened, his eyes narrowed, he leaned into the metal frame of the bed and said, “Then what have you been doing with him?”

“Beats me.”

Richard Strand looked around the room. He crossed and uncrossed his arms. He turned and began pacing. He came to a stop.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Help me to understand here because my son is in a lot of pain and I’d like to be able to explain to him why he’s not allowed in this room to do the only thing he wants to do right now, which is to see you.”

Anna’s right eye began to throb. She raised a hand to it.

“Do you know what a coma is?”

“Of course I know what a coma is.”

“Would you agree with me that a coma is a pretty serious thing?” Richard Strand stared. “Can we come to this conclusion together? Is it something we can do?”

“Anna . . .”

“I have nothing more to add. I have put my daughter in a coma, and I have nothing more to add.”

“All he wants to do is help.”

“I’m sorry. There is no room for anything else.”

At the door Richard Strand turned. “What about later?” he said.

“There will be no later,” she said.

W
e run from memories, we run like hell.

Eva in the bath with a rubber toy, beating it hard against the water, crying. Eva undetected the day Anna walked in, covered in blood and dust. Eva with her back to the minutiae of frost one morning, a child enchanted by the soft geometries of snow, no hat, no gloves, as Anna locked the door thinking,
You’ll find out the hard way
. Eva on her knees after her first bicycle fall, her face a mask of tears.

“Get back on the bike,” Anna had said.

“No.”

“Get back on the bike.”

Eva white-knuckled in the backseat as Anna floored the gas. Eva aching for her father’s voice.

“You’ll be late for school.”

“But it’s Daddy.”

“Tell him you’ll be late for school.”

There was no relief to be pried from the past, and soon the nightmares began. A judge sentencing her to life in prison; an endless series of doors behind which Eva could be heard but not found; an unforgiving horizon against which her little girl dissolved while trying to say something. The waking hours weren’t much better, consisting, as they did, of a single prohibition.

“It’s too soon for you to walk.”

“Then wheel me down.”

“We can’t wheel you down.”

“Why not?”

“We are not allowed to wheel people down.”

“Then let me try to walk, please let me try to walk,” and just as she was being helped to her feet the next day, just as she began to put one foot in front of another, concealing behind a fixed smile the nausea rising in her throat, the pounding in her skull, the door swung open and the lawyer walked in—slack-jowled, entirely out of breath.

“She needs to sit down,” he told the nurse.

Gripping the metal frame of her bed—her right eye pulsating madly, every inch of skin soaked with sweat—Anna lowered herself onto the bed and watched as the lawyer extended a piece of paper. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, “but a temporary restraining order has been issued against you. It was filed by her father in district court. It was an ex parte decision, meaning, it was granted in your absence. You may not see your daughter until we go in front of the judge sometime next week.”

Esperanza had betrayed her. She had betrayed her.

“On what grounds?” Anna asked, her voice a whisper.

“That you’ll attempt to flee the country with your daughter before a custody suit gets under way. Apparently you’re in possession of your daughter’s passports. I understand she’s got two.”

Anna looked down at her hands. There were bones there she’d never seen before, hard things coming up at hard angles in a fast-forming topography of pain.

“Flee the country? My daughter is in a coma.”

The lawyer’s eyes softened. “I wouldn’t take it too seriously. A temporary restraining order is a piece of cake to get in this state. All you have to do is ask for one. But at the next hearing he’ll have to show cause, and that won’t be nearly as easy.”

He’ll have to show cause.

How many times had Anna foreseen this exact sequence of events and gone over the complexities of smuggling Eva out of the country the minute she woke up? She had gone back and forth on the destination, then somehow settled on a Greek island. She would open a bed and breakfast and learn to make
tsatsiki
. Eva would leap into the high blue of the Ionian sea in summer and curl up against her in the glow of a fire in winter as, below them, rows of cypresses, rough mosaics of olive groves, pines, and firs, surrendered moaning to the violence of the wind. There would be no cars, no treacherous expanses of tarmac. Her child would grow up innocent, clothed in brine and honey, sea foam in her eyes. Letters would come by ferry with the new and the full moon.

No one would know.

“It should be pretty smooth sailing,” the lawyer was saying. “I mean, Jesus, your daughter is in a coma and you can’t even stand up . . .”

Oh but I will. I will stand up. And if she wakes, I will take her with me.

“. . . We’ll just need to turn in her passports, that’s all.”

Anna felt a sudden chill, a cold compression of chemicals stripping her down to the primal impulses of fight or flight.

“Her passports? I’m not turning in her passports.”

The lawyer brought his client’s face slowly into focus. “You’re not turning in her passports? Is that what you said?”

“It’s exactly what I said.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“I do. I do have a choice. My daughter is in a coma and I am physically incapable of engineering an escape. Surely you can find a way of proving that. Surely there’s plenty of medical evidence in support of that.”

The lawyer’s eyes grew still. “Wait a second. Are you planning to take her out of the country if she comes out of her coma?”

“No, of course not. It would be impossible.”

“Any judge in this country can and
will
compel you to turn in her passports.”

Yeah, but I’ll be gone by then. Long gone.

“I understand that. It’s why you’re here. It’s why I hired you.”

The lawyer leaned forward in his chair. “Let me explain something. There are laws in this country.”

Anna pressed her palm over her bandaged eye.

“Don’t talk to me about the law. The law is supremely malleable, besides which this system is backlogged. It’s sluggish and it’s backlogged. At the next hearing, if the judge asks for her passports, you’ll present a motion, and then another motion and another after that, until we go to trial.”

“You can forget about lifting the restraining order then.”

Anna laid both her hands on her lap. “I have no problem with that.”

“You can forget seeing your daughter.”

“I have no problem with that.”

“Your call,” the lawyer said.

As the door closed behind him, Anna returned to the realization she’d gained in a jail cell in some African country knee-deep in shit: never,
ever,
rely on the law.

“You used to run a manufacturing plant in China.”

Ree looked up and nodded.

“Can you make me a map?”

“Sure. What kind of map?”

“From here to Eva’s room. With all the nurse’s stations and all the ways around them—nooks, alternative routes, whatever. So I can make it from here to there without being seen. She’s on the second floor. Room 276.”

“Anna, there’s a restraining order.”

“Make me a map.”

“You’re all fucked up. You can’t even walk.”

“But a good one, Ree, a really good one.”

“I can make you all the maps you—”

“Make me a map.”

They pored over it together in the morning, Anna insisting for the first time on a cup of coffee and no drugs. That night—pain like a bayonet in her gut, adrenaline tensing every neuron in her brain—Anna glided like a ghost past nurses and janitors, past double doors, vending machines, around corners, down two sets of elevators and a long corridor, to a door with 276 on it. She pushed it open. Someone stood up. Anna closed the door behind her.

She’d never seen a male nurse. This one was a colossus, standing nearly seven feet tall. He had almond eyes, cheekbones like razor blades, skin the color of dark chocolate.

“I’m her mother,” she said. The nurse stood like a slab of granite.

“Sixty seconds,” she said. “It’s all I’m asking for.” The nurse cast a glance at Eva, then motioned Anna forward with his chin.

She approached against the glare of far too many monitors until she saw her—skin like chalk, bruises everywhere, Death stalking every breath with feral cool.

“Talk to her.”

Anna turned, her fist in her mouth.

“Talk to her.”

“Eva . . .”

“Put your mouth against her ear.”

Fighting a wave of nausea, Anna leaned down. “Eva, my love,” but then there were far too many tears and she began to back away.

The nurse’s voice cut through the night. “Talk to her.”

“I can’t.”

“Talk to her.”

Anna filled her lungs to capacity. She exhaled slowly. She brought her mouth to her daughter’s ear and talked. She talked of the dog and of the things they would do together, how she would buy a new Scrabble board and a fishing rod and a picnic basket so they could do the river in style, how they would, finally this year, set up a stand outside the house and sell apples from their tree instead of having the neighbors come and take them all, and how this time—this time—they would actually make jam and sell that, too, and the proceeds would go toward a bigger operation, a more clever money-making scheme, and she was trying to think of what that might be when she felt a rough hand tighten around her arm.

“Go.”

“Why?”

“We’re out of time. Please.” The nurse pushed her toward the door. “Run.”

“I can’t run.”

“Run. Your legs will carry you.”

She ran and her legs carried her.

In her dream the next day, it was morning before school. Eva was standing by the door with no lunch box and no shoes. Hair matted, skin bruised, she stood against the light, hollow with longing. Anna opened her eyes. “She’s waking up,” she said.

It took ten minutes for the nurse to come—a blinding infinity of time, seconds fastening with great leisure onto the back of other seconds to form minutes, minutes bleeding unthinkingly into other minutes, as the silence around her hardened into pure dissonance, pure pain.

“My daughter.”

“What about your daughter?”

“She’s waking up.”

“Honey.”

“No honey. Call downstairs and find out if she’s waking up.”

She was. Her little girl was waking up. The sun hung low in the sky when a doctor Anna had never seen before pulled a chair up to her bed and said, “What we got today was a single response to a stimulus. The next step is a repetitive response, the one after that, a differentiated repetitive response.”

“A differentiated repetitive response?”

The doctor nodded.

“What is that?”

The doctor tapped the back of her hand with the tip of one finger. “Tap is a single response. Tap-tap is a repetitive response. Tap-tap-taaap-tap-taaap is a differentiated repetitive response.”

“So you’re tapping?”

“We’re tapping.”

“That’s it? You’re tapping?”

“No.” The doctor smiled. “Of course not. But for now, tapping is Eva’s only available response. The rest of her body is still immobilized.”

Anna closed her eyes. “How long?” she asked.

The doctor scratched his head. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I have a feeling it’s going to be quick.”

Anna watched Ree settle by the side of her bed. “You should have been a cartographer,” she said.

“Should have been?” Ree said, wiping her tears with the back of one hand. “There’s still time. There’s still time. Then I won’t have to cook. I’ll make maps instead.”

Anna let go of a pale smile. “I was going to take her to Greece, you know.”

“You were going to take who to Greece?”

“Eva. I was going to wait until she woke up, then I was going to smuggle her out of the country and take her to an island in Greece.”

“You speak Greek?”

“No.”

“You get these crazy ideas.”

“I know.”

“The craziest shit.”

“I know.”

“It could be some disorder.”

“It could be.”

“The poor girl. Stranded on some Greek island. So what’s next? A houseboat in Malaysia?”

“I’m thinking apple jam in New Mexico this fall.”

Mia came around later that morning with bits of people’s lives—the asking price of a property bitterly vacated by a friend, the improbable union of two people, the acquisition of chickens by someone in their yoga studio—a woman whose only prior distinction had been the purchase of a Porsche Cayenne SUV.

“All these people getting chickens,” Mia said.

Anna looked away. “Eva wanted chickens,” she whispered after some time. “And a garden, she wanted a garden. I said no to both.” It was Mia’s turn to look away.

“Come,” Anna said, pushing the covers away.

Arm in arm, they went as if for a walk to the vending machines, slipped around the corner to the back elevator and down to the third floor, where they changed elevators. They walked, talking of nothing, deflecting stares with their seeming absorption, and came to a stop only once they got to Eva’s room, Anna’s breath coming out fast and hard by then. Mia pushed the door open. The male nurse was gone, a short white thing stood squat and glum in a pair of white clogs instead.

“Can I help you?”

Anna stepped forward. “I’m her mother.”

The nurse considered her for less than a second. “Ma’am, you’re not allowed in here.”

“Just one minute. Let me talk to her for just one minute.”

“Ma’am, there’s a restraining order against you. I can have you arrested.”

“Some people . . .” Mia said, shaking her head.

The nurse brought her hands to her hips. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Some people ought to stay home. Spare the world their presence.”

“Me? Spare the world my presence? What about
her?
She nearly killed her child!”

“Go home,” Mia said. “And stay home.”

Anna woke up with a start in the middle of the night and didn’t even bother with her slippers. The nurse’s station was deserted as she ran past, somehow light on her bare feet. Someone did a double take on the second floor, not too far from Eva’s room, but Anna kept going and no one called out. She closed the door behind her. The male nurse stood up.

“This one will have to be quick,” he said, so Anna lowered her mouth to her daughter’s ear and began to talk, with greater fluency, greater conviction this time, and a dim sense of a full emergence, a blessed surfacing. She’d learned from Mia that chickens could be purchased over the Internet and began debating the number the two of them could handle, the female to male ratio and, beyond that, the type of greens they might be able to grow. With each sentence came details of a new relationship to the Earth. The coop would have to be marked and fenced, the garden turned and watered. As she spoke, an idea began to form in her mind of all the things Eva might latch on to in the murkiness of her state and refuse to give up once fully conscious.