The Odds (17 page)

When Nick gets to the landing, Meg climbs up and over him in order to get him standing again and positioned with the crutches. He looks like a fallen bandit, like a collapsed rock star—whisker growth, tousled hair. Meg says, “I’m going to put out a towel and soap and a razor. I know that’s probably the last thing you care about right now, but when you’re ready, you’ll have them.”

Laurie and Susannah creep up the stairs, not wanting to miss anything.

The four of them stand crowded in the hallway, listening, while in the bathroom Nick pees for what seems like years.

“Kidneys are working,” Joel says.

They manage to stifle a laugh.

Laurie suggests they read for a while before the Sunday house-cleaning in order to let Nick sleep.

Joel agrees. “He needs to sleep.”

“So long as we clean,” Meg says.

“And have TV time,” Susannah adds.

“He better stay upstairs, huh?” Laurie asks.

“Definitely,” Joel says.

“Are you giving him Alison’s bed?”

“Yes.” Meaning Meg is giving up the space she enjoyed the last three nights. Space—and she was able to keep the light on into the night. “Back to the bunk bed,” she says, equal with them once more.

The bathroom door opens.

“In here.” She points Nick toward the bedroom. “In here you can really rest.”

It takes him a long time to get from the bathroom to the hallway and then to position himself at the bed, and finally to figure out how to pivot so he can lie down. The kids lift his leg up slowly while he tries to help. The effort clearly exhausts him.

Joel is frowning. “There are ways to do this. I’ll work them out. A strap would help. And … I think there’s a way to use the left leg to lift the right.” He scratches his head, an engineer working out the mechanics, while Nick looks even more defeated.

Meg lets Laurie put the crutches in the bed where Nick can get to them, but she tells Nick to call if he needs to get up. “Don’t try to do it alone yet.” She turns to Joel. “Right?”

“Right.”

Susannah, without being told anything, has brought him a glass of water from the bathroom.

“Not likely,” he says, looking at it, bleary eyed.

Joel says, “You have to.”

Meg adds softly, “Water is the best thing. Can you sleep, do you think?”

He grunts, nods. Outside a thunderstorm threatens. At first it’s just wind, but the clouds come in darker and darker. He is looking toward the window, where the shades are drawn.

They all four retreat and go downstairs.

In the next moments, they can hear him sobbing. For three hours after that it’s quiet because he’s sleeping again.

They do everything they are supposed to do, the lunch, the homework, all the while waiting for some sound from Nick. They dust, sweep, clean in a quiet hush of concentration but stop short of using the vacuum. Finally it’s time to turn on the television, and Meg is heading toward it when Joel speaks.

“I didn’t tell you one thing,” Joel says. “We’re supposed to clean the wound and dress it—two or three times a day.”

“Two or three
times
? Why didn’t you say?”

“I’m trying to figure out how to do it. We don’t have enough gauze. We need clean bandages, something sterile to wrap around the whole wound. Where do we get the money for all that? And we’d have to take off the splint to do it. Put it back on.”

The others listen intently.

“I didn’t know,” Meg said. “It makes sense now that you say. Of course. If we have to, we have to. We can take the splint off, put it back on.”

“It’s the best guard against infection.”

“We should have done it this morning, then.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me what kind of bandages?”

He makes a circling motion with his hands. “Ideally they circle the leg. They’re wrapped around. Well, that’s what I was reading. Do we have any safety pins? The bandages are supposed to be clean each time. You dip them in clean water. It’s good to keep them on tight. You can use an Ace bandage for keeping them on.”

“We have to buy gauze, I guess,” Meg says worriedly. “We have an Ace. It was Dad’s, remember? It’s in that drawer in the bathroom.”

Laurie still has nine dollars from babysitting all Saturday afternoon. They have enough gauze and mailing tape to get them through until tomorrow. “We have to ask him for money,” she says.

“We have to,” Meg agrees. “But he might not have an easy time getting it. There was just cash in his wallet, no bank cards. And we used all the cash.”

“I know what,” Laurie says. “We have bleach. If we took an old T-shirt and washed it in bleach … and then boiled it and then cooled it, would that work?”

Joel nods. “That wouldn’t be bad at all.”

“Maybe,” Meg says, “when he’s not so scared, he’ll … want to go to the hospital after all.” Although she doesn’t say it—none of them do—if he does the right thing, they’re in trouble.

Laurie goes to the basement to make the bandages. At four in the afternoon, they hear a thumping sound. He’s trying to get up. “Damn,” Joel mutters. Meg flies up the steps, Joel behind her. They catch him from behind, support him without a word, get him into the bathroom, and retreat to wait in the hall.

They hear a gruff, “Okay now,” and they help him back to the bedroom.

The bandages are boiling on the stove. They have to wait until the water cools, then all four of them tromp up to the bedroom. He looks at them with dazed eyes as they explain what they will have to do—three times a day—the undoing, the irrigating, the fresh bandaging.

“Who are you?” he asks. And of course he means
what are you
? Spirits, demons, dream figures, odd little creatures who don’t fit in the world.

   HE CAN’T BELIEVE THEIR existence. He woke up thinking he dreamed them. He needs to know things. What they have in mind, when he’ll be able to get out, whether they’re likely to rat on him.

When they gather around his leg, he says, “If you want money, I’m afraid I’m going to be a big disappointment to you. You got what was in my wallet.”

“That isn’t it,” the oldest girl answers.

The boy jumps in with, “Why should we lie about it?”

“We
need
money,” she says, turning to her brother. “Okay, that’s the truth, but he’s asking why you took him food to begin with. He wants to know why.”

The boy says angrily, “I don’t know why.”

They start to do things to him once more. They put plastic on the bed and move his leg over it. The littlest girl has carried up a pot of water and she stands in the corner guarding it. The middle girl holds a bucket of rags.

What kind of thing has he fallen into?

“Are you hungry?” the oldest one asks.

“A little.”

“That’s a good sign. Lie back. Concentrate on something else. We have to irrigate the wound again. Really, lie back.”

He starts to look around. A plain room, a bureau. A chair.

“Where did you get the Styrofoam?”

The boy tells him, “Rite Aid. The Dumpster. In a box that held an industrial vacuum cleaner. We were lucky. We tried the Giant Eagle and the liquor store, and we thought we weren’t going to find anything, and then we did.”

“So, after you do this whatever, I’m good to go?” There is a long silence. “When? What are you saying?”

“It’s just that we need to do this a couple of times a day. Either us or a hospital. It’s very important.”

He lies there looking at the ceiling, trying to work it out. If he limps through the street, will one of Marko’s men find him? If he stays here, is he actually safer? His car is gone, so that means someone is staking out his apartment. That means his cash is gone, too. Almost certainly. “What do you need money for?”

“Food, more bandages, pills.”

“What pills?”

“Antibiotics. We have almost enough, not quite. We should refill again.”

“How much does all that cost?”

The older girl is helping her brother uncover the leg. “The newspaper’s going to get wet,” she murmurs. She begins to take bits of it out, warning him, “Whatever you do, don’t move.”

“How much?”

“Say about twenty-one or twenty-two dollars for supplies. Then food.”

“And you have how much?”

“Nine at the moment. We’re okay for today.”

“The parents or whoever get back when?”

“Don’t know. We’ll think of something. But if you had a bank card, well, that would make it easier.”

“I’m sorry. I was living without cards,” he tells them. He sees the unmistakable flicker of suspicion cross their faces.

The boy pours water on the wound; the middle girl mops it up. “If it stings some,” the boy explains, “it’s because I put a little salt in. Saline is good in a case like this.”

He almost laughs. These kids are so odd, he wonders how they make it in the world.

“Well, you say I can’t move. I had some cash at my place, but … it’d be gone now. And people watching. I still have a key to the pizza shop.”

“It’s got a sign posted that it’s closed for a couple of days.”

Nick thinks about it, the likeliness that one of them could get in and out without being seen.

There is a still silence in the room.

If Marko sees one of them and follows … “Maybe you better nix that idea,” he says into the silence.

“Earlier today,” the older girl says, “we thought about it and we decided against it.”

“It’s stealing,” the middle girl says. “We don’t intend to do that if we can help it.”

“What are you going to do for food?”

“We have jobs. Little ones. We’re going to look for more.”

When they leave the room, he looks around again. His breath comes quickly, in little panicked bursts, when he realizes how hard it is for him to think clearly. Who lives in this room? There is almost nothing in here. And only one other room upstairs from what he can see when he hobbles to the bathroom. He wonders how long they’ve been alone. He tries to remember the downstairs—couch, chair, table and chairs. Bookcase, lots of books. Otherwise, it’s a sort of bare house down there, too. It runs in his mind that poverty usually equals clutter, but even though this is the other way, not cluttered, even clean, he can see poverty.

The kids don’t act as if they owe obedience to anyone. What a wild place he’s landed in. He tries to get his brain to cough up a solution to the money problem, but everything he thinks of is impossible or dangerous.

The middle girl brings him a book and turns on the lamp. He thanks her, but he doesn’t look at it. He isn’t a reader. He doesn’t have time to tell her because she leaves again, busy.

Strange. Strange. Better than jail, but not unlike it. A bit more space, a bit.

The middle girl returns eventually with a bowl of pasta. “Kind of boring, but it might go down okay.”

He eats a little and feels himself moving toward sleep again. At six he wakes to a sound like cannonballs. He goes still, listening. Thunder and rain. The kids are all downstairs. He can hear them in the kitchen.

After a while the boy comes up. “It’s a storm out there.” He goes to the window and pulls up the shade to show how bad the rain is. Yeah, it looks bad, all right. Nick tries to figure out where he is exactly. “Is the pizza shop near?” he asks the boy.

The boy points. “Just across the street at the corner.”

In the boy’s open hand are two pills that look alike and one different one.

“What is all that?”

“Antibiotics and pain pill.”

He takes them down with a glass of water. Trust. What choice does he have?

The boy starts out of the room.

“Come here.”

He comes back a few steps.

“You know two boys, one bleached hair, wears a black jacket and the other dark hair wears a—?”

“Yeah. Mac and Zero.”

“That’s who you were looking for up at the house?”

“Yeah.”

“What do they do up there?”

“They shoot up.”

“They know I’m here?”

“No. Nobody does. Except us.”

“They know you found me?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“ ’Cause if they did, it would mean … there could be a couple of guys come around asking questions, looking for me. It could get violent. If they ask—”

“I won’t talk.”

“Okay. You understand what I’m up against.”

“Yeah. Killers. Drug people. Killers.”

Panic hits him again; his whole body feels like electric wires connect one part to the next. He wants to leave here, run, but where?

“Tomorrow’s a holiday, so we’ll be here at home. After that we have school. Tomorrow it would be good to practice with the crutches while we’re here to help. Don’t try to make it down the steps. You won’t be ready yet. When you get bored, you’re going to want to, and that’ll be tough.”

“Sure will.”

“We only have one television. We don’t have cable. We were thinking of bringing it up, but it doesn’t do too well in here. Still we could. If you want it—”

“It’s okay.”

“Better to sleep anyway.”

He lets himself fall asleep again. When he wakes up, he has no sense of what time it is. He tries to listen for sounds. A faucet running, the television.

He makes it to the bathroom alone, defiant. They hear and come up to watch him making his way back to the bed, but they don’t stop him. The crutches kill his underarms, but he’s not going to say it.

He uses a belt the girl brought in to lift his own leg up.

They watch.

Then all four kids arrive again with the water and bandages and start on his leg all over again.

   IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE night and Meg wakes. She sits up in bed, listening.

He’s trying to get out of bed. As she slips from her own bed, she realizes she should have put her mattress on the floor in his room, slept there, kept watch. She tiptoes to the hall, getting there just in time to catch him faltering, one crutch slipping. She holds on to him, steadies him. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “You all right?”

“Yeah. Foggy. Something woke me up.”

She takes him the whole way into the bathroom and backs off to leave him alone, but she keeps the door open a crack. “Call me when you’re done. This is too hard.”