Trouble (2 page)

Franklin's eyes had opened when the reporter's camera flash went off. But he didn't blink. He stared out straight, intent, still. What is he looking at? thought Henry. He reached his hand out in front of Franklin's eyes, but his brother looked right through Henry's fingers, focusing beyond them.

"Franklin," said Henry.

His brother's eyes closed.

Late, late at night, when there was no more to see, Henry's parents decided to go back to the house. Louisa hadn't been home when the policemen came; no one had told her yet. They tried to get Henry to come, too. "There's no more we can do here tonight," his mother said.

Henry ignored her.

He had never ignored his mother before.

After a very silent while, his parents left. Henry stayed on Franklin's bed.

Cold. The low hum of the overhead light, the clattering and clicking of elevator doors. The smell of antiseptic, of clean sheets, of bandages. The slight wrinkle of corruption in the air. Outside, a nurse patrolling the nearly empty hallways with the steps of someone who knows that all the world is asleep and it shouldn't be awakened.

Henry felt strangely peaceful ... and guilty for feeling peaceful. But the lights in the room were dim and his brother was so still. He could hear Franklin's breathing, timed with the rhythms of the quiet machine behind him. The one window in the room was opaque with the reflection of the light over his brother's bed. Sometimes Henry crossed the room and leaned his forehead against the cold glass so he could see out. As the night went on, he did this more and more. He needed to remind himself that this one room wasn't the whole world.

Close to dawn, a nurse came in to change the dressing on the stump. "Do you want to wait outside?" she asked.

Henry shook his head. He wanted to watch. He wanted to see everything.

"I think that you had better wait outside," said the nurse.

She led him into the hall and then around the corner, and he sat down in a vinyl chair by the nurses' station. He let his head fall back against the wall.

He closed his eyes.

And he saw himself with his brother, hefting their packs up higher on their shoulders as they climbed through the Gateway and up, up to the Knife Edge, Franklin turning to him and saying, "I knew you'd make it. I knew it all along," and Henry nodding, not needing to say anything.

When Henry's parents came back to the hospital the next morning, they found him asleep in the vinyl chair. One of the nurses had put a striped cotton blanket over him, and he had curled up and fit as much of himself under it as he could.

They woke him, and together they went back to Franklin's room. Nothing had changed. Franklin still unmoving. Clear plastic mask and tubes. His eyes closed. His breathing still the same, in time to the rhythms of the quiet machine. The new bandage on the stump of his arm stained at the end. Henry thought he could smell whatever was doing the staining.

Perhaps the only thing that was different was that the sun was up and Henry could see out the window.

And his father hadn't shaved—which was, Henry thought, the first time that had ever happened.

Louisa had not taken the news well, his parents told him. She had been waiting for them when they got home, holding the quick note that Mrs. Smith had left for her in the kitchen. They told her about the accident. They told her that Franklin's arm was gone. That his brain had swollen and that the doctors were using drugs to relieve the pressure. That there would be tests as soon as the swelling went down. That everyone had to hope for the very, very best.

Then Louisa had dropped the note to the quarried-stone floor and run up to her bedroom.

They had heard her through the night, but she would not open her door to them.

She would not open the door in the morning before they left.

His mother reached out to Henry and drew him to her. He could not remember another time when she had held him so tightly. Or when his father—with his eyes closed and his hands up to his face again—had looked so ... empty—as if the soul had left his body, and his body understood that it would never come back.

They stood that way, together at the foot of Franklin's quiet bed. That was how Father Brewood found them. They stayed that way during the psalm he read to them—"In the time of my trouble I sought the Lord: I stretched forth my hands unto him, and ceased not in the night season." But during his prayer—"Look down upon Franklin Smith, your servant"—Henry's stomach started to growl. Loudly. Then very loudly.

"I'm sorry," said Henry when Father Brewood had finished.

"No matter what happens, there is always the business of the world to attend to," said Father Brewood.

Henry went downstairs to the hospital cafeteria to find some breakfast. It was quiet and still there, too, and the mopped floor smelled slightly of disinfectant, as if someone had thrown up and the janitor had made a job of it. He found a waxed carton of orange juice and a pastry with no filling; they were both as tasteless as Henry expected them to be. He took small bites and ate slowly. He didn't need to hurry back to the room. Nothing would change, though he wanted more than he could say to have things go back to the way they had been before his birthday.

But Henry was wrong.

He knew it as soon as the elevator doors opened and he stepped onto his brother's floor. A white-coated doctor ran past him, and the nurses' station was empty. Henry sprinted toward Franklin, and when he turned the corner of the hall, he saw his parents standing outside the room, his mother holding his father, together looking inside. Father Brewood stood beside them, his hands on them both. The running doctor was pushing past them. The sounds that were coming from the room, the terrible sounds ...

The smell of the cafeteria disinfectant came back into his throat, and Henry threw up.

The next time that Henry saw Franklin, his brother had a strap drawn tightly across his chest. His right arm was strapped down. The thought came into Henry's head: They don't need to strap down his left arm, because it isn't there anymore. I wonder where it is? He went to sit again on his brother's bed. He fingered the taut straps.

Dr. Giles was back in the room. There was a seizure, he said. Significant swelling of the brain still. Whatever damage there had been may now be more extensive. If the scan is positive, then surgery will be recommended to control the swelling. No visitors now. Stimulation to a minimum. Hope for the best.

Henry couldn't say whether the rest of that day went quickly or whether it dragged its wearisome self along. The brain scan came back with a report of "indeterminate brain activity." The decision was made, and Franklin was taken immediately into surgery to relieve the swelling. They waited for about forever. Finally, he came back, the top of his head wrapped in bright white bandages, his eyes closed. All the blood cleaned from his face and fingernails.

"With some patients, the scans are simply impossible to decipher accurately," said Dr. Giles. "But we'll be able to tell more in twenty-four hours. We'll have another scan then."

Sitting on his brother's bed, fingering again the taut straps.

Eating in the hospital cafeteria. Thick roast beef with thick brown gravy. Canned corn. Canned carrots, tasting like the canned corn.

And all of that seemed to take no time at all, because there was no time at all. There was only Now. In the hospital. Where they all sat in the middle of Trouble.

That night, Henry went home with his parents. He was astonished that the world was pretty much as it had been before he had gone to the hospital. He was astonished that he was sitting in a familiar car, riding along familiar streets, idling into the carriage house, walking through the back door of his home, climbing the stairs, coming into his own room. Is it possible for everything to change, and for nothing to change? He opened his casement window, and the clean salt smell of the sea rose to him. He could hear the waves cresting onto the black boulders along the cove, one after the other. The moon was coming up, throwing a startling silver light along the undersides of the clouds and setting them apart from the darkness.

Henry lay back on his bed and fell into sleep.

And dreamed again of the Gateway. His brother was ahead of him, always ahead of him, hefting his backpack up around his shoulders. He turned back to Henry. "I knew you'd make it," he was saying again.

And Henry desperately wanted to say something to him. Something to let him know how wonderful it was to be up on the mountain with him. Something so beautiful that they would both begin to cry.

But when he opened his mouth, all he could say was "Indeterminate brain activity." And still asleep, Henry did begin to cry, and the waves below him galled themselves on the dark stone ledges beneath the house.

I
N THE MORNING
—What day was it? Wednesday? Had he lost track?—in the morning, Henry came down and found yesterday's
Blythbury-by-the-Sea Chronicle
beside this morning's
Blythbury-by-the-Sea Chronicle
out in the back gardens, the first one damper than the second. The first had the reporter's hurried photograph of Franklin on the front page, and, thought Henry, you had to admire a guy who could focus and shoot that quickly. Part of his own back blocked the view of the machine behind the bed, and there was part of a hand—probably one of the policemen's—at the bottom. Otherwise, Henry's brother filled the image. No one could tell from this angle that Franklin's arm was missing, but the headline—"Longfellow Prep Student Loses Arm in Accident, Faces Brain Surgery"—helpfully added that detail.

Henry didn't read the article.

But he did read the article in the second newspaper, because there was a different picture. It was a yearbook picture, and a dark-haired, dark-eyed face looked formally out of it, as it if wasn't used to appearing over a suit and tie and didn't quite know how to hold itself.

"Chay Chouan of Merton Charged in Smith Accident," the headline announced.

Henry read through the article and found, when he reached the end, that he couldn't remember a single thing—except for the dark-haired, dark-eyed face. So he read it again. Chay Chouan. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Preparatory High School. Father and mother, Cambodian immigrants. Stone masonry business in Merton. One brother. Coming home alone after delivering a load of slate for a roof. Asleep at the wheel. Never saw the jogger.

"
Runner,
" whispered Henry to himself; then he threw the two
Blythbury-by-the-Sea Chronicles
into the garbage can in the carriage house before his father and mother could see them. In the kitchen, he fried up three eggs for himself. Toast. Fresh orange juice. And it all tasted like the canned corn from the hospital cafeteria.

He thought vaguely for a moment about Whittier and didn't decide not to go to school as much as he drifted away from deciding anything at all. And who would drive him? He hadn't seen Louisa since the accident and his parents were still not up. So he set his dishes in the sink and headed toward the cove, where the frothy tops of the small waves bending into the beach were white as milk, almost as white as the sky that backed the sea.

He untied his kayak from the high-water post and pulled out the paddle and life jacket from inside. He kicked off his shoes and rolled up his pants, drew on the life jacket, then carried the kayak into the first water until it floated bow up, stern up, bow up, stern up on the low waves. He got in, looped the paddle string around his wrist, and headed onto the milk-white sea.

He hadn't really decided where he was going. When he had first gotten the kayak, he had explored north along the coast, sneaking into every tiny inlet. Later, he had explored south near Manchester, paddling among the marina docks and the highprowed boats, then along beaches stretched beneath the houses of Old Money—like his own.

But today, he headed straight out from Salvage Cove, paddling fast. It was still early in the morning, and who knew how far he could go? He let his mind turn as white as the waves, fading toward indeterminate brain activity, paddling, feeling the familiar, welcome strain on the muscles of his shoulders. He dug the paddle into the water and pulled. Dug and pulled. Dug and pulled. Soon he would be out of the cove's shelter and into the open sea. Already the swells were longer and deeper, and the white froth was turning a slight green. Stroking hard into an oncoming wave, he felt the spray dash to a mist around him.

And that was when he heard the frantic, panicked, cut-off yelp.

He turned toward the sound, somewhere off the north point of the cove, where the ledge dropped straight down into the breaking water.

And there—it came again. Desperate. Choked. Hard to hear above the ocean's heavings around his kayak, but still unmistakably there.

And there again.

Then Henry saw something struggling in the sea, thrashing the water around itself.

He turned the kayak and slanted it across the waves. Now he felt the force and muscle of the water, pushing him back directly into the cove. But he kept the kayak cutting across the swells even when he began to ship some water, and he paddled so that the spray from the bow flew back into his face. He knew that if he weren't paddling, he would be shivering, for the water was still spring cold, especially this far out from shore.

He kept on, faster now as the thrashing grew less, and he couldn't be sure if it was trying to float or getting too weak to struggle. Its head was low to the water, and now it was going under most of the oncoming waves. It wouldn't be long before it stayed under.

"Wait!" he cried. "Wait for me!"

The head went under.

Henry paddled desperately.

It came up again. And it turned toward him.

It was a dog. A black-faced dog, and as soon as it saw him, it began to swim out with sudden spurts of frantic energy, as if it could run through the water somehow, wrenching itself up and free from the waves, then falling back, then wrenching itself up again. Trying to yelp.

A dog.

Henry kept the kayak slanted, willing the waves to drive him by the stern. They did, and as Henry closed, the dog gave a choked bark, went under and came up again, tore itself toward him, went under, came up, and then, with an unbelievable final leap, careened from the water and threw its two front legs and as much of its chest as it could up over the kayak's bow.