Dream Girl(19)

Gerry had to go to the bathroom, but no one would believe him. Even if they did, he would have to come back or suffer the consequences at school, assuming there was ever school again. Wallace Wright, on the noon news today, had suggested there would be no school at all this week. His mother had turned off the set and started to cry. But they had everything they needed as far as Gerry could tell. Food, toilet paper, coffee, the amber liquid his mother poured into her coffee at night. He didn’t give his mother any trouble. That was the phrase instilled in him by his father, who traveled so much. “Don’t give your mother any trouble.” When he was younger, a nursery school baby, he had imagined a box with a bow. But what, exactly, would be inside a box of trouble? He didn’t know and he didn’t want to find out. Gerry didn’t give his mother any trouble.

She missed his dad, he guessed. He had been supposed to fly home Sunday and now he kept calling and saying his flight was canceled. Every day so far.

The trick to riding a toboggan was getting it to stay still long enough to get on it. Gerry had learned to lay it perpendicular to the path, but one still had to move quickly. He liked the fact that one rode sitting up, wind in the face. It slowed one down. He tucked his booted feet beneath its curve. There was a steering mechanism of sorts, but how one used one’s weight was more important. His father had taught him that last winter.

The toboggan almost got away from him, so eager was it to head down the hill. So Gerry jumped on, even as the sentry began to yell the word no one had yelled all day.

“Car. CAR.”

Then: “No.”

Oh thank God, Gerry thought, not that he would ever say such a thing out loud.

“TRUCK!”

It was a postal truck. A red, white, and blue mail truck, although the white part was almost invisible against the backdrop of snow. And while it was not going that fast, it was going fast enough. In fact, it seemed, from where Gerry was on his flight down Berwick, as if the truck, should it fail to stop, was moving at the exact right speed to crush him. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night—THANKS U.S. POSTAL SERVICE.

All the boys were screaming now and Gerry realized there must be some girls, too, for there were shrill, high-pitched squeals among the screams and shouts. Some of the boys seemed merely excited at the prospect of carnage, but all the girls were genuinely terrified. Girls were nicer than boys, except when they weren’t, like when that big girl from the third grade, bigger than anyone in the second grade, asked Gerry what his father really did. The girls did not want Gerry to die, or maybe they just didn’t want to see his blood and guts.

He was approaching Bellona now, the postal truck bearing down on him, and he understood that the truck could try to put on its brakes, but it would only become more unreliable and there were kids everywhere. The truck had no choice but to keep going. So he leaned hard, as hard as he could to the left, and the toboggan miraculously took the tight turn without spilling him, perhaps because his boots were, in fact, stuck under its curved hood. It felt almost as if the toboggan rode along on one side, in a ninety-degree angle to the street, but surely that wasn’t possible.

At any rate, the truck didn’t hit him and everyone cheered and it was the best moment of his life. He had wet himself inside his snowsuit, but no one could see that. Not even his mother seemed to notice when he came home an hour later and peeled out of his clothes, reveling in that strange sensation of feeling, with that first exposure to heat, as if he were colder than ever. He tried to figure out a way to tell his mother the story without upsetting her—Don’t give your mother any trouble—but he couldn’t find the words.





February 21




GERRY STARES into the swirling snow outside his window. While his corner of Baltimore is dark, he can see that other sections still have power. Maybe that means his power will be restored sooner. But it also could mean there is less urgency about responding to an outage confined to Locust Point. For as long as Gerry can remember, Baltimore has had complicated conspiracy theories about city services—whose streets get plowed first, whose 911 calls receive priority. Despite the few glamorous high-rises that nestle here, the new town houses clustered around them like little chicks, Locust Point is not a place with clout. Would it matter if the Olympic swimmer actually occupied his expensive apartment?

Aileen sits nearby, in a low-slung easy chair, her plain face big and bright as a full moon thanks to the light from her tablet, where she appears to be playing some game that involves stabbing the screen with her index finger over and over again. The lower floor of the apartment made her uneasy in the dark, so she asked if she could stay up here with him after she groped her way downstairs to retrieve the tablet. Actually, she didn’t even ask, come to think of it, just asserted that she would sit up here and keep him company. Gerry didn’t want the “company” she offered, but now that she’s here, he’s miffed that she’s making no effort to engage him. Normally he would be asleep by now, but it’s almost too quiet to sleep. He feels more alert than he has in weeks. Did he miss his medication in the aftermath of the power going out? His pain doesn’t seem to be affected, which is to say it’s not good, but it’s no worse than usual.

“It’s getting cold,” Aileen says, looking up at last. “Without electricity, the heat doesn’t work. We’ll have to leave if this goes on much longer.”