Picture Us In The Light(80)
“No.”
The rest of it will hit me soon, I know, all of it, but right now that’s the part that sinks through me: that they’ve always had to keep this from their friends.
“Daniel, there was nothing you could do. Listen to me. Look me in the eye.” He takes a long breath and then forces a wobbly smile. “We have been careful all this time. We have taken every precaution. We have many plans in place and have prepared for every scenario. And now you are going to RISD and you have a very bright future and you will be very happy. Okay? So don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”
When I wake up it’s dark outside and I feel the collision in all my bones. I’m on the couch bed, and when I sit up, the springs creaking angrily, there’s a note next to my pillow:
Get rest, my dad’s written in his messy scientist’s scrawl. Take care of your mother. If you feel any symptom of concussion such as: nausea, dizzy, double vision, excessively tired, call me RIGHT AWAY.
I still ache all over, like someone unzipped my skin and wrenched each bone thirty degrees out of place and then zipped me back up again, but otherwise I’m fine. My mom’s the one who paid for what I did.
I texted Regina before I fell asleep. Are you okay? I wrote, and when she wrote back that she was I said, You promise? and she said yes. Harry’s been texting and calling me—there were like fifteen messages the last time I checked, and then I stopped checking and then I turn off my phone. I know I’m breaking the code we’ve lived by since Sandra died. I should call him back. Except everything that happened yesterday (I can’t believe it was just yesterday) isn’t anything I can tell him. I feel hollow inside, and I can’t fathom talking about any of this. What is there to say?
When I peek into my bedroom now my mom’s sleeping on my bed, her hair splayed across the pillow. On my nightstand next to her there’s an expired bottle of Vicodin from years ago when she sprained her ankle, and a cup of tea I don’t think she touched. I stand in the doorway as the crash flashes over me again, and with it all its alternate-universe endings—my dad and I coming home without her, my dad planning her burial—that I was so close to bringing about. I watch her there, remind myself she’s breathing, steady myself back in the world.
Around lunchtime my mom wants to move back out to the living room. I help her to the foldout couch and then hole up in my room, lying down and trying to nap or trying to lose myself on the internet. She calls for me an hour or so later.
“Can you—bring me—water,” she says, biting off the end of each syllable like it hurts to talk. “Time for—another pill.”
I get her a glass of water and bring it over. She shakes out a pill from the orange bottle and swallows it, and then sinks back down onto the bed, wincing, then lies flat and tries to catch her breath. “The medicine makes me so tired.”
I don’t know what to say to her—it feels wrong to be talking at all without having first apologized. But everything I try to imagine saying sounds so impossibly small, wet cardboard trying to hold up a rooftop. There’s nothing I can say in my defense, nothing that can possibly make the situation any better, in any way, and I can’t bear the thought of hearing that made solid and loud and permanent by admitting it. Right now that truth is a hard knot in my stomach. I say, “Okay.”
And I can hear right away how it comes out all wrong—I sound hostile and sullen. She looks at me, wounded and maybe a little angry, and I should say it all then, at least try, but I can’t. I go back to my room instead.
All afternoon and all evening I draw Mr. X. This time I draw him on a couch, hungrily watching immigration agents pointing guns at my mom on his TV, his blood pumping like his team just won the Super Bowl. It’s dark out and I’m shading in his knuckles (he’s holding a beer, enjoying himself, his cane lying next to him on his couch), when a knock on the door shatters the quiet, threatens to detonate my heart. I sit frozen at my desk for a good ten seconds, waiting, the room contracting and then expanding around me in time with my heartbeat. When I lean forward and look into the living room my mom is out still, the medication pulling her under the surface. Another knock. I get up silently, cold all over, and look through the peephole.
It’s Harry. I close my eyes and try to breathe past that feeling like a belt cinched around my chest, wait for relief. It doesn’t come. And the realization crests over me then, my eyes still closed: I can’t go to Providence next year. There is nothing I don’t owe my parents now, and I can’t leave them on the brink of emergency like this each time someone knocks.
I open the door and step into the hallway, closing the door behind me. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here? I came to see if you were all right, which, apparently, you are. Where the hell have you been?”
His jaw is tensed. And something about the way he has his arms folded tightly against his chest—I’ve never thought this, ever, but I’m pretty sure he wants to hit me. I say, “I was here.”
“And you couldn’t take five seconds to pick up your phone? I’ve been calling you since yesterday.”
“I know. I saw. I just—”
He lets his arms fall. He takes a step toward me and shoves me toward the wall, not hard enough to make me lose my balance, but not exactly gently, either. “You saw and you, what, just couldn’t be bothered?”