When My Heart Joins the Thousand(69)
But I realize that, for the first time in months, I do feel something: restlessness. I want to get out of this place. I don’t know what I’ll do once I get out. I don’t care. I’m just sick of it—sick of the smell, the pea-colored tiles, the mushy green beans with every meal. I want to see animals again. Real ones, not the stupid cartoon cutouts pinned to the bulletin board.
So I keep talking. I answer the doctors’ questions. I read more and more; the nurses start to call me Little Einstein, and bring me books as presents. One of them gives me a copy of Watership Down.
After a while, a doctor says, “Good news, Alvie. You’ve improved so much, you’re going to be released into the foster care system. You’ll have a family. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I wait to feel something. Anything, even a flicker of relief. But there’s no response from inside me.
What they called improvement was simply a slow process of locking everything away, deep in the recesses of my mind, until I was numb enough to function. Over the past few months I have been building the Vault, stone by stone. Now I walk and talk, but a part of me is still far away, and I don’t know how to reach it.
Mama is dead because of me. I should be with her, rotting at the bottom of the lake.
Maybe I am, and that’s why I can’t feel anything. Maybe I’m like Schr?dinger’s cat, alive and dead at the same time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The screech of rubber on pavement yanks me awake. My body jerks upright on the bench, and I open my eyes just in time to see a car swerve, narrowly avoiding a squirrel in the road. The squirrel freezes, then darts away in a blur of brown fur and vanishes.
If things had happened in a slightly different way—if a quantum particle spun in one direction instead of another—maybe the driver wouldn’t have braked in time, and the squirrel would have been hit. Maybe in another universe, that did happen. Or maybe in yet another reality, the car hit a person instead. It could have been me. Or anyone.
Snow falls thick and fast, covering the world in a blanket that muffles all sound. My breath steams in the air.
I climb into my car and huddle in the backseat, though it’s not much warmer here. Shivering, I rummage inside my duffel bag until I find my tattered, dog-eared copy of Watership Down, the same copy the nurse gave me over six years ago. I read it for the first time that very night, in a single sitting.
Before that point, I’d never had much interest in fiction—I preferred nature and science books, even as a child. Novels were always about feelings and relationships, things that confused and intimidated me. But somehow, Watership Down was different. I couldn’t stop turning the pages. Hazel and Fiver and Bigwig became every bit as real as the flesh-and-blood people around me. I was there with them in the pages. I felt it all—their hunger and fear and desperate yearning for a place they could call home.
I touch the pages, my gaze lingering on a familiar phrase: My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.
For some reason, the words send a chill through me.
I close the book and gently tuck it back into my duffel bag. My fingers are numb inside my gloves; I flex them, trying to restore circulation.
I don’t want to waste my last bit of gas by running the heat, but if I stay here, I’m going to get frostbite. There’s a convenience store across the street, the windows bright, glowing with inviting warmth. Maybe I can spend twenty minutes or so there before getting kicked out.
A bell jingles overhead as I walk in. I realize that this is the same store I used to shop at back when I had my apartment. The clerk glances at me, then away. Does he even recognize me, with my ragged, filthy clothes and matted hair?
I pretend to browse through the newspapers. My gaze skims over the text, not really absorbing it . . . and then I freeze.
The headline reads SCHAUMBURG TEEN CHARGED WITH ASSAULT AND BATTERY. I recognize the photo. It’s TJ.
Beneath that: 18-year-old Timothy J. Hawke was arrested following an altercation in a public park with 19-year-old Stanley Finkel, during which Finkel was allegedly beaten with his own cane. Hawke claimed that Finkel initiated the confrontation between them, provoked him verbally, and struck the first blow, but only Finkel sustained injuries, the extent of which are unknown. Hawke awaits a court appearance on Monday, while Finkel remains hospitalized.
The words blur. My hand begins to tremble, and my fingers tighten on the paper, crumpling it.
I drop the newspaper and run out of the store.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
When I arrive at Saint Matthew’s Hospital, they don’t want to let me past the lobby. Maybe because I’m not part of Stanley’s immediate family, maybe because I look like a crazy person, with my grimy clothes and matted hair. But I won’t leave. I park myself in one of the seating areas. Whenever anyone says anything to me, I just repeat in a monotone that I want to see Stanley Finkel.
I’m exhausted and dizzy with hunger, but I don’t care. I’ll stay here as long as it takes.
Finally a nurse arrives in the lobby and says, “We informed him that you’re here. He says you can come up.”
I follow her into an elevator, and we get out on the third floor. She leads me down a long, sterile white hall and stops in front of a door. “He’s been in and out of surgery,” she says. “I’d advise you to keep your visit short.”