Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(81)

Brady promised. He was good at keeping secrets.

“It might be better if he does die. Because if he wakes up and he’s brain-damaged, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

Then she clasped him to her and her hair tickled the side of his face and the smell of her perfume was very strong. She said: “Thank God it wasn’t you, honeyboy. Thank God for that.”

Brady hugged her back, pressing his chest against her titties. He had a boner.

Frankie did wake up, and sure enough, he was brain-damaged. He had never been smart (“Takes after his father,” Deborah Ann said once), but compared to the way he was now, he had been a genius in those pre–apple slice days. He had toilet-trained late, not until he was almost three and a half, and now he was back in diapers. His vocabulary had been reduced to no more than a dozen words. Instead of walking he made his way around the house in a limping shuffle. Sometimes he fell abruptly and profoundly asleep, but that was only in the daytime. At night, he had a tendency to wander, and before he started out on these nocturnal safaris, he usually stripped off his Pampers. Sometimes he got into bed with his mother. More often he got in with Brady, who would awake to find the bed soaked and Frankie staring at him with goofy, creepy love.

Frankie had to keep going to the doctor. His breathing was never right. At its best it was a wet wheeze, at its worst, when he had one of his frequent colds, a rattling bark. He could no longer eat solid food; his meals had to be pureed in the blender and he ate them in a highchair. Drinking from a glass was out of the question, so it was back to sippy cups.

The boyfriend from the bank was long gone, and the fat babysitter didn’t last, either. She said she was sorry, but she just couldn’t cope with Frankie the way he was now. For awhile Deborah Ann got a full-time home care lady to come in, but the home care lady ended up getting more money than Deborah Ann made at the beauty shop, so she let the home care lady go and quit her job. Now they were living off savings. She began to drink more, switching from wine to vodka, which she called a more efficient delivery system. Brady would sit with her on the couch, drinking Pepsi. They would watch Frankie crawl around on the carpet with his fire truck in one hand and his blue sippy cup, also filled with Pepsi, in the other.

“It’s shrinking like the icecaps,” Deborah Ann would say, and Brady no longer had to ask her what it was. “And when it’s gone, we’ll be out on the street.”

She went to see a lawyer (in the same strip mall where Brady would years later flick an annoying goofy-boy in the throat) and paid a hundred dollars for a consultation. She took Brady with her. The lawyer’s name was Greensmith. He wore a cheap suit and kept sneaking glances at Deborah Ann’s titties.

“I can tell you what happened,” he said. “Seen it before. That piece of apple left just enough space around his windpipe to let him keep breathing. It’s too bad you reached down his throat, that’s all.”

“I was trying to get it out!” Deborah Ann said indignantly.

“I know, any good mother would do the same, but you pushed it deeper instead, and blocked his windpipe entirely. If one of the EMTs had done that, you’d have a case. Worth a few hundred thousand at least. Maybe a million-five. Seen it before. But it was you. And you told them what you did. Didn’t you?”

Deborah Ann admitted she had.

“Did they intubate him?”

Deborah Ann said they did.

“Okay, that’s your case. They got an airway into him, but in doing so, they pushed that bad apple in even deeper.” He sat back, spread his fingers on his slightly yellowed white shirt, and peeped at Deborah Ann’s titties again, maybe just to make sure they hadn’t slipped out of her bra and run away. “Hence, brain damage.”

“So you’ll take the case?”

“Happy to, if you can pay for the five years it’ll drag through the courts. Because the hospital and their insurance providers will fight you every step of the way. Seen it before.”

“How much?”

Greensmith named a figure, and Deborah Ann left the office, holding Brady’s hand. They sat in her Honda (then new) and she cried. When that part was over, she told him to play the radio while she ran another errand. Brady knew what the other errand entailed: a bottle of efficient delivery system.

She relived her meeting with Greensmith many times over the years, always ending with the same bitter pronouncement: “I paid a hundred dollars I couldn’t afford to a lawyer in a suit from Men’s Wearhouse, and all I found out was I couldn’t afford to fight the big insurance companies and get what was coming to me.”

The year that followed was five years long. There was a life-sucking monster in the house, and the monster’s name was Frankie. Sometimes when he knocked something over or woke Deborah Ann up from a nap, she spanked him. Once she lost it completely and punched him in the side of the head, sending him to the floor in a twitching, eye-rolling daze. She picked him up and hugged him and cried and said she was sorry, but there was only so much a woman could take.

She went into Hair Today as a sub whenever she could. On these occasions she called Brady in sick at school so he could babysit his little brother. Sometimes Brady would catch Frankie reaching for stuff he wasn’t supposed to have (or stuff that belonged to Brady, like his Atari Arcade handheld), and then he would slap Frankie’s hands until Frankie cried. When the wails started, Brady would remind himself that it wasn’t Frankie’s fault, he had brain damage from that damn, no, that f**king apple slice, and he would be overcome by a mixture of guilt, rage, and sorrow. He would take Frankie on his lap and rock him and tell him he was sorry, but there was only so much a man could take. And he was a man, Mom said so: the man of the house. He got good at changing Frankie’s diapers, but when there was poo (no, it was shit, not poo but shit), he would sometimes pinch Frankie’s legs and shout at him to lay still, damn you, lay still. Even if Frankie was laying still. Laying there with Sammy the Fire Truck clutched to his chest and looking up at the ceiling with his big stupid brain-damaged eyes.