Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(82)
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*cking 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.
That year was full of sometimes.
Sometimes he loved Frankie up and kissed him.
Sometimes he’d shake him and say This is your fault, we’re going to have to live in the street and it’s your fault.
Sometimes, putting Frankie to bed after a day at the beauty parlor, Deborah Ann would see bruises on the boy’s arms and legs. Once on his throat, which was scarred from the tracheotomy the EMTs had performed. She never commented on these.
Sometimes Brady loved Frankie. Sometimes he hated him. Usually he felt both things at the same time, and it gave him headaches.
Sometimes (mostly when she was drunk), Deborah Ann would rail at the train-wreck of her life. “I can’t get assistance from the city, the state, or the goddam federal government, and why? Because we still have too much from the insurance and the settlement, that’s why. Does anyone care that everything’s going out and nothing’s coming in? No. When the money’s gone and we’re living in a homeless shelter on Lowbriar Avenue, then I’ll be eligible for assistance, and isn’t that just ducky.”
Sometimes Brady would look at Frankie and think, You’re in the way. You’re in the way, Frankie, you’re in the f*cking goddam shitass waaay.
Sometimes—often—Brady hated the whole f*cking goddam shitass world. If there was a God, like the Sunday guys said on TV, wouldn’t He take Frankie up to heaven, so his mother could go back to work fulltime and they wouldn’t have to be out on the street? Or living on Lowbriar Avenue, where his mother said there was nothing but nigger drug addicts with guns? If there was a God, why had He let Frankie choke on that f*cking apple slice in the first place? And then letting him wake up brain-damaged afterward, that was going from bad to f*cking goddam shitass worse. There was no God. You only had to watch Frankie crawling around the floor with goddam Sammy in one hand, then getting up and limping for awhile before giving that up and crawling again, to know that the idea of God was f*cking ridiculous.
Finally Frankie died. It happened fast. In a way it was like running down those people at City Center. There was no forethought, only the looming reality that something had to be done. You could almost call it an accident. Or fate. Brady didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in fate, and sometimes the man of the house had to be fate’s right hand.
His mother was making pancakes for supper. Frankie was playing with Sammy. The basement door was standing open because Deborah Ann had bought two cartons of cheap off-brand toilet paper at Chapter 11 and they kept it down there. The bathrooms needed re-stocking, so she sent Brady down to get some. His hands had been full when he came back up, so he left the basement door open. He thought Mom would shut it, but when he came down from putting the toilet paper in the two upstairs bathrooms, it was still open. Frankie was on the floor, pushing Sammy across the linoleum and making rrr-rrr sounds. He was wearing red pants that bulged with his triple-thick diapers. He was working ever closer to the open door and the steep stairs beyond, but Deborah Ann still made no move to close the door. Nor did she ask Brady, now setting the table, to do it.