How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets (21 page)

“I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Listen, Evan, I’ve always liked you. But you think you’re the victim in all this, and you’re not. You’re the one who got away clean. You owe me one, Evan. One day I’ll call you on it.”

“Yeah, okay, ” Evan says, completely rattled by Brad’s claims.

“I gave you Dean, ” Brad says. “I put him right in your lap. You think they would’ve called you? Think again. I gave him to you.”

“Thanks, Brad, I owe you one.”

Brad laughs derisively.

“Fuck you, Evan, ” he says.“Take the one you owe me and shove it up your ass, you pompous fuck. Don’t call me again.”

The line goes dead.

• • •

EVAN IS BLOWN away by his conversation with Brad. Is everything that Brad said true? All of it? The beatings, mental anguish, the way it all came to be? He staggers to Tracy’s room and throws himself on the bed. It doesn’t make sense. Frank would punch Tracy in the stomach? No. Evan saw her with her shirt off plenty of times. Not on a regular basis, maybe, but often enough, when they would fool around. Although sometimes they didn’t fool around, she didn’t
feel
like fooling around—Wait. This is crazy. She kept her shirt on because she was covering up her bruises? No.

And the idea of punching Dean in the face. That
can’t
be true. Just can’t be. What kind of a human being would do such a thing? Who could hit a child at all, no less a clay-handed ogre hitting a nine-year-old kid? No.

There’s no point in trying to sleep. It won’t happen. He’s too upset. He turns on the TV, hoping to drown out his thoughts with electronic white noise.

HE’S STARTLED AWAKE by a rustling sound in the hallway. He leaps out of the bed. Is someone in the house? Burglars? Thieves? His heart pounds. He checks the clock; it’s three-fifteen. He feels especially dazed.

He walks across the room and peers down the hallway. Someone is there. It’s hard to see. Someone in the dark hall standing at a door. It’s the door to the linen closet. The person doing the rummaging is Dean.

“What’s going on?” Evan asks.

Dean mumbles something that Evan can’t hear. He walks toward him.

“What?”

“I have to change my bed, ” Dean mumbles a little louder.

“Why?”

“I threw up.”

Evan reaches Dean and sees, in the dim glow of the yellow bug light that spills through the front window, that Dean is practically green; he’s quite ill.

“Let me help.”

Evan takes the sheets and goes into Dean’s room. It smells awful; foul, rank, dark vomit is splattered on the sheets and blankets.

“You couldn’t make it to the bathroom?” Evan asks.

He looks back at Dean who’s swaying in the doorway, barely able to keep himself upright. Dean shakes his head slightly, then retches, tightens his lips, but a few drops spurt out; he turns and runs to the toilet, Evan hears the vomit come; he hurries to help. He waits until the round is over.

“Is it a flu? Are you sick?”

Dean shrugs listlessly, leaning against the wall of the bathroom, his legs splayed out around the toilet bowl.

“How do you feel? Are you achy? Feverish?”

“My back hurts really bad.”

“How bad?”

“Bad, bad.”

“What part?”

“Here.”

Dean points to his lower back, his kidney.

“One side, or both sides?” Evan asks.

“One side. It hurts real bad. I think I’m dying.”

Evan takes a moment to think. Projectile vomiting and severe pain in left kidney. What could that be? Kidney failure? From what? Poisoning? No—wait. From a blow. A severe blow to the kidney. Holy crap.

“Which side did you land on when you fell at the skate park?”

“I don’t know, ” Dean moans.“This one.” He points to his left side.

Oh, man. Evan’s stomach drops. Dean’s done severe damage, internal bleeding, urine is backing up, he might die—

“Let’s go!” Evan commands.

“I’m sick.”

“I’ll carry you. Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To the hospital.”

• • •

THEY FLY THROUGH the black streets without hindrance; everyone in Yakima, including the police, sleeps at night. They fly, fly, fly to the hospital. Dean groans and turns uncomfortably in the backseat, one second lying, one second sitting up, one second heaving into a plastic garbage bag Evan has brought along. The town is silent. There is nothing to hear but the sound of four tires on rough pavement and the uneven rhythm of a boy vomiting.

The hospital comes into view, a yellow brick building all lit up like a beacon of hope for the frail and sickly. Evan skids into the parking lot and stops at the ambulance entrance. An empty ambulance is parked by the curb. The lights under the awning are so bright they hurt his eyes. Two-foot-tall red letters announce the importance of the portal: EMERGENCY ONLY.

Evan leaps from the car, rushes in. A woman sits behind a desk and is startled by Evan’s entrance.

“My son. He’s having kidney failure. He was hit. He’s vomiting. He’s in the car. I can’t carry him—”

Bam
! She hits a button somewhere because in an instant, two giant orderlies come rushing at him.

“Kidney failure in the car outside, ” the woman barks.“Get him into triage, stat! How old is your son, sir?”

“Fourteen.”

“Does he have any history of kidney failure?”

“No.”

“Has anyone in your family ever—”

“No, no.”

“Why do you think it’s kidney failure, sir?”

“He fell really badly, in a skate park, you know, where they jump off ramps and spin around. He hit his lower back and got a giant bruise. He seemed fine, but then he started vomiting everywhere and he can’t move and his back hurts so much—he can’t even walk, I had to carry him to the car—he’s probably bleeding to death internally—”

“Please, sir, don’t panic.”

She picks up the phone and dials.

“Dr. Katz, we have a fourteen-year-old male with a blunt force trauma to the lower back, suspected internal bleeding and kidney damage. He is extremely ill, vomiting, lethargy, acute localized pain, inability to ambulate. Yes, sir. Of course, Dr. Katz. Very well, sir.”

She hangs up.

“Dr. Katz is our attending trauma doctor, ” she says to Evan. “He’s instructed me to bypass triage. He’s on his way.”

The gurney bearing Dean is wheeled through the lobby at high speed. Dean groans horribly. He’s covered with a sheet and is belted down.

“Prep Two, ” the woman shouts at the orderlies. She turns to Evan, “The best thing you can do is relax. Why don’t you fill this out for me?” She hands him a clipboard.“Do you have your insurance card?”

Insurance? Clipboard? His son on a gurney? No. It’s too much for Evan: he’s suddenly assumed the role of his parents, the sit-and-wait role, and he doesn’t like it. It’s easier to be the patient than the one who waits.

“Sir?”

His head starts to spin. He’s tired. Very tired. And stressed. Oh, god. Is that rubber he smells? Burning rubber?

“Is something burning?” he asks.

“No, sir. Are you all right?”

He feels not-so-all right, actually. A little dizzy. His insurance card. A clipboard. Dean disappears down a hallway. Evan hears metal rings scrape against a metal rod as a privacy curtain is snapped shut. He hears a wail of pain from Dean.

“Sir?”

“I have epilepsy, ” Evan says to her. He holds up his hand, shows her his bracelet. “Please call my neurologist in Seattle. He will tell you exactly what to do.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t do anything until you’ve called him.”

“Are you all right?”

“Don’t touch me until you’ve called him. Do you understand me?”

“Sir?”

And then the blow comes, the blunt end of an axe swung hard by a big, strong man intending to chop down a tree with one magnificent swing; the blow comes, striking him just below the base of his skull; his head snaps back, his arms flail, his legs go rigid; he falls.

E
VAN GAVE HER the money she asked for one afternoon as they walked home from school together: he handed her the envelope he had gotten from the bank, blue with a white stripe and holes neatly punched in it for some unknown reason.

He offered to drive her to the doctor, to wait for her, to drive her home. She said no. He asked her if there was anything he could do. She said no. He asked her if there was any way she would reconsider, if there weren’t some way they could grow up quickly, keep the baby. She said no.

“Tracy, I—”

“What, Evan?”

“I want . . .”

“You want what, Evan?”

He wanted so much. He wanted to be older and more mature and to tell her again that he wanted to keep his child. Even if she didn’t want him, he wanted to keep the kid.

“Are you sure we can’t try to make it work?”

“And if it doesn’t work out, Evan, what do we do
then?
”

She smiled sadly when she saw that he had no answer.

“You can’t force someone to be a father, Evan, ” she said. “My mother forced my father, and look at him. Bitter and mean. I won’t do that.”

But it wouldn’t be forcing anything. She wouldn’t have to force.

“Go, Evan, ” she said, “follow your dream. Be famous. Make me proud.”

“But I—”

“But what, Evan?”

What could he say to her? That he didn’t want to be famous? No. She was giving him a gift, releasing him, giving him a mission. Go, be famous.

She turned and walked up the street, flat and dry, dirt for sidewalks and ditches to collect the rain.

“Go, ” she said.“Go home.”

“But, I—”

“
Go
, Evan.”

But, I—

“Y
OU’RE A VERY fortunate young man.”

Evan blinks his eyes open. He’s in a hospital bed. That’s more like it. He looks over. A doctor.

“I see you’ve had a tracheotomy before. Your seizures sound remarkably like a collapsed trachea. I can imagine how that could confuse an EMT.”

White coat, blue scrubs, mid-forties. He has a long, flat face with a broad chin and speaks with an accent, a hint of Australia. Possibly New Zealand? He never says “mate, ” but Evan can feel the word lurking at the back of his throat.

“I’m glad you showed the nurse your Medic Alert bracelet. We called your neurologist; he gave us a detailed medical history. In all, you were seizing for less than ten minutes. Very fortunate.”

Evan doesn’t respond; the doctor doesn’t leave. All doctors do that. They linger a moment. What do they want? Thanks? Thank you for giving me life? The doctor as God. Maybe that’s the real reason God cast Adam out of Eden. He didn’t say thanks.

“Where’s Dean?” Evan asks.

The doctor steps aside and presents the other bed in the semiprivate room. In it lies Dean.

“He’s asleep, ” the doctor says.

“Is he all right?”

“Gastroenteritis. Food poisoning. Probably salmonella, but we won’t know until the cultures come back from the lab. Acute, painful, but his kidneys are just fine. Did he eat any contaminated food recently?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it later. Don’t worry about it now. Once he wakes up and we get your blood levels back from the lab, we can release you both. Dr. Melon wants to see you as soon as possible, of course.”

“Of course.”

The doctor turns to go. At the door, he stops, thinks a moment with his back to Evan. Then he turns around.

“Do you ever wonder about something like this?” he asks.“You must. You have
status epilepticus
. Very rare. You must wonder about these sorts of things.”

“What’s that?” Evan asks.

“Your son would have been perfectly fine at home. He’d have vomited and vomited and vomited and eventually fallen asleep, slept for a day or so, and then he’d be over it. But if you’d had that seizure at home, you might have died. The only reason I mention it is that Dr. Melon told me how intelligent you are, and that you have a very clear understanding of your epilepsy. And epilepsy fascinates me. I wonder. Did you ever think that maybe your assumption that Dean was in a life-or-death situation was really your brain’s way of fooling you into going to the hospital?”

Evan considers it for a second, but it’s hard to consider anything because he feels drugged and tired.

“You don’t have to answer, ” the doctor says.“I’d be interested to know, but it’s really not my business. If you were to ask me, though, I might say that, consciously, you brought your son here to save him, but, subconsciously, you brought your son here so you could save yourself.”

He steps out into the hallway.

“Very fortunate, ” the doctor says to himself.“You’re a very fortunate man. And you have a very fortunate son.”

And he is gone.

HOURS LATER, EVAN awakens. Dean is sitting up in bed, sucking on ice chips, watching TV.

“You want some ice?” he asks.

Evan nods. Dean presses his buzzer. When the nurse arrives, Dean says, “Could you get my dad some ice, please?”The woman nods and heads off.

“It was the chicken, ” Dean says. “Bad chicken. Someone came and asked if we wanted TV. I said okay. Is that okay? There’s a fee. Is it okay?”

“It’s okay, ” Evan says.

“I can’t believe we both got sick off of that chicken. We should sue Emeril.”

Oh, wait. Dean thinks . . .

“I mean, it tasted fine going down, but it sucked coming back up, right? I feel pretty good now. How do you feel? I feel good. Just take it easy for a couple of days. That’s what Dr. Katz said. Just take it easy.”

The nurse returns with a cup of ice chips.

“How are you feeling?” she asks Evan discreetly as she tucks in his sheets and fluffs his pillows.

“Pretty good.”

“You’ve been admitted for observation. They’ll let you go in the morning. I’m on duty all night.”

Evan wonders if she is propositioning him. He wants to ask her if there’s a sponge bath in his future.

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

He looks over at Dean, who’s shoveling ice chips into his mouth like popcorn and flipping the channels like it’s a Play Station 2.

“Maybe for something sweet, ” he says.

She smiles at him knowingly, turns to Dean.

“You want a popsicle?” she asks brightly.

“Sure!”

She leaves. Dean smiles at him like it’s some special vacation, and Evan doesn’t say a word, not one thing. Not about the seizure, not about what Brad told him. He smiles at Dean, but he keeps his mouth shut.