Jake (2 page)

We don’t talk about what I remember about my dad anymore. I still like the smell of Camel cigarettes, even knowing it isn’t a Dad memory. I breathe deep whenever we pass someone with that smell floating around them.

Even knowing cigarette smoke is bad.

It probably doesn’t matter whether my memories are perfect. Cigarette smoke made me feel like I remember my dad. That was better than nothing.

So this Saturday, we left the breakfast dishes in the sink. Mom said we needed the extra five minutes to dress warmly. We put on long underwear and knotted
scarves around our necks like snowmen. We still got cold standing in the elevator.

“It’s going to be brutal outside,” Mom said, like she was thinking about turning around and going back to bed.

“Joey Ziglar’s dad says the elevator shaft works like a thermometer. The cold comes from the basement, where there isn’t much heat because heat rises. The cold follows it up the shaft like mercury.”

“Thanks for that bulletin,” Mom said, rolling her eyes.

The lobby, usually shadowy, was bright with reflected sunlight. The plants around the fountain looked more enthusiastic than at any other time of year. Or maybe the super, Mr. G, made it look that way by adding all these red flowers in pots for the holidays.

We zipped through the doors in our usual hurry and stopped. The first couple of seconds outside took our breath away.

Mom and I looked at each other with scream faces, then ducked back into the lobby for a second to let ourselves get used to it. “Cold out there,” I said, sort of gasping.

Mom kept jumping from foot to foot, warm-ups.

My eyes teared up when the wind hit me. It’s cool
really. Everything looks like it has such sharp edges for a few minutes after that happens.

“I’m gonna beat your butt in class,” Mom said.

Okay, so there was no turning back. We charged outside again.

The wind blew so hard my scarf stood straight out over my shoulder. A fresh layer of snow had fallen overnight, and the wind picked it up, so that it danced through the air like crisp, cold bees, stinging our faces.

We turned the corner of the building to get to the car, and walking in the shade there, the wind wasn’t so bad. We were too cold to talk, though. Mom says the air makes the fillings in her teeth hurt.

Then we got out in the sun again. It was better in the sun. Not really warm, but better.

We scraped an eggshell-thin layer of ice off the windows and mirrors while the car warmed up. I like doing this. The ice falls away in dinner plate–sized sheets that make a sound like
crickle-crackle
. It looks like broken glass when it hits the ground.

I said, “What did you get me for Christmas, that’s what I want to know.”

“For me to know, for you to wonder and worry,” Mom said, not wanting to open her mouth too much.

We go to karate class first.

My mom and I take class together. It’s sort of hard to live down, taking class with Mom. She says, if one of us has to quit, I’m going to get awful cold waiting in the car for her because
she’s
not embarrassed to be seen in class with me.

Or without me.

So neither one of us is going to quit.

Next is grocery shopping.

Everything up to this point was like any other Saturday. Well, except for the hundred Christmas trees lined up in front of the store for people to choose from.

Lately it smells like walking through a pine forest to go buy bread. A Santa Claus rang a bell for people to drop money in his Meaty Bone box for the dog pound. Even dogs get Christmas, I guess.

More pine forest as we left. I kept trying to get Christmas present hints out of Mom. As we skidded and skated across the icy parking lot, she planned the rest of our day.

Shopping, shopping, and shopping.

When we got to our car, I had to work the grocery cart over an icy ridge. I didn’t need any help. Karate has made me strong. I said, “I’m old enough to stay home alone, I hope you know.”

Mom said, “Not a chance. Who’s going to lug the loot ba—” and the locks on the car doors sprang open. I lost the rest of what she said as the cart rattled over that last icy bump.

I unloaded the cart, putting everything on the floor in front of the backseat. It took five minutes, probably less.

“Mom?” I said, looking around when I’d finished. I didn’t see her.

“Mom!” I yelled. “Mom?”

This old lady who was slipping and sliding along behind her cart looked my way. I yelled, “Mom,” then she yelled and pointed at the car. At the other side of the car, so I ran—slid—around there.

Mom had fallen on the ice.

She’d slipped partway under the car. She was white, almost like the ice, her face pinched in a way I had never seen. It was a lot more slippery on this side of the car. The ice was wetter, like somebody had spilled something there. I fell on my butt getting to Mom.

I hardly felt myself hit. For a second, everything went black.

I’d heard someone say that once in a movie. I pictured it like Suzie’s darkroom where she makes her
camera film into photographs. You switch off the light and you have this little bit of light in your memory so you have a second or two to get used to the black.

It wasn’t like that. I was in the dark so fast I didn’t know it until the light was coming back.

I felt numb as I got up; I couldn’t move as fast as I wanted to. Something did hurt. I couldn’t tell what, and I didn’t feel like thinking about it.

Mom hadn’t moved. That old lady never stopped yelling. I liked that. By the time I got on my knees next to my mom, help was arriving. The Santa. Then four or five more people.

“Mom,” I said. I put my hand on hers, not sure where she hurt, or if I could make it worse. She grabbed me and held on tight. She hadn’t said anything. I looked up, saying, “She’s hurt.”

“Somebody call an ambulance,” a man in a store jacket said over the other voices.

“Mom,” I said again. I couldn’t get over it. I ran the idea through my mind a few times. Not like a thought, over and over, but something I had to figure out.

Mom worries about something like this happening to me. Not out loud. But when she hesitates a little before she says yes to rock climbing with Aunt
Ginny and then adds, “Be careful,” I get it that she’s worried. When she won’t buy me a bike, I get it.

And now I could see her point. I was right here when this happened and I didn’t even know it for whole minutes. And there was nothing I could do to help.

Another few people came to look, including a woman with a crying baby on her hip. The baby kept crying and crying. The mom paid no attention to it at all. When the ambulance came screaming down the street, it took me a minute to know the difference.

The old lady, the first to notice Mom had fallen, said very loudly, “I feel better knowing help has arrived and I’m going now.” She turned to the woman with the crying baby and said, even more loudly, “I’d advise you to do the same, so the medics can hear themselves think.”

For a moment there, I just loved that old lady.

It was a
broken leg, that’s what the medic guys said. They made me ride up front in the ambulance, like a copilot. The real copilot rode in the back with Mom, sitting where I would rather have been.

I think I would.

Mom had begun to moan a lot and that made me feel sick, even from up front. The pilot—the driver, that is—tried to take my mind off Mom.

He asked, “What’s your favorite sport?”

I couldn’t think of any sports. I stared at him. He was wearing this knit cap with a pom-pom dangling down his neck. I’d get beaten up in the school yard wearing a hat like that.

He ran the siren through a busy part of town. Green ropes of tinsel and little Christmas flags were
strung between the streetlights. Cars pulled over to the side of the road so we could rush past them.

While all this noise was filling our heads, the driver looked over and grinned like a crazy person in a scary movie I saw once at Matthew’s house. He even had the same pointy eyebrows.

He definitely didn’t look like somebody Mom would let drive us anywhere. I almost wished
he
were the one riding in the back. Except Mom had enough problems without him sitting next to her.

When he stopped at the hospital, he said, “Great ride, huh?”

I knew he’d been trying to make me feel better. It didn’t work, that’s all. I climbed out and hurried around the ambulance.

There was no ice in this parking area, so it was easy for them to lift Mom out of there and push her inside on this bed with wheels. A gurney, they called it.

More noise came at me in the hospital. Squeaky wheels. A doctor yelling questions at us. The ambulance guys yelling back. Somebody crying. Was that Mom crying?

People moved fast. I ran behind the gurney till somebody pulled a curtain closed right in front of my
face. The ambulance driver said, “She’s gotta do this by herself.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

He walked me to a desk where he said, “I’ve gotta move the truck.”

He put some woman in charge of me. She barked questions at me like a seal. “Can you call your dad? Where do you live? How old is your mother? What’s her insurance company? Who’s her doctor? Which relative do you call in an emergency?”

“I don’t know,” I said. That felt wrong. I was sure I knew the name of the doctor Mom went to. Probably I knew everywhere she sent checks because she usually talked to herself while she wrote them. No names came to mind. My mind went blue, like a computer waiting for someone to choose a screen saver.

The other guy from the ambulance came and said, “You should follow the gurney upstairs.”

He put me on an elevator. “Get off on ten,” he said, and pushed ten like I was too young to know.

Other people got on and off at the third floor, and the fourth, and the seventh and ninth. Because they were patients, none of them looked like anybody I usually saw on elevators. I tried not to stare at the
ones with plastic tubes taped to their arms or sitting in wheelchairs.

In the end, I was glad he told me to get off on ten and pushed the button to be sure I would.

At the desk, I said, “Can I see my mom? She just got here.”

A nurse said, “Sit over there.”

There was Christmas music playing. It sounded sort of too slow, like the tape player needed batteries.

I could have looked out the windows, I guess. I sat there, thinking my butt still hurt, like that should matter, and bit all my fingernails down. Mom hates nail biting. I figured she wouldn’t care much that I was doing it right now.

After a while, another woman came to talk to me. Not a nurse; she wore a skirt and sweater like she worked in an office. She said I should call her Miss Sahara, like the desert. I think this was supposed to be funny, only I couldn’t smile. Besides, she was smiling hard enough for both of us.

Miss Sahara told me the insurance stuff could wait, but she needed to know what relative to call. Did my mom have any allergies or illnesses they ought to know about? “Can’t Mom answer any of this?”

“The doctor gave her a sedative.”

“What does that mean?”

“They put her to sleep.”

“To sleep?” I stood straight out of my chair.

Mom had our cat put to sleep last year because she was old and sick. Mom wasn’t either one of those things. Tears started running down my face. I must’ve looked like a big baby but I didn’t care.

“I didn’t even get to talk to her.”

The weird thing is, somebody tells you your mom is dead, you’d think it would be like stuff they say on television, your heart would be breaking.

Only my heart was sort of numb. My voice went away entirely and it was my jaw that might break. My mouth was wide open. I wasn’t making a sound and I couldn’t close it.

I never cried like that before.

Miss Sahara kept on smiling and listing diseases I mostly never heard of. This guy in a white coat—maybe he was a doctor only not in a big hurry to go anywhere—came over and said, “What’s going on here?”

She showed him even more teeth and said, “I’m trying to sort things out. We’re having a little meltdown here.”

“I thought,” I managed to say, “it was just a broken leg.”

My voice came out so hoarse, I don’t think they understood me. She looked away and talked to him in a lower voice, as if I had left the room. “His mother’s the spiral fracture. No purse, and she’s out like a light.”

“Okay, fella, deep breath. Way deep,” the guy said. I noticed his name tag, it said STAN. Stan the man, I’d heard that somewhere. “Everything’s going to be fine. Just you and your mom out together today?”

I tried to get a deep breath that wasn’t the kind that had to do with crying. I had this feeling like a belt pulled tight around my chest.

“Shake your head yes or no.”

I shook yes.

“Your dad at home?”

No.

“Your dad live with you?”

No.

“Got a grandma or grandpa?”

Yes. A grandfather.

I never saw him. I talked to him on the phone at Christmas and my birthday, that was about it.

While I was answering Stan, my jaw started to relax. He saw that, I guess, because he sat down and
waited for me to be able to talk. “It was a broken leg,” I said, finally.

Miss Sahara’s smile shrank just enough to look like I’d said something stupid. “A spiral fracture is—”

“—a certain kind of broken leg,” Stan said.

“That can be fixed,” I said. “They didn’t have to put her to sleep.”

Now it was Stan who looked like somebody’d said something stupid. Only he looked that look at Miss Sahara, who turned red.

“Your mom’s going to be okay,” he said to me. “The doctor gave her something to
help
her sleep so she wouldn’t be in pain.”

“She’s not dead?”

“No way, man,” Stan said. “Sleeping like a baby. They’re going to have to operate, though. Miss Sahara, here, it’s her job to ask you questions your mom can’t answer now.”

The tears didn’t quit. They ran so fast I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My face sort of crumpled. My breath came faster.