The Outcast (26 page)

Slanting the pitchfork against the wall, he collapsed next to the milk storage tank just like Rachel and he used to do when they were young and innocent. He must have sat there for hours on the dirty cement floor of his brother’s barn, digging fingers into his skull in an attempt to rip out the visuals of her with a man who wasn’t him, who would
never
be him; then—once his anger was spent—crying over the girl who’d become a woman he didn’t even know but whose heart had somehow already claimed his.

Judah cannot take any more memories. Snapping his seat into the upright position, he cranks the engine of the blue Ford, guns it up the ramp and back onto the interstate. He turns the local rock station as loud as his radio will go, more to block out his thoughts than because he enjoys the words.

He knocks back Red Bulls and then tosses the crushed cans to the floorboard; he digs through an open bag of pizza-flavored Combos he keeps in his lap. Grating lyrics screech to a stop and then drive full-throttle into the next song; radio stations fade in and out; DJs’ velvety voices disappear into the void of airwaves, only to be replaced by another slew whose voices are just as gravelly as the others were silken. All the while, Judah wishes something would occupy his mind besides Rachel. Besides Eli. Besides himself and his own mistakes.

Just as the sun rises over I-24, turning the four lanes of asphalt from gray to gold, Judah crosses the Tennessee state line. He pulls over at another truck stop on the outskirts of Nashville and pays for a shower whose availability is called out over the intercom like an order of fast food.

He is standing at the sink in a fresh set of clothes, shaving off his three-day beard with a two-dollar razor and soap from the dispenser, when he pauses and stares into his eyes. They are bloodshot from lack of sleep and an overabundance of caffeine, but there is something different about them that is due to more than just exhaustion. He then realizes that his eyes—albeit the same honeyed brown—are as hard as
fossilized amber. Though my son avoided the more overt temptations, he knows a lot of his innocence has been lost in the short time he’s been away. Judah’s only hope is that Rachel will not see this, for he fears she might blame herself, when Judah knows he has only himself to blame.

Bundling up his dirty clothes in the stiff towel that is even dirtier than they are, Judah walks out into the truck stop’s store and purchases from a rotating glass case a crystal figurine of a horse that is small enough to fit inside a thimble. For Eli, he gets a bouncy ball that lights up when thrown and is too large to be swallowed by a six-month-old throat. These gifts are a paltry attempt at consolation, he knows, but the idea of walking into that hospital room empty-handed and hollow-eyed fills Judah with so much dread that he would never have the courage to go in.

Thirty minutes later, Judah enters the south garage of the Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. The ceiling is so low it makes him feel claustrophobic as he circles his vehicle around and around the numerous levels trying to find a space.

He marches up the sidewalk with his heartbeat roaring in his chest as loudly as the thoughts inside his head, wondering if Rachel will even want to see him or let him see Eli. Walking through the double set of automatic doors into the hospital, Judah is amazed by its festive appearance when the people who come here do not have much to be festive about. There is a wide, curving staircase with a star-and-ribbon banister, and just past the elevators, an
elaborate train set encased in protective glass that winds past minuscule homes, snowy lakes, and evergreen forests whenever a patient presses a red button.

Judah walks into the waiting elevator and presses the button for the myelosuppression floor as Ida Mae instructed. In the elevator with him is a hospital volunteer with a Rubbermaid cart heaped with toys and a young Spanish couple whose son looks completely healthy but is wearing a white hospital wristband. Stepping off the elevator when it reaches the sixth floor, Judah walks over to the intercom box and is buzzed in once he can reveal to the nurse the room number and name of the person he is visiting.

Slipping his truck-stop gifts into the pocket of his coat, Judah rubs his hands with the mandatory disinfectant and strides down the ocean-themed hall toward Eli’s room. His breath grows shallow and his legs weak the closer he comes to that door. Taking the gifts out of his pocket, Judah holds on to them with everything he has, hoping that such small tokens can be enough to let him back in.

Rachel

I am furious when someone raps on the door. This is the first time Eli has slept without whimpering in two days. Springing from the chair, I cover the hospital room in four
steps and fling the door wide. I begin to say, “No visi—” but cannot finish the word.

“Judah?” I ask, although it can be no one but him. His hair is longer, his face harder, the skin pulled across his cheekbones coarse and burned as if he has been someplace that, even in winter, sees the sun. Because of these changes, or because of the guarded expression in his eyes, he looks more like a man than the boy who walked off Ida Mae’s porch into the rain three months ago.

Even though I opened the door ready to send whoever had come to visit right back home again, my emotions are so unstable that I now cross the hospital room’s threshold and bury my face against Judah’s chest. All I can hear is his thundering heart keeping time with the beeping machines behind us, and then he eases both arms around me. I begin to weep as he does, for I don’t know how long it has been since I have been held and not the one doing the holding. Turning his torso, Judah slips something into his pocket and closes the hospital door with one hand. Judah moves this hand up between our bodies and uses the rough pad of his thumb to skim the tears from my cheeks. It is a simple gesture, a sweet gesture, yet the same one his brother did the night I realized the full magnitude of what the two of us had done.

This memory brings me to my senses. I step away from Judah and watch as his face falls; then his arms fall in slow motion back down to his sides.

“You cut your hair,” he says.

I turn my head so that his outstretched hand doesn’t touch my severed locks. I lace my arms to hide their shaking. “And I see that you
haven’t
cut yours.”

Judah grins, and I think nothing in him has changed, that he is still that same mischievous boy I knew from before. But that shadow in his eyes soon returns, and he glances over at the hospital bed where my tiny child is struggling to recuperate even as more chemo is being pumped into his system.

“How is he?” Judah asks.

I move over to the bed and fold Eli’s blankie down so that it doesn’t come in contact with the plastic tubes snaking from his port.

“It’s hard to say.” I am relieved to drop my upbeat performance for the people who barely know us, who just ask about Eli so they’ll have the details of another sad story to tell. “We’re almost through treatments. But every time we come back here, it feels like Eli’s closer to dying.”

“That’s how chemo works, isn’t it? The doctors kill off the good cells with the bad, then let the good ones rebuild themselves again?”

I shrug. “Most of the time I don’t know what’s going on. I just have to trust that these complete strangers know what they’re doing when they take my son’s life in their hands.”

“I’m so sorry, Rachel.”

I have heard those rote words so often, I usually don’t hear them anymore. But this time I do.

I can tell by the pained expression on Judah’s face as he looks at my son that if he had the power to scoop Eli up from that hospital bed and make him well again, he would; if he had the power to take me in his arms and heal my heart again, he would.

I sit in the chair again. In my shattered state, I do not trust myself to keep from going over and leaning against Judah in an attempt to absorb the strength his presence exudes. I do not know what has happened to me or to him in the time since he’s been gone, but looking at Judah now—leaning against the door of the bathroom with his hands sunk in the pockets of his faded jeans and his wavy blond hair brushing the hood of his hunter-green jacket—is like looking at a stranger. Besides the color of his eyes and the crooked angle of his smile, I can see no semblance of the boy I knew in childhood, the boy for some reason I never thought could turn into a man until he was gone.

“Where did you go?” I ask. “I mean, after here?”

Judah strolls over to the window and splits the blinds so he can look down on the happenings of Music City. Taking his other hand from the pocket of his jeans, he folds his arms and turns back toward me. “Wyoming,” he says. “Cody, Wyoming. I was a farrier for the rodeo.”

“But how’d you get out there? How did you get that job?”

“I hitchhiked. And had some money saved. So when I got to Wyoming, I got my driver’s license, then bought a truck and drove over to the rodeo and told them I knew a thing or two about horses.”

Maybe it’s the way he won’t look in my eyes, or the way his sentences are so halted it is as if he’s making them up one fragment at a time. But something about his story doesn’t ring true. Or maybe there is something about his story that he is not telling me. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I realize what it is.

“You’ve met someone?” I ask. “From Wyoming?”

“Nobody’s from Wyoming,” Judah says. His gaze remains fixed on the few stubborn wisps clinging to Eli’s scalp that I haven’t had the heart to cut. “At least not in the rodeo.”

My cheeks grow hot; I realize he has evaded my question. It is all I can do to keep still, not to pace and fidget like Judah is doing in front of the window. I am grateful that he didn’t look me in the eye as he said this, won’t even look my way now. If he could see my face, he would know the envy that is inside my heart.

I hate myself for these fickle emotions. I am acting like a normal young woman with boy problems even though I am sitting next to a hospital bed occupied by my diseased son. I hate myself because this envy is rooted in selfishness, letting me know that I have not changed much at all. My dear childhood friend deserves to find someone who will cherish him for the man he is, not a woman who couldn’t stop self-destructing long enough to realize what a treasure she had before it was too late to claim it.

I am opening and closing my mouth, attempting to dispel the tension between us but not finding the right words,
when Ida Mae taps the door, then comes in. “How’s our little man?” she asks, bending down in front of the miniature fridge to replenish the juice boxes and carrot sticks I ate yesterday.

“He had a solid BM this morning, and they’re taking him down for a PET at noon,” I explain. Ida Mae nods. She and I often communicate in medical acronyms that would never make sense to anyone listening from the outside world.

“Your mom and Norman been by yet?” she asks, then closes the fridge and turns. “Oh, hey there, Judah. Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

My own eyes flit between them. Ida Mae doesn’t seem the least bit shocked to see Judah standing here after months away, and I never did find out how he’d known of Eli’s sickness and which hospital room he was in. The moment I start to ask these questions, Ida Mae tosses a juice box at me. “Now, you two are too young to be inside on such a pretty day. Why don’t y’all go take a walk around town?”

“Aren’t they calling for sleet?” I waggle the plastic straw into the juice box and take a sip. “I saw it on the news.”

Ida Mae waves her hand. “Those doom-and-gloom weather reporters don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Judah turns toward me and shrugs. Getting up from the hospital chair, I place the juice box in the fridge, kiss Eli’s forehead, and retrieve my coat and scarf from the closet. Judah holds the door open, and I pass under his arm into the hall. We ride down the elevator in charged silence, our
unspoken words electrifying the air. When the automatic doors of the hospital open, ushering us out into the street, I gulp the biting wind and let my lungs fill until they feel like they will splinter.

“I haven’t left the hospital since Dr. Sengupta put Eli on a supplemental IV,” I explain, working my fingers into my red mittens and coiling the matching scarf around my hair, the first red items I have ever been allowed to own. “Even this freezing cold feels wonderful.”