The Paperboy (30 page)

A
T SIX IN THE MORNING
, Ward was moved from surgery to the recovery room. He lay in the room alone, although it was built to accommodate half a dozen patients. The room was cool, and the nurse covered his chest and arms with an extra blanket, being careful not to tear loose the tubes that ran from the bottles overhead into his arm.

He was conscious, she said, but he was tired and he did not move when I stood beside him and touched his shoulder. I spoke his name.

There was no answer, and I looked at the nurse again. She came to his side, reaching beneath the blanket for his wrist, counted the beats of his heart, his breathing; she checked the lines leading from the bottles into his arm to make sure they were dripping at the proper speed.

She looked at her watch, then at my brother. “He was
under anesthesia a long time,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t start back up all at once.”

She picked up the chart at the foot of his bed, entered his statistics, and headed for her other patients.

A
T THE HOTEL
, she took me by the hand and led me to her room. I lay on her bed, kicking off my shoes and my pants, and she lay down next to me. A little later, she pulled me into her neck, holding me there, faintly rocking.

“Tell me if you feel sick,” she said.

I burrowed myself into her, smelling her familiar perfume right against her skin, a different odor this close.

I was surprised at the weight of her breasts against my chest.

I did not move again until the middle of the afternoon.

I
WOKE UP ALONE
. The door that connected this room to Ward’s was open, and she was in there, packing his things into his bag. She had showered and washed her hair and put on her makeup. I stood in the doorway, watching her from behind. I swayed on my feet, and she turned, as if drawn to the movement.

“I called Yardley,” she said.

I walked in and sat down on the bed. The sheets had not been changed and they were stiff in places with dried blood. “He had to know,” she said.

I sat looking at the sheets, trying to decide what that changed. I could not make any of it stay in one place long enough to see it.

“He had to know,” she said again, as if we were arguing.

“What did you tell him?”

She studied me a moment, and gradually I realized she was looking at my forehead. “They shouldn’t have let you out of the hospital,” she said.

I touched it with the tips of my fingers, pushed slightly into it, and felt the push straight through to the back of my head. My forehead was softer than it had been before and it bulged, as if it were growing a head of its own.

“A crack like that, you could have died.”

“What did you tell Yardley?”

The phone rang and she picked it up. “Don’t tell him anything else,” I said, but it was only the front desk, asking if we intended to stay an extra day. She threatened to sue the hotel if we were bothered again and hung up.

“I told him Ward took a walk out on the beach,” she said. “I told him the policeman said it happens all the time.”

A moment passed, I tried to make those words a sentence, to find a beginning and an end and the meaning.

“What did he say?”

“Yardley? He said he was working.”

I looked at her, waiting. She liked to make you wait, even when she was feeling sorry for you. “He asked if Ward was going to make it, and when I said yes, he said he was in the middle of writing and couldn’t leave.”

I saw that he’d believed her, because if he’d thought that Ward had compromised himself in a hotel room, he would have been on the way to the hospital.

That was Yardley Acheman’s nature, and it was better that he was sitting in Lately writing his story about Hillary Van Wetter and Moat County than in Daytona Beach, putting together what had happened to Ward. He was not the sort of person to leave hurtful things alone.

She crossed the room and kissed me quickly on the
cheek, smelling of soap and shampoo. I wondered how I smelled to her.

“He’ll be down after he finishes Hillary’s story,” she said. “Maybe next week.”

“I don’t think Ward’s going to be able to work for a while,” I said.

“That man from the newspaper is still there, and he’s checking it as they go along, instead of Ward … ”

I smiled at her and the things she didn’t know about the newspaper business, and about my brother and Yardley Acheman. “Yardley doesn’t know it well enough to write it alone,” I said finally.

“That’s not the way it sounded,” she said, and I got up and went into the bathroom and stood for a long time in the shower, and decided again that nothing Yardley Acheman did with the story about Hillary Van Wetter mattered. My only interest was to keep him removed from what had happened in Daytona Beach. And as I was thinking that, I came back to something else that had been going through my head, something which was there even the night before as I was following the ambulance attendants down the corridor of the hotel.

I didn’t know if Ward would lend himself to the story that he was walking along the beach. I was not sure he could lie.

I
SAT BESIDE HIM
in the hospital all the next day. He had suffered a fracture of the skull, and for that reason could not be given pain relievers. Charlotte came and went, leaving flowers, medical opinions. If her estimation of my brother had changed because of the hotel beating, it didn’t show. To her, it was exactly as if he had been attacked walking along the beach at night.

It was not that simple for me, although I understood that Ward hadn’t changed, that the change was in the way I saw him.

He had made his way through a crashed airplane, after all, while Yardley Acheman, who slept with women regularly, found his reasons to stay outside. He’d returned to the fraternity house at the University of Miami the same night they had beaten him, he had walked into the Van Wetters’ camp in the heart of the wetlands near the river. And none of that was recast because one night in Daytona Beach he craved sailors.

“Listen,” I said, and then could not think of the words. The room was quiet a long time, I wondered if he was still listening.

“Listen, I don’t care what you were doing with those guys, it doesn’t matter to me.”

He moved his head slowly, rolling it across his pillow until he was looking at me through the slit in the tissue around the eye that was not bandaged.

“How bad is it?” he said. His voice was dry, and I could barely make out the words.

“Pretty bad,” I said.

He waited, blinking.

“You’re going to need more surgery, to reconstruct your face.”

He nodded, as if he already knew that. “It’s like the ocean.” He lifted his hand from beneath the sheet and moved it over a series of small waves. He smiled then, showing a black crust inside his mouth. “We should go swimming,” he said.

His hand dropped and a moment later his breathing was deep and dry and regular and I knew he had fallen asleep.

His eyes opened the moment I stood up, on the way out
to find a drink of water. I settled back in my seat and said, “The police caught them. Did you know that?”

He shook his head no, uninterested.

“They beat one of them up, I don’t know about the other one. I think they’ve had trouble with sailors before.”

My brother had no investment in what happened to the men who nearly killed him. “They either had to let them go,” I said, “or the whole thing would have ended up in the newspapers.”

It was quiet in the room, and then someplace down the hall a woman screamed.

“When you were hurt in the ocean … ” he said finally, and then he stopped, as if he couldn’t find the frame for what was next. Or as if his throat was so dry he had lost his voice.

“You want me to get you a Coke?” I said.

He shook his head no.

“When you were hurt in the ocean,” he said again, “was it like this?”

I said I didn’t know. “It was bad, though. I think it’s always bad when you come close to dying.”

“It’s a strain,” he said, and smiled again. There were a few teeth left in back. His lips were swollen and he barely opened them to speak. “Did you feel like crying?” he said a little later.

I stared at him a moment, remembering it.

“Not when it was going on,” he said, and the words were stripped bare, “but afterward, when it was over. Did it make you weep?”

“Yes, that’s what it does to you,” I said.

He nodded his head, and in a moment his unbandaged eye shone with tears, and when he blinked they ran over and down his cheek.

“There is something sad about almost dying,” I said. “It comes to you later.”

And tied together in this way, Ward and I, for a little while that afternoon, were as close as we would ever be.

I
DID NOT TELL WARD
until the next morning that Yardley Acheman was continuing alone with the story. Ward had showered before I came in, but because of the stitches he could not wash the blood out of his hair.

He looked better, though, and even with his face half covered in bandages, he seemed more himself. The swelling was down, for one thing, and I could see more of his good eye.

He would not cry again at the sadness we’d spoken of, although I know from experience that the feeling itself does not disappear because you give in to it. He had cried once, though, and I suppose that was as much of it as he was allowed.

“Yardley Acheman is going ahead with it,” I said.

Ward was drinking a Coke through a straw, taking little sips. He put the bottle on the table which bridged the bed and dropped his head back into the pillow.

“The editor’s with him, and they’re writing it,” I said. My brother lay still, thinking, jumpy with apprehension.

“What difference does it make?” I said a little later. “It’s a story in a newspaper.”

He didn’t seem to hear.

“They don’t know what happened at the hotel,” I said, thinking that might have been on his mind. “They know you’re in the hospital, that’s all.…” I stopped there, not wanting to enunciate the thing they didn’t know, not wanting to say it out loud.

“The police said you were out walking along the beach,” I said. “That’s what they wrote in the report.”