The Rule of Four (40 page)

I arrive to find the door to the room blocked by the one person who is more physically intimidating than Charlie: his mother. Mrs. Freeman is explaining to a doctor that after taking the first train from Philadelphia to be here, and listening to a man from the dean’s office say that Charlie is dangerously close to suspension, and being a nurse practitioner for seventeen years herself before becoming a science teacher, she is in no mood to have a doctor condescend to her about what’s wrong with her son. From the color of his scrubs I recognize him as the man who told Paul and me that Charlie was in stable condition. He of the hospital words and canned smiles. He doesn’t seem to realize that the smile hasn’t been invented yet that will move this mountain.

Just as I turn in toward Charlie’s room, Mrs. Freeman spots me.

“Thomas,”
she says, shifting her weight.

There is always a sense around Mrs. Freeman that you are watching a geological effect, that if you aren’t careful, you’ll be crushed. She knows that my mother is raising me alone, so she takes it upon herself to contribute.

“Thomas!” she repeats, the only person who calls me that anymore. “Come over here.”

I inch closer.

“What did you get him into?” she says.

“He was trying to—”

She steps forward, trapping me in a shadow. “I warned you about this sort of thing. Didn’t I? After that other business on the roof of that building?”

The clapper. “Mrs. Freeman, that was
his
idea—”

“Oh, no. Not that again. My Charlie’s no genius, Thomas. He’s got to be
led
into temptation.”

Mothers. You’d think Charlie couldn’t find the wrong side of the tracks if you pushed him off the train. Mrs. Freeman looks at the three of us and sees bad company. Counting my one parent, Paul’s none, and Gil’s revolving door of steprelations, we don’t have as many positive role models among us as Charlie has under one roof. And for some reason, I’m the one with a pitchfork and a tail. If only she knew the truth, I think. Moses had horns too.

“Leave him alone,” comes a wheezy voice from inside.

Like the world on its axis, Mrs. Freeman turns.

“Tom tried to get me out of there,” Charlie says, weaker now.

A blip of silence follows. Mrs. Freeman looks at me as if to say, Don’t you smile, there’s nothing smart about getting my boy out of a predicament you got him into. But when Charlie starts to speak again, she tells me to go in and talk to her son before he wears himself out carrying on like that across the room. She has some business with the doctor.

“And, Thomas,” she says, before I can get past her, “don’t go putting any ideas into that boy’s head.”

I nod. Mrs. Freeman is the only teacher I’ve ever known who makes ideas sound like a four-letter word.

Charlie is propped up in a hospital cot with a short metal railing on each side, the kind that isn’t high enough to keep a big guy from rolling off the bed on a bad night, but is exactly the right height to let an orderly slip a broomstick between the railings and keep you pinned to the bed forever, a permanent convalescent. I’ve had more hospital nightmares than Scheherazade had stories, and even time hasn’t sponged them all from my memory.

“Visiting hours end in ten minutes,” the nurse says without looking at her watch. A kidney-shaped tray is clamped in one of her hands, a duster in the other.

Charlie watches her shuffle out. In a slow, hoarse voice he says, “I think she likes you.”

From the neck up he almost looks fine. There’s a lick of pink skin jumping out over his collarbone; otherwise he just appears tired. It’s his chest where the damage was done. He’s wrapped in gauze down to the point where his waist is tucked lightly into the bed, and in places a sweaty pus has seeped to the surface.

“You can stick around to help them change me,” Charlie says, drawing my attention back north.

His eyes seem jaundiced. There’s a wetness around his nose he would probably wipe if he could.

“How do you feel?” I ask.

“How do I look?”

“Pretty good, considering.”

He manages to smile. When he tries to peer down at himself, though, I realize he has no idea how he looks. He is just together enough to know he shouldn’t trust his senses.

“Anyone else come to see you?” I ask.

It takes him awhile to answer. “Not Gil, if that’s what you mean.”

“I mean anyone.”

“Maybe you missed my mom out there.” Charlie smiles, and repeats himself without noticing. “She’s easy to miss.”

I look out the doorway again. Mrs. Freeman is still talking to the doctor.

“Don’t worry,” Charlie says, misunderstanding. “He’ll come.”

But by now the nurse has called everyone who might care that Charlie is conscious again. If Gil isn’t here already, he’s not coming.

“Hey,” Charlie says, changing the subject. “You okay with what happened back there?”

“When?”

“You know. What Taft said.”

I try to call up the words. We were at the Institute hours ago. It’s probably the last thing he remembers.

“About your dad.” Charlie tries to reposition himself and winces.

I stare at the railing, suddenly pinned. Mrs. Freeman has bullied the doctor enough that he finally leads her into a private room to confer. The two of them disappear behind a distant door, and now the hallway is empty.

“Look,” Charlie says faintly, “don’t let someone like that mess with your head.”

This is what Charlie does on death’s door. He thinks about my problems.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” I tell him.

I know he’s about to say something smart, when he feels the pressure I’m putting on his hand and keeps it simple.

“Me too.”

Charlie smiles at me again, then laughs. “I’ll be damned,” he says, and shakes his head. His eyes are focused on something beyond me. “I’ll be damned,” he says again.

He’s fading, I think. But when I turn around, Gil is standing in the doorway, a bouquet of flowers in hand.

“I stole these from the ball arrangements,” he says hesitantly, as if he’s not sure he’s welcome here. “You better like them.”

“No wine?” Charlie’s voice is faint.

Gil gives an awkward smile. “Only the cheap stuff for you.” He walks forward and extends a hand to Charlie.

“The nurse told me we’ve got two minutes,” Gil offers. “How are you feeling?”

“Been better,” Charlie says. “Been worse.”

“I think your mom’s here,” Gil replies, still searching for a way to begin.

Charlie’s starting to drift, but manages another smile. “She’s easy to miss.”

“You’re not going to check out on us tonight, are you?” Gil asks quietly.

“Out of the hospital?” Charlie says, too far away now to know how the question was meant.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe,” Charlie whispers. “The food in here”—he exhales—“is terrible.”

His head falls back onto the pillow just as the leather-faced nurse returns to say our time is up, that Charlie needs his rest.

“Sleep tight, chief,” Gil says, putting the bouquet on the nightstand.

Charlie doesn’t hear him. He’s already breathing through his mouth.

As we leave I look back at him, propped up in his bed, swaddled in bandages and guarded by IVs. It reminds me of comic books I used to read as a kid. The fallen giant that medicine rebuilt. The mysterious patient’s recovery that amazed local doctors. Darkness falls on Gotham, but the headlines are all the same. Today a superhero wrestled with a force of nature and lived to complain about the food.

“He’s going to be okay?” Gil asks, when we reach the visitor’s parking lot. The Saab is sitting alone in the lot, its hood still warm enough to have melted the falling snow.

“I think so.”

“His chest looks pretty bad.”

I don’t know what rehab is like for burn victims, but getting used to your own skin again can’t be easy.

“I didn’t think you were going to show up,” I tell him.

Gil hesitates. “I wish I’d been there with you guys.”

“When?”

“All day.”

“Is that a joke?”

He turns to me. “No. What’s that supposed to mean?”

We stop just short of the car. I realize I’m angry at him, angry at how hard it was for him to find anything to say to Charlie, angry at the way he seemed afraid to visit Charlie this afternoon.

“You were where you wanted to be,” I say.

“I came as soon as I heard.”

“You weren’t with us.”

“When?” he asks. “This morning?”

“This whole time.”

“Jesus. Tom . . .”

“You know why he’s in there?” I say.

“Because he made the wrong decision.”

“Because he tried to
help.
He didn’t want us going into Taft’s office alone. He didn’t want Paul to get hurt in the tunnels.”

“What do you want, Tom? An apology? Mea culpa. I can’t compete with Charlie. That’s the way he is. That’s the way he’s always been.”

“That’s the way
you
were. You know what Mrs. Freeman said to me in there? The first thing she brought up? Stealing the clapper out of Nassau Hall.”

Gil runs his fingers through his hair.

“She blames
me
for that. She always has. You know why?”

“Because she thinks Charlie’s a saint.”

“Because she can’t believe
you’re
the kind of person who ever would’ve done something like that.”

He exhales. “So what?”

“You
are
the kind of person who would’ve done something like that. You
did
do that.”

He seems unsure what to say. “Does it occur to you that maybe I’d had half a dozen beers that night before I ran into you guys? Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Or maybe you were different then.”

“Yes, Tom. Maybe I was.”

Silence falls. The first dimples of snow are forming on the hood of the Saab. Somehow, the words amount to a confession.

“Look,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I should’ve gone in to see Charlie the first time. When I saw you and Paul.”

“Forget it.”

“I’m stubborn. I’ve always been stubborn.”

He emphasizes
always,
as if to say, Look, Tom, some things haven’t changed.

But everything has changed. In a week, a day, an hour. Charlie, then Paul. Now, suddenly, Gil.

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

“You don’t know what?”

“What you’ve been doing all this time. Why everything is different. Jesus, I don’t even know what you’re doing next year.”

From his hip pocket Gil produces his key fob and unlocks the doors.

“Let’s go,” he says. “Before we freeze to death.”

We stand in the snow, alone in the hospital parking lot. The sun has nearly slipped off the edge of the sky, introducing darkness, giving everything the texture of ashes.

“Get in,” he says. “Let’s talk.”

Chapter 25
                           

That night I got to know Gil again for the first time, probably also the last. He was almost as charming as I remembered: funny, interested, smart about the things that mattered, smug about the things that didn’t. We drove back to the room, Sinatra playing, conversation somehow never faltering, and before I could even ask what I was going to wear to the ball, I opened the door to my bedroom and found a tuxedo waiting for me on a hanger, pressed and spotless, with a note clipped to the plastic garment bag.
Tom—If this doesn’t fit, you’ve shrunk. —G
. In the midst of everything else, he’d found time to bring one of my suits to a rental shop and ask for a tux of matching size.

“My dad thinks I should take some time off,” he says, answering my question from before. “Travel for a while. Europe, South America.”

It’s strange to remember someone you’ve known all along. It isn’t like returning to the home you grew up in and noticing how it left its shape on you, how the walls you’ve raised and the doors you’ve opened since then have all followed the design you saw for the first time there. It’s closer to returning home and seeing your mother or sister, who are old enough not to have grown since you last saw them but young enough not to have aged, and realizing for the first time how they look to everyone else, how beautiful they would be if you didn’t know them, what your father and brother-in-law saw when they judged them most and knew them least.

“Honestly?” Gil says. “I haven’t decided. I’m not sure my dad’s one to give advice. The Saab was his idea, and that was a mistake. He was thinking about what he would’ve wanted at our age. He talks to me like I’m someone else.”

Gil was right. He is no longer the freshman who let pants fly above Nassau Hall. He’s more careful than that, more circumspect. You would see him and think he was world-wise, self-involved. The natural authority in his speech and his body language is more pronounced now, a quality that Ivy has cultivated. The clothes he wears are quieter by a shade, and his hair, which was always just long enough to be noticed, never seems tousled now. There is a science behind it, because you never notice when it’s been cut. He’s put on a touch of weight, which makes him handsome in a different way, a hint more staid, and the little affectations he brought from Exeter—the ring he wore on his pinky finger, the stud he wore in his ear—have quietly disappeared.

“I figure I’ll wait until the last minute. I’ll decide during graduation—something spontaneous, something unexpected. Maybe become an architect. Maybe get back into sailing.”

Here he is, changing into his clothes, taking off his wool pants in front of me, not realizing what a perfect stranger I am, a person this version of himself has never met. I realize I’m probably a stranger to myself, that I’ve never been able to see the person Katie waited for all night last night, the newest model, the up-to-the-minute me. There is a riddle here somewhere, a paradox. Frogs and wells and the curious case of Tom Sullivan, who looked in a mirror and saw the past.

“Man walks into a bar,” Gil says, returning to an old standby. “Completely naked. And there’s a duck sitting on his head. The bartender says, ‘Carl, there’s something different about you today.’ The duck shakes his head and says, ‘Harry, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.’ ”