them, Ruby is laying her head in Clark’s lap. She hardly blinks, as if she might be sleeping with her eyes open. His father is crying. He has been crying the entire time, not making a sound, wiping his wet cheeks again and again. Robin is amazed by this sight. He wants to ask questions, but those tears are what keeps him quiet. He looks so handsome, Robin thinks. They both look like new people, so beautiful and serious in their tragic faces.
A man dressed all in white is there suddenly. He is young, with a helmet of blow-dried hair and dark bars on his sleeves. “Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie,” he says in a delicate voice.
His father says, “Yes, Doctor?”
The man smiles. “Oh, I’m the nurse,” he says. “Dr. Glade would like to speak with you. Come with me.”
Robin gets up to go along, but his mother motions for him to stay. “Watch your sister for a minute.”
“Where are you going?”
Dorothy holds her finger to her lips. “Shhh ...”
The man who is a nurse smiles at Robin. As they walk away, Robin hears a siren from down the hallway, toward the parking lot. He imagines that they have left him and Ruby behind to be arrested by the police. You killed your brother, they will accuse. You have the right to remain silent.
The nurse returns and comes over to them. “You must be Robin and Ruby,” he says. “I’m Harold.” Ruby sits up. Robin nods, fearful.
“I hear you got a little scratched up, too,” Harold says to Robin. “Let’s see.” Robin turns his palms face up and lays them on Harold’s outstretched hands, which are warm, a little callused. His own palms are streaked with cuts, some already scabs. There is a film of blacktop powder embedded in his skin. “Why don’t we clean things up a bit?” He motions for them to come with him.
Ruby crosses her arms in front of her. “I’ll wait here,” she says.
“Let’s stick together, OK?” Harold says. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out hard candies wrapped in cellophane. They each refuse.
“I’m staying here for my mom and dad,” Ruby says.
“Come on, Ruby,” Robin pleads.
“No.”
Robin thinks of her at the top of the slide, trapped between Jackson and Larry. He thinks none of this would have happened if she had just slid down into Larry and kicked him. “Don’t act like a baby,” he snaps.
She bursts into loud sobs—her body instantly convulsing. Harold motions to an older woman in white at the nursing station. “Would you keep an eye on Ruby while I clean out Robin’s cuts?” Harold asks.
Ruby’s stare implores Robin to stay, but he feels the sudden urge for an escape. He follows Harold toward an examining room. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and Ruby heaves herself into the lap of the other nurse. “Good girl,” the nurse says. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a hard candy wrapped in cellophane.
The examination room is cold and bright with a black window facing the parking lot. Harold pats his hand on an examination table. The paper crinkles as it gives in to Robin’s weight.
Robin’s hands sting under the antiseptic; he squeezes shut his eyes and bites down on his teeth. Harold is talking about something but Robin doesn’t hear the words. When the bandages have been taped down, he looks up and Harold is smiling.
“How come you have stripes on your uniform?” Robin asks him.
“They give these to the male nurses to identify us.”
“Why? Don’t they already know that you’re a guy?” Robin asks, and Harold laughs. It seems like a real laugh, a laugh that they share.
“Any other questions?” Harold says, lifting him back to his feet.
“Yeah, about a million. Like, about my brother . . .”
Harold pauses, wiping off his instrument table. He sighs. “I’ll take you back out to your parents.”
When he comes back into the waiting area Dorothy is there. “Your father took Ruby home,” she says. “I need a cigarette.” It is the most she’s said to him since they got here.
She walks him out to the parking lot and is lighting up before the automatic doors swing closed behind them. Neither of them has a coat, and the temperature has dropped, so they hurry to the car and sit inside with the heat on and the windows cracked to let out the smoke.
“Jackson is not doing well. He suffered a neck injury.”
“He’s going to live?”
“So it seems.” Robin watches her to try to understand what this means, but she is silent for a while. She inhales. She exhales. Smoke hits the windshield and then flattens out around her. In the momentary glow from the ember, he sees the lines at the corner of her eyes, around her lips, across her forehead. She doesn’t look beautiful now.
She says, “I want you to tell your sister this is not her fault.”
He doesn’t say anything, and then she says, “She told me it was her fault and I don’t want her thinking that way.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“And I want you to tell Larry it is not his fault.”
“OK.” He says this less quickly.
“It’s not anyone’s fault,” Dorothy says, as if convincing herself. “It’s not . . . it’s just something that makes no sense.”
“OK.”
“I need you to be strong for me, Robin. You’re so much stronger than the others.”
“I guess.”
“You are. You are. This is going to be difficult.” She puts out her cigarette in the ashtray, stubs it over and over until every speck of flame is extinguished. Then she pinches the butt between her fingers and throws it through the crack in her window.
“Is Dad mad?” Robin asks.
“He’s very concerned,” she says.
“Very concerned?”
“Yes, dear. He’s waiting to see—”
“—If Jackson’s going to die.”
Dorothy leans back in the seat, focuses her eyes into the rearview mirror. She pokes at the corner of her eye as if flecking something painful from it. She says, “I don’t think it’s that bad. We don’t know how bad it is.”
He hears her impatience with him, which makes her words less convincing. It makes him angry with her, and when he speaks again there is spite in his voice. “He could have brain damage or turn into a vegetable or a retard with a crooked body spilling his food on the floor and shitting in his pants.”
“Good Lord, Robin, enough! We don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.” It sounds like an order.
He asks, “Are you mad at me?”
“No, of course not. Of course not.” Long pause. “Of course not.”
“I wish Jackson didn’t go up that slide,” he says.
She is silent.
“I wish I didn’t go up after him,” he says. “I thought they were going to push Ruby off.”
More silence.
He asks, “Is this God’s will?”
Dorothy leans forward and sighs in exasperation. She says, “Robin, I said I want you to be strong.”
“OK,” he says. He thinks, I have never been that in my life, ever.
In the dark Jackson’s empty bed is a gaping hole, a vacuum. Robin stands next to it staring, unblinking.