and a hint of syrup. He gets up again and smoothes everything back in place.
His parents take turns at the hospital all night, coming and going in shifts. Robin does not want sleep. Downstairs his father sobs in waves, Robin feels them through his feet. His mother paces back and forth between the living room and the kitchen. The fridge swings open again and again, he knows she is getting drunk on white wine. He goes to the window, needs air, his throat is dry. His hands are itching under the bandages, it hurts to push up the sash.
There’s a piece of rock stuck way back in his throat, rotating its sharp edges. He coughs. He keeps coughing until his mother comes upstairs.
“Have a little of this.” She tilts the glass to his lips. It’s sweet and bitter—perfect. “Try to sleep, Robin.”
“I will.”
She kisses him good night on the lips and he pushes his face into hers until their noses mash and she pulls away. “Give me more wine,” he says. He finishes it off, a couple of gulps.
He dreams he is a woman with scarlet flowers in her hair. A woman in a dress with pieces of glass stitched into the wool. His sister letting the hem out, him tripping on the edge, cuts on his feet. When he wakes he is on the floor. He gets up to pee like any other night and then remembers the whole day. In the bathroom he tries to force out vomit, his finger down his throat. Just a few sour burps. He rips the bandages off his hands. The skin beneath is whiter, edged by a thin, gummy line from the tape. Back in bed he dreams again. Sharp-fanged dogs snapping in the air in front of him. His fingers weaving through their rough coats, grabbing on, tearing off chunks of hairy flesh. Running. The pitch of sirens.
Chapter Four
His eyes open, then shut against the bright assault. He hears his name, wags his head to shake off sleep. Even through his eyelids, he can tell the room is holding too much light. Again, a voice. Ruby’s.
“Nana Rena’s here,” she says.
Robin pulls his arms down from above his head—his sleeping position—and props himself up on one elbow. He breathes deep before making the effort of opening his eyes again. A pain somewhere below the back of his neck clamps against his shoulder. He jerks to a sitting position to relieve the pressure, rubs his hand where it hurts. The room looks like a black-and-white photo, all the color sucked out by the sunlight.
Ruby is sitting upright on the edge of Jackson’s bed, watching him. Her heels are kicking backward into the bedspread and the metal frame beneath. Her uncombed hair is straining against a couple of crudely placed barrettes. “We don’t have to go to school today,” she says.
“What time is it?”
“It’s lunch,” she says. “Nana wants you to get up and eat something. Mom and Dad are at the hospital.” He feels instantly annoyed to have been left behind, but also something else—some vague relief.
She says, “Do you feel like eating olive loaf? That’s what Nana’s making. Olive loaf sandwiches.”
He groans and drops his head into his palms, presses his fingertips into his face. “What’s going on with Jackson?” he mutters, filling his cupped hands with his moist, sour breath.
“Uh ... uh ... I don’t know.” Her heels thud faster into the bedframe.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” he says, then wishes he didn’t because when he looks up her face is a guilt-stricken mask.
“I don’t know,” she says. Her voice nearly cracks and her face seems to be growing flatter as she tries to hold back tears or a wail or something.
“OK, sorry,” he says. “Sorry.” Her face relaxes a little. He presses his fingers deep into the gristly shoulder muscle, still aching. He senses another, more familiar pressure in his lap, realizes he’s woken with a boner, realizes he has to pee badly. He wants Ruby to leave, but except for her swinging legs, she isn’t moving. She’s staring past his face at something. “You were doing it again,” she says. “Picking at the paint in your sleep.”
He looks behind at his headboard. A jagged circular patch the size of a dinner plate has been scratched into the blue-black woodgrain varnish. The exposed spot is smooth and pale like hard plastic, and certainly bigger than the last time he took note of it. He scans his fingernails and sees the telltale dark filings embedded there. His father has yelled at him about this but he doesn’t know what to do about it, he can’t very well control what he does in his sleep.
“You were doing it when I came in here,” Ruby says. Her face holds a certain fascination in the midst of everything else it’s telegraphing—the guilt, the anticipation—which pisses him off.
“Yeah, well.” He almost says, At least I don’t wet my bed—which was Ruby’s problem for years—but something tells him that’s the wrong attitude to take with her under the circumstances. Then he remembers his conversation with his mother in the car. He sucks another heavy intake of air and says, “You know, it’s not your fault.” The words don’t come out as comforting as they were supposed to.
Her face freezes again. “What?”
“You know”—he nods his head toward Jackson’s pillow—“what happened.”
“I know.” Her eyes move inside their sockets as if she’s trying to remember something she’s been told. “Umm . . . it was an accident.”
“That’s right.” He nods vigorously, and she mirrors the gesture, matching him nod for nod. This seems to do the trick. Ruby hops to the floor, turns around, and smoothes out the spot where she had been sitting. “See you downstairs,” she says as she exits.
He tears off the covers and makes a dash for the bathroom. He taps his toes on the cold tile until his bladder lets go and he pisses for what seems like forever. The releasing of it actually hurts. At the first sense of his muscles relaxing, it’s as though the air in the room begins to stir, blowing back at him the noisy memories of the day before. “Goddamn it,” he says, suddenly finding himself on the top of the slide, looking down at Jackson’s striped shirt. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”
Ruby is sitting at the kitchen table, studying the flat sandwich on her plate with a degree of scrutiny intense even for her. As far as Robin can tell it’s just the usual pink meat on white bread with a yellow smear of butter—the way she always has it—though Ruby’s lifted off the top slice of bread and is poking at the insides, dropping her head close for a good sniff. When she looks up at him, her eyes bug out a little; it’s that guilty look he saw upstairs in his bedroom. The feeling that the two of them are accomplices in a crime against their brother is so strong it takes all his concentration not to think about it, which he knows doesn’t make very much sense: thinking hard about what you want to forget. With her wounded stare focused on him, Ruby looks like something stuffed with too much of something else, as though she might literally burst open. Robin has a sudden flash that this is the face Ruby will be wearing all the time now, and he feels angry again, wishing she could just play it cool the way they’re supposed to, at least until someone tells them what is going on.
Across the room, at the counter, is their grandmother, her broad back to them, her doughy elbows poking into the air. She is building a pile of sandwiches like the one on Ruby’s plate.
“Robin’s here,” Ruby announces.
“And it’s a good thing, too, with enough food to feed an army of boys twice his size,” Nana Rena says.
Robin hasn’t seen his grandmother since the summer, at a family picnic at her house in Massachusetts. The sight of her, the sound of her peculiar accent—that funny Polish roughness mixed in with the twangy New England vowels—is an instant comfort. She’s the first person, the first anything, he’s seen since the playground that looks and sounds exactly the way it’s supposed to. She’s wearing her “around the house” wig today—the plainer, grayer of the two she has—and her green dress, the one with the hundreds of faded blue flowers printed onto it.