has slid backward and sideways; wispy white strands poke out at the ears. She shuffles closer to him to take the phone.
He steps away, stretches the cord toward the basement door, and curls more tightly into it. “Wait, Dad. What’d you say?”
“Listen, we’re going to hang around for a couple more hours. They’ve just done some tests and we want to wait for the results.” A pause, a sniffle. “So your mother and I will be here for a while. Waiting.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Oh, you know, to . . . uh ... assess the situation. The brain and all that.” There’s a kind of a choke that gets covered up, a hand over the receiver. Somewhere back there Robin guesses the tears are starting again. He hands off the phone to Nana Rena.
“Hello? Hello?” She has raised her voice as she always does on the phone, forever living in the old days of weak, staticky connections. “Clark?”
Ruby is curling her sketchbook into a tight tube with both hands. “What did he say?” she asks Robin.
“They’re doing tests.”
“What tests?”
“How should I know?” Now his voice is raised.
Nana Rena is waving at both of them, trying to quiet them down. “Dottie? Dottie, what have you got to tell me?” Robin tries to read her face, which reveals only her attentiveness. She nods as she listens, interjects “Mm-hmm” and “Yah” every few seconds, her eyes cast downward.
When Robin senses the conversation winding down, he says, “Let me talk.”
She hands the phone to him with the receiver covered up. “Now don’t trouble her,” she commands.
Robin grabs the phone and stretches the cord past the basement door, closing himself into the darkness. “Mom?”
“Hello, darling. How are you holding up?” He immediately wishes he were with her.
“Fine, you know. I mean, I’m really bored here.”
“Yes, well, the waiting will do that. But it’s best for you to be there for now, with your sister.”
“She’s kind of bugging me.”
“Robin, honey, please. I need you to—”
He cuts her off. “I know, I know. So I told her what you said, about it’s not her fault.”
“That’s very good of you.”
“And I told Larry, so, you know, mission accomplished. So what are these tests?”
“Modern medicine. More tests than you ever imagined.” She says this lightly. He can feel her needing him to take on this same tone but he remains quiet. After a tiny cough she says, “I don’t want to upset you, Robin.”
“I’m already upset.”
“I know, honey. I know. It’s just a bunch of complicated medical hoo-hah. They have to scan the brain to see how well he’s responding.”
“Did Jackson’s brain get smooshed when he fell?” He pictures a mass of scarlet jelly in his brother’s head, bone chunks and brain matter suspended within.
Another sigh. “It’s the spine, the point at which the spine enters the brain. There’s a question about motor skills.”
“Oh, yeah, that.” He’s not sure what this means exactly but waits until she continues.
“There are different parts of the brain that do different things and some of them don’t seem to be working right and some of them they can’t really tell, so the tests will continue until we know everything we can.”
The operator’s voice intrudes suddenly: nasal, impersonal, looking for more money.
“Oh, Christ,” Dorothy says. “Clark? Give me another nickel.”
There’s a knocking on the door behind Robin. It’s Ruby. “I want to talk to her, too.”
“Hold your haystacks,” he shouts and pounds back.
In his ear, he hears the metallic drop of the coin. “What’s going on? Are you still there?” Dorothy asks.
“Can I come to the hospital?” he asks her.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“This sucks.”
“Robin, I’m going to get off the phone now. I can’t have you come here. It’s just too chaotic. Why don’t you do some reading or help your Nana cook dinner?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Put your sister on the phone and say good-bye, OK?”
He is silent. Along the gray staircase, he can see the lines of wood paneling, line after line like jail bars. His father put up the paneling himself. Robin and Jackson held it in place while his father hammered in skinny nails and the smooth board shuddered under their palms. He recalls laughing with Jackson, the two of them sharing a joke at their father’s expense. The memory confuses him.
“Robin? I love you, dear.”
“Yeah, me, too.” He stands up and kicks back the door. Ruby gasps. The afternoon sun is shining through a window into his eyes.
“You almost hit me!”
He holds out the phone. “Here.” He walks past her, past Nana Rena and the humming refrigerator, out the back door to his bicycle.
Pedaling fast in the fading afternoon sun, Robin is unsure which streets to take to the hospital. He cuts down Schrader and Lewis, which takes him past the shop where his father bought him his bike last winter, past the Episcopal church and the Italian delicatessen. It’s eerie being outside again, because the world is the same as always, yet in some way unfamiliar, slightly shifted, askew. As he speeds by on his bike certain details rise up and surprise him: the sharp angle of the church roof, the gnarly twists of low-hanging tree branches, the broken concrete of sidewalks he’s walked a hundred times but never before studied. He passes a couple of houses where kids he goes to school with live, expecting faces at the window, eyes following his flight. He wonders if the word has gotten out, if people he’ll see in school when he goes back (tomorrow? next week?) will know about the accident. They must know. He can’t imagine that something he’s spent every minute thinking about isn’t already common knowledge. What will they think? They’ll know he caused it all, they’re readying their accusations, it’s only a matter of time. As he comes to a halt at a stop sign, a police car drives across his path, and when the officer in the passenger seat stares his way, he feels his insides tighten up. It’s all in slow motion: the officer’s dark glasses and beaked nose, a finger adjusting the brim of the cap. A touch of breath on the inside of the window. The muffled squawk of the police radio.
Robin drops all his weight on the pedals; he passes the library, where his mother would be working today, moves toward the center of town. He slaloms around the trunk end of cars pulling out of parking spaces. Up ahead, the siren of the nightly commuter train—the one his father usually rides home from the city—blankets every other sound. Red lights flash at the edge of the tracks. Cars obediently slow down and pedestrians freeze at the corner, but Robin doesn’t want to break his momentum. He gauges that he has enough time to get across the train tracks before the wobbly black-and-white warning arms drop. Someone shouts for him to stop as he moves toward the tracks, his wheels slamming over the steel ties, his pelvis vibrating. The train bellows, its dagger of light widening. He sucks in his breath, lowers his head and races under the second descending arm. The train rumbles behind him, squealing to a stretched-out halt at the depot.
“Are you outta your mind?” A woman in a trench coat, her hair piled under a scarf, a briefcase in her hand: she looks familiar. A teller at the bank where he has his Christmas Club? The mother of someone from school? She keeps her disapproving eyes on him. Keep moving, he tells himself.
On