Chapter 35
WILLIAM
When the bottle rocket fired, William felt its release in the soles of his feet.
There was a giddy joy in the sheer force of it, how it shocked everything nearby to attention.
Bang. Whoosh. It was a ripped seam in the dark, a tear of light, and he felt jubilant.
But then the earth shifted, and he saw an inverted mirror of his rocket careening toward him, and he remembered the game, though in that moment it didn’t feel like a game, his body so overtaken by fear that he was no longer able to think, only to leap out of the missile’s path.
His arm twisted back when he hit the wet grass. There was a yell, but it was not his own.
The doctor had not changed out of his bathrobe, a thin blue flannel that fell to his ankles. His practice was run out of a boxlike addition on the side of his house, the white paint a shade brighter. It had been a ten-minute walk from the field.
The other teenagers were in the living room, taking turns using the mustard-colored phone in the kitchen to call their parents, the doctor’s wife—a stone-faced woman in her fifties—forcing them to dial one by one.
The floral couch they sat on was covered in plastic, and it squeaked when they rose.
William stayed in the exam room, maybe because he was an adult, maybe because he was responsible for the boy’s injury, but certainly because he was no longer one of them.
The accident had brought him back to himself.
He had breathlessly explained everything that had happened once they arrived, though the doctor had just nodded, more focused on the injury than anything that preceded it.
When William ran to Bean on the field, he found the boy curled into himself, clutching his shoulder.
He was moaning, his eyes shut tight, and the other teenagers were arranged around him like a painting of the crucifixion: kneeling at his side, hands at their throats, a torrent of swear words pouring from their mouths.
William felt like poison. No one had been harmed until he’d decided to play.
It was another horrible decision in a week, a month, a year of horrible decisions, but he was suddenly the adult, and he had to do something.
“Is there a hospital?” he had asked, and they all looked at him like he was speaking another language. “On the island? Is there a hospital?”
Finally the girl comprehended what he was asking and explained where the doctor lived, saying she could guide the way.
William instructed one of the other boys to lift Bean with him, and he looped his arm beneath the boy’s armpit, the one near his injured shoulder, which, even then, Bean would not stop clutching, as if he was worried it would detach and fall into the field like the debris of one of the rockets.
When they lifted Bean, he screamed, and William thought of how it was still a child’s scream at its thin, shrill edges.
In the white light of the doctor’s office, the shoulder looked like a hell-mouth. A gaping vermilion center crusted with black. Bean moaned as the doctor poured water over the wound and cleaned it with slow, calm precision.
“You’re lucky,” the doctor said. “This could have been much worse.”
“It looks . . . bad,” William said. He was leaning against the wall. The doctor snapped his fingers, pointing at a roll of gauze, which William stood to fetch. Tears fell from the corners of Bean’s shut eyes. He still hadn’t said a word.
“It’s just a surface wound. He still has both eyes, all his limbs. Ten fingers, ten toes, just like when I delivered him.”
“You delivered him?”
“All of them out there.” The doctor waved his hand at the shut door. “Vince here used to refuse to open his mouth at every checkup. And do you remember what I had to do?” He began to sing to the boy. “They ran and ran and had great fun, and pop! Goes the weasel.”
Miraculously, the boy—Vince, it appeared—opened his mouth, and the doctor placed a small red aspirin on his tongue. William felt a profound jealousy. The whole island was kin to one another. The doctor snipped a length of gauze and began to cover the wound.
“So, are you here with the wedding party?”
“Yes.”
“You’re quite the event. Though people have also been talking about that odd girl—have you seen her, hanging around the shore?”
It felt like someone was dragging a cold, wet cloth down William’s spine. “What odd girl?”
“My wife was telling me—there’s a girl with a shaved head that some of the fishermen have been asking about. Apparently she slept on someone’s boat last night. Didn’t seem to be a wedding-guest type.”
William blinked and saw the golf cart buzzing in the distance, the figure clearer now: unmistakably female, the stubble of her skull needle-sharp; her thin form slipping into the church and kneeling in the pew, a knife in her hand. It had not been an apparition.
The doctor cut another strip of gauze and looked up at him, his brow furrowing. “Are you all right?”
“Did they say anything else about her?”
“Not that I remember. People dock here on and off during the summer. She may have already sailed off, though it’s odd she slept on someone else’s boat. I think people were just gossiping because of her hair, though who knows, are girls just doing that on the mainland? Some sort of protest?”
“Not really, no.” His voice was faint.
The door opened and the doctor’s wife entered, and William noticed there was a smudge of green near her ear—night cream she had perhaps rubbed off when she heard the knock at their door.
They’d interrupted a peaceful evening and forced this woman from her bed.
She said Vince’s father was on the way, an announcement that elicited a fresh moan from the boy.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” William said.
“Don’t want to cross paths with the boy’s father?” the doctor asked.
“No, it’s not that.” He did not want to appear to be running—to be at Aunt Eleanor’s again, shutting the door—but he had to find Shay. “I would stay, but—”
“It’s all right.” The doctor sighed, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. “Probably best to just get Vince home.”
“I’m really sorry.” He said this to all three of them, though Vince’s eyes were closed again. The gauze at his shoulder looked like the ridges of a wing.
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “It may leave a scar, but we all have those, don’t we?”
When William passed the teenagers in the living room, their bodies slumped on the stiff plastic couch, they lifted their heads in unison.
He mumbled that Vince would be all right, that the doctor had done a good job patching him up.
The boys shook their heads, already ignoring him, and played with their belt buckles, the holes at the knees of their jeans.
Only the girl maintained eye contact with him.
When he said goodbye, she raised her middle finger in farewell.