Chapter 8
They told me Ronan would be coming back to school the first week of November.
But it wasn’t him.
How could it possibly be him?
Ronan runs.
You can’t run if you’re in a wheelchair. It wasn’t him.
They told me that he wouldn’t be the same as he had been when I last saw him. The same as what? The same as himself? Then who would he be?
Whoever they wheeled into Mrs O’Neill’s room that day wasn’t Ronan, I knew that.
Ronan could talk.
This one in the wheelchair had its head all lopsided, causing the right side of its face to bunch up, pressing in to its right shoulder.
Its eyes wandered in a baby-like gaze but didn’t seem to hold focus on any one thing.
Its mouth was drooped and wet from a tongue that slithered over lips that lay loose at first and then stretched as its jaw unhinged in slow openings, closings and half-circle grindings.
It didn’t speak a language I could understand; a broken moaning yodel gurgling from its throat.
Sometimes the mouth would pucker up tight and the face would crinkle and redden like an infant’s on the verge of bawling, except it didn’t burst into a bawl, it made the noise a weightlifter might make when lifting a barbell.
It hissed the air out of its flared nostrils and the face drained of its redness and a trickle of pasty gloop came snailing out its nose and onto its upper lip – it made no effort to wipe the gloop away.
In fact, its hands looked withered and cramped, as if it couldn’t grip anything but it might be able to swing the whole arm if it wanted to. Better not get too close.
No. This was not Ronan.
They said he would recognise me, but how could I believe anything they told me when this obviously wasn’t him?
And yet its eyes.
They settled on me.
And the mouth; it moved into a smile.
Smiling at me.
Smiling because he knew it was me.
And me?
I didn’t smile back.
I couldn’t.
I couldn’t because I knew it was him.