CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Six is a different country.
In the PICU there is always somebody four feet away and something is always making a noise. On six there is a hallway with rolling carts in it and a nurse who comes every four hours and long stretches of nothing at all, and the nothing is worse.
I gave him the helmet.
He took it in both hands and turned it over and looked at the shield on the front, and then he found the little metal buckle on the chin strap and worked it back and forth twice with his thumb.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Gus sent two. There’s another one in the bag.”
“Two?”
“In case.”
He nodded and turned it over again.
“Is this a new one,” he said, “or is it my one?”
“It’s a new one, bud. Yours was in the apartment.”
“Okay.”
He set it on the windowsill next to the water pitcher, with the shield facing out into the room.
He never put it on.
Not once. Not in that hospital, not in the transitional housing, not on Delaney Street. It moved with us three times and it sat on three different windowsills with the shield facing out, and it is on his dresser right now, and my son has never once put it on his head.
The old one he wore to the grocery store.
Nobody tells you which parts are going to be the ones. You brace for the big ones and then a seven-year-old sets a piece of plastic on a windowsill and you have to go stand in the hall for a minute.
I went back to work on the Monday.
Not full time. My boss is a decent man who owns half of a four-person office and he gave me two weeks and then said, without being asked, that I could do afternoons from wherever I was and come in Tuesdays and Fridays.
He also did not ask me one single question the entire winter, which I have decided was kindness and not cowardice, and I have decided that on purpose.
So I worked on a laptop that belonged to Jess, on a rolling tray table, in a hospital room, with a boy watching a show about tree houses eight feet away.
I did payroll for a landscaping company on the third of December in room 614.
By then the rituals were set.
One. The light stays on.
Not a nightlight. The actual overhead. In the hospital that was easy because the hospital is never dark anyway, and I did not understand yet that it was going to be a permanent feature of my life.
I have bought lamps for this. I have a whole system now, warm bulbs, low wattage, one in every room, and the electric bill on Delaney Street runs about nine dollars a month higher than it should, and I have never once mentioned that number to anybody.
Two. The door stays open a hand’s width.
His hand. Not mine. He measures it. He puts his palm flat in the gap and if it does not fit he opens it more, and if it fits with room he leaves it.
Every door. Bedroom, bathroom, the door between the kitchen and the hall on Delaney Street that does not need to be open ever, for any reason. It is open right now.
I have explained this to two teachers, one school nurse, a nine-year-old friend of his who wanted to build a fort, and one extremely patient woman at an indoor trampoline place, and I have gotten very good at explaining it in about ten words with no explanation attached.
Three started on the second night in 614.
He was in bed. I was in the chair with the laptop. It was twenty past nine.
“Mom, can I see your phone?”
I gave it to him. I assumed he wanted a game.
He did not turn it on to the game. He held it in both hands, in front of his chest, and turned the screen toward himself, and looked at the very top right corner of it.
Then he said, out loud, in a normal voice:
“Sixty-three.”
And handed it back.
“Sixty-three what?”
“Percent.”
“Okay,” I said.
The next night he did it at nine o’clock exactly. Eighty-one.
The night after that, at nine, he was already asleep, and he woke up at ten past and did it, and then went back to sleep.
By the fourth night I was charging my phone at eight thirty so that when my son picked it up at nine there would be a good number on it, and I did that for a year and a half, and I still do it, and the phone is at ninety-four percent as I write this down.
I asked him about it once, early, in that room.
“Bud, what’s the number for?”
He thought about it for a while. He is a thinker. He does not answer fast and he never has.
“So I know,” he said.
“So you know what?”
And he did not have anything for me. He looked at the ceiling and moved his mouth around a little and then he said, “I don’t know,” and I said okay and let it go, because the alternative was to keep pushing on a seven-year-old at nine o’clock at night.
A nurse named Bree caught the end of it.
Bree was the one who wrote GOALS on the whiteboard in bubble letters. She was about twenty-six and she had a lanyard covered in enamel pins and she was the least sentimental person on that floor.
She waited until he was asleep and then she said, from the doorway, quietly:
“That’s a good one.”
“What is?”
“The phone thing.” She came in and got the water pitcher. “The ones that scare me are the kids who stop asking for anything.”
“It’s not really a question, though. He doesn’t ask me anything.”
“Mm,” she said, and filled the pitcher at the sink and put it back. “He’s asking you something.”
Then a woman from care coordination came on the fourth of December with a clipboard and a very organized folder, and sat down in the fold-out chair, and asked me the question.
Her name was Odette and she had done this ten thousand times.
“So we’re looking at discharge Monday, Tuesday at the latest. That’s the good news.”
“Okay.”
“I just need to get a couple of things sorted on my end.” She had a form. “And where will you be discharging to?”
I sat on a rolling stool with a laptop open on a tray table.
Jess’s daughter’s bedroom had two people in it and one of them was ten and had been sleeping on a trundle for three weeks.
There was a security deposit I did not have and a first month I did not have and no apartment to put either one into, and a hundred and four dollars of a fourteen hundred dollar envelope left, and a renters insurance claim that had been open for twenty-two days with a note on it that said pending final report.
“I’m working on that,” I said.
Odette did not blink. She turned to a different page in her folder, which she had clearly had ready before she ever walked into the room.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s talk about that then.”
That night, at nine, my son picked up my phone in both hands and turned it toward himself and said “ninety-two” and gave it back.
And I was lying in a fold-out chair four feet away in the dark with the overhead light on, and I got it.
He was not checking the phone.
He has never once cared whether that phone works. He does not care about the signal or the data or whether it is going to ring.
He wanted to know whether an adult could be reached.