4. Cole
COLE
Captain Brooks insisted on driving me to my appointment.
I told him I could drive myself.
He told me to get in the truck, and there's a particular flatness he can put into four words that ends a conversation before it starts. So I got in the truck.
We're halfway across town before he says anything, and when he does it's got nothing to do with me.
"Did I ever tell you about teaching Sadie to drive?"
"No."
"Worst six months of my life," he says.
He says it warm, though. He says most things warm.
Brooks is a big man gone gray at the temples, hands like he borrowed them off something larger, and a way of talking that takes the long road on purpose.
"She wouldn't check her mirrors," he says.
"Wouldn't check them. I'd say, mirrors, Sadie, and she'd check them after she'd already done the thing the mirrors were supposed to warn her about.
Backed into a fence. Clipped the mailbox.
Drove the whole length of Hartley Road in second gear with the engine screaming because she was too proud to ask me what the noise was. "
I look out the window.
"We fought about it every single day," he says. "Every day. I'd come home wrung out like I'd done a double. Her mother had to come out to the driveway one time and physically take the keys off the both of us."
I wait for the point. There's always a point with Brooks.
He buries it like a dog buries a bone.
Somewhere you'd never think to look, and you have to wait for him to go dig it back up.
"And then one day," he says, "we just sat down. The two of us. Talked it out, properly, like people instead of a man and a kid yelling about mirrors. And after that it was fine. She got it. Passed her test first time, matter of fact. Drives better than her mother now."
He's quiet a second, pleased with himself.
"Worked itself out," he says. "All of it. Just took sitting down and being honest about it."
I let that sit there in the cab between us.
"Didn't Sadie drive into a lamppost," I say. "In the Target parking lot. Last week."
Brooks doesn't miss a beat.
"She did," he says.
"Took the mirror clean off,” I say.
"She did that too."
"So."
"Nobody's perfect, Cole." He says it like he's handing me the answer to a test. "That's the whole point. That's the entire point I'm making."
I don't say anything.
I'm not sure what point he thinks he's making, but I know him well enough to know he thinks he's made it, and I know him well enough to know there's no hurrying him to the part where he tells me what it was.
We pull up outside the hospital. He puts it in park and lets the engine idle.
I get my hand on the door.
"Cole,” he says.
I stop.
He reaches over and taps me, once, on the shoulder. The bad one.
He doesn't know it's the bad one. Or he does and doesn't care.
Because Brooks has never once in his life handled me like I was breakable, and I've always been grateful for it.
"It's not your fault," he says. "That little girl. It wasn't your fault."
I look at the door handle.
There's a whole speech I could give him.
About the floor. About my own foot coming down in the one place it shouldn't have, and how I knew the half second before it gave that I'd killed us both.
How being half-right about it is the worst thing I've ever been right about.
He was there.
He had a hand on my arm and he told me not to go back in and I went back in anyway.
He knows exactly what happened. He just chooses to remember it different than I do.
"Thanks, Cap," I say.
And I get out of the truck before he can tell whether I mean it.
In the elevator, I tell myself I’m not going to be like last time.
That’s the deal I make with myself between the doors opening and the doors closing.
I was rude to her last week.
I know I was rude to her.
She did nothing but try to help me and I gave her one word at a time and watched the clock and walked out without so much as a thank you.
A decent man would have lain awake over it.
So this time I’m going to be civil.
I’m going to be normal.
A regular person sitting in a regular chair answering regular questions.
That's the plan, right up until she opens the door and says, "Cole. Come on in,.”
Then plan walks straight out of my head and leaves no forwarding address.
Because she's beautiful.
I keep snagging on it.
I snagged on it last week and I've been snagging on it all week and here it is again.
Worse now that I've had seven days to think about her and tell myself I wasn't thinking about her.
Dark eyes.
That mouth.
The way she stands in the doorway like the room belongs to her and she's deciding whether to let you stay.
"How's the shoulder been?" she says.
"Fine."
I hear it come out of me.
Flat.
One word.
The exact word I promised myself I wasn't going to keep handing her.
"Fine," she repeats, and there's a dryness in it that tells me she remembers last week as well as I do. "We'll see about that. Sit down for me."
I sit down for her.
And this is the part I can't explain to anybody, least of all myself.
It isn't that I don't have words.
I've got plenty of words.
I've got a whole sentence built and ready about how the shoulder seizes up in the mornings, and how the back's worse when I've been sitting, which is most of the time now.
And how I did the exercises she gave me.
Some of them.
The ones that didn't make me feel like my shoulder was about to snap right in half.
I've got all that.
And then she rolls her stool over close enough that I can smell whatever it is she smells like and she looks up at me with those eyes.
"Talk to me," she says.
And every word I had lines up at the door of my mouth and refuses to come out.
So I say nothing.
And then, because the silence is unbearable, I say something stupid.
"It's been okay."
"Okay," she says.
"Yeah."
"That's a different answer than fine."
"Is it."
"It's a whole word longer." She wheels in and gets a hand on my shoulder, warm through the shirt, and starts moving the arm the way she does. Slow and watching my face instead of the arm. "We're making progress already."
I think she's teasing me.
I think this beautiful woman with the steady hands is teasing me.
Gently.
The way you'd coax a dog that's been kicked.
And the worst part, the part I'm ashamed of, is that some animal part of me leans straight into it.
Wants more of it.
Sits there in that too-small chair lit up like a kid because a pretty girl said a soft thing.
I clamp down on it.
I've got no business feeling lit up about anything.
Not me.
Not now.
There's a boy in the children’s ward and a woman who won't wake up, and I'm getting warm because someone touched my shoulder.
So I go quiet again.
Properly quiet.
The shutters-down kind.
And I feel her notice.
She doesn't say anything about it, but her hands change. Just slightly.
She’s more careful now. More professional.
The warmth banked.
And I think to myself, I did that. I took the easy thing she was offering and I put it back.
"Tell me the second anything hurts," she says.
It hurts the whole time.
I don't tell her.
By the time she's done with me I'm hungry.
Not regular hungry. But the hollow kind.
The kind that means I've forgotten to eat again. That the day's most of the way gone and there's nothing in me, and there's a deli on the corner does a roast beef thing the size of your forearm and my body knows it and starts up about it the second I'm out the door.
I don't go to the deli, though.
I go to the children’s ward.
Because I don't get to be hungry and then go and fix it. That's not a thing that's available to me right now.
There's a girl who'll never eat another meal because I put my foot wrong, and her brother's breathing through a tube.
If I'm hungry, then good.
I should be hungry.
I should sit in it.
It's the smallest possible thing and it's still more than I deserve.
So I take my hunger to the bad chair and I fold myself into it and I sit.
The Same chair. The Same window. The same green lines on the machines that I’ve learned to read.
Eighteen days now, for his mom. Eighteen days she hasn't moved.
I've stopped doing the thing where I tell myself the number doesn't mean anything. It means something.
I've read enough of those machines to know what the number means.
Through the glass, Danny sleeps.
A small shape in a blue blanket with one arm flung up over his head.
He doesn't know I come.
And that's fine. I'm not here for him to know.
But the nurses know.
There's two of them at the station down the hall and I can feel them clocking me the way they do.
The glance and the murmur.
I try to make myself smaller in the chair. To not be what I am, which is a very large man with his hands curled into fists sitting outside a sick child's room saying nothing to anybody.
I know how it looks.
I've caught sight of myself in the dark window and I know exactly how it looks.
So I keep my eyes on the boy and I try to take up less room than God gave me.
I'm so far down in it I don't hear the footsteps.
"Cole?"
I look up.
It’s Maya.
Out of the white coat now, with a real jacket over her shoulder and a bag in her hand.
On her way out of the building. The end of her day.
She's stopped dead in the middle of the hall. And she's looking at me, and then past me.
At the window.
At the boy.
At the second bed and the woman who doesn't move in it. And I watch her put it together.
I watch it land on her face. The whole shape of it. Even if she doesn't have the details yet.
"What are you doing here?" she says.
Soft.
Not nosy.
Careful, the way she went careful with my shoulder when I shut the shutters on her.
There's an answer.
There's a true answer and it's right there and for one second I almost give it to her. Because she's got a face you want to give true things to, and I am so tired of carrying this one on my own.
That's him, I could say.
That's the boy I carried out. And that's his mom.
His sister didn't make it.
That part was me.
But, I don't say it. I don't say anything.
I get up out of the chair, slow and careful the way I get up around people now. So I don't knock anything or scare anybody. And I don't look at her face because if I look at her face I'll talk.
"Cole—"
I walk past her.
Down the hall, toward the doors. My chest pulling tight and my breathing not coming right and the hunger still sitting in me, hollow and earned.
I don't look back.
That's the thing about me she's going to learn, if she hasn't already.
I get up.
I get out.
I say nothing.
It's the only thing I'm any good at anymore.