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 Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2009 3:38 pm
Hint: the book ends long after he writes that letter to Victoria. And later I'm actually going to show you what she replies with. It's just...like a backwards flashback, that's all. in medias res or something like that.
He is getting older--but we'll see that better once January or so comes around. I hate it when books end too...a good book is one that you never want to end, yes? Or at least, never want to put down. SOme books I flip over when I'm done and start reading all over again.
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Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 12:27 am
Okay! PHEW! >< I would have been so upset if it had ended. xDD
I lvoe to read, but I don't do it too often DX So because I have so many unread books I haven't gone back and read any of my really favorite ones Dx I'll add this to my to-do list in the summer ><
There's one book, I always went back to in Elementary school... "You forgot your bloomers, Amelia!" xDD I read it in 2nd grade? It's about how wommon have to wear such uncomfortable clothing, and Amlia helps establish wommon with better clothing or soemthing xP
What about you? x3
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Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 4:03 pm
Maniac Magee, for me! it's about this twelve-year-old boy who like runs away from home and goes to this town that's split in half, black and white, and it tells about how he became a legend and how he was always looking for a place to live for good. I loves it. heart
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Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 1:50 am
EEP! I love that book too!
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Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 7:34 am
cool guy yes. but that one will always be my favorite. unless he wrote frindle. then I might have to reconsider.
4000 breahts is haaaaaard to write Kahme's mom is weird and evan is so awkward....
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Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2009 3:31 pm
What's Frindle? =o
x3 Whenever I think of Kahme's mom, I always think of this Japanese singer that appeared on the Suite Life of Zack and Cody {{Yes I know how lame this might sound DX }} I don't know if you've seen any episodes
But you can do it!!! ><;
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Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:00 pm
Frindle is a rather good book by someone who has a lot of books like that about an eighth grader or sixth grader or someone who is annoyed by the way the world works and all, but then he hands a pen to his friend and calls it a frindle instead. And then they call it that all the time, trying to make it accepted by everyone. It's cool. There's another one the person wrote about a girl about that age getting a book published. And another one that is entirely different and not by the same person at all about a boy who wants to become president.
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Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 5:55 pm
Come October, Kahmè was making daily phone calls; I knew that I would pay for it later, but it didn’t really bother me as much as it should have. Every afternoon she talked to her mother about the move, asking her when she was going to leave and when she would arrive; her mother gave her a set date—the 20th—but waited until the 18th to start packing (to my incredulity, but I guessed that they didn’t own much). Then on the 19th, just when we were both getting a bit worried that she wouldn’t ever leave in time, Kahmè called one last time and was told by the chieftain that her mother had left hours since. The next hour or so was spent dodging Kahmè and trying to seem pleased about this as she ran and skipped around doing a happy dance and squealing with delight. All week, she could talk about nothing else, and that day was no exception; but all the same, even though I was getting a bit sick of it, I couldn’t help feeling miserable as I walked her to her new home the next morning.
The first thing I noticed was that the SOLD sign was gone; but there was no car in the driveway, nor any sign that anyone was there, and I warned Kahmè again that her mother might be later than she had thought. But like before, she wouldn’t listen to me; her optimism got the better of her, and before I could say anything else she ran up the stairs, knocking loudly on the doorframe. I followed her more cautiously, trying not to look down as I ascended. I had expected for her to call for her mother for several minutes before she gave up, but this was not the case: to my surprise, the door flew open at once, and Kahmè disappeared.
I quickly peered around the door and saw a tall, slender woman standing just inside who could only be Kahmè’s mother: they looked exactly alike, only her mother was cleaner and neater, and she was even wearing Native American clothes—a long, sleeveless, dark blue dress with beads sewn in patterns across the front—and moccasins just like Kahmè’s. They had the same face, the same eyes, the same hair. If Kahmè had been twenty years older, I knew, she would have been this woman’s double.
They were babbling away to each other in what I assumed was Cherokee, but when I crept over her mother suddenly noticed me for the first time; Kahmè introduced me—I could only tell because I heard my name—and her mother smiled at me, extending a hand for me to shake. Her hands were small, soft, and warm, just like Kahmè’s were, and her wrists were covered in beaded or braided bracelets and thin metal and wooden bangles. Her ears, unlike Kahmè’s, were pierced—several times, in fact—and every hole was filled with colorful earring of some sort. But she wore only one necklace—a leather thong with a carved wooden medallion that rested in the hollow of her throat—and one ring, a simple golden wedding band. She was still married? She still considered herself married?
“It’s good to finally meet you, Evan,” she told me, in fluent and natural but slightly accented English. “I’m Kahmè’s mother, Marala Sandred. But please,” she added with a bright, happy smile. “Call me Mari.”
Marie, a name more French than Cherokee, and more American than anything—I could do that. I would have to, as I hadn’t caught her real name; it took me several repetitions to finally be able to pronounce it, and whatever her middle name was, it was worse.
She shook my hand, then gestured inside. “Come in,” she said graciously, and, wary, I nonetheless did so, though I was afraid of what I might see. I knew the house would be dim and small regardless of its furnishings, and as I had never moved, I had no idea what to expect inside.
But there wasn’t much to see. There was a narrow pathway between kitchen and living room into which we emerged, and from which the central room, a sort of round hallway, branched off; but every room that I could see was empty, save for about a dozen boxes stacked in the living room in lieu of furniture. They were not big boxes, the smallest a tiny shoebox and the biggest printed with a picture of a bulky television, and I couldn’t help gaping: was that all they had? The boxes were all sealed with tape, marked with black paint in what looked like the Cherokee’s old-school script, and placed in one corner of the room in a neat little pyramid.
Mrs. Sandred led us into the kitchen, which was bare save for a long counter that was built into the wall, containing an oven and stove and a space for a refrigerator and dishwasher. Kahmè was talking to her in rapid Cherokee again, and I felt very awkward and in the way; I stood against the wall, pretending I was a lamp, watching the two of them with vague apprehension. Kahmè’s mom interrupted her babbling with a brief question, a request—Kahmè skipped off to the living room at once, and I followed, glad for something to do.
Evidently Kahmè could read Cherokee well enough, because she began poking at the boxes stacked around the room, glancing at their painted titles. “Whatcha looking for?” I inquired, and she said she needed to find a box. Instead of asking for specification I stood out of her way—there were only, like, ten of them, she’d find it soon enough. After a few seconds she found one that was about the size of a microwave, and looked just as heavy—when I saw her struggling with it I offered to lift it for her, and she let me, even though she was probably much stronger than me. I carried it into the kitchen, setting it on the floor, and Kahmè started pulling things out: a box of matches, a kettle, a teapot, three cups, three saucers, and a small flat box full of tea leaves. She lit the ancient gas stove and started to boil water—at least the plumbing worked, that was good—then dropped a clump of tea leaves into the bottom section of the teapot, which was covered by a filter. All of it—everything from the teapot to the cups to the counters and stove—looked as if it were straight from the eighties.
I asked about this, and Mrs. Sandred laughed. “The people who owned this house…they didn’t seem to like it much. They tried to tell me that it was old, too old maybe, but I don’t see what’s wrong. It’s clean, it has a little furnishing and running water…it even has electricity, which makes it nicer than anything we’ve ever lived in so far, yes, Kahmè?”
She nodded carelessly, busy arranging the cups and saucers on the counter by the window. “Yeah, ‘n’ then there was the house that didn’t have water at all, remember Mama? With the well?” Her mother nodded, smiling nostalgically—and then suddenly, Kahmè started talking in Cherokee yet again, and her mother responded; it sounded like a brief argument. I was worried for a minute before I could remind myself that Mrs. Sandred was not my dad—it wasn’t likely to end with violence.
And then, out of nowhere, Mrs. Sandred started spouting a monologue of some sort, with Kahmè listening attentively. It took me a minute, but then I understood: her mother was catching her up on everything. She was still talking when the kettle started to whistle; she was only finished when they were all sitting on the floor, the two of them cross-legged and me hugging my knees and feeling awkward while we were waiting for the tea to cool. Then Kahmè asked a few questions—and then, making me groan internally, Kahmè started telling her mom about everything she’d missed. It took a long time—I sipped at my tea while waiting for someone to address me in English, flinching at any glance thrown my way, worrying about what Kahmè was saying. The tea was good, at least—there was no sugar or cream, but I found that once it had stewed for awhile, it tasted kind of like black coffee, only I actually liked it. It was darker than I thought tea should be, brownish-black, with little flecks of tea leaves or spices or something floating in it.
But then, as I was taking another sip, a horrible thought made me choke a little—what if Kahmè told about my dad?!
I couldn’t risk that. Oh my God, he would KILL me—
I scooted across the tiles, sitting closer to Kahmè—then, without worrying about subtlety, my panic getting the better of me, I leaned toward her, cupped my hands around her ear, and hissed, “Don’t tell her anything about my dad.”
Surprised, she blinked at me. “Why not?” she whispered back. “It’s my mom—”
“I don’t care, please just don’t say anything,” I breathed frantically, then leaned away again, afraid of the way Kahmè’s mother was staring at me. Kahmè’s hand suddenly touched mine, making me jump, but all she wanted was to hold it—I looked away from her mother and blushed, but no one said anything about it. Instead, they began talking in Cherokee again.
Kahmè usually listened to me, so I could trust her not to tell—I slowly felt relief replace my panic, allowing myself to relax. No one was going to find out…or at least, no one ELSE. But as we all began to finish off our tea, I started feeling awkward again, a third wheel—should I leave? Was I just getting in the way?
Fearing this, I used the next lull in the conversation to speak up: talking mainly to Kahmè, I stammered, “Th-…thanks for the tea, b-both of you, really…I…maybe I should go now, I’m just….”
“Oh! No, don’t leave!” Kahmè said at once, upset. “What’s the matter, it’s just Mama, not anyone scary—”
She, too, had clearly noticed my returning stammer. I thought I had gotten rid of that. “I…I just…I’d b-b-better….”
“We’ll speak in English from now on, if that makes you more comfortable, Evan,” Mrs. Sandred said, unexpectedly cutting right to the heart of the problem. Intuitive, I thought, and felt uneasy—I never liked being scrutinized with any intensity by insightful people. “I’m terribly sorry, that was rude of us….”
“No, no, I just…I’m interrupting. I…unless I can help you with something…? I don’t know….”
“Oh, certainly,” Mrs. Sandred said cheerfully, and rose with a grace that Kahmè clearly had not inherited—not yet, anyway. “I like to linger over tea, that’s all. But you must find it so boring. I’ll put you to work right away.” She winked, and I couldn’t help feeling a little more relaxed—I would like her, I thought, if she weren’t taking Kahmè away from me, and if she weren’t so goddamn smart….
Kahmè helped her sort the boxes: Mrs. Sandred took two into her room, claiming that she would unpack them herself, and took another box to the bathroom to set all of that up, but left the rest to us. There wasn’t much: Mrs. Sandred said she was going furniture shopping later, but at the moment all she had were sheets, blankets, and a half-dozen towels. These we folded and placed in the small cupboard outside Mrs. Sandred’s bedroom. In the kitchen we stashed the few dishes, silverware and utensils, along with the tea leaves, a pot and skillet, and some random food, like saltines and a bottle of juice. There was only a mess of wire where the refrigerator should have been, so we just put everything in the cupboards—I hoped that it didn’t matter, in the long run. For the living room, we had nothing but a box of small knickknacks—pieces of colored glass and Native American-ish ornaments and things like that—and as there was nowhere to put them we slid the box into the closet with the linens.
Which left a lot of wind chimes and birdfeeders and things for the porch, which we hung from the railing and the rafters—and then, when that was done, it was time to tackle Kahmè’s room.
It was just a plain, white-painted room with a honey-colored wooden floor, with only one window, but to Kahmè it was a palace: she had never had her own room before, she had always shared with her mom. If I had had the option, I wouldn’t have lived in here, I would have curled up with my mother every chance I got—but it wasn’t my decision, so I didn’t say anything. She bounced around it, planning what she would paint on the walls and where her bed would go and what she would put on the windowsill. It really was a nice room, about the size of mine with a deep window, big enough to make a window seat; the closet was shallower than mine, but longer, and the ceiling was slanted, giving it an odd but very spacey look. I envied her—but then, if I had had to sleep in such an open, sunny place, it would probably have just scared me.
We unpacked her things: she folded all of her clothes and put them on the closet’s shelf until her mother could buy hangers. Actually I wasn’t sure that they knew to buy them—I would have to give them a list. Modern house, modern equipment, I thought, and made a list in my mind. Her mother could write it down later. I wondered if she could read English, and how she had learned so many languages in the first place.
Her closet looked just as barren after she had finished stacking her clothes inside: she had barely any clothing, even including all the things I had bought her. I thought of the things girls in my school had talked about, how they wore a new shirt every day and felt awkward if they repeated outfits, how they had walk-in closets full of clothes and had probably never washed any of them in their lives. And here was Kahmè with only three dresses to begin with, feeling like the luckiest girl in the world because she had blue jeans and a couple of five-dollar t-shirts and having no idea what to do with all of the empty space. She was so tough, she could have survived anywhere in the wild, but this was urban territory, and she was lost. That, at least, was very easy to tell.
I made suggestions where I could. I helped her figure out where she should put the bed to get as much space as possible—in the end we decided to push it up against the shorter wall where the ceiling was lowest, so she could feel cozy when she slept and the room would still be roomy. I suggested a rug in the middle of the floor, and a nightstand, and I showed her where the outlets were and what they were for. Since she didn’t read and would probably never have enough clothes to even fill the closet, I knew that dressers and bookshelves would be redundant, but I suggested a small shelving unit on one wall where she could keep her collections of feathers and rocks and things like that, and a toy box for all of her other stuff. She didn’t have much aside from clothes: there was a large shoebox full of bits of glass and shells and that sort of thing, her bag full of Christmas and birthday presents and her toys, two blankets, a much-abused teddy bear, and a hairbrush. My heart ached for her; it was so sad, and was somehow even worse when I realized that she didn’t feel deprived at all, she felt just the opposite. She deserved everything, and here she was with an empty room. I promised I’d get her some more stuffed animals if she wanted them, and she spent the next five minutes squeezing the breath out of me—I took that as a yes.
We just set all her things neatly in the closet and folded the blankets in a pallet on the floor—I still couldn’t believe that she was sleeping there that night, especially when I imagined how hard and uncomfortable the floor would be—and were done before Mrs. Sandred was—she had been filling the bathroom with her healing supplies, and was just finishing her arrangements of bottles of herbs and seasonings in the kitchen cabinets when we emerged.
“American houses are so strange,” she said in English for my benefit, shaking her head in amazement. “The bathrooms are tiny and the bedrooms much too large. What are we going to do with all of this space?” she demanded, spreading her arms wide in the empty kitchen.
“Um, well, Mrs. Sandred,” I said awkwardly, “they were counting on American furnishings…it’s a lot different for us. And um, to be honest,” I added as politely as I could, feeling like an idiot, “if you’re going to be living in an American house, you should probably have American things too….”
“But American things seem so unnecessary to us,” she said, shocked. “Why on earth should we need them now?”
“Um, well, ma’am, it’s like this,” I tried my best to explain, pointing to the living room. “Maybe before you didn’t have carpet, but you do now, see? And to clean it you’d need a steam cleaner. And you’ll have to pay an electricity bill anyway, so you might as well use the lights, but for that you’ll need new light bulbs…and it’s already hooked up for a fridge, so you might as well get one of those, too. It’s like…it’s a waste of space and energy, because what else are you going to do? And now that you can, why wouldn’t you want at least some of it? It’ll make life more convenient….”
Mrs. Sandred stared at me, her lips pursed, throughout my speech; before a quarter of a minute had passed I was staring at the floor again, too shy to look up, afraid to see derisive skepticism. But instead, she asked me, after a long silence, “Evan, you have been American all your life, yes? Will you show us how to live in an American house?”
I laughed, just a little—it sounded so strange. “It’s not that complicated,” I told her, but then added. “Of course I will.”
She beamed at me, and suddenly I missed my mother so, so much. “Thank you! What can we do?”
“Um, well,” I said, hesitating. “Is there somewhere I can write this down?”
~
Mrs. Sandred wanted to go furniture shopping after lunch, but after poking around and finding only the saltines and spices, she frowned and asked me where the nearest marketplace was. I put my foot down and told her that it would just be easier to go out to eat, and Kahmè backed me up—she loved fast food, though the only reason why that I could of was that she had probably never had it before then. Mrs. Sandred, who hadn’t had it since Kahmè was born, agreed with enthusiasm, and took us to the nearest pizza place. They were both vegetarians, of course, so we all ended up getting cheese. But it was good, made even better by the fact that I hadn’t had to make it, and that I wasn’t getting yelled at or hit right now—I told Dad that I’d be out all day, and had taken the resulting kick to the ribs with pleasure, absolutely certain that it would be worth it. And it had been.
As we left I asked her if she was ready to go shopping, and if she had enough money. To my alarm, she pulled an enormous wad of cash from her pocket—it must have been at least two thousand dollars—and grinned a very Kahmè-ish grin. “Don’t worry,” she assured me. “That isn’t a problem.” Ignoring the obvious question of where a single woman who lived on a reservation and had just bought a house had gotten that much money in cash, I waited anxiously until she put it away, then advised her to put it in a bank or something—it would be safe from robbers, and she would get more out of interest. But she flat-out refused: judging by the look on her face, I guessed that she had heard about the bank and stock market crashes back in the thirties, and liked to keep her money where she could see it.
After that we went to the nearest furniture depot, which was in Zephyr Cove, and shopped ferociously for two hours straight: I had my list ready, and helped Mrs. Sandred get the stuff that was both cheap and sturdy. She didn’t really have any décor to match, so it was easy to pick things out; nothing really had to match, and most of it could always be painted. I used a couple of skills I had learned from my dad over the years and got them to deliver it all to her house for a pittance; when we got back there would be two beds—a single and a queen—two nightstands, two shelving units, three lamps, a kitchen table and four chairs, a sofa, a coffee table, and a refrigerator on their front porch. I told Mrs. Sandred that we would figure it out from there, and hoped to hell that that would be possible.
After that, we made trips to several other stores, buying a steam cleaner (the kind that could be used on all surfaces), tile cleaner, dish soap, a broom and dustpan, Windex and cleaning rags, and a set of dish towels. The OCD cleaner in me wanted to get much more than that, but I had to keep it minimal—poor Mrs. Sandred, she was probably overloaded as it was, but Kahmè could show her how to do all of this. They already had things like nail clippers and bathroom towels, so I got her to get a pack of hangers and half a dozen little cans of paint and a brush for Kahmè to play with. They said that they would leave the rest of the house with its original coloring, so I told myself that that was enough and sent all of the heavy stuff back ahead of us. In towns as small as mine, people understood that sometimes you just preferred to walk places, and Mrs. Sandred wasn’t the only one without a car.
We stopped by the grocery store on the way back, getting a lot of filling, non-perishable ingredients (no one was quite sure how to hook up the refrigerator). When we got back, laden with shopping and grocery bags, there were a lot of boxes on the porch, but all except for the refrigerator were easy enough to shove inside, and Mrs. S assured me that her husband could help her with that. As we were setting up the kitchen table, I asked her about him. “I thought he didn’t live with you? Is he coming back now?”
“Didn’t Kahmè tell you?” she replied, surprised. “He visits every year. Of course he hasn’t known where Kahmè’s been so he’s missed her—but he’ll be back within the week to see the new place and help us with whatever is left to do. He sent me the money for the move you know.”
That explained that, at least. I glanced over at Kahmè, who was trying to figure out the bolts and washers and things—she looked happy, but quietly so, which was unusual for her. I would have to ask her about that later: if her father was abusive too then I would ******** kill him. But maybe she was just confused because she hadn’t seen him in so long.
Mr. Sandred apparently roamed around the country, working wherever he could and sending all of his money save what he needed to survive to his family. Since he didn’t like staying in one place even for a week, it had become easy for him to live off of pocket change, especially since he never stayed in motels or anywhere where he had to pay rent. Mrs. Sandred had hardly had a use for the money, so she had saved it for the past thirteen years—apparently what she showed me was only a fraction of what she really had, but I didn’t pry. Still, it was strange that they lived so frugally by choice; I had just thought that they were poor.
When we had finally set up all the furniture and put it into place, we were starving—Mrs. Sandred started to make pasta for us, but as it wouldn’t be ready for awhile we decided to decorate Kahmè’s room. We moved all of the furniture and things into the middle of the room, stacked on top of each other, and I helped her as she painted whatever came to mind on the walls. I busied myself with drawing a lot of tiny little blue flowers around the window, hardly knowing what else to do, while Kahmè ran around painting suns, clouds, flowers, birds, hearts, peace signs, kittens and puppies, whatever she wanted. She was good when she concentrated, but when she didn’t her drawings turned out more like a kindergartener’s art homework than anything really beautiful. Still, I was astounded at the talent she exhibited while painting life-sized goldfinches, squirrels, trees, and birds of paradise.
We had to pause to eat dinner—it was the most fantastic pasta I had ever had, though Mrs. Sandred didn’t believe me when I told her so—but we only stopped for good when we had almost run out of paint, and by then the walls were a mêlée of color and shapes, confusing but somehow warm and comforting in spite of that. She had used the paint lids as pallets, carefully mixing color after color, and the result was a beautiful image or two on the wall…and a lot of spots of paint on the floor. Before we cleaned up—moving the furniture back, Kahmè collecting paint tins and cleaning them out with the hose on the porch, and me steam-cleaning the hardwood—I used the rest of the paint (mostly blue, but with some purple and yellow too) to write her name in thick letters on the wall above her bed. At first she had had no idea what I was doing; I had had to explain, and once I had finished dodging her bone-crushing hugs of thanks I told her that she could write on her wall too, it wasn’t hard, and it didn’t have to be in English.
“Silly, you know I can’t write,” she told me, brushing the issue aside—it was like an ordinary person telling someone that they couldn’t play Bach’s Minuet on the cello: a cool skill to learn, maybe, but not a necessarily useful one.
“But you can read Cherokee, can’t you?” I protested. “So why can’t you write it?”
She blinked at me. “Can’t read, either. Wow, Evan, are you really hungry or something?”
“No, you…the boxes. You read what was in them, I saw you—”
She stared at me for one very long second, then burst out laughing; I grimaced and resisted the urge to kick something while I waited for her to finish. Of course I was the stupid one in this situation, that made perfect sense….
Finally, she explained: “Evan, silly, that’s not Cherokee on the boxes, I swear. They were like pictures. Mama can’t write neither, she gets Daddy to do all that kind of stuff. She drew what our kitchen looked like at home, that’s how I knew. Plus she told me it was the fat heavy one.”
Well THAT made sense. At the very least, it explained why the “Cherokee” writing looked more like peck-marks than actual penmanship. Then the mention of her father reminded me: “Hey, Kahmè? What’s up with your dad? Why doesn’t he visit more?”
She shrugged, sitting on the bed beside me and looking around her new room. It was open and looked sort of barren, as they hadn’t gotten a rug for the floor yet, but now that the walls were painted it looked less sterile and much homier. The window-seat, which was now padded with another blanket on top of a couple of towels, was covered, around the inside and outside edges as well as along the bottom and top, with blue flowers of all different shapes. She would need curtains, but only because she was such a close, warm-and-fuzzy kind of person that the empty window would need more color and filler to it before it would seem comfortable to her. Her bed was made with brand-new, pristine-white sheets, and covered with a blanket knitted by her mother, three different shades of purple with yellow flowers growing around the edges. It was a happy room now: her collections were assembled, her clothes were hung up, her toy box was not empty anymore.
But she didn’t look very happy.
“He doesn’t want to, I guess,” she murmured, staring at her bare feet—Mrs. Sandred was a no-shoes-in-the-house kind of woman. “I mean, he says he travels a lot, so that’s why, but ‘s not like that makes a lot more sense. He comes every year…Mama doesn’t know her birthday, so he comes on mine….”
“Why are you so upset?” I asked her, worried, and edged closer to her, reaching for her hand. She took it, but then she fell onto her side, curling up with her stomach against my back, her head resting by my leg.
“I dunno,” she murmured. “’S new house, I guess…I like Daddy,” she mused. “But ‘s like…he’s never there. Mama’s all happy when he’s around but she knew him for a long long long time, I didn’t…he’s not like your dad, there all the time, he’s never around….”
“Kahmè,” I said very gently, “my dad hits me. He’s definitely no better than yours.”
She scowled at the blanket. “Don’t r’mind me,” she muttered, and I sensed somehow that she had changed: she was her more mature self right now, the one who viewed the world with clarity at the expense of her usually-boundless optimism. “Your dad is MEAN. But at least he’s there.”
“Most of the time,” I told her, just as gently, “he’s about as present in mind as your dad is in body. Do you know what I mean? At least…at least you know that your dad WANTS to be with you.”
“But that’s just it! He DOESN’T,” she wailed. “If he wanted to he would, right? ‘S not like he can’t just get a job somewhere else like your daddy, I don’t get it….”
I thought about this, softly stroking her hair as I did so. “Well,” I finally asked her, “Why does your mom put up with it?”
“’Cause, she says…she doesn’t want to make him stay. She said he isn’t meant to stay in one place, he wouldn’t be happy like that…and she wanted to go too, but she couldn’t ‘cause it wouldn’t be good for me….”
“So,” I said slowly, “you’re upset because you’re afraid that they’re unhappy because of you?”
She nodded miserably, closing her eyes. “She said when I’m older we’ll go,” she murmured. “She SAID. But I dunno. I mean…’s so long….”
She sounded as if she were about to cry; my heart hurt for her, but all I could do was try to comfort her, try to understand her. “Let me guess…that’s not what you want, is it?”
She shook her head, burying her face in the blanket, her voice muffled as she replied, “I dunno…I wanted to so much before, but now I’m here and I…I just…I wanna stay here with you, I don’t….”
I didn’t think it was a good time to let her know how very flattered and touched and HAPPY hearing that made me, but internally, I glowed. She did? She really did? I struggled to concentrate. “Well…grownups are really stupid, Kahmè. They do really stupid things all the time. If they made their decisions, then it’s theirs to deal with, it doesn’t have to affect you, and even if it does it’s not your fault. Maybe your mom is waiting until you’re older partly because she wants you to be able to choose for yourself…like, when she was however old she decided to hook up with your dad, so she thinks that when you’re however old you can decide whether or not you want to stay here. And you know…in normal America, once you’re eighteen you really can do whatever you want if it’s legal. She can’t make your decisions for you then.”
“I wanna stay with Mama,” she told me, “but I wanna stay with you, too….”
“Well, you have both of us now,” I reminded her, and she smiled just a little.
“New house,” she muttered distractedly, looking around her with faint, confused fear. “I dunno….”
“It’ll be all right,” I encouraged her. “You have everything you need here. And if you get lonely you can go in your mom’s room, she won’t mind….”
“But…I wanted to stay with you,” she whispered. “Will Mama be mad?”
I felt my mouth fall open; my brain spun with sudden pleasure. She wanted to stay with me? It was just what I wanted to…. “I’m sure she won’t be,” I assured her without really focusing, then suddenly turned toward her, squeezing her hand in mine. “I hope not,” I told her in one of my rare, awkward moments of bluntness. “I was scared that you wouldn’t want to stay with me anymore.”
Her eyes widened; she sat up a little and stared at me, unaware of how suddenly compromising our position was—she was mere inches from me, and I was leaning over her for support, bending eagerly toward her. “’Course I do! You’re my best friend…y-y-you’re the only f-f-friend I’ve got…an’…an’ you always know just wh-what t-to d-d-do….”
For a moment I was scared that she would burst into tears, but she didn’t—instead, she did just what I most wanted, but had least expected her to do.
She kissed me. She grabbed my shoulders and pulled herself toward me, wrapping her arms clumsily around my waist and pressing her lips again and again against mine, missing often, hitting my cheeks and nose instead. I was so surprised that it took me a minute to move, but when I did I decided that it was time I took control: being as gentle with her as I possibly could with my heart throbbing so quickly, I pushed her carefully down until she was laying flat on the bed, leaning over her and holding her tightly to my chest as I pressed my lips to hers, then opened them slightly, kissing her for real. I made myself keep it very, very slow, and to my surprise she picked up the rhythm in seconds, kissing me back without expertise but with passion, with real feeling. My fears that her less-than-mature mind and body couldn’t feel the way I felt for her dissolved in a heartbeat, and I kissed her as best as I could, one hand holding up her head, her arms pressed against my back, her touch burning me, in utter bliss where I was.
Only one small part of me was not completely absorbed, and as we kissed it spoke up: Wow, this is awesome, it said again and again, and then it asked, I wonder if she’ll let me touch her boobs?
Shut the ******** up, I told it then, and it digressed.
~
Kahmè spent the night with me that night, and every other night after that (whether she had permission to or not) but didn’t kiss me again, and I didn’t make her—I had reminded her, very gently, after we were through kissing that if she didn’t want to do it, she didn’t have to. And she didn’t—it seemed to have been a one-time thing, though she didn’t find that awkward or strange at all. She took what I said literally, completely oblivious to all the social moirés and modern American behavior standards that she was shattering to bits, especially the ones about mixed signals. But I tolerated it, fully aware that it was my own stupid fault that this was so.
Still, things changed after that—or I guess that they had been changing since I first kissed her and I simply hadn’t noticed. I guess the short way of putting it was that she was growing up, losing her childishness, but it wasn’t that simple, or that noticeable; it was, in fact, so subtle that it took me several weeks of nagging subconscious effort to figure out what was different. She was less hyperactive but just as happy; she moved more slowly in mind and body, not so quick and birdlike, taking time to focus and think more than she ever had before. She was just as passionate, but replaced childish sympathy with more mature empathy, understanding as well as feeling. Somehow she sounded smarter when she talked, and much more insightful; she didn’t babble as much, and seemed self-conscious when she did—and it was very, very rare for her to feel self-conscious at all—and would sometimes get upset over things she normally wouldn’t have, though it usually passed very quickly. She had grown, and grew another inch or two between that summer and the new year; and of course, hopeless pervert that I was, only I seemed to notice that her breasts grew from vague, half-formed ideas of breasts to…well, breasts. I would have to broach the subject with her mother, but I wasn’t sure how to without being brained by a frying pan.
She also smiled at me more, making my heart freak out every time she did—the smile was always accompanied by this look, so unfamiliar that I could hardly translate it, though it looked warm and happy and comforting to me, very pleasant, and very understanding. There was a connection between her and I—there always had been one, it had always been there, and it grew every day, but now she and I were both aware of it, and of the strange turns it had taken. From “friends” bonded by weird and psychotic trauma—one grudgingly civil, the other unbearably enthusiastic—we had progressed to real friends, best friends who shared everything to each other—and now, we were…well, I didn’t know what we were. I couldn’t exactly put a word to it (though sometimes, in a burst of pathetic-ness, my subconscious would accidentally address Kahmè as “my girlfriend”) but if I could have briefly explained it, I would have said that we had grown with each other, becoming something bigger than best friends, something not quite platonic—but we couldn’t help that, because there was so much depth there that it couldn’t possibly be contained in an area as small as “friends”.
I still lusted after her like crazy, still fought the urge to kiss her tooth and nail every minute of my life, it seemed, even in my dreams—but she either didn’t have that problem or hid it better than me, because she didn’t once touch her lips to any part of me for months after that night in her new room. I bemoaned this often, and became sulky enough when I wasn’t around her that even I couldn’t stand my own company—combined with my natural liking for dark colors and long sleeves and my steadily-getting-longer black hair, people at school called me “emo,” and I guess the term fit. But really I was very happy; I adored Kahmè, I would have done anything with her, and was so happy that she still stayed with me almost every night that I could barely believe my luck. I started believing in God again—I guess I wanted someone to thank.
As she grew up, changed in tiny, subtle ways, my affection for her only grew, until it got to the point where I asked myself, for the second time in my life, if I was in love with her. But it was too weird, too strange, and too terrifying, so I pushed it away, telling myself that if we ever got to a point where we could kiss regularly without any drama, then I would consider it again. People in love at least kissed, didn’t they? To be honest, I really wasn’t sure, but believing so sure made my dilemma much easier.
If only everything else could have worked as well as our friendship—and for awhile, it seemed to, much to my surprise. Kahmè’s father came and went in about two days, but I never met him—I resented him slightly, for upsetting Kahmè and for trying to make her stay home the one night that he was there (she snuck out anyway when they had locked themselves in Mrs. Sandred’s room for the night, and I had had to try hard to keep a straight face when she demanded to know what the hell they were doing), but said nothing about him, and Kahmè didn’t say much about him either. It was quiet, in and out, and he probably wouldn’t visit for another year, so his presence caused barely a stir.
High school was hell, of course: I was a freshman, and though the work wasn’t hard and I was better at Geometry than Algebra, I couldn’t make any real friends, and it was a struggle to find a place to sit at lunch every day. Mostly I sat outside on a cluster of benches and read, but sometimes seniors or teachers kicked me out and forced me to hide in the bathroom until the bell rang. Jocks beat me up out of nowhere with alarming frequency, for as long as they could go undetected—I learned to scream really loudly when they came toward me, but it didn’t always work when they and I were the only ones around. I had more homework than ever, and it was slightly difficult to cram it all in, even if the subject matter was cake—and for a lot of it I had to use the computer, which made Dad angry, even though I tried to reassure him that I wasn’t talking to sketchy internet people or downloading porn. He never believed me.
In fact, the relationship between Dad and I had become very, very strained in that first semester—I couldn’t quite put my finger on why until I realized that there wasn’t a reason at all. At least, not one that I could see: suddenly Dad’s temper was more vicious and uncontrollable than ever, suddenly he was drinking more and more and exploding with alarming frequency, suddenly his mindset was rapidly and progressively deteriorating. When he wasn’t angry, he was silent, and said or did nothing at all—I never saw him calculate taxes and bills and things anymore, I never saw him do anything except take a glass of undiluted whiskey into the living room and watch TV with glassy, unfocused eyes. He had a high alcohol tolerance, I guessed, and needed to drink much more than he did every weekday to get drunk, but the alcohol ignited his already dangerous temper and ended almost every time in something that was half-argument and half-violent beating.
Weekends weren’t as bad—he got properly drunk then, and either fell asleep or hit me until the nausea got to him and he went to throw up in the bathroom, and I had over twelve hours free after he passed out. But I still had the hangovers to deal with, and more than half the time he found before too long that he wasn’t feeling too shitty to hurt me somehow after all. His punishments had once been cruel, quiet but crafty, or at the very worst terrifyingly unstoppable; now they were erratic but frequent, clumsy but rough, poorly aimed but so brutal that they could make me scream if I didn’t keep my jaw clenched tight, my teeth clamped down hard on my tongue.
Kahmè, despite my pleas, threats, and bribes, still watched from the stairs—to be sure I didn’t get really, really hurt, she told me—and was much more alarmed by this new trend than I was. She was growing up, this was true, and she stood up for herself now: I couldn’t treat her like a little kid anymore, she had an opinion and she wasn’t going to back down from it. She was scared, and frequently told me so—and what scared her most, she said, was not that he was hitting me more, but that I was taking it. The ever-increasing violent rage terrified her less than the fact that I was just standing there and letting him beat me, waiting for it to be over. I didn’t even care, it barely affected me aside from the bruises and soreness, it was the same old thing I had endured for years, nothing more. She was frightened by the thought that I was becoming complacent, allowing him to hurt me, refusing to fight.
I tried to convince her that this was bullshit, and no cause for further hysteria—how was I even supposed to stop him anyway, how was I supposed to fight? He was still three times my size, bigger and stronger and far more powerful than me, and all he would do is punish me even more if I DIDN’T just stand there and take it. There was nothing I could do, I told her bluntly—and, shocking me, her reply was that that attitude was exactly what scared her. It wasn’t my behavior, it was my attitude that scared her…but unfortunately for her, my attitude was not very easily changed. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, see what was going on as anything but The Way Things Were, because I couldn’t bear going through the depression that being fully aware of my situation inevitably caused. If I thought about it too much, it would slowly drive me insane.
So I didn’t think about it at all if I could help it. Okay, Dad could hit me all he wanted to, eventually he would get tired of it…even though he was knocking me out more frequently than ever, at a rate of once a week instead of once a year, and even though it was increasingly affecting my concentration and my overall cheerfulness, as well as my overall health, I refused to acknowledge it. Okay, I told myself. Dad’s going to hit me. It’s unavoidable. And it’s not a big deal, no reason to freak out. Gone were the days when I had panic attacks out of fear of his punishment—now I somehow knew when a night was going to end badly, as it often did, and faced it with weary submission, counting to 4000, knowing that if I didn’t move at all it would be over before I hit 2500. I tried to explain to Kahmè a hundred times that he wasn’t knocking me to the ground, I was letting myself fall—it was like playing dead to a bear, if you did it convincingly they would get bored with you and walk away. This also made sure that less damage was done to my face than to my torso, which made it easier to hide. It was cold outside, I could wear gloves and long sleeves as much as I wanted to and no one would care, but there was no hiding a black eye without some serious makeup—at least this way I didn’t have to lie through my teeth all the time. And people cared less in high school—only a couple of teachers would ask you if your face was banged up, but that was all; half of the students, in fact, seemed to think that it was funny.
But Kahmè wasn’t buying my explanations that my father would literally kill me if I tried anything else, wasn’t buying my leave-it-as-it-is philosophy, which was somewhere in between, or far beyond, optimism and pessimism, and she started to bug me with annoying regularity about doing something—she rarely had any specific suggestions, though, aside from asking other people like her mother or the police for help, and was infuriated that I wouldn’t take the hint and use all of my reading skills and American-boy resources to find help myself. She never accepted my way of thinking, never backed down from her position, and never relented on her inquisition to get me help—though at the same time, she respected my wishes, she helped me and took care of me when I needed it, and she remained my best friend. And I still adored her, though slightly less when she started on what I thought of as “the stupid nagging that’s going to get me killed”. She meant well, I knew, and I appreciated it, even if she wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell her why it was so unreasonable. Why nothing was going to change for the better, and how I was stopping it from changing for the worse. Why this pain was nothing compared to what could happen.
But I had forgotten that we were time bombs, my father and I, and he was still ticking away, moving ever closer toward the inevitable explosion. I was preventing the “could happen”, but I didn’t see that it WOULD happen, and soon, no matter what I did…I didn’t see that Kahmè was right, that he was dragging us both to hell, and sooner than later, all of this was going to reach its bursting point.
Sooner, rather than later…the rapid turnaround of my life, from somewhat better than okay to the closest to hell I had ever been, would begin very soon, in a matter of weeks, one night in the middle of January.
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Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 5:57 pm
and OMG OUKOW I JUST SAW THAT ZACH AND CODY EPISODE THIS AFTERNOON and that lady is NOTHING like Kahme's mom. nothing at all. wtf.
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2009 9:05 pm
Lmfao! XD
Okay then, I'll stop picturing her mom like that. Sorry XDD
The book sounds interesting, I'll see if it's in our school's library. =3
ZOMG!? NEW CHAPTER? *Mustread*
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2009 9:55 pm
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Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 4:43 pm
>w< Okay, now I picture Kahme's mom almost like...a mixture of my sister, and step mom-who are awesome- but more fragilely looking xP
I actually forgot about Kahme's dad. I knew he wasn't there, but like....I dunno, I thought he was dead or they didn't know him.
But jesus.. <3 Their kiss... <3
It was cute and adorable, but then it turned into sweet romance in a soft tone. >w<
But Evan's foreshadowing makes me gloomy D;
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Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2009 5:19 pm
He does that. he's an emo-butt.
I think i'm doen with the next chapter! actually I know I am. just need to type it up! I was gonna last night but english homework meh.
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Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2009 5:39 pm
28
After a relatively normal Thanksgiving we had a relatively normal Christmas, with one exception: when Kahmè asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I teasingly replied, “All I want’s a kiss.” It was true, but I had said it as a joke, and expected it to be interpreted that way—however, come Christmas night, when I had finally retreated to my room, instead of giving me a present (I had given her a bunch of stuffed animals, as promised), she wrapped herself around me and kissed me, and let me kiss her for as long as I wanted to. I felt guilty later, especially when she made it clear that she didn’t want to do it again, but she said she had enjoyed it, and hoped it had been special—and it had, it really had.
On New Year’s Eve, my dad went out to drink with some friends, leaving Kahmè and I alone—we split a bottle of fake champagne and watched the ball drop in New York City, and I lied to Kahmè and said that it was midnight here too so I could go to sleep faster. But she never let me, she never seemed to get tired, at least until she crashed all at once—and somehow, both of us ended up asleep on the couch, though I woke up at the sound of Dad’s returning car and managed to carry Kahmè upstairs without her waking up or Dad discovering us. It was surprisingly comforting, and at the same time exciting, to have Kahmè cradled in my arms, even if she was far too heavy for me—and if it wasn’t then that I noticed her well-developing chest, then I was certainly vividly reminded. I reminded myself yet again that I should talk to Mrs. Sandred—she probably wouldn’t know about things like this, though I hadn’t gaped at her enough to tell for sure—but I still couldn’t think of a way to do it that wouldn’t make her hate me.
And then came a day I remembered vividly, probably because of her reaction: One day, when I had finished cleaning and had dinner simmering on the stove, I sat down at the kitchen table to do my homework. It was some weird science s**t that had me looking stuff up on the charts in the back every few seconds, but it wasn’t bad, it worked just like ratios once you crossed out all the stupid unnecessary things. Kahmè was sitting by me, playing with my free hand when I didn’t need it, in full form with her sending-mixed-signals routine.
But halfway through the homework, she saw something on my hand, an odd-looking scar that caught her attention; she raised my hand to her face and examined it curiously, frowning after a minute. “Evan?” she asked me, “What’s this?”
“Don’t touch,” I warned her, already knowing what she was looking at. It still hurt if something touched it too hard.
She carefully set my hand down at once, but continued to peer warily at it. “What is it?”
“A scar.” Clearly. I had lots of them on my hands and arms.
“But…why’s it all dark like that?”
“There’s graphite in it.”
“Graphite?”
“It’s what’s in pencils. The grey stuff.”
Her frowned deepened. “Why is there…what happened?”
She had skipped straight to the important question, probably already knowing what I was going to say. I told her anyway—not too long ago she had yelled at me, then burst into tears, because I had tried to spare her by telling her only part of the truth. Now I knew better than to hide things from her, because bad things would inevitably happen if she didn’t get all the information she wanted from me. She trusted me, so I had to trust her too, or else she’d cry—and I HATED it when she cried.
“Back when I was like ten,” I said, deciding to tell her the whole story to avoid answering too many questions, “I asked Dad at the beginning of the year for all the school supplies on the list. He got them for me—yelled at me a lot, but he still got them. But about halfway through the year I ran out of pencils and I was starting to run out of pens too. I was good about keeping up with them, I always have been, but pencils break and people borrow them and never give them back and the pens were cheap and kept running out of ink. So I asked Dad to get me more.” I smiled wryly. “Simple request, right? If you asked your mom for some she probably would have brought you home a chocolate bar or something, just ‘cause she saw it and thought you’d like it.
“But with Dad…. You know him. He freaks over little things. And I was too dumb to ask him when he was sober. He started shouting at me, asking me what had happened to the ones he had already bought, and I tried to explain, but he didn’t really listen—he told me to show him my pencil bag, to prove it I guess, I don’t know, and when I showed him he took the only pencil left in there and stabbed me with it.” I twitched my fingers, feeling the slight tug on the smallest one. The thin gray scar was still there, on the side of the middle joint. “He missed—he was aiming for the center. But he got me really hard, it was bleeding and some of the graphite got stuck in there, and he wouldn’t take me to the hospital…I couldn’t move my finger for weeks. I still can’t, not really.” I wiggled it to be sure—the top joint worked fine, but the middle one would only bend ten degrees or so, and felt stiff and swollen, even though it looked all right. “I never asked him to get me pens and pencils again,” I commented, detached, focused on my homework. “I just saved up and bought them myself. It isn’t worth it.”
I glanced up at her from the corner of my eye: she was staring at me wide-eyed, and I knew a freak-out was inevitable. I carefully copied my homework—in pen, of course, as I still had a phobia of pencils—and waited for her to start.
It didn’t take long. “That’s horrible!” she cried, sounding close to tears. “That’s terrible, why’s he have to do that, why, Evan, why does he have to hurt you—?”
“Kahmè,” I said as gently as I could, squeezing her hand in mine. “Calm down.” I didn’t look up as I told her, softly but firmly, “This happened years and years ago, there isn’t anything anybody can do anymore. You know as well as I do that my dad hurts me in a lot of really sick ways, that’s nothing new, why is this any worse than the coffee thing? Or leaving me in a cemetery?” We both flinched—the memory of the graveyard, in particular, still haunted me some nights.
She wrenched her hand away from mine, and I could tell without looking that she was angry. “Why do you have to be like that?” she demanded, her voice rising uncontrollably. “It’s horrible and you know it, why don’t you ever act like it? You just…ACCEPT it…you’re…you’re so….”
She struggled; I came quietly to her aid. “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘apathetic.’”
I could practically feel her glaring at me—she hated big words. “Why don’t you ever want to get help, Evan? Why? If we just tell Mama or call the 911 people or SOMETHING they’ll be able to help you, it’s better than doing nothing at all!”
“I’m not ‘doing nothing,’” I objected, still calm. “I’ve told you a hundred times, Kahmè, there isn’t anything else I can do—if I tell anyone else, he’ll just stop everything they try to do, and then he’ll literally kill me. And he’ll kill me if I try to fight him, too. At least this way I’m alive.”
“But you don’t even care!” she tried to shriek, but it came out distorted—she was about to start crying. “You don’t care at all….”
“Of course I care,” I said softly, turning to her and taking her hands in mine. “It’s my life, isn’t it? I like it. I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to leave you.”
I was being honest, not just trying to comfort her, but also trying to explain to her why it didn’t worry me—I was tough, I could get through the rough patch intact, I wasn’t going to die. But she was worried for me.
She leaned forward, letting me catch her safely in my arms. She really was crying now, much to her dismay, I was sure: she hated crying with a passion, because not only did it give her a headache, but it also, she feared, made the people she tried to talk to fail to take her seriously when she started with the waterworks. “Th-that’s why…I want you t-t-to get help…c-cause I don’t want you to die, Evan, I want you to stay with me….”
“It’s okay,” I assured her, hugging her close and trying to soothe her as best as I could. I was growing too, and Kahmè fit neatly against me now, her head just high enough to rest on my shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay.”
But it wasn’t, and she knew it—Kahmè was right and I was wrong, and I should have seen it when I had the chance. This, I should have known, was no rough patch. It was a sinkhole, and I was getting sucked deeper and deeper into it, so deeply that before long I would never be able to find the light again.
~
There wasn’t really a reason for it—in the end, I told myself that I had just snapped.
It was a Wednesday night—for some reason school people always assume it’s best to send grade reports in the middle of the ******** week. I was finishing up my homework, mashed potatoes lumped in a covered pot on the stove, a big steak marinating in the oven, waiting to be served for dinner. Kahmè had, just a few minutes ago, excused herself so she could get ready for bed—she was getting the hang of being American now, taking daily showers and wearing adorable Native-American-ish pajamas, but she had to run home to shower now and usually walked back in her day clothes, preferring to change in my bathroom. Of course I had no problem with this, especially as I still hadn’t reminded her mom that she would, eventually, need to wear a bra. I loved it when she spent the night, loved sharing a bed with her and talking until we fell asleep—in fact, on the rare nights when she couldn’t come, I could hardly sleep, and would have to turn the lamp on and convince myself that there were no ghosts in my room before I could.
My dad had always had strange habits, and these had only increased in the past few months. For one, he sometimes drank before he even got home, though I had no idea what was bad enough on the drive home that he had to drink to get through it. And for another, the paranoia. I knew for a fact that he had had a loaded gun in his nightstand, just inches from where he slept, since he and Mom had been married. And of course, he had always made sure the doors were locked before he went to bed—it was such an ingrained habit that he didn’t even forget when he was completely wasted some nights. But now he actually used our complicated security system, checked it every evening, keying in complicated codes—now he freaked out if he heard anything unusual in the night, and would beat me up in the morning about it, even if it was only a cat or a distant siren—and now he kept obvious security measures in strange places, like the pepper spray in a drawer in the front hallway and the wooden baseball bat by the back door.
It was my bat, actually—the irony of it hasn’t escaped me. I had gotten it back when Mom had still been alive and had signed me up for Little League. I wasn’t good, and didn’t have a particularly huge amount of fun, but it was nice while it lasted. I hadn’t known that Dad had kept all of that stuff, but at the very least, he seemed to have remembered the bat. It was short, seven-year-old sized, and kind of pathetic, but it could still brain anyone who walked into our house uninvited. It leaned against the corner by the door—I could see it from where I sat if I turned around—and though its presence right beside the hypothetical point of forced entry was kind of a security flaw, I didn’t mention this to Dad.
Another of his strange habits, which I assumed that he’d had for a lot longer than I’d known, was that he liked to stop in the driveway, turn off his car, and read the mail while lounging in the driver’s seat. I guessed that he didn’t like to be around me and was stalling, or maybe he wanted to catch any bad news before he saw me so he could plot, but for whatever reason, that was what he did, and it really creeped me out. I had discovered this strange idiosyncrasy one evening when I had wondered why he was later than usual and had peeked out the window, only to find his car sitting in the driveway and him flipping through the mail. Okay. Scary…. But not overtly dangerous. Not DEADLY.
Not until that night.
He came into the house shouting—he didn’t even shut the door. Freezing air seeped into the warm, toasty kitchen, but I didn’t feel it yet—all I felt was Dad’s hands jerking at my collar, pulling me up, knocking my chair over. I realized that he was shouting, but he was shaking me, and I could barely understand WHAT he was shouting. Something about grades? I hadn’t remembered making any really bad ones…in fact, I had made As and high Bs, those were good….
He kept shaking me for what felt like ten minutes straight, then suddenly let me go and punched me in the stomach—the breath knocked out of me, I hit the wall before sliding to the floor. I curled up immediately, playing dead, but for some reason it wasn’t good enough for him this time; he dragged me to my feet again, still shouting, and threw me away from him, against the wall. I caught myself before I slammed into it and dodged a punch, which only infuriated him—he grabbed my arm and held me still while he punched me again and again, twisting my arm out of the way when I raised it to defend myself. He hit me wherever he could and as hard as he could, and within minutes I felt as though he had punched holes through me, torn out my insides and strewn them across the floor.
But this was all normal—what wasn’t was my reaction.
For the first time I could remember, I was ANGRY—I had been in a good mood, caught unawares, not doing a thing wrong, and I had made the best grades I ever had outside of elementary school. What had I done to him? Why should he be angry at me? Was it really worth beating the s**t out of me? I was mad, maybe just a little bit, but enough to where I couldn’t control it—my temper got the better of me, and before I could stop myself and come back to reality I heard myself screaming over his voice: “Stop it! Leave me alone! Just leave me the ******** alone!”
I never said anything—it was so rare that he stopped dead even before I had finished speaking, staring at me in disbelief. In that moment of silence before the inevitable, I realized the enormity of what I had done. Not only had I resisted him, not only had I spoken up for the first time in months, not only had I cursed, but I had given him something very, very close to a direct order. I had tried to boss him around. As if I were in control.
The moment was gone, and he exploded. His voice pierced through my head, making me wince, shouting what sounded like an endless stream of swear words—and then, very suddenly, his hands were around my neck.
After that I can’t remember much…but I do remember him slamming my head against the wall, hard, several times, as I kicked and struggled and tried to breathe…I remember him throwing me away from him, remember stumbling, remember crumpling to the ground, still gasping for breath…I remember him kicking me over and over again, dragging me up just to hit me once and make me fall again…I remember the shouting, ever-present, and the raining blows, one after another after another, and the pain, and worrying that it would happen again, that internal CRACK that would mean that I was badly hurt, too badly to repair on my own….
And then the pain doubled, changed, and my mind, sluggish with pain, took a moment to realize what it was. It was the bat.
The BAT?!
“No,” I moaned at once, “no, please, stop it….”
But it didn’t stop.
Though I had thought I’d heard screaming, I hadn’t been sure if it had been coming from me or not—but this time, I made an honest effort. I gave the scream all I had, though I was still gasping desperately for breath…but I couldn’t hear anything. And nothing happened, nothing ended. I know I struggled, I know I tried everything I could, even if my vision was blurred from pain and lack of oxygen and I could barely move without hurting myself…but it was all in vain. Something smashed into my head, just above my ear, just as another blow struck my right arm, followed by a sickening snap and a rush of agony.
He’d broken my arm.
From that moment on, it was all over. The pain was too much to handle, too much to fight with, especially when it doubled soon after—my leg was gone too. There was no hope for me. My head spun dizzily, and I felt sick, so sick that I couldn’t tell if my insides were still in my body, not ripped out and strewn all over the floor—I think I threw up, I know I started to cry, but I couldn’t hear myself, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t feel anything but the pain. A tiny, panicking part of my brain screamed for help, told me that I was dying, but the rest of my brain was shutting down, flickering out, giving up.
I went limp, too tired to fight, but it was still a long, long time after that before the pain began to end. I could still hear screaming echoing in my head as I passed out little by little, though at that point I couldn’t be sure who it was—Dad or Kahmè or me or my mother—and by then the voice was far too late to save me.
I was shaken awake: the first thing that came back to me was the pain. I tried to scream, but it came out as a low groan. Someone was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand….
Little by little, I became more aware of things. I could hear nothing at all save that voice, sweet and welcome but sounding panicked and scared…I had my eyes closed, I couldn’t open them all the way and could only see properly out of one of them. My vision was blurry; it was hard to focus. I saw the legs of the kitchen table, a chair knocked to the floor, and the baseball bat, with a long crack in it, where it had rolled away from me, resting in the middle of the floor. It was covered in a thin, dried layer of blood, as were the tiles around me. My nose was bloody and hurt a lot, and it was hard to breathe—every time my lungs moved, it hurt. My nerves were shot, too overloaded with pain to feel much, but I realized that I was cold—gradually, I came to feel the hard tile beneath my body, the warm little hand brushing at my face.
“Evan?” I heard from far away. “Evan…speak to me, please….”
Familiar, so familiar….
The warm hand eased itself gently beneath my head, which was tender enough for that to hurt—I let out a moan of protest, but it came out choked and tiny, sounding barely human. Something smooth and cool touched my lips, shifted slightly, and then a tiny bit of water washed against my mouth—I felt it trickle in, down my throat, and tried to swallow, but I just ended up choking on it.
I heard a frightened sob. “Evan….”
I tried to say something, not knowing how or even what I could say to sum up all this pain—all that came out was another muted, inhuman noise of pure agony. I felt my face tighten as I winced involuntarily. It hurt, so much that I couldn’t focus on one pain or the other, I didn’t have any idea what was really wrong with me—all I knew was pain, pain that took over my entire body, ate into my brain….
The voice was crying now, babbling incoherently. I realized that I was shivering.
“Evan, please, please answer me, please, you can’t die, you gotta wake up, please….”
Kahmè?
I tried to call for her, tried to say something that would bring her closer, she sounded so distant, but I choked on the words, and had to turn my head to spit up a mouthful of blood. I moaned again—not this, not this, I couldn’t be coughing up blood again….
A warm, clean, rough towel dabbed against my face, wiping away the blood; then hands, two this time, cupped against each side of my face, tilting it up. I blinked, and saw a fuzzy figure over me, with dark skin and black hair and a mouth that was moving, her voice flowing around me….
“Kahm…mè…?” I said dreamily, my voice sounding as though I had swallowed glass. Maybe I had? That would explain why my stomach felt like death.
“Evan!” she said in relief, and her voice was clearer than ever, though I still had to concentrate to make it out. The same towel, dampened this time, pressed against my forehead; it felt nice. “Evan, thank everything, I’m so scared, Evan, I don’t know what to do—”
“Wh-wh-what…?” I was far away from the point where I could give or take advice. It was hard enough just understanding what she was saying. “…h-happen….”
She let out another sob; my heart ached in a way that was not caused by a baseball bat or a fist. “It w-w-was your d-dad,” she told me between panicked gasps for breath. “He h-h-hit you, he w-wouldn’t s-s-s-stop, he wouldn’t….”
This made sense, and corresponded with the little that I could remember. But my brain wasn’t working properly; I couldn’t think, couldn’t wrap my head around more than one idea at a time. I’m hurt? I thought, again and again and again. I’m hurt? Am I hurt? But I couldn’t make sense of it.
“Evan,” she whimpered when I didn’t respond, “Evan, wh-wh-what do I do? I…do I call the…the hospital…?”
I’m hurt? I’m really hurt? I thought, and then, very suddenly, Yes. I am. Just like before.
Hospitals, then, were a very bad idea—not unless I wanted to stay hurt. “No!” I said at once, weakly, then coughed hard—it felt as though I were splitting in half, right down the middle. “You c-…can’t…!”
“But you’re hurt,” she said frantically, and only then could I really hear how scared she was. “You’re really, really hurt, you could die, you gotta get help….”
I could die? But no—I refused to consider that. “It’s…okay,” I told her as firmly as I could. “It’s…gonna be…okay.”
That was about all the convincing I could do. I felt her dab at different parts of me with the towel, but only when she touched my right elbow did it really cause me pain. When I cried out she pulled away—she was crying again, I could hear her.
“Evan…what do I do…?” she whimpered, and grabbed my left hand—I squeezed it as tightly as I could, wincing again from the pain, surprised and sickened when she gave a little gasp: I had hurt her. I tried to let go, but she wouldn’t let me. “What do I do?” she asked me again.
I thought about it, as hard as I could, but it was so difficult to focus…all I wanted was…was….
“Daddy,” I gasped. Kahmè understood immediately—even if she did interpret it the wrong way. I wanted her to get my father. But she knew that we had to get somewhere where he couldn’t find me.
“I get it…I’ll do it, Evan, I promise…you’ll be okay….”
At first I wondered why she was freaking so much, petting me and rearranging me—couldn’t she just help me up? But then I remembered that I couldn’t move. I was, for all intents and purposes, paralyzed. This scared me—at least until I realized that she’d have to carry me. That scared me even more.
“Kahmè, no,” I tried to plead, but it was too late—without wasting another moment she slid her hands beneath my legs and shoulders and heaved. I must have been twenty pounds heavier than she was, at least; she stumbled, and I could feel her shaking, but to my eternal amazement she didn’t fall. She took a step, then another step; I bit my lip, refusing to cry out, to show her how much it hurt.
Slowly, step by step, she got me to the stairs. And then the really difficult part came, for her at least: our stairs were pretty steep, and curved, even if they were short. But she didn’t even pause; she held her own, her arms straining as she tried to support my weight. Stairs hurt me even worse than normal steps did, and my broken arm dangled crazily and painfully at my side, sending agony through me if it happened to swing the wrong way or touch a stair, but I forced myself not to say anything.
And then she had done it—she reached the top of the stairs, then immediately staggered and fell to her knees, letting me rest on the floor. She was gasping for breath, falling over with exhaustion—I had really worn her out. I was sightless again; I closed my eyes and let my head fall back, supported by her arm, concentrating on breathing in and out. She patted my face and stroked my hair, flinching away when she touched a sore spot and I winced, whispering in my ear. “It’s okay, Evan, you’re okay…it’s gonna be okay, I promise….”
Behind her words I could hear the barely-controlled panic; what was she doing, trying to comfort me? She was going to have a nervous breakdown if I didn’t do something, but I didn’t have the energy to talk anymore—I was afraid that if I did, I would start screaming.
Kahmè only rested for a minute or two—then she shifted, preparing to lift me again and stagger down the hall to my room. But in doing so, she had to clutch at the top of my right arm, and when my wrist dragged against the carpet, the arm twisted awkwardly, the broken pieces of bone knocking against each other; I screamed weakly as the pain burst inside me, burning me from my fingers to my shoulder. The noise was loud in the silence—Kahmè jumped, then stiffened and held her breath, holding me tightly as I cried out in pain again; I couldn’t help it.
And then, before I could make myself shut up, a shout exploded from my dad’s room.
“EVAN!”
Both of us froze, Kahmè letting out a tiny whimper of fear. I felt the panic rise again, getting stronger—he couldn’t do anything more to me, but what would he to do her? I felt her shivering; my head spun, and I couldn’t breathe. Oh no, oh no, oh s**t no, oh….
But no one came for us—I wasn’t even sure that we had really heard him—and after a minute of frozen silence, Kahmè rose shakily to her feet again. But the movement sent another lightning bolt of pain through me, and it was too much for my brain to handle; it gave up, plunging me into blissful darkness.
I don’t remember the journey into my room, though I do remember Kahmè laying me in my bed and covering me up…I don’t remember much of that night, though I do remember patches of it: the pain; the blurry, lamp-lit dimness that was reality; the eerie, gloomy darkness of my half-formed nightmares; Kahmè opening my shirt and dabbing at it with a wet towel. Every sensation was heightened, I was extra sensitive, but all of it was tainted and warped by the pain. I couldn’t move. I could barely see, and my hearing was just as dim and distorted. I tried to speak a few times, tried to assure Kahmè that it was all right, that I’d be okay, that a hospital really wasn’t necessary, but I don’t know what came out of my mouth—I couldn’t hear myself. Whatever I might have said, nothing changed because of it; I still flickered in and out of reality, floating on the very edge of death, terrified, panicked, and lost….
I think I remember her, for one moment, pressing her lips very softly against mine. But then, I could have just been dreaming.
I don’t remember the morning, but I do remember the latter part of the afternoon—remember Kahmè petting me and fussing over me like a mother hen with a chick, barely stopping herself from crying, just as scared as I was—remember her stiffening, going motionless with her hand on my head, then pulling away and diving out of sight, leaving me alone. I remember trying to call for her, hearing nothing, getting no reply.
But then I heard it too, the noise that had frightened her: muffled footsteps, coming my way. Someone was walking to my room. I recognized those steps….
The door burst open, hitting the wall, and, dizzy, I looked up—and froze with fear. Through blurred eyes I saw the dim figure of my dad, standing in my doorway and staring at me in absolute shock, his hand slipping from the doorknob.
“Evan?”
What happened after that might have been reality, might have been a dream. I don’t know; I have no way of knowing. But for the longest time, I had always assumed that I had been dreaming…that none of that was real. Could it have been real? Or is the only possible explanation a fit of madness, a hallucination?
Whether it was real or not, it felt like it to me, so I reacted to it—even though I could barely open my eyes, even though I had no idea how I was supposed to react: with relief, with terror, with anger, with supplication…. All I could feel was muted shock.
I blinked at him, and he blinked at me—I couldn’t clearly see his face, his expression was a blur—and then, fighting back a powerful sense of unreality, I let my eyes close again. Whatever was behind them was just as real to me, if not more so, than this, the strangest of dreams.
Everything that happened afterward felt like the memory of a dream, vague sensations washing over me, making no sense even when accompanied by a brief moment of vision. I can’t be sure how much was imagined and how much actually occurred. But I thought that my dad crossed over to me—I could have sworn he put his hands on me, not violently or painfully, but carefully, his hands shaking. I heard him talking in my sleep, calling me, his voice becoming more and more panicked. I felt it when he shook me, hard, telling me to wake up.
I didn’t know if he was drunk or not, but whatever the case, it took him a minute to figure out that I wasn’t going to get up…when this realization hit, he stopped shaking me, took his hands off me entirely. Then, slowly, his whole body shaking now, he peeled back the covers—I saw them later, they were a bloody mess, almost as unsalvageable as my jeans—and looked at me. The cold woke me up, just for a minute, and I could have sworn I saw fear on his face, but then I was gone again.
The next thing I knew, he was carrying me, hurting me with every step, my broken arm crushed painfully to his chest. I think I might have cried out somewhere between the stairs and the back door…I heard a jingle of keys, heard a low voice talking to me, repeating my name in a jumble of other words. None of it made sense to me, none of it sank in.
Then there was a rush of freezing air—the arms around me tightened as I shivered violently from the needles of cold. A car door opened, and I heard my dad’s voice say, “It’s okay, Evan, you’ll be all right, it’s okay….” If he hadn’t said my name, I would have thought he was talking to the car—never in my life had he spoken to me like that. He sounded so worried about me, so…AFFECTIONATE…was I really awake?
The car door shut awkwardly, was shut again, and the engine roared loudly to life. As I felt it move, I let my eyes flicker open, but what I saw made no sense to me. I saw my body, curled up and covered in the blanket from my bed, resting between the driver’s side car door, the steering wheel, and my dad’s arm; I saw his legs beneath me, his foot pressing hard on the gas pedal, and heard his heartbeat through his green shirt. The heater was on high; the scenery rushed by at an alarming pace.
This had to be a dream. I closed my eyes again, drifting, only my hearing connecting me to the world. I heard my dad continue to mutter frantically under his breath…I heard the engine stop, heard the car door slam…heard the hiss of an automatic door, a babble of voices, a chorus of mechanical beeping…heard a gasp, a dim woman’s voice saying, “Oh, God, what HAPPENED?”…heard low voices talking, one sounded familiar…heard soothing reassurances as a needle slid into my wrist…heard a buzz of machinery, accompanied by a glimpse of a room stuffed with computers and monitors and filled with rows and rows of occupied beds…heard someone tell me that I was okay, it was going to be okay….
And then suddenly, after an eternity of darkness, I opened my eyes to an empty hospital room, my strange dreams fading with the steady pulse of morphine through my veins.
~
GASP!
Questions to discuss: how will this affect Evan? for how long will he be in the hospital? how will this affect Kahme? Was he really dreaming that his dad was nice to him, or was it real? What was the room with the rows and rows of beds? Will Evan suffer any permanent effects from this "accident"?
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Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2009 4:35 pm
29
They’re always disorienting, those first few minutes in a new hospital room. It takes you awhile to remember—and then, once that’s over, to judge by the array of machinery jut how badly off you are.
This room was just the same as the one I had stayed in previously, nothing at all like the room with the machines I had remembered from my dream. It was normal, comfortingly so: bed with rails, armchair, small desk, bathroom door. The remote with the call button was easily within my reach this time.
I tried to focus through the haze, concentrating first on the sounds, as everything else was awakening more slowly. I heard the steady beep of a heart monitor, the self-diagnostic clicks of the IV, the slow current of air from the heater vents in the ceiling. It smelled like clean laundry, and I was cold.
I couldn’t move, I felt too heavy; if my toes and fingers twitched when I tried to make them, I could not see or feel a change. But I could move my head from side to side with a great deal of effort, which helped a lot—I didn’t want to spend my whole time in the hospital staring at the ceiling. In the absence of the pain, I COULD feel, if vaguely, as if there were a fluffy pillow between the sensations and me. I felt the hard plastic mask that was strapped across my mouth and nose, felt the easy flow of cool oxygen trickle through it from a long gray hose that trailed off the edge of the bed. I felt a thin blanket—white, and fluffy—covering me from my chin downward, and felt the standard hospital gown, the only thing standing between me and utter nakedness, brush occasionally against my chest as my lungs expanded and contracted at a rhythm that was completely out of my conscious control. I felt tight bandages around my ribs and stomach, and more wrapped around my forehead, covering the uncomfortable lump on my temple. I felt a hard cast around my arm, and a brace on my leg; I felt a dull throb when I tried to move my free leg, which made me wonder, vaguely, how badly the unbandaged parts of me were hurt.
Which made me wonder what had happened…and what Dad had said had happened. In my drugged state, I couldn’t feel panicked about anything at all—I told myself, calmly, that I would just have to feign amnesia. Or brain damage. It looked, and felt, to me as though both were very reasonable. The hospital people would buy it, too, I knew they would. Hopefully, though, Dad would come fill me in soon…actually I wasn’t sure if his coming was good or bad. Had all of that really been a dream? It had to have been….
The morphine—I recognized the feel of it—kept the pain away, but dulled my mind, and I couldn’t focus on any thought in particular aside from sleep, cold, and dim confusion. I did wonder where Kahmè was and what she was doing, and for how long I would be hospitalized. To be honest, I really didn’t mind it—it was better than school and getting yelled at and beat up at home, anyway—though if I had to be alone for so long, I didn’t know what I would do….
Before Kahmè, I’d preferred being alone—it was just so much easier, so much more peaceful. But since she had become a part of my life, and a very big part too, I had grown too attached to her to let go for long…it felt like forever since I had seen her, and I missed her terribly. Loneliness wasn’t new for me, not by any means, but this, even through the drugs, was much more powerful—and I worried that I had scared her, felt sad at the thought of her left all alone, especially after witnessing something like that….
But I knew she wasn’t coming; that was too much to hope for. All I could expect now was a visit from Dad, followed by at least a week of unrelieved boredom. I sighed and closed my eyes, praying that the medicine would take this as a hint to make me take a nap.
But ten minutes or so passed, and I did not fall asleep; I was still awake enough, when the door to my room opened, to turn my head, open my eyes, and stare. It was a nurse, middle-aged and friendly-looking, who had presumably just wanted to check on me, as she turned to leave almost immediately. But then she saw my flickering eyelids and turned back to me at once, gently shutting the door behind her.
“Hi, Evan,” she said quietly, coming to stand next to the bed, crouching a little so I could look at her more easily. “How do you feel?”
Not like s**t, which was the best I could hope for on any day. And yet, still like s**t—useless, motionless, and smelly. I wanted a shower. And a glass of water. And another blanket. “Okay,” I managed to rasp, then added. “Cold. And…thirsty….”
She nodded briskly, crossing the room to a low cabinet and returning with two more blankets. She shook them out and laid them on top of me, carefully tucking them around me. I felt almost instantly warmer; I tried to smile at her, though I was so beat up that this was probably not a good idea. “I’m sorry you’re thirsty, sweetie,” she soothed me as she worked, her voice so pleasant and soft that I couldn’t possibly be worried or scared about anything now. “You can’t eat or drink anything just yet. But don’t worry, you’ll be better soon, I promise. Is there anything I can get you, dear? Are you in any pain?”
“N…no….” I struggled to focus through the haze. “Is my dad…?”
“Oh, of course,” she replied kindly. “I’ll call him in.”
And she left to do just that, leaving me alone. I considered worrying—I didn’t have the energy to panic—but decided to take a nap instead. But before I could, the door opened again, and my dad burst into the room, radiating that intensity that had always made me flinch when he came near me. He was followed by a doctor, an old man that looked like a grizzly bear, who smiled comfortably at me as he read some notes on a clipboard.
“Evan!” my dad said immediately, crossing over to sit in the desk’s chair. He sounded more alarmed than anything else—but then, he couldn’t really act how he truly felt, not with someone else in the room. “What’s going to happen now, is he going to be all right?” he asked the doctor, an incredible actor as usual; he seemed upset, beneath this, in a way I couldn’t place, which scared me—was he angry with me? Would he try anything here? I winced at the thought.
“He seems all right,” the doctor said calmly, double-checking the machines arranged around me. “The nurse checked on him an hour ago, and nothing seems to have changed. Everything’s perfectly normal. He’s stable now, there’s nothing at all to worry about.”
Now? Had I not been earlier? A thread of worry drifted through my morphine-daze. “Wh-what…?” I tried to ask.
The doctor smiled at me, pulling the armchair over to my bedside, scratching a note on his clipboard. Human speech, check. Not speaking in tongues, check. Stutter, check. “I bet you’re a little confused, huh?” he said kindly, and I attempted to nod. “Then allow me to bring you up to speed.” I could tell that he was joking with his pretentious language, pretending to be a stereotypical douchebag sort of doctor, and knew that hospital staff workers would often try this to cheer the patients up. I listened patiently, frowning a little around the plastic mask, as he told me what had happened.
“You’ve been in here for two days, but you’ve only been in this room for about twelve hours. Before that we had you in ICU so we could better monitor your health. While you were in there we did some blood and urine tests, got a few X-rays and CAT scans, and gave you another pint of blood, and you spent a couple of hours in surgery. Once you were stable we moved you. Your right arm is broken at the elbow, you’ve got a fractured femur on your right leg and some deep muscle bruises and a ruptured vein on your left, a couple of broken and cracked ribs, a bit of damage to some of your internal organs, including your stomach and liver, a broken nose, a lot of bruises, and a big bump on your head. All in all, you’re pretty beat up,” he said with mock-seriousness. I snorted to myself, quietly; he had no idea. But it did sound really bad, especially the part about ruptured veins and internal organ damage….
“We stitched your head up, and repaired the vein in your leg, though that one will need another little surgery later on in the week. We also took a look at the damaged organs; they weren’t too bad, nothing needed replacing, though there was a lot of cleaning up to do in there. You’ll have to take it easy for awhile—no eating spicy food, keep the binge drinking to a minimum, you know, all that kind of stuff.” He smiled at his joke, and I tried to smile back, but I couldn’t remember how. He went on to explain all of the machines and how they applied to me.
“We have you on an air machine right now to make sure that you don’t breathe in any toxins or viruses in the air—you had a pretty vicious fever when you came in, 103 I believe it was, and we can’t risk you getting sick again in your state. In a couple of days I’ll tell them to get it off of you. You’ve been in the hospital before, I see?” he added, looking at my records. “So you probably know what all of these gadgets are. The one making the noises is the heart monitor—make sure to call the nurse if you hear it changing at all, especially if it’s speeding up—and this is the air machine, and that’s the catheter bag, it’ll be gone as soon as you can walk on your own…. We had you on intravenous feeding and a respirator for a little while, which is probably why your throat’s a bit sore right now, but now you’re just on the regular old IV. Here it is, it moves, look, you can put it anywhere you like. Make sure not to touch it, it’s what’s feeding you vitamins, medicine, and morphine, you don’t want it to break. If it starts beeping let the nurse know right away. You’re getting special attention, did you know that? The whole staff is at your beck and call.” He smiled warmly at me, and I felt the tension in me ease a little at his joking, even though his words were scaring me, just a little.
He seemed to understand that I could not reply to his comments, so he just kept talking, knowing that I was listening, probably assuming that my dad was too. “I’ve checked all your statistics and they’re fine, you’re perfectly stable now, so don’t worry about a thing. I’m also having a nurse prepare another dose of morphine for you—if you’re awake that means it’s starting to wear off,” he explained. “While we’re waiting on that, though, do you mind answering a few questions?”
“N-no,” I rasped, though I did mind—I felt nervous, especially with my dad staring at me in that weird, unquantifiable way. What was up with him, why was he so quiet?
“Tell me, Evan,” the doctor said convivially, “do you need anything? Want anything?”
“No,” I said again, though I did want several things—Kahmè and a big jug of ice water among them. He couldn’t give me what I wanted, and anything I could have asked for—food, books, or normal clothes, for instance—I couldn’t have done anything with anyway. I wished that the catheter wasn’t necessary, though—it had never been before.
“Are you in any pain?” the doctor asked me. I thought about it, then slowly shook my head, glad to see that that didn’t hurt either.
“What do you feel like? Dizzy? Queasy? Tired?”
“Dizzy…I think….”
“Can you feel this?” He tapped his gloved finger softly against my uninjured arm. At least, the contact FELT soft.
“Yes,” I said.
“Can you move at all? Try moving these fingers…not the right ones, the left ones. Go on.”
I did my best, but I couldn’t really feel anything. After a moment of trying, I inquired, “Is it working?”
Frowning a little, he made a note on his clipboard before replying, “Yes, everything’s working fine. What’s your full name?”
“Evan Thomas Moor.” It SOUNDED right, anyway, though I felt, at this point, a little delirious from attempting to worry through the morphine.
“How old are you? When’s your birthday?”
“I’m f-fourteen…be fifteen on September…fourth….”
“Where do you go to school? What’s your address? What’s your father’s full name?”
Slowly, one by one, I answered his questions as best as I could, and he wrote some of them down, occasionally asking my dad if they were true. Some of them, like my favorite activities and the name of my best friend, he sounded very unsure about, and I knew that he had no idea at all. Throughout this, his face was like stone—I tried not to look at him very often, it made my stomach lurch.
The last he asked was the one I had feared the most. “Do you remember what happened to you?”
After a slow moment’s thought, and a frightened glance at Dad, who wasn’t looking at me, I hesitantly replied, “No…not really….”
To my intense relief, he let it go. “Only natural,” he said genially, and rose to his feet. “You seem perfectly fine, Evan. No evidence of brain damage or amnesia, though I believe at one point you did have a concussion or two, which would explain the memory loss. I’ll come visit again in a couple of days. In a couple of minutes the nurse is going to come in with your medicine, all right? I hope you get to feeling better.”
“Thank you,” I said, my voice tiny, and he waved cheerfully at me before he left. However, the brightness of his happy aura permeating the room was sucked away the moment I glanced at my dad.
His face wasn’t stony anymore; he looked alarmed again, too intense, almost angry, I thought. He sat in silence for a very long minute, saying nothing, not even looking at me; I couldn’t think of a word to say to him. I settled for cringing against the sheets, wishing I weren’t paralyzed so I could run away from him. He scared me, and, vaguely, I remembered what he had looked like with the bat in his hand. How it had been cracked, covered in blood. How easily he had done it.
He waited until the nurse had come and gone, after quickly taking my temperature and blood pressure and injecting more morphine into my IV. Then, when the door finally shut, he rounded on me.
“What the ******** happened?” he demanded before I could say a word. “How the hell did you get back up to your room?”
Oh, hi Evan, are you okay? I was worried about you…. I snorted in my head, but weakly—sarcasm is too hard when you’re drugged into oblivion. “I…it took…a long time,” I tried pathetically to explain; it was honestly the best I could do, and at least it seemed to be good enough for him.
He grabbed the top of my free arm—there was still a bruise there, three days old, from this same hand. “Listen to me,” he said urgently, and I paid close attention to the story I knew was coming. “That concussion thing was okay for now—” I had a sudden vision of two pickpockets in 1800’s London, father and son, the father congratulating the son on a well-executed theft, and felt a pang of sadness—“but they’re gonna ask again, they know you won’t forget entirely. It was getting dark out, all right? You were out walking, and got jumped by a gang with a bat. They beat the s**t out of you, stole your wallet, threw the bat in a Dumpster, and left you in the middle of the sidewalk. You woke up at three in the morning, went to your room, and slept until I found you. Got it?”
“Okay,” I said dizzily, soaking this in. His grip on my arm tightened, but it did nothing to me; I felt it the way you feel a bug land on your skin.
“Do not ******** this up,” he warned me—as if I needed warning. “Wherever else they’d put you would be ten times worse than here. I’m your father, you’re staying with me, do you understand?”
“Okay,” I said again, more vaguely this time; the medicine was beginning to come in waves, spreading numbness through my body, making me feel dull-witted and warm. Also tired; craving the apathy of sleep, I turned my head onto its undamaged side, letting my eyelids fall.
When he saw my eyes close, Dad let go of my arm, but he didn’t give up; “This isn’t going to happen again, Evan,” he told me, and had I been paying attention, I would have wondered at the fear in his voice. “Do you hear me?”
But I was already gone.
The nice thing about morphine is that you don’t dream; hours pass, but it feels as if you’ve only napped for a moment or two. Every time I woke up, any panic I may have felt was dulled almost immediately by the medicine, leaving me sleepy but happily delirious. And if I ever felt any pain coming, all I had to do was push a button, and I was back into oblivion.
I don’t know how many times I woke up and fell asleep again before Kahmè came, but even though it went by like nothing at all, it still made me ache with longing and relief when I blinked awake one day (it is impossible to tell time in a hospital save by the light coming through the window) and saw her sitting on my bed. I blinked again, disoriented, focusing on her as best as I could as I fought the drug-induced sleep off. Her mother was sitting in the armchair next to her, her hand on Kahmè’s shoulder; Kahmè had her arms around her knees, looking as if she could use some cheering up. As I watched her, attempting to summon my voice, Mrs. Sandred smiled and nudged her, pointing to me, and Kahmè looked up in alarm. Then she jumped off the bed and came to stand by my head, barely refraining from hugging me for all she was worth.
“Evan, you’re awake!” she cried, sounding more terrified than relieved. “Evan, oh gods, I was so worried, are you okay?”
“’M okay,” I repeated stupidly, my grip on reality still weak and shaky. Her eyes were wide, and she was biting her lip, but she didn’t freak out immediately; instead, her hands lightly brushed through my lank, dirty hair, again and again, soothing me into a happy sleepiness. It felt incredible—the nurses weren’t allowed to touch me much, and I realized that I’d missed the human contact. Especially from Kahmè, oh how I’d missed her….
“The d-d-doctor explained..wh-what’s gonna happen…” she told me quietly, her voice quivering. “He said you were hurt real bad, Evan…we saw you like three days ago, it was scary, they made us wash our hands a million times and wear a masky thing and you had all these tubes and wires sticking out of you and no one would tell us what they were for….”
“Better now,” I assured her hoarsely, my voice muffled slightly from the breathing mask. “I promise.”
“I was so worried,” she whispered, and she looked it; there were shadows under her eyes, and she swayed on her feet.
“Come lay by me,” I murmured, hoping her mother wouldn’t mind, and she did so at once, stretching out beside me, careful not to touch me anywhere. I smiled at her beneath the mask, and she did her best to smile back.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she sighed, resting her head on my pillow, still absently stroking my hair. I wished that I didn’t look like such a mess, or feel so dirty and smelly and gross. I would have given anything for a hot shower, only in the state I was now I would probably have collapsed thirty seconds in from the weight of the water droplets, then passed out from the morphine and drowned.
“Are YOU okay?” I breathed, feeling, and sounding, like an alien with the stupid mask over my mouth. Then again, I hadn’t seen a toothbrush in days—maybe it was better that my breath was contained.
She nodded, but she looked exhausted and scared; it made my heart hurt just looking at her. She hesitated, bit her lip, then confessed all in a rush, “I was s-s-so s-scared, Evan, I thought he was gonna take you away f-forever, I thought I’d n-never s-s-see you again, I th-thought you were gonna d-d-die, I w-went home and M-m-mama made me t-t-tell her wh-why I was s-s-so worried and she took me here t-to see if you were h-h-here too and you were, I was s-so h-h-happy ‘cause you were s-s-safe but I was so so worried—”
“Whoa,” I said weakly. “Calm down.” Her mother glanced over, worried, but when Kahmè took a deep breath and managed to control herself, she went right back to knitting what looked like a Kahmè-sized scarf, very subtly giving us some privacy.
Kahmè hesitated again, then leaned down to whisper in my ear. “I’m sorry, Evan,” she told me, sounding very distressed. “I had to tell Mama. I had to.” She let out a sob, backing away from me slightly, hugging my pillow because she couldn’t hug me. “I’m s-s-sorry…I thought you were gonna die…I shoulda stopped him…I shoulda called 911…I shoulda called Mama right away, I was stupid, I’m s-s-so s-sorry….”
“Kahmè,” I said as gently as I could, though I felt sick with shock and fear, “calm down. It’s okay…there wasn’t anything…you could have done. Thank you….”
It was woefully inadequate, so much so that I felt I deserved to be shot for it, but it made her smile.
“Really?” she whispered, and I did my best to nod.
She gave me a guilty look, then, her voice soft again, asked me, “Evan…what’s he gonna do to you? Is he gonna hurt you again? Because you…were….”
I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to make her hurt anymore. “He won’t,” I said quietly. “He’ll stay away from me…for a long time….”
“That’s good,” she breathed, dizzy with relief. “They said you can’t have food or water…are you gonna be okay?”
“Yeah, c-course…I am,” I stammered unimpressively. “’M all right now…thanks to you….”
She smiled at me again. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she told me, her fingers brushing through my hair again. I closed my eyes.
“I missed you,” I whispered, and only when I said it aloud did I realize how true it was.
“I missed you, too,” she breathed. But then she sat up—a beeping noise had caught her attention. I opened my eyes and looked at its source: the heart monitor was beeping persistently, going substantially faster than it had been before.
“Oh no,” Kahmè wailed, but her mother rose to her feet at once.
“I’ll get the nurse,” she said calmly. “Both of you stay calm.”
Kahmè grabbed my hand beneath the blankets as we waited for her to return, not saying anything, but even though I was half-conscious and felt like s**t I wanted to take her into my arms and kiss her. Would I ever have the chance to again? Could she ever feel that way about me, especially after what I had forced her to go through? I wanted her to feel the same way about me, I wanted to mean everything to her, just like she meant everything to me….
The nurse came in, reset the monitor, injected a syringe full of morphine into my IV, and left without a word; I felt it take effect almost immediately, but I was stressed over my dad and worried about Kahmè and I didn’t want her to leave, I wanted her to stay with me forever….
“Don’t go,” I pleaded with her as I felt the medicine begin to work. “Please.”
“I won’t,” she soothed me, squeezing my uninjured hand, pressing her other hand against my cheek. “It’ll be okay. Just sleep, Evan.”
“I don’t…want you to leave….”
“I won’t. I promise I’ll be here when you wake up.”
But she didn’t understand, she couldn’t understand, what could I possibly say to make her understand? I had nothing, there was nothing, except the first thing that jumped into my throat, something I hadn’t said for years:
“I love you,” I told her, my voice distant and slurred from delirium. “I love you, Kahmè.”
And then my eyes closed, and I was under—and if she had said anything, if she had replied at all, I had not been awake to hear it.
When I woke up again, it was nighttime; I couldn’t be sure how much time had passed. Time meant something completely different to the patients than it did to the staff. The staff, at least, had calendars and computers and clocks, but we had nothing; when they said that we’d be released in a week, it was like telling a Christian that the Second Coming would happen at the end of time. Something higher than us knew when it was going to happen, but all WE could do was wait. And wait. And wait.
Sometimes when I woke up I would turn my head and immediately go back to sleep again; sometimes I didn’t even remember opening my eyes. But this time, whether I was more awake or less so than ever, I couldn’t possibly fall asleep again, because when I turned my head, I saw Kahmè lying right next to me.
She was sleeping, curled up under her own blanket, her head resting on her own pillow—we were small enough that both of us could fit easily on this bed, it was probably even bigger than mine at home. Her hair was falling into her face, and she looked so adorable that it made me smile. My breaths were loud in the silence, my heart monitor keeping tempo with shrill beats, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She must have been very tired.
The memory of what I had said to her was very fuzzy, so I decided to push it out of my mind entirely. There would be time to berate myself endlessly when I wasn’t high on morphine—and anyway, I had no idea how she would react. Or even if it was true. WAS it tr—? NO! I told myself firmly. Bad Evan.
I was too awake to drift off for awhile, so I tried to distract myself by attempting to move. I could actually feel my limbs now, for the most part, but I still couldn’t feel pain; this is awesome, I thought, pleased, as I experimented, able to move and feel the pain without really FEELING it. When, without the medicine, I knew a twitch of my broken arm’s fingers would make me howl in pain, now it just felt like someone had poked me in the elbow. I knew it would fade eventually, and I’d be left feeling pain again, and then I would be knocked out once they shot me up with morphine, but for now it was fun. I could move my right hand and my whole left leg, my right foot, my neck, and my lungs, all on my own. I was just experimenting with the left arm—carefully, as Kahmè was laying right next to it—when I accidentally nudged her and she jumped, startled, looking around and blinking hard.
“Wha?” she murmured, and then, “Evan? What’s…?”
“It’s okay,” I told her—my voice was a lot stronger than it had been before, though that wasn’t saying much. “You just fell asleep.”
She rolled over, grabbing my hand, and I was pleased that I could finally squeeze back. “Are you okay?” she whispered, her voice loud in the darkness.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said with enthusiasm. “Look, I can move….”
And I showed her how the useless lumps under the blanket were now mostly under my control. She was just as happy as I was about it. But she was still worried.
“Do you hurt anywhere?” she asked, touching her hand to my cheek. “Do you need more medicine?” But I couldn’t hear her words; I felt her warm hand on my cheek with my strange, exaggerated sense of feeling, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had told her I loved her. And that I wanted her to kiss me. And do a lot of other things…. I felt my heart start to go crazy at her touch. It had never happened to me before, or at least not as noticeably; in my current state, it hurt, but I still wanted her to keep touching me, it didn’t matter where….
But that goddamned heart monitor started to go off again, and Kahmè jumped and pulled away from me, panicking. “Oh no,” she moaned, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
But before she could start frantically pushing buttons while trying to fix my accelerated heart rate, a nurse beat her to it; she swept into the room, reset the monitor with the touch of a button, then crossed over to me. Kahmè, who had slid out of bed entirely, ducked out of the way and stood meekly against the wall, her eyes still wide.
“Is the medicine wearing off?” she asked me, kind but tired, like most graveyard-shift nurses, I guessed. “Do you need more?”
“Yes,” I said, “but can I get a lower dose this time? I want to stay awake. Look, I can move,” I showed her how high I could lift my left arm, still somewhat delirious from the medicine left in my system.
“Honey,” she said gently, “the medicine isn’t what’s making you tired. It’s your body that wants so much sleep, you have to rest so it can have the energy to heal. The medicine just helps you relax. And if it’s wearing off we need to give you a big enough dosage so you won’t feel pain, which is probably going to make you really tired again. I’m sorry, sweetie, but if you feel tired, you need to go back to sleep.”
“Okay,” I sighed, resigned, and watched her as she injected me again.
“Do you need anything else?” she asked me, and I shook my head.
“But, um,” I added on an afterthought, and she waited patiently. “Do you know when I can eat? Or not be on a breathing machine?”
“Well, that’s up to your doctor, dear, but you won’t be attached to so many machines for much longer, I promise,” she soothed me. “Maybe another couple of days. As for food…honey, your stomach was hurt. Anything we give you might make you sick. I’ll see if you can have some ice chips in the morning, but for now just be patient, okay?”
“Okay,” I sighed again, though I knew patience would be hard with a growling stomach and a burning throat. I told her I didn’t need anything else, so she left, off to see someone else who couldn’t eat anything, either. I felt bad for them. I settled down and waited for the medicine to knock me out again.
Kahmè hesitated, then edged skittishly around my bed, worried and cautious. “A-are you okay, Evan?” she whispered.
I nodded. “Come over here,” I urged her, patting the bed with my newfound motor skills. It felt funny—as if I were brushing aside gas particles in the air. I guessed that this was the closest I was going to get to the pins-and-needles sensation from before.
Kahmè came to lie by me again, curling up under her blanket, and smiled back at me when I tried to grin at her. For some reason, I felt HAPPY—was it the morphine? Or was it Kahmè? It must have been Kahmè, for this had happened before…now that I remembered, it had always made me feel better when she was around, even if I was barely conscious…seeing her had always made me feel better, I just hadn’t noticed…. Maybe it hadn’t since the first day we met, but for a very long time.
Was that love?
But no, I couldn’t think about that. I wouldn’t. No.
“Can you get to sleep?” I asked her, and she nodded; she certainly looked as if she’d have no trouble sleeping. I squeezed her hand beneath her blanket, wishing just a little that I wasn’t so gross. At least, last time, I could get up and shower if I needed to.
Kahmè closed her eyes, but I wasn’t tired yet. “Kahmè?” I asked her carefully—I felt as if I had to now, while I was still lucid.
“Mm?”
“Did you…did you REALLY tell your mom…?”
She nodded guiltily, opening her eyes so she could look awkwardly away from me. “I’m sorry…I didn’t know what else to do….”
“I understand.” I would have been pissed if I had been home, but for some reason hospitals made me feel so calm and safe, as if the world were very distant from me. I was only ever scared if Dad were in the same room as me, or if he were in my direct line of sight. I didn’t even have nightmares here. “What did she say?”
“She freaked out,” Kahmè admitted—she had been using American slang more and more lately. “She started using bad words that even I’ve never heard. Part of the reason she wanted to come here was so she could beat up your dad, but I made her stay away from him.”
“Probably a good idea.” I shuddered to think of what he could do to her, and to Kahmè through her. Just as I shuddered to think of what could have happened if Kahmè had stood between us as she’d wanted to.
“’Course,” Kahmè continued, frowning a little, “after she calmed down she made me explain everything…I had to tell her about all the mean stuff he did…she just didn’t get it. Like my daddy wouldn’t EVER hurt me. He wouldn’t even think about it.”
“Yeah, well,” I mumbled, and quickly changed the subject; I didn’t want to think about the possibility of having non-abusive parents. “Kahmè, can you tell me what…happened?”
She hesitated, biting her lip and looking away; then she came closer, curling up against me with her head on my uninjured shoulder, the same way she would have if we had been home. I could barely feel her weight on me, but I could feel the warmth, and it was unbelievably comforting.
“I…I went upstairs after I came back…from my house, you know…and I was just sitting on your bed…and then I heard shouting, and I went on the stairs, to see, and he was…he was yelling at you, and throwing you around, and hurting you…and I wanted to help, I wasn’t scared, I was just mad,” she confessed, her voice contorted with pain and fear. “I would’ve gone to help you, ‘cause you never fight him, I would’ve for you…but you said not to, and I thought you’d know best, so I just waited…and then you yelled back at him, and I thought you’d really fight back, and he’d leave you alone, I was glad, but…but then he started strangling you…I started screaming and all, but no one heard me, he was yelling too loud, and then he…he started really hurting you…you were screaming and you never scream, I knew it was bad, but I couldn’t…I didn’t know if you’d…be mad at me. I thought you’d hate me.” Her voice caught; I felt a powerful surge of guilt. God, I’m a b*****d, I thought to myself.
“And then…and then he…he had a bat, and he wouldn’t…stop…there was blood everywhere…he wouldn’t stop hitting you, even when you weren’t moving anymore, I thought you were dead…I should’ve helped you,” she sobbed. “I should’ve. I don’t know why I didn’t…I came as soon as he left, but I should’ve…I….”
“Kahmè,” I said gently, pressing my cheek to the top of her head—it wasn’t something I did often, but I couldn’t really do anything else. She blinked, then relaxed a little, looking much less miserable—did she like that? With some girls, it was hard to tell. “You did the right thing. I’m glad you listened to me, if you would’ve gone down there he would’ve killed you. There’s no question. But look, we’re both alive, see? We’re fine. I’m gonna get better, there isn’t anything to feel bad about.”
She sniffled, and looked as if she wanted to protest, but couldn’t find her voice yet; I quickly interceded with a distracting question.
“What about after? What did he do?”
She sniffed again, then answered in a thick, low voice. “He…after he figured out that…that you weren’t moving anymore…he dropped the bat and just kinda…looked at you. For a really long time. He didn’t say anything or do anything, he just sat in a chair and stared at you. And then he got out that whiskey stuff and drank a whole lot of it, right out of the bottle, like it was water or something, and then he…he just…he got a plate of food, Evan, and he just sat on the couch and ate it, like there wasn’t anything wrong. And then he turned on the TV and just stared at it for forever. While you were just laying there….”
I couldn’t say that I was surprised, though my stomach turned at the mental image. Glad for the first time that I wasn’t permitted to eat, I told her, “Yeah, that sounds about right. He probably had the munchies.”
“The…the what?”
“You get really hungry when you’re drunk,” I explained. When she turned to look at me, horrified at my cavalier tone, I told her bluntly, “Kahmè, you know my dad, that’s just how he is. He was drunk. If he was sober he would have done something else, I don’t know what, but it wouldn’t have been that. That’s just how he is, even when he’s not drunk, sometimes.” I remembered the incident with the steak knife-stabbing, and several other incidents from the past. Dad was a raging-lunatic-drunk, or a quiet-and-moody-drunk, depending on if I was around, but he was something else entirely when he was sober. If he had been…well, I didn’t have a clue what he would have done, actually. Probably plotted a strategic ditch to dump my body in if I died, and a cover story, complete with false evidence pointing to someone that didn’t even exist, if I lived. “So,” I said quickly, before she could give me that look again, “he went to bed at, what, three? Then what?”
She paused, clearly considering whether she should yell at me about my dad or not; but then, probably deciding not to because I was, after all, hospitalized, she told me, “Yeah, around then. Real, real late. He wasn’t even doing anything, I didn’t know why he didn’t fall asleep…but then he stood up out of nowhere and started coming up the stairs. I went into your room until he was in his, then when he didn’t come out I ran downstairs to get you. It took…FOREVER for you to wake up…I was just about to call 911 when you said something. I didn’t know what was wrong…it looked like something had exploded in you, you were a mess…I c-c-carried you ups-st-stairs, and I waited and w-waited for you to w-w-wake up but you c-couldn’t…not even in the m-m-morning…and then in th-th-the aftern-n-noon your dad came in…and I hid under the bed…and he j-just p-p-picked you up and t-took you away…I f-f-followed you outside, but he was in a c-c-car, it was t-too f-f-fast…s-so that’s wh-when I went h-h-h-home….”
“It’s okay,” I soothed her, my voice muffled, but still soft. “It’s okay. I promise it’s okay. You were great, Kahmè, you saved my life….”
“I should’ve…I…I don’t know,” she said miserably.
“You did all you could. You were great. I’m sorry you had to go through that,” I added, sighing. “I’m so sorry….”
“No!” she said, suddenly fierce. “You can’t be sorry! No, no, it is NOT your fault, it isn’t, Evan! You’re the LAST person who did something bad, you ARE! It’s your dad that’s awful…he should go to jail…he SHOULD….”
I hesitated for a moment, trying to find the best way to phrase it. “Kahmè,” I finally said, very quietly. “If I wanted to, I could use this situation to my advantage. More doctors and some policemen are gonna ask me who did this to me; I could tell them the truth, and give them tons of evidence to prove it. I could put my dad in jail for years and years—by the time he got out he’d be an old man, and I’d be grown up, he couldn’t hurt me anymore. Before you came, he came in here first, and told me a cover story to give them, he told me to lie…I don’t have to listen to him, Kahmè, I’m not scared that he’ll be able to stop them. Not anymore.” I had grown out of that; and in any case, I knew ways around it. I wasn’t his son for nothing.
“But I’m not going to do that,” I told her firmly, before she could open her mouth to encourage me. “It’s not that I don’t know how to get away from him, Kahmè, that isn’t it. It’s just that…if I do tell anyone, whether he is in jail or not, somehow, some way, he’s going to make me pay for it. He’ll kill me, Kahmè, you don’t know him like I do, he won’t just let me go. It’s not as easy as just turning him in, he knows how to outsmart the police and the government if he has to, and he has some kind of degree in criminal law, he knows his stuff. He’s not just going to back down. And also, he told me, just yesterday, or whenever it was, that there wasn’t anywhere for me to go. And he was right. There isn’t. I don’t want to go to a foster home, Kahmè. I’m not. Even if it’s much better than here, I wouldn’t go. This is my home, this is where I belong, with my dad, and with you. I’m not leaving.”
“But…but he hurts you…you can’t get hurt anymore, what if you die?” she whimpered.
“I’m not going to die,” I said firmly. “Dad told me himself that this is never going to happen again. It’s too dangerous for him, too. Kahmè, he knows better than to kill me, honestly, how in the world would he get out of a murder?”
This reassured her slightly, for which I was glad, because I knew plenty of ways for him to get out of that one. “But…what if he…forgets?” she whispered after a moment. “What if he hurts you really bad by accident?”
“Kahmè, I’m not gonna let him kill me,” I soothed her. “I promise.”
“You let him do this to you,” she pointed out, her voice barely audible. “And you let him do all the other stuff.”
“Did I?” I argued quietly. “You said you were proud of me because I stood up to him. That’s not just letting him hurt me.” She opened her mouth to say something, but then realized that there was nothing to say. I continued. “Kahmè, I’ve been dealing with this for years. It’s not a fight, it’s not something I can win. He has power over me that you can’t even imagine—power that your mother never had over you. If we fight, and we have to go to court for it, there will be someone that will try to convince everyone that my dad has every right to hit me. There are laws that give him power over me, there are things he can do to me that you could never dream up. Even if he weren’t twice my size—which he is. Kahmè, I wasn’t trained to fight like you were. I never learned how. And it would just get worse if I tried. Look,” I said firmly, when she tried to object, “let me tell you something. What he meant to do to me that night was just the same thing he’s done since I was eight. He was just going to beat me up. He just wanted to hurt me. Not kill me. It was when I fought back that he lost control. I could have died, you’re right. But if I had just given up and let him beat me around a little, I wouldn’t be in here. I’d be at home. Don’t you see, Kahmè? I CAN’T fight. It will NEVER do any good.”
She could see the logic in it, and she didn’t know how to fight it—she had none of the quick, rapier wit that every American teenager I knew possessed, nor did she have any argumentative skills whatsoever. Physically, she rose to any challenge. But mentally, when someone attacked her, she gave up. Instead of either affirming or denying what I had said, she started crying, and nothing I could say could calm her down. Before I could manage to soothe her, I felt the unmistakable signs of the medicine beginning to work; “Kahmè,” I pleaded, “please don’t cry, I have to go to sleep now but I don’t want you to be sad….”
If a bit of a low blow, it certainly worked; she didn’t cheer up, but she did become more quiet, and hugged me awkwardly as the medicine began clouding my brain. “Please get better,” she murmured. “Please, you have to get better, Evan…I don’t want anything to happen to you ever again. You gotta TRY to get better, at least, won’t you? For me?”
“Yeah, I…” I tried to say, but before I could get any further, everything began to fade.
When I woke up fully again it was still dark—or perhaps dark again. I woke slowly, fighting the haze, looking around me to see where Kahmè had gone. She was sitting at the desk, her legs swinging childishly, chewing her way through a tray of food.
I let her go—she looked much happier than she had been before I’d gone to sleep—and attempted to experiment with my limbs again, to see how well I could move them today. But before I’d gotten much further than raising my left arm a foot or so, Kahmè started and choked on a mouthful of ice cream.
“Evan!” she said, relieved, and grinned at me, her cheeks swollen like a hamster’s. She swallowed, then smiled again. “You’re FINALLY awake, took you forever….”
“H-how long was I out?” I muttered; I didn’t like being asleep for so long. It made me uneasy.
“Almost a whole day!” she told me, frowning. “You slept from really late YESTERDAY to now—it’s like just after sunset,” she informed me before I had to ask. “You slept for forever! People kept coming in and messing with you with all these metal things—oh!” she added, slapping her palm to her forehead. “I was ‘sposed to tell them when you woke up….” She reached over to my bed and fumbled for the remote, poking at the red button. Then she took another bite of something that looked like pancakes. My stomach ached for them, whatever they were.
“Are those for me?” I joked, trying to smile at her.
She made a guilty face. “No…I asked ‘em for something. Like I didn’t have lunch, and I was hungry, and the lady asked me if I was hungry so I said yes, and I told her pancakes, and she got me some! And look, ice cream and fruit, too, and milk and syrup and what is THIS?” she added, making a face, and she showed me a cup of Jell-O. It was hard not to lick my lips; I wanted it, I wanted it very much.
“It’s Jell-O,” I explained. “Looks orange flavored. It’s good, try it.”
She did so, taking a bite and making a thoughtful face, then swallowing and taking some more. “Yummy,” she said happily. “It’s good.” And then she froze, throwing another guilty glance at me. “Um…do you want me to…?” She gestured to the tray.
I shook my head. “Nah. Go on. It doesn’t bother me.” Satisfied, she began wolfing down the rest of the food—whatever else anyone could say about Kahmè, I had never seen her waste food. How she stayed so heartbreakingly skinny when she had the appetite of an elephant seal was beyond me.
“So what did you do today?” I asked while we waited for the nurse, experimenting again. Trying to move the right leg hurt a little, but my left leg was almost normal. I couldn’t move it much, though, without bumping into tubes and the rails and things; my arm, thankfully, was more dexterous. I proudly showed Kahmè how I could bend my elbow all the way now—she was just as pleased as I was. The nurse came in when I was attempting to lift my right arm.
“Nah-ah-ah,” she told me at once, and I let my arm drop. “Don’t move around so much, dear, you’ll strain something.” I waited patiently and quietly while she took my blood pressure and temperature, read the monitors, and asked really awkward questions. Kahmè feigned deafness, munching on her pancakes and humming to herself.
Finally, when I had reassured the nurse that I was not, yet, in any pain, she delivered some good news. “Your doctor has decided that your medicine dosage can be lowered, and that the air machine is no longer necessary. It would have been removed this afternoon, but this morning, the low fever you’ve had for the past couple of days peaked, so he wanted to be sure that you didn’t catch any additional viruses from the air. But you’re all right now. Your temperature is a steady 99.7 and your lungs are healthy, so you don’t have to wear this anymore.”
And, with solemn but regal ceremony, while I sang 1812 Overture in my head, she unstrapped the air machine from my face. The hospital air was sweet and cool; I breathed in deeply, coughed once, then grinned.
Kahmè snickered. “You’ve got little red lines all over your face.”
“Yeah, you try having a Holocaust gas mask strapped onto you,” I retorted, and before she could figure out what “Holocaust” was supposed to mean, I asked the nurse, “Is there anything else that can go away?”
She smiled in spite of herself. “No,” she said apologetically. “Though the heart monitor will be the next to go. It needs to stay for a little longer so we can be sure that you don’t get stressed—that could be very dangerous, as your organs are all still weak from surgery.”
“So I can’t eat?” I said sadly.
She shook her head. “But,” she added, “you CAN have some ice, now that the mask is gone. I’ll get you some right away. Is there anything else you need?”
I shook my head. Then I thought about it for a moment more, and asked, “Um, what day did I come here?”
She pointed to a calendar on the wall, tapping a space on it. “Last Thursday,” she said.
“And…what day is it now?”
“Wednesday.”
This threw me; I’d been here for almost a week. It felt as if I’d only been here for a day or so. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to sleep so much.
“And, um…when can all this other stuff go away?” I inquired, looking meaningfully at the annoying heart monitor.
“You’ll be on the IV until the day you’re checked out, which won’t be for another few days,” she explained. “Possibly a week, depending on your rate of recovery—though you’re doing just fine so far,” she noted, glancing at my statistics on a clipboard. “You’ll have the cast on for a few weeks after that. as for all the other stuff…everything but the IV will probably be removed once you can stand on your own. Though there isn’t any hurry,” she soothed me. “Unless it bothers you to be bedridden?”
I nodded firmly; she’d gotten right to the point. “I want a shower,” I said bluntly. “And by myself,” I added, giving her a dark look, in case she should suggest something compromising. “Can I brush my teeth?” I added, but she said no. Expecting as much, I nodded; I had only one more question.
“Um, the doctor said…all my insides were messed up. Are they getting better? What’s wrong? What’s gonna happen?”
She hesitated; I felt my heart rate climb, just a little. Hesitation was bad. “Well,” she said slowly, “Mostly the damage is to your stomach. The stomach is a very sensitive organ, and from what your records show yours was already extra-sensitive…it was very close to rupturing from the strain,” she admitted, and I winced—I’d seen quite a few movies where that had happened. “You were lucky; that is not easily fixed. But it still took a lot of…damage. It’s hard to explain, exactly…I’m not a doctor. But the lining of the stomach is sensitive, and the medicine isn’t helping it heal very much…so it will probably take a long time to get back to normal. You won’t be able to eat anything more interesting than mashed potatoes for awhile, honey,” she said gently. “And you’ll have to be careful not to get sick, so we’ll have you on heavy antibiotics from now on, which you’re going to have to take for the next couple of months.”
“Great,” I said gloomily, and the nurse gave me an apologetic look.
“And also,” she added, to rub a little salt in the wound, “you’ll have to take multivitamins to counterbalance the deficiencies in your diet, and iron pills to help with your anemia.” Wonderful, more pills. And it’s not like Dad would let me have them anyway. Our medicine cabinet was going to be stuffed to bursting. “And we don’t know if you’ll be able to walk on your own immediately after you’re released,” she added, and I gaped at her, hurrying to interrupt.
“WHAT?”
She blinked, shocked at my reaction. “Normally,” she told me firmly, “with a fractured leg, you’d have to use crutches for a few weeks. But since an artery ruptured in the other leg, you can’t walk on that one either. And there’s also the question of whether you’ll be strong enough to. I’m sorry, Evan, but that’s just how it is.”
I lay back on the pillow, stunned. I wouldn’t be able to walk?
“But otherwise,” she told me, “everything will work out just fine.”
I didn’t believe her.
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