Kids These Days (32 page)

“What happened to Dad?” Delton asked. She was crying. “Did they just shoot him?”

“I don't know,” I must have said, reaching for Alice, for all of them. I almost could not hear, could not see, could not taste.

Delton said, “Is he going to be OK?”

I was cold, I realized, for the first time since we'd moved. “Somebody's coming,” I told her. “There's going to be a helicopter.”

“How are they going to get him down?”

“They'll get him down,” I said. Friendly was halfway up the tree, standing on a limb in his suit. Still no movement in the cart. “There are people who know how to do this,” I said, wanting to make it true. I felt Alice's hand on my back, a small circle of heat. I turned around just to make sure.

At the hospital, we ate candy bars from the machine. We bought out their supply of anything with peanuts in it. They'd already told us we wouldn't get to go back to see him. Maggie stretched out along a row of seats and tried to go to sleep, kept pretending to wake from a nightmare. She'd sit up, eyes wild, and one of the twins would pretend to calm her back down again, pat her hair. It was not quite a game, but it was enough to keep them busy.

What we knew: He'd been hit. That he'd already had one surgery, and they were talking about a second. That one of his lungs had collapsed, or was collapsing. Carolyn was back there with him. She'd ridden in the helicopter. It was Carolyn who was coming out to give us updates, to tell us they had him sedated, to tell us they'd posted an officer outside his room. Friendly and Helpful had one of their guys out there, too, she said—they had guys—to watch the officer watching Mid. He had broken bones. He had pieces of the cart in his shoulder. The bullet had done something Carolyn couldn't quite explain, had hit one thing and bounced off another. He'd lost a lot of blood. A GSW does a lot of damage, she told us. Alice asked what that was. Gunshot wound, Carolyn said. She'd learned the lingo. She had emergency powers. They were trying to decide when to wake him up, she was telling us, and they didn't want to wake him up until they knew if they wanted to go back in.

We hadn't seen Carolyn in an hour. Alice thought that meant they were back in surgery. I said we did not know what it meant.

When we'd first gotten to the hospital, the sun was going down, and it lit the sky three hundred shades of orange on its way out, turned even the parking lot into something it wasn't, something fabulous, something adorned. But now night had come on, and out the window there was only the same darkness everybody everywhere else got, interrupted by the same sodium lights. Somewhere out there was the ocean. Somewhere out there was the Twice-the-Ice.

They'd flown him to Jacksonville, to the same hospital where we expected the BOJ to make her appearance sometime around Christmas. Maybe we'd get a helicopter ride, too. Or at least a star in the east. Mid would be healed by then, would be showing off his scars. “That's where it went in,” he'd say, showing us his shoulderblade. Then he'd turn around, face us, pull his shirt to one side, show us a cigar burn of a scar, and say, “And that's where it came out.” Whether he'd show us in the visiting quarters of the state penitentiary or in his own wine pantry, I had no idea.

Delton sat down between Alice and me. She looked otherworldly. Exhausted. We all must have. “Nic wants to come,” she said, holding up her phone like he was inside it. “Is that OK?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Cool,” she said.

“Tell him to bring some burgers or something,” Alice said. “The kids need to eat. You need to eat.”

“I will,” she said. She got up again, walked back over to the wall where she'd been sitting, curled herself into a ball.

“Do you think she's alright?” I asked Alice.

She said, “Would you be?”

“I'm not,” I said.

“Well, there you go.”

“Do you think she will be?” I said.

“I don't know,” she said. “Maybe we'll all get lucky like that.”

Earlier, after Carolyn had come out to bring us the first piece of news—that he was alive—Alice had said this to me about tackling the deputy: “What if he'd shot you, too?”

“I wasn't thinking about that,” I said.

“What were you thinking about?”

“I don't think I was. I just did it.”

“I need you,” she said. “We need you. You can't leave.”

“I'm not leaving,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“I am,” I said. “I'm right here.”

She said, “It's different now. You have to know that.”

“I do know it,” I said.

“We don't know anything,” she said. “That's what's so crazy.”

“We'll learn it,” I said.

“How?” she said.

All this was at the coffee machine, which was next to the candy machine. There was also a soda machine and a water machine. We could see everybody from where we were standing, all four girls, could make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be.

“We need to think of a name,” Alice said. “A real name.”

“We will.”

“I want to start. I don't want anything to happen and us not have a name.”

“When we get through this,” I said. “We'll get through this, get home, and we'll get her a name.”

“Or him,” she said.

“It's a girl,” I said.

“I know. I know it is.”

“Or him,” I said.

Mid strafing us from an ultralight. A baby girl up there on the television screen, live from the belly of the whale. There was nothing that was not possible anymore.

We slept at the hospital because that seemed right, but by morning what seemed better was to get Alice home, get her in a true bed. They had done the second surgery, and everybody was happy. He was critical but stable. There were other classifications, Carolyn told us. Worse ones. Given the conditions, he was in good shape.

The idea was for Delton and Nic to take a real turn at playing house, take the twins and Maggie back to the castle for showers, breakfast, changes of clothes. Some kind of normal routine. We offered to do it, but Carolyn and Delton seemed to have arrived at a new arrangement, however temporary. What I thought Carolyn might know was this: Her pregnant sister needed rest. Her husband had been shot out of the sky and was now hooked up to tubes and bags, reactors and centrifuges. He needed someone to sit by him in his time of need, watch fluids go into his body and come back out. She could only do so many things.

We drove south. With the sun streaming through the windows and into our laps, Alice soon enough fell asleep, which left me to spin the radio dial back and forth. I wanted something to half-hear underneath all the noise in my head. My shoulder hurt, my back, my whole body. I watched signs for golf courses go by, for amusement parks two hours' drive from where we were, surf shops even farther still. If we were not in paradise, there was at least a billboard every five miles that would tell us how many exits were left before we got there. I saw egrets in the medians, stark white against the persistent green of everything else. The only time the land was not green was when it had been blackened by fire this year or last, and even then, out at the edges of the char and up above the burn lines on those trees left standing, there was new green. The flatness. There was nothing anywhere to make you believe the land did not extend this way forever. I punched in radio stations from our old life, familiar numbers. For whatever reason it seemed to me that they might carry down out of the hills and travel this far. I got nothing, of course. Static. We had left behind nearly anything I'd ever known.

I got us parked in the lower level of the garage, got Alice upstairs and into the bed, brought her water and juice and half a cup of coffee, told her to call me if she needed anything. I said I was going to take a quick ride, look in on Mid's life and make sure everything was still alright. Be careful, she said. Of what? I said. Of everything, she said. I got back downstairs, got in the hatchback, put it out on the highway, and headed for St. Augustine. I'd do what she asked, I was telling myself. I would keep a fair distance. I would exercise caution. But there was something I needed to know.

When did we move here? Our daughter would ask us. Before you were born, we'd say. I thought about my parents' stories, how when they'd talk about the lives they'd led before my brothers and I were born, it felt invented. Flickering. They had not been real people until we were there—we were sure of it, even if we never said so. Before you were born, I would tell her, there was nothing. No heavens and earth, no sky, no sea, no fish, no birds, no air. Thank God you came when you did. Your mother and I had begun to think we had certain things figured out. We wrote them into the lease. We felt sure we knew those things were true.

I drove over the bridge, through downtown, and out the other side. I found the two astrologers' houses. I shut the radio off, the AC off, rolled the windows down. I got lost. I ended up back out on the main road more than once. But I found it—I found the orange house, the empty yard, the flatbed with its mannequin leg, its Christmas lights. The lights were not on. There was no other car. There was a chicken sitting on the ground by a rusting toolshed. It was not moving, but it was alive. There was no Twice-the-Ice, which was what I'd come to see. I'd wanted to know if Mid was right—about that, about any of it. I guess I'd thought it would be there in the yard, the brilliant white fact of it plugged in and hooked up, Pete Brett dressed in full pirate garb and filling cooler after cooler with brand-new ice. But it was not. And without it, all the answers crowded in again, all at once: The company had repossessed it. The crime syndicate had stolen it. Pete Brett had it hidden somewhere else. He'd junked it for parts. He'd dumped it in the sea. It had never been there in the first place, or it had only winked into being when we were there to see it. The front door of the house opened, and I drove away, heart drumming hard. I did not wait to see who was coming out. I did not want whoever it was to see me.

Alice was still asleep when I got home. I called the hospital, and the nurse said Carolyn was sleeping, too. I hung up and walked out onto our back balcony, looked down at the beach. It was crowded—umbrellas, tents, children everywhere. There was a sand bar a hundred yards out into the water, and some older kids were trying to surf the few small waves it was kicking up. Every now and then one of them would get up, ride all the way in to shore.

It terrified me, what had happened to Mid. Not the shooting. What spooked me was what had come before—whatever it was that nudged him past the vision of himself he thought he'd mastered and into whoever it was flying that thing, singing and shooting flares. I held tighter to the railing, looked down at the grass between the building and the dunes, wondered if I'd survive a fall. I wanted to know if Mid had felt it coming. Not if he'd known
what
was going to happen, necessarily, but that
something
was. If he'd known how close it would come to killing him. I looked south, looked for Hank. I wanted to see the
POW-MIA
chute, the green cart, whatever extra flag was called for on a day like today. But he wasn't there. The sky was empty. I went back inside, crawled into bed next to Alice, listened to the steady rhythm of her breath.