Dream evaporated; abyss ceased to beckon. Suddenly Rich wanted to live. “Brother,” he whispered. Dylan’s eyelids twitched. Richard saw a flash of white eyeball, startling in the drying red mask. “Wake up, buddy. Please.”
Using one hand and his uninjured leg for propulsion, the other hand clamped tightly over his wound, Richard tried to move across the bedroom floor. Fabric and blood stuck him to the hardwood. By inches—one, three, five—he moved toward Dylan. The effort was so great there wasn’t room left for thought. Each tiny movement brought a calamity of pain. The pain had ceased to be localized; his entire being was on fire.
Don’t. Pass. Out.
He forced the words through the clamor of nerve-death in his mind.
Dylan’s head lolled off the edge of the mattress at an unnatural angle.
His neck was broken. Dylan would be in a wheelchair, peeing through a tube. A ragged end of strength rippled through Richard. Dylan would be helpless; he would need his brother. More than anything Richard wanted to be there.
Push your chair, brother. Take you for walks in the park.
An inch. Two. Behind him on the hardwood was a smeared trail of red. The room was so damn big.
Richard’s arm was failing; his uninjured leg cramped. Blinking to stay conscious, he tried to remember why he was bleeding across this wasteland.
The phone. Dial 0, the operator, and ask for the police. The phone on the nightstand looked impossibly far away, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Dylan!” Richard screamed. Dylan didn’t move and Richard was out of air.
Rest.
He would rest a moment. Leaning against the bureau, he watched the orange light pulsate deeper, then paler. It made him sleepy.
Don’t sleep; stay awake,
he warned himself.
Never sleep; your hand will come loose. Sleep is death.
He would just rest a second or two; then, when he was stronger, he would continue his journey to the telephone, to 0 and rescue.
“Water,” he croaked, seeing in his mind the parched desert crawlers of late-night TV Westerns. He was so thirsty he could have cried. He licked his lips and tasted Vondra. After he’d left her, he’d showered and brushed his teeth, but the taste was still there.
Vondra. He had been with her when he should have been with Dylan. He had not been a good brother. Now Dylan was going to die.
The thought was intolerable, more so than bleeding to death.
Anger gave him strength. By inches and screams, he reached his brother’s side. He smoothed back Dylan’s hair and kissed him.
Before he passed out he managed to dial the operator.
2
Richard woke to white lights and the low constant noise of controlled urgency. The first face he saw was that of a beefy policeman, his skin red and fissured from too many late nights in subzero weather.
The ruddy mask cracked, and from between lips thinner than a snake’s came the words, “Hey kid.” The tone was fatherly, warm and strong. It brought tears to Richard’s eyes. He didn’t fight them. If ever there was a time when being seen crying was okay, this was it. Hot and tickling, they trickled from the corners of his eyes and down his temples.
A pair of flat callused thumbs smeared them into his hair. The cop was comforting him, wiping away his tears like he was a small and precious child. This unexpected kindness lent Richard a sense of control. He smiled shakily.
“Hey,” he managed.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the cop said.
Alive.
In a rush, Richard remembered everything that had happened. “Where am I?” he asked stupidly. Halfway through the question he realized he was in a hospital, the emergency room. Embarrassed to sound so predictable, he waved a hand at the white privacy curtains surrounding the bed and asked, “Am I in a sheet factory?”
Rather than being annoyed, as his dad used to be when Richard played the fool, Beef Cop gave the appearance of being charmed. His eyes, a glacial shade of blue, warmed. The thick shoulders rounded in to create a less threatening silhouette. Lowering an oversized haunch, he sat on the edge of the hospital bed.
Richard winced.
“Oh, sorry, did I hurt you?” the cop asked anxiously and, to Richard’s relief, removed his rear end from the vicinity.
“It’s only a flesh wound,” Richard said because his brain was foggy and he couldn’t think of anything anywhere near witty to say.
The cop seemed to think this was high comedy. A hearty laugh was followed by a clumsy hair-ruffling.
“No, son, you’re not in a sheet factory. You’re at the Mayo Clinic. The best there is.”
Son.
He called him son.
With that, he remembered his leg, the wound on his thigh. “My leg.” The words came out high-pitched and scared. That bothered him but he didn’t try to cover.
“He cut you bad,” the cop replied, looking around for a place to sit. Richard was prepared to scream if he put his butt back on the bed. He didn’t. Condemned to stand, he went on, “The docs’ll tell you more, but the short of it is they got you stitched up, and you’ll be good as new pretty near. You don’t worry about that leg. You don’t worry about a thing. We got you covered.”
The policeman liked him.
The belle of the policemen’s ball
, Richard thought idiotically.
“You’ll be running track in no time,” Beef Cop said.
Richard nodded weakly and said, “Good.” And “Thanks.” He had no idea what he was thanking the cop for, but people liked to be thanked.
“Yep, the Mayo. The best there is,” the cop reiterated.
Richard needed to see who else was in the room, but, what with beaming Beef and the sheet factory, he couldn’t see more than three feet. The last thing he remembered was Dylan, bleeding, his neck twisted, but still breathing.
Crippled, Richard remembered. His neck looked broken.
“Dylan . . . ” he began.
“Your brother’s alive. At least for now,” the policeman cut in. His eyes reverted to their arctic shade of blue, and his cheeks went from flab to granite. He sounded pissed off, but he wasn’t pissed off at Richard. He was pissed off at Dylan.
“Excuse me.” Like a leaf on the first winds of winter, a cool voice blew the cop out of Richard’s line of sight. A woman in white replaced him, a nurse of forty or so. She, too, smiled at Richard, a real smile, the kind mothers save for favorite sons. “My name is Sara.”
Richard liked her voice. It was warm, like she thought he was okay. He tried to smile at her and failed.
“Your brother is fine,” she said kindly.
Fine. Going to be fine. Fine meant nothing. Fine was a cover-up, pabulum for kiddies.
The fear that had shortened his patience with the policeman jerked his jaws together and locked them.
“Is he crippled?” Richard demanded, nearly lisping through clenched teeth.
“No, no. Just a concussion,” the nurse assured him quickly. “He’s going to be just fine.” She reached out as if to pat him on the head, then snatched her hand back. Richard was pretty sure his teeth were bared, and he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have bitten her if she hadn’t pulled away.
Their “fine” was not his “fine
.
”
“Is he crippled?” he yelled, trying to sit up and barely succeeding in lifting his head. “His neck looked broken. Goddamn it, is he going to be a cripple?”
“Shh, shh,” the woman hissed, thinking snake sounds would comfort him. “Your brother has a concussion. He’s not crippled. I don’t know who told you that. Breathe now. You’re going to be fine.”
Now, he was going to be “fine.” She filled a hypodermic needle and squirted liquid out the end just like he’d seen in a hundred TV shows. Inserting the needle in a port of his IV tube, she squeezed the plunger a half an inch or so.
“Just fine,” she whispered.
Warm. Motherly.
But only for him. The way she’d said “your brother” told him that. Try as she might, she couldn’t entirely keep the loathing from her voice.
“You just worry about getting yourself well,” the nurse said as she pushed the plunger all the way in. “That brother of yours will be right as rain in a day or so. And don’t you worry; we’re going to take good care of you.”
Right as rain, white as snow,
Richard thought, and wondered where the words came from.
Drugs?
“This is going to put you to sleep,” the nice, motherly Sara was saying as she pulled out the hypodermic needle. “When you wake up again, we’ll have your leg all fixed up.”
“I’ll be right as rain?” Richard heard himself murmur.
The nurse smiled as if he were the cleverest boy in the world.
In the space of a night, maybe not even a night—he had no idea how much time had elapsed—the world had changed utterly. Richard hadn’t. They had. They, them, everybody else had.
Beef Cop edged the nurse out of his range of vision. “Son, was it you who hit your brother?” he asked.
Tears started again. “I hit him,” he said. “I had to.”
“Good kid.” The cop’s voice turned flinty. Richard imagined words striking sparks when he talked. “What did you hit him with? That axe? The neighbor girl . . . ”
Morphine, or Darvon, or whatever it was furred the edges of Richard’s tunneling vision. Through this black fuzzy sleeve he watched the cop pull a notebook from his coat pocket.
“Vondra Werner,” the policeman verified. “Vondra Werner said you spent most of the night with her.”
At first Richard didn’t see the ghost of a grin behind the cop’s words. Then he did, and he knew the man thought he was a hero.
Not just a survivor, but a hero.
“That’s enough,” Nurse Sara said. “Look at him, poor, poor, beautiful boy . . . ” was the last thing Richard heard.
3
Nothing was ever going to be right again,
Dylan thought.
Except Rich. Rich didn’t die. He almost died, but he didn’t.
The first time Dylan saw him again was at the trial. It wasn’t held in Rochester because everybody there hated Dylan too much for it to be fair. They were trying him in a little town called Hammond about three hours away. He had to get up at five every morning so they could drive him there in time. The courthouse was small and looked like it was supposed to, with benches and a fence between the audience and the lawyers. Every day it was packed, mostly with newspaper and TV people.
Rich, looking like his old self with color in his skin and everything, his hair a little longer than their mom would have let him wear it and waving in that surfer-boy style he liked, was pushed down the aisle of the courtroom in a wheelchair. His leg was wrapped in so many bandages they’d had to cut open that side of his pants even though it was probably twenty below zero outside. He’d gotten skinnier.
Though Dylan knew Rich would spit on him, or ignore him like he was a bug, or scream he was a psycho, or worse, he didn’t look away. He kept watching the rolling chair. When it first came through the double doors, everybody got quiet. Then, as it got closer, flashbulbs started flashing and people started murmuring.
Rich was so cool—academy awards, the red carpet. He was smiling for the cameras but kind of sadlike. Dylan loved him more at that moment than he ever had. Nothing Rich had done in the past mattered. This was what mattered. The love hurt Dylan, it was so big.
Since that night the whole inside of him felt black and crusty like the inside of a lightning tree. Mostly, Dylan stayed in the burnt-out hole and didn’t think or feel. He didn’t know what to be or how to be anymore. No one else seemed to know what he was either. Or what to do with him. Doctors, lawyers, cops asked questions. A newspaper guy got in, and flashed, and questioned until the cops chased him out.
Dylan hadn’t been able to answer the questions, so he’d coiled up in the black and hid. Until he saw his brother. The pain of loving Rich felt almost good; it made him feel like a person. He didn’t look away as the wheelchair rolled down the aisle toward him but steeled himself to take the hit. Maybe it would kill him, but he doubted it. Nothing he wanted to happen had happened for a while now.
Then Rich was opposite him on the other side of the wooden railing. He held up his hand, and the nurse stopped the chair. Dylan felt like crying, his brother was so cool. He’d made the nurse do what he wanted without saying a word, like a cop stopping traffic. Bracing against the armrests, Rich struggled to get up. The nurse, all done up for the trial in her crisp uniform and hat, put her hands on his shoulders to make him stay down, but he shrugged them off.
Dylan stood too. If Rich wanted to hit him, he could. For a weird jag of time, Dylan experienced his brother’s fists hammering him, his feet smashing into his ribs and belly, and he welcomed it. He craved being beaten to death like he craved air when he’d been under the water too long.
Getting up must have hurt Rich. His face lost color, and he swayed like he was going to pass out. Holding onto the railing to keep himself up, he made it the two steps to where Dylan stood waiting.