Accelerated (24 page)

When Nicole and Kat left, the room was achingly lonely. He’d brought a paper to read, but all he could do was stare at Toby. If he kept watching, Toby couldn’t stop living.

He stayed that way for what could have been fifteen minutes or an hour before he heard a tentative knock at the door. “Do you want me to leave?” Jess looked cold and red and alive, in stark contrast to everything else here.

He shook his head. “No.” He motioned her in.

She pulled off her hat. “Any news?”

He shook his head grimly, trying to fend off the leaking.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should have called you yesterday as soon as I noticed Toby was acting funny. This is all my fault.”

“No, it’s my fault.” He stared at Toby. At the floor. “I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

They breathed together in the quiet. “Can I ask you a question?”

He nodded.

“Why were you so eager to have Toby evaluated? I’m just wondering.”

He laughed, but it wasn’t funny. “I was practically forced at gunpoint.”

“Bev said you insisted.”

“She made it pretty clear that if I didn’t do it, Toby’s Bradley tenure would be short.”

“But …” Jess was filtering everything through this new bit of information. “Bev said … I thought you …” She let out a long, sad sigh and stared at Toby. “I’m so sorry this happened. It’s the worst thing I can imagine.”

He put his hand on hers and held on to it. “I needed to blame someone. But this isn’t your fault.” Comforting Jess diffused his own misery. It gave him something useful to do. Before he realized he was doing it, he’d wrapped his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “Thanks for being here,” he whispered.

She rested her head on his shoulder and he thought about Bradley and why Bev Shineman would tell Jess he’d wanted to get Toby evaluated. None of it made sense.

Jess’s body was warm and comforting and a new wave of exhaustion swept over him. He closed his eyes.

“S
EAN
!?” T
HE VOICE BARGED IN FROM THE OPEN DOORWAY
, jolting him and Jess awake. It was unmistakable: throaty but delicate, with a hint of disdain. Ellie.

He wasn’t sure which one of them tensed first, but he and Jess were putting distance between themselves quickly.

Ellie burst into the room like a banshee. “Oh my God,” she wailed. “Oh my God.”

She rushed to Toby’s side and started pawing him, touching him to make sure he was warm, then for some inexplicable reason she started rubbing his arms, his chest, his legs. “Wake up, sweetie,” she pleaded. “Wake up Toby.” Ellie climbed into bed next to Toby and, navigating tubes and the IV, took him in her arms. “My sweet boy,” she said, resting her head next to his. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” She kissed him on the temple three times like she always did before bed. “I love you, sweetie. Mommy loves you.”

“Ellie,” he said awkwardly from across the room. “He’s unconscious.”

“I know that, Sean,” she said, coming out of her misery long enough to glare at him with all the blame in the world. “I talked to the doctor on my way in.”

Suddenly, the room was claustrophobic. He didn’t know how to hold his body. He’d been caught. But he wasn’t sure what he’d been caught doing. He realized he hadn’t introduced Jess, which made it worse. “Uh, this is Toby’s teacher.”

Ellie was rocking Toby and couldn’t have cared less.

“I should get going,” Jess said. He thought he heard her sigh as she hurried out of Toby’s room.

Ellie was unreachable for over an hour as she sobbed into Toby’s pillow. He hadn’t thought he could absorb another drop of guilt. Still, sitting there with blame radiating off Ellie, he managed to take in even more.

Despite being in agony, Ellie looked amazing. She always looked amazing. But there was something different about her now. Dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater, with her hair tied in a loose knot, her usual New York veneer had been replaced with a wholly un-Ellie-like earthiness. She looked like she’d discovered some secret he would never be allowed to know.

She finally dislodged herself from Toby’s side, blew her nose, and faced Sean full-on for the first time, fury in her eyes. “What did you do to him?”

His first instinct was to deny that he’d done anything. But that wasn’t a viable position. He
had
done this and they both knew it. “I did what the doctors told me to do.” He despised himself for passing the buck. “I did what
you
wanted me to do.”

“What I wanted you to do?” Every word was a dagger. “I wanted you to have him evaluated. Not put him on dangerous drugs without consulting me first.”

“You wanted consultation rights?” Sarcasm dripped from the words. “You should have stuck around.”

She took a deep, hostile breath and swallowed it. “This is my fault,” she said. He wasn’t sure where she was going with this. Ellie never accepted blame without putting up more of a fight. “I’m an idiot,” she said. “A complete idiot for thinking you could handle this. That you could make adult decisions on your own.”

She was un
fucking
believable. “Where the hell were you, Ellie?” he screamed. “No one fucking knows. You took off. Vanished. And this is
my
fault? Guess again.”

“You
put him on drugs, Sean,” she spat out.

“You
abandoned him.”

“I’m his mother.” She enunciated
mother
in a menacing way.

“I called you almost two days ago,” he said. “You sure took your time getting here.” The clean, deep cut did the trick.

She bowed her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “Fucking retreat didn’t allow cell phones.” She tried to explain that she’d been at a chakra cleansing seminar in Arizona, but he had no interest in hearing it.

“Look,” he warned. “I’m doing my best here. Which is more than you’ve done for months.”

“I know.” She stared at her hands miserably and bit her lip.

He was all yelled out and barely had the energy to produce sounds or form words. “I was trying to help him. I was … I screwed up.”

The admission took the wind out of her sails. “You were trying to help him.” She breathed. She didn’t want to fight, either. That was good. “So this is a reaction to the drugs? You’re sure?”

“Not a hundred percent … but I don’t know what else it could be.”

She nodded, looked at Toby, and was overcome with another wave of tears. A nurse walked past them as if they weren’t there and fiddled with Toby’s monitors. He and Ellie could fight all they wanted, they could blame each other and cry and wish it had turned out differently, but nothing they could do was going to change what had happened. Nothing they could do would make Toby better. This was the definition of torture: sitting and watching, waiting, unable to do a goddamn thing.

“Sean can you stop that?” Ellie was glaring at him.

He hadn’t realized he’d been kicking the leg of the chair, but forcing his foot to stop was almost painful. He walked to the window. He turned and walked back to the door. He turned back to the window again.

“Can you do that somewhere else?” He was driving Ellie crazy.

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“Go home,” she said. “Lie down. You look like shit.”

Sean shook his head. “I’ve got to be here when Toby wakes up.”

Without looking at them, the nurse said, “There are no signs anything is going to change soon.”

“I’m here,” Ellie said.

Sean shook his head. “No way. I’m not leaving.”

“Bring back Teddy,” Ellie said. “He needs Teddy.”

Sean thought about it for a second. Toby loved that ratty bear. What if it would help? He could get Toby’s bear and charge his phone. And maybe if he slept for a few hours and took a shower he could think straight.

He pulled on his coat. “I’ll be back soon.”

Before he was out the door, Ellie twisted to face him. “That was Toby’s teacher?”

He nodded and she turned back to Toby. As soon as he’d slipped out the door, he broke into a run and didn’t stop until he’d crossed the park and arrived at his apartment.

T
HE APARTMENT WAS GRAY AND STILL AND LIFELESS
. W
AY TOO QUIET
. So much worse than it had been over Christmas. He flicked on the Wolverine lamp and sat on Toby’s tangled dinosaur sheets. His chest ached thinking about all the times he’d yelled at Toby to make his bed. Making his bed was so unimportant, so meaningless. He swore to whomever you swear to that if given the chance, he’d never yell at Toby again. Not for anything.

He scooped up the teddy bear and stroked the fake, matted fur. He should bring Toby some pajamas and his toothbrush. He grabbed everything he thought Toby might want or need. Then he saw the Spiderman suitcase in the corner. If Toby woke up,
when
he woke up, he’d love seeing it in that drab, sterile room. But when Sean unzipped the suitcase, it wasn’t empty. Dozens of letters filled it, each one folded in half and addressed to “Mommy.” Sean slumped to the ground, dropping everything he’d gathered and stared at the pile of letters. He picked one up and opened it. “Dear Mommy,” it said. “Today I drew a picture of you. You were in a car driving and there were mountains in back. I hope you call or send another post card. I miss you. Come home soon. Love, Toby xxxoo”

Toby had been writing Ellie every day and Sean hadn’t even known. He could barely breathe as he picked up another one. “Dear Mommy, I made up a song for you today during music. It’s in my head and I can sing it for you next time I see you.”

The heat rose up through his chest, onto his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Tears blurred his vision and inhuman moans slipped from his body between gasps for breath. Every inch of him ached with grief. When the crying jag subsided, he sat paralyzed, staring at nothing. He finally climbed into Toby’s bed with his computer. He typed “Methylphenidate and …” he held his breath. “Fatalities.”

He scrolled through the first twenty of 40,600 results. Each article was more depressing than the next. There was no hard evidence that methylphenidate caused heart problems, but there were too many pieces of anecdotal evidence to discount. He closed the computer when he got to a site that blasted parents for poisoning the still-developing brains of their children with mind-altering drugs. He breathed in the smell of Toby’s pillow and closed his eyes.

Sean woke from a black hole of sleep to his ringing phone. He sat up, disoriented, and looked around the room. A moment later, the reality of why he was here flooded him with a new wave of sorrow. His phone was charging in the kitchen. He ran for it.

“Ellie?” he said, flipping open the phone.

“Um …” It was a man’s voice. “Toby missed tutoring yesterday.” Noah. “I couldn’t get through on your phone, like, all night. Is everything okay?”

Sean caught his breath. His heart pounded against his ribcage.

“No. Actually nothing’s okay.” He told Noah about Toby—about the diagnosis, the drugs, the hospital.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Noah said. “You put Toby on medication? Why the hell would you do that?”

The bottom fell out of his stomach. Why the hell
would
he do that? “I guess you don’t think he needed it.” Why hadn’t he told Noah, asked his advice? He felt like an idiot.

“I wish you’d asked me, man. That’s all. I wish you’d talked to me.”

“Why are you saying it that way?”

“Let’s just say—and this is off the record, not to be repeated to anyone, you understand?” He had a serious, un-Noah tone. “Do you?”

“Yeah, okay.” Sean was getting impatient. “What is it?”

“Look, it’s not my field of expertise or anything. But he seemed fine to me, perfectly fine.”

Sean didn’t need anyone else to tell him what a douche bag he’d been. He knew. “What’s off the record?”

“I’ve seen this happen before. With Bradley. Other schools, too, but Bradley in particular. They do this. They make
suggestions
. They make threats. They don’t leave parents much of a choice. Parents of boys, mostly.”

Sean’s heart rate sped up. “You’re saying this happens … a lot?”

“I’m not saying anything. Because if a tutor in this city were to say anything about Bradley, that tutor would never get another referral from any private school ever again. But if I
were
to say something, I’d say that instead of changing the way they teach, schools go for the easy fix. What happened to Toby—it’s not the first time this drugging-the-healthy-kid thing has backfired for them. I’d say they have a magic Bradley way of making their problems disappear.”

“But why would they want to drug healthy kids?”

Silence. “Noah? Hello?”

“I’m here.”

“Why?” The phone shook in his hand. “For better test scores?”

“I hope Toby gets better, man. He’s an excellent kid.” Noah paused. “I don’t pray often. But I’ll be praying for him.”

T
RAFFIC CLOGGED THE
N
INETY-SIXTH
S
TREET TRANSVERSE
. T
OTAL
standstill. Sean was trapped in the no-man’s-land between Central Park West and Fifth Avenue with no forward motion, as some perky fake newscaster jabbered at him about the best cannoli in Staten Island. He stabbed at the power button on the TV screen until it went black. The quiet was almost worse. He tapped his thumb nervously on his thigh and clenched and unclenched his toes inside his shoes. He bit the inside of his lip and felt his blood pressure rise.

“Stop,” he ordered, though the cab wasn’t moving. “Here. I’ll get out here.” Sean rifled through his wallet, but it was empty.

“But,” the driver protested. “We’re not through the park yet. A few more minutes and we’ll be—”

“Now,” he said, desperately. “I need to get out.”

The driver cut the meter and Sean poked at the screen to pay by credit card. Each time his fingers hit the wrong button his chest clenched a little more. When the Verifone machine couldn’t read the strip on his card, he thought he might have a coronary. Somehow, he managed to execute the transaction and escape onto the narrow sidewalk that bordered the traffic.