More Than Enough (3 page)

I looked over at Jenny, who was smiling and who clearly liked the sound of the new pool as much as I did. “My room,” she said (and I knew very well what she was about to demand since she had done so many times before), “will have two large windows and will be far away from Steven's, all the way down the hall from his, and right across the hall from a bathroom.” Then she said, “My bathroom.” I usually snapped back at her for her nasty possessiveness and her desire to escape me, but Jenny and I had been in cramped quarters for as long as we could remember, and that afternoon I understood her wish for her own space, for two windows and a bathroom all her own. I wanted that, too.

“Of course,” my father said to Jenny. “You will have your own bathroom. Steven will have one, too. I will have one and your mother will have one. And,” he added, “we will also have a guest bathroom. Five bathrooms.” He lifted his hand from the steering wheel and put out five fingers, wiggling them a little for emphasis. I imagined these bathrooms, my mother's done in pink colors with little pink seashell soaps beside the sink, Jenny's done in purple with seashell soaps of that same color, my father's bathroom and my bathroom in marine blue or in rustic earth colors, though I didn't know much about how bathrooms should look. I knew only that there would soon be five bathrooms where there was now only the hurried and shameful privacy of one.

“How are you feeling, Steven?” My mother had turned around and I could see from her face—tired and worried—that she didn't believe a word my father had said and that she was in no mood to pretend that she did.

“Fine,” I said. “Great.”

“Great,” she said, laughing a little. “How could you feel great?”

“I just do,” I said.

My mother said something odd then. “You don't have to feel great for our sakes, you know. You're allowed to feel however you feel.”

I didn't understand her and neither did my father. “Why are you telling him that?” he asked. “He's doing just fine and you're telling him he shouldn't be.”

“He's hurt, Billy,” my mother said, “and we're acting like nothing has happened.”

“We're not acting like anything,” my father said. “We're just making conversation.”

“We're talking nonsense. We're talking about bathrooms we don't even have.”

“I like to talk about them,” I said. “It makes me feel better to talk about them.” My parents were too angry to continue speaking, and whatever spell I had been under, whatever state of mind had kept the pain away, was broken now. I looked down at my lap and saw again how my palm and forearm were turned up at a wrong angle. My upper arm was swollen, and I moved the ice bag that—though I didn't remember it—my father must have given me farther up on my shoulder. I felt a stabbing pang, then another and another. “Jesus,” I said, trying to concentrate and keep the pain away.

“We're almost there, kiddo,” my mother said.

“A minute ago,” my father said, “he was just fine. And now, no thanks to you, dear, he's in agony.”

“Please,” I said, “please don't argue.”

They were quiet for a while, and I was glad since the pain now demanded all my concentration and made the tears come to my eyes, though I managed not to sob or make any humiliating childish noises. I just let the tears fall and held on to my arm and was thankful for the silence until my mother turned around again and said, “Please, Steven, tell us how this happened. We know you didn't fall. Who did this to you?”

“I fell,” I said. “It was an accident.”

“Jenny,” my mother said, “what happened to your brother?” I looked at my sister and tried to tell her with my eyes, full of tears or not, that if she said anything I would hurt her, I would make her life miserable.

“I don't know exactly,” she said, looking down in her lap.

“Jenny,” my mother said.

Jenny looked up. “Why don't we believe in God?” she asked.

There was a silence in the car. “Because we would rather not believe something just to make ourselves feel better about the world,” my father said. “Because we're not afraid of the truth. Because what we have is what we see in front of us, and that's good enough.” We had heard our father's lectures on this subject before whenever we asked this question. He had always felt strongly about his atheism. He seemed to feel that he—and his family—were stronger because of it.

My mother turned around and looked at Jenny. “Why are you asking?”

“Because that's what the boys who hurt Steven wanted to know.”

“Shut up!” I yelled, even though my lungs felt as if they would shatter. “Shut the fuck up.” I wanted to kick her, but I didn't have the strength.

“They were Mormons,” my sister continued, having decided to betray me completely. “Kids from our neighborhood. Kids who live up the hill.”

“Shut up!” I was crying out loud now and hated her for reducing me to sobs.

“Did you hear that, Billy?” my mother said. “The Mormon kids. Those little brats. When we're done at the hospital, I'm going to find them. I'm going to go to their houses.”

“No, you're not,” I said.

“Damned if I'm not. Look at what they did to you.”

“Please don't,” I said. I looked up at the rearview mirror where I met my father's eyes and thought I saw that he understood me, that he knew that his son could not become a snitch.

“No one's going over to anyone's houses,” he said. “Let's just get to the hospital. We'll think about the rest later.”

My mother turned back around in her seat. “We'll see,” she said under her breath. I knew then that my father would do what he could for me. We were all quiet again, and I hoped it would stay that way until we arrived at the hospital, though finally Jenny sighed. “I wish we went to church like everybody else in this city. I wish we believed in God.” She was writing her initials over and over again in the steamed glass of her window.

“We believe in ourselves, Jen,” my father said enthusiastically. “We're not afraid of the fact that we have no one and nothing else to rely on. People don't get anywhere thinking that something out there is going to make life better. You think that way”—he cleared his throat—“and you never have to look at yourself and see who's really running your life.”

Jenny didn't answer him. None of us did except for my mother, who laughed bitterly at his remark.

“I'm not joking, Mary,” he said. I could tell by the way he leaned into the steering wheel that he was irritated and maybe even hurt. “Please stop writing on the window, Jenny,” he said. “That makes a mess. And who do you think has to clean it up?”

“Okay,” she said, and stopped.

*   *   *

The hospital was called The Richmond Clinics, a huge, newly constructed building with white siding and hundreds of large windows that emanated a bronze light in the dark snowfall. “Don't let him slip,” my mother said as we walked through the snow-covered parking lot. I could stand up straighter now, though I found that hunching over reduced the pain and made breathing easier. The blood on my face had dried, and my lips and cheeks felt stiff and swollen. A series of black glass doors that read
EMERGENCY
slid open for us, and signs for check-in led into a brightly lit waiting room with rows of padded chairs and tables, where a few old people sat quietly reading. There were almost no signs of other people's emergencies except for a small boy who sat beside his parents holding a white compress stained with blood to his head. “What's wrong with you?” he asked my sister when we sat down across from him.

“I'm just fine,” Jenny said. She took off her puffy winter coat, which she did right away whenever she entered a place because she hated to appear fat. She wore a pink sweater and white Levi's, clothes that looked new and expensive despite the fact that my mother had bought them secondhand. For some reason, clothes always looked new when Jenny wore them. She was a pretty girl with long curly hair that reached the small of her back. She made sure a strand or two hung down the side of her face, aware that this gave her what she called “girl appeal,” which meant something like sex appeal, though as a fourteen-year-old freshman in high school, she hadn't yet developed. She was still too flat to need bras and didn't have much shape in her hips. All the same, she acted like an adolescent girl, sealing herself away for hours in the bathroom, arguing with my mother about how a young girl should wear her hair, and reading women's magazines, one of which she picked up now and opened while she talked to the boy across from her.

“They're going to have to use a needle,” the kid said. “I need stitches and I might have a concussion.”

“Ouch,” Jenny said, though she didn't of course really feel his pain. She'd just said that to be a charming, conversational girl, which she often tried to be. On the front of her magazine, a woman looked out at us, her eyes blue and hungry, and her hair flung back and wind tossed. “My brother's hurt, too. He did something to his shoulder. He dislocated it, we think.”
TWENTY TIPS FOR GIRLS WITH THIN LIPS
, the front of her magazine said. I understood then why the woman on the cover was pursing her red, glossy mouth into a whistle; she was showing the world how full her lips were, how full a woman's lips should be. The kid asked what dislocating a shoulder meant and Jenny did something fancy with her fingers and made a popping sound with her mouth to illustrate the idea. “It's when your arm gets pulled out of joint.”

The little kid looked at me, his eyes swollen from tears, and I think he saw in my face exactly what I saw in his: the fear of what had happened to us and the fear of what would soon happen—the needles, the stitches, the doctors and nurses using incomprehensible words. I also knew that Jenny, unhurt and determined to be pleasant and social while also fingering through her magazine, did not understand the first thing about our fear, and I wished that she were hurt, too, cut or stung or poisoned or anything that would keep her from saying the terribly kind and untrue thing she said next. “You'll be okay, I'm sure. You won't even remember it happened to you tomorrow.”

A man came into the room and called the kid's name, which made him panic. He dropped his bloody bandage and flailed his arms when his father picked him up and said, “No! I won't go! I won't!” though he was easily carried beyond the flapping double doors, and I listened for his voice until I could no longer hear it. The same man returned and called my mother and father and me to a desk where he gave my father a clipboard of paperwork and a pen with the name of the hospital—
THE RICHMOND CLINICS
—written on it, which for some reason made me feel better about the place.

“We're not sure what happened to him,” my mother said. “He can't stand up straight. It hurts him to talk too much.”

The man's name tag said
NURSE DOUGLAS
. He was large and wore a beard and had powerful-looking arms—not my idea of a nurse. He looked inside my parka and, without hesitation, said, “That's a dislocated shoulder. He should be able to stand up again as soon as his muscles start relaxing.”

“He's in terrible pain,” my mother said. “Could you give him something now? A pill? Anything for the pain?”

“We can't give him anything until he's checked in. As soon as we can, we'll take care of him. He'll have the best doctor in the state.” I believed him when he had said they'd take care of me, and I was ready to surrender myself into his hands. My mother squeezed my good hand in hers and I knew that she had calmed down, that she believed things would turn out for us. “So how did this happen, Steven?” Nurse Douglas asked.

“I fell,” I said. “I was playing football.”

To my surprise, my mother let this go while Nurse Douglas made some notes and started typing on the computer in front of him. “Football,” he said, “that's a rough sport. We see a lot of young football players in here.” He looked up from his computer screen then and studied the plastic insurance card my father had given him only minutes ago. “I hope we don't have a problem, Mr. Parker,” the nurse said.

“How so?” my father said. I felt my mother's hand stiffen again.

“My computer is not showing that you're covered.”

“Of course we're covered,” my father said. For some reason, my father began pulling plastic cards out of his wallet, blue and red and white cards, video membership cards and student cards and library cards, and shuffling through them as if he were about to find another insurance card. “I know we're covered. Stop looking at me like that,” he nearly shouted at my mother, who did not stop looking at him.

“Oh, God,” she said in a tired voice. “You're actually going to do this to us.”

“I don't see your names here,” the nurse said.

“Names,” my father said. “Where don't you see our names?”

Nurse Douglas picked up the phone while he continued to study the computer screen in front of him. “One moment,” he said. Behind him was a large black-and-white wall clock with a red second hand slowly ticking away. “The computer is not always right,” Nurse Douglas said. It is not always right, I thought, and I tried to believe it was wrong now. But a voice in the telephone soon confirmed the opposite.

“I'm sure I paid,” my father said.

“Of course you did,” my mother said in a tone so cruel that I felt compelled to let go of her hand.

“Okay,” my father said to Nurse Douglas, “if we have to, we can get on a payment plan. I'll pay some now and some later.” He counted through the cash in his wallet—a lot of ones and some fives. “I can write a check.”

“One minute, please,” the nurse said. He left through a door behind his desk and did not return for a period of minutes, during which my father drummed his fingers on the desk.