The Kindness of Strangers (19 page)

Jordan unpinned Sarah’s note, took off his sweatshirt, and pulled on Nate’s jersey. It was way too big and hung on him like a dress. He tried to picture himself having a body that filled this shirt, being big and strong, years away from right now.

He gathered up the mail to put in his drawer, but the intercom blurted out some garbled, urgent command, and he dropped it all. He left the cards on the floor. He hated the stupid things that reminded him and triggered the jumping in his chest. They had an intercom at home, because the house was so big.

Thinking of his house made him yank on his IV stand. Time to check out new exit routes. Wendy, at the nurses’ station, looked up and said, “Good to see you out and about. Where are you headed?”

“Down to that lounge, with the Xbox.” He’d seen it on his walk to Bryn’s office.

“Sure. Have fun.” He saw Wendy check her watch and write that down. Jordan knew they could see him on cameras, but they wouldn’t know what he was up to if he was just looking around the lounge. He walked down the hall on his weak, achy legs, all the nurses greeting him, happy to see him out of his room. Every nerve in his body jangled when he was out of sight of the nurses’ station. Jordan was so on alert he figured he could smell his dad coming if he was anywhere in the building. As he walked toward the lounge, he noticed a stairwell and two elevators here at this curve of the hallway. He had just stepped onto the green- and purple-tiled floor of the lounge when a sound paralyzed him.

The sound of water. Bubbling water. He balanced again, right on the edge, and as much as he wanted to be able to remember, he was afraid to fall. He knew that sound.

He took a tentative step past the bookshelf into the lounge. No one sat on any of the purple and green couches. The TV flickered a cartoon with the sound off. He took another step, and there it was.

An aquarium. A huge one with a filter bubbling. Angelfish swam along while smaller, neon yellow fish darted around them. The sound filled Jordan’s whole body. He wobbled and caught himself on the arm of a couch. He backed away from the aquarium. He couldn’t stay in here. He hated that sound. His heart jumped in some jagged way that made it hard to breathe. He turned around, wanting to run from the sound, but his IV stand caught on some games and videos on the floor. He tried to tip the stand, to lift the wheel over what caught it, and a DVD case popped open, the disk rolling and clattering on the tile.

The disk.
Jordan didn’t feel his heart jump that time. He felt it stop. The silver disk shone up at him from the tile.

And he remembered.

All sound stopped, except for the bubbling amplified in his ears. The bubbling hurtled him backward in time. Pictures came to him, in mixed-up bits and pieces, but each one led him farther back to what he’d forgotten. His own fingertips on his throat. The stench of the port-o-john. The drumming of the rain on the plastic roof. The green van pulling up in his driveway. Sarah saying, “Get in.”

More bubbling. Farther back. The intercom. It was Wednesday night. Wednesday. He was safe on Wednesdays. He could relax and pretend they were a normal family. He was in his room, studying math. The intercom clicked on, and his mom said, “There’s somebody here for you.” Who? He knew it wasn’t Danny. Not anymore. Billy Porter? Billy sucked at math and asked Jordan to help him all the time, even though he wouldn’t even sit with Jordan at lunch. Would Billy actually come to Jordan’s house just for the math homework? Jordan didn’t think anything of it because
it was Wednesday.
Bad things never happened on Wednesdays, so he’d walked downstairs right into it. When he saw the new people, a man and a woman, and the lights set up, he’d even stuttered, “B-but it’s W-Wednesday.” The couple laughed. His mom and dad laughed. And their laughter broke something in him. Or maybe fixed something in him, because he’d decided not to be “a good, good boy,” and he’d fought it, which he hadn’t done since those first times. It took all of them to hold him down.

But he didn’t fight for long. It never kept the bad things from happening, so there wasn’t much point in getting beat up. And so he went away, spelling words, pulling the toughest words from all the vocab tests of the year, sorting them into alphabetical order: A-d-v-e-r-s-e. A-f-f-e-c-t. A-f-f-i-n-i-t-y. A-f-f-i-r-m-a-t-i-o-n. A-l-i-b-i. A-l-l-a-y. A-l-l-e-v-i-a-t-e.

W
hen he returned, vocab words still floating through his dreams, he was in his bed. The house was quiet except for the gurgling of the aquariums downstairs, which he could hear above the hum of heavy rain. He opened his eyes. His mom sat at the edge of his bed. “Hey. How ya doing, cookie?” she whispered.

He lay still. His throat throbbed. His jaw ached. His head felt hollow from the medicine Mom had given him partway through last night. The bee sting of the needle was the only thing that interrupted his vocabulary list—he’d started over at the beginning after that. Mom said the medicine made it “easier,” but it actually made it harder for him to concentrate. It made everything slower and thicker and made the room tilt funny if he kept his eyes open. He straightened his bent knees and winced.

Mom touched his forehead and brushed back his hair. Her hand was cool and felt good, but he froze, stomach tightening. She only touched his cheeks and hair, though. “You’ve got a fever, cookie. Do you feel sick?” He curled up on his side, and she stroked his hair and rubbed his back. “You shouldn’t go to school today. I’ll call them before I leave.” But he wanted to go to school. There was a vocabulary test today.

She got up, and he thought she was going to make the call, but he heard her opening bottles and running water in his bathroom. She came back to his bed with a glass of water and a handful of pills. “Here, c’mon, babe, sit up.”

He did, his elbows and hips feeling thick and slow to bend, like old, rusted machine parts. The room went green and wavy for a few seconds. Mom handed him two Tylenol. He moved his heavy tongue and gagged on the familiar, plasticky taste in his mouth. He took the glass and swallowed the pills. “That’s for your fever. Now, take this medicine, too.” He swallowed four more pills. He wanted to drink more water—every part of his body felt thirsty—but his throat hurt, so he set the glass down.

Mom sat on the bed and hugged him, pulling him against her. He wanted to hug her, with the same longing he wanted more water, but his chest and stomach clenched. “You’re one tough cookie, you know that? I’m so proud of you. I love you.”

He wriggled free of her embrace and lay back down.

She combed his hair with her fingers.

His skin prickled, and his chest tightened even more. She was sitting here too long.

She kept running her fingers in his hair and said, “Maybe when you feel better, next week, it would be fun for you to invite Danny over after school.”

Jordan wasn’t sure he’d ever breathe again. He thought he’d solved that. He thought the Danny thing was over and done with.

Mom twirled some of his hair around one finger. “Maybe to swim. Like you used to, after practice. How’s that sound?”

Jordan panicked for a second, then remembered how to inhale. “Danny doesn’t like me,” he whispered.
Danny would never come over by himself anymore
.

Mom rolled her eyes. “Well, then, you need to make him like you. Be nicer to him. God knows he could use some kindness. He’s had a rough go of it.”

Jordan felt a rush of hatred for Danny Laden. What about
his
life was so rough?

But Mom moved her fingers from his hair to his cheek, and the hatred raced away in shivers. “I need to get you better medicine.” She leaned over and held his face in her hands. Her cool hands felt so good on his hot skin, but he clamped his lips shut and turned his head to the side. She let him go. And she stood up. “What sounds good for dinner?” she asked. “Any special requests?”

He shrugged.

She cleared the water glass and rattled more bottles in his bathroom. “How ’bout a milk shake, at least? I’ll bring you a strawberry milk shake, and then I’ll go get anything else you want. I promise.”

Jordan stared at the bathroom door and listened to her voice. Did she go Somewhere Else, too, during the bad things? Just like he did? She must. How else could she be so happy? She brought him a cool washcloth and placed it on his forehead. Then she went downstairs, and as he drifted in and out, he heard her call the school, heard the beep of the microwave, heard her footsteps coming back up the stairs.

Under the covers he pressed his hands against his ribs, trying to stop that awful feeling, like someone forcing him to button up a too-small coat.

“Here, sweetie,” she whispered, setting a tray on his nightstand. “Here’s some chicken broth and some juice. You need to drink, okay? Drink as much as you can.”

He nodded a small, careful nod to keep the washcloth on his forehead.

“Feel better.” She leaned over and kissed him on the nose, then left the room.

When he heard her car drive away, he sucked in deep breaths, as if a pillow held over his face had been lifted off. But then, right away, he felt bad and wished she would come back. He should’ve talked to her. He should’ve been nice to her. He thought he might cry.

The steaming mug of chicken broth prodded him to sit up and try some; it made him feel better to hold its warmth in his hands. And it soothed his sore throat.

He listened to the aquariums bubble. And the rain. The rain sounded too much like those stupid fish tanks. He wanted to go to school. What would he do if he lay here all day except hear that awful bubbling? At least at school he could think about other things.

He got out of bed, shivering with cold. Stabs of pain shot through his hips with each step he took. He limped into the bathroom and took off his underwear. He wrinkled his nose. He’d bled some. More than usual.

He showered—watching the hot water swirl into the drain. He was too shaky and tired to scrape himself pink the way he usually did. He pulled on clean underwear, jeans, a turtleneck, a sweatshirt, trying to hang on to the heat of the shower. Grabbing his backpack, he shuffled his way downstairs, his joints warming up at last. Yes, he would get to school. He would take the test. Today was gym day. He could skip gym, he bet, since his mom had called to say he was sick. Tomorrow was Friday, so that was art day, and he—

Tomorrow was Friday.

There was a party Friday. He sat down on the bottom step, hugging his backpack. Tomorrow he’d have to do those things all over again.

And that’s when he’d had the epiphany. It had been
Wednesday.
He could live with the weekends. He’d even gotten used to them, had figured out how to get through them and move on to the school weeks. But if every car on the drive, every knock on the door, was someone here for him . . . he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t stay on emergency alert all the time. The alarm had to stop ringing at some point. It had to.

He put his head on his backpack as if it were a pillow. He couldn’t do this anymore. Doing what they wanted didn’t get him anywhere. Fighting it didn’t get him anywhere either. And now it was going to happen
more
? There weren’t enough vocabulary words in the world. Not even if he started reading the dictionary.

And he wouldn’t be nice to Danny Laden. It was one thing for the other kids to just appear at the parties, but Jordan wasn’t going to recruit them himself. R-e-c-r-u-i-t.

He was through. He felt it in the heavy ache of his bones: He would never do those things again. To make him, they would have to kill him first.

He closed his eyes. They wouldn’t kill him, though. And they
could
make him; they had before. So . . .

His breath stopped for a moment when the thought popped into his head. He opened his eyes. As much as it made his heart race, he knew it was the answer. They wouldn’t kill him. But
he
could.

He lifted his head. When he fought back, it was usually stupid; they laughed at him. They wouldn’t laugh at
this,
though.

He walked into his parents’ bedroom, trying not to look at the king-size bed. He opened the middle drawer of the dresser as he’d watched his mother do once. He lifted the false bottom beneath the stack of sweaters, and there was everything he needed. He hadn’t really paid attention to what she was doing at the time, mostly because he’d been spelling words, but his brain had stored it. He selected a vial of Dilaudid along with a needle and syringe. She usually gave him only a little bit from the vial. What if he used the whole vial? There were also more packets of pills like the ones up in his bathroom. He took those out, too. He would swallow them all, just in case. His heart beat too fast for his breath to keep up.

He started to unwrap the needle from its plastic, then stopped. Maybe he was just being stupid, but it didn’t feel like it would be enough just to die.

He wanted someone, somewhere, to know why.

But that meant he couldn’t die here, in this house.

He pocketed the vial and the needle and the pills. He walked into the living room, past all those stupid fish he hated, and opened the closet. He reached behind a shelf of Disney movies, bringing out a handful of CDs.

Kneeling there, he shuffled the disks in his hands. He knew in detail what had happened on each of the penned dates. Each party was as separate and distinct to him as a birthday or Christmas. No matter how many words he spelled, he could never get them to fade or blur together.