The Kindness of Strangers (24 page)

“Can I walk downstairs with you?” Jordan asked. He looked up at the ceiling again. Nate looked up, too. What was the kid looking at? The clock?

“Um, sure, I mean, are you supposed to—”

“They want me to get more exercise,” Jordan said. He stood, holding one arm to his chest, still clutching the napkin. He wore Nate’s old Rangers jersey, which hung off his shoulders and draped almost to his knees. The jersey made Nate’s eyes sting, reminding him that Jordan could’ve been spared, might be somewhere whole and healthy, or at least not here in the hospital, if Nate hadn’t been so conceited that he’d actually believed Mrs. Kendrick’s coming on to him was perfectly normal. What had he thought, that he was such a stud the woman couldn’t help herself? Before Nate could ask the kid what was wrong with his arm, Jordan snaked around him, and, clinging to the wall, left the lounge with surprising speed. Nate looked back at the IV stand. Oh. So that wasn’t Jordan’s.

In the hall Jordan looked back at Nate, then up again. “What do you keep looking at?” Nate asked. But this time, over his shoulder, he saw the camera in the ceiling. He frowned. “Hey, are you supposed to—”

“Come on,” Jordan whispered, opening an unmarked door. “This way.”

“What are you doing?” Nate asked. He followed the boy into a stairwell. Jordan practically ran down the stairs, and he wasn’t very steady. He needed to hold the railing, but he kept his left arm held tight to his chest and groped along the wall with his right. Nate heard the kid gasping for breath. “Slow down. What the hell’s your hurry?”

Jordan stumbled on a landing, and for a second, Nate was terrified the kid was going to fall down the next flight. Jordan used both hands to catch himself and ended up sitting on the top step. He dropped the napkin, which Nate saw was bloody. “Whoa. Hey, why are you bleeding?”

Jordan clutched the bleeding hand back to his chest. He used his other arm to push as he scooted on his butt down two more steps.

“Hold on.” Nate descended the stairs, but Jordan scrambled to his feet to face him, his back to the wall, balancing unsteadily on a step.

“You’re bleeding. Let me see.” Nate reached for Jordan’s arm.

Jordan yelled, “Don’t touch me!” and kicked Nate in the shin. Nate dropped his Gatorade, which went plunking down the stairs with a hollow slosh.

Jordan’s eyes widened, as if he couldn’t believe he’d kicked Nate. Nate might’ve laughed, if it hadn’t felt like he’d been cracked with a ball bat.

Nate backed up several steps, eager to put distance between himself and whatever the kid thought his intentions were. He rubbed his shin as Jordan took two more steps down and reached the landing.

“Jordan, man, I won’t hurt you.” Nate hated how thick and about-to-cry his voice sounded. “But, shit, you’re bleeding. You’re breathing like you just finished a damn marathon. Are you sure you’re supposed to go downstairs?”

Jordan slid down the wall and sat cross-legged on the landing.

A door opened somewhere above them, and a woman’s voice called, “Jordan!?” Nate watched the kid freeze. He didn’t answer. The voice said something Nate didn’t catch, and the door clunked shut.

Jordan exhaled.

Realization washed over Nate. “That was your IV stand back in the lounge, wasn’t it?”

Nate figured the blood was from a botched job of pulling out his own IV. “Are you trying to break out of here?”

Jordan’s eyes flicked to Nate’s.

“Oh, good plan,” Nate said. “Very good plan.”

Jordan glared at Nate.

“And where the hell are you gonna go, Einstein?”

The anger drained from Jordan’s face. He shrank against the wall and closed his eyes. He whispered, “The social worker’s coming again today. They’re putting me in a foster home.”

Nate didn’t know what to say to that. He sat down, three steps above Jordan. The images from the disks superimposed themselves every time he looked at the kid. He cleared his throat. “Nice shirt,” he finally joked, just to say something.

Jordan opened his eyes, face changing. As pleasant as could be, as if they were chatting at a bus stop, he said, “Thanks. How’re playoffs?”

Nate shrugged. “I got kicked off the team.”

“Get out. No way.”

“Yeah. I skipped school. It’s no big deal—I was supposed to get
expelled,
but the principal cut me a break. There’s only one game left anyway.”

Jordan nodded, and asked, “How much do you guys practice off-season?”

“Well, we do weights and we—Look, you gonna sit here on the stairs all day? What the hell are you doing?”

“What are
you
doing?” Jordan threw back. “Why are you here?”

A slapped-cheek heat smarted across Nate’s face. “I told you. I came to see you.”

“Why?”

Nate didn’t know how to answer that. “Because. It was a pretty awful thing that happened to you. I just . . . I don’t know. . . .” He felt stupid.

Jordan studied him a moment, then coughed. The cough turned into a wheeze.

“You okay?”

“This was probably really stupid,” Jordan said, leaning his head back against the wall.

“Tell me what you want me to do. You want me to go get someone?”

Before Jordan could answer, the door swung open on the landing beneath them and a security guard shouted, “Here he is!”

Nate moved between the guard and Jordan. “He’s okay. He’s on his way back to his room.” But the stairs crowded with orderlies and hospital security. Nate shielded Jordan from the crowd, feeling like the enforcer on a hockey team, with Jordan his star player, his Wayne Gretzky. No one was going to touch this kid if he could help it, not that anyone seemed to want to; they all hung back, and with his shin still throbbing, Nate couldn’t blame them.

Dr. Darlen charged into the stairwell, taking two stairs at a time to reach them. Nate wanted to hug her when he saw her this time, but she didn’t seem to recognize him. She just shot him a nasty-ass look, then asked Jordan, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I went for a walk,” he said, raising his chin. Nate admired the bit of attitude the kid threw at her. “Look.” Jordan pointed at Nate. “I decided to see visitors.”

Dr. Darlen shook her head, her eyes glittering. “You are in so much trouble, you little . . . You scared me.” She wiped her eyes and said to the crowd, “Thanks, you guys. Can I get a chair down there?” People moved into action at her command.

“Nate, I need you to help me.” She’d recognized him after all.

“You know him?” Jordan asked.

She nodded. “His dad was my boss for a while.”

Jordan squinted at Nate. “Your dad’s dead.”

“Yeah.” Damn, did this ever get any easier? “He used to work at Miami Valley.”

Dr. Darlen tilted her head and studied Nate a moment before directing him, “Walk beside him in case he falls. I’ll spot in front.” As bossy as ever.

“I can walk,” Jordan said, but he wobbled as he navigated the six or seven steps.

At the next landing, they went through the door to the hall, where an orderly produced the requested wheelchair. No one said a word on the elevator trip back to the third floor and Jordan’s room. Nate followed along, wondering when he could politely leave.

He waited in the doorway as Dr. Darlen helped Jordan into bed and tucked his legs under the covers, her long earrings jingling as she worked. The kid sank back against his pillows. He looked like he’d been run over.

Wendy, the chubby nurse from the desk, came in, and Nate backed against the wall, trying to stay out of the way. She crossed her arms and said to Dr. Darlen, “I told this boy Jordan didn’t see visitors.”

Jordan said, “I want him to stay.”

Nate felt a combination of victory and terror at those words.

Dr. Darlen and Wendy both seemed happy. “Good,” Wendy said. Nate almost wished they’d tell him to leave.

Wendy cleaned and bandaged Jordan’s arm. She ran a new line into the back of his hand and reattached him to what looked like antibiotics. Nate wondered what they were for.

While Wendy messed with the IV, Dr. Darlen lifted the Rangers jersey and began rehooking the cardiac monitor, clamping the leads onto the metal knobs like miniature jumper cables. Nate looked at the kid’s bony chest and wondered who the hell was attracted to that. Who looked at that skinny, bird-skeleton body and got turned on?

He looked instead at the cardiac monitor itself and the two orange lines of rhythm that appeared, dipping and peaking across the black screen.

Wendy held Jordan’s wrist and said to Dr. Darlen, “He got rid of his ID bracelet.”

Dr. Darlen ran both hands through her spiky hair like she wanted to pull it out. “Where were you going to go, Jordan? Don’t you understand that you’re very sick and you need to be here?”

Jordan smoothed his top blanket and wouldn’t look at her.

When Wendy left, Nate sidestepped his way to the chair on the other side of the bed.

Dr. Darlen fiddled with a knob on the monitor. “Jordan, don’t ever pull a stunt like that again. And you, Nate, you of all people know better. I can’t believe you were a part of this.”

Nate’s pulse peaked, just as Jordan’s did on the monitor, the number jumping from 76 to 98. He looked at Jordan, expecting the kid to speak up and set her straight, but Jordan gazed casually out the window even as Dr. Darlen continued to tear into Nate.

“Did you think for one minute about the ramifications of this, or were you just off on some juvenile adventure? What were you thinking, ‘This’ll be fun; let’s piss off the nurse?’ ”

Nate’d never expected this from Ali, who’d always been one of the few adults in his life who was fair and asked for his side of the story. Once, when he was a kid, he’d had a crush on her, and she’d been really cool about it and hadn’t made him feel too stupid. He’d felt really stupid later, though, when he realized she was a lesbian. By the time his mom and dad had talked to him about it, he’d already figured out that Priah was more than Ali’s housemate. Jordan still gazed out the damn window and said nothing, the little shit. “Sorry,” Nate said.

“I’ll
make
you sorry if you try it again.” She gave him a warning glare, then turned her attention back to Jordan. “You could’ve done serious damage to yourself.”

Jordan nodded, studying the new IV in his hand.

She rubbed her forehead, shutting her eyes as if in pain. “It’ll be okay, kiddo,” she whispered. “Nothing is official on this foster home. We can figure something out. You’re safe. We’ll make sure you stay safe. Your father is not going to hurt you ever again.”

Jordan seemed lost in the examination of his hand.

Dr. Darlen sighed. “All right, you guys. Stay out of trouble. I’ll see you this evening, Jordan.” She left the room, leaving the door open behind her. Nate felt abandoned, like the goalie waiting for the penalty shot.

“Why did you do that?” Jordan asked, his face ready-to-run wary.

“What?”

“Why did you act like you helped me escape?”

“Well, you weren’t exactly jumping to my defense, were you?”

“You could’ve told her. You didn’t even try.”

Nate shrugged. “I get blamed for everything. I’m used to it.”

Jordan frowned and tapped the IV in the back of his hand.

“Look,” Nate said, “I should probably get going. I just wanted—”

“Why do you all keep sending me pictures of black-and-white cats?”

“What?”

“Your mom sent me this card.” Jordan shuffled through some mail on his table. “And then Danny drew a picture of Raja, and I wondered if—”

“I think that’s supposed to be our rabbit,” Nate said, taking Danny’s picture from Jordan. He opened Danny’s homemade card. It said,
“Dear Jordan. I’m sorry. We all really miss you.”
He snorted. Bullshit. He’d heard those little fifth-grade shits torment Jordan. “I thought you and Danny were pissed at each other.”

Jordan shrugged. “The teacher made the whole class make cards.”

Ouch. “So what’s the deal with you guys? What did you fight about?”

But Jordan reached for the card back. He squinted at it. “
That’s
supposed to be Klezmer?”

“I know. Danny kind of sucks at art.” Nate noticed a sketch pad, open on Jordan’s table. An excellent pencil drawing of a cat stretched out on its back stared up at him. He remembered the drawing inside Jordan’s vocabulary book, too. Nate imagined a lonely, abandoned cat starving to death in that giant yellow house. “Do you have a cat? Is someone taking care of it?”

“No.”

“I could go feed it and—”

“I don’t have a cat,” Jordan said.

“But you said ‘a picture of Raja,’ and I thought—”

“I don’t have a cat!” Jordan snapped.

“Jesus, all right. I was just asking.” Man, this was as bad as dealing with Tony; no way to know what would set him off. “Look. I’m not sure why I came. I just wanted, you know—”

“They might let my mom out of jail.” Jordan regarded Nate, as if to gauge what he thought of that. The orange line in the monitor rose, the number jumping to the nineties again.