Waiting For Sarah (3 page)

“Tell 'em to go to — ”

“Well, if you won't listen to Rehab at least you're well enough to go back to school,” Norma interrupted firmly. “You can't mope about like this, doing nothing, staring out the window or sitting on the sea wall watching the boats all day.”

“I don't want to go back to school.”

“You've got to go. Your mother wouldn't like it if you didn't. Joanne wouldn't want me to sit idly by and watch you become an under-educated, anti-social hermit. I won't allow it. It's time to start living again, Mike. School is the perfect place to begin.”

“I hate school.”

“Your mother told me you liked school. You were a good student.”

“What can I do ... in this?” he burst out angrily.

“Many people have wheelchairs, Mike. They manage. They cope. They get on with their lives. You still have your good mind. And your arms and shoulders. There are many worse off than you.”

“Worse off! You mean like
no
arms as well as
no
legs
and
no
family? Hah!” He was in a furious temper.

“You could get rid of the wheelchair and walk if you wanted. Dr. Ryan says ... ”

But he wasn't listening. He was too angry. Norma was beginning to think she'd moved too soon; he wasn't ready yet to join the world. But she couldn't go back now.

“Mike! You've just got to stop beating up on yourself.” She pulled over a chair and sat facing him. “Your mother is gone,” she said firmly. “And your dad. And Becky. And there's
nothing
anyone can do to bring them back. One thing I do know and it's this: they would want you to be happy. You're here and you're alive. And they would want you to go to school. Once you're back you'll find everyone is on your side ...”

“Forget it!” Without another word, he spun his wheelchair, rudely turning his back on his aunt, and pushed himself angrily away.

The weeks and months went by. By now he had missed the whole of grade eleven. With the next school year approaching, one year after the accident that had claimed the lives of his family, his aunt became persistent. And so did Robbie.

“Give it a try, Mike, okay?” said Robbie. “The kids at Carleton are pretty good. They're gonna be on your side. They'll be real happy to see you back, man, honest!”

Finally he gave in. Boredom temporarily overcame fear and bitterness; that was the reason. Another reason was the offer of credit for the missed year.
Unusual and extenuating circumstances, the school called it, which meant he could, if he wished, stay with his class, pick up a few of the missed grade eleven units and graduate on schedule. That was the clincher. Not that he cared about graduating — he cared about nothing — but his Aunt Norma cared. Except for Robbie she was the only one who did care. Robbie and Norma had stuck with him, visiting hospital and Rehab every day, even when he'd given them the silent treatment, even when he'd yelled and sworn at them, even when he'd thrown their gifts to the floor; he owed it to his aunt. She was a true friend, not like some of the so-called friends of his dead parents who had made one visit or had sent one Get Well card and then nothing. A few of the other family friends had continued to visit and bring gifts but soon stopped when he had nothing to say to them. It had been much easier to feign sleep when visitors came. Aunt Norma, on the other hand, had turned out to be a source of strength. She was really something else. And so was Robbie. He didn't know what he would have done without them.

He returned reluctantly to Carleton High in September, over a year since his accident. He did it only to please his aunt.

He was alone. Robbie had wanted to be there, but Mike said no; he had to do it by himself. Full of purpose, he pushed his chair towards the main entrance. But then he stopped. There were steps. He'd forgotten about the steps. How was he going to get up that formidable obstacle and in the front door? He looked up at the school motto above the entrance as if the answer he needed was to be found there:
ad summum
, “To the Heights.” The building was old and lacking ramps. He looked at the steps again. There was no way he could get his chair up to the entrance. Annoyance turned to anger. Damned school! Was there a way around the back?

“You take one side and I'll take the other.”

It was Robbie with another boy and they were grasping his chair and carrying him up the steps. Mike kept his eyes closed until they had put him down in the front hall. Then he glared at his friend. “I told
you I'd manage by my — ”

Robbie turned away. “Thanks,” he said to his helper.

The boy smiled. “No problem,” he said as he walked away.

Robbie turned back to Mike and grinned. “There's an entrance around the back. It's near the band room. No steps. I knew you wouldn't remember.” He turned on his heel before Mike could say anything else. “See you later. If you're polite maybe I'll walk home with you.” He grinned again and was gone.

Mike looked around. It seemed to him that every eye was on him. He wheeled past the band room and through the halls, staring straight ahead, scowling, hating everyone. The secretary in the school office had his timetable ready. He snatched it from her hand and turned to go.

She stopped him with a word. “Wait.”

He paused, but did not look back.

“Mr. Warren, the vice-principal, wants to see you before you ...”

“Well, I don't want to see him.”

He found his first class and insisted on sitting at the back of the room. Desks were moved; space was made for him. If anyone stared he glared back at them, and they turned away, withered by his hate.

Even Carleton's new, cute and over-excited eighth graders, all with two strong legs, all with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, all with proper homes and families. He despised them all.

Robbie helped him home, pushing on the uphill parts.

“So how was it, Mike? How did it go?”

He played dumb. “How did what go?”

“You know. Classes, crowded hallways, being back with friends, stuff like that.”

“Friends! Hmmph!” He was still ticked off at Robbie for lifting him up the school steps. He'd felt so helpless. “Who was that other kid this morning?”

“What other kid are you talking about, man?” Robbie playing the innocent.

“I'm talking about the one who helped with the skyride.”

“Oh, him. He's a new guy. In my history class. He's big and he happened to be passing by so I grabbed him. Name's Ben Packard.”

“Hmmph!”

He went to school every day.

He hated it.

He was unfriendly. Kids he'd known for years,
who had been with him through elementary school, he ignored as though they were strangers; he wanted nobody's sympathy. He was asked to join the yearbook committee. “Not interested,” he told them. He was invited to join the chess club and the debating club, but he refused; he was no longer interested in chess, and as for debating, he didn't much like the sponsor teacher, Mr. Dorfman. So he joined no clubs. Mr. Estereicher, a popular PE teacher, asked him if he might be interested in wheelchair sports; there was a meet coming up, and Estereicher would be happy to coach him for track or basketball or whatever interested him. “I don't give a damn about wheelchair sports — thanks very much,” he added sarcastically.

People soon learned to leave him alone.

They didn't like him. He didn't care.

Someone hung a bumper-sticker on the back of his wheelchair: Ban Leg-hold Traps. Robbie managed to remove it without Mike knowing.

By the end of October it was almost as though he had never been away from Carleton High. The school was still the same, but he had changed. In tenth grade he had been busily involved in the school's classes and activities; now everything was meaningless. He endured it only because of Aunt Norma and Robbie.

Today he had Dorfman first period. He didn't like Dorfman's class. He didn't like Dorfman. History should be interesting, exciting even, but Dorfman managed to convert it into sleeping pills. For the first fifteen minutes of each seventy-five minute period there was a quiz on yesterday's notes. If you forgot to memorize the notes you lost the fifteen marks. When the quiz was over it was note-taking from the overhead projector for tomorrow's quiz. Notes and quizzes, always notes, one mind-numbing page after another. In addition to all this, Dorfman expected him to hand in two lengthy essays on eleventh grade topics, ones he had missed.

Dorfman stood at the front of the room, behind his overhead projector, the classroom lights out. Except
for the windows, most of the light came from the projector's 300 watts of non-enlightenment thrown onto the wall-screen behind and over Dorfman's glittering baldness, poorly covered by a phony comb-over. Whenever Dorfman leaned into the projector to operate the roller, the light reflected off his thick-lensed glasses, hiding his usually magnified eyes and shining up under his face, accentuating the thick wet lips and flat nose, twisting his features into a Halloween fright mask.

Mike sat at the back near the window. He'd had Dorfman before, in tenth grade, and used to copy his notes religiously, never missing a word. Now he didn't care about taking notes. Instead, he simply scanned them idly as they came up on the screen, and then went back to his book,
The History of Flight
, always handy in his packsack slung behind his wheelchair, glancing up again only when he heard the squeak of the rollers.

In his first class, when Dorfman had caught him reading his book instead of furiously scribbling history notes like the other kids, he'd threatened to have him expelled. Mike had shrugged. “So expel me.”

Dorfman had stared at him angrily through lenses like the bottoms of pop bottles. No more was said about expulsion. Besides, Mike always managed to pass the daily quiz. And he was in a wheelchair; what kind of teacher would expel a kid in a wheelchair?

Robbie's two small cousins were visiting for Halloween and Robbie had agreed to take them on a trick-or-treat tour of his neighborhood. “Why don't you join us?” he said to Mike. “Should be fun. Jimmy and Sharon are going as aliens, so I'm gonna join them in a Boba Fett bounty hunter mask.”

“No, thanks. I'm too old for that stuff.”

“You don't have to dress up. Just come as you are.”

“Meaning what? I look like a natural freak?”

“Aw, come on, Mike. You always liked Halloween, remember?”

“How old are your cousins?”

“Jimmy's eight, Sharon's six.”

In the end he agreed to go. Robbie was like a little kid, eager and excited over the smallest thing, like wearing a mask and shepherding his little cousins around. It was the least Mike could do; Robbie was always there when Mike needed him. Easy-going and good-natured, he never expected anything in return.

The weather cooperated. The day had been
sunny and cold. In the late afternoon a mist had descended, making it the perfect evening for a haunting. Robbie wore his Boba Fett mask just as he had threatened, and his excited young cousins were dressed as Martians.

“This time last year you were in Rehab,” said Robbie.

He didn't answer. He was looking at Jimmy and Sharon, so thrilled to be out in the dark, and thinking of Becky who would be eleven if she ...

He thought about his dad and his own feelings of — what? Inadequacy? Inferiority? How he'd never seemed to please his father, not that his dad ever complained or criticized. It didn't seem to matter whether it was school grades or basketball or track, nothing Mike ever did drew praise from his dad. “Running is okay,” he would say to his son. “And basketball's okay too. But the bike is where it's really at.” Will Scott had been a competitive cyclist when he was young, and had plenty of racing medals to show for it. Mike knew that his dad wished he would take up cycling, but he simply wasn't interested. Maybe it was his dad persuading him to watch all those boring Tour de France stages on television when he was a little kid that turned him against it; he didn't know, but he was darned if he was going to take up a sport he didn't even like and none of his friends was interested in.

And now it was too late: he would never hear from his dad those few words he had always wanted, those words that said simply ...

“Trick or treat!” Jimmy and Sharon squealing at an opening door brought him back to the present.

Jimmy and Sharon wanted to help push Mike's chair. “Sure,” said Mike.

Robbie said, “You know what, Mike?”

“What?”

“Tonight is the first time in a year you haven't growled at everyone. Must be the Halloween spirit.”

Mike shrugged. Halloween this year seemed different. Strange. As though there really
were
ghosts in the air. He could feel them. The dead are everywhere, he thought, surrounding him in the darkness and in the misty lamplight. He could feel them in the streets and in the trees and in the garden hedges, hovering at the edge of visibility.

Maybe Mom and Dad and Becky were out there too, watching over him; he refused to accept that they were gone forever, that he would never see them again. They had been together, one family, noisy and alive, and now they were gone. He'd never realized that life hung on such a thin, weak thread, that death could so easily snap it, that your normal, everyday life and routines, and your home, could change so drastically that you weren't the same person anymore.

The mist swirled under yellow streetlights.

Mom and Dad and Becky, buried under a granite stone at Forest Lawn Cemetery. But their spirits were out there somewhere, in the misty darkness.

In a better place.

He had to believe it.

It was Halloween. Robbie was showing off for his cousins and having fun.