Wish (16 page)

Finally, a voice confirming our name, asking my mom and me to follow. Ty onto his feet. Little Brew squeezing my hand and nodding encouragement as I left him. A nurse walking on white shoes, a colorful smock, a blood-pressure gauge tucked in her hip pocket. The squeak of her sneaker tread when she rounds the corner almost athletic, almost winter nights in a gym with snow falling outside and girls yelling and screaming with their pom-poms. Almost that.

Dr. Shemp was tall and thin and tilted his head when he talked, as if his thoughts rose from his shoulder and he sucked them in and gargled them out again. He held a BlackBerry in his right hand and a clipboard tucked under his armpit. His office had old leather chairs that made saddle sounds whenever you switched your legs or changed positions. A fish tank, quiet and comforting, bubbled behind him.

“He’s in rough shape,” Dr. Shemp said, pushing back in his chair and putting the BlackBerry on his desk as we came in. He gestured for us to sit down. “But at this point
we expect him to make it. He swallowed a lot of water and it becomes complicated with his condition. But unless he experiences a reversal of some sort, he should be fine in a few days.”

“Can we see him?” I asked.

Dr. Shemp pursed his lips as if he had never been asked such a question.

“Not yet. Let him rest and we’ll see how he looks in the morning. He’s had a close call, you understand. He should never be allowed to attempt something like that again.”

He glanced at me. Then he nodded in understanding with my mother.

“Is that it, then?” Mom asked.

“More or less,” Dr. Shemp said. “Given his cystic fibrosis, he’s a lucky boy. That’s rough water out there. I don’t think he’ll suffer any long-term effects, but you can never be sure. You’re from New Hampshire, correct?”

“Yes,” Mom said.

“He’ll have to fly, then, but I recommend you schedule an appointment for him as soon as you get back. Maybe you should call from here, or, if you like, our office can take care of that. He needs to be seen at least once more as a final check.”

“Did he die?” I asked. “Was he dead?”

Dr. Shemp didn’t answer.

“We understand,” Mom said, reaching over to touch my
hand. “Can we at least peek in on him? We’ll probably go out for something to eat, but we’re going to stay here.”

Dr. Shemp shrugged and said, “Wouldn’t hurt, I suppose, but please don’t wake him or try to communicate. Rest is what he needs right now.”

We stood. Dr. Shemp stood also. He didn’t extend his hand and he didn’t come around the desk. We waited a second, then went out. My mother turned to me and we hugged. I felt weak and shaky.

“He’s okay,” she said. “He’s going to be okay.”

“I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“I know you didn’t mean it to turn out this way.”

We kept hugging for a little while. When we stopped, Mom ran her hands over her eyes. She had been tearing up.

“We need to tell Ty and Little Brew,” I said. “They’re waiting to hear.”

“Okay,” Mom said, reaching out to rub my arm. “You go ahead and I’ll peek in on Tommy.”

I hurried to the waiting room. Ty hadn’t moved, but Little Brew had figured out a way to get comfortable in the straight-backed chairs. He had his legs up and was reading a
National Geographic
. I crossed the room and smiled at Ty.

“He’s going to be okay,” I said. “The water got in his lungs, but he’s going to be all right.”

Ty stood and hugged me. Little Brew did, too. Then Ty
seemed to lose all strength and sat back down. He covered his face with his hands.

“I thought I’d killed the kid,” he said from under his fingers. “I can’t believe it.”

“He’s okay,” I said and put my hand on his shoulder. “Tommy’s a fighter.”

“Snow Pony,” Little Brew said, making his voice funny.

“Snow Pony,” I said.

“I can’t believe it,” Ty said again. “I would never have forgiven myself.”

“I guess we were nuts to let him try it,” I said. “I don’t know what we were thinking. We were crazy.”

“We were thinking he wanted a charge,” Little Brew said, his voice level. “You can’t go blaming yourself when things don’t turn out the way you want them to. He was stoked to do it. He didn’t hesitate.”

“I know,” I said, “but we should have known better. I should have known better.”

Ty stood back up.

“Can we see him?” he asked.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “The doctor says he needs complete rest. Mom is looking in on him now.”

Ty hugged me again, hard. Then I hugged Little Brew, who held on to me. The warmth of his body became the center of almost everything and I didn’t want to let him go. He kissed my cheek and pulled me closer. We had been
through too much in too short a time. We held each other in the middle of the waiting room. Over his shoulder I saw a light rain begin to fall in the parking lot.

TOMMY SHARK FACT #10:
Tommy found a video on YouTube of a surfer in Australia being attacked by two great white sharks. He has watched it so often that he can do the play-by-play of the attack without even glancing at the video. An Italian tourist happened to be filming the surfers when a great white rose on top of a wave, grabbed a whole surfboard, and tossed it backward into the trough or valley created before the next wave. What astonished Tommy and other researchers was that the whites seemed to cooperate: a second great white was waiting in the trough. The surfer sustained a bite on his left arm, but it wasn’t critical. The sharks seemed to recognize that a human is not their preferred mammal. They disappeared and the surfer made it to shore without further injury. Authorities closed the beach for a couple days, then reopened it. The YouTube video appeared on something called SharkWatch. Tommy receives e-mail alerts from a dozen shark Web sites and is a subscriber to the Inter national Shark Attack File, a database in Florida that records and analyzes shark attacks around the world.

Tommy also tracks accounts of people feeling “sharky” or “predator-aware” just before being attacked or approached by a great white. He says that if he had the chance to
research things, he might concentrate on that. According to him, the warning prickle we get along the neck may be one of our oldest, most instinctive reactions. He tells the story—from
The Devil’s Teeth
, his favorite book—about an urchin diver named Joe Burke who was stalked by an enormous female great white off the Farallones. The female approached and showed aggressive interest, but what Burke later reported was a sense of cunning. The shark would disappear, then try to sneak up on Burke. Burke hid out against a pile of rocks on the bottom of the sea, but each time he left the rocks the shark reappeared. It unnerved Burke not only because this went on and on, but because the shark seemed to be enjoying it. Finally becoming nervous about his air supply, Burke climbed into his urchin basket and signaled to his partner on deck to haul him up. As he rose through the water, the shark circled, looking, so it seemed to Burke, for a way to ambush him. Burke felt connected to the shark in a prey-predator minuet, and it surprised him to discover that he knew where the shark was likely to appear an instant before she did.

I kissed Tommy’s forehead. He didn’t wake. My mom sat on a small chair next to the bed. The medical staff had taped a ventilator into Tommy’s mouth. The ventilator
made a small wheezing sound as it breathed with Tommy. I looked over at my mom.

What we both understood, I think, was that we would meet again like this. We knew it. The day would come when we would stand on either side of a hospital bed, Tommy between us, and that would be a different day. That would be a day without end, a day of losing Tommy, and the look that passed between us communicated that as surely as if we spoke it aloud. I watched my mom’s eyes fill and for a second I imagined what it must have been like when the doctors first delivered the news about Tommy. The world had to change the minute she learned he had CF, and she had watched the symptoms progress. And since then the world had never come back to level for my mom.

Our eyes stayed on one another’s for a ten count, then whatever had passed between us disappeared.

“Hungry?” my mother asked.

“Starving,” I said.

“So that was the famous Ty Barry?” Mom asked, a menu spread out in front of her. “He’s a handsome boy. And his brother is an absolute knockout. He’s movie star material. I’m sure you didn’t notice, though.”

I smiled. She smiled, too.

We sat in a diner somewhere north of Redwood City. It
was the first place we came to when we drove away from the hospital in her rental. According to the back of the menu, the owners of the diner had bought it from somewhere in Indiana and had it reset out in California. They had aimed for authenticity, but they had tried so hard to get all the details correct that it seemed phony in its accuracy. The diner’s name was Calamity Jane’s. It had a lot of air-conditioning.

“Ty Barry was the guy who was attacked by a great white,” I said. “He was on a surfboard.”

“Some kind of hero to Tommy. I know about him.”

She looked for the waitress, who was busy delivering food to another booth. Mom turned her attention back to the menu. She liked eating out. She always studied the menu, but never ordered anything exotic.

“Ty’s been terrific to Tommy,” I said. “He admires him. He’s not just stringing him along. He likes Tommy.”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Mom asked.

She caught the waitress’s eye and the frazzled waitress raised a finger to say one minute. A page of her order book hung outside the pocket of her apron and flapped whenever she moved quickly.

“Tommy doesn’t have any friends, Mom,” I said. “Kids his age just see a scrawny little egghead. They call him E.T. They don’t have the patience they need to get to know him.”

“He’s got some friends. He’s friends with Larry Feingold.”

“Larry’s a loser, Mom. He’s a Dungeons and Dragons geek. Tommy doesn’t even like playing with him. With Ty and Little Brew, Tommy feels like he belongs to a group. They call him Snow Pony.”

“Snow Pony?”

I decided I couldn’t quite explain it. I also knew Mom wasn’t going to see it my way, exactly. She was hungry and wanted the waitress and it annoyed her to have to wait. Things my mom didn’t want to look at closely had a way of glancing off her. Sometimes she reminded me of a snow-plow, sharp and pointed, with curls of snow on either side of her. She didn’t mean to ignore things around her, but she was too intent on driving ahead to see how she affected people. And right now she wanted to eat.

Finally the waitress came over and took our order. We split fries, as we usually did, and we each ordered a hamburger. Mom checked her cell phone. I sat and looked out the window. When she clicked the phone closed she turned to face me.

“I called Mr. Cotter,” she said. “He’s looking into whether the foundation can cover the hospital bills. If they can’t, we’re screwed.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said.

She let some air out of her lips and stared at me. Then she took the saltshaker and spilled a little salt onto the
table, and tried to make the shaker stand on its edge in the grains. It was tricky, but after a while she did it. She kept her eyes on the saltshaker when she spoke next.

“I know you don’t think I’m much of a mother,” she said and held up her hand before I could interrupt. “Don’t deny it, it’s okay. You think I’m overly interested in men and that I need men around me no matter what. I know what you and Tommy say about me. I’m not dumb or deaf.”

I didn’t answer. She looked at me quickly, then looked back at the saltshaker.

“I know,” she said. “And you’re right. Mostly you’re right. I do need men around. I always have. I don’t like it about myself. I know it’s destructive a lot of the time. On the other hand, you probably don’t keep track of things like I do, but I’ve gone years with no one around. When you were little, it was just you, me, and Tommy. Your father left as soon as he found out Tommy had CF. You don’t really know about those years, Bee.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “We don’t have to go into it all.”

“No,” she said, “you should know about things. About me.”

“I’m not judging you, Mom.”

“Sure you are,” she said, looking up again from the saltshaker. “Everyone judges people. That’s what humans do. It’s supposed to be a survival technique. We have to judge people to know if we can trust them and if we can count
on them to help us. It’s a tribal thing. At least, that’s what I read.”

I kept quiet. I didn’t want to interrupt her.

“Anyway, your dad leaves and I’m in a small New Hampshire town with two kids, one of them with CF and huge medical bills. That’s a lot to handle. If you work, then you have to find someone to take care of your kids. If you find decent child care, it eats up all your money, so, in the end, you’re working so a stranger stays at home with your children. Your grandparents—well, you know them. My father never cared for me. He just plain didn’t like me, really. He always thought I was trashy and maybe I was. He saw the breakup of my marriage as confirmation that he had been right about me. And my mother is a mouse and couldn’t squeak about boo. So, yes, I’ve probably been looking for some sort of daddy approval. I’ve read enough self-help books to know that.”