Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,51

see her? he asks me after a minute.

—Is she going to die tonight.

Probably not, he says. But you never know. We have her stabilized. Her brain is mainly what we’re worried about, but it seems like her other organs were probably affected as well. You understand?

OK, I say.

—OK?

—I’ll see her.

Pinch.

Dr. Moscot leads me down a hallway and up a flight of stairs. Then he swipes his ID and walks through a set of fire doors and we walk down another hallway. I walk behind him. We don’t speak.

We come to a booth with two nurses in it and they are laughing. About what I don’t know.

We walk past them and Dr. Moscot pulls back a curtain and there is my mother asleep. She looks green. She looks yellow and green. My first thought is how strange it is to see her out of the house at all. It’s been years. My next is to wake her: it is what I do when I see her asleep, when I see her drunk and asleep.

Slowly I walk toward her, heel before toe, and I put one hand on her arm, avoiding the needle and tape. She is blanketed. Her baldness is exposed. Her rash stands out on her face, very red and irritated. One bluish glint of eyeball appears beneath her lashes. There is the honeybee on her arm. There, snaking over her shoulder, is the blue-inked cord of her electric guitar.

OK, I say. OK.

I’ll leave you for a while, says Dr. Moscot.

Nope, I say. I have to go.

—Where?

I look at him. It’s none of his business.

Do you have somebody to go home to? asks Dr. Moscot.

Yes, I say. I could tell him something more—I could make up a lie to make him feel better but I don’t. I don’t want him to feel better.

I start walking. I wipe my face on the sleeve of my jacket and leave a trail of snot on it.

Young man, says Dr. Moscot. We have—

But I’m gone before he can finish, I’m through the double doors.

Walking through the waiting room is hard. The grandmother looks up from her knitting and gives me a heartbroken look. I run. I’m out the door before anyone else can see me. It’s dark and cold outside and I rode here in the ambulance and now I don’t know how to get home so I start walking.

I’m not really sure what to do. Just let me think, I keep saying. I don’t want to go back to my house. I cannot bear the thought of sleeping in my own house without my mother there. I could call Trevor but I don’t want to because I suddenly hate him. I take out my phone and I go through all the numbers in it.

I stop when I get to Dee Marshall’s name. I haven’t talked to him since he started hating me after I left Yonkers. But he was my best friend for fourteen years. I call him without thinking. I don’t know why but it feels right to do this.

Dee Marshall doesn’t answer. I leave a silent message. Five seconds long. I say nothing and hang up.

It takes me half an hour to walk to my home which is no longer a home. I do not go inside. Instead I get into the car and back out of the driveway. All of this I do unseeingly and unthinkingly. I do not look both ways. But no one hits me. This I take as a sign of something.

When I am nervous before a game I have a trick that I do. It involves turning off my brain. It involves not letting myself be nervous by simply not thinking about what I’m nervous about. I do this now. I turn off the pain by not letting myself give in to it. I drive toward the Saw Mill. And go up it. As if I am going to school.

Just let me think a minute.

Do not come in. Call police.

The horrible wrongness. The wrongness of doing something like that to me.

I put on 1050 AM and listen to Charlie Rasco.

Lawrence Tynes kicked an overtime field goal to lift the Giants over the Falcons yesterday. After the clock ran out on the first quarter, the Knicks’ Nate Robinson jokingly shot a three-pointer for the Nets which his coach was not happy about. And callers are not happy about.

When I get to school I pull into the parking lot. It is a comfort to me to see the