“Maybe that’s my plan.”
She left them off. “What’d the CT scan show?”
“I told you.”
“I mean really.”
“Doctor won’t tell me. He says he wants to wait for my parents to get here.”
“Oh,” Sam said, looking down.
“Maybe it’s just routine, the way they do things in this place.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so.”
Sam started flipping through the textbook. “I think we should try to get some work done.”
“Where’s your iPad?”
“Stolen.”
“Get out.”
“At the game last night. See what happens when I come to watch you play?”
“Guess I owe you a new one.”
She hadn’t told her parents yet. No reason to worry them about it since there was no money with which to buy a new one right now anyway. The thing was practically new, six months old at most. Maybe they’d taken out some kind of warranty on it or something. But what warranty included theft? And how much medical weed did they need to grow to buy a replacement?
A lot, Sam figured.
“What kind of kid steals an iPad?” Alex was saying. “Everyone’s got a tablet of their own.”
“It wasn’t a kid,” Sam told him. “And stop stalling.”
“Stalling?”
“So you won’t have to work. The doctor gives you a clean bill of health, only you get benched for being academically ineligible.”
“Yeah, that would suck, but I can’t help it if I’m stupid.”
“You’re not stupid.”
Alex looked down, then up again. “My parents think I am.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? Then why do they want me to do another year of high school?”
“Do they?”
He turned toward the window, as if seeing something beyond it Sam couldn’t. “I haven’t really discussed it with them.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I found brochures for a whole bunch of schools. My mother told me I’m not ready for college yet, at least not the kind she wants me to go to.”
Sam hesitated. “I thought you said you didn’t talk about it.”
“It was last night in the emergency room. I shouldn’t have brought it up, but I did.” Alex’s eyes turned almost shy. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“No.”
“The truth, Sam.”
“No. N-O.”
“If I’m not stupid, why do you need to spell it?”
“Stop it, Alex.”
“What?”
“That.”
“What?”
Sam picked up the physics textbook and smacked Alex in the arm with it.
“Ouch.” He grimaced.
“That didn’t hurt.”
“How do you know? It’s not your arm.”
“Because it’s solid muscle. I think you broke the book,” she said, laying it back down on the bed.
“As opposed to opening it, you mean.” Alex winked. “And that’s physically impossible.
“Very funny.”
“I thought so. So you were at the game last night,” he said, his tone changing a bit.
“Cara scored me a front-row seat,” Sam told him, leaving it there.
“That ended up costing you—what?—five hundred bucks?” Alex asked, with a gleam in his eyes.
“Something like that.”
“I’ll buy you a new one with my signing bonus once I get drafted. Of course, that’s a few years off.” Alex propped himself up in bed, frowning. “Can I ask you a question?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Not about school stuff. You ever do something and not remember doing it?”
“All the time. Like putting the milk back in the fridge and then rushing back downstairs thinking I left it on the counter.”
“I’m talking about more than that. Say, drawing. Like in a sketchbook. Pictures of things you’ve never seen before.”
Sam smiled, but stopped just short of chuckling. “That’s called imagination.”
“What if you don’t remember drawing them?”
“You draw?”
“I didn’t say that. Never mind,” Alex said, clearly flustered.
Then a stabbing pain bit into the center of his skull and left him wincing. He thought he might be slipping into one of his daydreams where he’d wake up with ink staining his fingers, but his head just kept throbbing.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked him.
“I told you my head hurts.”
“I thought you were lying. We’ll pick this up later.”
“No, you’re here,” he groused. “Let’s just get it done.”
He’d slept fitfully the night before, his first ever spent in a hospital. His parents had stayed until he began to nod off but once they left, the hospital sounds and a dull light flickering in the hallway kept him from ever really fading out. And each time he managed to slip off, his sleep was marred by strange dreams that were more like movies unspooling in his mind. Visions of being chased by something that remained at the edge of his consciousness. And once when he woke up, with a jolt that rattled his spine and brought fresh pain back to his skull, a shape stood in the doorway.
It was the tall man, looming so big that the top of his head stretched beyond the frame, his sallow face bathed in inky black splotches from the hallway’s irregular lighting.
Alex had closed his eyes and then opened them again.
Nothing but hallway loomed beyond. The tall man dressed all in black was gone.
At his bedside now, Sam was still flipping the textbook’s pages in search of the right chapter. He found himself viewing her differently again, seeing more than just the glasses and perpetually overstuffed backpack. Samantha looked kind of like an athlete, even though she had given up gymnastics years ago. Shapely, with enormous hazel eyes and a head full of unruly brown hair she let wander every which way it wanted. Never wore makeup but looked great in the jeans she had on today, though her big-framed, tortoiseshell glasses kind of hid her warm, friendly eyes.
“Why don’t you get contacts?” Alex asked her suddenly.
“Stigmatism. And I tried. Couldn’t get used to them. Don’t you remember I told you that?”
“When?”
“The last time you asked.”
“Hey, you gotta cut me a break.” He tapped the side of his head. “Got my bell rung, remember? Who knows what damage has been done.”
“Just wait for the CT scan results.”
“I had a CT scan?” Alex posed playfully. “I must’ve forgotten.”
13
DR. PAYNE
“WHAT TIME ARE YOU supposed to be up at Ames?”
“How do you know I’m due there at all?”
“Because it’s Saturday. You always work there on Saturdays. I don’t want to keep you from your job.”
“It’s only a job if they pay you.”
“Like tutoring me?”
“I’m underpaid, believe me.”
“You could always quit.”
“Not until I get you through the state championship,” Sam followed.
“Cara offered to tutor me, you know. She said it would be a good opportunity to spend more time together.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“That I wanted to pass my classes.” Alex narrowed his gaze. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
“Nothing.”
“Then stop looking away. You always look away when there’s something you don’t want to tell me.”
Sam swallowed hard. “Like you do when we get to a subject you don’t like?”
Alex propped himself up further, wincing from the sudden burst of pain in his head. “Test me. Go ahead, I dare you.… Wait, tell you what. You ask me a question. I answer it right, and we call it a day. Deal?”
“Deal.” Sam leaned in closer to him. “What causes a spa
rk?”
“Ha-ha! When a negative charge plows into a positive charge. Boom! Nailed it!”
Sam closed the physics book. “Yes, you did.”
“Hey, don’t sound so happy about me getting an answer right. Tell you what. I’m supposed to get out of here in a couple hours. Come over tonight and we’ll pick up then,” Alex told her. “Like around eight. Deal?”
“Deal.”
And that’s when the gray-haired doctor entered the room, looking grim and dour. Sam read his name tag: LOUIS PAYNE, MD.
A doctor named “Payne”? Really? thought Sam.
“We need to talk, Alex,” Dr. Payne said. And then, with a sidelong glance cast toward Sam, “Alone.”
14
HOME SWEET HOME
“ALEX IS ANGRY WITH us,” An Chin said, facing Li across the kitchen table.
“We should have discussed prep school with him before,” her husband said, sighing.
“We decided to wait until after football season, remember?”
Li shrugged. “A mistake now. Clearly.”
“Prep school is not a mistake.”
“But him finding those brochures—what would you call that?”
“We were only exploring options.”
“It’s Alex’s life.”
“And he’s our son. Is it so wrong,” An demanded, “to want what’s best for him?”
“Only if he embraces it, only if we make the decision together, with him instead of for him.” Li Chin reached out and took An’s hand in his. “And that’s not the only thing we haven’t told him.”
An Chin looked away.
“We need to tell him,” Li Chin said, cradling his wife’s hand in both of his.
“No,” she said, stiffening, staring down at the table as if her eyes might bore through it.
“There is a time and place for everything. It has come.”
“No!”
“We must learn our lesson. All this with the boarding schools—it’s a sign. We can no longer hold back the truth from him.”
“He’s better off not knowing,” she asserted.
“You mean, you are better off, my love.”
Li Chin gazed at the sealed cigarette pack sitting just to his right. Old habits died hard. He hadn’t smoked since the day Alex became theirs. This pack of Marlboros was the very last one he’d bought, but never opened. He’d abandoned the habit as a gesture of thanks and goodwill to the higher powers he didn’t necessarily believe in but respected all the same. He was a practical man, subscribing to the old Chinese proverb that to believe in one’s dreams is to spend all of one’s life asleep. Alex was his excuse to abandon the cursed habit. As a ritual, though, every time tension rose between him and his beloved An, Li Chin would lay the old unopened pack, smelling musty and stale even through the plastic, nearby, as if to defy temptation.
“He deserves the truth, my love,” Li said, stroking his wife’s hand now.
“He’ll never understand.”
An’s car keys, as always, rested on the kitchen table before an empty chair no one ever used; it was just the three of them, after all. She’d made a habit of resting them there so she’d always know where they were, after misplacing them time and time again. Looped through the ring was a tiny wooden statue of Meng Po, the ancient Chinese goddess who brought light to darkness.
Keep it close always, to bring you the light, her father had told her before she left China for the last time. She’d never seen him again.
He had carved the statue himself and drilled a small hole at its top so it could be placed on a key chain. It had been his final gift to her and hugging him with the statue squeezed in her hand was her final memory of him.
One last thing, he’d told her when they finally eased apart. This Meng Po is also the guardian of secrets.
So Li had his pack of cigarettes, An had Meng Po, and every time stress brought them to this very table, they reached out to take their respective talismans in hand in the hope the objects might provide reassurance where words had failed.
“He’s an adult now,” Li persisted, squeezing his ancient pack of cigarettes so hard the plastic crackled. “He deserves—”
“Don’t tell me what he deserves!” An laid Meng Po back on the table, her various keys jangling against each other. “It’s just … well, it’s too soon.”
Li looked at the sealed pack of Marlboros, then back at An. “It’s been eighteen years.”
“You want us to tell him the whole truth?” she said to Li, stroking what remained of the tiny statue’s battered finish with her thumb, almost affectionately. It had been chipped and marred by too many key scrapes when the chain was stuffed in a pocket or purse. Much the worse for wear now, its once smooth wood no more than a memory, just as her father was. “That he’s not really ours?”
Li closed his hand over the pack of cigarettes and drew it toward him.
“That his papers were forged by the same people who create fake documents for Chinese who sneak into the country illegally,” An continued. “That buying the adoption documents that made him ours cost our entire savings at the time, and that we’ve lived in fear of being blackmailed or having the authorities uncover the fact that we never adopted Alex legally.”
“I fear that phone call, I fear that knock on the door as much as you,” Li said, coming up just short of tearing the cellophane from the old pack of Marlboros. “But I don’t fear telling Alex the truth while that truth is still ours to control. He must hear it from us, my love.”
“You mean as opposed to a phone call or a knock on the door?”
And before Li Chin could answer An’s question, their front doorbell rang.
15
ARTIFACTS
“IS THIS ABOUT THE CT scan?” Alex asked Dr. Payne after Sam had left.
“I’m afraid it was inconclusive,” the doctor told him, not sounding very convincing. “Too much swelling to get a definitive diagnosis.”
“So I need to get another one.”
“Standard procedure.”
“Like you not telling me something. Is that standard procedure too?”
Payne sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We should wait for your parents.”
“I’m eighteen. That makes me an adult and means we don’t have to wait for anything.”
“I still think we should wait for them.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Payne nodded grudgingly. “The CT scan showed a shadow.”
* * *
“A shadow,” Alex repeated, wishing in that moment he’d listened to the doctor and waited for his parents. Big tough football player feeling like a little boy again. “What’s that mean?”
“Maybe nothing.”
“Maybe…”
“Probably. We just need to make sure.”
“Am I going to play football again?” Alex heard himself ask Payne, as if somebody else were posing the question. “Just tell me that.”
Payne shrugged, the gesture abandoned in mid-effort. “Let’s wait and see what the second scan shows. Try not to worry until then.”
Right, Alex thought, good luck with that.
* * *
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Alex eased himself onto the CT scanner’s table, the cold metal’s chill slipping right through his hospital johnny. Knowing the drill now, he made himself as comfortable as possible and waited for the technician to slide the table robotically forward into position.
“You ready, Alex?” a voice called over a speaker.
Alex nodded. The nurse had backed behind a screen, no longer visible. He realized the technician might not be able to see him.
“Ready!” he called.
“Okay, here we go.”
And the table began to move, positioning his head directly beneath the X-ray tube and over the detector panel. Alex watched the lights in the room dim and closed his eyes, trying to keep his breathing steady.
“Try to relax, Alex. Just breathe normally.?
??
Is it that obvious how nervous I am? Alex would’ve asked if he’d been allowed to talk.
“Time to get started,” the technician announced, and the irregular whirring sound began.
Alex closed his eyes as the machine began its work. He wished he had a happy place to go to in his mind, but he’d never needed one before and the only thing he could think of was the football field, which hadn’t proven to be so happy the night before. Think of that and all he could picture was the bone-crunching impact that had put him here.
“Stay still, Alex.”
He hadn’t realized he was moving.
“Stay still. Take a deep breath and hold it.”
Alex obliged as the table started to move through the scanner, accompanied by a humming sound that seemed to make the inside of his head feel warm. It stopped and he let his breath out before taking and holding another to avoid “artifacts” on the images, as a different technician had explained during his initial CT scan. This one would probably take about ten minutes, just like that one had. Only, he felt different this time, something fluttering inside his head as if a bird were trapped there flapping its wings.
“Seku nura fas turadi.”
“Please don’t talk.”
“Seku nura fas turadi.”
That indecipherable language again, sounding like it was coming from someone else when Alex knew it was coming from him. And then the room was suddenly filled with the machines from Alex’s daydreams, moving this way and that. But this time he was wide awake, as the horde seemed to spot him and glide over en masse.
“Can you see them?” he cried out.
“Please, keep still. We’re almost finished.”
“Can you see them?”
“See what?”
How could the guy not see them? The machines were everywhere!
“Bassa, bassa, bassa—”
“Alex!”
“—bassa!”
The bulbs lining the scanner’s internal chamber burned out in a rapid series of pops and crackles that sounded like misfiring firecrackers. The stench of scorched metal flooded Alex’s nostrils and he opened his eyes to the sight of glass spraying in all directions.
“Alex!”
He felt as if his brain were outside his head, roasting. He remembered hearing at some point that the brain itself didn’t feel pain. Well, it certainly felt heat, and Alex realized he couldn’t move. Again. Just like last night on the field. Same, exact sensation that had stolen most of his breath and the rest of it now.