“Where are your parents?” I asked.
“It’s only my mom and I don’t know where she is.” His voice cracked on the last word, and then he started talking fast, the words tumbling out of his mouth like a spill of stones. “She was the lucky caller on Q102, and we got to come here, and go to a movie premiere and meet the stars. She said she was going down to a party by the pool for just one drink, and that I should stay in my bed and she’d be back by nine, and then it was nine and she wasn’t back and I climbed up to see if I could see her and I slipped . . .” His voice broke again, and he turned his face away, looking furious, scrubbing at his eyes with his good hand, first one and then the other, so hard that it had to sting. “Go away,” he said, and it sounded like he was still crying. “Just leave me alone.”
Instead of leaving I looked out the window, but all I could see was the dark. No ambulances with their lights flashing, no people coming in all bloody, like the man I’d seen two nights ago who had cut his hand when he was slicing a bagel. Alice had giggled a lot when I’d told her that one, probably because, we’d decided, bagel was just a funny-sounding word.
“I’m Rachel Blum,” I said. “It’s spelled B-L-U-M, but it’s bloom like flowers, not blum like plum.” When he didn’t smile or even look at me, I said, “I’m eight, too.”
“I’m almost nine. I’ll be nine in two weeks,” he said.
“Where are you from?”
“Philadelphia,” he said . . . and then, after a minute, “The lady told me I’ll probably need an X-ray.”
“X-rays don’t hurt,” I said.
“I know that,” he said, and looked away again. I could see goose bumps on his arms, underneath the short sleeves of his shirt.
“Do you want to borrow my blanket? My nana made it herself. She knits.” Before he could tell me no, I pulled my blanket off my lap, looked around, then sneaked out of my chair to spread it on his lap.
“Thanks.”
“Are you hungry?” I handed him one of the little doughnuts, and he took a bite—just to be polite, I thought. I was running out of things to talk about or ask about, so I picked up
my bear.
“Hello, Andrew!” I said, in the silly voice I had used for all my stuffed animals when I was a little kid, five or six, and I liked to pretend that they could talk. Sometimes if there were little kids in the playroom I would do it for them, make the stuffed bears and owls and rabbits pretend to meet each other, or go to the first day of school, or get in fights.
He didn’t smile, but he did ask, “What’s his name?”
I had decided that the bear was a girl and named her Penelope, but didn’t want to say so. “He doesn’t have a name yet.”
Andrew turned the bear over, inspecting its tag. “It says Darwin.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to call him that. You can change it. You can keep him if you want to.”
“Really?”
“I have a bazillion stuffed animals. My dad brings one every day. I think they sell them in the gift store. All the dads bring them. My mom says it’s because it’s convenient.”
Andrew looked at his lap. “My dad is dead.”
I had no idea what to say to that. We sat together silently for a few minutes as Dallas gave way to the eleven o’clock news and the man in the hat punctuated the report of an unsolved murder in Little Havana with his groans.
The boy looked at my incision. You could just see the very top of it underneath the collar of my pajama top. “Does it hurt?” he asked.
“It did, a lot, at the beginning.” Every time I’d coughed, every time I’d moved, the pain had rolled through me, like something big with lots of sharp teeth was trying to bite through my chest. I was trying hard not to think about how bad it had been, and, if I needed another operation, how bad it would be again. “It’s okay now,” I told him. “The worst part is that my parents worry. My mom cries when she thinks I’m sleeping. She thinks I’m going to die. My dad just brings me presents and barely even talks to me at all.” I touched my scar, feeling the edges of the tape with my fingertips, the bumps of the stitches underneath. “Everyone in my school thinks I’m weird. I have to stay home a lot, or else I’m in the hospital, and when I come back the teachers make a big deal, and everyone stares at me like I’m . . .”
I wasn’t sure the boy was listening, but he said, “Like you’re what?”
“Like I’m broken. Like I’m a busted toy, or a bike with flat tires. Nobody wants to play with me at recess. At lunch, we eat at our tables, so I don’t sit by myself, but at recess they all play Four Square or Princesses and Ninjas, or Red Rover, and no one ever wants me in their game.” I didn’t tell him the worst part, which was that sometimes I thought that I was broken, too, and that maybe I’d never get better. I’d just keep coming to the hospital and coming to the hospital and finally they wouldn’t be able to fix me anymore and I would die.