“He cut you bad,” the cop replied, looking around for a place to sit. Richard was prepared to scream if he put his butt back on the bed. He didn’t. Condemned to stand, he went on, “The docs’ll tell you more, but the short of it is they got you stitched up, and you’ll be good as new pretty near. You don’t worry about that leg. You don’t worry about a thing. We got you covered.”
The policeman liked him. The belle of the policemen’s ball, Richard thought idiotically.
“You’ll be running track in no time,” Beef Cop said.
Richard nodded weakly and said, “Good.” And “Thanks.” He had no idea what he was thanking the cop for, but people liked to be thanked.
“Yep, the Mayo. The best there is,” the cop reiterated.
Richard needed to see who else was in the room, but, what with beaming Beef and the sheet factory, he couldn’t see more than three feet. The last thing he remembered was Dylan, bleeding, his neck twisted, but still breathing.
Crippled, Richard remembered. His neck looked broken.
“Dylan… ” he began.
“Your brother’s alive. At least for now,” the policeman cut in. His eyes reverted to their arctic shade of blue, and his cheeks went from flab to granite. He sounded pissed off, but he wasn’t pissed off at Richard. He was pissed off at Dylan.
“Excuse me.” Like a leaf on the first winds of winter, a cool voice blew the cop out of Richard’s line of sight. A woman in white replaced him, a nurse of forty or so. She, too, smiled at Richard, a real smile, the kind mothers save for favorite sons. “My name is Sara.”
Richard liked her voice. It was warm, like she thought he was okay. He tried to smile at her and failed.
“Your brother is fine,” she said kindly.
Fine. Going to be fine. Fine meant nothing. Fine was a cover-up, pabulum for kiddies.
The fear that had shortened his patience with the policeman jerked his jaws together and locked them.
“Is he crippled?” Richard demanded, nearly lisping through clenched teeth.
“No, no. Just a concussion,” the nurse assured him quickly. “He’s going to be just fine.” She reached out as if to pat him on the head, then snatched her hand back. Richard was pretty sure his teeth were bared, and he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have bitten her if she hadn’t pulled away.
Their “fine” was not his “fine.”
“Is he crippled?” he yelled, trying to sit up and barely succeeding in lifting his head. “His neck looked broken. Goddamn it, is he going to be a cripple?”
“Shh, shh,” the woman hissed, thinking snake sounds would comfort him. “Your brother has a concussion. He’s not crippled. I don’t know who told you that. Breathe now. You’re going to be fine.”
Now, he was going to be “fine.” She filled a hypodermic needle and squirted liquid out the end just like he’d seen in a hundred TV shows. Inserting the needle in a port of his IV tube, she squeezed the plunger a half an inch or so.
“Just fine,” she whispered.
Warm. Motherly.
But only for him. The way she’d said “your brother” told him that. Try as she might, she couldn’t entirely keep the loathing from her voice.
“You just worry about getting yourself well,” the nurse said as she pushed the plunger all the way in. “That brother of yours will be right as rain in a day or so. And don’t you worry; we’re going to take good care of you.”
Right as rain, white as snow, Richard thought, and wondered where the words came from. Drugs?
“This is going to put you to sleep,” the nice, motherly Sara was saying as she pulled out the hypodermic needle. “When you wake up again, we’ll have your leg all fixed up.”
“I’ll be right as rain?” Richard heard himself murmur.
The nurse smiled as if he were the cleverest boy in the world.
In the space of a night, maybe not even a night-he had no idea how much time had elapsed-the world had changed utterly. Richard hadn’t. They had. They, them, everybody else had.
Beef Cop edged the nurse out of his range of vision. “Son, was it you who hit your brother?” he asked.
Tears started again. “I hit him,” he said. “I had to.”
“Good kid.” The cop’s voice turned flinty. Richard imagined words striking sparks when he talked. “What did you hit him with? That axe? The neighbor girl… ”
Morphine, or Darvon, or whatever it was furred the edges of Richard’s tunneling vision. Through this black fuzzy sleeve he watched the cop pull a notebook from his coat pocket.
“Vondra Werner,” the policeman verified. “Vondra Werner said you spent most of the night with her.”
At first Richard didn’t see the ghost of a grin behind the cop’s words. Then he did, and he knew the man thought he was a hero.
Not just a survivor, but a hero.
“That’s enough,” Nurse Sara said. “Look at him, poor, poor, beautiful boy… ” was the last thing Richard heard.
3
Nothing was ever going to be right again, Dylan thought.
Except Rich. Rich didn’t die. He almost died, but he didn’t.
The first time Dylan saw him again was at the trial. It wasn’t held in Rochester because everybody there hated Dylan too much for it to be fair. They were trying him in a little town called Hammond about three hours away. He had to get up at five every morning so they could drive him there in time. The courthouse was small and looked like it was supposed to, with benches and a fence between the audience and the lawyers. Every day it was packed, mostly with newspaper and TV people.
Rich, looking like his old self with color in his skin and everything, his hair a little longer than their mom would have let him wear it and waving in that surfer-boy style he liked, was pushed down the aisle of the courtroom in a wheelchair. His leg was wrapped in so many bandages they’d had to cut open that side of his pants even though it was probably twenty below zero outside. He’d gotten skinnier.
Though Dylan knew Rich would spit on him, or ignore him like he was a bug, or scream he was a psycho, or worse, he didn’t look away. He kept watching the rolling chair. When it first came through the double doors, everybody got quiet. Then, as it got closer, flashbulbs started flashing and people started murmuring.
Rich was so cool-academy awards, the red carpet. He was smiling for the cameras but kind of sadlike. Dylan loved him more at that moment than he ever had. Nothing Rich had done in the past mattered. This was what mattered. The love hurt Dylan, it was so big.