Lauren’s room was down a dim hallway that smelled musty no matter what the weather was like. The nurses nodded at them. Lauren’s skin was pale, her dark hair in a ponytail, her green eyes cloudy. Taking a seat, he read her a chapter of Harry Potter as Sam sat outside. After a while she came in, and he went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. When he came back, he saw that she’d fitted her iPod headphones over Lauren’s ears and was staring at her intently.
Lauren had always liked music. Her favorite song was “Here Comes the Sun,” and every time he heard it his eyes filled with tears.
If she liked what Sam played for her, she didn’t show it. The nurses nodded at them when they left.
On the drive home, they chatted a little. Curiously, when he parked in front of Sam’s house, they sometimes talked for five minutes or more, the girl suddenly bubbly, as if the fact that she’d soon be getting out of the car, or that their errand was over, relaxed her.
“So a couple summers ago Mr. Harad was giving out free passes to soccer teams?” she said today. “Like for ice cream cones or whatever? And these kids just started bringing in these old passes, saying they’d forgotten about them. So we had to give them all this free ice cream, tons and tons of it. But then he figured out the passes were fake.”
“He must’ve been mad,” Mike said.
“Steam was literally coming out of his ears,” Sam said. “He was screaming at these ten-year-olds, ‘You use computers to cheat! Computers are to learn!’ ”
“I wish,” Mike said drily.
“No kidding,” Sam said, then opened the door, got out, and waved at him exuberantly, even though they were only a few feet apart.
At home Diana was making Sunday brunch, which they ate while reading separate sections of the newspaper. She used to tell him about the day’s sermon, until she realized he wasn’t listening. He couldn’t help it; he just tuned out. She’d grown up in the Moravian church, whereas his childhood Sundays in Ohio were devoted to football games on TV. By now they had a truce on the subject. When he was finished clearing the plates and loading the dishwasher, he found Diana on the couch in the living room, not doing anything, just sitting. She was thin and dark haired, as was Lauren. She sewed quilts and gardened and coached Lauren’s old softball team — all that on top of working twenty hours a week in the school-board office.
She glanced up and saw him in the doorway. “Come here,” she said.
They sat together on the couch, Diana’s legs flung over his, her head against his shoulder. After a while he turned on the TV and they watched the end of a John Wayne movie. Diana fell asleep holding his hand.
Summers he generally spent fixing up the house, lucky to have learned these skills from his dad, a contractor. This year he was redoing the bathroom on the first floor. One day he and Diana were at Home Depot picking out fixtures when suddenly she grabbed him and pulled him into the next aisle, flattening him against a rack of lamps, pressing against him.
He could smell her shampoo and feel her hummingbird heartbeat against his chest. A chandelier dug into his back. “What are you doing?” he said, laughing.
She shushed him, lowering her face, and he put his arms around her, wondering if she was upset about the bathroom. But they’d planned the renovation even when they thought Lauren would soon be off to college; they needed it for when family came to visit. When Diana finally released him, her eyes were dry, her cheeks flushed. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s the Kents.”
Gazing over her shoulder, he saw Sam’s parents browsing through the lawn mowers. They were kind, smart people, both doctors. After the accident they’d come by regularly, bringing food and flowers, eyes soft with pity, but Diana had stopped returning their calls. “It just makes me feel worse,” she’d said. This was why he didn’t tell her that he took their daughter with him to the hospital every Sunday. It was the only secret he kept from her.
They hid in the lighting aisle until the Kents were gone.
The following Sunday, he picked Sam up again, read to Lauren, and drove Sam home. In front of her house, she said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“When I go away to college …” Her voice drifted off.
She had a scab on her right knee, like a younger child, and she’d been picking at it; it looked angry and infected, blood oozing out. If she were Lauren, he’d be on her case about it. He waited for her to go on.
She looked vacantly out the window and said, “Should I, like, write to Lauren?”
Gripping the steering wheel, he turned away. They’d never once talked about the accident or how they felt about it. It was what had made their Sundays so comfortable. When he spoke, he was surprised by how unsteady his voice was. “It’s up to you,” he said. Carefully, then, he brought his voice under control, adopting his teacher’s tone. “If it would make you feel good, then I don’t see why not. I could read the letters to her.”
She blew out a puff of air, spraying her bangs out to the side. “It’s just weird, like we said we’d keep in touch, so I feel like I should, but I don’t really think she can hear me. And even if she could, wouldn’t she be pissed? That I’m going to college and she’s not?”
“I don’t think she would,” Mike said. The truth was in the car between them: that Lauren didn’t have the faculty for anger, that college meant nothing to her now. The thought sank him. It was like going down in an elevator into a dark, cool basement so deep beneath the earth that you might forget you could ever come back up. Forget that you’d ever seen the sun. When he was in that place, Diana said he was unreachable. Lost. So far away, in fact, that he didn’t notice at first that Samantha was crying, sniffling bubbles of snot that she wiped away with the back of her hand. He wished Diana were here; she’d have handed her a tissue and given her a hug. He patted the girl’s shoulder awkwardly. “It’s okay,” he said.
“I feel like it’s all my fault,” the girl said.
“It’s not,” he said, then paused. “Right?”
The events leading up to the accident had always been mysterious. Sam, who’d been sitting in the back, was the only one who’d come out of it intact. The boy died at the scene. At first, the doctors said that Lauren would be all right, that they could relieve the pressure on her brain. Later, they’d changed their minds.
And now Samantha was next to him, her eyes wild and red, her chin trembling spastically. After the accident, she’d been so upset that no one had been able to get anything out of her. Later, she said she didn’t remember any of it. Sometimes Mike had wanted to shake the memory out of her. But he’d tried to let it go; knowing what had happened wouldn’t undo it.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s all right.”
She took a deep breath, then hiccuped. Not knowing what else to do, he took a card from his wallet — it was from a plumber they’d used last year — and wrote his cell phone number on the back. “You can call me anytime,” he said.
She took it gratefully, seeming relieved to have something to hold, and put it in her pocket, smiling at him through her sloppy bangs. “Thanks,” she said.
That week he worked on the bathroom, stripping out the tile and removing the old toilet and sink, and ferrying it all to the landfill. The summer was densely humid, and his sweaty clothes stuck to him. At night, his muscles ached. He was deep asleep on the following Friday when his phone rang. It took him a while to understand what was happening, and then to remove the mouth guard so he could speak. When he finally flipped the phone open, he heard only music, some pulsing dance beat.