Then there were the moments with Penny, the two of them suspended like water vapor in some strange atmosphere. Then Penny said, “Listen, I’m going,” and Hobby decided to stay, and everything went black.
As he was regaining consciousness, he’d had some thoughts. He’d been aware that the world he was returning to didn’t have Penny in it. And he was aware of another shadowy presence that he wanted to grasp, hold on to.
Claire’s baby. His baby.
The nine days in a coma scared Hobby only now, in retrospect. He’d asked a couple of the doctors at Mass General if a person in a coma was technically dead or technically alive.
“Neither, really,” the doctor said. “You’re in a third state. The state that we call a coma.”
Another doctor said, “A coma is when your body is alive, but your brain is unresponsive.”
“So your brain is dead,” Hobby said.
“I didn’t say ‘dead,’ ” the second doctor corrected him. “I said ‘unresponsive.’ ”
What Hobby believed was that he had been partially dead for nine days. And then magically, miraculously, blessedly, he had returned to life. His mother had been sitting there. He remembered her face upon seeing him open his eyes-man, her face alone had made coming back to life worthwhile. He saw that he had made the right decision in letting Penny go by herself. His mother needed him more.
Claire had been at the hospital that day too, though it had taken a while for anyone to tell Hobby that. When he first returned (this was Hobby’s term; his mother preferred to say “woke up”), he saw his mother first, and then a whole slew of doctors and nurses came in to grin and gawk at him and announce that they had seen a miracle that day and praise the Lord, the boy was okay, they were just going to do some tests and did he know his name and did he know who this woman was and could he name the President of the United States?
When he croaked out “Barack Obama,” the whole room practically burst into the Hallelujah chorus.
They took his temperature and his blood pressure, and it was only then that Hobby realized he was in a shitload of pain. Pretty much all over his body. It felt like he’d been sacked forty times by that monster lineman from Blue Hills. He said, “Mom? I hurt.”
There was talk of upping his morphine, and seconds later the pain subsided, that was fine, his mother was still crying, that was fine, but Hobby sensed that he had a lot of other business to deal with, he felt jammed up, like he had a paper to write and a chemistry test to study for and nine innings of baseball to pitch before nightfall.
He said, “Mom?”
Suddenly the room cleared of nurses and doctors. Only his mother was left, and she was laying ice chips on his lips. The cold wet was like heaven. He was so thirsty.
His mother said, “You have some broken bones.”
He wanted to ask if he was paralyzed, but he couldn’t form the word; it had too many syllables. He tried moving his right hand, his throwing hand, and his right foot, and both of those worked, so he figured he wasn’t paralyzed. Nothing on his left side moved, but people didn’t get paralyzed that way, did they? Side-to-side?
His mother said, “Your clavicle, three ribs, your left radius, your left femur…”
Oh Jesus, his femur. His eyes fluttered closed, and he felt his mother’s icy fingertips on his forehead, brushing back his hair. She said, “Do you remember what happened, Hob?”
“Accident.”
There was a long pause. He opened his eyes to see if he was correct about the accident, though of course he was correct, he hadn’t broken all those bones in his sleep. His mother’s face was blurry. She was crying, that was the problem. She had her lips pressed together, and tears were streaming down her face.
She said, “I have something to tell you.”
He didn’t want her to say it. He wanted to stay in this not-knowing-for-sure state for a little while longer. He wanted to stay in the jubilant condition of newly-arrived-back-on-Planet-Earth-from-who-knew-where-the-fuck-he’d-been. But Zoe had shored herself up to say it, so she was going to say it: “Penny is dead.”
He nodded. It hurt to nod. His head hurt. It felt like a cracked egg. “I know,” he said.
“You know?” Zoe said. “How could you possibly know?”
“I saw her,” Hobby said.
“You saw her?” Zoe said. She was looming over him, the cup of ice chips rattling in her hand like dice. “You saw… what? Her neck snap? She broke her neck.”
Hobby shook his head, but gingerly, gingerly. How the hell could he explain this to his mother? “I saw her. She said, ‘Listen, I’m going.’ ”
“Going where? Leaving the party, you mean?”
Hobby shook his head again. He’d have to tell her later. But her mention of “the party” had brought something else to mind. “Claire,” he said.
“Claire,” Zoe said. “Sweet Jesus, I nearly forgot! Claire is here! She’s here at the hospital! I can send her in. Do you want me to send her in? Are you up for it?”
“Yes,” he said.
When he saw Claire, he knew she hadn’t done it. He knew this not from how her body looked-it was still too soon for that-but from the expression on her face. The unadulterated joy. And something else: a collusion. They had a secret, they still had it, thank God, thank God! If Hobby had had the energy, he would have burst into his own Hallelujah chorus.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said back.
He reached for her with his right hand, and without saying a word, she pressed it to her belly.
Life, he thought. Thank God.
The hospital, his return, his homecoming to Nantucket, so many well-wishers, enough to fill a stadium-all of those were fine. But there were many other things that followed that were not fine.
Penny’s funeral. Hobby went off his pain medication for a few hours because it was the funeral of his twin sister, and he wanted to be cogent for it; he wanted to remember every detail so he could tell her about it later. Hobby wasn’t a particularly spiritual person-his mother had never been big on church, and he certainly wasn’t mystical-but he felt very strongly that he would see Penny again, in the whatever-came-after. Their conversation wasn’t over. It couldn’t be over. She was his sister. She was his twin. When he died, and he hoped that would not be until seventy or eighty years in the future, she would be on the other side waiting for him. And he would tell her about everything. All that she had missed.
The funeral was sad, and Hobby was in pain, and he cried along with the rest of the people in the packed and stifling church. He cried for his mother. He had done the right thing, absolutely, in staying alive, because his mother couldn’t have sustained the loss of both of them. She was strong for the funeral, or sort of strong, but she was weird. She wouldn’t let Hobby speak, she wouldn’t let Jake speak. She couldn’t bear it, she said. Hobby protested, and she said, “Maybe I’m not being clear, Hobson. If I have to listen to you speak about your sister, I will break. The same goes for Jake Randolph. I’m keeping this service simple.”
Hobby saw his coaches at the funeral, and his teammates and the fathers of his teammates. They had all come for his sake, he knew, and not because they felt any deep connection to Penny. (Although she had diligently kept the stats on his basketball games at the Boys & Girls Club-had he ever thanked her for that? Probably not, dammit. He would have to do that later too.) Hobby accepted rushed, manly hugs from these men, but he saw the look in their eyes. His body was broken: he had sixteen fractures in all. His future career as a quarterback or a shooting guard or a pitcher was over. He would walk again, he would run, he would throw, but the 24-karat-gold caliber of his playing was gone forever.