She kicked her ankle out to shake him loose. Annie, he said, don’t.
Now she was starting to get scared. Her gaze drifted down from the blue deeps of the sky, across those farms, grain elevators, houses, streets, to the rain gutter and the paved walk down below. Mama had put the garbage out. The garbage cans shivered in the rising heat.
She thought of Bobby tumbling down there and carrying her with him.
She shook her foot again, harder.
One hand came loose. Bobby scrabbled against the shingled roof. She kicked again. Annie. Please don’t.
It was peculiar, it was maddening, how calm his voice still sounded.
Annie kicked to pry him loose, felt his hand separate from her ankle. She had turned her head away and when she looked back she caught the briefest glimpse of him as he disappeared over the edge, an expression of vast surprise on his face.
She scrambled down the bunk-bed ladder and looked over the edge of the balcony and saw Bobby on the paved walk beside the garbage cans. She looked for a long time, unable to make sense of what she saw. His head was broken open and some of what was inside had come out.
When Bobby left the hospital, he was back in diapers. Mama had to change him all the time.
Once, she shook a soiled cotton diaper in Annie’s face. “This is your fault,” Mama said.
Bobby’s head was curiously flat on one side and he didn’t talk, but whenever he saw Annie coming he curled away from her and closed his eyes.
Mama died a couple of years after that.
Annie had hoped to win back her father’s affection with a medical degree; but he died, too, while she was away at school.
She finished her degree anyhow. Bobby was institutionalized, and the estate was paying for everything, but that money wouldn’t last forever, and she would need a good income—a doctor’s income—to keep Bobby cared for.
Her residency was the hardest part. The sight of a head wound still made her dizzy.
When she took up the partnership with Matt Wheeler, he talked about his wife Celeste and how he had lost her. Annie never talked about Bobby. Bobby was a secret. It kept them apart, but Annie understood that this was what they both needed: something more than friendship, something less than love. Matt was guilty about loving someone after Celeste. And Annie… Annie wasn’t convinced she deserved to be loved.
The Travellers had stirred up these memories, but the Travellers had offered something in return: objectivity, as cool and cleansing as mountain water. The ability to forgive herself.
Annie forgave Annie, a quarter-century down the line.
But it wasn’t her own forgiveness she really craved.
Bobby tired himself out playing lawn tag, so they retreated to the shade of the patio at Wellborne. Annie brought out two glasses of lemonade from the staff cafeteria. The lemonade was tart and perfect. They sat on the steps, drinking it.
“We’re going on a trip,” Bobby said.
She thought he meant the Wellborne patients. “That’s nice,” she said. “To the seashore, Bobby?”
“No, I mean—us. We’re all going on a trip.”
“Oh. That trip. Yes.”
“Are you excited, Annie?”
“It’s not for some time yet, Bobby. A few months, anyhow.”
“They have to build the spaceship.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “I have a lot of growing up to do.”
“There’s no rush.”
“I got kind of… left behind.”
She wanted to say, “I’m sorry!”—but couldn’t find her voice.
“I’m getting stronger,” Bobby said. “Annie—look what I can do!”
A wooden railing ran all around the patio of the Wellborne building. Before she could say anything, Bobby had boosted himself onto the banister. He was clinging to the narrow timber with hands and feet… then he stood up, like a tightrope walker, balancing himself.
His hips stuck out in bony ridges from the loose jeans. His arms, thrown out for balance, were fragile as twigs.
A brisk wind could knock him down from there. She felt a surge of panic. “Bobby, stop it!”
“No, Annie, look\” He took two tentative steps. Proud of his balance. Proud of his new life.
“Bobby, you’ll hurt yourself!”
“No, I—”
But she was up without thinking about it, running to him, grabbing him around his painfully thin waist and lifting him down. He was lighter than she expected. He was as light as a nine-year-old.
“Annie, Annie, it’s okay!”
Bobby wrapped his skinny arms around her and pressed his misshapen head against her cheek.
“I know why you’re crying,” he whispered. Did he? Oh, God!
“That was all a long time ago,” Bobby said. “We were kids. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
And Annie cried in her brother’s arms as if she had tapped a reservoir of tears, a well of sorrow ancient and eager for the light.
Part Three
Indian Summer
Chapter 19
Annie and Bobby
Tom Kindle decided he would stay in Buchanan until the end of the World Series. After that… well, the horizon had an alluring look, these rainy autumn days.
Matt Wheeler didn’t appear to approve of the idea.
Kindle walked with him through the empty hallways of the regional hospital. Some of the overhead fluorescents had burned out; some flickered like candles in a cold wind. The building was increasingly spooky, in Kindle’s opinion. Nobody but Matt came around anymore.
“I’d be happier if you stayed,” Matt said.
Kindle didn’t answer. He was concentrating on the pleasure of locomotion. Christ in a basket, it was good to get out of that wheelchair! It was good to be walking under his own steam.
It hurt like hell, but it was good anyway.
Monday he’d made it halfway to the maternity wing and back; today, all the way to Maternity and far beyond, as far as the fabled corridors of Physiotherapy, where empty sitz baths gleamed like strange idols in dim green rooms.
He stumbled once. Matt took his arm. “Don’t overdo it.”
“No pain, no gain.”
“It was a bad break. At your age, you don’t heal as fast as you used to.”
“Thank you, Dr. Kildare.”
“You want me to lie?”
“Every once in a while it might be nice.”
A pause. Matt said, “You’re serious about leaving Buchanan?”
“Yes.” Kindle gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “Okay, now we turn around.”
They shuffled back through ancient odors of ether and antiseptic. Kindle wore his old jeans and a cotton workshirt. The doctor wore his hospital gown over a similar outfit. We don’t look all that different, Kindle thought. He caught their reflection in a rainy corridor window. Not doctor and patient. Just two guys who ought to shave more often. Two guys with similar worry lines. Different pain.
Matt said, “You have somewhere in particular to go?”
“It’s a big country… I haven’t seen it all.”
In fact, he was thinking about the Wind River Range, the Tetons, that area. He hadn’t seen Wyoming for about twenty-five years.
“What about the Committee?”
“I never signed on to salvage Buchanan. I barely lived here, you know, before Contact. The Committee’ll get on without me.”