Collecting Cooper

chapter forty-four

His mother used to tell him only girls cried, and when he went down to the basement and came back with tears on his face that’s what made him a girl. He never thought so. He always thought it was what those two orderlies did to him sometimes when they stripped him naked that made him a girl, or they thought of him as a girl, he isn’t sure exactly which. But right now he is crying. He’s pulled the car off the road well away from Tate’s neighborhood and he’s holding his hands tightly on his leg and there are tears streaming from his face. He cries not only from the pain but from the frustration. Nothing is working out. He always has to fight for everything in his stupid life and this is going to be no different. Why can’t things just come easily to him like they do to everybody else?

Why can’t people just like him?

His hands are covered in blood. There isn’t anything in the car he can wrap around the wound, and if he takes his pants off to use he would be almost naked. His leg is itchy and too tender to scratch. He lowers his head and stares at the hole, tears dripping into his blood, and he imagines he’s back in his room at the Grove and he’s pacing the room, counting the footsteps, preferring the even footsteps over the odds, starting with his left and finishing with his right. Then he thinks about the cats, the boys who pissed on him and beat him, then he imagines putting them in the ground and digging them back up, ending their lives the same way they ruined his.

His tears start to slow, and the pressure in his chest from sobbing begins to ease. Strings of snot dangle from his nose and he wipes them with his hands, forgetting about the blood for a second until it streaks across his face. He begins to cry again. Life isn’t fair. It never has been. It never will be.

His leg hurts but it’s not bleeding as much now. His pants are completely soaked in blood. He can’t stay on the side of the road all night. He wipes his hands dry on the passenger seat, starts the engine and drives slowly, but not too slow, not wanting to attract the kind of attention that will get him pulled over. Blood has pooled into his shoe and makes a sucking sound when he presses on the accelerator. The wound is bad, but he knows if it were that bad he’d have passed out or died from loss of blood. He has no idea how to treat the wound or take care of it. In the past, cuts that were bad were bandaged for him by one of the nurses or his mother, and since leaving the Grove he’s never needed a doctor or a nurse to take a look at anything. What he needs is his mother, either one of them, but one’s dead and so is the other and he has never felt their loss as much as he feels it now. He truly is alone with nobody to care for him, he’s out of mothers, out of old people, his best friend left him for a girl that isn’t even real, and those at the halfway house never warmed to him the same way ninety-nine percent of everybody else never warms to him.

Including Cooper.

Friendship is such a simple thing for others, but not for him. And he’s being naïve if he thinks Cooper really wants to be his friend. Although Cooper was right about the police.

He begins driving, heading back home, unsure if Cooper will help him, trying desperately to think of another option. Each turn is painful as he switches from accelerator to brake. There aren’t many people on the streets, not in the suburbs. People don’t go out much at night. He learned not to. At night the last place he ever wanted to be was outside the walls of the halfway house.

He could go to the hospital. He couldn’t go in, but he could get one of the nurses coming out to help him. She wouldn’t want to at first, but he would make her do it. He could hold a gun to her head and she wouldn’t say no. The problem is somebody might see him. The hospital is a public place.

What then?

“Why couldn’t you have helped me?” he says, talking to his second mother. If she had helped him in the beginning, none of this would have happened.

He pulls over and stops the car, thinking, thinking, the only person who would help him is somebody who doesn’t know him already, somebody who hasn’t formed an opinion.