Fortunate Son

15

Thomas awoke in a hospital room breathing in mild alcohol vapors and other medicinal scents. He tried to remember what had happened, why he was there, but it didn’t come immediately. His back hurt. That brought on the memory of being shot.

Who shot me? The police? No, that was a long time ago and in the front not the back.

There was a spider tentatively making its way up the eggshell-colored nylon curtain next to the window. Thomas smiled, feeling akin to the gangly arachnid trying to survive in a place where cleanliness meant her demise.

“Are you awake?” a woman’s voice asked.

Thomas looked up and saw that it was Ahn. For some reason this didn’t surprise him.

“Hi,” Thomas said.

“How are you?” she asked.

She put her knitting down and sat forward in the chair, touching the edge of the mattress with her fingertips.

“I’m okay, Ahn,” Thomas said.

The ageless Vietnamese woman frowned and tilted her head. She looked closely at the weathered, battered, and scarred face. Then she drew back in frightened surprise.

“Tommy?”

“Yeah.” The solitary word floated on the music of a lifelong apology.

“What’s happened to you?” Fear and guilt clouded her usually impassive face.

“Life, I guess.”

Thomas could see this life imagined in her eyes — the knife wounds and roofless nights, broken bones and empty pockets. Ahn suffered for him.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t cry, Ahn. It’s not so bad. I’m alive.”

The little woman got to her feet and touched his callused hands, hands that were so big compared to his body that they seemed swollen.

“What happened?” Thomas asked.

“You were shot,” she said. “You saved Mona, but that boy shot you in the back trying to kill her.”

“That was the little girl?”

“Yes. The police came and killed him before he could finish killing you.”

It was as if she were talking about some story in a book or on Madeline’s TV, something far away from Thomas.

“And there was a woman?” he half-asked.

“Mona’s mother, Christie,” Ahn said solemnly. “She died on the way to the hospital.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “He took my cart and shoved it into the door. I tried to stop him.”

“You saved Mona, Tommy. Oh, Tommy, look at you.”

“Where’s Eric?”

“He’s getting ready for the funeral. It’s tomorrow. Dr. Nolan went with him. They asked me to come here and see about you. But, but they didn’t know who you were. They said your name was Bruno.”

“Why did you tell me not to call?” Thomas asked. The question had been in his heart for years. Just asking made him feel better.

Ahn couldn’t answer right away. Her eyes filled up, and she slumped into her chair.

Thomas’s back hurt and his breathing was shallow. He wanted to get up and comfort his old nurse but didn’t have the strength.

“It’s okay, Ahn. I’m here now.”

“But you are so hurt. Your hands and face. Your chest. How can all this happen to a child?”

Thomas found that he could still shrug if he didn’t pull his shoulders too high.

“I thought,” Ahn said. “I thought that if you came back home something bad would happen to you, like your mother. Maybe you get sick. I don’t know.”

“Because of Eric?”

Ahn nodded.

“Eric can’t hurt me, Ahn. He’s my brother. He always saved me.”

There was sunlight shining in through the window. Thomas realized that it didn’t hurt his eyes. He smiled then and so did Ahn.

“I forgot you,” she confessed.

“I never forgot you.”

Thomas slipped into a coma that evening. Dr. Nolan and Eric came to the hospital when Ahn told them who he was. They stood over his frail body.

“He looks so peaceful,” Eric said. “Just like he was taking a nap.”

“There’s less than a ten percent chance that he’ll revive,” said Dr. Bettye Freeling, the physician in charge of the ward.

“He might surprise you,” Minas Nolan told her. “He’s got something in him that won’t let go. He might be the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

“Do you know his family?” Freeling asked. She was a younger doctor, handsome. “I see that he’s uninsured.”

“I’ll pay for him, Doctor,” Minas said. “I owe him at least that.”

Michael and Raela came to Christie’s funeral. Michael wore a medium-brown suit because that’s all he owned. Raela wore an elegant black dress, flat black shoes, and a tasteful ebony tam, and carried a small black purse. When she touched Eric’s forearm in sympathy, there was a loud and painful crackle of static electricity.

By then everyone knew about the tryst between Drew and Christie. Drew had told his father about the affair in their brief conversation before he stole the Luger. And the doorman of the Tennyson saw them coming in late at night and watched them groping each other through the video eye in the elevator.

Almost everyone felt sorry for Eric. He was a poor cuckold, an innocent bystander. He grieved for his dead girlfriend and held their tearful daughter in his arms. Only Ahn wondered how Eric’s fateful aura had caused the hapless college dropout to murder Christie. She watched him closely. When she saw the teenage girl stand near him, she knew. It was time for him to lose his lover, Ahn thought, and so the stars conspired to kill her. The Vietnamese woman shivered under her thin silk shawl.

Christie’s parents hugged Eric and kissed their sweet granddaughter. Half of Christie’s class from Hensley showed up to express their sorrow.

Drew would be buried three days later. Only his parents and Eric came to that ceremony. Drew’s father shook Eric’s hand, thanking him for coming and apologizing for his son.

“He just never grew into a man,” Mr. Peters said. “I hope that you can one day forgive him.”

Eric didn’t answer, but he felt no enmity toward Drew. He believed that it was his own inability to love Christie that had driven the lovers together, and then his attempt to make himself love her was what destroyed them both.

Eric moved back into his father’s house so that Ahn could help with Mona. He went to the hospital every day and sat next to his comatose brother.

Thomas was surrounded by an oxygen tent that was meant to help his punctured lung heal. The doctors didn’t have much hope for him, but Eric came each morning and sat for hours in silence at his brother’s side.

One morning, after Eric’s father went to work and Ahn and Mona had gone to the stone animal park, the doorbell rang. Eric was getting ready to go to the hospital. He was on leave from his classes and had no intention of going back to school.

He opened the door to find Raela standing there. She seemed taller and more beautiful than before. It was as if she had been a child when last he saw her, Eric thought, and now she was a woman. He wondered if she had grown or if he had diminished since losing Christie.

“Hi,” she said.

Eric felt his heart skip and hated himself for an instant.

“I can’t know you, Raela,” he said.

“It’s too late for that now,” she replied, her bearing both solemn and serene.

She walked into the house, and he closed the door behind her.

She went into the living room as if she had always lived there. She sat and so did he.

“We killed them,” he said.

“We aren’t gods,” she retorted.

“I didn’t love her, but I asked her to marry me.”

“You had a child together. What else could you do?”

“I could have been a man and done what was right.”

“What’s right?” she asked him. “What can anybody do?”

“My brother did what was right,” Eric said with conviction.

“Maybe. But he’s special. You aren’t him.”

“I don’t love you, Raela.”

“I know that. I don’t care about love. I just know that we have to be together. We have to be. You know it.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I do.”

“What about Michael? What will happen with him?”

“He’s my brother and he loves me,” the raven-haired beauty answered. “Show me upstairs.”

Eric and Raela became lovers that afternoon. He wasn’t worried about getting into trouble. He wasn’t concerned that she was too young. Staying away from her had killed Drew and Christie. Maybe even Thomas would die because of his refusal to be with her.

Raela had felt alone for her entire life. Her stepmother was more like a servant than a relative. Her brother loved her, but he couldn’t comprehend what was in her heart. And Kronin was just a big bear who wanted her to pay attention to him. No one had ever gotten close to understanding her until she met Eric.

He too was alone and unable to love. His heart was as disconnected as hers. They could at least understand each other. Maybe there could be more.

In the weeks that followed, Eric found himself laughing often and intrigued by the way the woman-child thought. She beat him at swimming, though he was her master at tennis. She could sprint past him in any short race, but he could run for miles and she couldn’t or wouldn’t — he was never sure which.

After her last class in the afternoon, she would meet him in Thomas’s hospital room, and they’d sit together holding hands and waiting.

Meanwhile, Thomas traveled among the dead. In the depths of his coma he convened with Tremont, the drug dealer, and Bruno, his best friend. The lost puppy, Skully, scampered about at his heels while Alicia (whom he had never known in life) made them all tea and biscuits served on her tomb in the alley valley that he always thought of as his one true home. They all spoke different languages and used signs to make themselves understood. Sometimes other guests would come. RayRay shambled in one day and asked — with wordless, elaborate apologies — Thomas to forgive him. Pedro climbed down from the fire escape and handed Thomas his gun. By this he meant that he would never kill himself again.

One day Thomas said good-bye to Tremont and Bruno. Then he and Alicia started out on a walk to the far end of the alley valley. It seemed to Thomas that he had never gone to the absolute end. The valley stretched for miles and became very wide. Trees grew tall and full above them. There were strawberry fields and orange groves along the way. Skully brought them beautiful stones and fish and tools when they needed them.

Alicia and he made love in the evenings. It was the way it had been with Monique, only instead of Lily they had Skully the dog, and because they were the same age they could have sex. The sun was bright, but Thomas didn’t mind it. The valley seemed endless, but neither one of them cared.

One day Thomas woke up to find that Alicia was gone. He knew that she was off taking care of her own unfinished business, something about the people that killed her and dumped her in Thomas’s valley. He didn’t worry about her; they would be together again.

The next day Skully didn’t come when Thomas whistled. But that didn’t bother him either. Traveling alone down the wide valley that started behind his father’s home, Thomas knew that he was getting somewhere.

One day — after many, many days of walking — Thomas heard a strange bird cry. It was a high, burplike noise. The call intrigued him, and so he began to climb up out of the valley because that was where the birdsong came from. Climbing up the slope, he began breathing hard. He fell to his knees and struggled through the brush. The bird’s odd song got louder and louder. And the louder it got, the more he wanted to see the animal that made that sound.

Maybe it wasn’t a bird, he thought. Maybe it’s a frog or a wolf or a man. Maybe it’s some new kind of talking tree.

As he climbed the foliage became thinner and the sun shone brighter. It got brighter and brighter, louder and louder, until Thomas was at the crest.

He opened his eyes and saw the beeping machine against the far wall of his hospital room. Next to his bed was a chair in which sat a black-haired girl.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“I am?”

“You’ve been in a coma... for six months.”

“What’s a coma?”

“Deep sleep. So deep that no one can wake you up.”

“I don’t feel tired now.”

“I should get the doctor.” The girl leaned forward, preparing to stand.

“No. Don’t go away.”

She smiled, and Thomas felt a tingle of happiness.

“Where have you been?” she asked him.

“In my coma?”

“No. Before. Eric said that you went away to live with your father and grandmother but ended up on the street.”

Thomas felt good in his bed. He sat up, and an electric whistle began to sound. He thought about his life in terms of the girl’s question, leaving the house he was raised in and then ending up on the street.

“Is Eric going to come see me?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’d be here now, but he had to take Mona to the doctor for a rash on her forehead.”

“Are you Eric’s girlfriend?”

Raela nodded solemnly.

“Oh my God!” the nurse coming into his room exclaimed. “You’re awake.”

Doctors and nurses bustled around him soon after that. They hurried the girl away and rolled Thomas into a room where they examined him from head to toe. The chief doctor probed his body with her fingers and kept asking how it felt. They looked into his eyes and ears and talked to one another, expressing surprise.

Finally the woman explained that he had experienced severe trauma to his system. He’d been in a coma for nearly six months, and it would be a while before he would be able to walk or take care of himself.

“Where’s my cart?” he asked when the doctor had finished.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“My shopping cart. That’s where I got all my stuff.”

“I don’t know. Maybe the police took it after the shooting. That was a wonderful thing you did.”

After a while they wheeled him back into his room. He had hoped the girl would still be there, but she wasn’t.

“Would you like me to turn the TV on, hon?” a plump redheaded nurse asked while pulling the blankets up to his chest.

“No thanks. I don’t like TV too much.”

“I wish my kids felt like that,” she said. “All they do is watch that thing. Between the one-eyed monster and video games, they don’t have the sense to come in outta the rain.”

When she left, Thomas thought about his books and the look in the doctor’s eye when she complimented his bravery.

The room was very quiet and white. Painfully, he pulled himself to a seated position at the head of the bed. This made him a little dizzy, but it was manageable. He realized, a little sadly, that his travels in the valley were a dream.

“Maybe this is a dream too,” he whispered. “Maybe everything is. Maybe it’s not even me dreaming.”

With these thoughts he fell into a light doze.

As he slept he tumbled down mountainsides, was attacked by feral dogs, and was raped unmercifully by boys from the desert facility whose names he had forgotten. But none of this pained him. His mother died, but she came back to console him. His brother got lost in a wilderness but still made it home in time for dinner. He found himself adrift on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean, floating in circles and being laughed at by cruel dolphins. In this last ordeal Thomas thought that it might be time to fall over the side, allowing himself to sink under the waves. He wanted to die and be with his mother and Alicia, Chilly, Bruno, and Pedro. He could look for Eric’s wife.

Eric.

When he opened his eyes again he was still sitting upright. The sun through the window had moved a good six feet across the wall. The door was open, and a moment later Eric was standing there.

“Are you a dream, Eric?” he asked.

The blue-eyed Titan came up to the bed and cupped his brother’s face with both hands.

“I’m sorry I let them take you, Tommy. And for making Mama Branwyn sick.”

“Ahn said that she thought you would hurt me,” Thomas replied. “But I told her that you always saved me.”

Eric pulled up the visitor’s chair, and the brothers talked for hours. In a haphazard, rambling manner, Thomas told his story. He started out with drug dealing and Monique and Lily. Then he talked about his alley and his father’s arrests.

“He isn’t really a bad guy,” Thomas said. “But he was just mad all the time because people were always trying to take things from him.”

When Eric told his story, it started with the beached green fish that he caught with his hands and unfolded event by event until Raela came to his house and said that they were meant to be.

In the middle of his story, a nurse popped her head in to tell Eric that visiting hours were over.

“This is my brother,” he said. “We haven’t seen each other since we were six. I can’t leave him.”

The nurse, a middle-aged Chicano woman, smiled and nodded, then quietly closed the door.

Eric confessed his crimes against the people he should have loved. He killed his mother and Branwyn and Drew and Christie. He won every game he ever played that was important. He failed to bring happiness into his father’s life.

“But Dad doesn’t think that,” Thomas stated with certainty. “All that stuff is just in your head.”

Eric thought about his self-portrait and the worried look on his art teacher’s face. Something fell together for him. He wasn’t complaining or distraught — just feeling empty.

Thomas took Eric’s hand and asked, “What about that girl? Do you love her?”

“No. I mean, she’s the only one other than you or Mama Branwyn that ever made me feel something. But it’s a little like I’m afraid of her, the way I used to feel about Ahn, but more.”

“Because why?” Thomas asked.

Eric smiled, remembering those words from their childhood, because why.

“I guess I don’t want anyone to know what I’m like on the inside. I feel ugly, you know? Except when I think about you or Mama Branwyn.”

They talked without holding anything back. It had been more than a dozen years and the boys hadn’t had one thing in common since the day they were separated, but still it was as if they’d been apart for only a day. They giggled and awed each other; they played and vowed never to be parted again.

“I will never let them take you away, Tommy.”

“And I won’t go nowhere.”

Eric didn’t leave the hospital until Thomas was asleep, and he was back the next morning with his father, Ahn, and Mona.

“I’m so sorry,” Minas told Branwyn’s son. “I should have done something to keep you. Or at least to find you once we knew that you were lost.”

“That’s okay,” Thomas said. “It’s really not all that bad. I mean, it’s kinda like a dream. I’m not mad at you. And I don’t care about what happened to me. I mean, even when you get shot it only hurts for a while. And if you don’t get all upset about it and nobody shoots at you again, then it’s okay. Or if you’re hungry it’s like that too. Because sooner or later you’re gonna eat, and then you’re not hungry no more. Right?”

Thomas liked being with the whole family, but it wasn’t the same as his time alone with Eric. With Eric he could say anything without thinking, but with the family it was more like he had a part to play. He didn’t mind though. He liked the role.

“You’re the man who saved me,” three-year-old Mona said during a lull in the conversation.

“That’s right,” Eric told her. “This is Uncle Tommy.”

“T’ank you, Uncle Tommy.”

“What would you like to do after you get out of here, Thomas?” Dr. Nolan asked.

“I don’t know. The doctor said that they lost my cart. Everything I had was in there. I had pictures of Monique and my blank book with my writings. I’d like to find that if I could.”

“But what would you like to do?”

“What you mean?” Tommy squinted for a moment, remembering the brightness that had driven him away from elementary school.

“Do you want a job? Do you want to go to school? Where would you like to live?”

“Could I stay with you guys for a while?”

“Of course,” Dr. Nolan said. “As long as you want.”

“Yaaaaaa,” Mona sang.

That afternoon the police were dispatched with a warrant to arrest Thomas Beerman, aka Bruno Forman. They sent Pittman and Rodriguez because the officers could identify the young con-man escapee.

“Thomas Beerman,” Officer Pittman announced. “You are under arrest.”

“No. I didn’t do anything. I, I saved the little girl’s life.”

“You presented yourself to the police with fraudulent identification and you escaped from the juvenile facility where you were being detained.”

For Thomas the facility was a long-ago dream. He couldn’t imagine that they would send him back there now that he was reunited with his family.

“No,” he said.

“No,” Dr. Bettye Freeling repeated. She was standing at the door to Thomas’s room. “This is my patient, and he is far too weak to be moved.”

“We have a warrant for his arrest, ma’am,” Rodriguez said with an apology in his voice.

“I’m a doctor,” she replied. “This is my patient, and you cannot take him without my permission.”

“It’s pretty clear-cut,” Nathan Frear, the lawyer, said to Minas Nolan and his son.

They were in Frear’s office at the top floor of a Westwood office high-rise.

“He was convicted of assault on police officers in an attempt to keep them from their duty. It says that he was part of an organized group that opened fire on the officers trying to arrest them.”

“He was twelve,” Eric said. “He didn’t even have a gun.”

“But he was part of the group, and he was convicted under a law devised to dampen gang activity.”

“But he wasn’t part of a gang. He was twelve and nearly homeless. He was just trying to stay alive.”

“All of that evidence was presented in court,” Frear said. “The judge still found him guilty.”

“What will happen if he goes to trial?” Minas asked.

“Either he’ll be returned to the juvenile authority or, more likely, he will be sentenced as an adult and will serve the full term of the original sentence plus whatever else the judge might want to tack on for his further crimes.”

“What crimes?” Eric asked. “All he did was save my daughter from Drew.”

“He lied to the police; he escaped from custody. He committed identity theft by using a Social Security card that belonged to Bruno Forman. The prosecutor might even try to implicate him with the man who killed your girlfriend. After all, Drew Peters used Thomas’s cart to block the door and keep you from saving your wife.”

Frear was tall and extraordinarily thin. His dark-blue suit was made from the finest material, and his aqua tie had a ruby tack that held it perfectly in place.

“That’s crazy,” Minas said. “He’s just a boy.”

“He’s a man,” Frear corrected, “homeless and black. A convicted felon, an admitted drug dealer, an escapee from a state institution, and there’s even some evidence that he was involved in the slaying of a customer of his, a Raymond ‘RayRay’ Smith.

“I can take the case, but it’s going to be very expensive. And without remarkable luck, he’s looking at anywhere from six to ten years in a maximum security prison.”

Bettye freeling could keep the police from taking Thomas for three more weeks. Minas decided to retain Frear. The initial fee was fifty thousand dollars. The lawyer visited Thomas twice but received little help from his client.

“I just took a walk,” Thomas said, answering Frear’s question about how his escape occurred. “I just meant to go around the block, but then I kept on walking. It was such a nice day, I remember. The sky had those big white clouds that everybody likes so much.”

When Frear wanted to know about the shooting, all Thomas could recall was Tremont coming out with his Uzi and the police opening fire.

“He went crazy, I think,” Thomas said. “He was mad that the police wanted to be messin’ with him.”

“Did you know about the Uzi?”

“Sure. We all did.”

“Did you know that it was against the law to have that weapon?”

“Tremont was the law in that alley,” Thomas said. “That was the first time I ever saw a cop down there in the three years I worked for him.”

“So you worked for him for three years?” Frear asked.

“Yeah.”

Frear decided not to put Thomas on the stand.

Raela, in the meanwhile, emptied a special account that Kronin had set up for her. Using her ATM card, she took out five hundred dollars a day for twenty days.

She spent the afternoons helping Eric with Thomas’s physical therapy and the evenings sleeping with Eric in his childhood bed.

Her mother and father threatened to call the police, but she knew they wouldn’t. Eric’s father told his son that Raela was too young, but after a few dinner conversations with the dark-hued girl, he gave up his arguments.

Minas Nolan blamed himself for Christie’s death because he made Eric move out. He wouldn’t kick his son out again.

Raela spent long evenings talking to Ahn and Minas. She had read thousands of books since the age of eight. She was considerate and mature. She helped with the dishes and explained that she and Eric would be married one day soon.

“He needs me,” she said to Minas one evening while everyone else was in bed.

“Eric doesn’t need anyone,” Minas replied. He was embarrassed by the mild note of contempt in his voice.

“No, Dr. Nolan,” Raela said, sounding more like fifty than fifteen. “He’s afraid of people. He thinks everybody is too weak and that if he isn’t careful he’ll hurt them. He blames himself for you losing Mama Branwyn. He even thinks that he caused Tommy to get lost.”

Minas felt the weight of her words in his chest. He realized, maybe for the first time, how closely physical heart disease was connected to the emotional heart. The girl was telling him a truth that he’d always avoided. He knew that Eric had been forced to carry the weight of his broken heart. He knew that his son had lived with Christie because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her.

“How do you know all this?” he asked the child.

“Because I’m just like him,” she said. “Or almost. My life has been just like his, only I don’t worry about people like he does.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“Because you can’t save anyone.”

“I save people all the time,” the doctor said, wondering at his need to argue with the child.

“But when people die on your operating table, do you believe that they were going to die with or without you?”

After that evening Minas could not remember if he’d answered her question. He’d lost eight patients under the knife. Eight lives that he could not save. He’d forgotten most of their names and didn’t attend any of their funerals. He’d washed his hands vigorously after every failure, gone home and got into bed. He wondered how a child knew all of that.

At the end of three weeks Raela gave the ten thousand dollars she’d collected to Eric. The next day Ahn and Raela went with Eric to the hospital and helped Thomas down the stairs and then to the station, where the brothers boarded a train bound for Phoenix.