Mystery

Tom spent the entire summer in Shady Mount Hospital. His parents visited him with the irregularity he came to expect of them, for he knew that they saw their visits as disruptive and upsetting, in some way harmful to his recovery: they sent books and toys, and while most of the toys came to pieces in his hands or were useless to one confined to bed, the books were always perfect, every one. When his parents appeared in his room, they seemed quieter and older than he remembered them, survivors of another life, and what they spoke of was the saga of what they had endured on the day of his accident.

The one time his grandfather came to the hospital, he stood beside the bed leaning on the umbrella he used as a cane, with something tight and hard in his face that doubted Tom, wondered about him. This, Tom suddenly remembered, was overwhelmingly familiar—the sensation that his grandfather disliked him.

Had he been running away?

No, of course not, why would he run away?

He didn’t have any friends out there, did he? Had he maybe been going to Elm Cove? Two boys in his old class at Brooks-Lowood lived in Elm Cove, maybe he had taken it into his head to go all the way out there and see them?

His class was now his old class because he would miss a year of school.

Maybe, he said. I don’t remember. I just don’t remember. He could vaguely remember the day of his accident, could remember the milk cart and the NO PASSENGERS ALLOWED sign and the driver asking him about girlfriends.

Well, which one had he been going to see?

His memory turned to sludge, to pure resistance. His grandfather’s insistent questions felt like blows.

Why had his accident happened on Calle Burleigh, eight miles east of Elm Cove? Had he been hitchhiking?

“Why are you asking me all these questions?” Tom blurted, and burst into tears.

There came a muted shocked exhalation from the door, and Tom knew that some of the hospital staff were lingering there to get a look at his grandfather.

“You’d better stick to your own part of town,” his grandfather said, and the young doctors and lounging orderlies gave almost inaudible noises of approval.

At the end of August, during the last thirty minutes of visiting hours, a girl named Sarah Spence walked into his room. Tom put down his book and looked at her in astonishment. Sarah, too, seemed astonished to find herself in a hospital room, and looked around at everything in a wondering, wide-eyed way before she came across the room to his bed. For a moment Tom thought that yes, it was astonishing that he should be here, and that she should see him like this. In that moment he was the old Tom Pasmore, and when he saw how Sarah shyly inspected his massive cast with a smile of dismay, it seemed to him ridiculous that he should have been so unhappy.

Sarah Spence had been a friend of his since their earliest days at school, and when she met his eyes he felt restored to his life. He saw at once that her shyness had left her, and that unlike the boys from their class who had come to visit his room, she was not intimidated by the evidences of his injuries. By now his head wound had healed, and his right arm was out of its bandages and cast, so he looked far more like his old self than he had during most of July.

As they took each other in for a moment before speaking, Tom realized that Sarah’s face was no longer that of a little girl, but almost a woman’s, and her taller body was beginning to be a woman’s too. He saw that Sarah was very much aware of the difference in her face and body.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Would you look at that cast?”

“I look at it a lot, actually,” he said.

She smiled, and raised her eyes to meet his. “Oh, Tom,” she said, and for a moment there hovered between them the possibility that Sarah Spence would hold his hand, or touch his cheek, or kiss him, or burst into tears and do all three—Tom almost went dizzy with his desire for her touch, and Sarah herself scarcely knew what she wished to do, or how to express the wave of tenderness and grief that had passed through her with his joke. She took a step nearer to him, and was on the verge of reaching out to touch him when she saw how pale his skin was, ashy just beneath the golden surface, and that his hair looked lank and matted. For just a moment her fifth-grade friend Tom Pasmore looked like a stranger. He seemed shrunken, and his bones were prominent, and even though this familiar stranger before her was a little boy—a little boy—he had ugly dark smudges under his eyes like an old man. Then Tom’s face seemed to settle into well-known lines, and he was not a little boy with an old man’s eyes but on the verge of adolescence again, the boy she liked best in her class, the friend who had spent hours every day talking and playing with her in summers and weekends past—but by then she had unconsciously taken a half-step backwards, and was folding her hands together at her waist.

They were suddenly awkward with each other.