Mystery

To say something, anything at all, lest she run out of the room, Tom said, “Do you know how long I’ve been here?” And immediately regretted it, for it sounded to him as if he was accusing her of having ignored him.

And then it seemed to him that he was trying to tell Sarah Spence in one sentence about all the changes that had taken place in him. So he said, “I’ve been here forever.”

“I heard yesterday,” Sarah said. “We just got back from up north.”

“Up north,” a phrase Tom understood as well as Sarah, did not refer to the northern end of the island, but to the northern tier of states in continental North America. Sarah’s parents, like many far east end residents (though not the Pasmores), owned property in northern Wisconsin, and spent much of June, July, and August in a pine lodge beside a freshwater lake. At the end of June the Redwing clan, Mill Walk’s most important family, moved virtually as a single organism to a separate compound on Eagle Lake. “Mom found out from Mrs. Jacobs, when she was talking to her at Ostend’s Market.” She paused. “You got hit by a car?”

Tom nodded. She, too, he could see, had questions she could not ask: How did it feel? Can you remember it? Did it hurt a lot?

“How did that happen?” she asked. “You just walked in front of a car?”

“I guess I was way out on Calle Burleigh, and it was rush hour, and …” Unable to say any more, because all he could remember now of that day was how the car had looked just before it struck him, he shrugged.

“How dumb can you get?” she said. “What are you going to do next? Dive into an empty pool?”

“I think my next death-defying act is going to be trying to get out of this bed.”

“And when do you do that? When do you get to go home?”

“I don’t know.”

Unsettlingly adult exasperation showed on her face. “Well, how are you going to go to school if you don’t go home?” When he did not answer, the exasperation was replaced by a moment of pure confusion, and then by something like disbelief. “You’re not coming back to school?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m going to be out a whole year. It’s true,” he added in the face of her growing incredulity. His depression had begun to return. “I can’t even get out of bed for another eight weeks—that’s what they told me anyhow. When I finally do get home, they’re putting me in a hospital bed in the living room. How can I go to school, Sarah? I can’t even get out of bed!” He was appalled to hear himself making terrible ragged noises as his pains began to announce themselves again. Tom thought that Sarah Spence looked as if she were sorry to have come to the hospital—and she was right, she did not belong here. In some way he had never quite realized, she had been his best and most important friend, and now a vast abyss lay between them.

Sarah did not run out of the room, but for Tom it was almost worse that she watched him dry his face and blow his nose as she uttered meaningless phrases about how everything would be all right. He saw her retreat into the world of ignorant daylight, backing away in polite horror from his fear and pain and anger. In any case, she did not know the worst thing—that he had been castrated and had nothing between his legs but a tube, a fact so terrible that Tom himself could not hold it clearly in his mind for more than a few seconds at a time. Now, without being aware of what he was doing, his left hand crept to the smooth groin of his body cast.

“You must itch a lot,” Sarah said.

He pulled his hand away as if the cast were red hot. She remained until visiting hours were over, talking to him about a new puppy named Bingo and what she had done “up north,” and how Fritz Redwing’s cousin Buddy had taken one of his family’s motorboats out into the middle of Eagle Lake and tried to dynamite the fish, and her voice went on and on, full of kindness and restraint and sympathy, as well as other feelings he could not or would not identify, until Nancy Vetiver came in to tell her that she had to leave.

“I didn’t know you had such a pretty girlfriend,” Nancy said. “I think I’m jealous.”

Sarah’s entire face turned pink, and she reached for her bag, promising to be back soon. When she left she sent no more than a glancing smile toward Tom, and did not speak or look at Nancy. She never came to the hospital again.

Two days later his door opened just before the end of visiting hours, and Tom looked up with his heart beating, expecting to see Sarah Spence. Lamont von Heilitz smiled flickeringly from the doorway, and somehow appeared to understand everything at once. “Ah, you’ve been waiting for someone else. But it’s just your cranky old neighbor, I’m afraid. Shall I leave you alone?”