The Spot: Stories

At this point, stalling for time, Cavanaugh put the rucksack out of sight behind his back and waited a few more beats before pulling it out again, saying, “Hey, hey, look, another rucksack,” and shook it near the boy’s head until he stopped flailing around, looked up with his ruddy face (the kid had what the doctor called dermagraphic skin — highly sensitive, prone to rashes), and said, “Give me, give me.” At which point Cavanaugh unzipped the rucksack slowly and said, “Let’s pretend it’s Christmas morning and we’re just up, having had our traditional morning cocoa and sweet roll”—Christmas was the one morning each year that they opened up the tightly packed dough, popping it against the counter and rolling out the spiral of cardboard foil—“and now Santa’s bringing some new presents,” and then, with great flourish, saying, “Ta da,” he reached in and pulled out the Emergency Tow Truck again, squat and malformed, with a thick front bumper, holding it out and watching as Gunner’s face composed itself around a cry, restrained itself for a second, his tiny mouth a tight rictus of pink next to which his cheeks bunched to reveal a remnant of his original baby face — womb wet with sweat, blue with blood, and dramatically horrific. Cavanaugh searched the boy’s face the way a sailor might read the twilight sky, and saw clearly that he was about to unfurl a squall-cry, a true record breaker on the scream scale. And he did. When it came, it was a squawking, ducklike sound, odd in its guttural overtones, yet paradoxically bright, shiny, and thin, like a drawn thread of hot glass. This was a cry that said: You led me to believe, fully and completely, that I was about to receive a newborn toy, something that would match my deepest expectations. This was a cry that rent open the universe and, in doing so, peeled back and exposed some soft, vulnerable tissue in Cavanaugh’s brain.

So that what he did next was, he thought later, simply an act of self-protection, reaching out and yanking the boy onto his feet and into one arm and then, with the cup of his hand, sealing the kid’s mouth shut, so that all Cavanaugh felt was the small, frail puffs against his palm as he spoke down into the hot, sweaty bloom of struggling face, saying, “Jesus Christ, Daddy was just playing a game, a Christmas game. Daddy was just trying to lighten the situation and keep you from doing what you’re doing right now. Daddy just wants his Gunner to behave himself, if not for the sake of the nurses — who, I’m sure, are out in the hall about to bust in here to see what’s going on — then for Daddy himself, who is at his wits’ end and wants this test to go as smoothly as possible.” At which point, as if on cue, the door opened, bringing in fresh air that smelled of disinfectant and hospital floor polish, and a nurse, beautiful in her tight uniform, with long blond hair, who said, “Oh, dear,” and presented a face, he later thought, that was readable in an infinite number of ways — soft around the mouth, with a wry smile that just about verged on a frown, set in a snowy Nordic topography of bone structure. From the nose down, she seemed to be frank and nonjudgmental, her mouth loose around unavailable words; from the nose up, her two intensely blue eyes and a single raised eyebrow seemed to be saying: Something funny’s going on here. Something’s not right. Something’s deeply wrong about the way you’re cupping the boy’s mouth in relation to the way he (the boy) is standing, in relation to the way you are looming behind him, in relation to the sheen of his terrified face, in relation to that cry I heard out in the hallway, which was so loud and shrill it penetrated the door and reached my ears. And then she tilted her face slightly to one side, glanced at the room (really nothing but two chairs and a heating unit lit with stark neon), and made a face that seemed to admit: Maybe for you, as a father, this is a trying test, though it’s certainly nothing compared with a bonemarrow biopsy, a spinal tap, or the claustrophobia of the MRI ring. But, yes (her face seemed to say), the analysis of the sweat in order to rule out, or to rule in, cystic fibrosis makes it oracular in nature, and in a few hours you, sir, will be offered up the results, and said results might give you a positive yes on the disease, which would mean, of course, that Gunner will face a future of hard breathing, clotted phlegm, and, most certainly, a relatively early death (in his thirties, if you’re lucky), but all this in no way excuses you, sir, from what appeared to be transpiring when I passed the door and heard the cries and stepped in to take a look.