Jake Read online

  The old lady, the first to notice Mom had fallen, said very loudly, “I feel better knowing help has arrived and I’m going now.” She turned to the woman with the crying baby and said, even more loudly, “I’d advise you to do the same, so the medics can hear themselves think.”

  For a moment there, I just loved that old lady.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was a broken leg, that’s what the medic guys said. They made me ride up front in the ambulance, like a copilot. The real copilot rode in the back with Mom, sitting where I would rather have been.

  I think I would.

  Mom had begun to moan a lot and that made me feel sick, even from up front. The pilot—the driver, that is—tried to take my mind off Mom.

  He asked, “What’s your favorite sport?”

  I couldn’t think of any sports. I stared at him. He was wearing this knit cap with a pom-pom dangling down his neck. I’d get beaten up in the school yard wearing a hat like that.

  He ran the siren through a busy part of town. Green ropes of tinsel and little Christmas flags were strung between the streetlights. Cars pulled over to the side of the road so we could rush past them.

  While all this noise was filling our heads, the driver looked over and grinned like a crazy person in a scary movie I saw once at Matthew’s house. He even had the same pointy eyebrows.

  He definitely didn’t look like somebody Mom would let drive us anywhere. I almost wished he were the one riding in the back. Except Mom had enough problems without him sitting next to her.

  When he stopped at the hospital, he said, “Great ride, huh?”

  I knew he’d been trying to make me feel better. It didn’t work, that’s all. I climbed out and hurried around the ambulance.

  There was no ice in this parking area, so it was easy for them to lift Mom out of there and push her inside on this bed with wheels. A gurney, they called it.

  More noise came at me in the hospital. Squeaky wheels. A doctor yelling questions at us. The ambulance guys yelling back. Somebody crying. Was that Mom crying?

  People moved fast. I ran behind the gurney till somebody pulled a curtain closed right in front of my face. The ambulance driver said, “She’s gotta do this by herself.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  He walked me to a desk where he said, “I’ve gotta move the truck.”

  He put some woman in charge of me. She barked questions at me like a seal. “Can you call your dad? Where do you live? How old is your mother? What’s her insurance company? Who’s her doctor? Which relative do you call in an emergency?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. That felt wrong. I was sure I knew the name of the doctor Mom went to. Probably I knew everywhere she sent checks because she usually talked to herself while she wrote them. No names came to mind. My mind went blue, like a computer waiting for someone to choose a screen saver.

  The other guy from the ambulance came and said, “You should follow the gurney upstairs.”

  He put me on an elevator. “Get off on ten,” he said, and pushed ten like I was too young to know.

  Other people got on and off at the third floor, and the fourth, and the seventh and ninth. Because they were patients, none of them looked like anybody I usually saw on elevators. I tried not to stare at the ones with plastic tubes taped to their arms or sitting in wheelchairs.

  In the end, I was glad he told me to get off on ten and pushed the button to be sure I would.

  At the desk, I said, “Can I see my mom? She just got here.”

  A nurse said, “Sit over there.”

  There was Christmas music playing. It sounded sort of too slow, like the tape player needed batteries.

  I could have looked out the windows, I guess. I sat there, thinking my butt still hurt, like that should matter, and bit all my fingernails down. Mom hates nail biting. I figured she wouldn’t care much that I was doing it right now.

  After a while, another woman came to talk to me. Not a nurse; she wore a skirt and sweater like she worked in an office. She said I should call her Miss Sahara, like the desert. I think this was supposed to be funny, only I couldn’t smile. Besides, she was smiling hard enough for both of us.

  Miss Sahara told me the insurance stuff could wait, but she needed to know what relative to call. Did my mom have any allergies or illnesses they ought to know about? “Can’t Mom answer any of this?”

  “The doctor gave her a sedative.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They put her to sleep.”

  “To sleep?” I stood straight out of my chair.

  Mom had our cat put to sleep last year because she was old and sick. Mom wasn’t either one of those things. Tears started running down my face. I must’ve looked like a big baby but I didn’t care.

  “I didn’t even get to talk to her.”

  The weird thing is, somebody tells you your mom is dead, you’d think it would be like stuff they say on television, your heart would be breaking.

  Only my heart was sort of numb. My voice went away entirely and it was my jaw that might break. My mouth was wide open. I wasn’t making a sound and I couldn’t close it.

  I never cried like that before.

  Miss Sahara kept on smiling and listing diseases I mostly never heard of. This guy in a white coat—maybe he was a doctor only not in a big hurry to go anywhere—came over and said, “What’s going on here?”

  She showed him even more teeth and said, “I’m trying to sort things out. We’re having a little meltdown here.”

  “I thought,” I managed to say, “it was just a broken leg.”

  My voice came out so hoarse, I don’t think they understood me. She looked away and talked to him in a lower voice, as if I had left the room. “His mother’s the spiral fracture. No purse, and she’s out like a light.”

  “Okay, fella, deep breath. Way deep,” the guy said. I noticed his name tag, it said STAN. Stan the man, I’d heard that somewhere. “Everything’s going to be fine. Just you and your mom out together today?”

  I tried to get a deep breath that wasn’t the kind that had to do with crying. I had this feeling like a belt pulled tight around my chest.

  “Shake your head yes or no.”

  I shook yes.

  “Your dad at home?”

  No.

  “Your dad live with you?”

  No.

  “Got a grandma or grandpa?”

  Yes. A grandfather.

  I never saw him. I talked to him on the phone at Christmas and my birthday, that was about it.

  While I was answering Stan, my jaw started to relax. He saw that, I guess, because he sat down and waited for me to be able to talk. “It was a broken leg,” I said, finally.

  Miss Sahara’s smile shrank just enough to look like I’d said something stupid. “A spiral fracture is—”

  “—a certain kind of broken leg,” Stan said.

  “That can be fixed,” I said. “They didn’t have to put her to sleep.”

  Now it was Stan who looked like somebody’d said something stupid. Only he looked that look at Miss Sahara, who turned red.

  “Your mom’s going to be okay,” he said to me. “The doctor gave her something to help her sleep so she wouldn’t be in pain.”

  “She’s not dead?”

  “No way, man,” Stan said. “Sleeping like a baby. They’re going to have to operate, though. Miss Sahara, here, it’s her job to ask you questions your mom can’t answer now.”

  The tears didn’t quit. They ran so fast I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My face sort of crumpled. My breath came faster.

  “Hang on, hang on,” Stan said. “Your mom’s fine. At least, she’s going to be.”

  It took a minute but I started to feel like I knew that. The tears stopped. I could breathe the way I usually did. Stan looked at me like I was somebody he already knew, which sounds strange but felt good.

  I looked at Miss Sahara. She still had that awful smile on her face.

 
; “So,” she said, making it sound the way a bird chirps. “Does your mother take medication for anything?”

  “Aspirin, sometimes.”

  “Anything give her a rash?”

  “Mangos make her look like a blowfish.”

  “Mangos,” she said as if it was good news. She wrote it down. “Anything else?”

  I shook my head no.

  “No worries there, then,” she said, getting ready to write. “Let’s get to you. Your name?”

  “Jake Wexler.”

  “Jake. What’s that short for?”

  “It’s Jake on my birth certificate,” I said, as I sometimes have to do. We went through a list; I sat down carefully, because I had fallen on my butt. I told her Mom’s name and our address and other stuff. I remembered who Mom’s doctor is.

  “Now about somebody to call,” Miss Sahara said.

  “For what?”

  “To take care of you,” she said in a let’s-go-to-a-party voice. She was starting to get on my nerves. “Any family living nearby?”

  I shook my head again.

  Stan asked, “Where do your grandma and grandpa live?”

  “North Carolina. Granddad.” Mom calls him Granddad when she’s talking to me, anyway. “The others have all died.”

  You’d think it would be good to have the one. I mean, I’d like to have grandparents like anybody else. I could be happy with only the one, but we don’t visit my dad’s dad and it’s weird talking to somebody you only know by their voice and a few old pictures. I never got around to calling him anything. I’d say hi, we’d go through a couple of the usual How’s school? kind of questions, we’d say good-bye politely, and that was it.

  “Well, that’s not too far away.” Stan said. “Granddad. Where in North Carolina?”

  “My mom wouldn’t call him. So I don’t think you should either.”

  Stan said, “Maybe there’s a friend of your mom’s you could stay with?”

  Miss Sahara said, “We need the name of another blood relative.”

  “There’s Aunt Ginny,” I said. “She’s away.”

  “Away?” This was Miss Sahara and she sounded like somehow Aunt Ginny should have known better than to go away this weekend. “Perhaps we should tell her she’s needed here?”

  “We can’t,” I said. “She takes women out for wilderness weekends, and nobody uses a phone. That includes her.”

  “Cool,” Stan said and then frowned. “Cold.”

  “They’re in a desert in Arizona this time.”

  Stan grinned. “Very cool.”

  “Surely they do have an emergency phone,” Miss Sahara said.

  “Nope,” I said. “Well, if somebody gets hurt, Aunt Ginny can call for help, but we can’t phone her. It’s against the rules and she keeps her phone turned off. She gets back on Tuesday, though.”

  “Any close friends?”

  “Suzie. Can’t get her either.”

  “Where might she be?”

  “She’s on a Greenpeace boat in the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Really very cool,” Stan said.

  Miss Sahara said, “Any friends from your mother’s workplace?”

  “Mom works at home.”

  “What does she do?” This was Stan.

  “She translates books to English,” I said. “Mostly about how people act. Behavioral science, that’s it.”

  “Wow, what languages?”

  “German, Danish, and Swedish.”

  Stan sat back a little. Something about this impresses people. “It’s cool,” I said.

  “It’s the coolest of all,” he said.

  I nodded, glad that Stan got it that Mom did something as interesting as Aunt Ginny or Suzie.

  Even I didn’t get it until this time I caught Mom doing a happy dance of having found just the right words. She was quiet, and there was no music, but the happy dance said it all.

  So did the ice-cream sundaes we made right after. Just thinking about it almost made me cry again. I missed Mom, but mostly I missed the way we felt that day.

  I gave Miss Sahara Granddad’s name. Ned Wexler. He was my dad’s dad and Mom is always careful that he knows she’s doing a good job with me. She can’t be blamed for breaking her leg, but then, Granddad always sounded a little stiff.

  That was all I knew about him. I started to wish I had a real grandparent, like Matthew’s grandma. I mean, Granddad sent presents at birthdays and Christmas. I had a present from him under the tree. It was always whatever Mom told him I wanted—without her help, he wouldn’t know what I’d like.

  I didn’t know what he’d like either. Mom always sent him cigars.

  I wished I could stay with Matthew Haygood’s grandmother.

  “What about your school friends?” Miss Sahara said. “For one night.”

  There was Joey Ziglar. Mrs. Ziglar liked me. But Joey’s family had already started for Florida, to see more family during the holidays.

  I thought about asking Mrs. Baxter if I could sleep over. The last time I did, Jerry broke a window and I said I did it so he wouldn’t get grounded from hockey practice. I don’t think his mom would want me much.

  Matthew Haygood’s mom and mine weren’t friendly enough for sleepovers. Mom still sort of sided with her on the T-shirt and panties thing, though.

  Mom liked Sarah Jane’s mom, but I didn’t want to spend the night on Sarah Jane’s couch. If Sarah Jane woke up before I did and saw me sleeping with my mouth open or something, it would be all over school in no time.

  I shook my head.

  “We need a name to call for overnight.”

  I stared at her.

  “You can’t stay here all night,” she said. “You have to sleep somewhere.”

  Looking out the window then, I saw it was practically dark outside. I missed lunch and didn’t even notice. It didn’t seem like we’d been away from home all that long. Of course, it got dark early in winter.

  “You can come back tomorrow, of course. So who are we calling?”

  “Mrs. Buttermark, I guess. Our neighbor. She’s sort of old, but we hang out together sometimes.”

  “Hang out?”

  “That’s what we say we’re doing,” I said. “She doesn’t think I need a babysitter either.”

  “She ought to do.” She looked like Mrs. Buttermark got an A+.

  Here I was wracking my brain for the actual people Mom would let me stay with. I could give her anybody’s name and she would be saying, “She ought to do.”

  I decided not to point this out to Miss Sahara. Really, how much more time did I want to spend with her?

  “Mrs. Buttermark. Her number?” Miss Sahara’s smile didn’t keep her from sounding like that thin ice that Mom and I scraped off the windshield. Crickle-crackle.

  Miss Sahara wrote the number down, then said, “Have you ever spent the night with her before?”

  “She stayed with us a few times. Last month when her bathroom was being fixed, and once when Mom had a bad cold. Then again when she caught the flu.”

  Miss Sahara looked happy to hear it. “Definitely our best choice.”

  “I should talk to her first,” I said. “So she doesn’t get too worried.”

  “Good idea,” Miss Sahara said.

  “Also, can I tell her you’ll put me in a taxi? That way she doesn’t have to worry about cleaning off her windshield and stuff.”

  “That’s not the way we do things,” Miss Sahara said.

  “Mrs. Buttermark is a lot older than my mom.” This was true, even if I did forget it sometimes. “If she breaks her leg getting here, there’s no one else.”

  “I live over that way,” Stan said. “If he sits ten more minutes, my shift is over and I can drive him home.”

  Miss Sahara said, “Stanley—”

  “Stan. That’s how it reads on my birth certificate.”

  Her smile wobbled. “Stan. It’s against the rules.”

  “Blink,” Stan said. “You won’t see a thing.”

&nbs
p; “Well,” Miss Sahara said, making the word into a sigh. “Let’s start with your grandfather anyway. What’s his phone number?”

  I didn’t know. It was like she hadn’t listened to me at all. I said, “Let’s call Mrs. Buttermark.”

  “Sit here,” Miss Sahara said, standing up. “Don’t go wandering around.”

  Stan said, “He’d be better off over in the next wing. There’s a TV in the waiting room there. Take his mind off things.”

  “Oh, all right,” Miss Sahara said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You hungry?” Stan asked me as we walked away from the bad tape of Christmas music.

  “Not really.” I was tired. Miss Sahara sort of wore me out with all that smiling. It would be rude to say so. Also, it worried me that she was going to call my granddad. I didn’t think Mom would like that.

  She doesn’t talk much with my granddad. More than I did, but not like she’d talk to one of her friends. I didn’t know what to do about Miss Sahara or anything she was planning.

  “So your mom fell on the ice, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think your mom’s purse got left where she fell or something?” Stan said. “Because nobody brought it in. I’m thinking her credit cards and stuff might be lost.”

  “Mom doesn’t carry a purse since it got grabbed away from her once. There’s a waterproof pocket in the jacket she was wearing. All her money and her driver’s license and stuff goes into that pocket.”

  “I think they looked in her coat.”

  “It’s hidden under the pocket flap where there’s a regular pocket too,” I said. “The coat’s special. The same kind Aunt Ginny takes into the wilderness when she’s going somewhere cold.”

  So we went to get Mom’s coat.

  On the way, I asked him, “How long till Mom’s better?”

  “A couple of months,” Stan said. “She’ll get out of the cast and then do some exercise to make sure she builds up muscle again.”

  I waited outside the room Stan went into. He brought Mom’s coat out, and I went through the pocket to find her insurance card. Stan had somebody at the desk make a copy and then he gave it to me.

  “You ought to take the jacket home with you for now,” he said. “Your mom won’t need it here. When they give her a locker, you can bring whatever stuff she asks for.”