Be Frank With Me (19 page)

When Julian didn't say anything else she picked up her book again and went back to reading. She hoped he'd get bored and leave. If he didn't, well, he could spend the night on her roommate's bed and she'd worry about him in the morning.

As it turned out, that wasn't necessary. After a few minutes of sitting there while Mimi studiously ignored him, Julian got up and left. She didn't realize he hadn't left by the door but had chosen instead to step out a window in her suite that looked over a quadrangle six stories below until she heard a tangle of voices far away, and then a siren.

“I never told those girls I had a brother,” Mimi told me. “And then I didn't have one.”

W
HEN
M
IMI
AND
I got to the emergency room admissions desk, she tried to tell them why she was there. “My son—” she said, and the rest of the sentence stuck in her throat. It happened over and over. “My son—” she'd say, and choke.

Finally I put my hand on her arm and said, “Our son Frank Banning came here in an ambulance. We just got a call from his school.”

I said that without thinking. I suppose the office lady we didn't know planted that idea in my head. The way it flowered turned out to be a thing of beauty. At the hospital, of course, they wouldn't let anybody beyond the swinging doors who wasn't a member of the immediate family.

The clerk at the admissions desk checked her roster. “You got here fast,” she said. “His ambulance hasn't arrived yet. You should think about driving ambulances yourself.”

U
NTIL HE WAS
stabilized, the clerk told us, only one parent could go behind the swinging doors to meet Frank as they wheeled him from the ambulance to the emergency room.

“You go.” Mimi's lips barely moved when she said it. She was pale and still and had her fists clenched in her lap and her eyes closed.

When they rolled him in, it took me a minute to realize it was Frank because he was dressed in the T-shirt and khakis and tennis shoes he'd cried over wearing that morning. Then I saw how slowly the gurney was moving and put my palm against the wall to keep from collapsing. There's no need to rush, I thought, because he's already dead. The T-shirt did it, on the playground, with a knife to his heart.

But the paramedics looked neither crushed nor sympathetic. They looked pissed. Frank's body wasn't covered by a sheet, either, as it would have been in a hospital drama. Why waste budget on hiring an actor to play a corpse, I could hear Frank's explaining voice say, when nonunion pillows under a sheet work equally well? Frank's eyes were squeezed shut in a way that didn't suggest death. Also, he was moving, his limbs jerking ever so slightly, arrhythmically, like a horse twitching off flies on a hot summer afternoon.

He was faking.

Once, standing on a street corner in New York waiting for the light to change, I saw a bicyclist get hit by a taxi. He'd zipped through a red light the way bicyclists do sometimes, and the greenlit taxi was going fast, as taxis will. The bike crunched under the tires and the bicyclist
got tossed onto the hood. His body shattered the windshield before he rolled up and over the roof. I don't know if the bicyclist lived or died, because that was when I did an about-face and walked as quickly as I could in the opposite direction. A good person would have stuck around to help, would have called
911
and made a statement to the police. I couldn't do it. I couldn't stick around to bear witness to an act of such shattering foolishness, something that would ever after alter the life of the bicyclist, the taxi driver, his passenger, and the innocent onlookers like me who couldn't unsee the guy rolling over that taxi roof. I didn't want to know how it actually ended. I needed to believe that everything turned out okay.

Seeing Frank lying on the gurney like that, I fought the urge to pull another about-face. I willed myself to go to him, and almost but not quite put my hand on his forehead.

“Frank,” I said. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“I was being pursued by a pack of coyotes on the playground and ended up flat on my back. I assumed I'd been brought low by some type of seizure. The principal saw me lying there and told me to get up. I explained my situation and he said, ‘If you're having a seizure, we need to call an ambulance.' Miss Peppe told him that wouldn't be necessary. But he said if I claimed I was having a seizure, then by gum, I was going to the hospital.”

“He said that?” I asked.

“Not exactly. He didn't use the phrase ‘by gum.' But that seemed appropriate to the situation. Did you know ancient man chewed a gum derived from birch tar during the Neolithic period more than five thousand years ago? Also, I'm guessing, ancient woman.”

I felt a little bit like having a seizure myself. “So Dr. Matthews called an ambulance to come and get you instead of calling me?”

“In his shoes, I would have opted for giving you a jingle, but I would rather not be in the principal's shoes because they were right by my head while I was convulsing and I would rather drop dead than wear horrible shoes like that. I suppose the principal called the ambulance
because he is a doctor and so he might assume I required hospitalization.” While he spoke, Frank forgot to twitch.

I had to put the hand I'd had hovering over his brow on the gurney to steady myself. “He's not that kind of doctor, you know,” I said.

“I know,” Frank said.

“
CAN'T YOU SEE
he's faking?”

I'd pulled one of the paramedics aside while the other carted Frank into the emergency room.

“You his mother?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. It was easier than explaining.

“Can I see he's faking? Hmm. What do you think?”

“Then why did you pick him up?”

“When the school called, we had to go. Once we got there, we had to take him. We're legally bound to. As the principal told me more than once, in case I'd forgotten.”

“But I don't understand. Frank's done this before. The school never used to call an ambulance to come for him. They called us.”

The paramedic shook his head. He looked disgusted. “That guy's a tool. Stood over the kid, saying, ‘You have a seizure, we call an ambulance and you go to the hospital. That's how things work in the real world, my friend.' Like that's any way to teach a kid a lesson. Give an eight-year-old boy a chance to cut class, run red lights, and blast a siren? What kid says no to that?”

“He's almost ten,” I said.

He shrugged. “Still.”

“The school told us Frank was having a seizure,” I said. “They didn't say ‘faking a seizure.' I've never been so scared.”

“Maybe you're the one the principal wanted to teach a lesson. He seemed like that kind of guy.”

IN THE WAITING
room, I explained what had happened. “Mimi,” I said. “Frank's all right.”

She opened her eyes but her face didn't register any emotion. “He'll never be all right,” she said. “He's like my brother.” She picked up her purse and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to work.”

“What about Frank?”

“You stay with him. I'll take a cab home.”

“You're going to leave without seeing him?”

“I'll see him when he gets home.”

“Mimi,” I said. “He needs to see you.”

“I understand that you're trying to help, Alice,” she said. “But I don't need to see Frank as a patient in an emergency room setting if I don't have to. I don't want that image stuck in my head. Not right now. I'm very near the end.”

I touched her forearm. “Of course,” I said. “I get that. Go. Don't worry. I'll take care of everything.”

“How gratifying for you,” she said. “Now take your hands off me.”

I did. She left.

I PUSHED THROUGH
the swinging doors again in time to hear Frank saying to a nurse, “Tinkerbell gave my mother a gown when she had to come to the emergency room, so I wondered if you might loan me a waistcoat. Or, failing that, a doctor's white lab coat. Size small.”

The nurse exchanged a look with the intern examining Frank. “Are you cold, sweetheart?” she asked. “I can get you a blanket.”

“I'm not cold,” he said. “I'm embarrassed.”

“There you are, Mom,” the intern said when he saw me. “Our friend Frank is in good shape now, so if you'll follow me and sign some papers, we'll be done here.”

He showed me to a chair in an empty room and sat down next to me in the narrow space alongside the examination table, underneath a staggering array of monitoring equipment. Without a patient on the
slab, the machines were quiet and the lines of colored light stretched flat across the screens. The intern fitted his palms together and stared at them, like some guy who had some very serious praying to do and didn't know quite how to start. Even to me he looked young. I had to figure he might not have come across a whole lot of kids like Frank in his training yet.

After he got through studying his hands he looked up at me from under his brows. He had such a kind face. I felt for him.

“About Tinkerbell,” I said. “I can explain.”

“I think Tinkerbell is the least of your problems,” he said. “I'm worried about your son.”

“So am I,” I said.

BY THE TIME
we got done with the talking and the paperwork it was almost dark outside. I tried to hold Frank's hand on the way to the car but he snatched it away. I decided he'd been through too much already for me to bust him for that this time. Frank got in the backseat and strapped himself in. I got in on the other side, next to him. “You can't drive the car from back here,” he said.

“I know. What's going on with you, Frank? Is there anything you want to talk about?”

“As a matter of fact, there is. Where is my mother? I can't help noticing that she keeps missing pivotal moments in my day-to-day life.”

“She had to go back to work.”

“On her book?”

“Yes. She's very near the end.”

“How do you know? Have you seen it?”

“I haven't. She said.”

“I don't understand the delay,” Frank said. “I wrote my book in an afternoon. I certainly hope this project of hers ends up being worth all the Sturm und Drang.”

“I hope so, too,” I said. “I know your mother wants to finish as soon as she can so she can get back to spending more time with you.”

“I have had about enough of this for one day,” Frank said. “It's time for you to stop talking.”

NEITHER OF US
wanted to go home yet. There was a marathon Keaton festival at the silent movie house, so we went there instead. We came in partway through the one on a steamboat where Buster, a poor boy in love with a rich girl who's the daughter of his father's steamship archrival, sneaks off his father's broken-down paddle wheeler in the night to be with his love. To throw his dad off the scent, Buster mounds pillows under the covers of his bunk so his father would think he was asleep there. When his dad ripped the blankets back and uncovered Buster's ruse, I started laughing and couldn't stop.

“Shhhhhhhhh!” Frank hissed when it became clear I wasn't going to be able to put a sock in it. “I understand that it's a humorous situation, Alice, but we'll be ejected for disruptive behavior. The management does that. You will not like it. I know.”

“I'm sorry,” I whispered. “Stay here. Don't move. I'll be right back.”

Out in the lobby, I drank from the water fountain and took some deep breaths to calm myself. Then I called Frank's psychiatrist and left a message. I hoped Mimi had done that already, but I had my doubts. After that I called Mr. Vargas. He sounded so glad to hear my voice I almost wept.

“Alice!” he said. “What's the good news?”

When I didn't answer for several beats, he said, “Alice?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “What? You're breaking up.”

“I said, how are things there?”

“It's Mimi,” I said. “She's very near the end.”

“Great!” he said. “See? Patience. Patience and kid gloves. Works every time.”

I couldn't help picturing those kid gloves. Red ones. Elbow length. Italian. Beautiful gloves. Not gloves I would have dreamed of before knowing Frank.

“Alice?” Mr. Vargas said. “Alice? Are you there?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm here.”

FRANK AND
I
watched that Buster Keaton movie to the end. And the one that came after it. By the time we got back to the house Frank was asleep. I managed to get him out of the car without waking him and half-dragged, half-carried him into the house and tucked him into bed, tennis shoes and all. I could hear Mimi typing so I didn't bother to tell her we were back. She could figure it out for herself.

I don't know how long I stood there looking at Frank's face illuminated by a shaft of light falling through the bedroom door. When he was asleep he looked so harmless. He was a beautiful child, really. Just handsome enough to catch a few extra breaks in life, but not handsome enough to be hamstrung by it. It was the way Frank packaged himself that pushed him over into the spectacular. That nobody could take from him, no matter how many small-minded men in horrible shoes might try.

I lay what I thought of as his Ragged Frank outfit—the blown-out morning pants and tattered tailcoat that were as close to owning sweats as he got—on top of his bedclothes so he'd see that instead of the T-shirt and khakis he'd gone to sleep in. I left his top hat on his bedside table. By that time I was practically asleep on my feet—horses sleep standing up, did you know that?—and put myself to bed, too. I didn't turn on the light, just tottered over and pulled the covers back.

Underneath the covers, I found Xander.

“What are you doing in my bed?” I asked.

He opened his eyes and blinked sleepily. “Hold on, Goldilocks. This is my bed, remember? I thought you blew town so I moved back in. What's going on?”

“I didn't go,” I said. “Scoot over. Keep your mouth shut and your hands to yourself.”

I talked, though. Boy, did I ever. I ended up telling Xander all
the stuff about the day that I'd wanted to spill to Mr. Vargas. “So then Frank says, ‘Do you know that ancient man was chewing a gum derived from birch tar during the Neolithic period more than five thousand years ago?' He just scared the liver out of all of us, and he's talking about the history of chewing gum?”

Xander raised his hand.

“What?”

“Can I say one thing?” he asked.

“Okay.”

“Frank couldn't wear his armor today,” Xander said. “Facts were all the protection he had. Facts were his force field.”