Authors: Callie Wright
The Dolphins filed in; the Bumblebees filed in. In Hugh’s office, nothing happened. While Cheryl’s prekindergarteners queued up behind the playground doors, it was silent on the yard, then twenty-five children bounded out, armed with shovels and buckets and foam balls. Hugh easily picked out Graham Pennington, his giant plaster cast cradled in a sling.
Hugh squeezed his temples, trying to suffocate his thoughts, but they were popping up too quickly. He tried to reassure himself that any fragmentary memories the boy might possess of … well—and here, Hugh’s brain fritzed, a kaleidoscopic trick of the mind whereby he was able to both see and not see Caroline’s unpainted fingernail tracing his erect penis—would soon give way to the body’s natural coping system: if the boy bothered to think of it at all, he would eventually decide he’d dreamed it.
Finally there was a death knell from the black phone on his desk. One, two, three. Mrs. Baxter was going to let it ring.
Hugh snapped up the receiver before the end of the third toll.
Line 1 glowed green but no one spoke.
“Caroline?” said Hugh.
“Oh,” said Caroline. “It’s you.”
* * *
On a chilly Wednesday the week before Joanie died, Graham Pennington had slipped from the top of the playground monkey bars and landed squarely on his left arm. By the time the teachers reached him, he was sitting up in the sand, slightly dazed, and when they peeked inside his jacket sleeve, they saw a tiny white sliver of bone poking through the skin below his now-bluish elbow.
Hugh called 911 first, then Graham’s mother, who could not be reached at either of her numbers—home and studio—so he called Graham’s father, who was divorced from Graham’s mother and worked for a bank in New York. Mr. Pennington, however, was en route home from Tokyo—his assistant promised to relay the message as soon as he landed—and the emergency contact, Graham’s aunt in Troy, didn’t pick up the phone.
Nothing like this had ever happened in Seedlings’ nearly sixteen-year history and Hugh had been both petrified and proud. The teachers had acted quickly and professionally. They cleared the yard. They kept Graham warm and talking. When the ambulance arrived, the children pressed their tiny faces to the windows to watch the EMTs wheel Graham on a stretcher across their playground. Cheryl walked beside the stretcher, softly brushing back Graham’s hair, telling him he was doing so well, everything would be fine, just fine. In the parking lot, Hugh boarded the ambulance with the boy and the crew and they took off for Bassett Hospital.
One of the technicians drove and the other inserted an IV in Graham’s wrist. He did not cry, but he squeezed his eyes shut and whispered to himself until the technician said, “All done.” Soon a painkiller coursed through Graham’s veins and he seemed delighted to be riding in an ambulance. The technician worked quickly with gauze and a splint, hiding the wound, and the boy was a model patient. When Hugh asked him where he might be able to reach his mother, Graham rattled off a list of places—her studio, the gym, Tracey’s, Beth’s, the gallery, the paint store. “Et cetera,” said Graham, and the technician, a young bald man with a gold cross around his neck, laughed and said, “Must be some school you’re running over there.”
“Here we go,” he said when they unloaded Graham in the emergency dock at the hospital. Then the EMTs disappeared inside, leaving Hugh and Graham in the open bay off the main drive. Hugh’s children had been sewed up and x-rayed and even splinted at Bassett, but they had never entered through the back door on a stretcher. Passersby slowed to see. Hugh wanted to tell them to mosey on, no rubbernecking please, but he understood their curiosity. Hugh himself was anxious to know what would happen next.
A nurse arrived and Graham was wheeled through the ER to admitting. Hugh produced a photocopy of the child’s health-insurance card, kept on file at Seedlings, and signed the necessary forms. When that was finished, an older nurse led them to a curtained room, where Hugh helped Graham change into a yellow gown, carefully pulling down the boy’s jeans and stripping his feet of their sweaty socks. The nurse cut off Graham’s jacket and shirt so as not to disturb his arm. By now Graham was vaguely green and Hugh asked if the doctor would see him soon.
“Just as soon as he can,” said the nurse. She closed the curtain on her way out.
Hugh smoothed Graham’s hair as he’d seen Cheryl do and asked him if he wanted to hear a story. Graham didn’t answer so Hugh kept quiet. He’d left instructions with Mrs. Baxter to keep trying Graham’s mother—she’d be here eventually, Hugh told himself, but he was starting to feel panicky. Graham closed his eyes and Hugh fretted that the child might pass out. What if he went into shock? Could that happen to a five-year-old?
By the time Graham’s mother charged into the examination room and threw her body over Graham—twenty minutes, an hour later?—Hugh was pacing the room, eyes fixed on the boy’s chest, monitoring its rise and fall.
“Graham,” said his mother, and at the sound of her voice Graham opened his eyes and smiled sleepily. “Sweetie? My God. Are you okay?” She enveloped him, smothered his face with kisses, and through the muffle of her hug Hugh heard Graham say, “I broke my arm.”
The bone was well hidden under a mound of sterile gauze so that there was, thank God, nothing to see. Still, Graham’s mother looked him over head to toe as though to make sure he was really all there, and she stroked his hair and his cheek and his torso.
During this examination of Graham, Hugh had a chance to study Graham’s mother. She wore paint-splattered white carpenter’s pants and a man’s button-down shirt, her golden-brown hair swept into a sloppy topknot, her car keys stuffed into her back pocket. He tried to place her from the carpool line at school but couldn’t get beyond the image of an old Subaru station wagon.
“Thank you,” she said, turning to Hugh, and he was instantly struck.
She was not conventionally beautiful—thick eyebrows arched high over hazel eyes and her incisors gently overlapped—but Hugh couldn’t unlock his eyes. A smudge of white paint crossed her reddening cheekbone and Hugh had an itch to rub the paint with the pad of his thumb, but she was looking right at him.
“I’m so sorry this happened, Mrs. Pennington.”
With her left hand still on her son, she reached out with her right to shake Hugh’s hand. “Caroline. Caroline Murphy, actually, but Caroline. Thank you so much for tracking me down. Hugh, right? I have to thank you. Your assistant called every store in Cherry Valley until she found me.”
“Graham’s been very brave,” said Hugh.
Caroline regarded Graham’s doctored arm while chewing a piece of gum. “How did this happen, love?”
Hugh had only just begun to say when the doctor entered the room.
He excused himself and used the pay phone in the waiting room to call Mrs. Baxter. Hugh reminded her to fax a copy of the accident report to their licensor, a woman in Albany whom he had never personally met but whose looping signatures on Seedlings’ certificates of operation were as familiar to Hugh as his wife’s. Anne—Seedlings’ “general counsel”—would have to call Diana D. Humphries in the morning to discuss insurance, liability, and legal claims, things Hugh did not even attempt to understand.
Hugh told Mrs. Baxter he would not be back to school that afternoon, then dropped two quarters in the phone and called his wife’s firm in Oneonta. Her secretary answered, a twenty-something named Alyson with a high, scratchy voice.
“Mrs. Obermeyer is in court today,” said Alyson. “Is there a number where she can reach you?”
So officious. Hugh supposed that’s the way she was paid to be, but for Christ’s sake.
“Not really,” said Hugh. He eyed the hallway to Graham’s examination room. “Will she be back soon?”
“I couldn’t say. Can I take a message?”
“Tell her I’m going to miss dinner tonight,” said Hugh. “Tell her I’ll see her at home.”
In the waiting room, he read an old copy of
Newsweek
, but really he just turned the pages. The night before, Hugh had gone to sleep while Anne was still downstairs working. The night before that, she’d come up early, shaping herself to his side, but Hugh had pled exhaustion. He liked to think they had sex regularly but the last time had been six weeks ago, on his birthday in late February. They’d drained a bottle of wine at dinner and let alcohol be their foreplay, and healthy Hugh had gotten and maintained an erection, but he was out of practice—or, rather, the kind of practice he’d been doing had trained him for the quick release—and seconds after he was inside Anne, he was done.
Anne’s hurt had been immediate and visible, a silent retreat to her side of the bed, but what could Hugh do? After nearly nineteen years of marriage, they still fought in silence. On a scale of one to ten, where ten was marital bliss and one was divorce, Hugh had no idea how Anne and he rated. He knew a few couples who had divorced—Caroline Murphy and her husband, for example. Hugh closed the magazine and went to see how she was holding up.
Graham’s arm was broken in two places, but the surgeon—a man whose wife directed the annual high school musicals—did not sound overly concerned. He called it a “routine” compound fracture and said they would clean the bone to decrease the risk of infection, insert pins above and below the breaks, and apply a plaster cast. The main thing was to watch for signs of infection. If all went well, Graham would be back at school in a week.
Graham went into surgery at a little after five o’clock, while Hugh kept Caroline company in the tiny waiting room outside the OR and tried to distract her from thinking about her son. He learned that Caroline and Graham lived in an old farmhouse in Cherry Valley, fifteen miles northeast of Cooperstown. Allen Ginsberg used to summer there, she told Hugh, tanning naked in his satellite dish. Sounded like the right place for Caroline Murphy, beautiful not in spite of but because of her worn clothes and paint-splattered hair. Hugh could imagine what Anne might say about her, but he tried not to.
They had the waiting room to themselves but sat side by side in attached bucket seats, Hugh stealing glances at Caroline. Tendrils of hair threaded her silver hoop earrings and a macaroni necklace looped her throat on a white string. She wore an oversize man’s diver watch, and Hugh was both curious and envious; he hardly knew her and wanted to know more.
“So how long have you lived in Cherry Valley?” he asked.
Caroline tilted her head and said, “Three years.”
Hugh thought of his own path to Cooperstown, eighteen years ago. Anne’s job, Teddy, then Julia. It wasn’t that he wanted to go back; it was that he wanted to go forward, to finally go.
“What about you?” asked Caroline. “Are you from here?”
Hugh started to say his wife was, but the words caught in his throat. “Boston,” he said.
“A transplant, then,” said Caroline. “Same as me.”
Hugh stood and pointed to the vending machines nestled between two potted ficus trees. He felt dizzy, light-headed—he needed a moment to collect himself.
“Can I get you something to drink?” asked Hugh.
Caroline said, “I’d love hot tea, if they have it,” and Hugh crossed the room, conscious of the possibility that she was watching him. If the vending machine didn’t have tea, he thought he would go down to the cafeteria or across town to Stewart’s or to a tea plantation in India to accommodate her. Caroline’s first words to Hugh that afternoon had been
thank you
, then
thank you
again—no hurt, no deep-seated anger, just genuine gratitude for his help, and Hugh was eager to reciprocate.
At eight o’clock, Graham was wheeled out of surgery to post-op. Hugh and Caroline stood beside him while the anesthetic wore off, his little body seizing against the diluting of the narcotic in his bloodstream. During the worst of it, Caroline held Graham’s shoulders and the nurse held his legs and Hugh felt so guilty he couldn’t look. When it was over, they followed Graham’s stretcher to his balloon-bordered room on the pediatric floor of the hospital. Graham had a private room with a view of the parking lot and the rolling hills to the west of town. Hugh stood by the windows while the floor nurse set up Graham’s IV and connected a tiny pulse monitor to his index finger. He was already asleep, from the painkillers or sheer exhaustion.
Sometime after ten, Hugh touched Caroline’s arm and told her he should go.
“It’s late,” Caroline agreed. She reached into her purse and pulled out a piece of gum and he watched her fold the sugared stick into her mouth and move it cheek to cheek with her tongue.
“Will you sleep?” asked Hugh.
“Sure.” She pointed to Graham’s bed. “There’s plenty of room. I’ll have a friend bring me a change of clothes.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” Hugh offered.
In the glow of the bedside light, Caroline reached out to him and he felt her arms around his neck, and then she was hugging him. Hugh stooped and let his arms circle her. She was tiny and he could feel every bone in her back.
“Thank you for staying with us,” said Caroline softly, so as not to disturb Graham. “I couldn’t have gotten through it without you.” Her lips brushed his ear and he let his hand find her neck, where the skin was warm and soft.
He considered staying exactly where he was, but finally he pulled away and they stood near each other, no longer touching.
“Come at lunchtime tomorrow,” said Caroline. “Hopefully Graham will be awake.”
Outside in the hallway the lights were too bright, and the sounds—nurses squeaking in soft shoes, phones ringing combatively—made Hugh want to retreat back to Graham’s room. Tomorrow, Hugh thought. It was not long to wait.
He told himself he was doing the right thing. He promised himself he’d tell Anne about the accident on the playground. But when Hugh got home, at half past ten, Anne’s car wasn’t in the driveway and he found a note on the kitchen counter:
The kids have eaten. I’m going back to work for a few hours. Let’s talk tomorrow.
But they never did.
* * *
That night he dreamed of the cabin in the Berkshires where, until his brother’s death, Hugh had spent his childhood holidays. It was winter again, but in the dream Hugh had not seen George, only Caroline, who was naked on the rock above Reacher Falls, the air freezing but the sun-drenched shale warm against their skin. Hugh curled his body against Caroline’s side, wanting to have sex, but he was overly conscious of the wind off the frozen river. He rolled away, touching his back to the stone, then pushed up against her again, cold, back and forth until Hugh woke, hard, on Anne’s side of the bed.