The First Stone (15 page)

When Reef offered no comment, Colville opened upthe file he was holding. “Now that you've settled in, it's time to start complying with the other conditions of Judge Thomas's ruling.”

Reef gave no reaction. Just waited.

“I've registered you for school, which is still a few weeks away.” He flipped through some papers in the folder. “Now it's time to get you involved in the rehab volunteer program the judge mentioned. You've got quite a few options, if you'd care to hear—”

“Just pick one.” What goddamn difference did it make anyway?

Colville looked at him, let the seconds tick by the way Reef had done earlier in the family room. Then, “Let's go with the first one on the list.” He looked down at the file. “There's a contact person listed here that I'll call tonight. They're busy people. I'll try to set up a meeting for sometime next week.” He closed the folder and glanced up. “You know, it's a good time to be getting involved in this. Volunteers can be scarce during the summer with people away on vacation. And besides, you'll soon be finished with the repairs to the greenhouse. You've done some good work there.”

Reef thought of the days he'd spent crawling over that christly structure in the back yard. Thought of the cuts he'd got on his hands and arms from the sharp edges of the glass panels he'd replaced. He'd cracked two in the process but, surprisingly, Colville hadn't made him pay for those. “There's a differencebetween an accident and an intentional act,” he had said. Reef wasn't so sure about that when the result was pretty much the same, but he'd been glad nonetheless that Colville was only going to deduct from his monthly Social Services check the cost of the panel he had broken his first day.

“Is that all?” he asked, standing up.

“One more thing,” Colville said.

“Yeah?”

“You had another call today from that girl.”

“Scar,” Reef said. It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes. This is probably none of my business, but are you ever going to call her back? You do have phone privileges, you know.”

“You're right,” Reef said. “It's none of your business.”

Reef tilted his head back and drained the can of Coke he'd taken from the fridge. When he'd returned to the family room, Owen had been Joined by Keith and Gordy, and the three of them were glued to some monster truck rally on the extreme sports channel. In the past, Reef would have enjoyed watching the mindless destruction such an event offered, but that was before. Before
what
, though? Before coming to North Hills? Or before sitting through the hearing and seeing the picture of the car that girl had been driving? He wasn't sure. Or maybe he
was
sure and didn't want to admit it. Christ! Colville's mind games were fucking up hishead. Now he wasn't sure of anything! He left the family room and headed through the kitchen, grabbing a Coke on his way out to the back yard.

He set the empty can down and leaned against the railing, staring at the outline of the greenhouse in the fading summer light.
You've done some good work there
. Good or not, it certainly hadn't been easy. The initial cleanup had been a bitch, since no one had ever bothered to clear out the broken glass. Colville said he hadn't had time to get around to it with all the work he'd been doing on the main house, but Reef suspected he'd just been waiting for free inmate labor. When Reef had asked why some of the others couldn't help out, Colville had just said everybody had jobs to do and this one was Reef's.
Eat shit and die
, Reef had wanted to tell him, but as it turned out, having someone else working with him would have been too awkward, maybe even dangerous. It wasn't a big structure to begin with, and having another body moving around inside would have complicated things. And, truth be told, Reef preferred working alone. That way, only he saw the mistakes he made.

It was an old greenhouse, made of wood rather than vinyl-covered metal like the mock-up he'd seen at Kent Building Supplies. That one would have been a lot easier to work on since all you'd have to do was take the screws out of the brackets that held the panels in place, replace the glass and screw the brackets back on. His greenhouse—and he'd surprised himselflately by thinking of it as his—required a lot more work than that. The panels were held in place by strips of cedar that had to be pried away from the glass, no easy feat since the glass offered no leverage to pry up the nails. The first two tries, he'd cracked perfectly good panels when he'd pulled the hammer back, its head bearing down directly on the glass. But he'd figured out how to use pieces of wood so the pressure of the hammerhead was evenly distributed over the frame.

Removing the broken panels was hard enough—installing the new glass was a bitch. Although the guy at Kent had cut the glass to the measurements Reef had written down, Reef had to cut new cedar brackets himself, and getting them the right length wasn't easy. If he cut them too long, there would be no room for the wood to expand in damp weather, and if he cut them too short, water could seep in under the bracket and, over time, rot the wood again. Colville had told him that a couple of the panels had broken simply because the inside brackets had rotted out and the glass had fallen clean through.

The most crucial part of the process was the glazing, applying a thin line of caulking between the wood and the glass to keep everything watertight. Too much and you just made a mess. Too little and you ended up with rot. Nothing, it seemed, was easy.

Like this thing with Scar. She'd called him four or five times already, but each time he'd refused to go tothe phone, told whoever had answered it to take a message. He wasn't even sure why he didn't want to talk to her. The first time, he'd been up on the ladder removing one of the cracked roof panels and it didn't make sense to crawl all the way down when he could just call her back later. The next time, though, he'd been watching TV, and the time after that he'd just been eating supper, but something had kept him from going to the phone. He wasn't quite sure what. For a time, he thought the reason was tied up somehow in the greenhouse. Like the bit about the glazing. Scar was the wood and he was the water. There needed to be something between them to keep everything solid and whole. And, for the time being anyway, North Hills was that something.

Reef looked at the Coke can again, picked it up with his right hand and squeezed it. The can collapsed easily into a crude hourglass shape, the words on the side accordioned and illegible. From somewhere in his head he heard, “Goddamn cars are no more'n tin cans,” then recalled the moment in a sudden rush of memory.

The old Dodge Dart sat along the edge of some road. It was a Sunday and his grandmother had wanted to take Reef to the beach. He'd never been before and he was excited, but they were late setting out because his grandfather had been drinking. Now the Dart was pulled over to the side, its hood up, motor dead, and his grandfather was everlastingly kicking the shit out ofthe front fender, driver's door, back door, back fender, working his way around to the trunk, which he'd opened. Taking out the lug wrench, he swung it again and again, first smashing out the taillights, then working his way back around to the front of the car, knocking off the side mirror and bashing in the driver's-side windows.

Reef had slid out of the car just as his grandfather began kicking the front fender, and he'd pleaded with his grandmother, who sat in the front seat, to get out too. But she hadn't. She'd just sat there waiting, staring straight ahead, as if looking down a road different than the one Reef and his grandfather were standing on. A road that held possibility rather than punishment, a future rather than endless nights of fear. When her drunken husband was finally too exhausted to swing the lug wrench any more, she climbed out and put her hand on his shoulder, whispered something Reef couldn't hear. Then she moved to the edge of the road and held out her thumb, flagged down a car that drove them all back to the city.

Goddamn cars are no more'n tin cans.

Reef thought again of that picture in the courtroom, tried to twist and pull the Coke can back into shape. But, of course, it was ruined. He threw it to the ground, jumped on it, flattened it with both feet. Bent down and picked it up, wound his arm back to fling it as far as he could.

But the greenhouse was in his way.

He wanted to cry out, but he did not. He lowered his arm, looked at what remained of the can for a long moment, then turned and dropped it into the recycling bin beside the deck.

Then he went back into the house.

It looked different than he'd thought it would. Taller, more like an apartment building than a hospital. But, then again, what did he know about hospitals? Weren't they just places people went to die?

Standing at the entrance to the Halifax Rehabilitation Center on that first day of August, Reef felt someone dance on his grave, gooseflesh marching up his back and arms despite the warmth of the morning. He hoped the grave-dancer was his grandfather, hoped he was dancing somewhere hot, red flames licking his toes while the soles of his feet singed and charred, then fell away from his bones in blood-blackened slivers.

“Something wrong?” Colville asked.

“No.” Reef moved forward and an electronic sensor opened the door. Colville followed him inside.

A man in his early sixties met them in the foyer. “Hi. I'm Jim Granter! You must be Mr. Colville! We spoke on the phone!”

“Frank.” Colville said, shaking his hand. “Pleased to meet you.” He turned to Reef. “This is Reef Kennedy.”

Jim Granter was the polar opposite of Frank Colville.

Where Colville was tall and trim, Granter was short and fleshy, at least forty pounds overweight; where Colville's hair was thick and dark, Granter's was sparse and threaded with white. But what Granter lacked in physical stature, he more than made up for in exuberance. His voice was filled with music, and every sentence seemed to end with an exclamation point. “Reef, my boy!” he said. “Glad to have you here! We always have room for volunteers!”

“Yeah,” Reef mumbled.

Granter took Reef's hand and pumped it four or five times, then clapped him on the shoulder and led him toward the elevator. “This young man will be fine here with me, Frank!” he called over his shoulder. “We'll take good care of him!” He pressed the call button, and the doors of one car immediately slid open. He and Reef stepped inside.

Reef felt as if he'd been hijacked by a sidewalk Santa on speed. He kept his face forward, tried to ignore the heat that was working itself up his neck to his face. Colville was still standing in the foyer, watching him, and even from the elevator, Reef could see a muscle twitch at the corner of his mouth. The sonuvabitch was trying not to laugh. Asshole.

“So, I'll be back around four to pick you up. okay?” said Colville.

“That's just dandy!” Granter enthused. He turned to Reef. “Tons to do, my boy, tons to do! And don'tyou worry, we'll feed you!” The elevator doors began to close.

“Good luck, Reef,” Colville called.
Bite me, you bastard
.

When the elevator arrived at the fifth floor, Jim Granter was still talking, and Reef felt like the target of a firing squad, a barrage of words instead of bullets pelting him endlessly. Granter was himself a volunteer. “I'm the greeter!” he'd said. “Granter the Greeter, they call me here!” He'd explained that he came to the rehab at least a couple times a week, and more often when new volunteers were expected.

As they stepped off the elevator at the fifth floor, Granter was outlining for Reef the various levels in the facility: the first floor included the X-ray department and the cafeteria, the second floor contained the physio gym and pool, the third floor was a general recreation area and the fourth floor housed occupational therapy and several doctors' offices. The fifth floor contained more offices and the cardiac rehab program, and the sixth floor was the musculoskeletal trauma unit, which also included beds for patients who had suffered brain injuries. The seventh floor contained beds for patients with spinal cord injuries or who'd had amputations and were coming in for prostheses. The eighth floor, Granter said, was set aside for stroke patients.

Following Granter down a long hallway, Reef was suddenly overwhelmed by the variety of injuries the human body could sustain. His stomach lifted uneasily, and he imagined Judge Thomas somewhere laughing her head off right that moment. He suddenly wished for the opportunity to inflict an injury or two on her.
Bitch
.

“Here we are!” Granter exclaimed. They'd come to the office of Shelly Simpson, the recreation therapist who was in charge of coordinating volunteers. Her door was open, but Granter knocked anyway.

A woman working at a desk looked up and smiled, then got up and came around with her hand extended to Reef. “So you're our newest volunteer,” she said as she shook his hand. “I'm Shelly. Very nice to meet you, Reef.” In her late thirties, Shelly Simpson was an attractive woman, tall and willowy with soft features and an even softer voice, but her handshake was surprisingly firm. In some weird way, she reminded Reef of a female version of Frank Colville, but he couldn't say why. She certainly didn't seem like an asshole. At least, not yet. But give her time. All any of them needed was a little time.