The Year We Left Home (28 page)

“Good riddance,” his mother said.

Matt took the ice and the glass of Coke back to his room. His dad wouldn’t take down the basketball hoop. He never did any of the things he said he was going to. Just like his mother never really called the police.

He had posters of Michael Jordan and Karl Malone, big ones, on his closet doors, which was the only place his mother let him tape posters. He had a
Star Wars
poster on heavy cardboard propped against one wall. It was from the first
Star Wars
movie, the best one, before
they got into gross stuff like Leia was his sister and Darth Vader was his dad, and you had to look at Darth Vader’s leaky old bald head under his helmet.

It was better when you had parents who weren’t your real parents because then somebody could kill them off and nobody felt too bad about it. Luke didn’t get to do anything while his aunt and uncle were still around.

In case God was listening, he thought he’d better take back the part about wanting his parents dead, so that if they should happen to die, it wouldn’t be his fault.

His mouth had stopped bleeding but it was going to hurt a while longer. If you were the hero of a movie, like Luke, you could save the whole galaxy. If there was ever a movie of his own life, most of it would be the waiting-around part, before anything you did mattered to anyone.

He couldn’t
sleep. He hadn’t slept well for weeks, months. It began with one bad night here and there. Then two or three or four in a row, then the dread of them piled up and, as his intelligent, reasonable wife pointed out, his mind became the enemy of his body.

In the beginning Ryan hadn’t been too concerned. When he’d got his first jobs in computer programming he’d often worked odd, late-night, all-night hours, because that was the way the work got done, how everyone did it, and if you slept on a cot next to your desk and lived on snack food and Mountain Dew, so much the better. It proved you were an ace, a pirate king.

But he’d been younger then, and if he needed to, he could sleep twenty straight hours over a weekend to catch up. This was different. He stayed awake for no reason, then wore himself down with fretting over it. He went through his days draggy, wired, gravel-eyed. Nothing helped. Drugs didn’t work; they shoved him into a black tunnel and drew him only partway out again.

His wife and daughter slept. He prowled the apartment, barefoot on the cold floor. Most nights he went to bed when his wife did, then woke up two or three or four hours later, unable to get back to sleep. The windows were cold to the touch, rimed with white frost. Outside,
the same frozen street, same dirty-pink mercury-vapor streetlight, the same stick tree throwing its bare shadow. Although they lived on a Wrigleyville street regarded as quiet, if you watched for even a couple of minutes, some car or truck always rolled along, even during the dead and frigid hours. It was easy for him to imagine, at such times, that he was lost in a nightmare loop of time, when it would always be a black night in stark and staring winter and he would always be awake to see it.

His wife, who had not yet entirely lost patience with him, suggested he enroll in some kind of sleep study. She’d heard of such things. Surely they had them at the big university hospitals. He told her he’d call around and see, although he never actually did. He didn’t like the thought of filling out nosy questionnaires, or trying to sleep with wires attached to his head in some blue-lit observation room. If you could fall sleep in a place like that, why would you need any help? His wife (still trying to be constructive, she didn’t mean it unkindly) remarked that maybe he
wanted
to be sleepless, for some reason that he himself did not comprehend, it filled some need.

Ryan didn’t like the idea that he was bumbling around with secret, destructive motives he was too stupid to figure out. “What, I need to be miserable?”

“Maybe you just need some time alone.”

He’d had to think about that one. At work he was often isolated, but never alone. His daughter, a boisterous and piping two-year-old, made any normal adult privacy hard to come by, and solitude impossible.

His wife said, “God knows, if I could keep myself awake long enough, I might try a little insomnia now and then.” She stayed at home with their daughter and had her own complaints.

Every effect had a cause, you had to assume that, and maybe the cause for his sleeplessness was a simple matter of fizzing brain chemistry. Not some big hurt that needed worrying about. Only the usual modern complaints: dullness, impatience, staleness. Maybe he should take up some expensive, challenging hobby, such as skiing. A lot of guys he knew were into skiing.

He was thirty-five, which didn’t feel either old or young. He didn’t know how to measure. It wasn’t an age anyone looked forward to, as in “someday, when I’m thirty-five.” By now many things had been decided, or decided for him. He missed the sense that everything he did was important and urgent. A kid’s feeling. That didn’t make it any less true.

But what portion of his life would he change if it meant that his daughter would never have come to be?

His wife said, “Maybe you should get back into running. It used to tire you out.”

He’d run along the lakefront in good weather. Lots of people did, at times the whole city seemed to be made up of rangy, purposeful runners pounding out the miles. There was always the lake to watch, its boats and circling birds, its moods in sunshine or its metallic look beneath clouds. There were the beaches, the volleyball games in summer, the strolling pairs, the roller skaters and bicyclists, everybody out to enjoy the city’s great front lawn. He guessed it had been the closest he ever came to alone time, taking his place in the communal scenery. It was his city now, and he belonged to it as well. He didn’t volunteer to people that he was from Iowa. They always thought that meant he’d grown up on a farm.

But he kept injuring himself, which depressed him because it meant age creeping up on you a little more every year no matter how you tried to stiff-arm it, and by the time he’d healed, the weather had turned cold, and though there were still runners out there, wearing propylene and goggles and earmuffs, he just wasn’t that hard-core. He missed it, sure, but he didn’t think it was making his body have some kind of nonsleep tantrum about it.

Then there were a few days of thaw, the false warmth you knew not to trust, and a little after midnight, marooned in sleeplessness once more, on impulse he dug out his running shoes and a down vest and a wool hat and wrote his wife a note in case she woke up and missed him. He let himself out and jogged a few blocks over to the Inner Drive and set himself a course of four easy miles, two up and two back. The
temperature was in the forties and the sidewalks were wet but not slick. There wasn’t anyone else out on foot, but that in itself didn’t make him feel unsafe. He had enough confidence in his speed to think he could outrun most problems, he had enough confidence in his judgment to believe he could spot them ahead of time.

Nevertheless, he carried an ID with him, so that in case of accident, his family wouldn’t be left to worry and wonder what had become of him. He did such things now, it was second nature to him. It hadn’t been that long ago since he was responsible to no one but himself.

North was the direction he chose, with the lake and the streaming traffic on his right. He’d stretched out at home, but the cold made it difficult for his muscles to loosen. All his old injuries (hamstring, knee, hip pointer) made themselves known, though mildly. He thought he could work through them if he didn’t push himself too hard. The air was cold, although not so cold that it hurt his lungs. After three-quarters of a mile he struck a good pace. His breathing eased and he took pleasure in his own motion. He’d always liked running at night, though it was another thing his wife had objected to, objections Ryan had dismissed as unrealistic and overcautious. She’d come into a mother’s worrying nature.

He couldn’t have said what he was thinking—if he was thinking anything at all, or if his mind had been quieted into perfect blank calm—it was not the same as carelessness. In any case he hadn’t seen it coming, the false step, the toe catching on an uneven surface. It upended him hard, his left knee taking the full impact, the whole of his left side on the cement and his head skidding.

It felt like sleep, like waking up from a restful sleep. There were feet around him, very close to his face, and voices a mile away. Man’s voice, woman’s voice. Back and forth. His knee hurt like hell. The pain brought him around, otherwise he would have been content to lie there listening to the mere sound of the voices without their taking on meaning. “Shit,” he said, or tried to say, tried to bend his knee up to where he could massage it.

A man knelt next to him. “Hey buddy, how you doing?”

“That’s a stupid,” Ryan said, meaning,
stupid question.
Something was wrong with his mouth as well.

The woman said, “I think he needs an ambulance.” He saw her feet, her dressed-up shoes.

“No.” He shook his head. It felt loose on his neck. He was determined that there be no ambulance, although he could not have said why.

The man said, “He’s got a head injury, he ought to get it checked out.” The man sounded like a bossy type. Ryan decided he didn’t like him.

He would have to proceed with cunning. He forced himself to sit up briskly, as if his head didn’t feel like it was full of sparkling confetti. “S’my knee that hurts.” He rolled his leg from side to side, demonstrating.

The woman said coaxingly, “Let’s get a doctor to look at that knee, how about it?”

Ryan thought about standing up. If he could stand, he could get out of their clutches. “Lil help here,” he said, attempting a jaunty tone.

Instead they took a step away from him and conferred in low voices. Then they surrounded him again. He thought maybe there were more than two of them. The man, or a different man, said, “You live around here? Someplace around here?”

“Yeah.” They were waiting for him to tell them where. He felt in his vest pocket and came up with the flat wallet that held his ID and house keys. This was taken from him and passed around.

“Buddy?” It was the bossy man again. “The lady’s willing to give you a ride home. If you got somebody there to look after you.”

“Ah, yeah.” He was expected to say more. “Wife.”

Then he was hoisted to his feet. He found himself draped over the bossy man’s shoulder, unpleasantly close to his jowls and large unclean ear. A car—the woman’s—was pulled up to the curb, and after some discussion it was agreed that he should be placed in the backseat so he wouldn’t have to bend his leg. He felt something wet leaking from the vicinity of his knee, either blood or melted snow. The woman got
behind the wheel and waited while the others arranged him lengthwise on the seat. “Thanks,” he said, waving. Then the door closed on him and the car started up. It was a Mercedes, luxurious, new smelling, with a leather interior the color of vanilla pudding. He hoped he wouldn’t bleed on it.

“How you doing back there?” she asked. “Still with me?”

She pulled away from the curb. He wanted to say something clever about where else would he be, then he realized it was a question about his mental state, much as you might ask someone if they knew the day of the week or the name of the current president. “Huh,” he said.

“I was driving right behind you when you fell. Scary. You practically cartwheeled.”

“I feel like an idiot,” Ryan said. His first complete, coherent sentence.

“It could happen to anyone.” She turned around and smiled, then turned back again to attend to her driving.

He hadn’t seen her face until then. He stared at the rearview mirror where now only her eyes were visible, passing in and out of strips of light and shadow.

She said, “I’m just going to go up two blocks, then turn around and go down Archer.”

“Fine.”

“I could still take you to an ER, if you want.”

“That’s OK.”

Silence as she braked at intersections, turned back south again. He was afraid his damaged head would make him say something wrong or crazy, he was afraid he was mistaken about everything. He was afraid of not being mistaken. “Here,” he said, once they approached his block. “The one with the courtyard.”

She eased the car up to the entrance. “Do you want me to help you out? Can you put any weight on that leg?”

“Ah, I think I’ll be . . . if you could just . . .” He was having a hard time maneuvering himself to the edge of the seat. He didn’t think he could get the door open.

She set the parking brake, got out, and walked around to the curb side. She opened the car door and peered inside. “Stuck?”

Ryan planted his good leg and pivoted out to the street, holding on to the Mercedes’s roof. There was no way not to look at her. A lady doing a favor for a stranger, her smile pleasant and impersonal. Something about the way she was dressed—heels, good coat, perfume—suggested that she might be on her way home from a party. “Thanks again,” he said.

“Let’s see if you can walk.”

He took a hop, lurched, crumpled halfway over, straightened himself. Led with his good leg, then let his bad leg catch up. “Like a champ.”

“I’m hoping you don’t have to climb any stairs,” she said. Which stopped short of an invitation to help him.

“Elevator. Lucky.”

“You should probably stay awake for a while, in case you have a concussion.”

“No problem.”

“I’ll watch and make sure you get inside,” she said, and walked back around to get behind the wheel of her car.

It was now a point of pride for him to get himself to the front door, and he did so, panting, cursing, but keeping up his pace so that she wouldn’t feel obliged to come after him and embarrass him further. At the door he turned around and waved. She tapped the horn and pulled away.