this is jack

Jack stood in the cold white hallway, leaning against the wall beside her door, lining the toes of his sneakers up to the long thin black smears of rubber on the floor. He wondered what had made them, and thought probably a wheelchair, or hundreds of wheelchairs. Maybe someone rolled a wheelchair down this hallway and one of the wheels got trapped on a discarded ballpoint, a forgotten earring, and locked, spilling out these flat rubbery jetstreams.

He smiled weakly at a nurse who passed by and smiled at him. He watched her as she walked into the tiny void at the end of the hallway, which seemed so long it couldn't possibly be real at the far end. It had to be a backdrop. "I wonder what the area code is down there," Eleanor might have said, and he bit his lip.

Inside the private room Eleanor was being attended to by her mother, who he was certain blamed him for the incident. She didn't have to worry, he wanted to say to her, he would never visit the damn island again as long as he lived, would never ever take Eleanor there again or anywhere if it would keep her safe. Wanted to say this but couldn't, went thin and pale whenever her mother looked at him. He couldn't get a word out. Even if he could, even if he could say these things, he was pretty sure that, whether she said so or not, Eleanor's mother would be thinking You'll never see my daughter again, bucko, you can bet the farm on that.

Just ten minutes ago he had been alone with Eleanor, sitting in the mottled orange plastic chair beside her bed, staring at her eyes, looking for a flicker of movement beneath her lids. He had been holding her hand, which was taped and bandaged, the gauze and adhesive covering small cuts and tears in her skin, and the stiff clear cord of intravenous that plunged into the back of her hand. And the door to Eleanor's room had been open, and it was a dim day, so he never saw the shadow of her mother fall across the room, but he knew she was there all the same, and he carefully put Eleanor's hand back and looked up at Mrs. Witt, who was balanced precariously between the immediate ache she felt whenever she entered Eleanor's room to see her daughter lying there, somewhere in a tangle of pulleys and slings and braces and supports, and the rush of offense she took at the sight of the boy she held responsible sitting there, right there, holding her daughter's still hand.

So he left the room before she could throw him out. He thought it might have been better to let her order him away, to give her an exit for that charge of anger, but today he wasn't certain he could remain stoic when the woman yelled at him, so he nodded politely and closed the door behind him.

The routine would begin now, Mrs. Witt complaining about every little thing she could set her focus on -- the IV is too tangled, the sheets need changing, has her daughter been bathed today? -- and he knew it was an exercise in distraction. That if she had nothing small to bitch about, she would see only the one large thing she couldn't do anything to change. So he gave her space, and sometimes she stayed all night, and the nurses sent him home, always sympathetically, always with a gentle hand on his shoulder.

Eleanor had been unconscious, interrupted, for two weeks when her mother finally exploded. Jack was in Eleanor's room again, sitting on the windowsill, reading to Eleanor from The Martian Chronicles. Her favorite story was the one about the man who was left behind on Mars when everybody else went home to Earth to fight in the big war, to make sure their families were fine, and he finds the one woman left on Mars and she's a great big cow. Jack was at the part where the woman was insisting the man run the movie again and again, when Mrs. Witt came into the room. He looked up and knew instantly that this time was going to be something new.

She was shaking, and when she opened her mouth, out of her came things he never thought he'd hear. She called him a son of a bitch, a dirty bastard, she challenged him to a fight. You want to hit me, you little asshole? she screamed, and then burst into tears. He didn't understand any of it. He dropped the book and lowered himself to his feet, and Mrs. Witt sobbed. "I'm supposed to read to her," she said, her voice almost buried beneath the storm of tears. She could barely breathe, and reeled in long, hard gasps between words, and exhaled a fury of emotion. "I'm her mother," she spat, "I'm the one who reads to her, you almost killed her, you son of a bitch, I'm the one who keeps her alive because you almost killed her, I want you to go away forever, you hateful little shit, you motherfucking bastard..."

When he left, a nurse was helping Mrs. Witt into a chair, Eleanor's mother moving like jelly, spilling out of the nurse's arms, and a man in a brown sport coat and a white lab coat over it stood in the doorway, observing. As Jack tried to leave, the man said, "Please don't take it personally, son. This is normal sometimes," and Jack twisted past him and went outside and climbed onto his bicycle and rode hard and fast to the beach. He knew that Mrs. Witt was under terrible strain, knew that she didn't really think of him that way -- hoped she didn't -- but all the same, he was fifteen, and his skin hadn't thickened yet. He didn't stop riding until he'd negotiated the thick, damp sand and reached the short pier. The wood drummed beneath the tires of the bike, and he vaulted off and let the bike fall. He crouched at the end of the pier where the rowboat was lashed, and he untangled the knots and climbed aboard. He rowed to the island, exactly like he would have promised Eleanor's mother he wouldn't, and when he was there he dragged the boat haphazardly ashore and ran up the hillside path to the cliff, and before he could think twice about it, Jack launched himself into space. He resisted the urge to fold himself into a ball or a spear, and hit the water on his back, flailing.

He missed every rock in the small cove and surfaced offshore, unharmed, and hated himself for it, almost as much as Eleanor's mother seemed to. The question she wanted to ask him was why he had done this to her daughter. The question he wanted answered was, if this had to happen to somebody, then why the hell had it happened to her, and not me?