The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley

  “We should go back,” I say. “Nurse Merchant is probably freaking out.”

  We leave the brooms behind, and I help Trevor roll his chair into the elevator. A thoughtful silence shrouds our journey back.

  “You’ll go to heaven, Trevor,” Lexi says, when the elevator stops at our floor. She holds the doors open with her foot but doesn’t wheel herself through. Her whole body hesitates, and I don’t understand why. I can’t wait to return to the hospital, to the familiar smells, the winding hallways, the chilly lights. “You’re too good not to.” She sighs and then finally exits.

  • • •

  People watch us as we move through the hospital. They look suspicious. It’s long past visiting hours, and we look strange: me pushing Trevor, Lexi wheeling herself. Her upper lip is beaded with sweat, and her flowery yellow top is damp. If I could push them both, I would.

  Peds is in chaos when we creep near the entrance. Nurse Merchant hasn’t left, even though her shift ended an hour ago, and there are two other nurses I don’t recognize rushing around, along with a security guard, a doctor, Lexi’s mom, and a couple that I assume are Trevor’s parents.

  Nurse Merchant is on the phone talking quickly and with her hands, waving them around like an orchestra conductor. Mrs. Kripke is shouting at anyone who will give her half a moment’s attention. Trevor’s parents hold each other and stare into space.

  “Shit,” Trevor says.

  “You hang back,” Lexi says to me. “I’ll tell them it was my idea.”

  “Thanks for today, Droopy.” Trevor bumps my fist and wheels himself the last few feet into the ward, followed closely by Lexi.

  I hide behind a tall cart filled with empty dinner trays and watch the scene unfold.

  Trevor says, “What’s up?” and the room erupts with questions and shouts. Nurse Merchant hangs up the phone and descends upon Lexi and Trevor with her stethoscope and thermometer. The security officer demands to know where they were. Lexi fends off the inquisition with noncommittal answers like “I don’t know” and “just hanging out.”

  “Do you know how much worry you caused me?” Mrs. Kripke shrieks. She’s clutching that god-awful wig like a security blanket. She doesn’t wait for Lexi to answer before sweeping her girl into her arms, ignoring Lexi’s protests, and hugging her tightly. I can’t tell if Mrs. Kripke is happy to see Lexi or attempting to suffocate her.

  “Sorry, guys,” Trevor mutters to his parents. He’s sagging in his wheelchair, as if his skeleton is too weak to support his weight. Trevor’s parents loom over him. It’s almost creepy, the way their arms are crossed over their chests. I’ve never seen Trevor’s parents before. They don’t look much like him. His mother is blocky, like an unfinished marble statue, with the same shiny blond hair Trevor has in his picture. Trevor’s dad is tan and leathery with a bushy black moustache and shoulders that roll forward so far, they’re becoming hunched.

  “They called us at work,” Mr. Guerrero says. “We had to close the store an hour early.” His voice has a hint of an accent he’s clearly worked hard to eliminate.

  Mrs. Guerrero strokes Trevor’s cheek with the back of her hand. I close my eyes and imagine that I can feel the soft skin of her fingers. My mom used to touch my cheek like that—when I was four and my closet was full of monsters.

  “I’m sorry,” Trevor says again. Mr. Guerrero fights to remain angry, but his brittle resolve collapses, and he falls to his knees in front of his son, weeping. A few moments later, Nurse Merchant wheels Trevor to his room.

  “We were so worried about you,” Mrs. Kripke is whining to Lexi. Lexi has been deposited back into her wheelchair, and her mother arranges the wig on Lexi’s head so that the curls brush the tops of her shoulders. Wig or not, Lexi really is a beauty queen.

  I wait for Lexi to rip the wig off her head, fling it at her mother, and wheel back into her room to seek refuge with her books—but she doesn’t. She patiently allows her mother to adjust the wig and doesn’t even complain when she uses spit and the hem of her blouse to clean some smear of imaginary dirt from Lexi’s forehead.

  “I love you, Mom,” Lexi says, and it’s so sincere, so real, that my world tilts and I feel hot and sick.

  I bolt down the hallway, not caring if anyone sees me. It’s a race to the bottom, and I’m going to win. I blow past two doctors, and it’s like a wind has torn through the hospital halls. I’m too fast for them to see, faster than the speed of sound. Fast enough to outrun this pain.

  When I reach my room in the unfinished wing, I fall down onto my mattress and pull out the tin box. My body is wracked with sobs, my eyes blind with tears. The walls of this room bend and breathe; they collapse in around me, so close they press my skin. There’s no door, no windows. There’s only me and this mattress and this goddamn picture. The picture of my family that’s always here waiting for me, even though they never will be. Not ever again.

  Because they’re dead, and it’s my fault.

  Being without my sketchbook makes me twitchy.

  The nightmares gather behind my eyes, crowding out reality, until all I see are the monsters lurking in dark corners, the Scythe hiding behind every curtain, Death standing in front of me with an empty tray and a hungry look in her eyes.

  “Andrew?” she asks. “Is everything all right?”

  No. Nothing is all right. I want to scream at her. I want to bludgeon Death with my cold steel ladle and force her to return my family. My thoughts are tearing at the seams of my body, trying to squeeze out and expose me, but I wrestle them back and calmly say, “Do you want Swedish meatballs or vegetable fried rice?”

  Death takes her tray of greasy Swedish widowmakers to her usual table in the corner and eats with one eye on me and one eye on a stack of files. A list of names. She gives me the creeps staring at me like that, and I wonder if she knows my true face the way I know hers and is merely toying with me because she enjoys the hunt far more than the kill. Either way, I am no one’s prey. She’ll take me one day for sure, but she won’t be laughing when it happens.

  The day passes quickly, and I finish my shift. Arnold tries to hand me a book when he pays me, but I wave him off and leave. I can’t function like this. I need my sketchpad.

  I screw up my courage and trek through the unfamiliar passages that lead to the chapel. I haven’t come here since the day I followed Death because . . . well, I don’t know why. This is a place of God, and He and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms these days.

  Trevor believes in all that heaven and hell and purgatory stuff. Lexi believes in quiet oblivion. I’m not sure what I believe. Heaven is a nice thought. If I knew, really knew, that my parents were hanging out in paradise, sipping rum runners while they waited for me, maybe I’d let Death catch me so that I could be with them. But I don’t know that. I can’t. This could be purgatory. Or hell. Maybe there is no single answer. Maybe our beliefs decide our fate after death.

  The chapel hasn’t changed, except this time it’s empty. It’s a cold room in spite of the warm colors. The walls are faded, the wooden pews are dull. The chapel feels wheezy and insubstantial, like Grandma Brawley—a room hovering on the edge of life, unaware of the day-to-day grief and happiness occurring around it.

  My parents were seriously lapsed Catholics. They kept a Bible on the bookshelf, and both had grown up attending mass and confessing their sins to deaf priests. They even kept a crucifix on their bedroom wall. But they never passed on their beliefs to me or Cady. I always thought, if Jesus really was the son of God, even he would find all the rituals oddly macabre.

  “I knew you’d return.”

  The chaplain startles me, and I turn around so quickly that I stumble into him. We both fall into the pews, and I grunt and scramble to my feet, helping the chaplain rise in the process. Even I know it’s rude to knock over a priest and not offer him a hand back up.

  “Sorry,” I mumble.

  “No, no. It’s my fault. Shouldn’t have scared you.” The chaplain’s got a sleepy vo
ice, like he just woke up from a solid nap. “I’m Father Mike.”

  Father Mike looks much as he did when I first saw him, though up close he seems less comical. His cheeks are dotted with razor burn and acne-scar craters. He’s also shorter than I thought, but the way he carries himself—his squared shoulders and straight back—makes him appear taller. He gives off a smooth, quiet confidence that I don’t believe is posturing.

  “Andrew,” I introduce myself. “Or Drew or Andy. Whatever.”

  “Andy,” Father Mike says. “I found your sketchbook. You’re quite talented.”

  “Did you read it?” I glance around for my sketchpad but don’t see it.

  Father Mike climbs the two steps to the draped altar and reaches behind it. He draws out my sketchpad and offers it to me, only there’s no way I’m going up there. Aztecs cut people’s hearts out on altars like that.

  “Did you dream up that Patient F story?” Father Mike asks.

  “I guess. I mean, yeah, I wrote it.” My hands twitch at my sides. This strange little man is holding my sketchbook hostage, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I wonder how many heaven points I’d lose for decking a priest. “May I have it back, please?”

  Father Mike opens my pad and flips through the pages. I feel the clean white paper pulling at me; I want to siphon off the nightmares that have bred uncontrolled inside me and imprison them between its covers. I need a quiet place to draw more than I need air to breathe.

  “Answer me one question, and I’ll return it to you.”

  “I really have to get going,” I say. “Lots to do.” The more Father Mike touches my pages with his stubby, oily fingers, the more I want to beat him into a coma, but this man is friends with Death, so I have to keep my cool.

  “It’s one question, Andy.” Father Mike closes my sketchpad and dangles it in front of his chest like bait.

  I scowl at him and pace down the aisle. “Fine,” I say, resigned to the fact that answering him may be the only way to escape. “One question.”

  “Wonderful.” There’s laughter in Father Mike’s eyes, caught up in the fine wrinkles that grow from the corners of his eyelids and spread like rays of light. Father Mike doesn’t move any faster than he needs to. At first I think it’s because he’s messing with me, but I realize it’s because he lacks urgency, which I suppose makes sense. Why hurry when you have all of eternity at your disposal?

  He flips through the pages until he finds the one he’s looking for. “Patient F is on the run from the RAND Corporation, and they’ve sent their deadliest agent, the Scythe, to capture him.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “And Patient F can move through time, but he only chooses to remember certain aspects of his life.” Father Mike rifles through the pages again. “For instance, he knows the names of all the men who were involved in murdering his family, but he doesn’t remember how they killed them, or why.”

  “Correct.”

  Father Mike looks up at me. “Why doesn’t he want to know?”

  “Guilt,” I say, and hold out my hand.

  But Father Mike makes no move to return my sketchpad. He isn’t even looking at me anymore. He’s staring at a page: Patient F is tearing out the skeleton of one of the men on his list. Outside the building, the Scythe is preparing an ambush. My pencil strokes are heavy, dense.

  “But why?” Father Mike asks. “Why does he feel guilty?”

  I drop my hand to my side but remain standing. “He blames himself for the deaths of his wife and child.”

  “How can he know that for certain if he doesn’t know how or why they were killed?”

  “What more does he need to know?” I ask. “They’re dead, and he’s alive.”

  Father Mike nods slightly, his eyes still glued to the book. He flips through the pages again. “So he feels guilty for surviving?” He looks up, stares right into my eyes. Father Mike’s got these blue eyes like I’ve never seen before. They’re flashlights, shining their holy light into corners of my soul that I don’t necessarily want illuminated.

  “It’s more complicated than that.” My legs are tired, and I slip into the cramped front pew, squirming to find a comfortable position. “Patient F is responsible for their deaths.”

  “Why?”

  “He just is!”

  “That’s silly.” Father Mike tilts his head and raises his eyebrows. Maybe he’s waiting for another explanation, but I haven’t got one. “Survivor’s guilt is understandable. I deal with families who blame themselves for losses they couldn’t possibly have prevented.” Father Mike touches the pages. He runs his finger lightly over a heavy pencil stroke. “But the revenge—Patient F’s obsession with dragging his family through time over and over so that he can save them—it’s bloody masochistic.”

  I struggle to find the words to explain it properly. If I had my sketchpad, I could draw what I mean for him, but he doesn’t seem to want to release it. “Patient F is protecting his family the only way he can.”

  “But they’re stand-ins. Ersatz duplicates. His wife and son are still dead. These people, they’re not really his family.”

  “Maybe not technically,” I say. “But they’re his to protect. His responsibility.”

  “He’s the one who’s putting them in danger in the first place.” Father Mike holds up the pad and points to a frame where Patient F is tearing his wife through space and time and dropping her into the body of an elderly woman on the street, who’s about to be robbed.

  “They were already in danger,” I say. “Look at the old woman. Whether his wife is in that body or not, the old woman is getting jacked.”

  Father Mike studies the frames. “It’s still masochistic,” the chaplain says. “And I don’t buy it.”

  I get up and snatch the sketchpad from Father Mike. “It’s not for you to get. You’re just some priest who read something that didn’t belong to him. What do you know about comic books anyway?”

  I turn to storm off down the aisle, but Father Mike clears his throat with authority—the way my father used to clear his throat when he knew I was trying to pull one over on him—and it stops me short.

  “I’m not saying the story is bad. Far from it.”

  “Then what are you saying?” I won’t give Father Mike the satisfaction of me turning around to face him.

  “Only that . . . someone who goes to such great lengths to avoid death and save people who aren’t even really his family—he isn’t acting out of guilt alone. He’s punishing himself.”

  I hesitate, then glance back over my shoulder, almost afraid to look at him. “Punishing himself for what?”

  Father Mike shrugs. “It’s your comic. You tell me.”

  My feet don’t listen to me.

  Instead of running somewhere quiet to immediately start sketching, I end up hanging around the ICU, watching people go in and out of Rusty’s room. Mostly his parents. They’re haggard and thin. They almost look worse than Rusty, and they barely leave his bedside. It’s like they’re funneling years of their life into Rusty so he’ll get well sooner. But I think if that were possible, more children who got hurt would end up as orphans.

  The girl’s here too. The one who was with Rusty in the emergency room that night. She doesn’t look broken anymore; she’s purpose made flesh.

  Rusty’s parents call her Nina, and she’s rebuilt herself. Now she’s full of rage, aimed at the monsters who put Rusty here. Nina doesn’t look like the crusading, angry type, though. She’s unassuming—dowdy, even. Her brown hair hangs in a limp ponytail, and her clothes look like she pulled them from her closet at random. She’s pretty, but she walks and dresses as if she’s unaware of it.

  Nina spends hours on her cell phone giving interviews to reporters, talking about how little the police have done to track down the boys who set Rusty on fire. From her chatter, I learn that there were no witnesses. That three boys doused Rusty with alcohol and set him ablaze. Rusty claims not to remember the identities of his attackers, but it’s an
established fact that he’s been bullied since his freshman year. The police have suspects but haven’t arrested a soul.

  Everyone scatters during Rusty’s burn care. His wretched screams rip through the ICU and linger like radiation, and I wonder how the nurses bear it. Then I see one of them, good old Coffee Nurse, tucked away in a corner, sobbing. She probably thinks no one can see her, but I do. From the empty room that I’m hiding in, I see her.

  The last time I was in the ICU, this room was occupied. Today it smells like bleach. The bed is stripped, and the machines are all silent. The room feels the void left behind by its last occupant; I feel the walls searching, groping for a warm body to protect. They have me instead.

  I nod off, curled up in a corner on the floor, and wake up in the dark. It was stupid to fall asleep, but at least I wasn’t caught. If I had been, Death would have descended upon me and spirited me away—that’s for sure. I still have her business card in my pocket, and sometimes I think it would be easier to call her and end this game.

  When I’ve stood, stretched, and cleared my head, I peek out the door and, spotting no nurses, dash across the ICU into Rusty’s room. There’s still heat coming off his body, but he looks better. The bandages are clean, and his face is less tortured. He still moans, but his voice is softer, like he’s moaning more from habit than anything else.

  “Hey, buddy,” I say. “Sorry I haven’t visited lately.” If Rusty hears me, he doesn’t acknowledge it. “I’ve been watching, though. Making sure Death doesn’t come around and get you. So . . . I’ve kept my promise.”

  I lean against the wall, folded into a blind spot. For a moment, I just stare at Rusty, memorizing the slant of his eyes, how his wave of red hair crashes over his forehead, the way his unburned left hand twitches in his sleep as if he’s playing the guitar.

  “I wish I could go back through time,” I tell Rusty. “I’d kill the guys who did this to you.” My voice breaks, and I feel a sharp pain in my chest. It’s like a shard of glass is burrowing through my rib cage. I can’t bear it: the thought of someone actually lighting another person on fire, of watching the orange and blue flames lick away the layers of another human being’s skin—the fat bubbles underneath, and the poor soul can’t do anything but scream in absolute fucking agony. After a while, maybe he can’t even scream anymore.