And sure enough, before he went back, Reese looked Kilgore up in the phone book and there he was, Thomas K. Kilgore, M.D.
So that meant Reese could tell him about the heart thing. Which he couldn’t tell his dad. Since Dad had the heart attack, Reese didn’t even feel like telling him when he had a sore throat. The heart thing—which had been going on for a while—would be a good way to use up time when he saw Kilgore again. It would distract Kilgore from Reese’s eye—which he knew Kilgore would bring up; in fact, he knew his father had told Kilgore about it in advance. But not just that. Because it was getting concerning. The heart thing was happening almost every night now, not just once in a while, and sometimes in school, too. His heart would just take off, like a flapping seagull getting up steam to rise off the water, bash, bash, bash. The first time it happened, Reese thought, I’m fucking dying. And he tried to get up out of bed, but he was out of breath, so he lay back down. And gradually it slowed, until it felt like a regular heart again, which is to say it felt like nothing, like you didn’t notice it. At first, because it didn’t start happening until after the fight, he thought Asshole Kramer had broken a rib or something when he decked him. But it didn’t hurt other times, like, at all.
So Reese figured it was inherited heart disease, getting started early. And when he went to the office, when Dad was talking to Kilgore in the sort of porch place outside, he got one of Kilgore’s green books down—Growing Up: Bio-Emotional Aspects of the Adolescent—and tried looking up early-onset heart disease. He didn’t get the book back in fast enough, though, because Kilgore had shoes like Mister Rogers (probably to keep from knocking up that lovely polished maple floor) and he was standing right there before Reese could do anything. Reese almost shed a skin.
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” said Kilgore, all nice.
“It’s okay.” Reese was sweating. He took a deep breath. “Actually, I don’t care, because there was this one thing I wanted to ask you about since I was going to be here anyway.”
Kilgore sat down on the chair opposite Reese. “Ask away,” he said.
“Where’s my dad?”
“We’re done.”
“Okay, you’re a doctor, right?”
“I’m a psychiatrist.” Shit, thought Reese, okay. Let’s make this as prissy as possible.
“But you have to be a regular doctor to be a psychiatrist? So you were a doctor once, right?”
“Yep, and I still am. I can prescribe antibiotics and everything.” Kilgore smiled. “What happened to your eye?”
“You already know. I heard my dad tell you I got jumped by some asshole.”
“I just wanted to see if you got the license plate.”
“The what?”
“Of the truck that hit you.” Oh, what a riot, thought Reese.
“Well, actually, yeah, I know the guy. He’s a sort of professional jerk.”
“Jerk-about-town.”
“Yeah,” Reese said. He liked that phrase. Jerk-about-town. “But whatever. I’m having this problem at night…when I’m in bed….”
“Most guys your age have—”
Oh, Christ, thought Reese. “I don’t mean that! I think I’m having a heart attack is what, and I don’t want my dad to know, because he’ll go totally crazy.”
“Why do you think you’re having a heart attack?”
Reese told him about the seagull in his chest. Kilgore got up for a minute and looked at a horse. Then he picked up a little spiral notebook and made a note, just like shrinks in the movies.
“Vincent, has this been a problem for a real long time?”
“Reese.”
“Reese, of course. I’m sorry. It’s just…you know, it’s actually kind of weird. Not bad weird. Kind of neat. You don’t meet that many kids who changed their own name. Just adults. Mostly ex-cons.”
“I guess.”
“But about your heart, Reese—how long have you been noticing this?”
“I figured you’d ask, so I actually thought about it. For months, off and on. But all the time since the fight.”
“Was the fight a really bad experience? I mean, your eye looks like an undercooked Big Mac, but even so…”
“It wasn’t any worse than any other fight.”
“Been in a lot of fights?”
Reese sniffed, unconsciously. “My share.”
“But this time you got hurt.”
“I get hurt a lot.”
Kilgore laughed. He fucking laughed! “Has anybody ever told you the meaning of the word ‘counterintuitive’?”
“No.” Reese bristled.
“I mean, if you get hurt a lot, are you the kind of guy who never makes the same mistake once?”
“Listen, Dr. Kilgore—”
“Tom.”
“Tom—the reason I got beat is ’cause I wasn’t ready for him, and also, the guy is like, five-ten, one eighty….”
“So why’d you piss him off?”
Why? thought Reese. Why is a good question. He knew why. He’d set out to find Kramer and piss him off, he knew that. Picked Jordie up on the way. They had to look two places: in the conservation park, where Kramer normally smoked like a big boy, and at the playground near the hoops, which was where they finally did find him. Kramer and his sensational friend, the rubber dick, Angotti. “I don’t know,” Reese said. “He annoys me.”
“More that day than any other time?”
“No.”
“So why that day?” Reese thought hard. And as he did, Kilgore said, “Did you have trouble with your mom? Your dad? Something going on at school?”
“No,” Reese said. “Honestly. It was an ordinary Saturday morning. I didn’t have to get back for any games or sports scores until like two or three. So I was just riding my bike.”
“Riding your bike…”
“I was riding my bike around the neighborhood. I went down to where these younger kids play street hockey, at this one kid’s house….”
“Do you play, too?”
“No,” Reese laughed. “They’re like nine.”
“So why’d you go there?”
“I like to…” Reese looked up at Kilgore. He felt a single wing beat in his chest, subside. “I just like to watch this one kid play. He’s really good.”
“He a friend?”
“I told you, no, he’s like eight. I don’t even know him.” Kilgore looked puzzled. “I just saw him in the neighborhood this one time and then I went past his house and he was playing street hockey. So I watched.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Months. A few months.”
“Months ago?”
“Yeah.”
“So, when you go over there and watch, do you talk to this kid?”
“No, I just sit there on my bike and watch.”
“Have you done this more than a couple of times?”
“What’s the point?”
“Just curious.”
“Well, like a dozen times. Maybe more. He’s a really good street hockey player. And you know, I’m interested in sports.”
“Does he remind you of somebody?”
What? thought Reese. “Like who?”
“Like maybe you, when you were younger.”
Reese said, slowly, “No. He’s really big for his age, for example No, he doesn’t look like me at all.” The gulls, suddenly, gathered with determination. Reese leaned forward on the couch and hugged his arms to his chest.
“Reese? Reese?” Kilgore was on his feet.
“It’s happening right now.”
“The heart thing.”
“Yeah.”
“Reese.” Kilgore sat down on the couch beside him. “I’m going to tell you exactly what’s happening to you. You’re not dying. You’re not having a heart attack. You’re having a panic attack, and though it feels very frightening and very real—and it is very real—it’s not dangerous. It’s not going to kill you.”
“I didn’t really think…” Reese gasped.
> “But maybe you did. I know it feels like it’s going to kill you because I had some once.”
Kilgore put his hand on the middle of Reese’s back. He pushed. Not like he was hugging Reese or anything. He just sort of pushed like Reese was a bicycle pump—press, release, press. “Blow gently and slowly out through your mouth, Reese. But keep it steady. Pretend you’re blowing up a balloon.” Reese did it, and as he did, he could sense the topping of the hill, the change that meant that, although the gulls kept beating, it was going to end, it was going to settle down. He gulped, waiting for the sensation of stopping. And as soon as it came, Kilgore didn’t keep sitting there; he got right up and acted like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
“So it was after the street hockey game?”
Reese still felt kind of sick, but he figured, if Kilgore was going to blow it off—actually, kind of a relief—he would play along. “Yeah. I went to get Jordie and we went to the playground.”
“And you ran into…?”
“I ran into Kevin Kramer.”
“Jerk-about-town.”
“Yeah.”
“And what started the fight?”
“Well, they were playing basketball, and I sort of rode past.”
“And that was it? Just right then, you were having at it?”
“No. Because I rode in between them.”
“Ahhhhh.”
“And this guy, his friend, Angotti, this guy with, like, gray hair, he’s been held back so many times, had to jump out of the way.”
“Oh.”
“And they’re like, ‘Cappadora, you little freak’…”
“And you didn’t want to put up with that.”
“Would you?”
“No.”
“It wasn’t so much that they were making jokes about…my height….”
“No crime to be short. You know, Reese, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be short all your life, either.”
“What they were saying was, I was, you know, stunted…all over.”
“I see.”
“This guy is like a sophomore. Kramer.”
“I see.”
“So I just said some thing, some ordinary thing, like…‘Don’t talk about your old man like that,’ and he goes out of his mind….”
“Is this the first fight you’ve had with Kramer?”
“Yeah. Well…” Reese considered it. “Not really the first verbal fight.”
“First physical fight.”
“Well, he just moved here.”
“I see.”
“Right.”
“But your other fights?”
“Look, people just can’t keep their mouths shut.”
Reese got up off the couch and went to stand in front of one of the horse pictures—he realized that the man holding the horse’s bridle was Kilgore, and there was a little girl sitting on it, a little girl with blond hair like Kerry’s. She had on this miniature-sized riding hat, a black thing with a big brim. You could hardly see her face. “Is that your kid?”
“My little sister.”
“Your sister?”
“She’s ten now. Big Irish family. There are eight kids. I’m the oldest and she’s the youngest. I was already in medical school when she was born.”
“What’s her name?”
“Tess.”
“They’re not all T’s, are they?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, they are,” said Kilgore. “Terrance. Tracey. Tara.”
“You got pretty lucky.”
“Don’t I know it.” He got up. “Reese, we’re pretty much out of time. I want you to remember the balloon-blowing thing, because that kind of breathing helps bring a panic attack to a close sooner, if you can concentrate on it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And next time we’ll talk more about how you can stop having them. And why you’re having them.”
“Okay.”
“And there’s one other thing I want to show you.” Kilgore reached out one hand and Reese cringed—Here comes the hug, he thought in disgust. But all of a sudden he was down on one knee; it was as if the guy had dug a piece out of his neck with the lit end of a sparkler.
“Jesus Christ!” Reese screamed. He was nearly crying.
“It won’t hurt long,” said Kilgore, and he was right. The place, the hollow just behind Reese’s earlobe, which had felt electrified a minute before, was now simply limp. Reese pressed it gently. It felt pretty normal. “I’m sorry. But you had to understand how this depends on surprise.”
“What’d you do?” asked Reese, rubbing his neck.
“We used to call them pressure points,” said Kilgore, taking Reese’s hand and putting his thumb against a place between two of his fingers. “See? You push…” And bam! Reese pulled his hand away.
“How’d you learn that?”
“Medical school. There are nerve bundles all over the human body. See?” Kilgore showed Reese a point behind the elbow, one near the small of his back. “You can look in an anatomy book and see where a lot of them are. Here—you can borrow mine…And you can tell when you find one, because you can make that place start to tingle if you press it just a little. And if you press hard, it will hurt like anything. You don’t usually press that hard on yourself, of course.”
“What’re you…?”
“It’s just, Reese, you can bring down an ox if you know the pressure points, and if you’re going to keep on getting in fights, I just thought you might…”
“Well,” said Reese. “Thanks. I guess.”
“I’m a short guy, too,” Kilgore said. “See you next Saturday.”
CHAPTER 18
The so-called family session lasted longer than double overtime, as far as Reese was concerned. It wasn’t just that he was embarrassed by all of them (Grandpa Bill in aqua-and-green golf pants and Grandpa Angelo dressed like a pallbearer); he just had a feeling that getting them all together in one room was going to lead to ignition and liftoff. When his dad told his mom about the session—didn’t ask her, just told her—she got that wild-horse look in her eyes that Reese recognized only too well.
Go slow, Dad, he thought. There be dragons here.
In those agonizing, dull minutes in the waiting room before it all started, Kerry (who also looked just great, because she’d insisted on wearing her purple net tutu) had really humiliated him. She’d had all five of her Red Riding Hood finger puppets on one hand. “Be the wolf, Vincent,” she said all of a sudden. He took the wolf-head puppet and put it on his index finger and waggled it at Red Riding Hood. “I eat little girls like you for breakfast,” he growled.
“You suck,” Kerry said sweetly.
Great.
And then, of course, Grandma Rosie had clicked her tongue, once, so softly Reese knew it was an extra-special click just for him, like he taught Kerry to swear, which he didn’t; Kerry was able to cuss from birth. Just at that moment, Tom came out and herded them all in, and they spent another eternity getting all shifted around on Tom’s couches and chairs.
Reese felt sorry for Tom. Talk about having your work cut out for you. Reese had never, not once in his life, heard Grandma Rosie say anything, a single sentence that began with the words “I feel.” She just gave commands; she sized up stuff. He had never, on the other hand, heard Grandpa Bill say a single sentence that wasn’t in the form of a question; Uncle Bick said talking to his dad was like being the host on Jeopardy.
And true to form, right away Grandpa Bill had said, “What can we do you for, Doctor?”
And old Tom didn’t waste time then, he jumped right in. “I don’t want all of you folks to think we’re here only to help out the master criminal here.” He gestured at Reese, like he was pointing a pistol and firing. “It’s my hope that you’ll all get something out of this, or I wouldn’t have put you all through arranging your lives to get down here. But I also know none of you wants to see a kid you love in this much pain, and Vincent—our buddy Reese—is definitely in a lot of pain.?
??
Everybody, even Kerry, nodded. “But what I’ve been hearing about, I’m just guessing, but I think it’s that this is a whole family in a lot of pain, for a lot of years, and Reese can’t get out in front of this until, basically, we open it up and let a little fresh air get to it. You know what I’m saying?”
Grandma Rosie looked at Tom as if he had just told her she should shave her head, put on bells, and become a Buddhist nun.
“I do not see,” she said softly, “how we can talk in this room and help Vincenzo be good.”
“There’s no guarantees we can, Mrs…. uh, Mrs….” Tom was waiting for Reese’s grandma to say, “Call me Rose.” Wait on, Tom, wait on, Reese thought. “Mrs. Cappadora, there’s no proof that in this situation, the healing is going to come from talk. But this kid you love is a real angry kid. And you are the people he loves. He might not act like that all the time, but that’s the fact. And with a kid this angry, there’s a whole world out there with its hands out, and the stuff in those hands is stuff you don’t want for Reese. Next time it might not be sewer covers.”
“You mean drugs,” said Grandpa Bill.
“Bill,” Tom said, not taking any chances on the old cozy first-name front this time. “Yes. There’s certainly that, and other kinds of acting out. So what I want to know, while I’ve got you all here, is, is this new? I mean, was Reese always kind of the angry young man…?” Tom smiled, right at Reese.
Nobody said anything.
“You’ve got a great kid here,” Tom went on. “A kid with a mind that just doesn’t quit. You all know it. And with a kid like this, the waste could be big.”
“He came out angry,” said his mom. A hundred years of silence, and then boom—this. Good old reliably nuts Mom. Everybody, even Kerry again, turned to look at her. “He was always hard. I mean, since he was a baby, he had his own ideas of how he wanted to do things. Not all bad ones. I’m not saying Vincent is bad.”
“Okay, Beth, okay. But when you say he was ‘hard,’ was he difficult, like this?”