Three words would save him. But all muscles can’t free one sound.
Thoughts throb in a vein. Red pulses his eyes again, then that one white shaft shooting up from the black he blasted through. Something in the road he’ll never reach now. Screaming up close as his life rolled. Someone here in this room, who will die with him.
The first word comes. It surfaces through a bruise wider than his throat. The skin grown over his mouth tears clear and a word forces through the bloody opening. I. The word hisses, taking so long she’ll never hear. I didn’t mean.
But words change to flying things as they hit the air.
Two weeks in, Mark sat up and moaned. Karin was at his bedside, five feet from his face. He buckled at the waist, and she screamed. His eyes twisted around and found her. Her scream turned into a laugh, then a sob, while his eyes twitched over her. She called his name, and the face underneath the tubes and scars flinched. Soon a raft of care-givers filled the room.
Much had happened underground, in the days he lay frozen. Now he poked out, like winter wheat through snow. He turned his head, craning his neck. His hands thrust out clumsily. His fingers picked at the invasive hardware. He hated most his gastric feeding tube. As his arms got better at clawing it, the nurses imposed soft restraints.
Now and then, something spooked him, and he thrashed to escape it. Nights were the worst. Once when Karin was leaving for the day, a wave of chemicals bucked through him and he surged upright, scrambling almost to his knees on his hospital bed. She had to wrestle him down to keep him from tearing out his hoses.
She watched him return, hour by hour, as in some grim Scandinavian film. Sometimes he gazed at her, weighing if she was edible or a threat. Once, a surge of animal sexuality, forgotten in the next moment. At times she was a crust he tried to brush from his eyes. He shot her that liquid, amused look he’d given her one night when they were teens, each of them crawling home from their respective assignations, drunk. You, too? I didn’t know you had it in you.
He started vocalizing—groans muffled by the tracheotomy tube, a secret, vowel-free language. Every rasp lacerated Karin. She badgered the doctors to do something. They measured scar tissue and cranial fluid, listening to everything but his frantic gurgling. They swapped his trach tube for a fenestrated one, pierced with tiny holes, a window in Mark’s throat wide enough for sounds to pass through. And every one of her brother’s cries begged for something Karin couldn’t identify.
He was back to how she’d first seen him, when she was four, staring down from the second-story landing on a lump of meat wrapped in a blue baby blanket her parents had just dragged home. Her earliest memory: standing at the top of the stairs, wondering why her parents bothered cooing over something far stupider than the outdoor cats. But she soon learned to love this baby, the greatest toy a girl could ask for. She hauled him around like a doll for a year until he finally took a few dazed steps without her. She jabbered at him, wheedled and bribed, kept crayons and bits of food just out of reach until he called for them by their real names. She’d raised her brother, while her mother was busy laying up treasures in heaven. Karin had gotten Mark to walk and talk once already. Surely, with help from Good Samaritan, she could do it twice. Something in her almost prized this second chance to raise him right this time.
Alone by his bed between nurses’ visits, she started talking to him again. Her words might focus his brain. None of the neurology books she pored over denied that possibility. No one knew enough about the brain to say what her brother might or might not hear. She felt as she had through childhood, putting him to bed while their parents were out wailing on homesteader hymns around the neighbor’s Hammond chord organ, before their parents’ first bankruptcy and the end of socializing. Karin, from the earliest age, playing babysitter, earning her two dollars by keeping her little brother alive for another night. Markie, skyrocketing from an overdose of Milk Duds and cherry colas, demanding they count to infinity or run telepathic experiments on each other or relate long epics from Animalia, the country humans couldn’t get to, populated by heroes, rogues, tricksters, and victims, all based on the creatures of their family farm.
Always animals. The good ones and the evil, the ones to protect and the ones to destroy. “You remember the bull snake in the barn?” she asked him. His eyes flickered, watching the idea of the creature. “You must have been nine. Took a stick and killed it all by yourself. Protecting everyone. Went to Cappy and bragged, and he beat the shit out of you. ‘You just cost us eight hundred dollars’ worth of grain. Don’t you know what those creatures eat? What have you got for brains, boy?’ Last snake you ever killed.”
He studied her, the edges of his mouth working. He seemed to be listening.
“Remember Horace?” The injured crane they’d adopted when Mark was ten and Karin fourteen. Winged by a power line, the bird had ditched on their property during the spring migration. It went into a dance of total panic as they approached. They spent an afternoon closing in, letting the bird adjust to them, until it resigned itself to capture.
“Remember, when we washed him, how he took the towel from you with his beak and started drying himself? Instinct, like how they coat themselves with mud to darken their feathers. But God. We thought that bird was smarter than any human being alive. Remember how we tried to teach it to shake?”
All at once, Mark started keening. One arm tomahawked and the other swung wide. His torso slashed upward and his head thrust out. Tubes tore off and the monitor alarm squealed. Karin called the attendants while Mark flapped about on the sheets, his body lurching toward her. She was in tears by the time the orderly showed. “I don’t know what I did. What’s wrong with him?”
“Would you look at that,” the orderly said. “He’s trying to hug you!”
She ran up to Sioux, to put out fires. She’d missed her return-to-work date, and she’d reached the limit of what she could ask for by phone. She went in to talk to her supervisor. He listened to the details, shaking his head with concern. He had a cousin, hit in the skull with a seven iron once. Damaged a lobe that sounded like varietal. Never the same afterward. Her supervisor hoped that wouldn’t happen to Karin’s brother.
She thanked him, and asked if she could stay out just a little while longer.
How much longer?
She couldn’t say.
Wasn’t her brother in the hospital? Didn’t he have professional care?
She could take an unpaid leave, she bargained. Just for a month.
Her supervisor explained that the Family Medical Leave Act did not extend to siblings. A brother, in the eyes of the medical-leave law, was not family.
Maybe she might give notice, and they could hire her back when her brother was better.
It wasn’t impossible, the supervisor said. But he could guarantee nothing.
This hurt. “I’m good,” she said. “I’m as good as anyone else on the lines.”
“You’re better than good,” the supervisor conceded, and even now she swelled with pride. “But I don’t need good. I just need here.”
She cleaned out her cubicle in a daze. A few embarrassed officemates expressed concern and wished her well. Over before she’d really started. A year ago, she’d thought she might rise in the firm, make a career, start a life up here with people who knew only her friendly readiness and nothing of her messy past. She should have known that Kearney—the Schluter touch—would come back to claim her. She considered walking down to tech support, to break the news to her flirtation, Chris. Instead, she called him on her cell phone from the parking lot. When he heard her voice, he gave her the silent treatment, both barrels. Two weeks without a call or e-mail. She kept apologizing until he talked. When he got over his sulk, Chris was all concern. He asked what had happened. Bottomless familial shame blocked her from telling all. She’d made herself witty for him, light, easygoing, even sophisticated, by local standards. In fact, she was just a shit-kicker raised by zealots, with a shiftless brother who’d managed
to reduce himself to infancy. Family emergency, she just repeated.
“When are you coming back?”
She told him the emergency had just cost her her job. Chris cursed the firm nobly. He even threatened to go have it out with her supervisor. She thanked him, but said he had to think about himself. His own job. She didn’t know this man, and he didn’t know her. Yet when he didn’t argue with her, she felt betrayed.
“Where are you?” he asked. She panicked and said home. “I can come down,” he volunteered. “This weekend, or some time. Help out. Anything you need.”
She held the phone away from her spasming face. She told him he was too good, that he shouldn’t have to worry like that about her. This made him sullen again. “That’s okay, then,” he said. “Nice knowing you. Take care. Have a good life.”
She hung up, cursing. But life in Sioux had never really belonged to her. It was, at most, a binge of simplicity that she now had to detox from. She drove to her condo to check on the place and pack a more realistic wardrobe. The trash hadn’t been taken out in weeks and the place reeked. Mice had chewed through her matching plastic sealable bowls, and lentils covered the counters and beautiful new floor. The philodendrons, schefflera, and peace lily were all past saving.
She cleaned up, shut off the water main, and paid the delinquent bills. No new monthly paycheck would cover them. Locking the door behind her as she left, she wondered how much more she might have to give up, for Mark. On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they’d given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It’s not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world’s. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
She owed her own competence to raising her brother. He was her psychology experiment: Given another parent, with everything else the same, could her own flesh and blood grow up worthwhile? But in exchange for her selfless care, he gave her back, at best, an endless supply of his chief attribute: total aimlessness. Animals like me, the eleven-year-old claimed. And they did, without fail. Everything on the farm trusted him. Even ladybugs would crawl fearlessly across his face, finding a place in his eyebrows to nest. What do you want to be when you grow up? she once made the mistake of asking. His face burst with excitement: I could be a real good chicken calmer.
But when it came to humans, no one quite knew what to make of the boy. He’d made some mistakes as a kid: burning down the corn crib while shooting off tinfoil-wrapped matches. Getting caught playing with himself behind the rotting chicken coop. Killing a five-hundred-pound newly weaned calf by lacing its feed with a bowl of mixed medicines, convinced it was in pain. Worse, he spoke with a lisp until the age of six, which pretty much convinced both parents he was possessed. For weeks, their mother made him sleep under a wall exorcised with a cross anointed with oil, which shed droplets on his head as he slept.
At seven, he took to spending long hours in the afternoons in a meadow half a mile from their house. When their mother asked him what he did there for hours at a time, he replied, “Just play.” When she asked with who, he said, at first, “No one,” and later, “With a friend.” She refused to let him leave the house until he told her the friend’s name. He answered with a shy smile: “His name is Mr. Thurman.” He went on to tell the panicked woman all the great times that he and Mr. Thurman had together. Joan Schluter called in the entire Kearney police force. After a stakeout of the meadow and a thorough cross-examination of the boy, the police told the frantic parents that Mr. Thurman not only had no criminal record, he had no record whatsoever, outside of their son’s head.
Karin was Mark’s only hope of surviving adolescence. When he turned thirteen, she tried to show him how to save himself. It’s easy, she claimed. She’d discovered in high school, to her shock, that she could make even the elites like her by letting them dress her and instruct her musical tastes. People like people who make them feel secure. He didn’t know what the word meant. You need a brand, she told him. Something recognizable. She pushed him into chess club, cross-country, Future Farmers, even the thespians. Nothing stuck until he stumbled upon the group that would take him in because he passed the simple audition of failing to fit in anywhere else—the group of losers that freed him from her.
After he found his tribe, she could do little more for him. She concentrated on saving herself, finishing her sociology degree, the first ever in a family that looked on college as a form of witchcraft. She pressured Mark to follow her at UNK. He made it through one year, never having the heart to upset his many advisors by actually declaring a major. She moved to Chicago, answering phones for a Big Five accounting firm on the eighty-sixth floor of the Standard Oil Building. Her mother used to call long-distance, just to listen to her phone-receptionist voice. “How’d you learn how to sound like that? That’s not right! That can’t be good for your vocal cords.” From Chicago she went to Los Angeles, the greatest city on earth. She tried to tell Mark: You could be lots of things out here. You could find work anywhere. They’re begging for easygoing people out here. Your parents aren’t your fault, she told him. You could come out here and nobody would ever have to know about them. Even when her own launch began to fall back to earth, she still believed: people liked people who made them feel more secure.
When Mark was himself again, she would restart them both. She’d get him on his feet, listen to him, help him find what he needed to be. And this time she’d take him away with her, someplace reasonable.
She’d saved the note, and read it daily. A kind of magic charm: Tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you. Surely that note writer—the saint who had discovered the wreck and come to the hospital on the night of the accident—would return to make real contact, now that Mark was awake. Karin waited patiently, for a long-delayed explanation. But no one came by to identify himself or explain anything.
A spring bouquet arrived from the IBP plant. Two dozen of Mark’s coworkers signed the Get Well Soon card, some adding jokey, off-color encouragements Karin couldn’t decode. The whole county knew what had happened to Mark: a police siren couldn’t go off in the Big Bend region without everyone between Grand Island and North Platte telling you exactly who had screwed up, and how.
A few days after the trach tube change, Mark’s best friends at last visited. Karin heard them when they were still down the hall.
“Damn, it’s a cold universe out there.”
“Tell me about it. My ’nads have migrated up into my eye-sockets.”
They rolled into the room, Tommy Rupp in black flak jacket and Duane Cain in Thinsulate-stuffed camouflage. The Three Muskrateers, reunited for the first time since the accident. They showered Karin with upbeat greetings. She fought the urge to ask where they’d been. Rupp strode up to Mark where he lay whimpering in bed and offered him a palm. Mark, from some deep reflex, flipped him a high five.
“Jesus, Gus. They really did a number on you.” Rupp waved at the monitors. “Can you believe this? All this gear, just for you.”
Duane hung back, squeezing his neck. “He’s making headway, don’t you think?” He turned to Karin, standing behind him at bedside. Tattoos crept out from under the collar of his long underwear, a cartoon of red muscles stung onto his hairless chest, as detailed and realistic as an anatomy text. He looked flayed alive. He whispered to Karin, slow and booming, for all those just emerging from a coma. “This is fucking inconceivable. Happened to exactly the person who didn’t deserve it.”
Rupp took her elbow. “Our man’s in pretty rough shape.”
Her arm went hot from the wrist up. The curse of the red-headed: she flushed faster than a pheasant from the brush. She withdrew her arm and smoothed her cheeks. “You should have seen him last week.” She couldn’t control her tone.
A look passed from Cain to Rupp: The woman is hurting, man. Don’t let the Madame Mao thing get you. Cain’s face was clear, earnest, working with her. “We’ve been calling in. We understand he jus
t recently woke up.”
Rupp had Mark’s clipboard chart and was shaking his head. “Are they doing anything at all useful for him?” The world needed new management, a fact so obvious that only a select few knew it.
“They had to reduce pressure on his brain. He wasn’t responding to anything.”
“But he’s coming back now,” Rupp declared. He turned back to Mark and fisted his shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Gus? Full return. Old times again.”
Mark lay still, staring.
Karin blurted, “You’re seeing him at the best he’s been since…”
“We’ve been keeping track,” Duane insisted. He scratched his tattoo muscles. “We’ve been following.”
A river of phonemes flowed from the bed. Mark’s arms snaked out. His mouth went Ah…ah, kee-kee-kee.
“You’re upsetting him,” Karin said. “He shouldn’t get worked up.” She wanted to kick them out, but Mark’s activity excited her.
“Are you kidding?” Rupp pulled an empty chair up to the bedside. “A visit is the best thing for him. Any non-insane doctor will tell you that.”
“Man needs his friends,” Duane echoed. “Raise his serotonin levels. You’re familiar with serotonin?”
Karin stopped her hands from flying upward. She nodded, despite herself. She grabbed her elbows for balance and walked out of the room. On her way out the door, she heard the chairs shuffle and Tommy Rupp say, “Slow down there, bro. Chill. What do you want to say? One tap for yes, two for no…”
If anyone knew what had happened that night, those two did. But she refused to ask them in front of Mark. She left the hospital, drifting toward Woodland Park. Late afternoon, under a purple-brown sky. March had launched one of its false springs, the kind that got the whole town to lower its guard before slamming it with another arctic blast. Steam trails rose up from the dirty piles of snow. She cut through downtown Kearney, a business district hosed for as far into the future as anyone could see. Falling commodities prices, rising unemployment, aging population, youth flight, family farms selling out to agribusiness for dirt and change: geography had decided Mark’s fate long before his birth. Only the doomed stayed on to collect.