Ask Again, Yes (15 page)

There was no mirror in the bathroom of his room. At night, with the light on, he could look to the window and see himself, but the reflection was too bright at the top because of the fluorescent overhead light. When he actually saw his face—Lena sat next to him on the bed and drew out a hand mirror from her bag—it reminded him of a clay model of a head that was handled too roughly before it had set. The top of his forehead to his jaw was a shallow concave bowl, like a dented fender. It
was discolored, full of blues and yellows and grays. They’d been repairing him bit by bit, and he understood that what he was seeing had once been a lot worse, that he’d already come a long way toward looking like a normal person again. Lena said softly, “Not that bad, right? Nothing that can’t be fixed.” He hadn’t seen her cry almost at all since everything happened, but she cried that day. “Say something,” she said, but he didn’t know what. It wasn’t that he’d ever considered himself handsome. It wasn’t as if he’d ever taken much notice of that sort of thing. But when he’d last looked in a mirror, he recognized himself.

A week before he was released, they brought him to the stairwell and had him summit ten steps. He still felt every step in his face. Lena held his elbow while the therapist stayed close behind, hands out and feet braced should he come tumbling down. The social worker looked on, asking questions about their house that had been asked and answered already, how many stairs out front, how many stairs inside, handrails, did the interior doors swing inward or out. When he got to the top of the stairs, he rested, tried to stave off dizziness by fixing his good eye on a single spot. He clutched the banister. Lena, he knew, wanted him to stay at the hospital longer. He was safe there, she said. The hospital had all the equipment he needed. His room had a walk-in shower. They took his temperature and kept track of his painkillers, his antibiotics, as well as his input and his output, and nothing went unnoticed. Early on, before the cranial swelling went completely down, he was still too numb to feel a urinary tract infection boiling his insides. A nurse caught it when she checked his catheter and noticed the smallest thread of blood.

“What would have happened if you were at home?” Lena asked.

“Is insurance covering this?” he asked almost as soon as he could speak. “All of it?”

And the way Lena busied herself told him that she had no idea, didn’t really care. Bills were something they could worry about when he recovered.

He went to a rehab hospital for three weeks and when he truly came home, he had daily visits from a nurse and a physical therapist and an occupational therapist and a speech therapist, but they came at different times so it usually fell to Lena to get him upstairs to the bedroom or the bathroom. They didn’t have a bathroom on the main floor, and Lena joked that that was one way to get the renovation she’d been wanting for a decade. Until then she took his arm and wrapped it around her shoulder and skirted her arm around his waist, and together they took the steps one at a time. The shower was another problem, the lip of the tub too high to lift his leg over on his own so she helped him there, too, holding him tight, her face pressed to his naked chest as she leaned over and lifted first his right knee, and then, when he was ready, his left, just as the therapist had taught her. The water had to be aimed at his chest or lower because if he felt water pressure any stronger than a fine mist on his face, he couldn’t stop himself from crying out, especially if his last painkiller was wearing off but he wasn’t yet due for another. For a few weeks Lena was so afraid that she stood in the shower with him and helped him wash. For this, she wore her underwear and a camisole. “Your clothes are getting wet,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said.

“Why are you wearing them?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

After a few weeks she let him wash himself but she stayed in the shower with him. He felt more naked since she wasn’t. After a while she began sitting on the closed toilet lid while he washed himself alone. Eventually, she trusted him to move around the house without her and she began leaving him for errands—the grocery story, mostly. The pharmacy. The bank. And it was only when she was on line at one of those places, sweating under her coat, anxious to get back to him, did she allow herself to wonder if she’d ever in her life go anywhere else
again. She drove by the hair salon she used to go to, and it seemed like a relic from another lifetime.

The girls had trouble looking at him. Nat and Sara each had a way of talking at him without really looking, their eyes skittering around his general presence without landing anywhere, without focusing. Kate was more brave. Pale, solemn, she seemed to make a point of looking not only at his one eye that was not bandaged, but at the rest of his injuries, her glance slowly traversing the top of his head, the side of his face, his neck. For a long time it was like that whenever they visited the hospital, the visits bleeding into the same interactions every time. Nat and Sara reliably filled the quiet with talk about school and neighbors, a determined cheeriness they copied from Lena, while Kate studied him, not listening to a thing her sisters said.

Once, out of nowhere, when he was still in the hospital, Sara in the middle of a story about auditions for the school play, around the time the doctors were beginning to talk about sending him home, Kate said, “You can figure out where she was standing based on the angle.”

“What?” Lena asked.

Kate stood up and crouched closer to Francis, looking at the entry point behind his jaw. “You turned your head to the right, I bet, and that exposed the left side of your head. Maybe you tried to move out of the way. She was probably about . . .” Kate walked across the small room and stood under the television. “Here.”

“Jeez, Kate,” Nat said. Sara looked nervous.

“What?” Kate said. “We’re not supposed to talk about it? I don’t see why.”

Silence.

“Also, where was Mr. Stanhope? No one has said.”

“That’s enough, Kate,” Lena said.

Everyone looked at Francis.

“It’s okay,” he said. Why did it make her feel better to know? he wondered. Of all of them, she was the one who would never accept a story
in broad strokes. He was shot. Anne Stanhope was arrested. But what about all the in between? Kate had wanted to know from day one. What had Anne done next? Had she tried to stop the bleeding? Where was Brian Stanhope? Where was Anne now? They’d tried to protect the kids, they kept them away from the lawyers and the investigation, kept the newspapers out of the house, but maybe that had been wrong.

“Yeah, that’s about right,” Francis said that evening. “Give or take a foot.” And he could see that just having that little part of the story acknowledged and confirmed helped settle her. She seemed calmer. She listened to the rest of Sara’s story and then like the rest of them watched the TV.

The new people who’d moved into the Stanhopes’ house may not have known much about what had happened before they closed, but after, they couldn’t leave the house without hearing it from one direction or another. They had a ten-year-old girl named Dana whom Kate didn’t have much time for until she realized the girl might know where Peter was. So she played sidewalk chalk with her a few afternoons in a row. Dana would only let her use white because it was the most boring and green because it was her least favorite. When Kate made her own name in bubble letters, Dana demanded that Kate do her name, too, over and over again until the word “Dana” was repeated all over her driveway. After they’d gotten to know each other sufficiently, Kate asked if she’d ever met the boy who used to live there, if he’d been there when the keys were passed from one family to the other.

“No,” Dana said. And then: “But I think I found stuff that’s his.”

“What stuff?” Kate demanded.

“All different stuff. Baseball cards. Army guys. Some race cars. Junk, mostly. It’s in a big shoebox.”

“Where was it?”

“In the closet in my bedroom.”

Kate pointed up to Peter’s window. “Is that your room?”

The girl nodded.

“Can I see that box?”

The girl shrugged. “Sure.”

As they made their way up to the porch, Kate felt as nervous as she would have if Mrs. Stanhope were still inside. Dana pulled open the storm door, kicked off her sneakers. Kate glimpsed a row of large black-and-white photos framed on the wall, a leather couch with buttons sewn in two neat rows along the back. The house smelled like vanilla, and Dana’s mother peeked her head out from the kitchen as she wiped her hands on a kitchen towel. “Oh, hello. It’s Kate, right? Come on in.”

Kate stood just inside the front door as if stuck to the mat. She no longer wanted to go upstairs. She didn’t want to take a single step further.

“Dana says she has stuff that might be Peter’s.”

“She does? The boy who used to live here?” Dana’s mother said, while Dana scowled at Kate.

“Just a box of junk,” Dana said.

“I’m going to take it for him,” Kate said.

“No you’re not,” Dana said, alarmed. “It’s mine. It came with the room.”

“It’s Peter’s,” Kate said. “And you know it.” She leaned over to get closer to the smaller girl’s face. “Hand it over.”

“Dana, honey, get the box,” her mother said.

“What the heck!” Dana shouted.

“Dana!”

When Dana stomped upstairs, her mother turned to Kate. “I know you were close with their son.”

Kate wiped her face blank.

“Poor kid,” she said and looked at Kate with soft eyes, inviting her to say more. When Kate didn’t say anything, Dana’s mom laughed lightly,
“Of course the realtor didn’t mention much about what happened. Just that there’d been a domestic incident and a hasty exit.” Kate could see that the new people knew less about the Stanhopes than she did. It was pointless.

“Here,” Dana said, shoving the box at her when she returned.

“Dana, please,” her mother said. “Be sensitive.”

Kate tucked the box tightly under her arm, leaned over, and said, “You’re super annoying, Dana, you know that?” Then she banged out the door.

Once everyone was certain that Francis would recover—with time, with physical therapy—the Gleeson girls went back to school to finish out the year. Kate couldn’t recall having a single conversation with anyone at school in that month. Later, she couldn’t remember if she’d ever made up the work she missed, or if her teachers had just let it go. Graduation was a blur. Nat graduated, too. No one thought to take photos. No one bought a cake. They’d once talked about having a joint graduation party but that, of course, didn’t happen.

Lena Gleeson had left Francis for the day to attend Nat’s graduation and take them out to dinner after, but high school was more important than grammar school, so on the morning of Kate’s graduation, which was just one day after Nat’s, Lena kissed Kate and congratulated her and then headed to the hospital. Kate’s aunt and uncle came to take Lena’s place, and they stood out from the crowd in their city clothes and the way they didn’t mingle with the other parents. Sister Michael hummed softly as she removed the two brown bobby pins Kate had used to secure her mortarboard, and replaced them with white ones she held in her mouth until she’d fixed the cap just so. There was no valedictorian named that year. Everyone knew Peter had had the spot cinched since sixth grade, and since no kid in the history of St. Bart’s had stopped
coming to school with only one month left to go, no one knew what to do. Maybe Mr. Basker left the option open in case Peter strolled into the building on graduation morning, and Kate spent most of the ceremony wondering if he would. In Peter’s absence Vincent O’Grady was asked to say a few words. Vincent’s grades were so-so but he was an altar boy and a Boy Scout and he’d had a solo in the Christmas musical and the teachers loved him. Though no teacher or anyone on staff ever addressed what had happened in any specific way except to lead them all in prayers for the Gleeson family, prayers for the Stanhope family, Vincent went up there and said a bunch of stuff about the cards they were all dealt in life, how growing up is learning how to cope, and with God as their guide and St. Bartholomew’s as their foundation, they would all go forward and honor God’s gift of life. Only when Melissa Romano leaned sideways and whispered, “Are you okay?” did Kate realize how furious she was to be getting advice from Vincent O’Grady, a boy whose mother still peeled and sectioned the orange she packed with his sandwich.

That summer broke heat records. Nat got a job at the ice cream parlor. Sara babysat for some kids on the next block, but most days, from late afternoon until bedtime, they were home alone together. Instead of running wild as they’d always fantasized, or inviting all their friends over for a party, they made easy dinners for themselves, watched TV on the couch until they fell asleep or their mother came home from the hospital and sent them up to bed.

On the Saturday Natalie was to leave for college, Mr. Maldonado backed his station wagon across the street into their driveway and packed the trunk full of Nat’s stuff. He drove her up to Syracuse because that was the weekend Francis was being moved to the rehab hospital, and Mr. Maldonado said he had a whole weekend of nothing to do. When Nat realized neither of the Maldonado kids would be tagging along, she begged Sara and Kate to come for the ride because it would be way too awkward to sit in a car with him for four hours, but since the car was so full that meant Kate had to sit up front between Nat and Mr.
Maldonado, while Sara sat in the back, buried under a garbage bag that held Nat’s bedding, towels, and pillows. It was only when they were already on their way that Kate and Sara registered the fact that they’d have to do the same journey back without Nat, and that he’d keep asking them if they had to “wee.” Just a few minutes into the return trip, Kate knew that if he asked one more time and if she made even the briefest eye contact with her sister, she’d either dissolve into a fit of giggles or start sobbing. When he pulled up at a rest stop to buy them McDonald’s, he made them eat outside while he did calisthenics on the stretch of grass beside the parking lot. Sara waited politely for him to finish while Kate peppered him with questions about his routine, if he’d crafted it himself, if he’d been an athlete when he was young, if he had any favorite videos, if Mrs. Maldonado exercised, too, if they enjoyed exercising together.