A CHILD IN THE WORLD by Ben Brooks
Hurt him, Eli, hurt him. Come on now. Punch his ugly face in.
At first he only thinks the words, but then they are coming out. “Hit him, boy! Come on now! Step into it! Step into it!” Bernard’s voice is hoarse. At the same time that he is speaking louder than normal, cajoling, almost but not quite yelling, he is also trying to restrain himself.
He is out of his seat, up by the ring, his hip leaning into the elevated floor, the platform, fingers looped over a rope, enough tension in those fingers that Bernard can feel the rope, with its stiffness, cutting back at his skin.
The two boys, the two fighters, are on the opposite side of the ring from him. His Eli has Joey Bertolini backed up against the ropes, but he won’t hit him. Not really hit. He hits like a girl, that’s what Bernard thinks. Flails out from his elbows and his wrists, no drive from the shoulder, no using the leverage of his body, no hips or legs, no stepping into a punch. The gloves are soft enough, padded enough, that no matter how hard the boys hit they won’t really do any damage. Moreover, the boys wear protection for their heads. But Eli could, if he punched right, at least make Joey’s face sting. That would be something, a start.
For five weeks now Eli has been taking these lessons. Every Tuesday at 4:00. Bernard watches his grandson Tuesdays and Thursdays after school while his daughter is at work – she teaches yoga classes – and Bernard’s the one who signed Eli up for boxing. The gym was surprisingly lax about the registration form and the liability release form, but he had gone in with assurance and the authority of a grandparent and a check to cover three months worth of classes.
He takes Eli alone those two days, without his wife Nancy, because Nancy reserves afternoons for time in her studio. Nancy would be shocked if she knew about the boxing lessons, and their daughter, Liana, would be horrified. She’d be indignant. She’d be furious, livid. But Eli is eight, he’s old enough to keep a secret from his mother, and from his father and his grandmother as well. Bernard had to convince him, but the boy adores his grandpa, so it wasn’t hard.
Part of the deal is that they will go out for ice cream afterwards, and that is a secret, too. Bernard doesn’t have to have Eli back home until 6:30, which leaves plenty of time after the boxing lesson for a treat. Liana has asked her father repeatedly not to feed Eli snacks right before dinner, but a deal is a deal, and that’s the deal he signed onto with his grandson. Eli just smiles when his mother asks what he has eaten that afternoon, smiles and looks at his grandfather and shrugs, and he says, as he does to so many questions, “I don’t know.”
There are never any bruises or marks on the boy when he gets home, nothing that would give any of it away, nothing that would betray their pact. The truth is, all the kids hit like girls. Joey Bertolini. Tim McGonigle. Ricky Jones. And the one girl in the boxing class – Jessica Lourie – she hits like a girl, too.
Eli hadn’t known any of the other kids before the boxing lessons began, because he doesn’t go to school with them. The others are all at the same public school, while Eli goes to a private day school. A Jewish private day school, where in addition to reading and arithmetic and the rudiments of natural science, he studies Hebrew and learns about the Jewish holidays and talks about two versions of history instead of one, standard history – real history, to Bernard – and Biblical history.
Bernard has mixed feelings about this sort of education for his grandson. On the one hand, he knows Eli is getting far more stimulation and that he is learning in a far better environment than if he were in public school, but at the same time, there is an aura of indoctrination in what they talk about in the classroom that offends him. Although Bernard is Jewish himself, by birth, he has never had much patience with the trappings and the rigmarole of organized religion. Nor does he like the idea of his grandson being separated out that way, by the school he attends, from other kids. The kids on his block, the kids in his neighborhood – Eli will never know them in the same ways that they will know one another.
Eli is a child with many interests. He likes baseball and soccer, but he also likes chess. He likes games of all varieties – physical games and sports, thinking games, word games, number games, silly games. He likes to read, and will lie on his bed for hours and read a chapter book from beginning to end on a Sunday afternoon. He likes the speed and glitz and magic of computers. He likes to crack eggs and stir batter, and help his mother bake cupcakes in the kitchen, and he likes to watch football on television with his father. With Bernard he likes to do sudokus, sitting on his grandfather’s lap, and with his Grandma Nancy, the artist of the family, he likes to paint and do other art projects she dreams up for him.
He has a sweet disposition, and he is precociously bright and curious, having learned to read at the age of three and able to solve intricate number problems in his head by four – yet he never shows off his smarts. In fact, he is more than precociously bright, he is something of a prodigy. Liana and Brad have talked on several occasions to the school administrators about moving Eli to a higher grade, but they came to a decision together that it would be better to keep him with his age peers for social reasons. So instead Eli gets individual attention from his teachers and individual assignments that will challenge him – and that is something, Bernard acknowledges, he would not likely get in public school.
He has many friends in third grade and no apparent enemies, yet the happier Eli seems, the more Bernard feels uneasy about him. Eli is a child in the world, and Bernard knows that a child in the world is vulnerable to too many insidious things – to deliberate or random cruelties, to crushing indifference, to life-threatening illnesses, to limb-threatening accidents, to broken hopes and dashed expectations and heart-shrinking disappointments. That is why Bernard decided, at the very least, that Eli needs to learn how to fight back, even if there is nothing yet for him to fight back against.
“You have to know how to take care of yourself,” he said to his grandson the first time they walked into the gym together. They’d been holding hands, but as they went through the doorway Bernard let Eli’s fingers go.
Eli glanced up at him with a quizzical look, as if he hadn’t understood the concept his grandfather was talking about – and that quizzical look confirmed for Bernard that he was absolutely right to be uneasy about him.
* * *
They go to the usual place for their ice cream, Eli’s favorite, a boutique ice cream shop called Maxine’s Flavors that’s four blocks from the gym. At Maxine’s, customers can pick from almost forty different kinds of ice cream and frozen yogurt. The names of the flavors are handwritten on a board, and the list changes from day to day. The ice cream is all made fresh on the premises, and customers can add their own nut or fruit or candy toppings for only fifty cents extra per topping.
It’s a popular ice cream shop, but the time of day that Bernard takes Eli on Tuesdays, around 5:15, there are never many other customers there. This day Bernard has invited Joey Bertolini and his mother Amber to come with them and share in their post-class ritual. Eli and Joey run ahead, stopping at each intersection to wait for Bernard and Amber to catch up with them, because neither boy is yet allowed to cross a street by himself. Amber, like Bernard but unlike the other parents, stays at the gym through the whole boxing lesson, and like Bernard she watches avidly everything that goes on there.
Amber is a very attractive woman, downright beautiful to Bernard’s mind, her face thin and defined by its wide brown eyes and the delicate bones that run across her cheeks and taper at her chin. She has smooth, pale, creamy-looking skin and thick dark hair that she teases outward. She also has a voluptuous figure, with large, soft-looking breasts and a narrow waist. Bernard has guessed, by the very fact that she has her son taking boxing lessons, and by the way she watches Joey’s progress, that Amber is a single mother, but he doesn’t know her well enough to ask. She wears a ring as if she is married, but that could be for any number of reasons, including to discourage unwanted men like himself from coming too close.
It’s a moot point anyway, Bernard thinks, since he himself is married, and has been for nearly forty years – and at his age he probably wouldn’t be very attractive to a woman like Amber, though he doesn’t hide from himself the reason he invited Joey and his mother out with them after the boys finished swatting their gloves at each other and shook hands in the center of the ring under the eyes of the coach. Bernard had been quite handsome in his youth, attractive to a multitude of girls and young women, and his face still retains much of its earlier look, but he has thickened over the years and put on weight, and his hair is now almost entirely gray. He still wears that hair long, but sometimes it looks more ridiculous to him than either rakish or carefree.
At the entrance to the shop Bernard pulls the door open and holds it for everyone. The boys dart in, and Amber turns to smile at Bernard before she steps through the doorway. He feels a sudden impulse to lift his arms and set his hands on her shoulders and knead her flesh while she walks in front of him, but he resists it.
At the cash register Bernard insists on paying for Joey and Amber’s cones. “You’re our guests,” he smiles. “We invited you, so of course the treat’s on us. Right, Eli?”
“Right,” Eli agrees. He has his head tilted sideways to take the first lick of his double chocolate fudge ice cream. There is already a trail of brown running down the side of his hand, though he’s only had his cone for a matter of seconds.
“Well thank you,” Amber says to both of them, bobbing her head up and down. “Thank you very much. That’s very sweet of you. This will be a delightful way for us to spoil our appetite for dinner, won’t it, Joey?”
Joey doesn’t answer his mother, and Bernard thinks for a second about his daughter, and about how she would agree with Amber about spoiling appetites, and he doesn’t say anything either. The ice cream never seems to make him eat any less when he and Nancy sit down for their meal.
The boys don’t talk at all. Whether it’s because they’re too busy eating, or they don’t really know each other, Bernard is not sure. Their acquaintance is solely through this boxing class, and for most of the class the instructor, a man not much younger than Bernard who calls himself Coach Harry, is demonstrating techniques of footwork or arm angles while the five kids emulate him silently, swaying their bodies across the mat and socking at air. They also spend time punching at the heavy bags, two children per bag standing on opposite sides, with Coach Harry leaning his shoulder into the third bag for the odd kid out to hit. And they take turns throwing jabs at Coach Harry’s hands, which he holds up in front of him after crouching down to their height. Rarely do they make Harry even flinch.
It’s toward the last part of the hour that the children pair off and flail away at each other in the ring for a few minutes, one pair after another. Each class, one of them gets to go at it with the coach. He is everyone’s first choice as an opponent, since Coach Harry doesn’t hit back. Today it was Jessica’s turn.
During his match Eli got one clever jab in, poking the tip of Joey’s nose, but there was no oomph at all behind the punch. Joey flicked his glove a couple of times across Eli’s face, but again, without impact. If a judge had tried to score their bout, Bernard thought when Coach Harry blew his whistle to signify the contest was over, he would have had a hard time finding anything at all to give points for.
With the boys so quiet – nothing but their licking and swallowing sounds – Bernard and Amber are forced into awkward, halting conversation. The only natural thing for them to talk about would be the thing that has brought them together, the one thing that his grandson and her son have in common, the boxing lessons, but Bernard is now acutely aware that Amber had to have heard him shouting for Eli to punch her son harder, to hit him so he felt it, so there is something awkward even about that subject.
“What other activities does Joey go in for?” Bernard asks finally. He, too, has ice cream appear on his hand, but he licks it away before it forms a stream.
“He’s a Cub Scout,” Amber says. “We like that. And in the spring he’ll play baseball.”
“Oh yeah? Eli plays baseball, too. Don’t you, Eli?”
Eli nods. He smiles at his grandfather, a smile so quick and so fleeting and so patently false that it can only have been picked up from something he has seen someone else do. Adults, Bernard thinks sadly, something he has seen adults do.
“What position do you play?” Bernard asks Joey.
Joey looks up briefly from his cone and shrugs.
“Well,” Bernard says, “that will all work itself out once the season starts, won’t it? Eli was an outfielder last year, but who knows, maybe this year he’ll be shortstop, or he’ll pitch.”
Amber smiles at him, an absolutely radiant smile with her full lips and beautiful teeth, but her eyes tell Bernard that she is not sure what she and her son are doing in this ice cream shop with Eli and him. Yet there is nothing anyone can do about the situation now, Bernard thinks, not until everyone’s ice cream is finished, so he lets himself sag back into his seat and concentrate on his cone.
* * *
On the way to the gym, as soon as they’re in the car, Eli pulls the yarmulke off his head and slips it into Bernard’s glove compartment. He does this every time Bernard picks him up from school. Yarmulkes are something the school requires all boys to wear – though not, according to Liana, for religious reasons.
“It’s because some kids are orthodox and wear them anyway, so they figure if all the boys have them on their heads, no one will feel uncomfortable,” is what she told Bernard and Nancy when she and Brad first enrolled Eli in the school.
By now Eli is used to wearing it, though it’s obvious to Bernard that he’d rather not have to. For Bernard the yarmulke on his grandson’s head carries an uncomfortable weight of religious significance, and in more than three years he hasn’t been able to rid himself of that connotation. He hasn’t worn a yarmulke himself since his bar mitzvah over fifty years before, an event which marked the end point of his religious life, the terminal moment, though it was supposed to signify the opposite, a new and elevated beginning.
At the gym Eli gets special attention from Coach Harry. The coach has seen something in Eli’s footwork that he likes, a way Eli has developed of feinting, and Harry wants Eli to demonstrate it to the other children. At one point the coach drapes his heavy body over Eli’s from behind and rests his chin on Eli’s head. With his arms enfolding the boy’s arms, he moves his feet and legs and hips with Eli’s. There is something vaguely obscene about the way they’re coupled, Bernard thinks. Plus, Coach Harry’s weight is cumbersome for the child, and it impedes Eli’s natural grace. Rather than showing off the cleverness of his movement, Eli lurches and stumbles. The two of them dance across the mat this way – the dance far beyond awkward – and Bernard wonders what possible inspiration the other kids can be getting from it.
Later, toward the end of the hour, Eli steps into the ring with Jessica Lourie. She is the one adversary Bernard does not want his grandson to pummel. In principle he has no problem with girls learning to fight and to defend themselves, but in practice, when it’s his own grandson in the ring with Jessica, he recoils at the idea. It has been almost forty years since Bernard’s been in a ring himself, but when he did fight he’d never been reluctant to lash out with his fists or draw blood. In the army, to give himself something to do beyond the numbing routine, he’d signed up to box in the middleweight division. Though he’d had no experience, he won more often than he lost. By sheer luck Bernard never had to ship out to Vietnam – all his combat came with gloves on his hands.
Eli’s match lasts four minutes, two rounds of two minutes each. He and Jessica circle each other warily, with Coach Harry barking encouragement at the same time he acts as referee. Occasionally the children swing their arms around, but neither is capable of causing any damage. This is one show Bernard watches in silence.
When the lesson is done he steps over to where Amber Bertolini is straightening Joey’s jacket and asks the two of them if they would like to go for ice cream again. All through the hour Amber kept her distance from Bernard so he could barely say hello, and it seems to him she avoided him on purpose. She is wearing a tight yellow sweater with knots of delicate, soft fuzz rising off the wool, and she looks more beautiful than ever. Now, for a moment at least, Bernard has her cornered.
At the invitation Joey glances hopefully at his mother, but Amber says, “I’m afraid we can’t today.” She looks Bernard right in the eye.
“No?”
“No, we’ve got an early dinner planned. But, thank you for asking.”
“So maybe next week?” Bernard feels shot down, and stupid for pushing it – like a kid in high school who has made up his mind to overcome his shyness and won’t let himself stop – but he can’t simply walk away.
“Yes, okay, maybe next week,” Amber answers.
“Great,” Bernard says, even more stupidly, “Eli and I will look forward to it.”
Outside, when Bernard and Eli leave, a cold mix of rain and sleet is dripping out of the sky. That sky was blue when they arrived, and now it’s nearly black. The month is November, and the nights have been starting earlier and earlier, and with clouds having moved in as well there is no sense of daylight. It seems too cold to be getting ice cream, but Eli insists he wants it anyway.
Bernard unlocks the car doors. Normally they walk from the gym to Maxine’s, but they’re not prepared for this weather. Bernard doesn’t keep an umbrella in the car.
They sit at stools at the long counter and Bernard asks Eli if he is liking his boxing lessons. Eli shrugs – he’s focused on his cone. This week he picked out grape ice cream with chocolate chips, a combination that seems to Bernard to be perversely unnatural. Bernard has a dish of butter pecan ice cream that he’s eating with a red plastic spoon. He twirls halfway around on his stool so he’s facing out to the room. The floor is varnished wood, a bad design choice, Bernard thinks, as there are stains and scratches and scuff marks everywhere.
“And what about Coach Harry?” Bernard waggles his spoon between his fingers. “What do you think of him? Is he a good boxing teacher?”
Eli shrugs again. “I don’t know,” he says between licks.
Bernard feels dispirited suddenly at his grandson’s distractedness. As Eli grows up, he knows, the distance between them will only get wider.
Sitting in the ice cream parlor, where there are no other customers, and where the counter girl has retreated into the back room, Bernard feels old, and he feels purposeless. He wishes Amber and Joey had come with them, and he is certain the whole spirit of the outing would be different if they had. Maybe he’d have suggested to the boys that they sit at a table by themselves, and he would have sat with Amber at the counter, their arms side by side, possibly even touching.
Bernard is only sixty-four, and it has been a mere two years since he sold his accounting firm, but today it feels more like two decades. Recently he hasn’t been able to generate the energy or the interest to practice on his saxophone. The idea had been that he would do music when he quit working, a lifelong passion when he didn’t have the time to pursue it, and even look for a band to play in, while Nancy focused on her painting – and together they would be wonderful grandparents to Eli and to any siblings or cousins that might come along. But Liana and Brad stopped with the one child, and Liana’s brother Luke hasn’t had any yet – he isn’t even married. Meanwhile, Bernard’s wife is still painting up a storm every day, five and six and seven hours at a time, while he tries to figure out how he is going to fill his next couple of minutes.
“Eli, let’s get the hell out of here,” Bernard says suddenly, and in a voice more gruff than he intends. “This place is depressing. We’re like ghosts in here.” There is still ice cream in his dish, but it has begun to melt and he doesn’t want it anymore.
“I didn’t finish yet,” Eli protests.
“Well, you’ve had enough.” Bernard lifts the cone out of Eli’s hand and in one motion tosses it into an open trash can. “Any more and it will spoil your appetite. Your mom’s right. You won’t be able to eat your supper tonight.”
* * *
At Liana’s, when he drops Eli off, Bernard gets into a spat with his daughter. It happens right away, and it is entirely unexpected, takes Bernard by surprise, as if he’d been drowsing in a darkened room and the unseen hand of an unknown person suddenly flicked on a light and startled him awake.
There is a sticky splotch of purple on the front of Eli’s shirt, which in his hurry to leave Maxine’s Flavors, Bernard did not notice. Liana sniffs out immediately what it is.
“Ice cream?” she says, her voice rising on the second word. “Jesus Christ, ice cream? At six o’clock? That’s really not helpful, Dad.”
Eli, who for a moment stands suspended between them, ducks his head and slips away as if evading one of Joey Bertolini’s ineffectual punches. Bernard watches him scoot up the stairs to his room.
“The kid needs to have a little bit of fun, honey-bun. He needs to have a treat every once in a while. His life is too structured. We had a little free time this afternoon and we did something spontaneous.”
“Spontaneous?” Liana narrows her eyes. “You just decided on the spot? You’re saying that this is the first time you and Eli ever went for ice cream?”
“I didn’t say it was the first time.” Bernard feels his face get hot. All of a sudden, he isn’t sure about what Eli might have told his parents regarding their afternoons together, and what he might not have told them. He isn’t sure what Liana knows or doesn’t know. “Nobody said anything about the first time. All I said is that today we got spontaneous.”
They are still standing by the entrance, just beyond the front door. Brad is there as well, in the kitchen, flipping through a stack of mail on the table, but he hasn’t said anything other than to greet Bernard when he came in. He can’t have been home for more than a minute or two, Bernard thinks, because he’s still wearing his tie.
“You’re unbelievable,” Liana says. “I ask you one thing, and that’s to not give Eli junk to eat right before dinner, and that’s exactly what you do.” She is glaring at her father, and a vein is pulsing in the hollow of her neck. “I knew it was a mistake to count on you.”
“That’s a nice thing to say to your father.”
Tears come into Liana’s eyes, but Bernard knows the difference between tears of grief and tears of anger, and the ones he sees forming are not tears of grief.
“You know, Dad, it might not be working out so well for you to be taking Eli in the afternoons.”
“Fine,” Bernard says, “I won’t then.” In the kitchen, over his daughter’s shoulder, he can see her husband determinedly looking away. Brad has frozen – he is as still as a statue. “You can find someone else to pick him up and hang out with him. Or, God forbid, you can do it yourself.”
“Ice cream,” Liana says back. “Not to mention that stain will never come out of his shirt.”
Bernard turns his shoulder and puts his hand on the doorknob. “Goodbye, Eli, I had fun today,” he calls up the stairs, and then he goes out.
In the car Bernard turns on the engine, then the wipers, the headlights, and the heater, but he waits a moment, breathing in sharp little gasps, before he drives off. He knows Liana won’t follow through on her threat – they need someone to watch Eli those hours and they don’t want to pay a sitter for it – but he pictures it happening anyway. The picture is one of emptiness, a blank. A picture of that many more hours to fill, and beyond that, of being separated from his grandson, the cord between them cut away.
* * *
At home he goes into his study and takes the saxophone out of its case. He wets the mouthpiece with his tongue and lips. Nancy is still in her studio out back, the light blazing through the glass doors, the music from her stereo tinkling through as well, and Bernard feels annoyed. It is nearly seven-thirty, and there has been no movement toward making dinner. A package of chicken parts is sitting on the counter, defrosted, but taking the chicken out of the freezer is all anyone has done, and Bernard did that himself earlier in the day when he made his lunch.
The instrument feels cold to his fingers. He blows a C, then an A, and then he goes back to C and plays a scale. He goes up the scale slowly, holding each note for several beats and listening carefully to the tone. The sound is off, not just lacking clarity but flat, and Bernard wonders if that might have anything to do with the cool temperature in the house and of the instrument. He adjusts the mouthpiece outward about a quarter of an inch and blows a C again, but it sounds exactly the same way to him.
He has stacks of sheet music in his study, but instead of putting any on the music stand, Bernard improvises. He shuts his eyes and in his mind he conjures John Coltrane on a stage in a dusky club, dipping his knees and swaying his entire body to the sounds he creates. This is an image of Coltrane he has seen in a documentary film. Coltrane’s eyes are shut too while he plays, like his own, and Bernard wonders what it is that Coltrane sees. Watching the great man blow, it is clear that Coltrane hears in his head the music that is about to come out of his instrument, hears it for the first time just moments before he actually creates it.
Bernard knows that to compare his own music to Coltrane’s, his personal, unique sound to Coltrane’s unique sound, is like comparing a rowboat to a cruise ship, or comparing what Eli and his friends do in the gym on Tuesday afternoons to what Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier once did. But he is feeling a little sorry for himself, and therefore indulgent of his fantasy. What he plays now he has never played before, but the extraordinary thing is, neither has anyone else in the history of the world ever played it. He is creating entirely brand-new music, and he is creating it out of nothing. His fingers flex and bend, press down and lift up, to their own will, and Bernard blows until his breath comes hard and the insides of his cheeks are sore.
* * *
He doesn’t see what happens. Not because he isn’t watching – he is, he always watches – but because Coach Harry’s big body gets between Eli and himself and blocks his view of his grandson. It is only for a moment that Bernard can’t see, but a moment is all it takes.
It is Eli’s turn to spar with the coach, and they are the last match of the afternoon. Eli circles Coach Harry and swings both his arms wildly, flailing, not having to worry that this opponent will jab back or parry or counterpunch. Coach Harry stays in the center of the ring, turning his body this way and that, making Eli move one way or the other in order to obtain a good angle from which to swing.
Then Eli is down. Bernard doesn’t see whether his legs crumple or fold or sag or collapse, all he sees in the first moment is Eli’s head on the mat, and one arm thrown out to the side at an awkward angle – a horrible angle – the red boxing glove ensconced over the hand like an outsized pustular growth. Then Bernard hears a high-pitched cry – he recognizes it, though it is a cry he has not quite heard before in its shrillness – and in the next moment the coach shifts his feet and Bernard can see Eli’s face stiff with pain, his eyes wide and searching for something, maybe for his grandfather, and then the child’s cry turns into a long, breathless wail.
* * *
They allow him to ride in the ambulance with Eli. Sort of allow – they don’t prevent him. Bernard doesn’t ask exactly, he just follows the men who wheel the gurney, his hand folded around his grandson’s good hand. On his other hand Eli still wears the boxing glove – the EMTs didn’t want to pull it off for fear of further disturbing the broken bones inside the arm.
The EMTs have stabilized the arm temporarily, and they are maneuvering Eli through doorways and out of the gym and down the outside stairs to their vehicle. Bernard is with them, trying at the same time to keep physical contact with his grandson and to stay out of the way. The EMTs are brusque and gruff with everyone except Eli – with him they are gentle, and careful not to jostle his arm.
Behind Bernard is Amber Bertolini – even in this horrible moment he can feel her presence – and just before he climbs into the ambulance she pinches the cloth on the back of his shirt and tugs. Bernard stops and turns around.
“I’m going to follow the ambulance to the hospital,” she says. “If you get ahead of me, I know where you’re going.”
“That’s all right,” Bernard says stiffly, “you don’t have to.” Amber has barely acknowledged him the last couple of lessons, and Bernard has been fairly successful in his effort to forget she is there.
“No,” she says, “I want to. You’ll need someone with you. And you and Eli will need a ride home, too, when they’re done with him, or else a ride back here to get your car.”
Bernard nods quickly and says, “Thanks, I appreciate that.” Then he turns back around and steps up into the ambulance, careful not to stand too quickly or too tall lest he crack his head against the low ceiling.
He smiles at Eli when the siren goes on, but there’s no smile in return. Eli’s closed face is another jolt to Bernard – it tells him just how bad the pain is. By now the boy’s sharp cries and wails have faded into a rising and falling moan, and for Bernard that is worse to hear.
* * *
At the hospital, everything is chaos.
The ambulance pulls up to the emergency room entrance, and Eli is lifted down and wheeled inside. The EMTs are practically running now, as if trying to keep up the speed they’d worked up to in the ambulance, and Bernard feels himself laboring to stay even with them.
Then there is a whirlwind of paperwork, shifting computer screens, questions, nurses scurrying from one station to another, phone calls. A harried-looking doctor with snow-white hair sticking out from his head takes long strides past Bernard to Eli’s temporary bed and draws the curtain around it.
Then there is Eli’s transfer to a wheelchair and the appearance of a second doctor whose name Bernard is never told. This doctor speaks in an urgent manner to two of the nurses in a voice too low for Bernard to hear.
Next, the boy is wheeled over to a bank of elevators so he can go down to the basement for X-rays, and this time, unlike at the entrance to the ambulance, Bernard is not allowed inside. The orderly wheeling Eli tells Bernard there is not enough room in the elevator for him, and he instructs Bernard to wait for the next elevator, which he does. But it turns out the hospital has two floors below ground level, and Bernard gets off at the wrong one. By the time he figures this out and makes it down to the lowest floor, there is no one around. He panics momentarily, but then sees a sign for Radiology with an arrow pointing down a long, empty, tiled corridor with fluorescent lights that give off an eerie, greenish glow. Bernard finds himself sprinting down this corridor, and at the end he does come to the Radiology admitting desk, but Eli has already been whisked away for his X-rays.
“I’m his grandfather,” he says, in as calm a voice as he can muster. He is breathing heavily from the sprint, and he feels like he is about to burst open.
The nurse gazes up from her desk with a look that is not entirely unsympathetic, and she gestures toward a row of upholstered blue chairs. She tells Bernard to have a seat and wait, it won’t be long.
* * *
He finds Amber and Joey in the waiting room upstairs, or they find him – one way or another, they all end up in the same place. The look on Amber’s face is as concerned as if the child who was hurt is her own – her brow knitted, her eyes moist, her mouth somber – and she steps right up to Bernard and lays her hand on his shoulder in a consoling way. He would like to gather this woman into his arms and just hold on for dear life, but even in his state of distress he is aware of how inappropriate that would be. So he only touches Amber’s warm hand with his fingers and presses for a moment.
Joey, standing next to his mother, looks bewildered, frightened. After Amber removes her hand from Bernard’s shoulder she cups it over her son’s head and reassures him that everything will be all right, his friend will be fine, nobody likes hospitals but they do take good care of people in them. She sends him over to a box of toys in the corner of the waiting room, and tells him to see what he can find to do.
The report on Eli is that his bone is broken. It’s a young doctor, a resident, who comes into the waiting room to talk to Bernard. He holds an X‑ray at arm’s length and with his other hand points to the picture to show where the break is. The bone is snapped clear through, and also slightly displaced, right above the elbow. The good news, though, is that it will not require surgery. The attending doctor is setting the arm now, the resident tells Bernard, and Eli has been sedated to alleviate his pain.
It is his right arm that’s injured, and Eli is right-handed, so on top of the pain and the hassles of convalescence and the curtailed activities, Bernard thinks, his grandson will have to learn how to do simple things with his other hand, like hold a fork and wipe his bum and write out his homework for school. With a cast on he’ll probably have to take sponge baths and sleep differently in his bed. Simple things, but not so simple to adjust to.
Bernard asks Amber if she would please telephone his daughter for him – he says he knows it is awkward, but he is too unnerved to do it himself – and when she nods that she will, he dictates the cell phone number. While Amber is waiting for Liana to pick up, Bernard sticks his hand in his pocket, and there is something in it that his fingers don’t recognize. He pulls it out and discovers Eli’s yarmulke, black and silky-feeling, which he remembers the boy had forgotten to take off his head until they were entering the gym. Eli had handed the yarmulke to Bernard on the steps, and the two had exchanged conspiratorial smiles. Bernard thinks now that if there is indeed a God, and if that God is indeed merciful, He might take more notice of Bernard and his situation if he balances his grandson’s yarmulke on his head. But he hasn’t worn one of those things in so long, over fifty years – and he resists the momentary impulse and presses the little cap back into his pocket.
When Amber says, “Hello?” into her phone, “is this Liana?” Bernard drifts over to watch Joey play. He doesn’t want to hear how this conversation will go.
* * *
“Are you insane?” Liana says. She is at the hospital thirty-five minutes after she gets Amber’s call, and Eli is not allowed to have visitors yet. “Boxing? Eli? How the hell long has this been going on?”
Nobody calls Nancy; Bernard, for the same reason he didn’t call Liana himself – he just can’t do it – and Amber doesn’t do it because Bernard is too embarrassed to ask her to. He has never mentioned his wife to Amber, and he imagines that she thinks he isn’t currently married, just as he thinks that of her.
But Brad is on his way, Liana having called him, and Bernard wishes his son-in‑law had gotten there before his daughter.
“I’m sorry,” he says to Liana. “It was going fine until today, it really was. Eli was awesome, and this was a complete and total accident. It was a fluke. I wanted to tell you about the lessons, but I couldn’t. I knew you wouldn’t let him do them.”
“Of course I wouldn’t let him do them. And you had him lying to his parents all this time? That’s great, Dad. Really great. A great way to teach a child. A great way to bring a child up.”
There is fury in Liana’s voice, a familiar fury Bernard feels he has detected in her voice ever since she was an infant – indignant over being fed the wrong kind of mashed fruit, or over being laid down in her crib and covered with a blanket when she wasn’t ready to settle down – but despite the fury, her eyes look at him as if she doesn’t know him at all.
Liana glares at Amber, too, to whom she has just been introduced, a woman her own age who apparently knows her father well, and who presumably also knows her son, and Liana stares at Joey for a moment as well. “Who in their right mind would let their kid do boxing?” This idea is something entirely new for Liana, something no part of her seems to comprehend, although this other woman lets her kid do it. “Does Mom know about this?”
“No,” Bernard says, tight-lipped, “she doesn’t.”
“So you’ve been lying to her also? Who are you?” she says to her father. “Do I even know you?”
Liana looks again around the waiting room, which is empty except for their party, her neck moving in a herky-jerky motion. She is short-haired, the brown hair colored reddish, and she is trim and fit from all her yoga, angular compared to Amber’s ample curves. But the yoga, which Liana originally took up as part of a holistic approach to enhancing her physical and mental and emotional states, has hardly left her calm, which is one of its supposed benefits. At least not now. She has a nervous energy that, at the moment, has no place to go so it just seethes out of her into the room.
“Where’s the doctor, anyway?” she asks, as if she’s just thought of it.
“He was here,” Bernard says. “Before you got here. One of them was – he showed us the X-ray. He must have gone back to be with Eli.”
“Us? Showed us the X-ray? Who’s us?” Liana shakes her head, as if to clear away something that flew in between her ears and got caught. “Wow. Us now. Us is you and this person I’ve never even seen before? Us is all the boxing people? You really are insane, you know that, Dad? What was I thinking, letting you watch out for him all these months? I can’t believe his arm is broken. Do you have any idea what that means?”
“I do know what it means,” Bernard says softly. “And I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Liana. I’m sorry.”
* * *
They leave the hospital separately. It’s dark out, evening, but there is no need for Eli to spend the entire night. There is nothing more the doctors can do for him right now. He is groggy from the painkiller, but that will wear off. The doctor hands Liana a small packet of pills, in case the pain returns and starts to get the better of Eli. He tells her that if Eli has trouble swallowing pills whole, she can mash them up and serve them on a spoon with water.
Eli goes off with his mother, sporting his new cast, which runs from just beneath his shoulder to his wrist. With his other hand he holds Liana’s hand, which has a tight grip on him. Brad will drive alone in his car and follow them. And Bernard goes with Amber and Joey, back to where he left his car near the gym.
On the way he asks if they would like to stop for something to eat – pizza, maybe, or Chinese, something quick – but Amber says she has a dinner planned at home, and besides, she feels worn out and Joey is tired, too. When they get to the street the gym is on, Bernard points out his car, and Amber pulls to a stop alongside it. She leaves the engine running and looks straight ahead. Bernard knows he has to go home, but inertia has overcome him and his body is reluctant to move.
“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for staying with me at the hospital. That was really a huge help.”
Amber turns her neck and looks at him, keeping her hands on the steering wheel. Their faces are dark, but there is enough ambient light from streetlights and headlights and store windows to make out each other’s features. “You’re welcome,” is all she says.
Bernard sways his torso toward her. He wants to kiss her, for no other reason than to show his affection for her and his gratitude – her cheek will do fine, or even her forehead, it doesn’t have to be her lips – but he doesn’t know how she will take a kiss, if she will want one. And of course her son is in the back seat. She doesn’t lean at all toward him, but she doesn’t lean away either. He stops short of making contact and again says, his voice husky with emotion, “Well thank you.” Then he turns to look at Joey and says, “Thank you, too, Joey. You were a huge help, too.”
As soon as he steps out of the car, Amber pulls away. Bernard is alone on the street. It is a chilly evening, he notices, with a stiff breeze, and there is an odor of something on the breeze, something that smells faintly like fire, but with an odd sweetness mixed in. It smells as if it is coming from a long way off – so far away, Bernard imagines, that whatever it is, an actual fire or something else, it could easily never get to where he is. Any number of things could slow down its progress or stop it altogether, or lure it onto a different path, re-route it, or even just snuff it out.
He reaches into his pocket for his keys, and once again he finds Eli’s yarmulke. He sits down in the car and puts the key in the ignition, then relents and reaches the yarmulke up to his head. He uses the rear view mirror to adjust it.
* * *
Bernard has the television on. He resisted it for a long time after lunch, for more than two hours. First he’d dealt himself hand after hand of solitaire, then he took his saxophone out of its case. He flexed his fingers over the keys in a silent rendition of “Moon River” – a song he hates on principle for its smarminess, its sentimentality, but one he committed to memory when he first began to play the sax – then other songs he’s got memorized, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually blow into the mouthpiece. Finally he set the saxophone back down and gave in, switching on the television.
It is a Tuesday afternoon, and Bernard’s choice is one soap opera or another soap opera, the same shows he chooses from every weekday now. What he does is flip among them, seeing how many of their different crises he can keep in his mind in parallel. Nancy doesn’t know about any of these crises – she is in her studio painting, and she will be for several more hours. Once she gets rolling, she hates to stop.
Tuesday afternoon, and no Eli. That is why Bernard feels so restless, so feckless, so melancholy. Eli goes directly from school now on Tuesdays and Thursdays to the house of one of his friends, and Liana picks him up there after her yoga class.
Bernard only sees Eli when others are with them – Nancy, and usually Liana and Brad as well. They all get together for dinner, or for brunch on Sunday, or they go to a museum together, or to a play for children. Eli’s cast has been removed, but the skin of his arm is still more pale than the rest of him, and that arm looks thinner than the other arm. Eli has exercises to do to strengthen it, and Liana has him doing certain yoga poses, too. But not even as a joke has Bernard dared suggest that Eli start boxing again to build up his arm.
Bernard switches the station, and there is a woman he has never seen before – or at least he thinks he has never seen her – a woman with long, bouncy blonde waves who turns her mouth down in a pout, with tears springing into her eyes. Bernard guesses her name will be Jasmine or Lindsay or Ariel or Cassandra, one of those names that are so popular on soap operas for beautiful young women whose love lives suddenly become treacherous.
Or Amber. Though the actress looks nothing like Amber Bertolini, Bernard cannot help but think of her. He hasn’t seen her since the day at the hospital. But Amber, he tells himself, is every bit as beautiful and mysterious as this character on television, and the complications in her life, he is certain – including the complications he has introduced to it himself – are no less harrowing and poignant than the complications sure to unfold in due time on the screen.
The camera holds the woman’s sultry head in a close-up, with music swelling in the background, a piano and violins. Whatever it is that is making her want to cry, this Jasmine or Lindsay or Ariel or Cassandra – or Amber – the feeling jumps from the screen straight onto Bernard, and he feels like crying, too. His mind is flooded with everything he has in his life, and with everything he doesn’t have. Sitting on the couch watching the actress emote, Bernard closes his hands into fists and squeezes them. There are tears lurking somewhere behind his eyes or in his sinuses, too. He can feel them there – the sting, the burn – but he does everything in his power to keep them from seeping out.
Ben Brooks is the author of the novel The Icebox (Amelia, 1987). His short stories have appeared in Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Mississippi Review, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.