“On the night Max wore his wolf suit, and made mischief of one kind. . .” Dan yawned, “And another. . . His mother called him. . .” He yawned again.
“ ‘Wild thing,’ ” Taylor supplied. “And Max said. . .” he paused, waiting for Dan to continue, “And Max said. . .”
“ ‘I’ll eat you up!’” Zac shrieked. He buried his face in Dan’s arm. “Don’t read this anymore.”
Dan turned to Taylor. “It is, like, the fifth time,” he agreed.
Taylor folded his arms across his chest and stuck out his lower lip. He’d caught a cold the night before, and his head, which hurt from the concussion anyway, was buzzing with that stuffy, closed-off cold feeling. He was tired, worried and cranky. He was also missing school, which he didn’t like to do at all. “I like this book!” Taylor insisted.
Dan nodded. “I know you do. Everybody’s sort of tired.” Absently, he ruffled Zac’s hair. “Especially. . .” his voice dropped to the level of a whisper, “you know who. . .”
“I want to see Ike,” Taylor whined. It wasn’t the first time he’d voiced this request.
Dan swallowed. He’d talked to Nora only long enough to find out that Isaac had made it through the surgery. She’d called him while Isaac was in the recovery room, and she hadn’t called again. It was probably a good sign, Dan thought, but he was anxious to hear something concrete. “Taylor, we can’t see Ike right now, because he’s too tired. He’s sleeping.”
“I WANT TO SEE HIM!” Taylor bellowed. By this point, he was beyond reason, and Dan tried to keep this in mind.
Zac, on the other hand, was fed up with his brother. “You CAN’T!” he yelled, and started to cry. Taylor started to cry. Dan wanted to cry.
“Hey, listen, do you guys want to just go back to sleep?” he asked.
Taylor coughed, rubbing his eyes. “I’m not tired.”
“Oh, no?” Dan asked.
Taylor yawned. “No,” he assured Dan, dourly. “I’m NOT!”
Dan nodded. “Okay. Zac, are you tired?”
Zac didn’t take his thumb out of his mouth. “No.”
“Look, I know this is really hard for both of you, but you don’t have to stay here much longer. They’ll let you out in an hour or so. Just hang in there until then, okay?”
“Is Ike getting out, too?” Zac asked.
Dan shook his head. “No, buddy, I think he’s going to have to stay for at least a few more days.”
“Does he have ammonia, too?” Taylor asked.
Dan shook his head. “No, but he. . .” He didn’t know what to say, exactly.
“Needs to get more blood?” Taylor asked.
Dan nodded. “Yeah, that’s part of it.”
“And has to get sewed up?” Taylor persisted.
“That, too,” Dan agreed.
“With stitches?” Taylor bit his lip. Stitches hurt. He didn’t want anybody to hurt his brother.
“With stitches,” Dan concurred.
“Why not a zipper?” Zac volunteered.
Dan winced at the thought. “A zipper?”
“Yeah.” Zac nodded. “He could zip it up, and then he’d be fine.”
“Oh, Zac. . .” Dan began. “It doesn’t really work that way.”
“Why not?” Zac persisted.
“Because a zipper’ed get all bloody.” Taylor closed his eyes. “I’m not really going asleep, okay? I just got my eyes shut.”
Dan nodded. “Okay.”
“Me neither!” Zac piped. “I’m not going asleep either!”
“You just resting?” Dan inquired.
Zac put his thumb back into his mouth. “Yeah, that.”
“Okay,” Dan agreed. “I’m just going to get up and. . . stretch for a minute.”
Zac opened his eyes. “You aren’t going anywhere, are you?”
Dan shook his head. “Me? Never.”
“ ‘Kay,” Zac murmured, yawning.
Dan stood up slowly, crawling off of the edge of the bed and tiptoeing to the chair across the room. He perched on the edge of the seat for a few seconds, waiting to make sure they were both asleep. Then he slipped out to the nurse’s station. He had to make a phone call.
“He still hasn’t really come out of it yet,” Nora explained to Dan. “Everything should wear off pretty soon, maybe, but he’s still asleep.” She yawned. She’d been asleep, too, when Dan paged her.
“Could I. . . I mean, would it be all right if. . .” Dan began, uncertainly.
Nora nodded, her voice gentle. “You can see him.” She paused. “Dan?” There was desparation in her voice.
Dan was alarmed. “What?”
Nora’s voice was small, hopeful. “Bring coffee?”
Dan nodded. “You probably need it more than I do.”
Dan borrowed a piece of paper from the nurse in charge and printed a few words across it.
“Don’t worry. I will be right back. If you wake up, you can ask the nurse to call me. . . she has the number. . . and I will be back here in five minutes. You can time me on the clock.” Then he drew picture of himself, with stick-straight hair, a single eyebrow and a day’s worth of beard stubble. He signed his name beneath it. “Dan.”
Dan didn’t hesitate before adding a post-script; that was the most important part. “I PROMISE,” he wrote in capital letters, underlining it four or five times.
He left the note on the table next to the bed and walked down the hall to the elevators.
“You brought it!” Nora met Dan outside the heavy metal doors that led to the ICU. “I love you!” She paused, her eyes meeting his with complete sincerity. “I do love you. . . not just for the coffee, honey. I‘m so glad to see you again.”
“It feels like it’s been years,” Dan agreed, setting the two Styrofoam cups on the floor. He put his arms around her. Neither of them really knew what to say.
“How are Taylor and Zac?” Nora asked.
Dan sighed, smiling grimly. “They’ll be okay. I mean. . .”
Nora took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “What are we going to tell them?”
Dan turned pale. “Nora, are you sure he isn’t going to. . .”
“No,” Nora shook her head. “I’m praying he will. I’m not giving up on him. His chances are a little bit better now.”
“A little bit?” Dan echoed.
Nora nodded. “He probably will make it.” Her voice grew; becoming more forceful. “He will make it.”
“He will,” Dan agreed. He hadn’t even seen Isaac yet, he realized, but that was all the more reason not to allow anything to shake his faith. “He definitely will.”
As soon as he was actually in the ICU, however, surrounded by the beeping of monitors and the hissing of ventilators, Dan wasn’t quite so sure. He didn’t want to do this anymore. He was scared.
Even Nora didn’t seem used to it, and she saw things like this every day. Dan felt her hand tighten around his as they walked further down the hallway. “He’s not as badly off as some of these people,” she whispered, as they passed by a room in which a painfully thin, wizened body lay in the middle of a web of tubes. “Thank God.”
At the end of the hallway, Nora turned. “Be prepared,” she said. “He’s hooked up to a lot.”
Dan almost turned away when he saw Isaac; he didn’t think anyone who was attached to so much scary looking equipment could ever live to tell the tale. “He can’t breathe on his own?” he asked, scared.
“As soon as he’s a little bit more stable,” Nora said. “When he wakes up, they’ll take him off the ventilator and see how well he does.”
Dan swallowed hard. “I want to kill her, Nora.”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Nora whispered. “I wish we could go back. . .”
Isaac heard the voices, but he couldn’t turn to see where they were coming from. His eyes were half-open, and he slid them in the direction of the sound, blinking until he could focus. He wanted to say something, but he still couldn’t make a sound.
He was still hurting, but it was a manageable kind of pain now. It was hard to think. . . he didn’t remember very much about last night. In fact, he didn’t remember much of anything. He had a vague sense of not wanting to remember much of anything.
Nora looked over and met his eyes, her own widening in surprise. “Ike,” she whispered, “you’re up?”
“Hey, buddy,” Dan added, swallowing. He didn’t really know what to say.
Nora stood at the edge of the bed, her hands on the railing. “It’s the morning now,” she said. “You were in surgery for a couple of hours last night.”
Isaac nodded, almost imperceptibly. His eyes were locked on her face; he was wondering, dimly, what she wasn’t telling him. Taylor and Zac, he thought. Where were they? Oh God, what if they were going to split the three of them up. . .
The events of the night before came rushing back to Isaac, and he wished he could crawl beneath the covers and go back to the day before. He wanted to wake up at home, in his own bed. He wanted to see his brothers. . .
“Taylor and Zac are upstairs, sleeping,” Dan said. “They’re fine.”
Nora smoothed Isaac’s hair back from his forehead. “Do you want that thing out of your mouth, honey?”
Isaac nodded, as emphatically as he could. (Which wasn’t very emphatically.) He did, badly.
“I’ll go get someone to take it out,” Nora said. “I’ll be right back.”
Dan and Isaac regarded each other as she left. Say something, Dan told himself. “You must be tired,” he observed.
Isaac nodded. He was tired. . . more tired than he had ever been in his life. His body ached all over. He wished he could slip out of it. Even a few seconds of freedom from pain would be enough to sustain him for awhile. . .
“It’s going to be all right,” Dan said. “We’re going to take care of everything. Don’t worry.”
Isaac blinked. How could he not worry?
“Okay, kiddo, you ready to go off the vent?” The nurse who entered the room was brisk and purposeful, a terse smile pasted on her face. She wasn’t insensitive, but she often came off that way. . . she didn’t believe in self-pity or making too much of physical ailments, no matter how severe. “If you can’t breathe once we take it out, we’re just going to stick it back in.”
Isaac’s eyes widened. That didn’t sound too good. . .
“We’re going to put the bed up, just a bit.” The nurse reached for the remote control that controlled the mattress level and raised the back of it a few inches, until Isaac was almost in a sitting position. “Now, I want you to breathe out as hard as you can.” The nurse turned off the ventilator and pulled on the end of it. “Keep breathing. That’s good, kiddo.”
Nora winced as the breathing tube came out and Isaac started coughing. He flinched, trying to get used to inhaling on his own again. His throat felt raw, and he had an awful taste in his mouth. She knelt down next to him, sliding one hand behind his back. “I know it hurts, honey.”
He blinked away the tears in his eyes. “It’s better than the other thing,” he croaked.
Dan turned away for a minute. He didn’t think he could watch this.
“It’ll be better now,” Nora agreed. “The breathing tube was just for the surgery.”
“Are Taylor and Zac really okay?” Isaac managed.
Dan nodded. He sat down in the chair at the other side of the bed. “I just left them a few minutes ago,” he said. “They were asleep. They’re both fine.”
Isaac closed his eyes for a moment, drawing on his last few reserves of energy. “That’s good,” he yawned.
“You’ll only feel like this for a day or two,” Nora promised, hoping she was right. “It’ll be better after that.”
Isaac nodded. He looked startlingly young, Dan thought, scarcely older than Zac, and incredibly vulnerable. I’m going to kill Kathleen, Dan reflected, meaning it. I’m seriously going to kill her.
“What’s going to happen now?” Isaac asked.
Nora took one of his hands in hers, gently so she wouldn’t hurt him. “You’re probably going to be here for a couple of weeks,” she said. “Taylor and Zac are going to stay with us. . . at least until we find a place where all three of you can be together.” Nora wanted, with every atom of her being, to keep the boys forever, but she knew that was out of the question.
“What if that doesn’t happen?” Isaac asked.
“It will happen.” Dan’s voice was level, unquestionably certain. “It will.”
Isaac closed his eyes, falling back into an exhausted sleep. He believed Dan, because he was scared not to. Everything’ll be all right, he told himself. It’s going to be fine. . .