“Are you tired?” Taylor demanded. Isaac had been home for half an hour, and even though he seemed happy, he wasn’t talking much.
Isaac yawned. “Kinda. But I‘m okay, though.”
“Ike, you just got back!” Taylor wailed. “You can’t be tired already.”
“I’m not,” Isaac lied, yawning again. “I’m sorry.”Ever since he’d gotten home, Taylor and Zac had been running around like crazy people, chattering nonstop.
“Look at this picture I did!”
“Look at what the cat can do!”
“When you weren’t here, we went to the grocery store, and Tay got lost. . .”
“I read this book all by myself! Want me to read it now?”
“Do you want to see me jump off the couch? I can jump really far.”
“‘I sat by the lake, I looked at the sky. . .’”
“Wanna see me do it again?”
“‘. . .And, as I looked, a fly went by. . .’”
“I can even do it again. Three times!”
As soon as they’d finished showing him their new tricks, Taylor and Zac had started in on “what we can do now that you are home.” This was obviously a topic they’d dwelt upon extensively. It kept them going for quite some time.
“We can make a snowfort, and have a snowball fight. . .”
“And you can go back to school. . .”
“And me and Dan, sometimes we go to the Y in the morning and go swimming. You can come.”
“Tell us that story about the little boys in the woods again tonight, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Now that you’re home, we can do the bestest things!”
Isaac bit his lip. He wasn’t even sure if he was allowed to do anything at all. “Restricted activity,” the doctor had said, and told him he had to stay in bed for another few weeks. Nora hadn’t made him go yet, but Isaac kind of wanted to. Last night he’d been so excited to be leaving that it had taken him a long time to fall asleep, and Taylor and Zac were wearing him out.
“You can’t be tired yet,” Taylor informed his older brother. “You’re not supposed to be.”
“Are you the judge of that?” Dan strode into the room, casting a sympathetic glance in Isaac’s direction and raising his eyebrows at Taylor. “You tell him whether or not he has a right to be tired?”
“Well,” Taylor said, “he isn’t supposed to be tired yet. I told him he couldn’t be. He’s not supposed to be.”
Dan shook his head. “And he is, anyway?”
“I’m not!” Isaac piped up, yawning again.
“Ike, how could you.” Dan shook his head in mock reproach. “You aren’t supposed to be tired yet.”
“Yeah, Ike,” Taylor agreed, indignant.
Isaac yawned again. He couldn’t help it. “Sorry.”
“Tay, run and see if Nora needs help,” Dan suggested.
“She doesn’t need help.” Taylor shook his head. “She’s at the kitchen table, drawing Big Bird for Zac.”
“Believe me, Tay, she needs help,” Dan affirmed. “Let me see how fast you can run.”
Taylor turned to Isaac. “If you go to sleep, I’ll wake you up!” he threatened, before he dashed out of the room.
Dan shook his head. “Are you ready to get into bed now?” he asked Isaac.
Smiling sheepishly, Isaac nodded. “Yeah. I don’t think I can stay awake.”
Dan grinned. “Tay’s not gonna be happy.”
“Yeah, I know,” Isaac agreed. “I do feel kinda bad.”
“It’s all right,” Dan assured him. “He’ll get over it.”
Isaac opened his eyes in the gray late afternoon daylight and lay still for awhile, looking around the room. He remembered Dan saying something about social services requiring that there be at least one bed per child before they’d approve the Conways as long-term foster parents. Nora’s sister giving them the bunkbeds her daughters didn’t like anymore, because they were old now and they fought all the time.
Nora had told Isaac that the first night they had the bunkbeds, she let Taylor sleep on the top. Five minutes after Taylor had gone to bed, Zac had come rushing downstairs, frantically screeching that his brother was “stucked forever!”
Taylor had somehow managed to wedge himself between the top bunk and the wall, and he was screaming bloody murder, terrified that he’d never get out. He had, though. Nora had pulled the bed away from the wall and caught Taylor before he fell.
It was the kind of dumb thing you could expect from his younger brother, Isaac thought, so dumb that even Taylor should have had a hard time finding something to do that was even dumber, especially in the course of one night. At the very least, Taylor should have realized that a person who gets himself trapped between a mattress, a bedframe and a wall probably shouldn’t sleep on the top bunk any more. He decided to try, though, “one more time,” and the dumb thing that Nora did was to let him.
Approximately five hours later, however, a colossal tremor shook the house, and Zac didn’t even have to dash into Dan and Nora’s bedroom. . . they’d come running.
Taylor had fallen out of bed again, the opposite side, this time. He was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.
“He’s dead now,” Zac explained, calmly. “He said so. I asked him.”
Nora ascertained that Taylor wasn’t dead, and that he hadn’t suffered any major injuries. He could move all of his appendages, and he seemed as coherent as any other six year old who’d been awakened upon impact with the floor, and he could remember the dream he’d been having before the fall and the shock that had been his initial reaction to it. As soon as he caught his breath, Taylor started wailing, Zac joining in, for lack of anything better to do.
“You told me I could sleep in the top!” Taylor sobbed, pointing an accusing finger in Nora’s direction. “You told me!”
Nora felt as badly as if she’d climbed up into the bed and pushed him out herself. “I’m sorry,” she’d apologized. “I’m sorry. . .”
“You did it. . .” Taylor wiped his eyes, sniffling. “You made me fall out. . . “
That night, Taylor and Zac both slept in Dan and Nora’s bed. Nora, worried that Taylor might have hit his head when he fell, wanted to be able to wake him up every now and then to make sure he wasn’t slipping into a coma. Zac didn’t want to sleep alone, and so he came, too. At four that morning, Dan fell out of bed when Taylor kicked him.
After that, Zac refused to go anywhere near the bunkbeds, and Taylor didn’t want to sleep by himself anymore, so they both slept in the other single bed.
Thinking about it now, Isaac smiled. Now, there were three beds, and his brothers were still going to sleep in one.
Signs of Taylor and Zac were everywhere. Plastic army men littered the carpet, lots of drawings were taped to the walls, and a small collection of rocks was accumulating on top of the dresser. And there were superhero sheets on the beds, now.
Isaac shut his eyes again, even though he wasn’t as tired as he had been. This was a lot better than the hospital, he thought. Way better.
Nora tiptoed down the hallway, a bottle of medicine in her hand. She pushed the doorway of the boys’ bedroom open, as quietly as she could. She wished she didn’t have to wake Isaac up for this.
The sun had set a few minutes before and the room was quickly darkening. Nora sat on the edge of the bed, gently rubbing Isaac’s back as he stirred awake, blinking.
“Hi,” she said, smiling apologetically.
Reflexively, he smiled back. “Hi.”
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m good.” Isaac yawned. “What time is it?”
“Five thirty,” Nora said. “I’m sorry, Ike, but I have to give you this.”
“What is it?” Isaac asked.
“The same stuff you were getting through the IV,” Nora said, “only. . .” she squinted at the bottle, “. . .cherry flavored.”
Isaac made a face.
“I know,” Nora agreed. “Doesn’t sound good to me, either. Just this much, though, okay?”
He nodded, sighing. It was every bit as bad as he’d expected.
“I just picked the prescription up,” Nora explained. “There are a couple of things you have to take. . . but most of it won’t be this bad, I don’t think.”
“I hope not,” Isaac managed.
“Do you want anything?” Nora asked him, brushing his hair back from his face. “If you feel good enough, you can come down and have dinner with everybody.”
Isaac swallowed. He didn’t know if he wanted anything. He didn’t know if he wanted to go downstairs and have dinner with everybody. Why was it so hard to make a simple decision? It wasn’t as if Nora were asking him anything consequential.
“I don’t know,” he managed.
“Why don’t I get you some ginger ale,” Nora offered, “and I’ll come back and see how you feel before we eat dinner?”
Isaac nodded. “Okay.” It sounded like a good plan to him. Because being home was kind of overwhelming.
He ended up falling asleep again. He hadn’t known that he would be this tired, but it had been hard to sleep in the hospital. Even when you were completely asleep, even when you were dreaming, you could still sense that the entire place was awake. There was an undercurrent of controlled chaos in the hospital, of hundreds of people being treated for some kind of problem, or being taken in to be treated, or sitting around worrying about someone who was being treated, people dying, being born, or fighting not to die, while hundreds of doctors and nurses and orderlies and technicians all performed whatever job they were supposed to do, no matter what time it was.
If you sat there and thought about the whole thing, it was mind boggling. You would find it very hard to sleep in the hospital ever again, Isaac thought. There was too much going on.
Before that, with Kathleen, nobody had ever really slept. You just closed your eyes and prayed for the morning, jumping every time a floorboard creaked. Unless the neighbors were fighting, which was kind of diverting.
When Isaac woke up again, it was dark, but Taylor and Zac weren’t in bed yet and he could hear voices downstairs. He stretched, wondering whether he should get up. He decided he would.
He was only wearing a t-shirt with his pajama bottoms, bandages still wound around his stomach, up to his chest. It was kind of cold upstairs, his skin prickling into goosebumps as he crept down the hall. He remembered the first time he’d ever been here, and realized he felt as uncertain now as he felt then. At the top of the steps, Isaac stopped and sat down.
There were only two choices. He would go down, or he wouldn’t go down. If he stayed here, nothing would happen. People would come up, eventually, when Taylor and Zac had to go to bed. And if he went down. . .
Isaac slid down another few steps. He should just stand up and go down there. Nothing would happen.
He wondered about what it had been like, though, with Taylor and Zac to be with Dan and Nora while he wasn’t there. Maybe they had their own private circle thing going on. Without Isaac.
He imagined walking down there and finding all of them sitting at the table, gathered together like a family on a board game commercial, or doing something else that was remniscent of people on TV, or in books. The room would be buzzing with conversation, which would stop when they saw him standing in the doorway. Maybe they’d all look up at him guiltily, unsure of whay to say next.
Isaac knew they didn’t want him. He was glad they’d wanted Taylor and Zac, but he didn’t know what he was going to do now. He didn’t know where he could go.
For a moment Isaac struggled to regain his composture. He told himself that he’d known from the beginning that he shouldn’t become attached to anything. He shouldn’t have cared about anything. Not about his brothers, and not about Dan and Nora. Because eventually no one wanted you around, anyway.
He was about to go back up the stairs when Dan wandered through the foyer and happened to look up. He peered through the bannister, eye level with Isaac.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” Isaac whispered back, unsurely.
“Have you been there a long time?” There was concern in Dan’s eyes, but his smile was warm, amused.
Isaac shook his head. “Not really.”
“You want to come down?”
Isaac thought about this for a moment. “Okay,” he answered, rising to his feet.
As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could see Taylor doing his homework at the dining room table, one pencil clenched in his hand and the other between his teeth. Zac, who was sitting on the couch with Nora, paging through a bright picture book, looked up suddenly, breaking into a tremendous smile.
“Ike!” he yelled. “Come and sit with me!”
Returning the smile, Isaac did.