But at night he thought of Hemming, alone in a hospital bed, how he’d be frightened and would cry and listen for the sound of his voice. When Hemming was twenty-one, he’d had to have a hernia removed, and he had wept until Willem held his hand. He knew he’d have to go back.
The flights were expensive, much more than he’d anticipated. He researched bus routes, but it would take three days to get there, three days to get back, and he had midterm exams he had to take and do well in if he was to keep his scholarship, and his jobs to attend to. Finally, drunk that Friday night, he confided in Malcolm, who got out his checkbook and wrote him a check.
“I can’t,” he said, immediately.
“Why not?” asked Malcolm. They argued back and forth until Willem finally accepted the check.
“I’ll pay you back, you know that, right?”
Malcolm shrugged. “There’s no way for me to say this without sounding like a complete asshole,” he said, “but it doesn’t make a difference to me, Willem.”
Still, it became important to him to repay Malcolm somehow, even though he knew Malcolm wouldn’t accept his money. It was Jude who had the idea of putting the money directly into Malcolm’s wallet, and so every two weeks after he’d cashed his check from the restaurant where he worked on the weekends, he’d stuff two or three twenties into it while Malcolm was asleep. He never quite knew if Malcolm noticed—he spent it so quickly, and often on the three of them—but Willem took some satisfaction and pride in doing it.
In the meantime, though, there was Hemming. He was glad he went home (his mother had only sighed when he told her he was coming), and glad to see Hemming, although alarmed by how thin he had become, how he groaned and cried as the nurses prodded the area around his sutures; he’d had to grab the sides of his chair to keep himself from shouting at them. At nights, he and his parents would have silent meals; he could almost feel them pulling away, as if they were unpeeling themselves from their lives as parents of two children and readying themselves to drift toward a new identity elsewhere.
On his third night, he took the keys to the truck to drive to the hospital. Back east, it was early spring, but here the dark air seemed to glitter with frost, and in the morning the grass was capped with a thin skin of crystals.
His father came onto the porch as he was walking down the steps. “He’ll be asleep,” he said.
“I just thought I’d go,” Willem told him.
His father looked at him. “Willem,” he said, “he won’t know whether you’re there or not.”
He felt his face go hot. “I know you don’t fucking care about him,” he snapped at him, “but I do.” It was the first time he’d ever sworn at his father, and he was unable to move for a moment, fearful and half excited that his father might react, that they might have an argument. But his father just took a sip from his coffee and then turned and went inside, the screen door smacking softly shut behind him.
For the rest of his visit they were all the same as they always were; they went in shifts to sit with Hemming, and when he wasn’t at the hospital, Willem helped his mother with the ledgers, or his father as he oversaw the reshodding of the horses. At nights he returned to the hospital and did schoolwork. He read aloud from The Decameron to Hemming, who stared at the ceiling and blinked, and struggled through his calculus, which he finally finished with the unhappy certainty that he had gotten all of it wrong. The three of them had gotten used to Jude doing their calculus for them, working through the problems as quickly as if he were running arpeggios. Their first year, Willem had genuinely wanted to understand it, and Jude had sat with him for a string of nights, explaining again and again, but he had never been able to comprehend it.
“I’m just too stupid to get this,” he’d said after what felt like an hours-long session, at the end of which he had wanted to go outside and run for miles, he was so prickly with impatience and frustration.
Jude had looked down. “You’re not stupid,” he said, quietly. “I’m just not explaining it well enough.” Jude took seminars in pure math that you had to be invited to enroll in; the rest of them couldn’t even begin to fathom what, exactly, he did in it.
In retrospect, he was surprised only by his own surprise when his mother called three months later to tell him that Hemming was on life support. This was in late May, and he was halfway through his final exams. “Don’t come back,” she’d told him, commanded him, almost. “Don’t, Willem.” He spoke with his parents in Swedish, and it wasn’t until many years later, when a Swedish director he was working with pointed out how affectless his voice became when he switched into the language, that he recognized that he had unconsciously learned to adopt a certain tone when he talked to his parents, one emotionless and blunt, that was meant to echo their own.