“This is only a hallway,” Meg said. “Sorry to disappoint you.” She pushed the door open. “Follow it and you’ll come out right by a stairwell that will take you up to concessions.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The hallway was full of old food trays and other concession stuff. Boxes and boxes that had come in from shipping, printed with CUPS and CUTLERY. Things they threw back in here because people didn’t pass through very often, I guessed. Lots of those tall metal racks where you could put a bunch of trays and then wheel them along. Like the kind you see in school lunchrooms sometimes. Leo pushed one out of the way and the sound made me think of lunchroom sounds, of kids talking and trays scooting. And Ben yelling.
When I was in fourth grade and Ben was in second, my parents decided to send Ben to regular elementary school instead of his special school. It lasted for three weeks. He cried every night but couldn’t tell us what was wrong. The teachers said he was doing fine in class, which meant he wasn’t screaming or trying to run away.
Then I went into the lunchroom one day on an errand for my teacher and I saw him sitting at a table with the other second-graders. (Lunch was one of the parts of the day where they were supposed to integrate the special-needs kids with the other kids.) Ben was not eating. He sat there, nervous, with his eyes closed. He held his wire whisk in one hand and was shaking it back and forth like he did with stuff, like the screwdriver and the toothbrush and other things. I didn’t see the teachers. Maybe they were getting their lunches. But the other kids were throwing food at Ben. A fruit snack. A pea. Every time they hit him, he said, “Don’t!” in a high-pitched yell, but he didn’t open his eyes, he didn’t stop flicking that whisk back and forth. I could tell he was trying to shut out the world. I could tell he wanted to be someplace else.
I went over and told the kids to leave him alone.
Ben opened his eyes when he heard my voice and an M&M hit him in the eye.
He cried.
I held his hand all the way to the office and told them we needed to call my mom. She came over right away and picked him up. He never went back.
That was one of the days I didn’t understand Ben completely, but I also knew I understood enough. I felt like my heart was cracking. Those were always the hardest times, when I saw Ben get hurt. Until the accident. Then it felt like not only my heart hurt. It felt like even my blood did, like my broken heart was pushing pain through the rest of my body. Beat. Beat. Beat.
When I was small I used to pretend that I had to tell my body everything it had to do or it would stop. Lungs, breathe, I whispered. Heart, beat. Eyes, focus. Tummy, digest. Legs, walk. Arms, move. I was so glad then that everything did what it was supposed to do without any conscious help from me. But after the accident I wished that my heart wouldn’t keep hurting so much. Wouldn’t keep going like this without my telling it to. Beat. Beat. Beat.
“That was nice of Meg to let us come through here,” Leo said.
“It was.”
“And she basically admitted that the tunnels are real.”
“She did.”
As we came out of the hallway, I pretended that the whole world had secret tunnels, where people could walk straight to wherever they really wanted to be and ignore all the meanness in the middle.
I wiped my eyes on my sleeve before Leo could see.
21.
The vultures in our yard weren’t only roosting in the tree anymore. Now they went back into the part of the lot that hadn’t yet been cleared, the corner with an old shed and a rotting fence surrounding a square of dirt that used to be a garden but was now a jumble of soil and vegetation.
“That’s next summer’s project,” my mother said. “I’ve got my hands full for now with this deck.”
She did. She’d been sawing and sanding in every spare moment. Whenever it rained, she ran outside to rescue her tools. Hundreds of boards leaned against the outside wall, under the porch.
She had framed in the base of the deck but it didn’t look quite right. It seemed too short. Something was off.
But of course I didn’t mention that. “Looks great,” I said to her. She put down her sandpaper and smiled at me.
The back door swung open and Miles came out. “I got the mail.”
“We actually have mail?” Mom asked. “Real mail?” All we ever got at the summer house were advertisements or bills.
“Something got forwarded to us,” Miles said.
“Miracles never cease,” Mom said.
Miles handed her the letter and she glanced at the envelope and then her face changed. She looked stunned. Without saying anything, she tore into the envelope and walked inside.
“Okay,” Miles said.
“Who was it from?”
“The return address looked like it was from a hospital,” he said.
“Oh no,” I said.
My mom had spent months and months dealing with medical and ambulance bills and life insurance.
Mom opened the door and came back out. “It’s okay,” she said, when she saw our faces.
“Miles said it looked like it was from a hospital.”
“Sort of,” Mom said. “But not.”