He stuck up his middle finger. Waved it. Then got into the Passat.
Halfway there, he saw a kid by the side of the road. Awkward-looking, her short hair a wild mess, she lugged a canvas bag, straps looped around both shoulders in a makeshift backpack like a runaway. His first thought was of his own childhood. The world’s full of loveless urchins. But then he saw that the kid was Julia.
He pulled over. Leaned across and opened the door. Julia climbed in. He didn’t start driving right away. Just sat. He was reluctant to reach out to her. Maybe she’d heard all the bad things people were saying about him. And she looked so grown, all of a sudden. So adult. So they breathed, looking ahead.
“I feel very heavy. Lately, it hurts to walk. I’m afraid to go to the hospital. I’m afraid this moment is the last one where we’re still a family,” he said, though he knew he shouldn’t have. But sometimes you can’t hold things in. Because you’ve done that your whole life, and it builds up so much you think you might die.
“I don’t know if I told you this,” he said. “But when I met your mom I had nothing. For the life of me, I’ll never understand what she saw. She was so nice. The nicest person I ever met. I know it doesn’t always seem like it. I make mistakes. But you and Larry and your mom are the most important people, the most important everything to me.”
She eased to his side of the car and cried in his arms. He ran his hands down her short, wet hair, her pimple-picked neck and back. She was substantial in his arms. Grown. He’d been chipping by the time he’d been her age. Fighting a nascent addiction. When he’d looked at other kids back then, they’d seemed like a different species. He’d never imagined they had anything in common with him. He saw now that wasn’t true. All kids are fighting their own kind of war.
“You’ll hear some things about me. Maybe you have already,” he said.
“You didn’t rape my best friend. I know that,” she said.
“No. I didn’t.”
As he held her, cars passing, his head over hers, he cried, too. She couldn’t see his tears, but she was Julia, so surely she felt them.
NYU Winthrop Hospital
Sunday, August 1
Larry had suffered a concussion. This accounted for his lethargy. The Wildes were told they would have to wait for the swelling to go down to know whether the damage was permanent.
Gertie spoke with the police as soon as she’d arrived at the hospital. They returned a second time. In the waiting room, among strangers, she repeated the events of the previous day and left nothing out. They asked Arlo questions. He had a good alibi. After that, they asked if they could speak with the psychiatrist at Creedmoor who’d attended Gertie after the brick. She agreed to this.
When all that was done, they were told that they could see Larry, but no more than two people at a time. The Wilde family heard this. They were in so much trouble already that they didn’t care. The hospital was busy. No one noticed. They sneaked Julia in between them.
They gathered in his room. He’d been struck with something sharp and hard. It had cut a flap of his skin open along his forehead and upper brow. He had an intravenous tube to keep fluid moving through his system so his brain stem didn’t swell.
Gertie was glad to see that his eyes could focus. When he’d first woken, they’d goggled.
They didn’t say much. Just showed him all the green clothing that Julia had packed, and talked about how lucky he was to get an unlimited supply of lime Jell-O. Then they sat on the bed, careful not to disturb him. They breathed in and out in time. As if matching him, trying to be him, and carry his pain. This didn’t last. They were too different.
For a long time, Gertie had blamed herself for Larry. Worried that she’d eaten the wrong things while pregnant with him, or been too stressed out. She’d yelled too often and tweaked his nervous system in the wrong direction when he’d been little, or she’d not been affectionate enough and because of that he couldn’t connect with others. After the accusation, she’d even worried that Arlo had done something to him.
But now, Julia’s homemade Robot Boy in his arms, vigilant and cheerful despite his heavy eyelids, she saw that he was the perfect incarnation of all of them. A misfit, who never stops trying.
* * *
They talked quietly in the car on the ride home. Julia was in back, but these things couldn’t wait until she was someplace else.
Gertie told Arlo her story about the photos of brush bruises, about the bricks and the state of Rhea’s house. She told about leaving her shoes behind. That the evidence she’d worked so hard to get was now gone, though she hadn’t been sure it would have proven his innocence anyway.