And I will never forget the way his eyes lost focus, the way his muscles seized. When you see seizures on television, they’re full of violent shaking, with people falling down and their bodies flopping around like a fish out of water, but that’s not what happened with Bo. Instead, he just went stiff as a board. His eyes closed, but I could see through his eyelids that they were still moving, violently shifting back and forth. His jaw went super tight, and his fingers became frozen claws. When Dad came outside, he couldn’t get Bo to walk; he had to pick him up by the shoulders and awkwardly shuffle him back inside while Mom called 911.
I kept backing away until I hit the dining room wall, and I stayed there, my back pressed against the beadboard the whole time. I watched as the EMTs arrived, as Bo came out of the seizure only to pass out. I stood there as Mom and Dad got into the car—Mom still in her pajamas and wearing a big overcoat—and followed the ambulance. I sank to the floor, my eyes still on the spot where Bo had been, and I fell asleep there, curled beside Mom’s china cabinet. When my parents came home the next morning, after checking Bo into St. Lucy’s, they didn’t even notice me. They walked right past the dining room, headed to their bed, exhausted from the night. Once I heard Mom snoring, I got up, walked up the stairs, and went to my room.
Bo was at St. Lucy’s for almost a week so that they could keep an eye on him and do an MRI and some other scans. Mom was there every day, but Dad stayed in his office, working. When the hospital was ready to release Bo, they sent him straight back to Berkshire Academy. Dad didn’t even have to drive up; the hospital sent Bo in an ambulance.
It’s been two weeks now, and he’ll be home in two days, and I don’t know how all of this is going to play out.
Mom cleans. Dad works. And I . . .
I just sit here.
? ? ?
At seven, there’s a knock on my door.
“Yeah?” I call.
The door budges a crack, then Mom pushes it open. She’s meek about it. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she says. She could have yelled for me from the base of the stairs like a normal mother, but she didn’t.
In the distance, a faint beeping rises up from the kitchen. “Oh!” Mom says. “The tenderloin! Go get your father and come on down, okay?” She dashes down the hall—passing the office where Dad is—and runs down the stairs toward the kitchen.
I push up from my bed, tossing aside the book I’d been reading.
The floorboards creak under my feet, and when I reach Dad’s office, I knock on the wooden door three times with the back of my knuckles. “Dad,” I say loudly from the hall. “Dinner.”
He grunts in response.
I start down the stairs, but something holds me back. I turn around and head back to Dad’s office, the door cracked open from when I knocked.
He’s standing by the window, but the curtains are closed. In his hands is a child-sized football, the kind Bo used to play with when he was in elementary school. Bo wanted to quit football in middle school, but Dad kept him in. But when Bo made the team at James Jefferson as a freshman reserve, he dropped out during the summer practice before school had even started. He made sure that Dad couldn’t reenroll him either, by flipping out on the coach and nearly getting himself suspended. I guess he actually got kicked off the team. But he did it on purpose.
Dad tosses the ball up, spinning it in the air before catching it again. The motion is repetitive and hypnotic. Maybe Dad didn’t really hear me when I told him about dinner. I raise my hand to knock on the door again—
And then a sliver of light from between the curtains passes over Dad’s face, illuminating the tear tracks on his cheeks.
I lower my hand, pressing my face against the small opening in the door to get a better look at Dad. I’ve never seen him cry before, and now he’s just standing there with big fat tears rolling down his face. His fingers fumble, and the ball drops to the floor, toppling end over end under his desk. Dad kneels down to pick it up, and I hear a sob escape him. I can’t see him anymore, not really, just his hands and feet and the tops of his legs as he crouches under the desk to pick up the ball, but that shaking sob guts me.
It’s the sound of defeat. No. That’s not right. Defeat implies that there was a fight, that you stood a chance of winning but just happened to fail. No. That sound was more hopeless than that. It’s the sound a man makes when he realizes that there’s no way to win because there’s no way to fight. Things just are, and nothing can change them.
I want to throw open this door and run to him, wrap my arms around him. I don’t want to tell him it’ll be okay, because neither one of us would believe it, but I just . . . I want to tell him I understand.
But I don’t move.
I need school as my place to pretend that everything’s okay. Maybe Dad needs his office. He’s just trying to survive this too.
From under the desk, I can see Dad’s grip on the little football tighten. I wonder what he’s thinking about. This whole situation—Bo being the way he is—it’s hard on Dad. Maybe harder on him than on Mom and me. Everything’s one way or the other with him: black or white, this or that, here or there.
But Bo? Bo is elsewhere.