It's. Nice. Outside.
Jim Kokoris
FOR MY SON ANDREW
YOU. ARE. WOW.
PROLOGUE
I arrived at the hospital early and found a space in the garage near the elevator. Ethan was up, alert, and fussing. I heard him crying, a tiny muffled sound. Mary had wrapped him in blankets, and he was now angrily kicking free of them. When I picked him up and put him in the stroller, I dropped his pacifier and, not for the first time that morning, grew angry with Mary for not coming along. I shouldn’t have to do this alone, I thought. But our babysitter had canceled, and Mary had to stay with the girls. She would wait at home for the results.
I walked slowly through the hospital, my shoes loud against the tile floor, trying not to look at the pictures on the wall: photographs of smiling children, laughing children, children running in fields, children flying kites. Normal children. In an hour I would walk back down this same hallway, knowing whether my nine-month-old son, my youngest child, was normal.
In the admitting room, I filled out forms, and then we were taken to an empty room where Ethan, who had fallen oddly quiet and wide-eyed, was medicated.
After the nurse left, I sat on the edge of the bed and watched my son fall asleep, forcing myself not to think.
*
The nurse was not particularly friendly. I thought, given the circumstances, she should be solicitous, nunlike, but she wasn’t. She was short, squat, and all business as she wheeled Ethan into the room where the MRI was to be taken. I went in with him and sat in a chair against the wall while the nurse and a skinny young male technician picked Ethan up and placed him on another bed. Then there was a loud noise, and the bed slid into the mouth of a cavernous machine where pictures were taken of my son’s brain. The whole process took less than ten minutes.
Afterward, the all-business nurse disappeared into an adjoining room marked RADIOLOGY. When she emerged a few minutes later, she was transformed, her face worried, her eyes avoiding mine.
“Why don’t we go back to the room and wait for the doctor,” she said. She touched me gently on the shoulder and led us away, back down the hall.
1
NINETEEN YEARS LATER
The garbage pickers came on Friday evenings in Wilton. At twilight they emerged from shadows, silently trolling the streets in rusting pickups, dented vans, and sagging station wagons, searching for remnants of other people’s lives.
The pickers, mostly stoic Mexican men, worked quickly and with purpose. They loaded the backs of their trucks and wagons up high, tying down the things they had chosen with ropes, chains. The chipped barstool, the old mattress, the stained rug—this was all precious cargo to them.
I stood in the driveway and watched a white truck without hubcaps slow then stop in front of our house. A man with a backward baseball cap and a bright orange T-shirt stepped out and sheepishly nodded at me as he circled the large tricycle I had placed by the curb. It was Ethan’s old bike.
I watched the man study it. He appeared confused, the knot of his brow tight.
“It’s for adults,” I called out. “You can take it. There’s something wrong with the handlebars, but you can probably fix them.”
He seemed hesitant, staring at the bike, his hands in his pockets.
“It’s not heavy. You want help?”
He finally glanced up at me, smiled, and then bent down, and in one quick move he lifted the bike into the back of his truck, positioning it next to a green filing cabinet. He nodded in my direction again, climbed back inside the truck, and drove off, his red taillights fading quickly in the growing dark.
*
I finished packing the van a few minutes later, wedging one last large box with a sleeping bag, the teddy bears, and the photo album into the back. Hoping to maximize every inch, I had started the process with a solid plan, arranging each box and bag like it was a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. But after an hour I abandoned this methodical approach and began randomly cramming things in. It was getting late, and we had to get going.