Now his voice, that had always been big as a man’s, was barely audible, not a cry so much as a whimper, and there was none of the old ferocity in him. Eleanor remembered a bird that had crashed into the plate-glass window of the kitchen one time. The bird had dropped to the ground and, for a minute there, showed no signs of life. Then it had begun flapping its wings, making odd chirping noises, finally dragging itself to a standing position. After flopping around for a bit, it flapped its wings again, and took off in strangely tentative flight before lifting off and disappearing beyond the tree line.
It would be like that with Toby. It made sense that for a few minutes he would lie there in Eleanor’s arms with his family on all sides stroking his face, his hair. First he would have that look on his face, like a character in a comic strip who gets bopped over the head and stars explode around him. Any moment now he would shake his beautiful mop of hair—wet from pond water—and burst out with that big, deep laugh. He’d look around, shake himself again, and take off like the bird.
Only he didn’t. He sat there staring at them all, still looking dazed, as if he was thinking,Who are these people?
“You okay, buddy?” Cam said. “You sure gave us a scare.”
Now Eleanor could put her arms around Ursula, who could not stop shaking. “If it wasn’t for you, Ursie, we might not have got to him in time.”
What she didn’t say, because she hadn’t worked through to this part yet, was that if Cam had been doing what she asked of him—if he had been watching their children as he had promised—Toby would never have been in the water in the first place. If he had been doing what he was supposed to, instead of falling asleep, he would have kept their son safe.
One of the EMTs was performing some tests now—shining a flashlight into Toby’s eyes, telling him to follow the light. He was taking Toby’s blood pressure, listening to his heartbeat.
“You learn the alphabet yet, pal?” the EMT said to Toby. This was Toby, who could recite the alphabet before his second birthday, and had recently been working with his older sister on counting to twenty in Mandarin. Also the times tables and the capital of every state and the name of every dinosaur, even the ones nobody else ever heard of, and the first thirteen measures of the Wieniawski Polonaise, not to mention every mineral in hisEncyclopedia of Rocks and Mineralsbook. He looked blankly at the man. “K,” he said. “K. L. Z.” His head flopped onto his chest.
“He’s still a little groggy,” Eleanor said. “It’s understandable, given what just happened.” She could hear, in her own voice, a certain note of terror just below the surface. Who was she trying to convince? Herself, probably.
“I’m not sure I could recite the alphabet myself at the moment,” Cam told the EMT.
“Just take it easy, Tobes,” he told their son.
Alison stood a little ways off, hands in her pockets, as if she already knew. Not Ursula. Kneeling beside her brother, she brushed his hair out of his face, arranged his curls.
“A, B, C, D,” she sang. “How ’bout we sing it together?” She musthave thought this was like school, where if you didn’t get the answer right, you could get in trouble.
“X,” Toby said. He sounded like an astronaut, coming to them from somewhere out in space. “W.” His eyes looked glazed, unfocused. His skin was so cold.
“Listen,” the EMT said to Eleanor. “I’m sure your son’s going to be fine, but we need to bring him in to the ER for a little testing. Just to be on the safe side. They’ll probably hook him up to an EEG. We need to be sure his brain is functioning like we want.”
They were buckling Toby onto the stretcher. It was unlike him to offer no resistance. One thing about Toby, he was not a boy to pin down.
A terrible sick feeling had started to come over Eleanor. “No, no, no,” she told the EMTs. “I want to keep him here.” So long as they were on their farm, he’d be all right.
“Can’t we do this another day?” she said.
“We have to do this, El,” Cam told her. He led Eleanor toward the station wagon.
Jackie Kennedy in Dallas. The pink suit, with the blood.
Eleanor wanted to get in the ambulance with Toby, but the EMTs needed to be there with him. “You follow behind,” one of them told her. There wasn’t room for more people.
Cam drove. Nobody said anything. There had been a cassette in the tape player when Cam turned the ignition on. The soundtrack fromThe Music Man,right at the spot where they’d left off, when she’d last pulled into the driveway, with the three of them all singing “Seventy-Six Trombones” in the back. Toby loudest of all.
“Turn off the music,” Eleanor said.
40.
That Moment Has Passed
The tests, when they got the results back, left them no room for fantasy. Mild to medium brain damage resulting from oxygen deprivation. The doctor started talking about lobes and hemispheres, but they couldn’t take in the rest.
“This is just temporary, right?” Eleanor said. “How long before he’s back to normal?”
The doctor just looked at her for a moment and took a long, slow breath. “There are people who can help your son retrain himself so other hemispheres take over some of the function of the damaged portions of his brain,” he told them. “But injured brain cells do not regenerate.”
She could see his lips moving, but the words made no sense. She must have heard this wrong.
“Your son can still live a good life,” the doctor told them. “Different from how he was before. But he can still take pleasure in his family. His motor function will not be greatly compromised. Primarily, his injuries have to do with language and cognition.”
