Sparrows Falling From The Sky 2

I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL.

A few days. Four days. Maybe five. Six. Hell, I don’t know. It felt like forever.

They ran tests. That’s what they do in hospitals. They were checking to make sure I had no other internal injuries. Especially brain injuries. I had a neurologist come in and see me. I didn’t like him. He had dark hair and really deep green eyes that didn’t like looking at people. He didn’t seem to care. Either that or he cared too much. But the thing was, he wasn’t very good with people. He didn’t talk to me very much. He took a lot of notes.

I learned that nurses liked to make small talk and were in love with taking your vitals. That’s what they did. They gave you a pill to help you sleep, then they woke you up all night. Shit. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep and wake to see that my casts were gone. That’s what I told one of the nurses. “Can’t you just put me to sleep and wake me up when they take my casts off?”

“Silly boy,” the nurse said.

Yeah. Silly boy.

I remember this one thing: My room was full of flowers. Flowers from all my mom’s church-lady friends. Flowers from Dante’s mother and father. Flowers from my sisters. Flowers from the neighbors. Flowers from my mother’s garden. Flowers. Shit. I never had an opinion about flowers until then. I decided I didn’t like them.

I sort of liked my surgeon. He was all about sports injuries. He was kind of young and I could tell he was a jock, you know this big gringo with big hands and long fingers and I wondered about that. He had the hands of a pianist. I remember thinking that. But I didn’t know shit about pianists’ hands or surgeons’ hands and I remember dreaming them. His hands. In my dream, he healed Dante’s bird and set it free into the summer sky. It was a nice dream. I didn’t have those very often.

Dr. Charles. That was his name. He knew what he was doing. A good guy. Yeah, that’s what I thought. He answered all my questions. And I had lots of them.

“Do I have pins in my legs?”

“Yes.”

“Permanently?”

“Yes.”

“And you won’t have to go in again?”

“Hope not.”

“Big talker, huh, Doc?”

He laughed. “You’re a tough guy, huh?”

“I don’t think I’m so tough.”

“Well, I think you are tough. I think you’re tough as hell.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been around.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really, Aristotle. Can I tell you something?”

“Call me Ari.”

“Ari.” He smiled. “I’m surprised at how well you held up during the operation. And I’m surprised how well you’re doing right now. It’s amazing really.”

“It’s luck and genes,” I said. “The genes I got from my mom and dad. And my luck, well, I don’t where that came from. God, maybe.”

“You a religious guy?”

“Not really. That would be my mom.”

“Yeah, well, moms and God generally get along pretty well.”

“Guess so,” I said. “When am I going to stop feeling like crap?”

“In no time.”

“No time? Am I going to be hurting and itching for eight weeks?”

“It’ll get better.”

“Sure. And how come, if my legs were broken below the knee, my casts are above the knee?”

“I just want to keep you still for two or three weeks. I don’t want you to be bending. Might hurt yourself again. Tough guys, they push themselves. After a few weeks, I’ll change your casts. Then you’ll be able to bend your legs.”

“Shit.”

“Shit?”

“A few weeks?”

“We’ll give it three weeks.”

“Three weeks without bending my legs?”

“It’s not such a long time.”

“It’s summer.”

“And then I’ll get you to a physical therapist.”

I took a breath. “Shit. And this?” I said, aiming my arm cast at him. I was getting really depressed.

“That fracture wasn’t so bad. It’ll be off in a month.”

“A month? Shit.”

“You like that word, don’t you?”

“I’d prefer to use other words.”

He smiled. “Shit will do just fine.”

I wanted to cry. I did. Mostly I was mad and frustrated and I knew he was going to tell me that I needed to be patient. And that’s exactly what he said.

“You just need to be patient. You’ll be good as new. You’re young. You’re strong. You have great, healthy bones. I have every reason to believe that you’re going to heal very nicely.”

Very nicely. Patient. Shit.

He checked the feeling in my toes, had me breathe, had me follow his fingers with my left eye, then my right eye. “You know,” he said, “that’s a helluva thing you did for your friend, Dante.”

“Look, I wish people would stop talking about that.”

He looked at me. He had this look on his face. “You could have wound up a paraplegic. Or worse.”

“Worse?”

“Young man, you could have been killed.”

Killed. Okay. “People keep saying that. Look, Doc, I’m alive.”

“You don’t much like being a hero, do you?”

“I told Dante I didn’t do it on purpose. Everyone thought that was funny. It wasn’t a joke. I don’t even remember diving toward him. It wasn’t as if I said to myself, I’m going to save my friend, Dante. It wasn’t like that. It was just a reflex, you know, like when someone hits your funny bone below the knee. Your leg just jerks. That’s how it was. It just happened.”

“Just a reflex? It just happened?”

“Exactly.”

“And you’re responsible for none of it?”

“It was just one of those things.”

“Just one of those things?”

“Yeah.”

“I have a different theory.”

“Of course you do—you’re an adult.”

He laughed. “What do you have against adults?”

“They too have many ideas about who we are. Or who we should be.”

“That’s our job.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Nice,” he said. “Listen, son, I know you don’t think of yourself as being brave or courageous or any of those things. Of course you don’t.”

“I’m just a regular guy.”

“Yeah, that’s how you see yourself. But, you pushed your friend out of the way of an oncoming car. You did that, Ari, and you didn’t think about yourself or what would happen to you. You did that because that’s who you are. I’d think about that if I were you.”

“What for?”

“Just think about it.”

“I’m not sure I want to do all that thinking.”

“Okay. Just so you know, Ari, I think you’re a very rare young man. That’s what I think.”

“I told you, Doc, it was just a reflex.”

He grinned at me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I know your kind, Ari. I’m on to you.” I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. But he was smiling.

Right after that conversation with Dr. Charles, Dante’s mom and dad came to visit. Mr. Quintana came right up to me and kissed me on the cheek. Just like it was this normal thing to do. I guess for him it was normal. And really, I thought that the gesture was kind of nice, you know, sweet, but it made me a little bit uncomfortable. It was something I wasn’t used to. And he kept thanking me over and over and over. I wanted to tell him to knock it off. But, I just let him go on and on because I knew how much he loved his Dante and he was so happy and I was happy that he was happy. So it was okay.

I wanted to change the subject. I mean, I didn’t have a lot to talk about. I felt like crap. But they were there to see me and I could talk and, you know, I could process things even though my mind was still a little foggy. So I said, “So you’ll be in Chicago for a year?”

“Yes,” he said. “Dante hasn’t forgiven me yet.”

I sort of just looked at him.

“He’s still mad. He says he wasn’t consulted.”

That made me smile.

“He doesn’t want to miss swimming for a year. He told me he could live with you for a year.”

That surprised me. Dante kept more secrets than I thought. I closed my eyes.

“Are you okay, Ari?”

“The itching makes me crazy sometimes. So I just close my eyes.”

He had this really kind look on his face.

I didn’t tell him that my new thing was trying to imagine what my brother looked like every time I couldn’t stand the sensation in my legs. “Anyway, it’s good to talk,” I said. “It keeps my mind off things.” I opened my eyes. “So Dante’s mad at you.”

“Well, I told him there was no way I was going to leave him behind for a year.”

I pictured Dante giving his father a look. “Dante’s stubborn.”

I heard Mrs. Quintana’s voice. “He takes after me.”

That made me smile. I knew it was true.

“You know what I think?” she said. “I think Dante’s going to miss you. I think that’s the real reason he doesn’t want to leave.”

“I’ll miss him too,” I said. I was sorry I’d said that. It was true, okay, but I didn’t have to say it.

His father looked at me. “Dante doesn’t have a lot of friends.”

“I always thought everybody liked him.”

“That’s true. Everybody likes Dante. But he’s always been something of a loner. He doesn’t seem to go along with the crowd. He’s always been like that.” He smiled at me. “Like you.”

“Maybe so,” I said.

“You’re the best friend he’s ever had. I think you should know that.”

I didn’t want to know that. I didn’t know why I didn’t want to know that. I smiled at him. He was a good man. And he was talking to me. To me. To Ari. And even though I didn’t particularly want to have this conversation, I knew I just had to go with it. There weren’t that many good people in the world.

“You know, I’m kind of a boring guy when you think about it. Don’t know what Dante sees.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that to them.

Mrs. Quintana had been standing further away. But she came up and stood right next to her husband. “Why do you think that, Ari?”

“What?”

“Why do you think you’re boring?”

God, I thought, the therapist has shown up. I just shrugged. I closed my eyes. Okay, I knew when I opened my eyes, they would still be there. Dante and I were cursed with parents who cared. Why couldn’t they just leave us alone? What ever happened to parents who were too busy or too selfish or just didn’t give a shit about what their sons did?

I decided to open my eyes again.

I knew Mr. Quintana was going to say something else. I could just feel it. But maybe he sensed something about me. I don’t know. He didn’t say anything else.

We started talking about Chicago. I was glad we weren’t talking about me or Dante or what happened. Mr. Quintana said the university had found them a small place. Mrs. Quintana was taking an eight-month leave from her practice. So really they wouldn’t be gone a whole year. Just a school year. Not such a long time.

I don’t remember everything that the Quintanas talked about. They were trying so hard, and a part of me was happy they were there but another part of me just didn’t give a damn. And, of course, the conversation changed back to me and Dante. Mrs. Quintana said she was going to take Dante to a counselor. “He feels so bad,” she said. She said maybe it would be a good idea if I went to see a counselor too. Yeah, the therapist thing to say. “I’m worried about the both of you,” she said.

“You should have coffee with my mother,” I said. “You can worry together.”

Mr. Quintana thought that was funny, but really I didn’t say it to be funny.

Mrs. Quintana grinned at me. “Aristotle Mendoza, you’re not the least bit boring.”

After a while, I was just really tired and stopped concentrating.

I don’t know why I couldn’t stand the gratitude in Mr. Quintana’s eyes when he said good-bye. But it was Mrs. Quintana who really got to me. Unlike her husband, she wasn’t the kind of woman who let people see what she really felt. Not that she wasn’t nice and decent and all of that. Of course she was. It was just that when Dante said that his mother was inscrutable, I knew exactly what he was saying.

Before she left, Mrs. Quintana took my face between her two hands, looked right into my eyes, and whispered, “Aristotle Mendoza, I will love you forever.” Her voice was soft and sure and fierce and there weren’t any tears in her eyes. Her words were serene and sober and she looked right at me because she wanted me to know that she meant every word of what she’d said to me.

This is what I understood: a woman like Mrs. Quintana didn’t use the word “love” very often. When she said that word, she meant it. And one more thing I understood: Dante’s mother loved him more than he would ever know. I didn’t know what to do with that piece of information. So I just kept it inside. That’s what I did with everything. Kept it inside.

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