The Quiet Boy Page 3

  Here, instead, was perfect stillness. No activity at all. The only sound the anxious sizzle of a fluorescent light, just overhead.

  Shenk took a step and cocked his head. To the right there was a duty desk, abandoned as if for fire alarm or active shooter. A magazine was open on a countertop; a half-eaten apple lolled on a napkin.

  Dimly now Jay heard the squeak of a rubber wheel on linoleum, somewhere on the other side of the world. The hushed inhale-exhale of a respirator from behind one of the patient room doors.

  “Hello?” he called out, walking slowly down the hall. “Hello?”

  It was like the end of time. He was Rip Van Winkle, waking to find that the world he knew was gone.

  A couple of doors stood ajar, and he peeked through one but the room beyond was empty, the bed neatly made, the TV switched off, sunlight flickering over the scuffed floor.

  He continued slowly down the hallway, looking for signs of life, like an explorer on a distant planetary surface. Until, rounding a corner, he saw a thick cluster of people crowded into a doorway.

  Shenk walked a little faster. He scanned the room numbers as he got closer. Nine oh two. Nine oh four.

  Then he stopped.

  There was something to see in room 906, and everybody was trying to see it. Doctors and nurses and orderlies, a sea of white coats and pale green scrubs, everybody angling for a view into the room, like the crowd along a parade route, jockeying for position.

  Whatever was going on with the Keener boy, it seemed like every doctor on the floor—Jesus, maybe every doctor in this hospital—was trying to get a look.

  Shenk got closer, and as he did his bright anticipatory tingling (new work! a new case! a humdinger!) was shadowed by another feeling: a dark, uneasy stirring way deeper down. And maybe this was one of those moments where he should have just stopped. Should have just turned around.

  Instead, Shenk took up a position at the back of the crowd, turned sideways to try to slip through the crush of people and get to the door.

  “Excuse me,” he murmured, but no one gave ground; no one moved, no one turned.

  Shenk couldn’t rise enough onto his tiptoes to see over anyone, and neither could he shoulder through. While he craned his neck to try to see, the sounds of the world seemed to return one by one, each as if through a filter: the hush of a doctor’s sneaker shifting on the tile; the nervous murmur of a single nurse, speaking sotto voce to another: “What the fuck…”

  And then, there, at last, the boy.

  A young teenager, walking slowly in a circle around the room.

  The boy’s face held no expression. His mouth was slightly open and his eyes stared straight ahead. His arms hung at his sides.

  He walked slowly, one step after the other. Each step was stiff and automatic. His back was straight. He walked like something that was not human but had learned to replicate the way that humans walk.

  The doctors were all watching, from the distance of the doorway. Staying back. Giving him room.

  Shenk stared at the boy. Everybody was staring at the boy. Who was just walking, after all, only walking—but what was it in his face, in the stiff posture of his upper body, in the uncanny deliberateness of each step?

  When he reached the window, Wesley Keener turned and walked back toward the bed.

  “What’s going on?” Shenk asked quietly, generally. “What’s the deal?”

  “They don’t know.” Shenk looked at the woman, a young African American doctor with her hair hidden under a paper covering, wearing black leggings under her scrubs. “They’re trying to figure it out.”

  Shenk had seen doctors in every attitude. He had seen them cocky and argumentative in the witness box, defending their professional acumen from his lawyerly assaults. He had seen them kindly and sympathetic, when he had been in a hospital like this one, over all those months, pleading for reassurance or hope from the parade of oncologists and specialists who had tried and failed to keep Marilyn on this side of the good gate.

  But this doctor, now? There was nothing in this young woman’s eyes that he had seen before, this mixture of puzzlement and fear.

  Shenk looked back at Wesley Keener.

  His mouth, his eyes, his hanging arms. The boy’s slow progress had by now taken him all the way to the rear of the room, where he turned again and started back toward the door.

  One step after another, just walking. From the door to the window, from the window to the door.

  Hollow.

  The word came forcefully into Shenk’s mind and he felt that it was absolutely right.

  They hollowed him out.

  “Hey,” he whispered to the doctor. “Where are his parents?”

  Shenk had walked right past the mother on his way in, and she was still down there in the lobby. Beth Keener, in her stupid itchy work clothes, white blouse and black skirt and sensible shoes, laying pure hellfire on this bullshit pencil-pusher prick.

  “No,” she told him, for the hundredth time. The thousandth. “Fucking no. Try again.”

  Unbelievably, he did. This prick had one sad little thing he said, and he just said it over and over, like a parrot. “If you would leave me your name and the patient’s name and room number, I will look into the situation and make sure—”

  “Jesus Christ. Dude.” She threw up her hands. She shouted. “No.”

  The prick winced. He was thin, bland, blond. He had a neat buzz cut and a laminated badge that dangled limply from a lanyard around his boneless neck. The badge said that he was ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF PATIENT SERVICES, the same thing it said on the office door against which she had backed him up. The badge also said that his name was Brad, because of fucking course it was. After a half hour of banging her head against a wall, of people not telling her jack up there on the ninth floor, Beth had stormed down here and demanded an actual human being come and talk to her, but apparently no human beings were available because they had sent her this dumb lump of crap, who could only say that he understood her concerns and that he and his team were committed to the highest standards of patient care and blah fucking blah.

  Nope. No. No, thank you.

  “I was waiting an hour up there, and I’m not gonna sit and wait anymore. OK? I’m not gonna wait around for you to pretend to call someone so you can pretend to tell me that no one answered, or—”

  “Mrs. Keener?”

  “—or that someone is on the way to talk to me. No—”

  “Mrs. Keener—it’s Keener, right?—I assure you, that is not how we do things here. I will look into the situation, personally, and get you some answers as soon as possible.”

  “Sorry, Brad,” she sneered, “but as soon as possible isn’t fucking soon enough.”

  Brad blanched. “It would be best if you could keep your voice down.”

  Beth snarled. She was small, but she had been small her whole life and she knew how to make herself bigger. She rose to the tips of her toes, her feet straining inside of the cheap shoes.

  “Sorry, Brad,” she shouted in his face. “I can’t keep my voice down.”

  Her son, Wesley—her son—had come out of surgery an hour and a half ago and something was not right, something was fucked up, but none of these dipshits in their white coats, with their clipboards, seemed willing to take two seconds to tell her what it was. Just tell me, she kept saying. Whatever it is, fucking tell me. And instead all of them, even the main guy, whatever his fucking name was, the fat neurosurgeon with the big beard, kept saying they’d let her know as soon as they were able to.

  No. Unacceptable.

  There was nothing about this situation that Beth could control, but she could control this. She could control the pale-faced, mush-mouthed Brads of the universe.

  “Look. My son—my son is—”

  It all collided with her then, in the middle of the sentence, everything she had not allowed herself to actually experience thus far, what it all looked like and how it all felt. Wes on that stretcher, his unconscious body bundle
d and jostled and strapped; Wes hyper-illuminated by the surgical lights, surrounded by strangers, his body just a shape under a sheet. His scalp, his skin, the ugly hum of a drill as it burred into his skull.

  Goddamn it, no. No one is crying. No. Not here in the lobby. Not in the presence of Brad.

  “I know how it works, all right?” she said. “Different people are treated differently, and I am not going to let you fucking do that to me. You understand?”

  “Yes, no, I understand. All of this must be very upsetting.”

  “Yeah. Upsetting.” Beth was burning hot. She was shaking. “I’m not upset because he’s hurt. OK? I’m not upset because he had to have surgery. He fucking hit his head. The doctors said he needed an operation, OK, fine. I know what surgery is. I’ve had stitches. I had my appendix out. I’ve pushed two human beings out of my vagina, Brad.”

  He smiled nervously, glancing over her shoulder, down the hallway, in search of rescue.

  “I am upset because I want information and you fucking pricks won’t give it to me.” As Beth advanced, Brad backed up yet further, flattening himself against the doorway.

  “I wish there was more that I could do.” His eyes were round with pleading. Beth thought she might grab the lanyard and choke him to death.

  “Hi. Sorry.”

  Someone was coming up the little carpeted Patient Services hallway, hands raised, like a hostage negotiator showing he had no weapon. Beth whipped around, and the man smiled gently at her, turned an affable gaze on Brad.

  “I wonder, Mr.—”

  “Willoughby,” said Brad. Brad Willoughby, Beth thought. Jesus Fucking Christ.

  “Mr. Willoughby, I wonder if you’ve tried putting a call in to the HOA?”

  “What?”

  “Is there an admin who handles all surgical?”

  “Uh—yeah. Yes.”

  “OK, perfect. Perfect! So maybe the move here is, skip the attending, because he or she might be still trying to get all the ducks in a row, and just page the operations admin, see if you can get just a temporary here’s what’s happening. You know?”

  “Yes.” Brad was nodding. “Sure. That totally makes sense.”

  The new arrival turned toward Beth, gave her a wink. “The attending surgeons, you know, God bless them, sometimes they’re hesitant to tell you anything until they can tell you everything. But you don’t need every detail, right? You just want a status update.”

  Beth had unlocked her angry gaze from Brad and trained it on this guy. Did he work for the hospital or what? A silver suit. Tan shoes. Hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Am I right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Beth. She nodded. The pulse of adrenaline began to ease. She nodded again. “Yeah, exactly.”

  3.

  Shenk waved away any thanks. What had he done? Nothing. He hadn’t done anything.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t mention it.”

  “It’s just these people drive you crazy, you know? Crazy.”

  They were outside the hospital now, he and the mother, Beth Keener, he leaning back against the concrete exterior wall, she digging through the massive canvas pocketbook she had dropped between her feet. Shenk glimpsed a lipstick, a broken ballpoint pen, a scatter of tampons like bullets.

  “They act like it’s their job not to help you. To tell you nothing, for as long as possible.”

  “Oh, but that is their job,” said Shenk. “Not all of them, but some of them. Trust me. I’ve seen it before.”

  Brad Willoughby was in there now, making the call that Shenk had gently persuaded him to make, and Beth was going to check back in after fifteen minutes. They stood together here, just beyond the glass doors—the diesel stink of the parking lot, the muted midday sunlight, the garage-entrance gate arm going up and down, up and down, like a mini-golf hazard—and Shenk was in repose, waiting for his moment, which would come, as his moments always did.

  “Are you uh—” he said, to the top of her head, as she rummaged into the depths of the canvas tote. “Are you by chance trying to find a cigarette?”

  “Yeah, I, uh—I can’t—” She looked up and exhaled. “Oh, thank you, man. Fucking lifesaver.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  Jay Shenk did not smoke, and was actually pretty firmly anti-smoking on general principle, but was always prepared. He carried cigarettes like he carried twenty-dollar bills and breath mints and a notepad and pens, like he carried business cards by the boxful, and clean shirts in dry-cleaning bags in his trunk. He held out the single Camel Light, pinched between two fingers at the end of his arm, extended all the way out to create maximum distance between himself and the stranger, to avoid any whiff of wolfishness. He was no sex fiend, just a nice guy, that’s all, who had arrived in the nick of time and seemed to have everything she needed.

  Wesley Keener’s mother took the Camel, and Jay smiled.

  And look, of course he was an opportunist, or if you want to go that far, then OK, he was a predator. He had followed her and found her, he had waited for his moment to strike, and even now, as he crept into her confidence, his heart was fluttering like a schoolboy’s. Not because this was an attractive woman, but because it was an attractive situation—and because, yes, he believed that he was the very best at what he did, and what he had to offer was at least as valuable as what he was wanting to take—and why, after all, couldn’t both things be true? In the end, his interest in Wesley Keener’s mother would redound to her benefit as well as his. She would emerge from their association as much a winner as he, if not more.

  Winner/loser, giver/taker, hunter/prey. What good was it, really, to divide the world into those kinds of artificial binaries?

  Beth Keener was a short and tough-looking white woman with frank dark eyes. She had cheap plastic sunglasses, pushed back high on her forehead so the stems disappeared into the thickness of her hair. She was dressed for some kind of low-stakes office gig, in a plain black skirt and a white blouse, but she had a little cluster of tattoos high on her forearm, a pair of tumbling dice, it looked like, and some sort of little gnome or devil. This woman had something about her of the biker chick, the savvy hardheaded workingman’s wife—this was Shenk, now, analyzing, sorting people into categories for later use—but also something of the harried mom, packing lunches and putting out fires. Furiously dedicated to those she loved.

  She dragged on the cigarette, letting her eyes flutter closed for the pleasurable instant of inhale. Then, when the moment had passed and another had begun, Shenk broke the silence.

  “I’m Jay, by the way.” He stuck out his hand, awkwardly, for her to shake, and she said “Beth” and shook it. Her thin lips twisted to blow smoke out against the wall of the hospital.

  “So what—do you work here?” she asked him, and he said “Sort of” and was about to say more, to pivot into business, when she made a sudden, sharp tsking noise, scowling at the parking lot. “I don’t know where the hell my husband is. He ought to be here by now.” She jerked up her arm to look at a watch that wasn’t there. “Do you know what time it is?”

  He did, and he told her, and Beth said thanks and then “For God’s sake.”

  Richard was a carpenter, she said, a set builder currently working at a studio complex on Sunset, and he had to turn his phone off when they were shooting, so he didn’t even know for the first hour what had happened, and now he was stuck in traffic on the 110. This even though she had told him to stay off the fucking 110—she had texted him, stay off the freeway—but now here she was by herself trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

  “I just—”

  She stopped talking. Her lips went tight and white and Shenk could see the energy sparking behind her eyes, all the confusion and horror.

  The unholy silence of that hospital room. Her child, moving in silent circles, head locked in place, staring straight ahead. Lord God, thought Shenk, what this lady must be feeling.

  “Ten times I told him,” she said bitterly, f
licking ash against the wall. “Take Mulholland. Stay off the fucking freeway.”

  She was going to finish the cigarette soon. She would go back inside to hunt for Brad, to go back up to nine. Her son was inside; she wouldn’t stay out here for long.

  “So your boy,” said Shenk carefully. “He’s had an accident of some kind?”

  “Yeah,” said Beth. “Of some kind.”

  Walking. Door to window, window to door. Round and round. Eyes open.

  Hollow.

  And now, again, way down low—below the mild exterior Shenk had assumed for his approach, below the panting eagerness of his lawyer’s heart—he felt a slow tremor of unease. He looked at Beth Keener while she took a last long drag and flicked the cigarette away, and Shenk knew he was still within the time frame where he could just leave. Wish a stranger well and slip out of her life as he’d slipped in.

  But instead:

  “I’m really sorry,” he said. “What happened to him?”

  And she told him. She launched, as people in extremis sometimes launch, as they sometimes need to, and Shenk simply listened.

  He was kind, and his kindness was versatile. He could widen it like a searchlight beam, expanding empathy parabolically, or he could do what he did now, narrowed it to a candle’s breadth, made of himself a glowing steady kindness, to which this suffering woman could gather herself and find the warmth she needed.

  She told him about the accident that Wesley had at school, and what had happened at the hospital: the whirlwind of the ER, the confusing bustle of doctors and nurses, and then, suddenly, the surgery. They drilled into him. His head. His brain.

  While Beth talked, two ambulance drivers emerged from the rear of their rig and stood in the driveway, chatting in Spanish and laughing, their calm workaday chatter an agitating backdrop to Beth Keener’s pain, her bombed-out expression. One person’s baffling nightmare is another’s day at the office.