Educated

My cellphone was in my pocket. I dialed. Dad answered.
I must have been frantic, sputtering. I said Shawn had crashed his bike,
that he had a hole in his head.
“Slow down. What happened?”
I said it all a second time. “What should I do?”
“Bring him home,” Dad said. “Your mother will deal with it.”
I opened my mouth but no words came out. Finally, I said, “I’m not joking.
His brain, I can see it!”
“Bring him home,” Dad said. “Your mother can handle it.” Then: the dull
drone of a dial tone. He’d hung up.
Dwain had overheard. “I live just through this field,” he said. “Your
mother can treat him there.”
“No,” I said. “Dad wants him home. Help me get him in the car.”
Shawn groaned when we lifted him but he didn’t speak again. Someone
said we should wait for the ambulance. Someone else said we should drive
him to the hospital ourselves. I don’t think anyone believed we would take
him home, not with his brain dribbling out of his forehead.
We folded Shawn into the backseat. I got behind the wheel, and Dwain
climbed in on the passenger side. I checked my rearview mirror to pull onto
the highway, then reached up and shoved the mirror downward so it reflected
Shawn’s face, blank and bloodied. My foot hovered over the gas.
Three seconds passed, maybe four. That’s all it was.
Dwain was shouting, “Let’s go!” but I barely heard him. I was lost to
panic. My thoughts wandered wildly, feverishly, through a fog of resentment.
The state was dreamlike, as if the hysteria had freed me from a fiction that,
five minutes before, I had needed to believe.
I had never thought about the day Shawn had fallen from the pallet. There
was nothing to think about. He had fallen because God wanted him to fall;
there was no deeper meaning in it than that. I had never imagined what it
would have been like to be there. To see Shawn plunge, grasping at air. To
watch him collide, then fold, then lie still. I had never allowed myself to
imagine what happened after—Dad’s decision to leave him by the pickup, or
the worried looks that must have passed between Luke and Ben.
Now, staring at the creases in my brother’s face, each a little river of blood,
I remembered. I remembered that Shawn had sat by the pickup for a quarter
of an hour, his brain bleeding. Then he’d had that fit and the boys had
wrestled him to the ground, so that he’d fallen, sustained a second injury, the