He lived on the sofa in the front room for two months. He was
physically weak—it was all he had in him to make it to the bathroom
and back. He’d lost his hearing completely in one ear and had trouble
hearing with the other, so he often turned his head when people spoke
to him, orienting his better ear toward them, rather than his eyes.
Except for this strange movement and the bandages from the surgery,
he looked normal, no swelling, no bruises. According to the doctors,
this was because the damage was very serious: a lack of external
injuries meant the damage was all internal.
It took some time for me to realize that although Shawn looked the
same, he wasn’t. He seemed lucid, but if you listened carefully his
stories didn’t make sense. They weren’t really stories at all, just one
tangent after another.
I felt guilty that I hadn’t visited him immediately in the hospital, so
to make it up to him I quit my job and tended him day and night.
When he wanted water, I fetched it; if he was hungry, I cooked.
Sadie started coming around, and Shawn welcomed her. I looked
forward to her visits because they gave me time to study. Mother
thought it was important that I stay with Shawn, so no one interrupted
me. For the first time in my life I had long stretches in which to learn—
without having to scrap, or strain tinctures, or check inventory for
Randy. I examined Tyler’s notes, read and reread his careful
explanations. After a few weeks of this, by magic or miracle, the
concepts took hold. I retook the practice test. The advanced algebra
was still indecipherable—it came from a world beyond my ability to
perceive—but the trigonometry had become intelligible, messages
written in a language I could understand, from a world of logic and
order that only existed in black ink and on white paper.
The real world, meanwhile, plunged into chaos. The doctors told
Mother that Shawn’s injury might have altered his personality—that in
the hospital, he had shown tendencies toward volatility, even violence,
and that such changes might be permanent.
He did succumb to rages, moments of blind anger when all he
wanted was to hurt someone. He had an intuition for nastiness, for
saying the single most devastating thing, that left Mother in tears more
nights than not. These rages changed, and worsened, as his physical
strength improved, and I found myself cleaning the toilet every
morning, knowing my head might be inside it before lunch. Mother