fine” or even “They expect we’ll lose him.” Anything but what she was
saying, which was, “They don’t know.”
Mother said I should come to the hospital. I imagined Shawn on a
white gurney, the life leaking out of him. I felt such a wave of loss that
my knees nearly buckled, but in the next moment I felt something else.
Relief.
There was a storm coming, set to lay three feet of snow over Sardine
Canyon, which guarded the entrance to our valley. Mother’s car, which
I had driven to Debbie’s, had bald tires. I told Mother I couldn’t get
through.
—THE STORY OF HOW Shawn fell would come to me in bits and pieces, thin
lines of narrative from Luke and Benjamin, who were there. It was a
frigid afternoon and the wind was fierce, whipping the fine dust up in
soft clouds. Shawn was standing on a wooden pallet, twenty feet in the
air. Twelve feet below him was a half-finished concrete wall, with rebar
jutting outward like blunt skewers. I don’t know for certain what
Shawn was doing on the pallet, but he was probably fitting posts or
welding, because that was the kind of work he did. Dad was driving the
forklift.
I’ve heard conflicting accounts of why Shawn fell.* Someone said
Dad moved the boom unexpectedly and Shawn pitched over the edge.
But the general consensus is that Shawn was standing near the brink,
and for no reason at all stepped backward and lost his footing. He
plunged twelve feet, his body revolving slowly in the air, so that when
he struck the concrete wall with its outcropping of rebar, he hit
headfirst, then tumbled the last eight feet to the dirt.
This is how the fall was described to me, but my mind sketches it
differently—on a white page with evenly spaced lines. He ascends, falls
at a slope, strikes the rebar and returns to the ground. I perceive a
triangle. The event makes sense when I think of it in these terms. Then
the logic of the page yields to my father.
Dad looked Shawn over. Shawn was disoriented. One of his pupils
was dilated and the other wasn’t, but no one knew what that meant. No
one knew it meant there was a bleed inside his brain.
Dad told Shawn to take a break. Luke and Benjamin helped him