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 Benjamin.
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 injury the doctors said should have killed him. It
was the reason Shawn would never quite be Shawn again.
If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?—I’D NEVER BEEN TO the hospital in town, but it was easy to find.
Dwain had asked me what the hell I was doing when I flipped a U-
turn and accelerated down the hillside. I’d listened to Shawn’s shallow
breathing as I raced through the valley, along Fivemile Creek, then
shot up the Bear River Hill. At the hospital, I parked in the emergency
lane, and Dwain and I carried Shawn through the glass doors. I
shouted for help. A nurse appeared, running, then another. Shawn was
conscious by then. They took him away and someone shoved me into
the waiting room.
There was no avoiding what had to be done next. I called Dad.
“You nearly home?” he said.
“I’m at the hospital.”
There was silence, then he said, “We’re coming.”
Fifteen minutes later they were there, and the three of us waited
awkwardly together, me chewing my fingernails on a pastel-blue sofa,