Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (12 page)

When he finally left, I stared at his sketch pad. He’d never let anybody look at his sketches. And now he was showing them to me. To me. Ari.

I knew he was only letting me see his work because he was grateful.

I hated all that gratitude.

Dante felt he owed me something. I didn’t want that. Not that.

I took his sketch pad in my hands and flung it across the room.

IT WAS JUST MY LUCK THAT MY MOTHER WAS WALKING
into the room as Dante’s sketch pad hit the wall.

“You want to tell me what that was about?”

I shook my head.

My mother picked up the sketch pad. She sat down. She was going to open it.

“Don’t do that,” I said

“What?”

“Don’t look at it.”

“Why?”

“Dante doesn’t like people to look at his sketches.”

“Only you?”

“I guess so.”

“Then why’d you throw it across the room?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know you don’t want to talk about this, Ari, but I think—”

“I don’t want to know what you think, Mom. I just don’t want to talk.”

“It’s not good for you to keep everything inside. I know this is
hard. And the next two or three months or so are going to be very difficult. Keeping everything bottled up inside you isn’t going to help you heal.”

“Well, maybe you’ll have to take me to see some counselor and have me talk about my difficulties.”

“I know sarcasm when I hear it. And I don’t think a counselor would be such a bad idea.”

“You and Mrs. Quintana making backroom deals?”

“You’re a wise guy.”

I closed my eyes and opened them. “I’ll make a deal with you, Mom.” I could almost taste the anger on my tongue. I swear. “You talk about my brother and I’ll talk about what I feel.”

I saw the look on her face. She looked surprised and hurt. And angry.

“Your brother has nothing to do with any of this.”

“You think you and Dad are the only ones who can keep things on the inside? Dad keeps a whole war inside of him. I can keep things on the inside too.”

“One thing has nothing to do with the other.”

“That’s not how I see it. You go to a counselor. Dad goes to a counselor. And maybe after that, I’ll go to a counselor.”

“I’m going to have a cup of coffee,” she said.

“Take your time.” I closed my eyes. I guess that was going to be my new thing. I couldn’t exactly storm away in anger. I’d just have to close my eyes and shut out the universe.

MY DAD VISITED ME EVERY EVENING.

I wanted him to go away.

He tried to talk to me but it wasn’t working. He pretty much just sat there. That made me crazy. I got this idea into my head. “Dante left two books,” I said. “Which one do you want to read? I’ll read the other.”

He chose
War and Peace
.

The Grapes of Wrath
was fine with me.

It wasn’t so bad, me and my father sitting in a hospital room. Reading.

My legs itched like crazy.

Sometimes, I would just breathe.

Reading helped.

Sometimes I knew my father was studying me.

He asked me if I was still having dreams.

“Yes,” I said. “Now I’m looking for my legs.”

“You’ll find them,” he said.

My mom never brought up the conversation we’d had about my brother. She just pretended it hadn’t happened. I’m not sure how I
felt about that. The good thing was, she wasn’t pushing me to talk. But, you know, she just hung out, trying to make sure I was comfortable.
I wasn’t comfortable.
Who in the hell could be comfortable with two leg casts? I needed help doing everything. And I was tired of bedpans. And I was tired of taking rides in a wheelchair. My best friend, the wheelchair. And my best friend, my mom. She was making me crazy. “Mom, you’re hovering. You’re going to make me say the ‘f’ word. You really are.”

“Don’t you dare say that word in front of me.”

“I swear I’m going to, Mom, if you don’t stop.”

“What is this wise guy role you’ve been playing?”

“It’s not a role, Mom. I’m not in a play.” I was desperate. “Mom, my legs hurt and when they don’t hurt, they itch. They’ve taken the morphine away—”

“Which is a good thing,” my mother interrupted.

“Yeah, okay, Mom. We can’t have a little addict running around, now can we?” As if I could run around. “Shit. Mom, I just want to be alone. Is that okay with you? That I just want to be alone?”

“Okay,” she said.

She gave me more space after that.

Dante never came back to visit. He’d call twice a day just to say hi. He’d gotten sick. The flu. I felt bad for him. He sounded terrible. He said he had dreams. I told him I had dreams too. One day he called and said, “I want to say something to you, Ari.”

“Okay,” I said.

And then he didn’t say anything.

“What?” I said.

“Never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

I thought it probably mattered a lot. “Okay,” I said.

“I wish we could swim again.”

“Me too,” I said.

I was glad he called. But I was also glad he couldn’t come to see me. I don’t know why. For some reason I thought:
My life will be different now.
And I kept repeating that to myself. I wondered what it would have been like to lose my legs. And in a sense, I had lost them. Not forever. But for a while.

I tried using crutches. It just wasn’t going to happen. Not that the nurses and my mom didn’t warn me. I guess I just had to see for myself. It was just impossible with both my legs completely straight and my left arm in a cast.

It was hard to do everything. The worst thing for me was that I had to use a bedpan. I guess you could say that I found it humiliating. That was the word. I couldn’t even really take a shower—and I didn’t really have the use of both hands. But the good thing was that I could use all my fingers. That was something I guess.

I got to practice using a wheelchair with my legs out. I named the wheelchair Fidel.

Dr. Charles came to visit me one last time.

“Have you thought about what I told you?”

“Yup,” I said.

“And?”

“And I think you made a really good decision by becoming a surgeon. You would have made a lousy therapist.”

“So you’ve always been a wiseass, huh?”

“Always.”

“Well, you can go home and be a wiseass there. How does that sound?”

I wanted to hug him. I was happy. I was happy for about ten seconds. And then I started to feel really anxious.

I gave my mom a lecture. “When we get home, you’re not allowed to hover.”

“What is this about making all these rules, Ari?”

“No hovering. That’s all.”

“You’ll need help,” she said.

“But I’ll need to be left alone too.”

She smiled at me. “Big Brother is watching you.”

I smiled back at her.

Even when I wanted to hate my mother, I loved her. I wondered if it was normal for fifteen-year-old boys to love their mothers. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t.

I remember getting into the car. I had to stretch out in the backseat. It was a pain in the ass to get me in. It was a good thing my father was strong. Everything was so damned hard and my parents were so afraid of hurting me.

No one said anything in the car.

As I stared out, I looked for birds.

I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.

THE MORNING AFTER I CAME HOME, MY MOM WASHED
my hair. “You have such beautiful hair,” she said.

“I think I’ll grow it long,” I said. Like I had a choice. A trip to a barber shop would have been a nightmare.

She gave me a sponge bath.

I closed my eyes and sat still for her.

She shaved me.

When she left the room, I broke down and sobbed. I had never been this sad.
I have never been this sad. I have never been this sad.

My heart hurt even more than my legs.

I know my mom heard me. She had the decency to let me cry alone.

I stared out the window most of the day. I practiced pushing myself on the wheelchair through the house. My mom kept rearranging things to make it easier.

We smiled at each other a lot.

“You can watch television,” she said.

“Brain rot,” I said. “I have a book.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of hard. Not the words. But, you know, what it’s about. I guess Mexicans aren’t the only poor people in the world.”

We looked at each other. We didn’t really smile. But we were smiling at each other on the inside.

My sisters came over for dinner. My nephews and nieces signed my cast. I think I smiled a lot and everyone was talking and laughing and it all seemed so normal. And I was glad for my mom and dad because I think it was me who was making the house sad.

When my sisters left, I asked my dad if we could sit on the front porch.

I sat on Fidel. My mother and father sat on their outdoor rocking chairs.

We drank coffee.

My mother and father held hands. I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

IT WAS A RAINY SUMMER. EVERY AFTERNOON, THE
clouds would gather like a flock of crows, and it would rain. I fell in love with the thunder. I finished reading the
Grapes of Wrath
. Then I finished reading
War and Peace
. I decided I wanted to read all the books by Ernest Hemingway. My father decided he would read everything that I read. Maybe that was our way of talking.

Dante came over every day.

Mostly Dante would talk and I would listen. He decided that he should read
The Sun Also Rises
to me aloud. I wasn’t going to argue with him. I was never going to out-stubborn Dante Quintana. So every day he would read a chapter of the book. And then we would talk about it.

“It’s a sad book,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s why you like it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly right.”

He never asked me anything about what I thought of his sketches. I was glad about that. I had placed his sketchbook under my bed and refused to look at it. I think I was punishing Dante. He had given me a piece of himself that he had never given to another human being.
And I hadn’t even bothered to look at it. Why was I doing that?

One day he blurted out that he’d finally gone to see a counselor.

I was hoping he wouldn’t tell me anything about his counseling session. He didn’t. I was glad about that. And then I was sort of mad he didn’t. Okay, so I was moody. And inconsistent. Yeah, that’s what I was.

Dante kept looking at me.

“What?”

“Are you going to go?”

“Where?”

“To see a counselor, you idiot.”

“No.”

“No?”

I looked at my legs.

I could see he wanted to say “I’m sorry” again. But he didn’t.

“It helped,” he said. “Going to the counselor. It wasn’t so bad. It really did help.”

“Are you going back?”

“Maybe.”

I nodded. “Talking doesn’t help everybody.”

Dante smiled. “Not that you’d know.”

I smiled back. “Yeah. Not that I’d know.”

I DON’T KNOW HOW IT HAPPENED, BUT ONE MORNING
Dante came over and decided he’d be the one to give me a sponge bath. “Is it okay?” he said.

“Well, it’s kind of my mom’s job,” I said.

“She said it was okay,” he said.

“You asked her?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” I said. “Still, it’s really her job.”

“Your dad? He’s never bathed you?”

“No.”

“Shaved you?”

“No. I don’t want him to.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

He was quiet. “I won’t hurt you.”

You’ve already hurt me.
That’s what I wanted to say. Those were the words that entered my head. Those were the words I wanted to slap him with. The words were mean. I was mean.

“Let me,” he said.

Instead of telling him to go screw himself, I said okay.

I’d learned to make myself perfectly passive when my mother bathed and shaved me. I would shut my eyes and think about the characters in the book I was reading. Somehow that got me through.

I closed my eyes.

I felt Dante’s hands on my shoulders, the warm water, the soap, the washcloth.

Dante’s hands were bigger than my mother’s. And softer. He was slow, methodical, careful. He made me feel as fragile as porcelain.

I never once opened my eyes.

We didn’t say a word.

I felt his hands on my bare chest. On my back.

I let him shave me.

When he was done, I opened my eyes. Tears were falling down his face. I should have expected that. I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to tell him that it was me who should be crying.

Dante had this look on his face. He looked like an angel. And all I wanted to do was put my fist through his jaw. I couldn’t stand my own cruelty.

THREE WEEKS AND TWO DAYS AFTER THE ACCIDENT
, I went to the doctor’s office to get new casts and x-rays. My father took the day off. On the way to the doctor’s office, my dad was very talkative—which was very weird. “August thirtieth,” my dad said.

Okay, so that was my birthday.

“I thought maybe you’d like a car.”

A car. Shit. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t drive.”

“You can learn.”

“You said you didn’t want me driving.”

“I never said that. It was your mom who said that.”

I couldn’t see my mom’s face from the backseat. And I couldn’t exactly lean over. “And what does my mom think?”

“You mean your mom, the fascist?”

“Yeah, her,” I said.

We all busted out laughing.

“So, what do you say, Ari?”

My dad sounded like a boy. “I think I’d like, you know, one of those low-rider cars.”

My mother didn’t skip a beat. “Over my dead body.”

I lost it. I think I probably laughed for five minutes straight. My father joined in the fun. “Okay,” I said finally. “Seriously?”