Trigger (2 page)

Did it hurt? Because I had this dream … no. Only a dream. But did I feel the bullet slam into my brain? In the dream, it burned and it hurt, so much. So, so much. Just a dream, right?

I gripped the sides of my memory book and squeezed. If
I got shot in the head, I bet nothing went through my mind, and it did hurt.

Maybe I had time to think, “Oh, shit.”

My shrink told me I
shouldn’t dwell on trauma like that
. And Carter taught me I wasn’t supposed to curse under any circumstances.

Watch your mouth, Hatch
, the occupational therapist would say.
That shit’s in the past
.

Did I mention the occupational therapist could curse? Only the OT called it swearing. And she said I was supposed to do what she told me to do, not what she did. Pragmatics, Hatch. Don’t forget pragmatics.

Quit goofing off, Jersey. Grip that ball if you want any of that hand back. Squeeze. Squeeze harder
.

The brain has no sensation. That’s why they keep people awake during some brain surgeries. After they saw through the skull, it’s no big deal. Now squeeze the ball before I cram it up your nose
.

Curl those fingers! What are you waiting for, an invitation? Up and forward, Hatch! Get with the program. The least you can do is get better so your parents don’t have to wipe your butt
.

Curl ’em, or I’ll break your good hand. Squeeze that ball like it’s a hammer about to fall on your nuts
.

The hand-Nazi. I’d never forget her. Hell, she did a lot for me. Oops. Not supposed to curse. Up and forward. No swearing. Harder on the outside. I didn’t need an occupational therapist anymore. I’d get to see a psychotherapist, but that wouldn’t be for months. Waiting lists. It was time to do things for myself. Proud. Lucky. I could have had a
very good duck. Curl those fingers. Duck balls and hammers. Pragmatics.

I was still thinking about hand-Nazis and nut hammers and wondering why my parents didn’t talk to me like the therapists did when Mom drove up to a take-out window and bought us all an early supper. She drove us to Lake Raven, really close to my house, and we sat there in the car at the wide end of the lake to eat. I turned my head to the right a little, so I could see the water, all blue with ripples and sunlight on top. There were some benches close by, and a little two-rail safety fence. I’d been there a lot. I knew I had, only I couldn’t really remember when, except for when I was lots younger, so I just stared at the water.

It took me forever to eat hot wings with one hand, and I couldn’t really taste them that much, but I managed—and I didn’t ask about the house a single time, not even when Mom started the car and got back on the road. Not even when she hit the blinker and steered the car into our neighborhood. Right away I noticed all the lawns were mowed up and down, like baseball fields. Neat, like our four-house cul-de-sac. Neat, like our two-story white house with black shutters.

HOUSE IS FINE MORON QUIT ASKING.

Proud. Lucky. Very good duck balls.

In a few seconds, I’d see the house for myself. I touched the messy circular dent in my throat. Tracheotomy scar. That’s what happened when I couldn’t breathe for myself. Some doc cut a hole in my neck and stuck a plastic tube through my trachea. The tube was hooked to a machine, and the machine pumped air into my lungs. In and out. Beep, click, hissss. Beep, click, hissss. I didn’t remember
that, but I learned about it at Carter. One of the therapists made me sit by a ventilator so I’d know what my parents had to go through the whole seventy-one days I wouldn’t wake up. Beep, click, hissss.

You need to spend more time thinking about other people, Hatch. It’s not all about you
.

Beep, click, hissss.

Can you imagine this day after day? Seventy-one days? Can you?

Beep, click, hissss.

Focus on what I’m saying, what you’re hearing. I want you to remember this. You can if you try. Apply yourself, Hatch. It’s gonna be harder on the outside
.

I rubbed a hand across my close-cut hair and fingered the upside-down C on the left side of my head, where they cut open my skull and took out the bullet and a bunch of blood. The craniotomy scar had lost its swelling—gone pale—but it was still there, like the entry dent in my right temple.

You’re a lucky boy, Mr. Hatch. It’s a miracle you’re blind in only one eye. A little higher, a little lower
…

It’s a wonder you’re alive, Mr. Hatch. An inch. Just an inch …

Must have a purpose …

Up and forward …

God must have his eye on you…
.

“God?” I laughed.

Dad stared at me in the mirror. Mom got stiffer behind the wheel.

“Oh. Sorry. Don’t worry.” I gave them my best half-grin, which was all my mouth could do. Seeing myself in
the rearview wasn’t fun. “He didn’t say anything. God, I mean. At least not that I heard. I was just thinking about proud and lucky and ducks and stuff. But not the house. Honest.”

Mom sighed as she pulled onto our short street. I let out a breath, too, because I was glad to see the house. It was still there, and I hadn’t been talking to God.

As we parked in the driveway, my fingers went from scar to scar. Did I really get shot in the head?

Would God care if I had?

The scars—but I didn’t remember anything.

Why?
Dad had asked a thousand times.

We’d covered it in family therapy at Carter over and over, the not remembering. The shrink explained I’d never remember getting shot—and probably not the year leading up to it, either. He said the gunshot wound was an open head injury, that it damaged my brain. Getting shot in the head was like unplugging a computer with nearly twelve months of data unsaved. The entries for those fifty or sixty weeks got fried. Gone. Poof. Most of my summer before my sophomore year, and the year itself. Fried.

Then I’d done eleventh grade in the hospitals, and now it was the end of summer before my senior year. Fried. Nobody from my school came to visit, so they didn’t ask how I got shot. Nobody from outside school came to visit, so they didn’t ask, either. My parents finally quit asking. Fried. Oh, yeah, wait—Mama Rush, Todd’s grandmother, came once during the third hospital, and she asked. But I don’t think she believed me when I told her I didn’t remember. Fried. In three weeks, I’d go back to school. Somebody probably
would get around to asking that one question I couldn’t answer, even for myself. Fried, fried, fried.

I struggled out of my seat belt, opened the car door, and got out, and I stood in our neat yard, which had been mowed up and down like a baseball field. The house stared at me. I figured if it had eyebrows, the one above my window would have gone sliding halfway to the roof. Even the house wanted to know the answer to that one question I couldn’t answer up and forward, down and backward, proud or lucky, very good duck or not.

Jersey Hatch, why did you shoot yourself?

chapter 2

I have this dream where both legs work and both arms work and I don’t have any scars on the outside. I’m sitting on the edge of my bed in dress blues holding a pistol. Sunlight brightens the dust in my room and darkens all the places where I’ve nicked the walls and doors. My fingers tingle as I lift the gun to my mouth. It tastes oily and dusty as I close my lips on cold gunmetal
—
but I can’t. Not in the mouth. I’m shaking, but I lift the barrel to the side of my head. The tip digs into my skin. I’m thinking nothing but how it feels, and that my hand’s shaking, and that my room has so much dust in places I didn’t even know. Then I’m squeezing the trigger and looking at the dust and feeling my hand shake and thinking nothing and there’s noise and fire and nothing. Nothing at all
.

Only a dream, something I made up because I never remembered and not remembering almost made me crazy. I had the dream every night. Crazy. But I didn’t tell anybody.
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell anybody, but there were lots of things I didn’t talk about, not even to the Carter shrink. Crazy. But now I was home and the dreams were right here and I had to go inside or I’d be stupid and unpragmatic and a big crazy baby. The five-year-old genius sucking his thumb.

Mom went inside before I even got to the door. Dad followed behind me lugging my bags. I got my memory book, but I couldn’t carry the suitcases myself because of my balance. My left leg—it pulled. Sometimes I tripped on my foot. And my left arm, I kept forgetting it. Always bashing it into doorframes and chairs, which helped me trip over my foot a lot. That’s why the pictures made me cry.

They were hanging right inside the front door, first thing, in the foyer. There was a boy in the frames, standing at attention in a marine R.O.T.C. uniform. He was dressed in football pads, going long. He was standing with a set of clubs on a green with a guy who stopped speaking to him long before he even pulled the trigger. The boy in all the pictures had wavy brown hair and no holes in his head and no holes in his throat, and I knew he was me—but he couldn’t be. So I held on tight to the memory book and my stomach hurt and I cried.

Dad came up beside me and put down my bags. For a second or two, he pushed the first button of his sweater vest in and out of its hole—something I couldn’t do on purpose with lots of help. After a while, he put an arm around my shoulders.

“Let’s go on upstairs,” he said in his I-support-you voice. “Be careful and use the rail.”

I nodded and wiped my face off with my shirt. Tears
smeared across the cover of my memory book, but the inked name on the spine didn’t run, not even a little. The pen on the dirty white string swung back and forth, back and forth.

Dad looked like he wanted to say something, but he bit his bottom lip before picking up the suitcases and starting up without me. I stood there for a while, staring at the pictures and trying to breathe.

The last time I had been here in this house, I shot myself.

I actually … but no. I didn’t know that for sure. I
might
have shot myself. Still had my thoughts about that, but I sort of believed it. Dad believed it, because he said I used his gun, his pistol, from his bedside table, the one he kept to deal with thieves and murderers.

Maybe Dad thought I was a thief and shot me. I could believe that easier than the story about me coming home from school, dressing in my uniform, loading a single bullet in Dad’s gun, sitting down on my bed, and blowing my brains out.

I mean, a person would have to remember
something
if he did all those things, right? And he’d have to remember why. All I had were my dreams of sitting on the bed and feeling nothing at all.

My eyes drifted over pictures. Before-boy. Jersey Hatch, prior to cleaning his own clock. Jersey-Before. J.B. I remembered him well, at least up until ninth grade. After that, things got a little patchy. R.O.T.C., golf, football … me. I did them all. And school and girls and everything. And these pictures, these were J.B. from two years ago. Do-everything J.B. I-want-to-be-a-lawyer J.B. Straight-A J.B.

I was him. He was me.

Not real, but he was real. Wasn’t he? I could see him, coming right out of the pictures, floating down, standing beside me, dressed just like me, only with no scars.

My teeth hurt when I clamped them on my lip. I thought about my socks. Wished I could stuff a sock in my brain so it would shut up. The more nervous I got, the more I thought about socks. Socks and ghosts. Ghosts coming out of pictures.

J.B., he sure looked like a ghost. Socks. His eyes seemed wide and bright and focused. The line of his jaw gave him a set, determined expression. J.B. was not a guy to give up. I couldn’t believe he’d put a bullet in his own head.

“So why’d you do it?” I asked. “Socks.”

“Do what?” Dad called down from my room.

“Not you.” I pointed the memory book at J.B. even though Dad couldn’t see me do it. “I was talking to the ghost. Socks.”

“Go upstairs, Jersey.” Mom’s quiet voice startled me out of the ghost-pictures. She was standing right in front of me, eyes wider than usual, holding a Diet Coke. “Help your father unpack.” Then, like she forgot the important part, “I’m proud of you for working hard to get home. Try to enjoy the day.”

“Um, okay. Sure.” Sweat broke out under my shirt. I felt clammy and cold. Socks. It was time to go upstairs, to J.B.’s room, to where he tried to kill us. Why hadn’t I asked them if I could move into the guest room? I couldn’t ask them now, could I? Not with them acting so nervous and freaky. That might blow their minds. They might think I wasn’t ready and send me back.

But going back might not be so bad. Socks. The
therapists told me it was easier at Carter. Easier. Probably was easier.

Before Mom could tell me to go up again, I faced the stairs. They looked really steep.

Steps were hard for a one-footer like me, but I could hear the therapists in the back of my mind.

Wah, wah, wah. It’s hard. So what?

So what.

The memory book tasted all plastic and salty when I crammed it between my teeth. I knew I’d need my hands. Strong one for the rail, weak one for the wall. Balancing as best I could, I moved my good leg up, then made my bad leg follow.

Behind me, Mom walked away. I heard her footsteps, but they sounded like whispers, like she was tiptoeing. Or maybe it was the ghost in the air in front of the pictures. J.B., coming with me. Socks. I tried to go faster. Up, and up. Each thump sounded like an earthquake. Up, and up. Maybe I could outrun him. If I went fast enough, the ghost would have to stay downstairs.

“Do it like the therapists said,” Dad yelled from the bedroom. “Good boys go to heaven. Bad boys go to hell. Good leg going up, bad leg after.”

That’s how I remembered it. Good leg leads going up the stairs; coming down, bad leg leads. Up, up, up. Heaven, hell. Heaven, hell. Heaven … hell. I made it. Socks. Socks. The landing at the top of the stairs seemed like paradise, no matter which word got me there. Up and forward, and all that rehab perky stuff. Socks. I went fast, so maybe I left the ghost downstairs after all.