He had his back turned when he heard sneakers squeak on the rungs behind him.He turned, and said, “Harris.Off of there, Bud.That one’s mine,” in his easy voice, not the alarmed one, because there was no call for the alarmed one.
And then the ladder’s feet skated on the drop cloth, and there was call for it.
He’d watched men come off bulls.He’d watched men get kicked, gored, and stepped on, and he’d been the first one over the rail.He knew exactly what a person getting injured looked like.
Harris went down between the ladder and the wall and caught the corner of the cast-iron radiator with his forehead on the way down.The blow made a dull thunking sound.Then Harris was on the floor and blood flowed from the boy’s scalp fast and bright and far too much of it, sheeting down into his eyebrow and onto the oak planks
Hank was already lunging forward as the boy hauled in one enormous breath to scream.The scream was good.A child screaming had a pulse, a working airway, and the wind to complain.It was the quiet ones that stopped his heart.
He dropped to the floor beside the boy.“I’ve got you,” he said, low and certain, his thumb finding the bleeder above the eyebrow and pressing it shut, clean and exact, the way he’d done a thousand times on a thousand foreheads.“I’ve got you, Harris.Look at me.Right here.You’re all right.”
Behind him, Jenson was keening thin and high, both hands pressed over his mouth as if it were his own head that was open.Presley was on her feet, white.And Sunny!
She crossed the room and was on knees in the blood without seeming to cross the distance at all, her hands reaching out, shaking.“Harris.Oh God.His head.The blood!”
“Scalp wound,” Hank said to her.“They bleed like the end of the world, and they almost never are.Look at me, Sunny.Does my face look worried?”
It didn’t.He made sure it didn’t.He’d learned a long time ago that his steadiness ran downhill into a frightened room and pooled wherever it was needed.He poured it now into the boy under his hand, into the woman beside him, into Harris’s twin, keening by the wall.
“Jenson,” Hank said without turning in the voice that stopped arguments with his brothers in their tracks.“I need you.You’re his brother and I need a brave helper.Go to my truck.Get the black bag on the front seat and bring it here.Can you do that?”
It gave the boy a job which was the only thing that always worked.Jenson tore out of the room as if Harris’s life depended on it.
The bag came.Hank worked with the radiator at his back and the boy’s head in his lap, and he narrated the whole of it in an easy front-porch drawl.Now I’m going to clean it, gonna sting a little.You’re doing fine.Hold still as a fence post for me.
He flushed the gash and finally got a good look at it.He saw, with the private flood of relief he never let reach his face, that it was long and shallow and theatrical.Not even deep enough for stitches.He closed it with a row of butterfly strips and covered them a clean white dressing.
By the time he was down taping it, Harris had stopped screaming and started being deeply, gloriously interested in the amount of blood he had personally produced.
“Is it gonna make a scar?”Harris asked, with naked hope.
“Might be a little one.”
“Cool.”
Hank felt the laugh go around the room like the pressure changing before weather.He sat back on his heels and let his own breath out, the breath he hadn’t told anyone he was holding, and only then did he let himself look at Sunny.
She was still on her knees beside him.There was blood on her hands and a smear of it up one forearm.She was looking at Hank as if he’d walked into the worst thirty seconds of her year and brought her child out whole, which was, he supposed, more or less what had happened.
“He’s fine,” Hank told her again.“He’s going to have a headache and a good story to tell.I’ll want to check his eyes again in an hour and tonight, but I’d bet my license he’s fine.”
“You ...”Sunny stopped.Tried again.“You didn’t even ...your hands didn’t ...”She turned her own hands over, looked at how they were still shaking, looked at his, which were not.
Bewilderment passed over her face.As if she’d spent years being the only steady person in the room, but this time somebody else’s steadiness had gotten to the crisis first.
“Practice,” he said gently.“That’s all it is.I’ve had a lot of practice being the calm one.It isn’t the same as not being scared.”
“You were scared?”
“Out of my mind,” Hank said.“I just don’t let it show on my face.”
And there was only one reason for him to have been that scared.It surfaced right there on the bloody floor of his dining room with Harris’s head on his knees.He wanted this.The loud house and laundry-basket toddler, a woman who was cautious of the whole world and had just, for one cracked-open second, let him be the one who held her world together.The wanting came up in him sudden and total, like water flooding a parched plain that had been dry for years.
And right behind it, fast as a reflex, came the old answer.
You ruined my life.You ruined me.Lorraine’s words, branded on his heart and under them the thing he believed, flat and reasonable as a diagnosis.This is exactly how it happens.You let yourself want something, you take your eye off the ladder for one minute to want it, and a child you love ends up bleeding on the floor.
He’d built a life around the certainty that he was safest to the people he loved when he needed nothing from them.That wanting was the variable that got them hurt.He looked at Harris, who was already negotiating to keep the dressing as a trophy.He looked at Sunny’s wrecked, open face.
