Page 39 of Roadrunner

My phone rang on the drive home.

I didn’t recognize the number. I recognized the rhythm of it, though. Three rings and then a hang-up if I didn’t answer fast enough, the impatience of a man who considered other people’s slowness a personal inconvenience. I let it go to voicemail. I didn’t listen until I was back in my apartment, boots off, textbook waiting on the counter where I’d left it that morning.

“Alex.” No greeting, no preamble, just my name delivered like the first line of a memo. “Give me a call when you get a moment. Your mother and I have been discussing your situation out there, and we have some thoughts about your future.” A pause, the kind he used to make a decision sound like a suggestion. “Nothing urgent. Call me back.”

I didn’t call him back that night.

I told myself it was nothing. A phase, same as always. A comment about my grades, a complaint about the distance, something I’d field on his terms in a week or two and forget by the following month.

I deleted the voicemail, poured a glass of water, and went to sleep thinking a summer filled with no college and much Riley.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Alex

Now

Joshua and I had one child. Arthur. I had kept him from the hospital on purpose. A room with tubes and a machine doing the breathing was not the first version of his father I wanted him to have. Martina brought him at nine.

I met them in the lobby. I wanted to prepare him. I understood, standing there watching them come through the sliding doors, that I did not actually know how to do that. There is no version of the sentence your father was in an accident that arrives gently, no matter how many times you rearrange the words on the drive over.

Arthur was in the clothes he’d slept in. Martina hadn’t made him change, which told me she’d made the right call about a great many things that morning.

He looked at me. He didn’t run. He walked, the way he did most things, at his own considered pace, like running toward bad news wouldn’t make it arrive any less true.

“Is he dead?” Arthur asked.

“No,” I said. “He’s alive. He’s very hurt, Arthur. I need you to understand that before we go up there.”

He nodded. Not like a child, like a man twenty years older. He was absorbing the information and filing it before he let himself have a feeling about it.

“How hurt?” he asked.

I crouched down so we were level, which I hadn’t done with him in over a year because he’d started objecting to it, and he let me do it now.

“He was in a car accident,” I said. “He has a lot of broken bones. He hit his head very hard, and the doctors are worried about that part more than the other parts.” I made myself keep looking at him. “He might not wake up all the way for a while. When he does, he might not be exactly like he was before. I don’t know that yet. Nobody does.”

Arthur was quiet. He looked past me, toward the elevators, toward wherever his father was.

“Can I see him?” he asked.

“If you want to. You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I need to tell you what it looks like first, so it isn’t a surprise. There’s a tube in his throat helping him breathe. There are wires. His face is bruised and there’s bandages on part of it. It’s going to look scary. It’s okay if it’s scary.”

He considered this with the same seriousness he considered everything, weighing it, deciding what to do with it before he let it show on his face.

“Is it my fault?” he asked.

The question landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there.

“No,” I said, immediately, more firmly than I’d said anything all morning. “Arthur. Look at me. This is not your fault. Not even a little.”

“We argued Thursday,” he said. “About the science fair thing. He said I embarrassed him at the school thing and I said some stuff back.”

“That has nothing to do with this,” I said. “He and I argued Friday night too. About something that had nothing to do with either one of us being careless with a car. People argue with people they love. That’s not what happened here.”