Black and Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

back and forth on the ragged pavement that makes a broad U around the perimeter of the garden apartment complex. Occasionally she stumbles and falls on a piece of concrete heaved up by a tree root, sees narrow red pinstripes begin to form on the yellow-brown skin of her knee. She wails, shrieks, forces enormous tears from beneath her spiky lashes, calls for Mama as though she is drowning and her mother is on the boat. A moment later there is the thin sound of chimes in the muggy air: “Ice cream,” the little girl shrieks, tears still glittering on her cheeks as she dances and claps. The definition of redemption.
    My son scarcely ever cries. And his smile comes so seldom thatit’s like bright sunshine on winter snow, blinding and strange. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. “Robert’s an old soul,” Grace used to say, maybe because she knew I needed to hear it, to think Robert’s silence, his preternatural self-possession, were inherent, not acquired, not the equivalent of covering your ears, hiding your eyes. But when Bennie’s little sister hugs Robert’s legs, he always smiles down at her. I had a kid in a coma once, when I was working med-surg instead of ER, and I remember the look on the face of his mother when he blinked his eyes and muttered “water” after he’d been close to dead for a month. That must be the look I have as I watch Robert smile down upon the shiny ebony head of Sandy Castro, the look of a woman whose child has come back to life.
    “This isn’t a vacation,” Robert had said in a low shaky voice when we’d first entered the apartment, and he must have seen the look on my face, because he went up the narrow stairs and didn’t come down again. I lay on the couch, exhausted, the cheap fabric scratchy against my face, and all at once I was asleep, a sleep as deep as unconsciousness. When I woke most of a day had gone. The place was as quiet as if it was still empty, and I took the stairs two at a time to the bedrooms, calling Robert’s name, and found him asleep yet again. I stood over him and looked down at his splayed legs, the hands let loose from their habitual half fists, the big bottom lip like his father’s, the light coffee skin. I’d breastfed him for almost a year, an excuse to hold his warm body close. “Who’d have thought, and you as small as you are,” my mother-in-law had said, eyeing the exposed breast disapprovingly. On the beach on summer Sundays I’d taken my time rubbing on his sunscreen, feeling the stalk of his spine beneath my fingers, vertebraafter vertebra, loved by me. At night in his room I’d read him One Fish, Two Fish as he curled into the semicircle of my welcoming torso. “You baby that kid,” Bobby said, sometimes with a sweet smile and a hand on my arm, sometimes with a sneer, a snort.
    “Hey, big guy,” Bobby always said to Robert, and he’d cuff the boy lightly, playfully, as though to prove that Robert had nothing to fear from his father’s fists. Once one of the cop wives asked me why Bobby didn’t wear a wedding ring, asked me in a way that suggested that maybe my husband spent time in the bars and clubs of Manhattan passing himself off as a single guy. And maybe he did. But the reason he’d stopped wearing his ring was because it had once split the skin when he punched me in the shoulder. I guess you could consider it considerate, that he didn’t want that to happen again. But of course it implied that there would be an again. And there always was.
    The second day after we’d arrived in Florida, when Robert still hadn’t spoken, I sat down on the edge of his bed as evening deepened into night and talked to his back as I rubbed it.
    “We’re going to stay here for a while. Maybe for a long time.”
    He was curled up on his side, his hands, with their long fingers, pressed together between his knees. “This isn’t a vacation,” he had said again, but this time with the dull flatness of fact.
    “We’re kind of