Don't Worry About the Kids Read Online Free PDF

whitecaps. Michael thought of dirty dishwater. He thought of Jerry on a stepladder, remembered teaching Jerry how to wash dishes, how to use the sponge and soap and steel wool. He saw raw spinach rising to the surface of cloudy water. Was he inventing the picture, or had Jerry once tried to wash spinach leaves as if they were dishes? He recalled his father coming home and praising Jerry, ranting at him.
    Michael walked to the port side. Brooklyn was gone, bathed in gray fog, and Michael sensed some light—the sun, behind the mist, slowly transforming the air to the color of unwashed ivory. Despite the fact that the air was now warm and moist, almost feathery in its tangible balm, Michael found that he was trembling, his teeth clicking. He should go inside, buy a cup of coffee, rest. He should forget Langiello. He should tell himself again and again that the hard thing would be to believe in his heart what he understood in his mind: that there was, literally, nothing he could do about what had happened and nothing he could have done. All he really wanted was to get to the other side of the Bay, to see Jerry, to spend time with him.
    Were Jerry to ask him about the children and were he to begin to tell Jerry the story of what had happened, he knew that Jerry would walk away, turn in circles. He wished that it wasn’t so important to him that others understand what, in fact, had truly happened. He wished he could be certain that he cared more for his children than he did about losing them, about losing his fight for them.
    Michael held to the iron railing, reminded himself to stop on the other side, to buy something to bring for Jerry—a magazine, a pipe, a box of chocolates. He smiled. Jerry would doubtless turn at once and hand the gift to another patient. Michael would tease Jerry about always giving things away and Jerry would laugh, would say something about their childhood that only he and Michael would understand. What do you think this is anyway, he would ask. Your birthday?
    The craziest thing of all, Michael sometimes thought, was that the two of them actually liked being together, enjoyed spending time with each other even though they both knew that their conversations made no ordinary sense.
    Jerry loved to ask Michael questions about surgery, to walk around his ward reciting the procedures to everyone he met. Jerry had an uncanny memory that made Michael believe he was not brain-damaged so much as brain-scrambled—all the pieces there, but in the wrong places. Michael considered: he could pretend that he needed Jerry to help him in surgery, that there was this guy he knew they had to operate on, so that the man would never walk again.
    Michael could imagine taking Jerry to the Italian restaurant, Jerry’s eyes bright with pleasure as he explained the procedure, repeated Michael’s words back to him: first you make an incision in the knee and put the fiber-optic light in. Then you look into the TV camera and you fill the knee with saline fluid. Then you make a cut of about five millimeters. Then you make an incision on the other side and you watch in the camera while you work with your scalpel and clamps and trocar and Army-Navy retractors. If there’s too much bleeding, you buzz the veins.
    Michael smiled. Jerry loved the idea of buzzing veins and arteries-cauterizing them with lasers—loved to use the word buzz as often as possible. The anterior or posterior cruciate ligaments would be the ones they’d cut, Michael explained, so that forever after the knees would—without warning, but regularly—give way. Or perhaps they could, Jerry offered, go into the neck and slice the carotid artery, or one of the vertebral arteries, so that, as if the guy had had a stroke, his brain would never again be able to tell his body what to do.
    The ferry slowed, turned, began backing into its spot in the harbor, foam boiling up above green scum. Michael went inside, moved quickly, pushing