Empty Mile Read Online Free PDF Page B

kneeling opposite me touched my shoulder and I stopped pumping while he blew another series of breaths into Stan. When I started again he spoke in rapid sentences around his own gasps for air.
    “He was under a long time. My kids saw it happen, but I couldn’t find him.”
    I knew all of this without being told, of course. Without the blinding caul of my lust, that this would happen was just so fucking obvious. Don’t leave a child alone by water—a primal understanding. I should have been looking after him. I should have been with him. But being with Marla had been more important.
    As I massaged Stan’s heart the utter clarity of my guilt, the knowledge that I alone was responsible for the stillness of his body, took from me part of myself, stole away that quality most humans assume to be the bedrock of who they are—the quality of believing oneself to be a good person.
    After that day I would never think that about myself again.
    When Stan choked and spluttered back to life, when his eyelids fluttered open and he gazed past me into the blue sky, I thought I would faint with relief. As he sucked in great sobbing lungfuls of air I held him close, shouting to the crowd, “He’s alive! He’s alive!” And as they clapped and cheered I promised myself that I had learned my lesson, that I would never again be careless with another human being. I had no idea, in those moments of jubilation, that my lessons were only just starting.
    The paramedics arrived while I still had Stan in my arms. They had lumbered their vehicle up Lake Trail in response to a cell phone call from one of the crowd. There were two of them and they pried Stan away from me, strapped him to a backboard, and carried him across the sand to their truck. I trotted beside them, repeating to Stan that he was going to be all right. He’d been looking around him as though enraptured by what he saw. When his eyes came to rest on me, though, he stared blankly for a moment and I felt the tendrils of a new fear tighten around me.
    “It’s Johnny. Are you okay, Stan? It’s Johnny.”
    He smiled and closed his eyes. “Johnny …”
    Then his head lolled sideways and we were climbing into the ambulance.
    Before they closed the doors I saw Marla. She must have been following us but I had not noticed her, had not even thought of her. She was standing still, watching me, and as our eyes met we both knew that what we had started in the forest that day was going to stay buried there for a long, long time.
    The paramedics took Stan fifty miles to the hospital in Burton on radioed instructions from Oakridge’s own emergency clinic. I remember the time as a strip-lit nightmare of recriminations from my father and my own worry for Stan. My father tried, I think, to keep his anger in check, but there were times when it was just too much for him.
    Through the battering storm of doctors and tests and waiting rooms and not knowing, a word began to surface, a wicked piece of flotsam that weighted our lives forever after and tore from me any hope that Stan’s near-drowning might ever become forgivable.
    Hypoxia. A brain starved of oxygen longer than three minutes begins to die. Like never leave a child alone near water , it is something we all know. But which parts will die, what trajectory of sacrifice the brain will plot and its effect on the individual, are never known until after the fact. Likewise the extent of recovery varies unpredictably.
    A doctor, trying to give us something to hope for, said, “There is no certainty of interpretation in brain trauma. In the way the brain interprets it, I mean.”
    He only wanted to help, but it was wasted on us. We could see for ourselves that Stan’s brain had interpreted its trauma pretty fucking severely.
    There was a transition phase in the weeks and months that followed. There was rehab and therapy, rapid improvement in motor skills—a sloping graph against the axes of time and damage. After three months Stan had pretty