Surface by Stacy Robinson Page B

Annie. She was someone, Claire was certain, who had witnessed all the pain and sadness life had to deliver, and at some point became resigned to its unfairness with quiet reserve. Claire looked away until she heard the squeak of the nurse’s white rubber soles exit the room.
    She walked to Nicholas’s bed and softly rubbed the stubble that had begun to grow back on his scalp. “Do you remember all those trips we made to the ER, Nicky?” she asked. “The monkey bar incident and your arm cast? Your chin stitches.” He grunted and ground his teeth—reflexive responses that she had grown used to, but responses nonetheless. “At one point they knew you by name downstairs, didn’t they, kiddo?” She smiled, remembering how she would read from his favorite book, The Phantom Tollbooth, to keep him calm and entertained as he was being stitched up or wrapped in a cast, always the same chapter about the Senses Taker, over and over, as his fear and pain disappeared into the cleverness of the wordplay.
    She rested her fingers on the zipper-like staples on Nick’s skull, and it occurred to her that maybe her little boy just needed an old, familiar key to get back to them.
     
    Claire ran her hands along the spines of the books on Nick’s bedroom shelves and bookcases, searched the drawers of his desk. She worried if during one of her cleaning flurries she had boxed up his childhood books and given them away. She looked in the closet, among the cubbies of old trophies and jerseys, computer games and art projects, taking in, as she did, the range of her son’s young life. She pulled out a blue notebook with a squirrelly spiral binding. Eighth-grade history. Claire opened the worn cover and thumbed through the pages, tentatively at first, tracing her son’s maturing script, the unexpected flourish around Dr. King’s initials, the sharp angles of a Washington Monument rendering; and then faster, flipping through the pages like an animator trying to bring it all to life. Claire pressed her nose into its pages, but only smelled a faint staleness. As she went to replace the binder, a note fell to the carpet. Meet me after school. xxoo P. P., it read in purple ink. P. P.? Peyton Pierce? She smiled and bent down to pick it up. Nick and Peyton had a crush? Neatly she folded the note and reinserted it into the middle of the binder, acknowledging that her son did have a life beyond what she knew.
    Claire closed the closet door and returned to the bookcases, reading each title aloud this time, book by book, shelf by shelf, to be sure she hadn’t missed it. Lodged between two yearbooks near the bottom, she finally found The Phantom Tollbooth. Clutching it, she went down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea before returning to the hospital.
    As the water was heating, Claire’s cell phone rang. Michael’s private line glowed on the screen.
    “Where are you?” he asked.
    “Has something happened?” She was already grabbing her car keys from the counter.
    “Yeah, something’s happened. But not with Nick.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I just got a call from Robert Spencer.”
    She could hear the agitation in his voice, but wasn’t sure where he was going with it. Jackie had taken messages from Robert and Carolyn Spencer about Nicholas, but everyone was calling. “And?”
    “And he wanted to let me know about a ridiculous story he’d just heard from Jim Chase and his wife about you and a younger man, and a cocaine overdose.” His tone grew more hostile. “Who have you talked to, Claire?”
    Claire lowered herself into the breakfast area banquette. “No one,” she choked, replaying Jeannie Chase’s polite willingness to cut short her visit, and trying to imagine just how much she might have overheard in the lobby.
    “Cut the bullshit, Claire.”
    “Do you think I’d want anyone to know about this? Jesus, Michael.” All along she had harbored a fantasy—Michael’s fantasy—that they would get through this