Us and Uncle Fraud

Us and Uncle Fraud by Lois Lowry Page A

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Authors: Lois Lowry
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hand, opened his fist, and handed the odd-shaped thing to me. It was what was left of Tom's glasses.
    Then he spoke. "His bike is there," he said.
    "I know. Father will get it. Come."
    But still he didn't move.
    Finally I shook him. "Marcus!" I said. "Marcus the Newbold! Let's go
home.
"
    He followed me then. We stumbled toward home, and the rain continued to fall.

    The doctor came to the house and examined Marcus and me as we sat shuddering, silent and stunned. He cleaned our cuts, bandaged Marcus's ankle, and
gave us both pills that made us sleep most of the day and night. In the morning I felt groggy and confused. Mother told me what had happened, but I shrank inside myself and wouldn't listen. I refused to look at the newspaper. On the front page there was a picture of men lifting my brother carefully to the bridge with ropes. I turned away from it, feeling sick, and stared dumbly at the wall.
    "Louise," Mother said in a firm voice, holding my shoulders, "read what it says. BOY SURVIVES FLOOD MISHAP. Tom isn't dead, Louise."
    I believed her, but it didn't seem to matter. Mother and Father had been at the hospital all night long. Tom was in a coma.
    The tree, with Tom clinging to it, had been swept down to the bridge in just seconds and had caught there. He had screamed for help and been heard. But the water washed over him in surges, slamming him again and again into the concrete and steel supports. By the time help reached him, he was battered and unconscious, half-drowned, with both arms and his skull fractured. Even the doctors were not sure if he would live.
    But Mother was sure. She said so with brisk authority: Tom would live. She made us all believe it.
    Father's sisters, Florence and Jeanette, arrived by train and took up residence in our house, caring for Stephanie while Mother and Father spent days at the hospital beside Tom's bed. My aunts saw to it that Marcus and I got dressed and off to school
in the mornings after we were ready to go back. Marcus's badly sprained ankle healed ; our cuts and bruises healed ; we were the center of attention for a while at school. And, after a few days, the rain even stopped.
    But Tom didn't heal. His broken bones, the X rays showed, were beginning to knit together inside the heavy plaster casts. But he didn't wake up. After a week, even Mother's vibrant optimism became shaky, and sometimes I saw her stop whatever she was doing and stand silently, a look of infinite sadness on her face.
    Father, too, was changed. His usual attitude of gruff playfulness and good-natured rudeness evaporated. He was gentle toward Mother and tolerant of the intrusion of the two aunts, who were always in the way and creating complicated productions of the most simple household tasks.
    "Relax," he said to Aunt Florence, who came to him, worried and flustered, one evening when Mother was at the hospital. Stephanie's only clean pajamas had a broken elastic in the waist. "Use a safety pin," Father told her calmly. Marcus and I overheard and looked at each other in astonishment. In the old days—before the flood, as we referred to that time to each other—he would have exploded; he would have bellowed, "For the Lord's sake, Florence, put the child to bed naked! Do you think the world requires a piece of elastic to revolve? And stop that incessant hand-wringing or you'll drive me completely around the bend!"
    Another evening I went to the basement to borrow the ball of twine that I knew was on Father's workbench, and I found him there, all alone. Around him, strewn across the workbench and on the floor, were all the parts of Tom's bike. He was meticulously examining each piece, one by one; he was sanding and scraping bits of rust away and rubbing the pieces with oil. It was the kind of thing that Thomas himself would have done, but Father had always been too impatient for such intricate, time-consuming tasks. He hadn't heard me come down, and he didn't see me watching. For a long time I stood

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