Free Please Don't Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos Page A

out she was thirty-three. She was wearing a black bathing suit and yellow flip-flops and had a hospital blanket wrapped around her. A couple of other women were with her, and some kids were off in the corner of the waiting room, playing. I was wearing my Burton Farms uniform, a too-tight royal blue polo shirt with white shorts. I still had my whistle around my neck. I looked like an idiot, like an extra from some bad 1970s summer-camp film. I sat alone along a wall. I could tell just by looking at the women that the kid was dead. They alternated between bouts of crying and long silences, where they just sat, holding their three heads together, like they were all joined by their skulls.
    It didn't seem right that this grieving mother should be sitting there in a bathing suit and blanket. I got up and went to the nurse at the admitting desk. I said, "Can't you get me some scrubs?"
    "For what?" she said.
    "For that poor woman over there. Her kid is dead."
    "I know," she said.
    "Well, get her some fucking clothes, please. It's not right."
    "Look," said the nurse. But then she didn't say anything else. She just picked up the phone, dialed three numbers, mumbled something, and looked at me. In about three minutes, an orderly brought me some green scrubs.
    I walked over to the mother and stood in front of her. The other women were rounding up their kids.
    "I'm very sorry," I said. I handed her the scrubs. She stood, dropped her blanket, and slid on the green pants, then pulled the shirt over her head. Then she sat back down and wrapped the blanket around herself again.
    "Do you want me to call a priest or something?" I said. I don't know why I said that. I never had been in the immediate aftershock of death before. It seemed like the kind of thing to do. I figured Father Mack, my mother's friend, would come down and talk to her. He was probably at our house right now anyway, whipping up a pasta salad or cleaning out the garage.
    "No," she said. "I'm not a Christian."
    "A rabbi?"
    "No, I'm not religious," she said.
    I nodded. It was pretty fucking bold, I thought, not to be religious when your kid has just died. I wanted to say something else, who knows what, but a hospital staff member came through the double doors of the ER and ushered her away.
    I sat down where she had been sitting. The two women who had been with her came back over with their kids. They were both blond, and they looked like sisters.
    "Are you here for her now?" they asked. "If you are, we'll be going. We're so sorry about everything. We barely know her. We just felt somebody should be here."
    "I am here now," I said. "I'll stick around."
    They seem relieved to be rid of everything. Clutching their children, they raced out the automatic doors.
    I waited for more than an hour at the hospital until the kid's mother came out to the waiting area again. She was still wearing the scrubs and holding the blanket around herself. She seemed surprised to see me.
    "Your friends left," I said.
    "I don't even know them," she said. "They're just mothers."
    "Should we call someone?" I asked.
    "Who?" she said.
    I hadn't expected her to answer like that.
    "I'm sorry," I said.
    "It's not your fault. I had my eyes on him the whole time, and then I lost him. He was my responsibility."
    She started to cry.
    "I was the lifeguard," I said.
    She looked down and shook her head vigorously, as if to disagree.
     
    I WAS ALMOST twenty-three. I'd spent the year taking more classes at the community college, another journalism course and a literature class. I had written a few more dumb pieces for the student newspaper— TUITION RATES TO INCREASE, STRAY CAT BECOMES BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT MASCOT, BOB SEGER VISITS CAMPUS —and my mother had them up on the fridge along with Kolya's Three-Legged Race Champion certificate from Field Day.
    I was still one semester shy of an associate's degree. My record was spotty and I had dropped a lot of classes. Still, although I hadn't told anybody this, a week