Free What Dies in Summer by Tom Wright Page B

came to me. At that moment I knew that Jack wasn’t seeing the cop at all anymore. He was blinking in a strange way, his hands opening and closing at his
sides, and I knew he was looking up instead at his own drunken, raging father, wishing he could become invisible and doing his best not to piss his pants.
    Trying, with no success and no hope, not to be weak.

 
11 | Dreamland
    LATER , lying on the bed in my room, unable to find a comfortable position, listening to the hospital noises, I thought I wasn’t going to be able
to sleep, but I must have drifted off because when I opened my eyes Dee was there, talking quietly with L.A. in the doorway of the room. Then he was standing beside the bed with his hand on mine.
Then Hubert Ferkin was there, saying something to L.A. about “that fuckin’ Jack.”
    The next time I woke up it was dark outside the window. I looked around the room. L.A. was curled up asleep in the armchair in the corner. There was an open Life magazine and an empty
paper cup on the floor beside the chair. She was lying with her cheek on her hands, and I caught the light sound of her breathing among the other noises of the hospital. I was thirsty, but not
quite enough to get up for a drink.
    And then I was crossing into and out of dreams, the long, involved, semi-real kind you sometimes get with painkillers, where it’s not always clear whether you’re thinking about
something that happened or dreaming about it:
    It is early afternoon at Gram’s, me on the couch in front of the TV with nothing else to do, watching Daffy Duck harass Speedy Gonzales.
    But really mostly thinking about Diana.
    L.A. is sitting cross-legged in her blue jeans and an old T-shirt of mine at the other end of the couch with a bottle of cream soda in her hand and her nose in one of Gram’s
     magazines. Earlier I saw her sneak a drink of the Madeira Gram uses for cooking, so the cream soda could be for camouflage. The cover of the magazine, which is the kind that has recipes and
     pictures of beautiful kitchens and quizzes about how to tell if you’re a good wife, shows a lemon cake with one slice out of it, like all magazine cakes. It looks like it would taste
     great, but I can’t focus on that because I can’t stop thinking about Diana. The reason she is a problem for me right now is that I have a more or less major date with her coming up.
     Actually it’s a road trip, and even though her parents will be there too, I still have my hopes.
    Not that Diana would worry. Except maybe for the possibility of hellfire and damnation, she is mostly fearless, seeing the universe as basically a safe place and generally counting on
     things to turn out all right. That seems kind of sweet but contradictory to me, a smart girl like her thinking that way, but I envy her peace of mind. Actually her whole family is like that,
     which is surprising to me because of the work they do. Diana’s mom is a nurse at Parkland, which is a place that is somehow both here all around me and also across town, and her dad is a
     police detective, which you’d think would make them both pretty serious-minded from constantly looking at people who are sick or dead or guilty. But it doesn’t really work that way,
     and this is one of the things I love about all of them. They like to laugh, even Fubbit, Diana’s little brother, whose actual, unused given names are Andrew Gaines. I’ve helped
     babysit him several times and know that although he can be a four-alarm screamer if you piss him off, like any baby, most of the time he is either chuckling and grinning or dead asleep and
     really almost no trouble at all.
    The trip I’m worried about is going to be to the Chamforts’ family cabin at a place called Duck Lake somewhere up near the Canadian border in Minnesota. L.A. was invited too
     but after talking it over we decided one of us should stay with Gram. Overcome by an impulsive burst of gentlemanliness, no doubt brought on by the fact I was