Free Willnot by James Sallis Page B

“Two walked, two waiting, one pledged to come back later.”
    Not a bad tally, considering.
    “I thought about holding his driver’s license, tell him he could redeem it when he returned.”
    “Are we that desperate?”
    “Not yet. Freda Malone’s in your office.”
    “Is Michael—”
    “With her.”
    And his head was already turning toward my voice when I walked in. Freda held him up.
    “See how much weight he’s put on!”
    Michael had become my occasional patient at age eleven months, having begun life four months early at just over a pound. Now he was three. He’d spent five months in the NICU at University Hospital and still went there for major problems or checkups; between times, he came to see me. See being a metaphor only, since he’d lost his eyesight to oxygen toxicity. But he knew my voice, always turned toward me when he heard it.
    I said hello to Freda and asked if Michael was all right. She said again “See how much weight he’s put on!” and started crying. I sat down in the chair by her and took the boy.
    “He’s fine,” she sputtered.
    “And you’re not.”
    She held her breath a moment to still the tears. “Michael’s daddy, he left us, been two weeks ago Tuesday.”
    Michael’s daddy . Not Preston, or Pres.
    It’s something you see a lot with chronically ill children. No matter how close the couple is, how devoted, the demands eat away at families. So much of the caretaker’s time and energy is spent on the child that there’s little left over for husband or wife, other kids, any pretense of a normal life. Ties wither. Affection fades. Tamped-down anger on every side.
    “What did Preston say?” I asked.
    “You know him, three words would be a speech.”
    And communication’s the first thing to go. Not that Preston was much of a talker to start with. More a nod-for-hello, grunt-to-indicate-he-was-listening kind of guy.
    “He left a bunch of money, said he’d send more.”
    “Have you talked to your social worker about this? Cathy, is it?”
    “You mean Candy up at the hospital, that’s been following Michael? No.”
    “Do. She can talk you through this. Ask her to call me if there’s anything I can help with.”
    Michael had to be among the quietest babies ever, always attentive, always reactive, but rarely emitting sounds. As though his beginnings, as he lay intubated and unable to cry or vocalize, subject to continuous pain and discomfort, had set silence indelibly at the center of his world.
    I held out a finger, he nibbled at it, I handed him back to his mother.
    “You know you can call me anytime, right?”
    “Thank you. I’m … I’m really scared. Not like before, not even all those times Michael was doing so poorly. This is different.”
    I walked Freda to the door and asked Maryanne to give me a minute before sending anyone in. I’d almost told Freda “You’ll be fine” but stopped myself. All those phrases that sprout so easily on the tongue, the dross of bad movies and hospital corridors: It will get better, It’s for the best, Everything will be okay, You’ll be fine. I had promised myself during residency to delete them from my vocabulary. Yet another promise I hadn’t kept, perhaps couldn’t keep, but I hung close.
    It wouldn’t get better for Freda, or would do so by tiny, invisible increments. She would never be fine. She would never see fine, never so much as catch sight of it on a hilltop far away, beckoning.

13
    “The assignment was to write about where you live, at least three pages. The idea being, what we talked about in class before, that most of us are forever looking off into the distance, don’t see the world around us. Nathan turned in twenty-three pages. With a note apologizing and saying he knew how busy I was and I didn’t have to read all of it.”
    “This is the ant-farm kid, right?”
    “Ant mill. But yes.”
    Richard was in his homeboy clothes, baggy tan pants, unbuttoned plaid shirt over a T-shirt the legend of which