Free Presbyterian Crosswalk: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page B

hair stood out between her fingers.
    “Where did it happen?” Beth said.
    “On Glenmore. In front of the post office.”
    Beth started running toward Glenmore, but Helen called, “There’s nothing there now, everything’s gone!” so Beth stopped and turned, and for a moment Helen and the swings seemed to continue turning, coming round and round like Helen’s voice saying, “You missed the whole thing. You missed it. You missed the whole thing.”
    “He was on his bike,” Helen said, dropping onto a swing, “and an eyewitness said that the car skidded on water and knocked him down, then ran over him twice, once with a front tire and once with a back one. I got there before the ambulance. He probably won’t live. You could tell by his eyes. His eyes were glazed.” Helen’s eyes, blue, huge because of her glasses, didn’t blink.
    “That’s awful,” Beth said.
    “Yes, it really was,” Helen said, matter-of-factly. “He’s not the first person I’ve seen who nearly died, though. My aunt nearly drowned in the bathtub when we were staying at her house. She became a human vegetable.”
    “Was the boy bleeding?” Beth asked.
    “Yes, there was blood everywhere.”
    Beth covered her mouth with both hands.
    Helen looked thoughtful. “I think he’ll probably die,” she said. She pumped her fat legs but without enough energy to get the swing going. “I’m going to die soon,” she said.
    “You are?”
    “You probably know that I have water on the brain,” Helen said.
    “Yes, I know that,” Beth said. Everyone knew. It was why Helen wasn’t supposed to run. It was why her head was so big.
    “Well, more and more water keeps dripping in all the time, and one day there will be so much that my brain will literally drown in it.”
    “Who said?”
    “The doctors, who else?”
    “They said, ‘You’re going to die’?”
    Helen threw her an ironic look. “Not exactly. What they tell you is, you’re not going to live.” She squinted up at a plane going by. “The boy, he had … I think it was a rib, sticking out of his back.”
    “Really?”
    “I
think
it was a rib. It was hard to tell because of all the blood.” With the toe of her shoe, Helen began to jab a hole in the sand under her swing. “A man from the post office hosed the blood down the sewer, but some of it was already caked from the sun.”
    Beth walked toward the shade of the picnic table. The air was so thick and still. Her arms and legs, cutting through it, seemed to produce a thousand soft clashes.
    “The driver was an old man,” Helen said, “and he was crying uncontrollably.”
    “Anybody
would
cry,” Beth said hotly. Her eyes filled with tears.
    Helen squirmed off her swing and came over to the table. Grunting with effort, she climbed onto the seat across from Beth and began to roll her head. “At least
I’ll
die in one piece,” she said.
    “Are you really going to?” Beth asked.
    “Yep.” Helen rotated her head three times one way, then three times the other. Then she propped it up with her hands cupped under her chin.
    “But can’t they do anything to stop the water dripping in?” Beth asked.
    “Nope,” Helen said distantly, as if she were thinking about something more interesting.
    “You know what?” Beth said, swiping at her tears. “If every night, you closed your eyes and chanted over and over ‘Water go away, water go away, water go away,’ maybe it would start to, and then your head would shrink down.”
    Helen smirked. “Somehow,” she said, “I doubt it.”
    From the edge of the picnic table Beth tore a long sliver of wood like the boy’s rib. She pictured the boy riding his bike no-hands, zigzagging down the street the way boys did. She imagined bursting Helen’s head with the splinter to let the water gush out.
    “I’m thirsty,” Helen sighed. “I’ve had a big shock today. I’m going home for some lemonade.”
    Beth went with her. It was like walking with her grandmother, who, because