Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“Drew!” Christie shouted, and he hated her even more.

The pistol rose of its own accord. Drew didn’t hear the shot, only saw the young mother convulse. He fired three more times, and Christie was down.

Eric shouted and strained against the thick glass.

The child ran for her mother as Drew leveled the gun at her.

Thomas leaped through the air shouting, “Lily!” and he pulled Mona down, wrapping his skinny body around her.

The policemen were running by then.

Drew realized what he had done, but he couldn’t stop his arm and hand from aiming and firing.

Thomas felt each bullet enter his back. He counted them — one, two, three. And then he heard firecrackers and yelling. The child was the loudest, shouting for her mother. Then came Eric with that booming voice Thomas remembered from childhood. And then the darkness he’d known since the death of his mother began to brighten. It got lighter and lighter until all there was was light — no details or shadows, just pure light and then nothing at all.

Thomas awoke in a hospital room breathing in mild alcohol vapors and other medicinal scents. He tried to remember what had happened, why he was there, but it didn’t come immediately. His back hurt. That brought on the memory of being shot.

Who shot me? The police? No, that was a long time ago and in the front not the back.

There was a spider tentatively making its way up the eggshell-colored nylon curtain next to the window. Thomas smiled, feeling akin to the gangly arachnid trying to survive in a place where cleanliness meant her demise.

“Are you awake?” a woman’s voice asked.

Thomas looked up and saw that it was Ahn. For some reason this didn’t surprise him.

“Hi,” Thomas said.

“How are you?” she asked.

She put her knitting down and sat forward in the chair, touching the edge of the mattress with her fingertips.

“I’m okay, Ahn,” Thomas said.

The ageless Vietnamese woman frowned and tilted her head. She looked closely at the weathered, battered, and scarred face. Then she drew back in frightened surprise.

“Tommy?”

“Yeah.” The solitary word floated on the music of a lifelong apology.

“What’s happened to you?” Fear and guilt clouded her usually impassive face.

“Life, I guess.”

Thomas could see this life imagined in her eyes — the knife wounds and roofless nights, broken bones and empty pockets. Ahn suffered for him.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t cry, Ahn. It’s not so bad. I’m alive.”

The little woman got to her feet and touched his callused hands, hands that were so big compared to his body that they seemed swollen.

“What happened?” Thomas asked.

“You were shot,” she said. “You saved Mona, but that boy shot you in the back trying to kill her.”

“That was the little girl?”

“Yes. The police came and killed him before he could finish killing you.”

It was as if she were talking about some story in a book or on Madeline’s TV, something far away from Thomas.

“And there was a woman?” he half-asked.

“Mona’s mother, Christie,” Ahn said solemnly. “She died on the way to the hospital.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “He took my cart and shoved it into the door. I tried to stop him.”

“You saved Mona, Tommy. Oh, Tommy, look at you.”

“Where’s Eric?”

“He’s getting ready for the funeral. It’s tomorrow. Dr. Nolan went with him. They asked me to come here and see about you. But, but they didn’t know who you were. They said your name was Bruno.”

“Why did you tell me not to call?” Thomas asked. The question had been in his heart for years. Just asking made him feel better.

Ahn couldn’t answer right away. Her eyes filled up, and she slumped into her chair.

Thomas’s back hurt and his breathing was shallow. He wanted to get up and comfort his old nurse but didn’t have the strength.

“It’s okay, Ahn. I’m here now.”

“But you are so hurt. Your hands and face. Your chest. How can all this happen to a child?”

Thomas found that he could still shrug if he didn’t pull his shoulders too high.

“I thought,” Ahn said. “I thought that if you came back home something bad would happen to you, like your mother. Maybe you get sick. I don’t know.”

“Because of Eric?”

Ahn nodded.

“Eric can’t hurt me, Ahn. He’s my brother. He always saved me.”

There was sunlight shining in through the window. Thomas realized that it didn’t hurt his eyes. He smiled then and so did Ahn.

“I forgot you,” she confessed.

“I never forgot you.”

Thomas slipped into a coma that evening. Dr. Nolan and Eric came to the hospital when Ahn told them who he was. They stood over his frail body.

“He looks so peaceful,” Eric said. “Just like he was taking a nap.”

“There’s less than a ten percent chance that he’ll revive,” said Dr. Bettye Freeling, the physician in charge of the ward.

“He might surprise you,” Minas Nolan told her. “He’s got something in him that won’t let go. He might be the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

“Do you know his family?” Freeling asked. She was a younger doctor, handsome. “I see that he’s uninsured.”

“I’ll pay for him, Doctor,” Minas said. “I owe him at least that.”

Michael and Raela came to Christie’s funeral. Michael wore a medium-brown suit because that’s all he owned. Raela wore an elegant black dress, flat black shoes, and a tasteful ebony tam, and carried a small black purse. When she touched Eric’s forearm in sympathy, there was a loud and painful crackle of static electricity.

By then everyone knew about the tryst between Drew and Christie. Drew had told his father about the affair in their brief conversation before he stole the Luger. And the doorman of the Tennyson saw them coming in late at night and watched them groping each other through the video eye in the elevator.

Almost everyone felt sorry for Eric. He was a poor cuckold, an innocent bystander. He grieved for his dead girlfriend and held their tearful daughter in his arms. Only Ahn wondered how Eric’s fateful aura had caused the hapless college dropout to murder Christie. She watched him closely. When she saw the teenage girl stand near him, she knew. It was time for him to lose his lover, Ahn thought, and so the stars conspired to kill her. The Vietnamese woman shivered under her thin silk shawl.

Christie’s parents hugged Eric and kissed their sweet granddaughter. Half of Christie’s class from Hensley showed up to express their sorrow.

Drew would be buried three days later. Only his parents and Eric came to that ceremony. Drew’s father shook Eric’s hand, thanking him for coming and apologizing for his son.

“He just never grew into a man,” Mr. Peters said. “I hope that you can one day forgive him.”

Eric didn’t answer, but he felt no enmity toward Drew. He believed that it was his own inability to love Christie that had driven the lovers together, and then his attempt to make himself love her was what destroyed them both.

Eric moved back into his father’s house so that Ahn could help with Mona. He went to the hospital every day and sat next to his comatose brother.

Thomas was surrounded by an oxygen tent that was meant to help his punctured lung heal. The doctors didn’t have much hope for him, but Eric came each morning and sat for hours in silence at his brother’s side.

One morning, after Eric’s father went to work and Ahn and Mona had gone to the stone animal park, the doorbell rang. Eric was getting ready to go to the hospital. He was on leave from his classes and had no intention of going back to school.