Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“At the bottom I wrote two questions,” he told Bill. “It’s all I want to know — nothing else. I don’t want addresses or telephone numbers or photos.”

Bill unfolded the paper, his lips moving as he read through the information. Aaron could tell when he got to the two questions:

1. Is she alive?

2. Is she happy?

Bill looked up. “Happy?” he said. “How the hell am I going to know if she’s happy?”

* * *

When Aaron was ten — almost ten — he fell into a coma that lasted two days, a coma that the doctors were never able to explain. It started on a Wednesday, after school. He went upstairs to do his homework in their apartment above the café, and when he did not come back down at four to eat a quick meal before helping his mother prepare for the supper crowd, she came upstairs and found him on his bed. When he awoke Friday evening, he did not remember arriving home from school Wednesday afternoon and drinking a glass of milk before climbing the stairs to his room, did not remember sitting at his desk and working out ten math problems (correctly) before going over to his bed to lie down. When his mother could not awaken him, she had run downstairs and across the street to Bildt Hardware, returning with Harold, who carried Aaron, wrapped in a blanket, down the back stairs to the Oldsmobile. Harold had offered to drive so that his mother could sit in the backseat with Aaron, but she had said no, so firmly that Harold turned without saying another word and went back to his store.

Aaron knew these details, the blow-by-blow account of what had happened, because his mother, hoping to force his memory, had described it all for him later, starting with the moment she entered his bedroom and called his name, shaking him harder and harder. As she spoke, he had closed his eyes and tried to visualize it, but he knew that the images in his head were not memories. “Finally I lifted your shirt,” she said, “and put my finger inside your belly button.”

He opened his eyes. “Why?” His mother knew that he could not bear to have his navel touched.

“I just wanted to be sure,” she said.

“Sure of what?”

“That you weren’t playing a game,” she said, which made no sense because his mother knew he was not a boy who played games. “Now concentrate.” He closed his eyes again and willed himself to recall the swaying of the car and the blanket like a cocoon around him, but he could not remember any of it. His mother always ended the story at the moment that she sent Harold Bildt back to his hardware store, which meant that he would never know what she had done as she drove the eleven miles to the hospital in Florence, whether she had spoken to him soothingly or even sternly—“I want you to stop the foolishness this minute, Aaron”—or whether she had not spoken at all.

The café had stayed closed while his mother sat beside his bed, waiting for the doctors to know something, waiting for him to open his eyes. When he finally did open them and took in his surroundings, she was there, sitting at the window, her head turned away from him so that she did not even know at first that he was awake. For several minutes, he had watched her stare out into the darkness as he tried to recall what had happened. He remembered walking down the alley to the café, stopping to feed the stray cat he called Clary that waited for him after school because Aaron always brought the cat leftovers from his lunch. The smell of tuna casserole and Clary rubbing himself against his legs — these were the last things Aaron remembered. Over his bed the nurses had stretched a length of string, on which cards were slung like tiny saddles. They were from his classmates, but when he read through them later, he could not reconcile the sentiments expressed—“Get well soon. We miss you!”—with the names printed after them, for these were the same children who rarely spoke to him and chose him last for their teams, even their spelling teams, though he was clearly the best speller in the class. On the table sat a pitcher of water, a vase with flowers, and a stack of books, his books. He turned back toward his mother, who was still staring out into the darkness, and whispered, “Mom,” and then, “Mother.” Neither sounded right, but she turned from the window, slowly, as though she had forgotten where she was, forgotten that he lay in a coma behind her.

Three doctors came in and stood around his bed, unsure what to say about the coma or his sudden recovery from it. “Welcome back, young man,” said one of them finally, as though he had been on a trip. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Clary,” he said. “I was feeding Clary.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” his mother said, not to him but to the doctors. “Clary is a family friend, but Aaron hasn’t seen him in nearly three years. He’s a dwarf,” she added, as though it might be relevant.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” said the doctor who had asked Aaron what he remembered. “There’s bound to be some confusion.” He leaned in close and looked into Aaron’s eyes with a small flashlight, then wrote something on a chart while one of the other doctors, a tonsured man named Dr. McFarley, fiddled with the water pitcher beside the bed before suggesting that the coma might have been anxiety induced.

All three doctors seized on this. “Is he under stress at school?” they asked. “At home? Anywhere?” Aaron lay in the hospital bed listening.

“His birthday’s coming up,” his mother said finally. “I told him he could invite only four friends. He looked upset. Maybe he feels bad about not inviting the others.”

It was true that he had been upset, upset because he understood that four was not a restriction but a quota, even though his mother knew that he did not have four friends to invite. She glanced at Aaron, giving him the look that they had used to signal collusion against his father, a look that meant that his job was to play along. Later, when he was back home, she told him that the coma was a mystery and would always be a mystery and that sitting in the hospital talking about it would not have solved the mystery, that she had just wanted to get him out of there.

In the end, the three doctors agreed that the coma was probably anxiety induced. They told his mother that she needed to find a way to accommodate all of his classmates, so the afternoon of his birthday, she closed the café and the party was held there, amid the booths and tables. All of his classmates came, though Aaron did not know whether they came because their parents had made them or because the coma had temporarily elevated his status or simply because they were attracted by the novelty of having the café to themselves. He received twenty-eight presents, most of them reflecting the tastes and interests of the givers — rubber snakes and magic tricks, various wheeled objects, and lots of bubblegum — but only one book, from Vickie, the messy girl who loved reading almost as much as he did. He knew that she had read the book before giving it to him because there was a thumbprint on each page, although the smudges stopped twenty pages before the end. He wondered whether she had grown bored with the book or run out of time. It did not occur to him that she might have washed her hands.

In the year following the coma, his mother took him in twice for checkups. Both times the doctor said he seemed fine, that there was nothing to worry about. Still, he thought his mother did worry, and he took to making noise as he studied after school — dropping a book, stepping heavily from desk to bed — but later he decided that he had imagined her concern. There was no proof other than the comments from customers about how frightening the whole thing must have been for her, but their comments were not evidence of what his mother actually felt, and beyond taking him in for checkups, she said nothing. Over the years, when he thought about the coma, he thought about waking up in the hospital and looking around for his mother, how that had been his first response, and about seeing her there at the window, how he had wondered — but would never know — whether she was watching something outside in the darkness or just studying her own reflection.