Somebody had my foot.
A hand had it through the blanket and was squeezing it, hard, the way you check a cantaloupe. Then a man’s voice came from down at that end of the bed, big, the kind that carries across a parking lot.
“There he is.”
I opened my eyes. Ceiling tiles. A light in a plastic box. A man at the foot of the bed with his hand around my foot, and my foot was a long way off. It was further away than my foot goes.
“There he is,” the man said again. His voice went wrong in the middle. He let go of my foot and turned around and looked at the wall for a while.
A woman on my left had both hands over her mouth. She was crying without any noise. She had short brown hair to her chin and a cardigan with a name tag still clipped to it, a tooth on the tag, DONNA. Past her, in the doorway, there was a tall kid in a grey hoodie that said CROWCHILD FOOTBALL. He had one shoulder on the frame. He didn’t come in.
I didn’t know any of them.
I went to sit up. I put my hand on the bed rail to push, and my hand went all the way around the rail and the fingers met the thumb on the other side. I let go. I looked at it. It was the size of a hand on a man who lifts things. There was a scab across two of the knuckles and a callus on the side of the thumb I’d never had.
I made it into a fist. It did that.
“What,” I said.
It came out of somebody’s chest. Low, and it cracked in the middle like ice going on a pond. I shut my mouth.
“Easy, bud,” the man said. He had his face back. He was big, with a red neck and a golf shirt that said REIMER MECHANICAL over the heart, and he was holding the foot rail now with both hands like he wanted to pick the bed up. “You fell. You fell and hit your head on that damn desk. You’ve been out a week.”
“I hit the bed,” I said.
That was true. I’d gone over sideways at 12:06 and the bed frame was coming at the back of my head. I put my hand back there. Nothing. No bump. I put it on top and there was no hair. There was stubble, short and soft, like the felt on a pool table. Mom had never once let me cut it above my shoulders.
I put my hand on my forehead. There was tape there, and under the tape a row of hard little knots over my right eyebrow.
“Stitches,” the woman said. “Seven. Don’t pick. You’ll want to pick.”
“Who are you?” I said.
The man laughed, one bark, and then stopped like he’d walked into something. The woman took her hands off her mouth.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
Then she sat down in the chair behind her, all at once, as if somebody had cut a string.
* * *
The nurse was called Yvette. She had pins all over her lanyard and glasses up on her head, and she didn’t seem worried about any of it.
“You’re my second this morning,” she said, shining a little light in my eyes. “Must be something in the water. Look at my finger. Now the other one. Push. Pull. Good. Strong boy.”
Strong boy.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“No.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Hospital.”
“Year?”
“Two thousand eight.”
“Who won the Stanley Cup?”
“Detroit.”
The man let go of the foot rail and pointed at me with his whole arm. “That’s my boy,” he said to the room.
“And these folks?” Yvette said.
I looked at them. The woman, the man, the kid in the door. The kid in the door looked back. He had a long face with nothing on it.
“No,” I said.
The woman said “Oh” again, very small. She didn’t say okay that time.
They told me anyway, while Yvette wrote. The woman did most of it, in order, like reading off a list taped to a fridge. I was Nathan. Nathan Reimer. I was fourteen as of last Saturday. That was Dad, Gordon. She was Mom. The one in the doorway was my brother, Brett, seventeen, going into Grade 12 at Crowchild. We lived in Hawkwood. I had a room at the end of the hall upstairs. I was going into Grade 9 at Bow Crest in the fall. My dad had the week off. Brett had a job at the golf course but he’d switched his shifts.
Brett didn’t say anything about the shifts. He was looking at my hands.
Nathan. I said it in my head while she talked. I said it again to see if it would still be there, and it was.
* * *
Dr. Anand came after lunch. She was small and had short hair and a cardigan on, even though it was June, and she pulled a chair up so her face was level with mine.
She told it to me, not to them. A fall in the night, a head injury. A week out. Some inflammation in the fluid from my spine, so probably a virus, an encephalitis, and they might never know which. Memory loss, common with this kind of injury, mostly personal things. It might come back. It might not.
“One more thing,” she said. “Episodes like this can come back. If he’s ever hard to wake, you call 911. You don’t wait to see.”
The man, Gordon, nodded hard, like she’d given him a job. The woman, Donna, wrote it on the back of an envelope from her purse.
It sat on me after the doctor left, the way the sky sits on a town before hail. I’d slept a week and come up in the wrong body. If I slept that long again, I didn’t know what I’d come up in.
There were cards on the tray table. A big one from Gordon’s shop that said THE GUYS on the front in marker, with a drawing of a furnace with a face. One from Donna’s office with a cartoon tooth in a bandage. A Flames card from somebody called Uncle Barry. At the back, behind the others, there was a plain white one, folded once, with nothing on the front.
“That one’s from the chaplain, I think,” Donna said. “Somebody comes around.”
I opened it. There were two balloons drawn on the inside, a pink one and a blue one, with their strings tied together in a bow. Beside them it said:
One year. Then wish again, together: stay, or go back.
Blue ballpoint. Ordinary writing. No name. I read it, and then I read it again with my thumb under each word.
I hadn’t said it out loud. I’d said it in my head with my eyes shut, slow, all the words, at a pink cake in Royal Oak, and nobody had been close enough to hear it.
Stay. I’d have said it to the card right there, out loud, with Donna in the chair.
I put the card inside the pillowcase, where Donna couldn’t tidy it.
Together. I didn’t have anybody to be together with. I didn’t have anybody in this whole city.
That night Gordon took Donna down to the cafeteria to make her eat something, and Brett stayed. He sat in the chair by the window with his feet up on the heater and his phone flipped open, not texting anybody.
“You really don’t remember anything,” he said.
“No.”
“Not the lake.”
“No.”
“Not Dad’s truck. Not Grandpa’s funeral. Not me.”
“No.”
“Huh.” He shut the phone. There was a fruit basket on the windowsill from somebody at Gordon’s shop, wrapped in yellow cellophane. He pulled the cellophane open and took out an orange and turned it over in his hand. Then he threw it at my head, not hard and not soft either.
I caught it. One hand, without thinking, the way I used to catch the tennis ball coming off the garage door. It smacked into my palm and stayed there.
Brett looked at the orange. Then he looked at me.
“What,” I said.
“Nothing.” He put his feet back up on the heater. “Eat it. Mom’ll be happy.”
I peeled it. He watched me do it the whole time, like I was parallel parking.
* * *
Sunday a physio came and walked me up and down the hall with a belt around my waist that he held on to from behind.
He didn’t need it. My legs were weak for about four steps and then they weren’t. The floor came up under my feet and stayed where it was. I’d always walked like I was about to get in trouble. This body walked like it owned the hall.
“Slow down, big guy,” the physio said. “This isn’t the Stampede.”
Big guy.
I slowed down. I sped up again when he wasn’t paying attention.
Most of the doors along the hall were shut. One had a crayon horse on it with six legs. Mine had a Flames pennant taped to it. Gordon had done it Saturday night with tape from the nurses’ desk, so I’d always know which one was mine.
On Monday I went into the little washroom by myself and looked in the mirror over the sink.
He had a long face and a buzz cut and stitches under tape. He was bigger than me by a head. He had my eyebrows, the ones that go up in the middle so you look worried even when you’re not, and that was the only thing on him that was mine. Everything else had been somebody else’s until a week ago.
I made a face at him. He made it back.
That afternoon Donna brought a photo album from home and then didn’t open it. She sat with it on her lap with both hands flat on the cover while the physio talked. When he’d gone she slid one photo out from the front and handed it to me.
It was a baby in a red quilted jacket, sitting on a hotel bedspread, with a man’s hand flat beside it for size.
“That’s you,” she said. “That’s the day we got you. Changsha, in February. It was so cold in that hotel your dad slept in his parka.” She laughed a little. “You’re from Hunan. You knew that. We told you.”
“Hunan,” I said.
Mom said that about me too. Hunan. She said it every New Year, folding dumplings at the counter with the cookbook propped on the toaster. Lots of kids came from Hunan, she said. Half the kids at the adoption picnic in Lethbridge were from Hunan.
I gave the photo back. Donna looked at it, and then at me, and put it back in the album in exactly the same place.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
In the hall I heard the doctor talking to Donna outside my door. “He’s doing very well. He’s a strong kid. He’ll be tired for a few weeks.”
He.
I lay there and let it land on me. It was like the first chinook in February, when the snow goes soft overnight and everybody walks around with their coats open.
* * *
On Wednesday Donna brought clothes from home in a gym bag. Jeans, a Stampeders T-shirt, runners, a zip hoodie, a brown wallet with a Velcro flap. In the wallet there was a student card from Bow Crest with my face on it, from before, with hair. There was a Reimer Mechanical business card and a five-dollar bill folded very small.
The jeans fit. I don’t know why that surprised me. They were his jeans.
I put the card from the pillowcase into the wallet, behind the five.
Gordon got there at quarter to one. He came in already talking.
“Some lady in a little silver Pontiac came around the loop like her hair was on fire. Nearly took my mirror off.” He held his hands about a foot apart to show how close. “I’m in the fifteen-minute spot. I’ll move it.”
A silver Pontiac.
Mom drove a silver Pontiac. So did half of Lethbridge. I sat on the bed with my hands on my knees and didn’t ask him anything.
Gordon didn’t move the truck. There was a family meeting with Dr. Anand, a handout about concussions, and a lot of signing, and at half past two Yvette wheeled me to the elevator because nobody walks out, those are the rules. She said I was her second one going home today, so the floor would be quiet, and she could finally do her crossword.
The truck was still in the fifteen-minute spot. There was an envelope under the wiper. Gordon took it off and read it and folded it and put it in his shirt pocket.
“Forty bucks,” he said. “Worth every penny.” He clapped me on the back, hard. It didn’t move me.
* * *
The house was on a cul-de-sac in Hawkwood. Two storeys, beige siding, a double garage, a basketball net over the door with no net in it. Donna had put a sign in the front window that said WELCOME HOME NATHAN in letters cut out of construction paper, and somebody had drawn a football next to it.
Inside it smelled of somebody else’s laundry soap. The stairs went up past a shelf on the landing full of trophies. Most of them were Brett’s: hockey, football, a big gold one with a running man on top. At the end there was a little plastic medal on a ribbon that said PARTICIPANT, with NATHAN R. on a sticker on the back.
My room was at the end of the hall.
Somebody had picked everything in it, and it wasn’t the kid who slept there. The bedspread had footballs on it. There was a Flames poster over the bed and a Stampeders schedule on the back of the door and a framed photo of a quarterback with a signature across the bottom that said To Nathan, keep working! in silver pen. The closet was golf shirts with collars and two pairs of khakis with the tags still on.
The cleats were on the floor by the desk in their Stampeders paper. The camp form was on the desk, with July 28 to August 1 at Shouldice Park, NATHAN REIMER in capitals, and a question mark beside POSITION.
There was a chip out of the front corner of the desk, low, about the height of a head going down. The wood was pale where it had come off. Somebody had wiped the carpet under it and the carpet was still a little lighter in a patch.
On the desk, by the lamp, there was a painted wizard no taller than my thumb. He had a staff and a dark blue robe dotted all over with silver stars. Somebody had painted him carefully, a long time, and gone over the edge of one sleeve and painted it back.
Nothing else in the room looked picked. The wizard did.
I didn’t touch him. I left him exactly where he was, facing the lamp, and sat on the bed with the footballs on it, and looked at the walls until it got dark. It got dark at about half past ten. Whoever had lived in this room hadn’t lived in it much.
* * *
At twenty to midnight I went down for water.
The kitchen phone was on the wall beside a calendar. Every square was full, in different colours of pen. Gordon was blue, Brett was red, Donna was purple, and Nathan was green, mostly. CAMP ran across the last week of July in green, and DR. ANAND was on the twenty-third. Somebody had written BACK TO SCHOOL on the second of September in all four colours, with a smiley face.
I knew the number in Royal Oak. Mom made me learn it the day we moved. She stuck it on the fridge and tested me at supper.
I dialled all of it.
It rang twice.
“Hello?”
It was her. She sounded tired. She sounded like she’d been crying earlier and stopped and then washed her face.
I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have a voice that was mine to say it with.
“Hello? Who is this?” She waited. “Look, it’s nearly midnight. My daughter just got home from the hospital today, and she’s asleep. Okay? Don’t call here.”
She hung up.
I stood there with the phone against my ear and the dial tone going. I thought about the lady in the silver Pontiac, and Yvette with her second one going home. Just got home from the hospital.
Somebody was asleep in my bed in Royal Oak. In the morning Mom would make them toast and cut it in triangles and ask them if they’d slept okay, and they’d say yes.
Whoever it was had lived in this house until a week ago. Whoever it was had painted that wizard, or been given it, and kept it by the lamp. If it was me in there, in a bed in Royal Oak with long hair and a pink dress on the chair, I’d want it back. I’d want it back so bad I’d walk here.
I could have gone over there. It was ten minutes in a car. I knew the way.
I put the phone back on the hook and pressed it in square. I stood in the kitchen in the dark until I was sure about the other thing.
I didn’t want to give it back.
* * *
When I got upstairs Brett was in my doorway. He was in a T-shirt and boxers and his hair was flat on one side.
“You awake?” he said.
“Yeah.”
He looked at me a second longer than people usually look. I don’t know what he was looking for.
“Okay,” he said, and went back down the hall.
* * *
In the morning Gordon made eggs. He made them in a frying pan the size of a manhole cover, a dozen at once, standing over them in a golf shirt and boxers and saying the weather to himself. “Twenty-six by noon. Good day for it. Furnace guys’ll be twiddling their thumbs and the AC guys’ll be run off their feet.”
Donna put a plate in front of me with four eggs on it and toast. She cut the toast in half, straight across.
I ate all of it. I’d never been that hungry in my life. It was like the hunger had been waiting for this body to show up.
“Look at him go,” Gordon said. He sat down across from me with the camp form, which he’d brought down from my room, and flattened it on the table with both hands. “Doc says no contact for four weeks. Four weeks takes you to the end of July. You’ll be back on the field by August. You watch.”
I’d played soccer since I was six. I’d asked for football every year since I was nine. Mom said there wasn’t a girls’ team, and there wasn’t, and she said it like that settled it.
I looked at the form. POSITION: ?
“Yeah,” I said.
Donna made two more eggs.