“Is this…you? So you changed your number?”
“I didn’t want you to find me until I was ready to tell you more.” Then she added, “It has to be this way. Is Stefan okay?”
“Not really,” I said. “Why did you send me Belinda’s poem? Did you know Belinda? If you have something to say, just say it and stop tormenting me and yourself.”
“I can’t,” she said. “It’s too late. I did things. If I said what I did, I would be all alone.”
“It sounds like you’re pretty alone right now,” I said, relenting.
“I am. Don’t ask why.”
“Well, you need some help. Seriously. Professional help. I know you weren’t there. I know exactly who was there. So please stop playing this game.”
She sighed and said, “You don’t know. You think you do, but you don’t. No one can help me now. Please just do what I asked. Just tell Stefan.”
But I still couldn’t tell Stefan about the caller, and I still didn’t. I had wanted all my life to practice restraint, and this seemed like the time. Let each day’s evil be sufficient unto that day. I weighed the caller’s warning against the positivity Stefan was beginning to feel around his return to the ordinary world. The warning felt threatening and absurd, fashioned from dark alarm. The prospect of Stefan settling down felt sunny and sensible, more like normal life.
Stefan started work at the lumberyard a week later. I don’t care what anybody else says, I think almost everyone who can work, wants to work. Everybody wants to feel good and be able to talk about work—to talk at work, to have a place to show up at regularly where you’re expected and at least minimally respected. At the lumberyard, Stefan made friends. As the winter wore on, he joined the basketball league and bowling team, pursuits he once would have considered ludicrously geezer. Stefan talked all the time about his coworkers Cal and Casey, twin brothers just a year older than he was, who’d started working at the mill the weekend after high school graduation and had already earned so much, living at home and living frugally, that they wouldn’t have one cent of college debt. There was a woman named Katie who sewed team sweatshirts for everyone and an old guy everyone called Pearl, who built harps on the side. Especially, he talked about his uncle, Andy, whom Stefan considered the stand-up guy of the universe.
It was Andy who called our home phone from the hospital emergency room that glowering afternoon. I picked up.
“Stefan is in surgery…now wait, he’s not in any danger. He’s not going to die. He’s not hurt like that. But there was an accident, an incident.”
“Tell me, Andy.”
“I’ll meet you here. I’ll explain.” He hung up. Jep was already walking in the door; my sister Amelia had called him.
“No,” I whimpered.
“Let’s just get there, and then we’ll figure everything else out,” Jep said.
At the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, we made our way through the maze. When it was built, the hospital was billed to be a marvel of modernity, but instead turned out to be something out of Alice in Wonderland, a place with no evident plan or sense. We ran to the first door we saw and then down one of the corridors that branched away like the halls in a cruise ship, past abandoned wheeled carts loaded with medical supplies. A rainstorm had started, and a sudden darkness turned the windows to opaque mirrors where I glimpsed my own face coursing rainwater tears; my shocked, rumpled hair. It was only the third time in twenty years that I’d been in any hospital—the first, right here when Stefan was born, the second, that night in Black Creek when Belinda was in surgery.
We finally came upon a woman at a long counter, all alone. A novel sat open facedown in front of her, along with a bowl of tomato soup and a sleeve of crackers.
“Hello,” I said. “Hello, please, we need help.” With a sigh, the woman glanced up. “I’m looking for Stefan Christiansen. He’s in surgery.”
“Surgery for what?”
“He was in an accident.”
“Then that would be emergency surgery. That’s in another building. You can get a map in reception.” She dipped her spoon into her soup. Both the woman and I jumped when Jep slammed his palms down on the counter.
“We’re not going to try to find our way to reception to get a goddamn map! Get off your duff and take us to the right place immediately.”
She was a massive woman, but one of those people who astounded logic because she shouldn’t be able to heft even one of her pillared thighs, but who instead moved like a cheetah. I had to run to keep up. We jogged for what seemed miles until we came to a room bordered in stiff, foreshortened green sofas. “Wait here,” she said. Then Andy and Amelia were with us.