The doctor says it’s best if Tom stays out of school and Mother agrees. Keep
indoors, the doctor says. If you get excited, think of something blue. Mother lets
him come downstairs for meals and chores only. Otherwise he’s to stay in his
closet. We have to be more careful, Tomcat, she whispers, and sets her palm
on his forehead.
Tom spends long hours on the floor beside his cot, assembling and
reassembling the same jigsaw puzzle: a Swiss village. Five hundred pieces,
nine of them missing. Sometimes Mr. Weems reads to Tom from adventure
novels. They’re blasting a new vein down in the mines and in the lulls between
Mr. Weems’s words, Tom can feel explosions reverberate up through a
thousand feet of rock and shake the fragile pump in his chest.
He misses school. He misses the sky. He misses everything. When Mr. Weems
is in the mine and Mother is downstairs, Tom often slips to the end of the hall
and lifts aside the curtains and presses his forehead to the glass. Children run
the snowy lanes and lights glow in the foundry windows and train cars trundle
beneath elevated conduits. First-shift miners emerge from the mouth of the
hauling elevator in groups of six and bring out cigarette cases from their overalls
and strike matches and spill like little, salt-dusted insects out into the night, while
the darker figures of the second-shift miners stamp their feet in the cold, waiting
outside the cages for their turn in the pit.
In dreams he sees waving sea fans and milling schools of grouper and
underwater shafts of light. He sees Ruby Hornaday push open the door of his
closet. She’s wearing a copper diving helmet; she leans over his cot and puts
the window of her helmet an inch from his face.
He wakes with a shock. Heat pools in his groin. He thinks, Blue, blue, blue.
***
One drizzly Saturday, the bell rings. When Tom opens the door, Ruby Hornaday
is standing on the stoop in the rain.
Hello. Tom blinks a dozen times. Raindrops set a thousand intersecting circles
upon the puddles in the road. Ruby holds up a jar: six black tadpoles squirm in
an inch of water.
Seemed like you might be interested in water creatures.
Tom tries to answer, but the whole sky is rushing through the open door into his
mouth.
You’re not going to faint again, are you?
Mr. Weems stumps into the foyer. Jesus, boy, she’s damp as a church, you got
to invite a lady in.
Ruby stands on the tiles and drips. Mr. Weems grins. Tom mumbles, My heart.
95