“What made you so happy?”
“Seeing you and your father together at the same table, talking and telling each other things.”
“Uh-huh.”
Branwyn turned to her son and looked into his eyes.
“Would you want to live with your father if you had the chance?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Would he come an’ stay at our house?”
“No. We’d have to move away from Minas and Eric.”
“Could Eric come live with us?”
“No. He’d have to stay with his own father.”
Thomas thought and thought, standing there in the refrigerated room. He thought about his new father and his brother, Eric. He thought about his mother crying and wished that she didn’t have to be so happy.
“Maybe Daddy could come and visit sometimes,” he said at last. “And then I could still go to school with Eric and read with Dr. Nolan.”
A f ew we e k s after Thomas had broken the greenhouse window, Eric came down with the flu. It was a bad flu, and he had a fever of 105. Minas was worried, and Ahn kept boil-ing eucalyptus leaves and bringing the steaming pots into the 3 5
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boy’s room. Eric was shivering and crying all through the night. He was in pain, and only Branwyn’s company would calm him. She sat up with him for most of three days. At the end of that time, Eric was laughing and playing and Branwyn was very tired, and so she went to bed.
The next afternoon, when Thomas and Eric got home from first grade, Thomas went to his mother’s room and found her still in bed.
“You tired, Mama?” Thomas asked.
“Very much, baby. I sat up so long with Eric, and now all I want is to sleep.”
Thomas and Eric spent many hours at her side that afternoon and evening, both of them trying to make her laugh.
She kept her eyes open as long as she could, but more and more she just slept. Minas wanted her to go to the hospital, but she refused.
“Hospital is just a death sentence,” she told him. “All I need is rest.”
On the third day Branwyn was not better. Eric heard his father tell Ahn that Branwyn had agreed to go to the hospital in the morning.
The blond tank rumbled up to his brother’s room and said,
“They’re taking Mama Branwyn to the hospital in the morning. We should pick flowers for her so her room’ll be pretty.”
“The hospital?” Thomas said.
Thomas hated the hospital. He’d been there half a dozen times that he could remember. Twice for pneumonia that had developed after he’d come down with chest colds, twice for broken bones, once for a cut when he fell down on a broken bottle, and one time when he fainted in school for no apparent reason. Every time he went they gave him shots, and twice he’d had to spend the night. He knew that people 3 6
F o r t u n a t e S o n
sometimes died in the hospital, and so when he went to bed later that night, he couldn’t go to sleep. He sat up remembering the stories of how his mother came every day and they looked at each other through the glass bubble. He believed that she had saved him by being there, and he wondered who would be there for her if he was at school.
Thomas went to her room after midnight. Branwyn stayed in her own bedroom when she was sick. She needed everything quiet and “no man kicking around in the bed.”
He climbed up quietly on the bed and stared into his mother’s face. At first he planned just to look at her as she’d told him she’d done when he was asleep in the ICU.
“Didn’t you wake me up?” he asked her.
“No, baby. You needed to sleep to get better and so I just sat there, but I’m sure you knew I was there in your dreams.”
Thomas planned to do the same thing, to sit so close that his mother’s dreams would drink him in. But after a few minutes he worried that maybe she had died. She was so quiet, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing.
“Mama?”
She opened her eyes and said, “Yes, baby?”
“I know how to answer the story.”
“What story?”
“The one Daddy said.”
“What is it?”
“First you take the rooster to the other side an’ leave him there. Then you come back and get the fox and bring him to the other side. Then you put the rooster back in the boat and take him back and leave him on the first side and you take the corn over to where the fox is. Now the corn and the fox are together but that’s okay, and so you
