A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [24]
Bill had not been there, however, when the incident with the alcohol had occurred. That was how Bridget thought of it now: The Incident with the Alcohol.
Bridget had woken on a Monday morning with the intention of making French toast for Matt and Lucas Frye, a friend of her son’s who had slept over the night before. Lucas’s parents—and Bill as well—were traveling. Feeling peppier than usual, Bridget had gone into the kitchen in her bathrobe, set out the ingredients, and then climbed the stairs to rouse the two boys. She called from the open door into Matt’s bedroom, Lucas answering groggily. Bridget thought, with some relief, that Lucas would get Matt up and into the shower without her having to do anything, an unexpected boon on a Monday morning. But it was Lucas alone, sheepish and bleary-eyed, who appeared twenty minutes later at the breakfast table. Bridget chastised herself for not having stayed up to make sure the boys got to bed on time.
“Where’s Matt?”
“He won’t get up.”
“Seriously?”
“I can’t get him up” was all Lucas would say, trying not to look at the frying bacon.
“You feel okay?” she asked, and Lucas shrugged. Bridget assumed that Lucas was simply as intractable on school mornings as her son.
Once again, Bridget mounted the stairs and walked into Matt’s room. He was not in the bed. She called his name, left the bedroom, checked the bathroom, and then returned to his room. It was then that Bridget noticed, in the center of a tangle of jeans and T-shirts and video games, an oval of vomit, orange colored and dried, on the carpet. Bridget called her son’s name again and walked further into the room so that she could see between the twin beds. Matt was lying on his side, wearing a pair of mesh basketball shorts and a T-shirt, his feet ensnared in his jeans as if he had made an effort to get dressed. Frightened, Bridget shouted his name. She knelt beside her son and tried unsuccessfully to rouse him. She sat back with a jolt that ran from her throat to her stomach. Had Matt had a seizure?
She ran to the top of the stairs and called Lucas’s name, in hopes of discovering what the boys had been doing, but, as she later discovered, Lucas had already let himself out of the house and was walking to school. Bridget dialed 911, returned to Matt’s room, and felt for his pulse, which, alarmingly, was racing. Oddly, her son did not smell of alcohol, which both the EMTs and the police commented upon, asking her repeatedly if her son was prone to seizures. Bridget thought of all the reasons a fifteen-year-old boy might have had a seizure, none of them good. The EMTs put Matt on a stretcher and carried him down the stairs and out the door to the waiting ambulance. Bridget thought, as she pulled on jeans and a sweater, This can’t be happening.
Two police cars and an ambulance were in her driveway, the lights of all three vehicles flashing, a small circus certain to bring every neighbor to the window. A mild drizzle fell, and Bridget, though shaking now, worried about Lucas. She told one of the policemen that he should try to find the boy.
Bridget took a seat in the front of the ambulance. No sirens wailed as they drove to the hospital, a silence that alternately alarmed and soothed her. She peered through the narrow opening to the back of the vehicle and saw an EMT rub hard on Matt’s sternum, rousing her son long enough for him to utter a word Bridget had never heard her son say and which nearly caused her to demand that he watch his language, despite the ludicrousness of the reprimand. Before they got to the hospital, news reached the driver via the radio that Lucas had been found on his way to school and had confessed: