Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [29]
The service was attended by Jude, Johnny, Harriet, Prudence, Kram and Delph and their parents, Rachael and her parents, the guidance counselor and two teachers from Ira Allen High School, and six or eight dutiful, well-dressed students, mostly girls, whose names Prudence knew but Teddy probably hadn’t. They had received permission to miss half of their second day back at school, and arrived on a school bus, the driver of which, a large black woman with pink curlers in her hair, also attended. The minister read a passage about shepherds and lambs. Delph played “Stairway to Heaven” on Jude’s guitar, but it wasn’t tuned. Jude wore a white button-down shirt, navy blue Dockers, a pair of Vans, and a clip-on tie borrowed from Delph.
Before Johnny returned to New York, he went through Teddy’s room in Queen Bea’s abandoned house, taking with him Teddy’s posters and clothes and record collection and the cardboard box of ashes. The rest of the family’s furnishings were sold in a yard sale organized by Kram’s mother, the proceeds from which she later sent to Johnny, folded in a cream-colored note she signed Joan, which he studied for some time before placing the name.
In the ICU, Jude had breathed warm air that tasted like the beach, listening to the Darth Vader rasp of his lungs. Salt water flowed in his veins, sugar and saline, thawing his limbs. His temperature when the ambulance arrived had been eighty-seven degrees. He had been shivering violently—his mother believed he was having a seizure—and if he’d been any colder, they said, his body would have shut down, and soon his heart would have stopped beating.
On the third morning in the hospital, the young doctor who had overseen Jude’s MRI, the one who wore a ballpoint pen speared through her elaborate French twist, led Harriet into her office. When she drew a folder from a stack on her cluttered desk, Harriet knew what was coming: the bill. She had signed three or four consent forms already, on clipboards balanced on her knee beside Jude’s bed, but no one had mentioned money, and she hadn’t mentioned that she didn’t have any. Before the divorce and for brief periods afterward, she had invested in family health care plans of the discount variety, but her children were rarely sick. It was cheaper to pay for Jude’s Ritalin out of pocket than to cover the monthly premiums. For the big things, like the children’s braces, she called Les.
She would, of course, have to call him again. She had called him the day it happened (strangely, he already knew the story—his girlfriend’s daughter and Teddy’s poor brother, who had somehow become associated, had just burst through the door with the news), but she’d been too panicked at that point to discuss finances with her ex-husband—or, for that matter, to talk to the daughter, whom she’d hoped could fill in the details of the previous evening. The detective assigned to Teddy’s case soon took care of that, questioning the girl and Teddy’s brother and Jude’s friends Kram and Delph. Jude, when the oxygen mask had been removed, volunteered that the huffing, both times, had been his idea, and that the marijuana had been Teddy’s mother’s (how easily it could have been her own!), but nobody seemed to know anything about how the boy had gotten his hands on cocaine in Lintonburg. In the end, Harriet wasn’t certain it mattered. Thankfully, the police officer was discreet, and kind; he did not wish to badger a boy in a hospital bed. No foul play had taken place, just an accumulation of poor choices.
“Mrs. Horn,” began the doctor, extracting the pen from her hair.
“Ms. I’m divorced. In fact, I never took my husband’s name. Always just Ms. Horn.”
“Ms. Horn—”
“I hope you have some more papers for me to sign,” Harriet said lightly, putting on her glasses.
The doctor produced