*
Since the Code Three call to the accident, Dolores worries more. That was a few weeks ago. She braces herself for every shift to lead down that horrifying road. She sees flashes of automotive metal screwed up and broken and twisted, feels the phantom weight of a small, soft body the size and shape of a plucked Perdue chicken. Her son Tommy felt like that, too, as a baby.
“Everybody has their first real bad one, it’ll wear off,” Ted had said after she told him about her nightmares. He’d even taken her to dinner at Applebee’s and ordered them both Long Island iced teas. “And everyone has their first real bad one that doesn’t wear off,” was what Dolores had not bothered explaining to Ted, to whom little could be explained. One drink turned into three, and Ted started spilling his guts about his wife’s affair with the football coach ten years earlier. Dolores was glad for this leverage over Ted although she’d never had any use for it.
Today’s call isn’t a bad one, it’s just ridiculous. They arrive at an ordinary suburban house—yellow siding, grey trim, sprinkler ticking in the yard—and enter through the unlocked front door. On the living room floor sits a white teenage male, legs outstretched and arms crossed. Acne coats his face and neck, and his ears project outward like butterfly wings. He’s a few years older than Tommy. Dolores wonders what Tommy’s doing right now— homework, maybe, long division. She pictures him stacking the numbers atop each other in his tidy handwriting. Where did he get such nice handwriting?
Ted sets his bag on the floor and squats beside the kid.
“What’s your name?” Dolores says to him.
“Bryan,” he says, smothering his face with his hands, rocking back and forth like an ecstatic pilgrim. “That’s B-R-Y-A-N. Bryan with a ‘y.’ Nobody gets it right.”
“So, Bryan. OK—Bryan with a ‘y,’—tell us what’s going on,” Dolores says, her gaze falling on the family portraits lining the mantle. Happy pictures, yes, but posed. That’s how it goes in most houses. Would she take a fake happy family over her real one—a family from which she’s been ejected? She doesn’t know the better scenario. Either way, she only sees her son every other Sunday.
“I got too high,” the boy says.
Ted, working the blood pressure cuff, guffaws. “Excuse me?” he says.
“I smoked so much weed, I thought I was going to die. Everything turned horrible. My heart—” He puts a hand to his chest and looks at each of them, first Ted, then Dolores.
“You’re fine,” Ted says, his fingers retreating from Bryan’s wrist. “Have a sandwich. You got ice cream? Have some ice cream. Watch cartoons. You’re absolutely fine.”
“Okay,” the boy says, dazed. “Will you stay with me for just a few minutes?”
Ted rises up and puts his hands on his hips. Male posture: take up as much space as possible. Intimidate. Threaten. “People are out there dying like flies from real overdoses—”
“Ted,” Dolores says. She sits in a battered brown recliner, the corduroy worn thin from some father figure. Maybe the father has a beard. Maybe he smells faintly like cigarette smoke, even though he’s trying to quit. He’s probably a good father if all his son’s doing is smoking weed. But Dolores knows better, she knows ‘good’ has little to do with so many downfalls. (So very many, Dolores would emphasize.)