“Whoa. That’s…intense.”
“Tell me about it. The wildest part is I honestly don’t love football enough to play in college. Hell, if I were more into it, I probably would have taken one of the scholarships.”
“So what do you want to do? Like, in life.”
“I don’t really know. And I’ve avoided thinking about it because—well, the company. I’d probably have to try a bunch of stuff before I figured it out. And I’d be lying if I said not knowing doesn’t scare the shit out of me.”
I don’t say “Welcome to the real world, pal!” Though, man oh man, do I want to. “So whatcha gonna do?”
“I knew you would ask that.”
“So?”
But he doesn’t get a chance to answer because I hear Mama come in. “Actually, hold that thought. I gotta run.”
“Yeah, yeah, fine.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Cool.”
I hang up just as Mama pokes her head in the door. “Jaxy has a fever?”
“Huh?”
Her eyes drop to the phone—with my hand still on it—and narrow. “You’re surely not back here on the phone while your brother’s curled up on the couch alone with a fever….”
All the air leaves the room. “A fever?”
“Yes. A fever. When’s the last time you checked on him?”
“Umm…”
And then her face morphs. From concern to puzzlement to rage. And I expect her to detonate—totally brace for it—but then every part of her seems to sag with disappointment. “Oh, Rico.” She looks like she might cry. Which is so much worse than anger.
She leaves the room without another word, and the weight of my miserable life drops on me with the force of a collapsing house.
There’s a hole in my sock. I’m stretched out on a children’s comforter on a twin bed. The blinds over the window are broken, and there’s a crack in the drywall above Jax’s bed. Which is in the same room as mine.
I’ve been on this “quest” for months, and none of these things have changed.
They probably never will.
“Rico, I need help!” Mama shouts.
And just like that, the final walls come crashing down.
* * *
—
Within a couple of hours, I’m sitting in the ER in front of a pretty, brown-skinned triage nurse with a sleeping Jax curled up in my lap. Mama stayed in the waiting room.
“How long has he been asleep?” the nurse asks.
The question startles me. How long has he been asleep? “I’m…I’m not sure. I haven’t been keeping track.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’m going to wake him up now, all right?”
I nod.
She rubs her knuckles over the center of Jax’s chest a bit too hard for my liking, and he whimpers. “Jax, sweetheart?” she says. “I need you to wake up for me, okay?”
He groans and snuggles deeper into me.
She does the knuckle thing again, and he literally growls, but his eyes do open. “Attaboy,” she says while pulling out the corded thermometer wand and sticking it inside the attached box to get a cover on it.
“Who are you?” Jax says.
“I’m Nurse Bolar, honey. We’re gonna get you feeling better. I need you to open your mouth and lift your tongue for me.”
Jax does as he’s told and the nurse gets his temperature—it was 105° before we left the house; no clue what it is now.
As soon as she pulls the thing out of his mouth, his head drops back against my shoulder and he’s asleep again.
“How long has he been lethargic like this?” She slips a kid-sized blood pressure cuff on his arm and clamps a little gray thing on his index finger.
“Few hours?” I say. “He fell asleep heavy in the car on the way over here.”
“And what’s the complaint besides the fever?”
“Well, he was with a babysitter until I got home at seven-thirty, and when I first saw him, he said he had a bit of a headache and his neck was sore. But I didn’t check for a fever then.”
“Hmm.” She presses a button on the machine Jax is now attached to, and the cuff tightens on his arm. “Have you noticed any rashes?”
“No…”
“He been sick recently?”
“He had strep a month ago….”
“Received treatment?”
I nod. “Amoxicillin.”
“He on any medication now?”
“No.”
“Allergic to any?”
“Not that I know of…”
“You or your mother been sick at all?”
This is starting to feel like an interrogation. “No.”
“And he hasn’t had any issues since the strep?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Okay.” She reads the monitor and scribbles a bunch of stuff down on a chart.
I decide to tell the rest. “He’d been sick a few times before the strep.”
The nurse looks up at me.
“He wasn’t seen by a doctor the other times, but the pediatrician who came to see him for the strep did say something about the possibility of needing his tonsils out.”
She pulls the cuff and finger clamper thingy off. “And what were the sympto—”
Jax starts convulsing in my arms. His eyes roll back in his head, drool spills out of his mouth onto my collarbone, and my lap is suddenly very warm and very wet.
I’m frozen.
“I need help up here NOW!” the triage nurse says, leaping to her feet. And then Jax is swept away from me in a whirlwind of different-colored scrubs.
* * *
—
They move Jax to a room in the PICU. He and Mama are out cold, but I couldn’t sleep if my life depended on it. All the doctors and nurses have left, but all I see when I close my eyes is the massive needle the doctor stuck in Jaxy’s back to draw out some spinal fluid.
They think he has bacterial meningitis.
Mama and I were told we got here right on time, but there’s a part of me that can’t shake the guilt of not acting sooner. When he told me about his headache and sore neck, I chalked it up to a combo of staying up too late and sleeping on the couch in an awkward position. I probably would’ve investigated his complaints more thoroughly if I hadn’t been in such a rush to call Zan.