Pandemonium

hours. She asked only a few questions—just enough to confirm the basic story she’d gotten from Amra, who’d gotten it from Lew. Mom was restraining herself. For now.

I spent most of the day inert as a statue, falling in and out of sleep without moving my head. Nurses came in at two-hour intervals to take my temperature, but their questions didn’t require more than a grunt or a nod. I thought about Christopher Reeve. I tried to imagine lying there paralyzed, watching each day’s sunlight track across the wall. But Reeve hadn’t stayed in bed. Okay, he was rich—high-tech wheelchair, staff of nurses, as many physical therapists as he wanted—but he was determined. People magazine said he worked for a year just to learn to move his pinky. How motivated was that? Eventually he even retaught his body to breathe on its own. Inch by inch, he was clawing his way out of that chair.

And then? Superman gets killed by a fucking bedsore infection. The sky outside the window darkened. Visiting hours came and went, without Mom and Amra. I closed my eyes in relief.

“You snuck up on me,” Lew said.

I sat in the dark in the chair beside his bed. I’d been watching him sleep for a long time, trying to decide if I should wake him. It was past midnight. The night staff seemed to be skeletal, and no one had noticed me shuffling down the hallway like an old man. It was only two doors, but it took me forever. I felt like my muscles had turned to jelly under the water, but I forced myself to keep lifting one foot, then the other. Move the pinky, Mr. Reeve.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“Didn’t know you were mobile.” His voice was slowed a notch from painkillers.

My face heated with embarrassment. “You got the worst of it.”

He tilted his head in a suggestion of a shrug. “I guess.”

He was propped up in bed, his arms unmoving at his sides. His right leg was in a cast from thigh to calf, to stabilize the knee. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, but I couldn’t read his expression past the bandages, the bruises that looked like deeper shadows.

“O’Connell says you don’t remember anything,” I said.

“One minute I was with her and Louise and the guards. The next, lying there next to the water, screaming my head off.”

“You don’t remember anything else—running after me, diving in?”

“Should I remember something?”

Run.

Faster.

“Nah. Get some sleep.” I pushed myself slowly out of the chair.

“Mom’ll be here in the morning and your sleeping days will be over.”

“But now you’ve woken me up.”

“You want me to read you a comic book?” I said.

“Hm?”

“Nothing. Mom told me about when we were kids. She said you used to sit with me and read me—” I got a clear image of Lew, holding up a page from The Flash. It was Flash versus Dr. Light, and Flash was moving in a red-and-yellow blur that was faster than light.

“You okay?” Lew said.

“I just . . .” My voice caught. “I just need to get to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I used the door frame for support and shuffled into the hallway, managed to make it back to my room without getting busted by the nurses. I sat on the edge of the bed, unable to get that image out of my head: seven-year-old Lew in the chair, holding that Flash comic. How many nights had he sat there, waiting for his little brother to come back? Waiting for the wild boy who’d maimed his mother to go away. And Mom, reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel over and over.

O’Connell asking, What do you mean, you loved it?

I clicked on the bedside lamp. My vision was blurred, and it was hard to make out the instructions on the phone’s faceplate, but I finally got an outside line. The call was picked up after only two rings. Louise sounded exactly as she had the night I’d phoned from Lew’s house in Gurnee: tired and annoyed.