Content area
Full Text
1.
Let something of mine be taken from! Let Father be returened to us.
So the son David Rainey, thirteen years old, who prided himself on notbelieving-in-God, prayed.
2.
In the medical center whose higher floors were frequently shrouded in mist, in the men's lavatory in the eighth-floor cardiac unit, he hid away to cry. What he hated about crying was his face shattering into pieces like a pane of struck glass. His eyes turned to liquid. His ridiculous nose ran. In a fury he tore off a long strip of toilet paper in which to blow it. A Mobius strip, unending. In despair thinking I hate them all! For it seemed to him that all of the family, not only his stricken father, had betrayed him. His father would be nine days in the cardiac unit. On the first interminable day, David entered the lavatory to hide and realized too late he wasn't alone. Somebody was in one of the stalls, sobbing. A helpless muffled sound as if the invisible person (a boy David's age?) was jamming his knuckles against his mouth.
Quickly, David retreated. He was in dread of meeting another so like himself.
3.
The father was down, the Rainey family was stricken. For years they'd been Meems and Dadda, Kit-Kit, the Goat, Pike, and Billy-o. They were Granmum Geranium, Auntie Bean, and Uncle Ike. (True, Pike and Billy-o had left home. Uncle Ike wasn't married any longer to Dadda's sister Bean.) These were their secret family names in the big old red-brick colonial on Upchurch Street on the highest hill of the hilly city. David, who was the Goat, knew the secret names were sort of silly, but he hadn't realized how sad-silly until Dadda was admitted to the medical center as "Mr. Rainey" (which was how the staff on the fifth floor referred to him, often as if he weren't even present) or "Marcus J. Rainey" (which was imprinted on the stiff paper bracelet around his left wrist, along with a computer number). And suddenly there was Mother who'd been Meems for so long, a pretty, freckle-faced, flurried woman with corn-silk hair and a laugh like a tickle in her throat, that made you laugh with her, now overnight a...