6. Parking Lot

My brother and I are in the Arden Hill Hospital parking lot, playing a game in the dark. The game is to run in a circle and touch the taillights of the five cars we have designated. It’s pretty intricate: you have to weave and zig zag and choose from many possible routes in order to reach all the taillights. We call this game “The Course.” As one person runs, the other one counts Mississippis to time them. We tried using the dashboard clock of my father’s Ford LTD for timing, but it only shows minutes, not seconds, so we kept ending up in a tie.

We’re here in the hospital parking because my grandmother, my father’s mother, is inside. She normally lives in New York City, in the Bronx near where my brother and I were born. Her apartment there smells like mothballs and bacon but it has the most comfortable couch I’ve ever sat on and a grandfather clock that makes a deep chime I love. She leaves the clock on all night, and if you sleep over the first night it wakes you up every time but by the second night you sleep right through. Whenever we visit, she gives me a big bundle of comics she saves from the newspapers she gets from “the other side,” Ireland, where she was born and lived until she was in her twenties. The comics aren’t really very funny, they’re mostly “Andy Capp”-like comics about husbands and wives and people sitting in bars talking in words you have to say out loud to yourself to understand, but I like that she saves them for me and I like reading them the way I like the chime her clock makes. They feel like they’re from another world, part of some other tradition I wish I knew more about.

My grandmother was visiting us when she got sick. It was about six weeks ago, on a Saturday. She said she was having chest pains and then she got all clammy and started moaning and my mother and father got her into the car and drove to the hospital. They came back alone; the doctors said she had to stay. My father seemed really sad as he was telling all this to us, but then he looked at me and his face lit up in a big smile. “You know what this reminds me of, tiger?”

I shook my head no.

“When we took you to the hospital that time. Never so scared in my life. You know the doctors told us if we’d been an hour later you might not have made it.”

I nodded. I knew the story.

My brother returns out of breath from his run. “55 seconds,” I say to him.

“Yes,” he says, raising his hands above his head.  “The new record!”

“Only until I get my next try.” I get set up in a three-point stance like one of the runners we saw watching the Olympics last summer. I wait for him to call “Go.”

The way it works these nights we come to the hospital is, my mother and father go in first and check on my grandmother. If  she’s seeming okay, aware of what’s going on around her, they’ll come out and get us and we’ll go in. There’s usually not much for us to do than say hello, let her clutch our hands. She has too many tubes in her to give us a hug. We sit in the big chairs in the room and tell about our days: teachers, sports, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to tell how much she understands. My parents look so relieved when my brother and I talk, probably because they don’t have to.

My parents have only come out to get us once during the past week. My brother and I have to wait in the car, sometimes for over an hour. So we make up games. We’ve always been good at making up games to play together. When we were younger, the games mostly involved beating each other up. There was the game that we played with the nerf basketball in the hallway, where we had a plastic hoop set up on my brother’s door at the end of the hall but you had to run as fast as you could from the living room, right at the other person, and shoot at the first moment of contact. There was a problem in that game, in that we both usually knocked each other to the floor and nobody could actually see if the ball had gone in the basket, but we still enjoyed playing it.

“Fifty three,” my brother says as I collapse against the car after running my course. This time I cut through the little space between the red car and black one, instead of going around. That’s where I gained the extra seconds.

“You have the new record,” my brother says, disappointment in his voice.

“You should have just lied,” I tell him.

“What do you mean?”

“You should have just said that it took me 56 seconds. How would I have known? Then you’d still have the record.”

He looks at me confused, not sure if I’m kidding or not. “That would be no fun,” he finally says. “It isn’t any fun if you don’t at least try to play right.”

I nod. It’s a good answer. “Why don’t you go again. Maybe you’ll find a way to retake the record.”
My brother takes off. But before he even touches the first car there are flashing lights, a siren. The siren is really loud, like it’s right there next to me. The police car’s headlights are as bright as the siren is loud, and they easily pick up my brother, who freezes for a moment, and then flees for some weeds at the edge of the parking lot.

“Halt!” an amplified voice calls, before the police car even skids to a stop. When the car does stop, a policeman jumps out, leaves his front door open, crouches behind it. I have a good view of all this from where I’m standing. The policeman has his gun drawn, and as he peeks around the car door he points it right at my brother.

“Walk toward the car,” the policeman screams. “Hands up, where I can see them. Walk slowly.”

My brother starts walking. He’s either shivering or crying, I can’t tell.

The cop grabs a flashlight with a long handle from the car and shines it at my brother. He gets up out of his crouch when he sees it’s just a kid approaching the car.

He jumps out from behind the car and starts yelling at my brother. “Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you here?” His tone is harsh, angry. My brother mumbles answers, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.

I want to yell out, run over, but I’m afraid if I do the cop will pull the gun out again. So I sit down on the front seat of my parents car and stay quiet.

I have a moment of panic when I see my brother getting into the police car. He can’t arrest my brother! But then they drive right over to where I am. The police car stops and the cop gets out.

He shines the  flashlight right in my eyes. “Do you know who this is?” he asks, in the same harsh voice he used with my brother.

“Yes,” I say. “His name is Jeffrey. He’s my brother.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Inside.”

“What are they doing inside?”

“They’re with my grandmother. She’s dying.”

It’s the first time any of us have said it, even my parents. But it’s what we all know.

The cop makes a disgusted noise. “If your grandmother is inside dying, then what are you doing out here running around in the parking lot?”

“No, we were only playing a game,” I say. “My parents leave us out here if my grandmother isn’t feeling well, and…”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

The cop lets my brother out of the car. He makes us both get in the back seat of my parent’s car and gives us a lecture on playing in hospital parking lots, how it’s disrespectful along with being dangerous. I want to argue, but I know he won’t listen, or even let me speak. I just want him to leave. Finally he pulls a clipboard from his car and writes something down.

“Now don’t move from this car until your parents come out,” the cop says, and drives away.

My brother and I sit in the dark. I can hear him sniffling, which I don’t blame him for. I’m guessing he feels just like I feel. Like everything is terrifying. Having a gun pointed at you. Policemen who hate you for no reason. Someone you love dying.

“You know what I’d do?” I ask, after a few minutes of silence. “Shoot him with his own gun. Take his gun away from him and shoot him with it right between the eyes.”

My brother makes a noise, halfway between a sniffle and snort.

“And then,” I continue, “I’d shoot him again. In the stomach this time. It bleeds a lot if you shoot someone in the stomach. I heard that in one of Dad’s shows.”

“Yeah,” my brother says, in a choked voice. “And then what I’d do is, I’d get his keys, and I’d run over him with his own car. Run over just his legs so it would hurt more.”

I smile in the dark. “Oh, yeah. That’s excellent. Run him over with his own car.”