Charlie sat with his father until Alan dropped back to sleep. When the mid-morning shift of the nursing staff arrived, heralding the start of visiting hours, he slipped off the ward. The nurses seemed to recognize that he did not belong with the crowd of visitors milling around with balloons and small plants and get-well cards. For lack of anything better to do, he bought a cup of coffee, borrowed a pen from the café cashier and started doodling on the paper napkins next to the creamer station, listing cube roots in columns. It took a while to get the hang of writing with his bandaged hand but the only time he faltered was when it occurred to him that this kind of single-mindedness would have worried Don. Charlie had to consider that for a moment—but, no, this was not N vs. NP. This wasn't math at all; it was biology. It was shock.
Charlie liked having a name for this shivery anxious feeling; it had been shocking, too. He'd been in the garage, alone, trying to remember the comments he'd wanted to make on Amita's thesis, and then Dad had followed him in. And then, suddenly, Anthony and then Don. And there had been shouting and blood and he hadn't known what to do. Stay with Alan? Run for help? Try to overpower Anthony? There were too many variables, too many people; he'd always been so bad at reading people. In the end he'd tried to solve it the way he would any problem: starting small, fixing what he knew was wrong—the denominator in equation three. It hadn't worked. He'd chosen the wrong mechanism and everyone had gotten hurt and then he'd been alone again.
Absently, Charlie smoothed out the napkins. They had the Queen of Angles logo printed on them: an intertwined Q and A. Question/Answer, he thought. He'd used up the whole stack without realizing it. Cube roots had been what he'd recited to himself while he waited for the ambulance to come. After Don had passed out, Charlie called 911 from his cellphone; the dispatcher had tried to keep him on the line but he'd hung up so that he could keep pressure on Alan's bullet wounds. Charlie hadn't realized that his father's lung had been punctured by the cracked rib, so he'd just tried to remember everything Don had ever told him about first aid. There had been so much blood; he'd practically had his hand inside his father's chest. Charlie had wanted to stay close to Don, too, but he worried that moving his brother closer might cause him more pain. In the end, he left Don stretched out on the floor, looking like a bizarre postmodern Hamlet in the disordered garage. Charlie had tried to keep talking, though, in case Don could hear him. First he started to repeat things that Larry had told him, stories about mathematicians, but he couldn't remember them all. Now, he recognized the forgetfulness as an early sign of shock. At the time, though, Charlie had really thought he was losing his mind, that his memory was seeping out of him with his blood. That had frightened him, made him angry: he'd yelled at Anthony.
Why? Charlie had shouted, what had he been doing? what had he been thinking? why? He hadn't gotten an answer; Anthony had shrunk away to the far corner of the desk and continued pulling at the handcuffs with his teeth and his free hand. He'd actually growled. In the end, Charlie found he had no more questions, no anecdotes left, so just repeated the cube roots. Oddly, that had seemed to have a pacifying effect on Anthony, too.
Squaring the edge of the napkins, Charlie slipped them back into their little holder before getting up to throw away his styrofoam cup. He imagined people—those balloon-toting visitors, the exhausted internists, maybe even that soccer kid (did she drink coffee?)—grabbing one and finding themselves with a list of cubes. The thought made him smile for the first time in two days. He checked his watch. Visiting hours were over. It was time to go see Don.
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