Titan Clash by Sigmund Brouwer

Author:Sigmund Brouwer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV000000
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2007-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

chapter fifteen

I had a study break the next afternoon. I decided to use it to go see Mom at the hospital. I wasn’t looking forward to it. Not after the phone call I had returned to Dad’s lawyer at lunch.

I didn’t much look forward to walking through the hospital either.

I’ll bet any kid who had to write about a hospital visit would mention the smell first. No matter how clean the wide and waxed hallway floors are, no matter how nicely painted the walls are, hospitals have that weird sweet smell of medicine and sickness and despair. At least that’s the way it seemed to me as I followed a big male nurse down the hallway.

He was pushing an older woman in a wheelchair. She kept turning her little gray head on her thin neck to look at me. “I miss my children,” she said again and again. “I miss my children.”

She made me think of a tiny lost sparrow. She made me wonder how people could let their parents waste away in hospitals and nursing homes. She made me sad.

When I got to my mom’s room, she was sleeping. The sadness inside me helped me to see her as a little girl lost in her dreams. I quietly pulled a chair up beside her bed and listened to her breathe.

The trouble was, most sleeping little girls don’t have bruises and black eyes from a broken nose. And most sleeping little girls aren’t held rigid by casts.

Moms have instinct, of course. Even in her sleep she knew I was close by. Her shoulders shifted a bit. She woke up and blinked her eyes.

“Sweet dreams?” I asked.

She smiled. She had shoulder-length dark hair. It was messed up from sleeping and made her look even younger than she already did. “It was more like being in the middle of a memory. A picnic. With you and your father.”

Her smile dimmed as more memories returned. She was in a hospital, and my father was in jail.

I had something I didn’t want to have to tell her.

With that instinct that moms have, she read it on my face.

“What is it, Jack?” she asked.

I held up my splinted finger. “Basketball injury,” I said, giving her a big grin. I’d tell her about getting cut from the team later. A person shouldn’t have to get more than one piece of bad news at a time. “Only a bad bruise, though. Not broken.”

She knew me well enough to know my grin was fake.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “So, what is it really?”

No sense in keeping the bad news from her.

“Dad decided not to pay the bail,” I said. “He says he’s going to stay in jail. He doesn’t even want his lawyer anymore.”

“What?”

“That’s what I said,” I told her. “His lawyer left a message at the school office for me this morning. When I called him at lunch, that’s all he could tell me. He said he didn’t know what Dad was doing. Dad wouldn’t explain it to him.”

“Your father’s going to stay in jail,” Mom said slowly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.