C H A P T E R 1 6 2 страница

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'I'm not crazy, ' Eddie whispered, the words coming out in a bare husk.

Mr Keene's chair creaked like a monstrous cricket. 'What? '

'I said I'm not crazy! ' Eddie shouted. Then, immediately, a miserable blush rose into his face.

Mr Keene smiled. Think what you like, that smile said. Think what you like, and I'll think what I like.

'All I'm telling you, Eddie, is that you're not physically ill. Your lungs don't have asthma; your mind does. '

'You mean I'm crazy. '

Mr Keene leaned forward, looking at him intently over his folded hands.

'I don't know, ' he said softly. 'Are you? '

'It's all a lie! ' Eddie cried, surprised the words came out so strongly from his tight chest. He was thinking of Bill, how Bill would react to such amazing charges. Bill would know what to say, stutter or not. Bill would know how to be brave. 'All a great big lie! I do have asthma, I do! '

'Yes, ' Mr Keene said, and now the dry smile had become a weird skeletal grin. 'But who gave it to you, Eddie? '

Eddie's brain thudded and whirled. Oh, he felt sick, he felt very sick.

'Four years ago, in 1954 — the same year as the DePaul tests, oddly enough — Dr Handor began prescribing this HydrOx for you. That stands for hydrogen and oxygen, the two components of water. I have condoned this deception since then, but I will not condone it anymore. Your asthma medicine works on your mind rather than your body. Your asthma is the result of a nervous tightening of the diaphragm that is ordered by your mind. . . or your mother.

'You are not sick. '

A terrible silence descended.

Eddie sat in his chair, his mind whirling. For a moment he considered the possibility that Mr Keene might be telling the truth, but there were ramifications in such an idea that he could not face. Yet why would Mr Keene lie, especially about something so serious? ! Mr Keene sat and smiled his bright dry heartless desert smile.

I do have asthma, I do. The day that Henry Bowers punched me in the nose, the day Bill and I were trying to make a dam in the Barrens, I almost died. Am I supposed to think that my mind was just. . . just making all of that up?

But why would he lie? (It was only years later, in the library, that Eddie asked himself the more terrible question: Why would he tell me the truth? )

Dimly he heard Mr Keene saying: 'I've kept my eye on you, Eddie. I told you all this because you're old enough to understand, but also because I've noticed you've finally made some friends. They are good friends, aren't they? ' 'Yes, ' Eddie said.

Mr Keene tilted his chair back (it made that cricketlike noise again), and closed one eye in what might or might not have been a wink. 'And I'll bet your mother doesn't like them much, does she? '

'She likes them fine, ' Eddie said, thinking of the cutting things his mother had said about Richie Tozier (He has a foul mouth. . . and I've smelled his breath, Eddie. . . I think he smokes}, her sniffing remark not to loan any money to Stan Uris because he was a Jew, her outright dislike of Bill Denbrough and 'that fatboy. ' He repeated to Mr Keene: 'She likes them a lot. '

'Does she? ' Mr Keene said, still smiling. 'Well, maybe she's right and maybe she's wrong, but at least you have friends. Maybe you ought to talk to them about this problem of yours.

This. . . this mental weakness. See what they have to say. '

Eddie didn't reply. He was through talking to Mr Keene; that seemed safer. And he was afraid that if he didn't get out of here soon, he really would cry.

'Well! ' Mr Keene said, standing up. 'I think that just about finishes us up, Eddie. If I've upset you, I'm sorry. I was only doing my duty as I saw it. I — '

But before he could say any more, Eddie had snatched up his aspirator and the white bag of pills and nostrums and had fled. One of his feet skidded in the ice-creamy mess on the floor and he almost fell. Then he was running, bolting from the Center Street Drug Store in spite of his whistling breath. Ruby stared after him over her movie magazine, her mouth open.

Behind him he seemed to sense Mr Keene standing in the doorway of his office and watching his graceless retreat over the prescription counter, gaunt and neat and thoughtful and smiling. Smiling that dry desert smile.

He paused outside on the three-way corner of Kansas, Main, and Center. He took another deep pull from his aspirator while sitting on the low stone wall by the bus-stop — his throat was now positively slimy with that medicinal taste (nothing but water with some camphor thrown in)

and he thought that if he had to use the aspirator again today he would probably puke his guts.

He slipped it into his pocket and watched the traffic pass back and forth, headed up Main Street and down Up-Mile Hill. He tried not to think. The sun beat down on his head, blaringly hot. Each passing car threw bright darts of reflection into his eyes, and a headache was starting in his temples. He couldn't find a way to stay angry at Mr Keene, but he had no trouble at all feeling bad for Eddie Kaspbrak. He felt real bad for Eddie Kaspbrak. He supposed that Bill Denbrough never wasted time feeling sorry for himself, but Eddie just couldn't seem to help it.

More than anything else he wanted to do exactly what Mr Keene had suggested: go down to the Barrens and tell his friends everything, see what they would say, find out what answers they had. But he couldn't do that now. His mother would expect him home with her medicines soon

(your mind. . . or your mother) and if he wasn't there

(your mother is determined you are ill)

trouble would follow. She would assume he had been with Bill or Richie or 'the Jewboy, ' as she called Stan (insisting that she meant no prejudice by so calling him, but was simply 'slapping down the cards' — her phrase for truth-telling in difficult situations). And standing here on this corner, trying hopelessly to sort out his flying thoughts, Eddie knew what she would say if she knew one of his other friends was a Negro and another was a girl — a girl old enough to be getting bosoms.

He started slowly toward Up-Mile Hill, dreading the stiff climb in this heat. It felt almost hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. For the first time he found himself wishing for school to be in again, for a new grade and a new teacher's peculiarities to contend with. For this dreadful summer to be over.

He stopped halfway up the hill, not far from where Bill Denbrough would rediscover his bike Silver twenty-seven years later, and pulled his aspirator from his pocket. HydrOx Mist, the label said. Administer as needed.

Something else clicked home. Administer as needed. He was only a kid, still wet behind the ears (as his mother sometimes told him when she was 'slapping down the cards'), but even a kid of eleven knew that you didn't give someone real medicine and then write on the label Administer as needed. If it was real medicine, it would be too easy to kill yourself as you went happy-assholing around and administering as needed. He supposed you could kill yourself with plain old aspirin doing that.

He looked fixedly at the aspirator, unaware of the old lady who glanced curiously at him as she passed on down the hill toward Main Street with her shopping basket over her arm. He felt betrayed. And for one moment he almost cast the plastic squeezebottle into the gutter — better yet, he thought, throw it down that sewer-grating. Sure! Why not? Let It have it down there in Its tunnels and dripping sewer-pipes. Have a pla-cee-bo, you hundred-faced creep!

He uttered a wild laugh and came within an ace of doing it. But in the end, habit was simply too strong. He replaced the aspirator in his right front pants pocket and walked on, hardly hearing the occasional blare of a horn or the diesel drone of the Bassey Park bus as it passed him. He was likewise unaware of how close he was to discovering what being hurt — really hurt — was all about.

When he came out of the Costello Avenue Market twenty-five minutes later with a Pepsi in' one hand and two Payday candybars in the other, Eddie was unpleasantly surprised to see Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Moose Sadler, and Patrick Hockstetter kneeling on the crushed gravel to the left of the little store. For a moment Eddie thought they were shooting craps; then he saw they were pooling their money on Victor's baseball shirt. Their summer-school text-books lay off to one side in an untidy heap.

On an ordinary day Eddie might have simply faded quietly back into the store and asked Mr Gedreau if he could leave by the back door but this had been no ordinary day. Eddie froze right where he was instead, one hand still holding the screen door with its tin cigarette signs (WINSTON TASTES GOOD, LIKE A CIGARETTE SHOULD, TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES, the bellboy who was shouting CALL FOR PHILIP MORRIS), the other clutching the brown grocery bag and the white drugstore bag.

Victor Criss saw him and elbowed Henry. Henry looked up; so did Patrick Hockstetter. Moose, whose relays worked more slowly, went on counting out pennies for five seconds or so before the sudden silence sank into him and he also looked up.

Henry stood, brushing loose pieces of gravel from the knees of the biballs he was wearing. There were splints on the sides of his bandaged nose, and his voice had a nasal foghorning quality. 'Well I be go to hell, ' he said. 'One of the rock-throwers. Where's your friends, asshole? They inside? '

Eddie was shaking his head numbly before he realized this was another mistake.

Henry's smile broadened. 'Well, that's okay, ' he said. 'I don't mind taking you one by one.

Come on down here, asshole. '

Victor stood beside Henry; Patrick Hockstetter trailed behind them, smiling in a porky vacant way Eddie was familiar with from school. Moose was still getting up.

'Come on, asshole, ' Henry said. 'Let's talk about throwing rocks. Let's talk about that, you wanna? '

Now that it was too late Eddie decided it would be wise to go back into the store. Back in the store where there was a grownup. But as he retreated Henry darted forward and grabbed him. He pulled Eddie's arm, pulled hard, his smile turning into a snarl. Eddie's hand was ripped free of the screen door. He was pulled off the steps and would have crashed headlong into the gravel if Victor hadn't caught him roughly under the arms. Victor threw him. Eddie managed to keep on his feet, but only by whirling around twice. The four boys faced him now over a distance of about ten feet, Henry slightly ahead of the others, smiling. His hair stood up at the back in a cowlick.

Behind Henry and on his left was Patrick Hockstetter, a genuinely spooky kid. Eddie hadn't ever seen him with anyone else until today. He was just enough overweight so that his belly always hung slightly over his belt, which had a Red Ryder buckle. His face was perfectly round, and usually as pale as cream. Now he had a slight sunburn. It was heaviest on his nose, which was peeling, but it spread out toward either cheek like wings. In school, Patrick liked to kill flies with his green plastic SkoolTime ruler and put them in his pencil-box. Sometimes he would show his fly collection to some new kid in the playyard at recess, his heavy lips smiling, his gray-green eyes sober and thoughtful. He never spoke when he exhibited his dead flies, no matter what the new kid might say to him. That expression was on his face now.

'How ya doin, Rock Man? ' Henry asked, advancing across the distance between them. 'Got any rocks on you? '

'Leave me alone, ' Eddie said in a trembling voice.

" 'Leave me alone, '" Henry mimicked, waving his hands in mock terror. Victor laughed. 'What are you going to do if I don't, Rock Man? Huh? ' His hand flashed out, incredibly fast, and exploded against Eddie's cheek with a gunshot sound. Eddie's head rocked back. Tears began to pour from his left eye.

'My friends are inside, ' Eddie said.

'" My friends are inside, " ' Patrick Hockstetter squealed. 'Ooooh! Ooooh! Ooooh! ' He began to circle to Eddie's right.

Eddie started to turn in that direction, Henry's hand flashed out again, and this time his other cheek flamed.

Don't cry, he thought, that's what they want, but don't you do it Eddie, Bill wouldn't do it,

Bill wouldn't cry, and don't you cry, eith —

Victor stepped forward and gave Eddie a hard open-handed push in the middle of his chest. Eddie stumbled half a step backward and then fell sprawling over Patrick, who had crouched directly behind his feet. He thudded to the gravel, scraping his arms. There was a whoof! as the wind rushed out of him.

A moment later Henry Bowers was on top of him, his knees pinning Eddie's arms, his butt on Eddie's stomach.

'Got any rocks, Rock Man? ' Henry raved down at him, and Eddie was more frightened by the mad light in Henry's eyes than he was by the pain in his arms or by his inability to get his breath back. Henry was nuts. Somewhere close by, Patrick Uttered.

'You wanna throw rocks? Huh? I'll give you rocks! Here! Here's some rocks! '

Henry swept up a handful of gravel and slammed it down into Eddie's face. He rubbed the gravel into Eddie's skin, cutting his cheeks, his eyelids, his lips. Eddie opened his mouth and screamed.

'Want rocks? I'll give you rocks! Here's some rocks, Rock Man! You want rocks? Okay!

Okay! Okay! '

Gravel slammed into his open mouth, lacerating his gums, grinding against his teeth. He felt sparks fly against his fillings. He screamed again and spat gravel out.

'Want some more rocks? Okay? How about a few more? How about — '

'Stop that! Here, here! Stop that! You, boy! Quit on him! Right now! You hear me? Quit on him! '

Through half-lidded, tear-blurred eyes, Eddie saw a big hand come down and grab Henry by the collar of his shirt and the right strap of his biballs. The hand gave a yank and Henry was pulled off. He landed in the gravel and got up. Eddie rose more slowly. He was trying to scramble to his feet, but his scrambler seemed temporarily broken. He gasped and spat chunks of bloody gravel out of his mouth.

It was Mr Gedreau, dressed in his long white apron, and he looked furious. There was no fear in his face, although Henry stood about three inches taller and probably outweighed him by fifty pounds. There was no fear in his face because he was the grownup and Henry was the kid. Except this time, Eddie thought, that might not mean anything. Mr Gedreau didn't understand. He didn't understand that Henry was nuts.

'You get out of here, ' Mr Gedreau said, advancing on Henry until he stood toe to toe with the hulking sullen-faced boy. 'You get out and you don't want to come back, either. I don't hold with bullying. I don't hold with four against one. What would your mothers think? '

He swept the others with his hot, angry eyes. Moose and Victor dropped their gazes and examined their sneakers. Patrick only stared at and through Mr Gedreau with that vacant gray-green look. Mr Gedreau looked back at Henry and got just as far as 'You get on your bikes and — ' when Henry gave him a good hard push.

An expression of surprise that would have been comical in other circumstances spread across Mr Gedreau's face as he flew backward, loose gravel spurting out from under his heels. He struck the steps leading up to the screen door and sat down hard.

'Why you — ' he began.

Henry's shadow fell on him. 'Get inside, ' he said.

'You — ' Mr Gedreau said, and this time he stopped on his own. Mr Gedreau had finally seen it, Eddie realized — the light in Henry's eyes. He got up quickly, apron flapping. He went up the stairs as fast as he could, stumbling on the second one from the top and going briefly to one knee. He was up again at once, but that stumble, as brief as it had been, seemed to rob him of the rest of his grownup authority.

He spun around at the top and yelled: 'I'm calling the cops! '

Henry made as if to lunge for him, and Mr Gedreau flinched back. That was the end, Eddie realized. As incredible, as unthinkable as it seemed, there was no protection for him here. It was time to go.

While Henry was standing at the bottom of the steps and glaring up at Mr Gedreau and while the others were staring, transfixed (and, except for Patrick Hockstetter, not a little horrified) by this sudden successful defiance of adult authority, Eddie saw his chance. He whirled, took to his heels, and ran.

He was halfway up the block before Henry turned, his eyes blazing. 'Get him! ' he bellowed.

Asthma or no asthma, Eddie ran them a good race that day. There were spaces, some of them as long as fifty feet, when he couldn't remember if the soles of his P. P. Flyers had touched the sidewalk or not. For a few moments he even entertained the giddy notion that he might be able to outrun them.

Then, just before he reached Kansas Street and what might have been safety, a ilttle kid on a trike suddenly pedaled out of a driveway and right into Eddie's path. Eddie tried to swerve, but running full-out as he had been, he might have done better to jump over the kid (the kid's name, in fact, was Richard Cowan, and he would grow up, marry, and father a son named Frederick Cowan, who would be drowned in a toilet and then be partially eaten by a thing that rose up from the toilet like black smoke and then took an unthinkable shape), or at least to try.

One of Eddie's feet caught on the trike's back deck, where an adventurous little shit might stand and push the trike along like a scooter. Richard Cowan, whose unborn son would be murdered by It twenty-seven years later, barely rocked on his trike. Eddie, however, went flying. He struck the sidewalk on his shoulder, rebounded, came down again, and skidded ten feet, erasing the skin from his elbows and knees. He was trying to get up when Henry Bowers hit him like a shell from a bazooka and knocked him flat. Eddie's nose connected briskly with the concrete. Blood flew.

Henry did a quick side-roll like a paratrooper and was up again. He grabbed Eddie by the nape of the neck and by his right wrist. His breath, snorting through his swelled and splinted nose, was warm and moist.

'Want rocks, Rock Man? Sure! Shit! ' He jerked Eddie's wrist halfway up his back. Eddie yelled. 'Rocks for the Rock Man, right, Rock Man? ' He jerked Eddie's wrist up even higher. Eddie screamed. Behind him, dimly, he could hear the others approaching, and the little kid on the trike starting to bawl. Join the club, kid, he thought, and in spite of the pain, in spite of the tears and the fear, he brayed a huge donkeylike hee-haw of laughter.

'You think this is funny? ' Henry asked, sounding suddenly astounded rather than furious. 'You think this is funny? ' And did Henry also sound scared? Years later Eddie would think

Yes, scared, he sounded scared.

Eddie twisted his wrist in Henry's grip. He was slick with sweat and he almost got away. Perhaps that was why Henry shoved Eddie's wrist up harder this time than before. Eddie heard a crack in his arm like the sound of winterwood giving under an accumulated plate of ice. The pain that rolled out of his fractured arm was gray and huge. He shrieked, but the sound seemed distant. The color was washing out of the world, and when Henry let go of him and pushed, he seemed to float toward the sidewalk. It took a long time to get down to that old sidewalk. He had a good look at every single crack in it as he glided down. He had a chance to admire the way the July sun glinted off the flecks of mica in that old sidewalk. He had a chance to note the remains of a very old hopscotch grid that had been done in pink chalk on that old sidewalk. Then, for just a moment, it swam and looked like something else. It looked like a turtle.

He might have fainted then, but he struck on his newly broken arm, and this fresh pain was sharp, bright, hot, terrible. He felt the splintered ends of the greenstick fracture grind together. He bit his tongue, bringing fresh blood. He rolled over on his back and saw Henry, Victor, Moose, and Patrick standing over him. They looked impossibly tall, impossibly high up, like pallbearers peering into a grave.

'You like that, Rock Man? ' Henry asked, his voice drifting down over a distance, floating

through clouds of pain. 'You like that action, Rock Man? You like that jobba-nobba? ' Patrick Hockstetter giggled.

'Your father's crazy, ' Eddie heard himself say, 'and so are you. '

Henry's grin afded so fast it might have been slapped off his face. He drew his foot back to kick. . . and then a siren rose in the still hot afternoon. Henry paused. Victor and Moose looked around uneasily.

'Henry, I think we better get out of here, ' Moose said.

'I know damn well I'm getting out of here, ' Victor said. How far away their voices seemed! Like the clown's balloons, they seemed to float. Victor took off toward the library, cutting into McCarron Park to get off the street.

Henry hesitated a moment longer, perhaps hoping the cop-car was on some other business and he could continue with his own. But the siren rose again, closer. 'You got lucky, fuckface, ' he said. He and Moose took off after Victor.

Patrick Hockstetter waited for a moment. 'Here's a little something extra for you, ' he whispered in his low, husky voice. He inhaled and spat a large green lunger into Eddie's upturned, sweating, bloody face. Splat. 'Don't eat it all at once if you don't want, ' Patrick said, smiling his liverish unsettling smile. 'Save some for later, if you want. ' Then he turned slowly and was also gone.

Eddie tried to wipe the lunger off with his good arm, but even that little movement made the pain flare again.

Now when you started off for the drugstore, you never thought you'd end up on the Costello Avenue sidewalk with a busted arm and Patrick Hockstetter's snot running down your face, did you? You never even got to drink your Pepsi. Life's full of surprises, isn't it? Incredibly, he laughed again. It was a weak sound, and it hurt his broken arm to laugh, but it felt good. And there was something else: no asthma. His breathing was okay, at least for now. A good thing, too. He never would have been able to get to his aspirator. Never in a thousand years.

The siren was very close now, whooping and whooping. Eddie closed his eyes and saw red under his eyelids. Then the red turned black as a shadow fell over him. It was the little kid with the trike.

'You okay? ' the little kid asked. 'Do I look okay? ' Eddie asked.

'No, you look terrible, ' the little kid said, and pedaled off, singing 'The Farmer in the Dell. '

Eddie began to giggle. Here was the cop-car; he could hear the squeal of its brakes. He found himself hoping vaguely that Mr Nell would be in it, even though he knew Mr Nell was a foot patrolman.

Why in the name of God are you giggling?

He didn't know, any more than he knew why he should feel, in spite of the pain, such intense relief. Was it maybe just because he was still alive, that the worst he had suffered was a broken arm, and there were still some pieces to pick up? He settled for that, but years later, sitting in the Derry Library with a glass of gin and prune juice in front of him and his aspirator near at hand, he told the others he thought it was something more than that; he had been old enough to feel that something more, but not to understand or define it.

I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life, he would tell the others. It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think. . . it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain.

Eddie turned his head weakly to the right and saw large black Firestone tires, blinding chrome hubcaps, and pulsing blue lights. He heard Mr Nell's voice then, thickly Irish, impossibly Irish, more like Richie's Irish Cop Voice than Mr Nell's real voice. . . but perhaps that was the distance:

'Holy Jaysus, it's the Kaspbrak bye! ' At this point Eddie floated away.

And, with one exception, stayed away for quite awhile.

There was a brief period of consciousness in the ambulance. He saw Mr Nell sitting across from him, tipping a drink from his little brown bottle and reading a paperback called The Jury. The girl on the cover had the biggest bosoms Eddie had ever seen. His eyes shifted past Mr Nell to the driver up front. The driver peered around at Eddie with a big leering grin, his skin livid with greasepaint and talcum powder, his eyes shiny as new quarters. It was Pennywise.

'Mr Nell, ' Eddie husked.

Mr Nell looked up and smiled. 'How are you feelin, me bye? '

'. . . driver. . . the driver. . . '

'Yes, we'll be there in a jig, ' Mr Nell said, and handed him the little brown bottle. 'Suck some of this. It'll make ye feel better. '

Eddie drank what tasted like liquid fire. He coughed, hurting his arm. He looked toward the front and saw the driver again. Just some guy with a crewcut. No clown.

He drifted off again.

Much later there was the Emergency Room and a nurse wiping blood and dirt and snot and gravel off his face with a cold cloth. It stung, but it felt wonderful at the same time. He heard his mother bugling and clarioning outside, and he tried to tell the nurse not to let her in, but no words would come out, no matter how hard he tried.

'. . . if he's dying, I want to know! ' his mother was bellowing. 'You hear me? It's my right to know, and it's my right to see him! I can sue you, you know! I know lawyers, plenty of lawyers! Some of my best friends are lawyers! '

'Don't try to talk, ' the nurse said to Eddie. She was young, and he could feel her bosoms pressing against his arm. For a moment he had this crazy idea that the nurse was Beverly Marsh, and then he drifted away again.

When he came back his mother was in the room, talking to Dr Handor at a mile-a-minute clip. Sonia Kaspbrak was a huge woman. Her legs, encased in support hose, were trunklike but weirdly smooth. Her face was pale now except for hectic flaring blots of rouge.

'Ma, ' Eddie managed, '. . . all right. . . I'm all right. . . '

'You're not, you're not, ' Mrs Kaspbrak moaned. She wrung her hands. Eddie heard her knuckles crack and grind. He began to feel his breath shorten up as he looked at her, seeing what a state she was in, how this latest escapade of his had hurt her. He wanted to tell her to take it easy or she'd have a heart attack, but he couldn't. His throat was too dry. 'You're not all right, you've had a serious accident, a very serious accident, but you will be all right, I promise you that, Eddie, you will be all right, even if we need to bring in every specialist in the book, oh Eddie. . . Eddie. . . your poor arm. . . '

She burst into honking sobs. Eddie saw that the nurse who had washed his face was looking at her without much sympathy.

All through this aria, Dr Handor had been stuttering, 'Sonia. . . please, Sonia. . . Sonia. . . ? ' He was a skinny, limp-looking man with a little mustache that hadn't grown very well and which, in addition, had been clipped unevenly, so it was longer on the left side than on the right. He looked nervous. Eddie remembered what Mr Keene had told him that morning and felt a certain sorrow for Dr Handor.

At last, gathering himself, Russ Handor managed to say: 'If you can't control yourself, you'll have to leave, Sonia. '

She whirled on him and he drew back. 'I'll do no such thing! Don't you even suggest it!

This is my son lying here in agony! My son lying here on his bed of pain! '

Eddie astounded them all by finding his voice. 'I want you to leave, Ma. If they're going to do something that'll make me yell, and I think they are, you'll feel better if you go. '

She turned to him, astonished. . . and hurt. At the sight of the hurt on her face, he felt his chest begin to tighten down inexorably. 'I certainly will not! ' she cried. 'What an awful thing to say, Eddie! You're delirious! You don't understand what you're saying, that's the only explanation! '

'I don't know what the explanation is, and I don't care, ' the nurse said. 'All I know is that we're standing here doing nothing while we should be setting your son's arm. '

'Are you suggesting — ' Sonia began, her voice rising toward the high, bugling note it took on when she was most upset.

'Please, Sonia, ' Dr Handor said. 'Let's not have an argument here. Let's help Eddie. '

Sonia stood back, but her glowering eyes — the eyes of a mother bear whose cub has been threatened — promised the nurse that there would be trouble later. Possibly even a suit. Then her eyes misted, extinguishing the glower or at least hiding it. She took Eddie's good hand and squeezed it so painfully that he winced.

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